On a lot of days, the crew at Mike’s Painting Co. is Mike Zimmerman. “Unfortunately or fortunately, I love painting, but a lot of days it’s just me, getting it done and doing the projects,” he says.
That is a smaller operation than the one he helped build. Zimmerman, whose given name is Micah, co-founded a residential painting company in Cleveland with his twin brother and a close friend. His brother still owns and runs it, with a crew Zimmerman puts at around 24 painters. Zimmerman stopped being involved when he moved to San Diego. The brothers still talk every day.
So the San Diego company is a second start at a much smaller size, and it runs on a few plain rules. One is that the owner picks up his own phone. Another is that he will not be late.
A client who needs something at 9 p.m. can call his direct line. “I’ll answer,” he says. He thinks that access counts for more in a city where homes often run into the millions of dollars. “To have someone come in your home or even work around it for a week is no small deal,” he says.
Lateness is the thing he is most blunt about. “I will close down the business before I show up late,” he says. He credits a business coach who keeps pressing him on integrity. He also points to the arithmetic of a young company: one slip, he says, could cost its whole reputation, and he takes that seriously.
The work itself is mostly the outsides of houses. Exterior residential painting is the company’s bread and butter, and it also paints interiors and repairs stucco and wood. Its FAQ page lays out the prep for an exterior job: power-washing off dirt and salt, scraping loose paint, repairing stucco and wood, priming bare spots and caulking seams. The coatings are Sherwin-Williams and Dunn-Edwards, two coats is the standard for a full repaint, and customers get a daily progress update.
The end of a job is a walk around the house with the client. Zimmerman wants to “make sure they’re 100% happy before they even pay us.” If a complaint comes in later, he says, he comes back.
Not every job is paint. One homeowner described a granite patio with spilled oil on it. A poultice went on one day, and the stone was pressure-washed two days later.
From the company’s warehouse, Zimmerman will go up to Del Mar, out to Poway, down to Chula Vista and some distance east, which he figures at about 20 miles.
Painting was not what he trained for. Zimmerman studied electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. In college he took one of the classic student-painter jobs, at $10 an hour, and found he liked more than the brushwork. “I was basically doing everything that a business owner would do, and I loved it,” he says. He linked up with his brother and his best friend, and they went from there.
He got his start right as the pandemic arrived. He remembers wearing a mask to go to estimates and knock on doors. Because they were doing exterior work, he says, it was not that bad for them.
The engineering degree left him with one habit he still uses. It “taught me, if nothing else, how to turn in my homework on time and show up to class on time,” he says.