CertaPro Painters’ chief got his start selling paint jobs for a college friend
Mike Stone went from selling custom homes to running CertaPro Painters, a franchise that bet on fewer, bigger local businesses and on painters as craftspeople.
Audubon, PA
After he graduated from the University of Iowa, Mike Stone sold houses for a custom home builder. On every project he noticed the same thing. “The last contractor in the house was always the painter,” he said on the Think Like an Owner podcast in 2024. “So, I kind of cut my teeth learning a little bit about the trades working for this builder.”
Then a college friend bought a CertaPro Painters franchise in San Diego and asked Stone to help get it going. Stone sold residential jobs and commercial jobs. By the late 1990s, he said on the podcast, it had grown into “a humongous painting franchise” by the standards of the time.
Stone has been president and CEO of CertaPro since 2015. The company started in 1992 with the idea of making house and commercial painting easier and more convenient for customers, and by early 2025 it counted 485 franchise territories in the United States and Canada. Its story runs largely through people who came up from the field, and through a choice about how to make a scattered local trade run like a disciplined business while keeping local owners at the center of it. Stone has had “about every role in the franchise and on the franchise,” he said on the podcast.
CertaPro, based in Audubon, Pa., is a subsidiary of the Toronto-based FirstService Brands, which belongs to the publicly traded FirstService Corporation. Most CertaPro businesses are owned and run by local franchisees.
Selling paint jobs in San Diego showed Stone how scattered the trade was. “I couldn’t believe how fragmented the industry was, and I saw a huge opportunity to professionalize the sector,” he told Authority Magazine in 2024.
The move east came for family reasons. His wife was from the Philadelphia area and wanted to raise their children near relatives, and CertaPro’s corporate office sat in the Philadelphia suburbs. Stone joined corporate in March 2003 as a general manager in development, training new franchisees.
His first weeks were shaky. The company was bringing in a new leadership team, and Stone, unsure whether his job was safe, interviewed for a position at AAMCO. The CEO at the time walked into his office and asked whether he was going to join AAMCO or stay. The CEO was friends with AAMCO’s director of operations, and word had traveled. “It was a very awkward conversation, but I told him on the spot that I wanted to stay at CertaPro,” Stone told Authority Magazine.
Rich Wilson also settled in at CertaPro in 2003. He had come into painting as a student who needed tuition money. “I could either spend a summer crab fishing in Alaska or start my own business,” Wilson told Franchise Update in 2014. “I decided to stay dry.” In 1987 he became a College Pro Painters franchisee, liked running the business enough to join the company’s corporate team instead of going to law school, and later worked at Aamco and Maaco before landing at CertaPro.
When Wilson took over as executive vice president, Franchise Update reported, growth had stalled. He reworked hiring, franchisee relations and marketing. He became chief operating officer in 2008 and president in 2010, and the company posted double-digit growth every year from 2009. In 2013 CertaPro made gold the accent color on its logos and clothing. It also replaced its habit of surveying a third of its clients each year with Net Promoter Score, which uses an outside agency to survey customers anonymously. “We could just finish the job and move on, but customer satisfaction is vital,” Wilson told the magazine. He put the company’s founder, Charlie Chase, at the top of his list of mentors.
Stone, meanwhile, moved up through operations. He was a regional vice president from 2007 and vice president of operations from 2013. In that job he had to speak on stage in front of the whole company for the first time. “Public speaking is not my forte and I looked like a deer in headlights,” he told Authority Magazine. He has practiced it ever since.
In 2015, he told the magazine, the founder asked whether he wanted to take CertaPro to a billion-dollar business and named him president and CEO. On the podcast, Stone recalled the request more bluntly: “Mike, I want you to take us to a billion dollars.”
One of the hard calls Stone has described came about a decade before that 2024 interview, and it was about where to put the brand. One path was to sell franchises in large numbers, the way Subway fills a map with thousands of locations. The other was to be choosier. “I made the decision to embark on a distribution strategy centered around trying to build big, strong businesses in fewer territories,” he told Authority Magazine. That meant giving owners more content, programming and leadership support. He called it a very difficult decision at the time.
Some of the owners who signed on came from far outside painting. Steve Carey, a former F-15 pilot, retired from the Air Force as a colonel after 30 years and bought the CertaPro franchise for Mobile and Baldwin counties in Alabama. “I bought the franchise in 2008, the start of recession, not a great business decision,” he said on the Mobile Alabama Business podcast. He described a franchisor that flew him and his wife to Pennsylvania to meet successful owners and then interviewed them both to see if it was the right fit. The system set certain standards, he said, including a written contract and a two-year warranty. His own summary of the work: “It’s not about painting, painting is what we do, it’s about running a good business, listening to customers, delivering extraordinary experiences.”
In Reno, Mary Wink became the first CertaPro owner nominated for the company’s top award, the CertaCup, in her first year of business. In her second year she won it, chosen from nearly 400 CertaPro businesses across North America, after turning her operation into a balanced mix of residential and commercial work within 24 months.
The company’s training became something trainees could put their hands on. In 2019 CertaPro moved into a 31,000-square-foot headquarters in Audubon, known as Certa City, with a 7,000-square-foot learning and demonstration area. Inside are realistic structures representing the interior and exterior surfaces painters face, so trainees can learn to identify a substrate, pick the right equipment, reach awkward spaces and make repairs. One of the contractors on the building was a franchise, CertaPro Painters of Lower and Central Bucks. “Certa City is designed for franchisees, their associates, and painters to see, touch, feel and experiment with these facades,” Stone told 1851 Franchise in 2019.
On a job, the company’s playbook, which it calls the Certainty Service System, comes down to habits Stone listed for citybiz in 2024: listen to the customer’s needs, write a detailed project plan, honor appointment times, treat the property with respect and keep the customer informed. When something goes wrong, he said, franchisees are expected to deliver what they promised, even if that means doing the job over again.
The company has also taken direct stakes in some local businesses. In 2025 it acquired a majority interest in CertaPro Painters of San Francisco, its fourth company-owned operation. George Irving, who had owned and run the San Francisco business since 2002, was set to oversee its day-to-day operations.
Asked by citybiz what he hoped to do for the trade, Stone talked about the people holding the brushes. “Painters are professionals, they are craftspeople,” he told the publication in 2024. “They take surfaces and spaces that are dull and lifeless and make them beautiful again.”