When Aunt Polly sent Tom Sawyer out to whitewash the front fence, before he even picked up a brush he was thinking about doing something else. Painting for pay is a standard job between jobs. It is also a popular second job. Firemen often paint when they are not at the firehouse. College students paint over summer vacation. Newlyweds paint for the first month’s rent. There are more paint experts walking the streets than there are dried-up paintbrushes sitting in blue coffee cans.
I first picked up a brush at the age of 7 when Ralph, Mimo and Francis showed up to paint my parents’ house on Mulberry Street. Ralph let me help him paint the cement foundation. By the end of the year he was working in a restaurant, Mimo was driving a truck and Francis had opened a television-repair shop.
At the end of last year I started thinking about how I might celebrate this anniversary. Perhaps a special announcement in the local newspaper. Maybe a summer picnic, inviting loyal customers and past employees.
But in early April, just before the start of the busy outdoor season, two of my best painters announced that they were leaving, going off to do something else. It quickly became apparent that the summer would be more about harder work and longer hours than about hot dogs and macaroni salad.
So what did I see in that fence that Tom didn’t? I saw the first 10 feet, freshly painted, glistening white in the midmorning sun. He saw the remaining 80 as dull and dirty.
The primary appeal of my job from the beginning has been the ability to see in black and white and every color of the rainbow what I have accomplished. In an hour. In a day. In the month of July. What a difference a coat of paint makes is a much-used cliche, but it gets me out of bed each morning.
In a world over-accessorized with too many gizmos and too many gimmicks, it is also reassuring to know that the basic tool of my trade, the brush, has only its bristles as moving parts. The brush has been used to apply paint for hundreds of years, and I am confident that it will continue to do so well into the next century.
I decided to become a house painter halfway through my college education. Since my parents were paying, I figured I would do them a big favor and get my diploma. Being half hardheaded and half pigheaded, it took me nearly 10 years to realize that I had not only done myself the favor but that the most important years of my business were the four that preceded its inception.
My father has a degree in English literature. When he was in his early 40s, he quit a secure job as a claims adjuster to start his own insurance agency. With the help of my mother, who went back into the classroom as a teacher, they clothed, fed and educated my sister and me into adulthood.
When I graduated, I continually badgered him that they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth with my education. He calmly assured me that it would be the subtle things that I would take from the campus into the real world that would be the most useful. A better ability to communicate with customers. A more comfortable understanding of getting along and dealing with associates. As usual, he was right. As usual, I didn’t believe him until I figured out on my own what he’d known all along.
I hired my first employee in my 18th year of business. For the first 17, the process of a paint job, from signing of contract to final payment on completion, was just between me and the customers. I carried my equipment into their houses. I took down their drapes and covered their furniture. I was nice to their dogs. If they were satisfied, I shared the credit with no one. If they weren’t, I had nobody to blame but myself.
As my business grew and I went from being a house painter to a paint contractor, I began to spend less time painting and more time worrying. I was a babysitter, an errand boy and psychologist to my employees.
When I first hired people, I was happy delegating tasks. It was easier to tell a painter to scrape, sand, reglaze and paint a window sash than it was to do it myself. Although sitting in on construction meetings with architects and interior designers was heady stuff, as I got farther away from the actual work, remaining accountable for its quality became much more difficult.
With 15 employees and jobs all over town, I began to think about doing something else. It wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t satisfying. I enjoyed being a house painter, and this is what I was not.
Thinking about a different line of work after all those years led to some pretty frightening questions. What else could I do? Would I be able to work for someone else after being self-employed most of my life? Would my bachelor’s degree in sociology ultimately lead me to what I was really meant to be?
Slowly, it was my employees who helped me find my way home. As they went back to school or off to other jobs, I didn’t replace them. I started accepting less work and doing more myself. My blood pressure came down. My cash flow went up.
The employee-led downsizing completed its course just in time for me to celebrate my 25th year in business doing what I started doing in my first–painting houses. A celebration of satisfying hard work. An anniversary gift to myself.
When Tom Sawyer threw his brush down and ran off to the river, he made the right choice. When I picked it up, so did I.
