Every new hire at Chamaleon Painting & Molding spends a week being trained by the owner. That includes the ones who arrive with experience.
“I just don’t say, ‘Oh, he has experience, okay, that’s good.’ No, I know you have experience, but I will train you because everyone works different,” Berlin says.
She can teach it because she can do it. “I don’t only know how to manage the business,” she says. “I know how to do everything. I know how to paint. I know how to do wallpaper.” Chamaleon, based in Trenton, paints homes and commercial buildings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It also installs molding, the second half of its name.
Berlin started the company in 2019. Before that she worked for another painting company, where she was the only woman and rose to supervisor. Then she decided to move on. She had field experience, so she set about learning the rest. She took online classes. She worked with a designer to learn wallpaper. She took courses in accounting and in how a business runs, and she earned certifications as a small business owner and as a woman and minority business owner.
The wallpaper lessons still show up in the work. Chamaleon hangs wallpaper and strips it, and it does drywall, taping and popcorn ceiling removal alongside the painting.
Her crews are not all men. Berlin says she makes room for women who want to learn the trade, the kind of opening she once had to make for herself.
Her own week is built around the job sites. She says she visits each one every week to check on the crew and the progress, and customers talk with her directly. She is particular about dates. If she tells a customer the work will be ready by Monday, she says, it will be ready by Monday. A new project that comes in does not push that customer to the following week. She schedules her time around the customer, she says, not the other way around.
Before the work starts, she sits down with the customer and goes through every product the crew plans to use in the house and what each one is for. The customer can approve it or ask for something else. If a project will take a long time, she explains why. She backs the work with a two-year guarantee: if something goes wrong because of Chamaleon’s work, she says, the crew comes back at no extra cost.
The jobs run from small to large. She mentions small houses and ranch houses, garages, single bedrooms and rooms that need only molding. On the larger end, a reviewer writing about the Willingboro Public Schools District said Chamaleon has handled many painting and power-washing jobs there.
Part of the job, as she sees it, is telling customers when they are asking for the wrong thing. “I will say no, no, that’s not right for you and that is not convenient for you,” she says. “This will be the best option because that’s my work.”