“You still have to come back with touch-ups,” says the owner of MasterCoat Services, explaining how a flooring company ended up in the painting business.
Ask him about painting and he starts with the floors. “We’re actually a flooring company,” he says. The family has worked as flooring contractors for more than 20 years. MasterCoat is the newer business, built out of the older one. The family’s site traces that history to De Armas Wood Floors, which works across South Florida and, the owner says, now has a location in North Carolina as well.
Painting, he says, rides along with floor work. “Whenever you’re in a home, it kind of goes together with the flooring almost.” Walls get painted before the floors go in, after they are finished, or somewhere in between. Either way, someone has to come back for touch-ups. After enough of those trips, adding painting as its own service made sense.
That return trip is the part he talks about most. If something goes wrong on a job, he says, “we come back 100 times to get it right.” He has no use for the contractor who finishes and heads off to the next job. “We’re working together until the customer tells me, hey, this is the best job I’ve ever seen,” he says.
The crew is a mix. Some of the men have 20 years or more in the trade, some have about 10, and some are just starting out. The owner says he sets the standard by doing it himself. “You gotta set the example for everybody,” he says. Because the team is close, the habits pass along easily, and the veterans are the ones who decide whether they stick. “Once the older guys are on board, everybody has to follow, almost.”
Most of the work is residential: interior and exterior painting, along with drywall repair, surface preparation, custom murals and textured finishes. One homeowner described having her exterior and living area repainted, then asking for murals in the bedrooms, and watching the crew turn her idea into finished walls.
The owner wants to take that habit of returning a step further. His goal for MasterCoat is property management work: larger commercial arrangements in which the company serves as the main contact for maintenance on a building.
The standard he holds the crew to came from his father, who was, he says, “especially big on word.” It was drilled into him as a kid and he carried it into the company. “If you give your word on something and you say you’re going to do it, you better do it or else.”
In practice, that shows up on the clock. For an estimate set for 10, “we’re there at 9:55,” he says. And when he tells a customer a job will take five days, he aims to finish in four, or even three.