At every big meeting, someone asks who got the free house and wants to hear the story, says Rayah Gilliland of Tulsa Christian Bros Painting.
The free house is a monthly goal: choose one person and paint their home at no charge. A salesman who comes across someone in need can put a name forward, and anyone can fill out the nomination form on the company’s website. Some of the people chosen, Gilliland says, were not asking for anything. One of the jobs drew some DIY YouTubers in Tulsa, who wanted to be part of it and featured it.
The Broken Arrow company does mostly residential work and later opened a commercial division. Gilliland says it has 80 to 100 painters in the field. In training meetings, the example it reaches for has nothing to do with paint.
“We actually use Chick-fil-A a lot as an example in our training meetings,” she says. The chicken is good, in her telling. What brings people back is the service: the “my pleasure,” and the worker out in the heat with an iPad, working the line so the food comes faster. The company’s own standard is convenient, reliable, professional.
Part of that is how a crew looks when it pulls up. “Everybody has to be TCB ready start to finish,” Gilliland says. Painters do not arrive in their own trucks. Everyone from the person at the front to the last one on the job wears the TCB shirt and stays clean.
She is careful about the middle word. Asked to rate the company’s reliability, she puts it at about an eight out of 10. “I would love to be like, yeah, we say we start at nine, it’s going to be nine on the dot every single time,” she says. “Well, it is construction.” A crew held up on one job can reach the next one late. “I’m not promising that every job’s going to start on time perfectly, but I am promising that if they need something they’ll always find somebody to communicate with to get it solved,” she says. A customer who calls asking where the painter is gets the office, which then reaches the project manager. The work carries a two-year workmanship warranty that she says can run as long as six years, depending on the package.
The company started in 2008 with a truck and the owner’s dad’s ladder. He went out looking for homes to paint. The family has been in the construction industry for more than 40 years, Gilliland says.
The free houses point toward something bigger. The company calls it the TCB block party: paint every house on one block for free. “Eventually we want to grow so big to paint the whole block and bring everybody out there, have a party, bring out the mayor, whatever,” Gilliland says.
For now the free jobs come one at a time. For one of them, the crew showed up with an oversized check made out to the homeowner for what the painting would have cost, and surprised them with the news that it was free. “We have that video,” Gilliland says, “so it was really fun.”