When a painter on one of Niko Mastoras’s jobs calls in sick at five in the morning, the clock starts on a second task: reaching the homeowner. “Within the next 15 minutes I’m either sending a text message or making a phone call to the homeowner to let him know in advance,” Mastoras says.
He does the same when a crew moving from site to site is going to land late. It is also why he gives customers a window instead of an hour. The crew will be there between seven and eight, or between eight and nine, “just to give some wiggle room.”
The habit belongs to a company that is young in everything except the people who work there. Mastoras Paint & Drywall has been in business in Homer Glen, on paper, since early 2024, by his recollection. Nicholas Mastoras, who goes by Niko, is 21. His father is a painter. So are his uncles. “I come from a family of painters that have been doing it a lot longer than I’ve even been alive,” he says, “since the mid to late 90s.”
He has been around the trade since he was about seven. “It’s really the only line of work I’ve ever been super familiar with,” he says.
That history decided who would do the work. When he opened the company, the crew was already there. “Most of the guys that work for me, I’ve known since I was in diapers,” he says. They are relatives, or friends of relatives, part of a community of tradesmen that had been working together long before he came along. He stepped into it. “It was a very easy entry level for me.”
He grew up in a Greek household, the son of two first-generation parents, and he credits that upbringing for his strong personality. Being so young adds to the pressure he puts on himself. He says he still has a name to make, and the name in question is printed on the company.
“My last name is on my business, so I have no choice but to care,” he says. A family-run shop, in his telling, is “forced to take more pride, even some days where we don’t feel like it.” He is the only owner, a “solo Joe,” in his words, working with independent contractors, subcontractors and relatives. He is on the job sites daily.
The company sells itself as one stop for two trades. Besides painting, Mastoras says, the crew hand tapes and finishes drywall. The business handles homes and commercial properties from its Homer Glen base, across the Chicago suburbs and into northwest Indiana.
He likes both kinds of customers, but he is frank about the difference. Commercial work is easier, he says, “because it’s more so production work, whereas homeowners work is a little bit more decorative.”
The pairing of trades shows up in the jobs customers describe. One homeowner had a hole cut in the kitchen ceiling to reach a water leak, and the company came in to patch it. When the touch-up along the ceiling line still showed, the homeowner recalled, a worker on the job took it upon himself to match the color and repaint the kitchen’s upper walls in full.
Mastoras expects the company to stay in the family. Realistically, he says, he will probably pass it down much the way his father and uncles passed down the trade, with one difference: this time there will be a company to hand over. A son or a nephew would be his first choice. Past that, he is not claiming to know. “I was just able to drink a legal beer, so I have no idea what’s going to happen for the next 10 to 15 years,” he says. “Who knows? But really, anything’s on the table.”