Nathan Welker was working property maintenance when he started calling every painter in the phone book. There were 22 of them. Two answered. He left messages with the rest, and one called back. Of the three he reached, one came out and put in a bid. The company Welker worked for decided it was too expensive and passed.
He put in his two-week notice anyway.
When the company asked why, Welker said he was starting a painting business. He was already doing all the painting around there, he told them, and he had just tried every painter in the book. What he had noticed, he says, was “the supply and demand in the work field.”
The business he started is Nathan’s Painting and Powerwashing Pros, in Joplin, Missouri. It is still a small outfit. “It’s just me,” he says. “I have a helper, a guy that works with me, just two man crew, small town down here in Joplin. Everybody knows everybody.”
Those calls still shape how he talks about the work. He doesn’t start with brushes or paint. He starts with the hours. “If you’re a guy that’s willing to wake up from eight to five, answer your phone, go out and meet people in your neighborhood and provide the service, if you show up, you’ve already got at least a 50% chance of winning the bid,” he says.
His scheduling rule is shorter. “You’re on the books. We’re there,” he says. If a job isn’t on the books, as he sees it, “something happened in translation.”
Welker is a painter first. “I do painting more so than pressure washing,” he says, and he describes the company as interior repainting specialists that also do exterior cleaning. That split carried him through COVID. Interior repaints, he says, “kept me alive through that time.” The pressure washing could keep going too, he figures, since all of it happened outdoors.
The interior work grows out of his old job. On the business’s About page, Welker says he spent 15 years in management and property preservation, painting more than 300 homes and getting houses ready to rent. One customer’s review describes the result on a single job: three bedrooms, a large kitchen and a laundry room painted in two days, the walls taken from a very dark brown to a neutral eggshell white, with the small nails pulled and the holes filled. On the company’s pages, tape and tarps go down before the painting starts, and each home job ends with a walk-through alongside the customer.
Pressure washing runs on a different clock, and Welker doesn’t soften it. “People want it done immediately,” he says. “They want it done before the weekend when their friends get there.” Anyone who offers the service, in his view, needs to get a bid in within a day or two. With painting jobs on the calendar, he can’t always manage that. When he can’t, he sends the customer to a family member who does pressure washing.
That family member is one reason he doesn’t plan to hand the company down. He expects to grow it and eventually sell it. A family handoff only works if somebody in the family wants it, he says, and his relatives already have businesses of their own.
He encourages anyone with the drive to try working for themselves, though he says it is not for everybody. When he gave notice, the property management company told him he was crazy and that he’d be back in a week. “Now 10 years later I’m still doing it,” Welker says.