“I can’t just service every little zip code in Portland,” Ran Shriki says.
Shriki founded Oren Painting in 1992, and over the years he has learned where his crews should not go. Some places are too far. Others have the wrong kind of house. “I purposely kept away from some areas either because of the distance or because of the type of homes that are there,” he says.
On the second count, the issue is lead. Some older properties are ones he doesn’t want to take on, because of their age and the lead containment they would demand. “I’m really always worried about my guys being exposed to things,” he says. On the older homes the company does paint, its residential page commits crews to the EPA’s lead-safe work practices for houses built before 1978. Shriki’s own filter is blunter. Some properties he simply passes on.
That worry about the crew runs through how he describes the business. Many of his painters have been with him for years. “I treat them like family,” he says. “I give them vacations. I offer them SIMPLE IRA, paid leave, and everything with me is on the book.”
Painters who have stayed that long, he says, have seen how he treats the people who work for him and the people closest to him, at work and away from it. “They know that it’s important to me that people know you’re reliable, you’re honest and you do good work,” he says. “You don’t just talk and do the opposite.”
He expects the crew to act on it. If a client isn’t satisfied, he says, he sends painters back, and they stay on the job until the client is fully happy.
Two of the people working beside him are his sons. As boys they came along to help, and Shriki says he pushed both of them toward the trade. One was a general manager at a paint store when his father recruited him. Shachar Shriki now runs operations, handling estimates and meeting with clients, and Oren Shriki handles supplies and specializes in floor coatings.
The work leans large. Shriki says the company once did nothing but apartment buildings, then moved into new construction and into facilities such as independent living and memory care. Its portfolio includes phased repaints of occupied apartment complexes, a senior living community in Portland and a feature home on the Street of Dreams tour.
Shriki learned to paint from an uncle and painted to support himself through college. When he opened his own company, he had two small children at home. “I needed to create my own time,” he says. Running a painting business let him set his own schedule.
He stays close to the people who hire him. “I try to communicate, maybe sometimes over communicate, and flood my client with daily progress,” he says. When a job ends, there is a follow-up call asking whether the client needs anything else.
The shop is in Tigard. The territory, for all the places he skips, still reaches from Hillsboro and Clackamas to Vancouver, Washington, and out to Bend. Wherever the job was, the line back to him stays open. “My phone line is always open, even if it’s complaints,” he says. “I will always take care of them, even if it takes a year or two for them to reach out.”