At AB’s Painting in Albuquerque, it all comes down to the estimate
Ramiro Dominguez painted for another Albuquerque company for 10 years before starting AB’s Painting from his house, and he still believes the bid decides the job.
Albuquerque, NM
The biggest job Ramiro Dominguez talks about is a school: 140 classrooms, all of them painted by the crew at AB’s Painting. That meant four painters and Dominguez himself. The company’s estimator, he points out, does not paint. The contract comes back to the Albuquerque company every year.
Ask Dominguez what decides whether a painting company lasts, though, and his answer comes before anyone opens a can. It is the estimate. “There’s nothing, no school, no nothing, nobody that’s going to teach you how to estimate this job,” he says. Somebody has to look at the walls and take the square footage. “It all comes to the estimates.”
The hard part is landing in the middle. “It’s hard to put a price in a job,” Dominguez says. “You can’t be too expensive, because otherwise you won’t get the job. You can’t be too cheap, because otherwise you go out of business.”
Matching the price to the job, and the job to the crew, is how Dominguez has run AB’s Painting since he started it from his house. The company is four painters, an estimator and Dominguez. It paints homes and businesses, and it grows only as fast as the owner can find people he trusts to send out in a company van.
He came to it after a decade on someone else’s payroll. Dominguez painted for another Albuquerque painting company for 10 years before he quit. “I’m the type of guy that I’m hungry,” he says. “I’m hungry for what I do.”
He went looking for work paid by the job instead of by the hour, and found it with restoration companies, the firms that come in after a pipe bursts or a roof leaks. He worked with one of them for about three years. It kept him busy until he no longer had to depend on it. The paperwork for AB’s Painting, LLC went in with the New Mexico secretary of state in 2020. The work came by word of mouth from the start, and it still comes in on the owner’s phone.
A good share of it starts with water. One customer wrote that the crew restored drywall and insulation in his garage and several rooms after a leak, then repainted so the repairs blended with the original decor. Another first hired the company through an insurance claim for water damage and later brought the crew back for an ordinary interior repaint.
Dominguez has no business partners and does not want any. “You could bring in your best friend to be partners in the job, but you guys eventually end up not being friends,” he says. “Partners don’t work.”
The name customers mention most after his is Nikki, the estimator. She comes out to see the job, writes the bid and keeps the customer posted once the crew starts. A local union carpenter sent one customer to her to repaint a family room with a kiva fireplace. One man was out of town while the crew painted the entire interior of his older manufactured home and repaired the sheetrock throughout. In a Google review, Wesley A. wrote that he had been nervous about having so large a project done while he was away, and that Nikki’s communication put him at ease.
For a crew of six, the company covers a lot of ground. Beyond interior and exterior painting, it repairs and textures drywall, patches stucco and adobe, and refinishes cabinets and decks. The crew works weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., from Albuquerque out to Rio Rancho, Corrales, Bernalillo and Los Lunas.
The crew will also work the way a customer wants. One couple hired AB’s to sand and refinish their decks and pergolas and repaint their garage doors and trim. They bought their own paint and sealers to match what they already had, and when the wife did not like the first color on the garage door, the crew let her go back to the store for a new mix. Another homeowner, painting over a previous owner’s pink, yellow and blue walls, took the crew’s advice to put a brighter color on the ceiling than on the walls. It worked out perfectly, the customer wrote.
Plenty of customers come back. The owner of a housekeeping company wrote that hers was the fifth job she had given the crew. Timothy P., who had used the company four times, wrote that Ramiro keeps his word: if he says he can do a job, it gets done on time, on cost and with outstanding results. His neighbors saw the work and hired the crew too. Outside of paid jobs, the company has donated to Family Promise of Albuquerque, a shelter for families with children.
The vans are one reason Dominguez is careful about hiring. A driver with DWIs on his record, Dominguez says, gets the company hit on its insurance. “We don’t hire just anybody,” he says. “We hire people that could pass a background check, that have a license, that could drive the vans.”
That standard puts a ceiling on how fast AB’s can grow, and Dominguez accepts it. He wants the company bigger, and one day he would like to pass it on to his kids. But he sees no point in taking 10 or 20 jobs the crew cannot get to. “You got to have a balance,” he says.
“You’re climbing a ladder,” Dominguez says. “You take it step by step.”