A lot of the painters who work for Mike Webster have been with him 15 to 25 years. That covers most of the life of Webster’s Quality Painting, the family-owned company he started in 2000 and runs out of Prior Lake, Minnesota. At its busiest, the crew grows to somewhere between 15 and 20 painters.
The standard those painters work to is older than the company. Webster spent the first six or seven years of his career learning the trade under older, old-school painters before he went out on his own, and he has held to their way of doing things since.
“They always said, do it once, do it right, then you’ll get referrals from other clients by doing so,” Webster says.
On a job, that rule shows up in the order of the work. The company describes Webster as being on every project from the start to the final walkthrough. Every exterior begins with a wash, because paint won’t bond to dirt, algae or chalk, and the surface gets time to dry before anything goes on it. Loose paint is scraped. Rotted trim is fixed before a brush touches it, and the method is particular: probe the wood around the damage before cutting, because what looks like six inches of bad casing can turn into 18 once you find where the dry wood starts. Exteriors carry a warranty of two to three years.
Inside, the same logic holds. Walls are patched, primed and masked before the first coat. The crews also texture ceilings, or skim coat them to make them flat. Inside corners on trim are coped rather than mitered, since miters open up as the wood moves and coped joints stay tight. The crews enamel interior woodwork of all kinds. On kitchen cabinets, each door is numbered along with its hardware so it goes back where it came from, the doors are finished flat and off the cabinet, and the enamel is sanded between coats.
Most of that work is on houses, interiors and exteriors, within about 25 miles of Prior Lake, with commercial jobs taken on as they come up. One homeowner who has hired the company at more than one house noted that while staining a very large deck, the crew moved furniture, protected everything underneath and brushed the stain on by hand.
Each job closes with a walkthrough with the client. If the client spots anything, Webster says, they just tell his guys, and the crew takes care of it before leaving.
His painters learned that routine from the person who set it, the same way he learned it. “Lead by example and train the men,” Webster says. “I’ve been there, done it, so they understand my standards.”