The job was old cabinets and trim that needed a lot of sanding. When the crew finished, the project manager came out to check the work, spotted a few things that had been missed and quickly sent a team member back to finish them. The homeowner, who described it in a review, said the communication with the project manager and the whole team stood out.
The company was Borders Painting, and its owner, Eric Borders, puts the standard plainly. “I show up when I say I’m going to show up,” Borders says. “I do what I say I’m going to do, and even if it means losing money on the project, I’m willing to do what I need to do in order to make things right.”
That last clause is the one he leans on. Borders Painting is a Round Rock company that repaints houses and commercial buildings around Austin. Its work carries written one-, three- and six-year warranties, which vary by painting package and project scope, and Borders talks about them as the start of a relationship.
“We want to be people’s painters for life,” he says. “If they call me back in five years, I want to be able to help them out again.” He says he is not trying to get “a quick dollar out of these projects and turn them over as quick as possible.”
Borders started painting in 2011, at 18, for a company in California, and founded Borders Painting in 2016. The company marked its 10-year anniversary in 2026. Today the work is almost all repaints, interior and exterior, for homes and businesses. The company takes on little new construction, and if he has to pick, Borders leans toward exteriors. Its crews work in Round Rock and the greater Austin area.
The team is small, and Borders treats that as a reason to be strict. He says he leads by example. “There’s no room for slop within the company because we are so small that I hold everybody to a pretty high standard,” he says.
Asked where the standard comes from, Borders doesn’t point to how he was raised. He points to the customer, who has plenty of other painters to choose from. “People have a lot of choices with where they spend their money,” he says. “I want them to know that if they’re spending their money with us, they’re going to get taken care of, just like I’m painting for my grandma.”