“My guys are there half an hour before,” Clif Jones says.
He means half an hour before they are due at a house. The habit did not come from the painting trade. It came from a recording studio.
“Being a recording engineer, you never ever showed up late,” Jones says. “Matter of fact, you showed up early.”
Jones, who owns Clif Jones Painting Company in Sherman Oaks, worked on big records, Sinatra and Streisand among them, until 1992. He was putting in about 80 hours a week. Then he got joint custody of his son, and the schedule no longer fit. “I needed something where I wasn’t working so many hours I could take my son to school and pick him up,” he says.
So he changed careers. In the beginning he painted whole houses by himself. He hired people as the work grew, and the company has been painting Los Angeles homes since.
He did not leave the old standard behind. “I took that mindset and moved it to the painting business, and I only hire good dependable guys,” he says. Skill alone doesn’t get a painter onto his crew. “No matter how good they are, if they’re not good guys, dependable guys, I can’t use them.”
He holds himself to the same rule. “I’ve never been late with a paycheck,” he says. When COVID arrived, many of his clients did not want anyone near their houses, and it was about six months before his crews were back inside homes. “I paid the guys and we survived,” he says. He also doesn’t hand the crew a job he wouldn’t have done himself in the early days. “I treat my guys with total respect and I get the respect back.”
Most of his customers, he says, are homeowners who care about their houses, which he puts at $3 million or $4 million and up. The neighborhoods on the company’s list include Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. He will go about 20 miles for a job, tops. The company says every painter it sends out has at least a decade in the trade.
Jones visits the job sites himself every day. He also picks colors. Clients ask him, and he says they generally go with his choices over those of their high-end interior decorator.
Preparation is where the time goes, and it is what he tries to teach customers as a job moves along. By his estimate, preparation is half the job. He believes it shows in how long a finish lasts, and by his account his paint jobs hold up far longer than the average. He jokes that the durability works against him. “We kind of shoot ourselves in the foot,” he says.
The floors are one place the care shows. A hardwood-floor contractor wrote in a public review that he refers his clients to Jones and nobody else, because the crew covers finished floors with paper even when the job is only walls.
Jones plans to hand the company to his crew eventually. “I’m going to hand it down to my guys,” he says, “but I’m not ready to give it up yet.” He still likes the work. “I take pride in taking a house and turning it around.”
About four jobs in five are residential. The rest are commercial, and he is happy to take them. “We love commercial spaces,” he says. “We don’t have to move people’s shoes and laundry basket and all that stuff.”