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School was not for me. Before my career in paint, I moved around to a few different colleges. I was in Phoenix at the time and wanted to come home for the summer. In fact, I ended up never going back to college. In 2004, when I came back that summer, I started working at a paint store named Big Horn Paint, and I fell in love with the industry. I worked there for three years and then decided I wanted to apply the knowledge I had learned. In 2007, I started contracting.
Painting runs in my family. In 2011, my wife actually ended up doing a Master of Fine Arts at LSU, so we relocated to Louisiana. While she worked on her MFA, I worked at Sherwin-Williams. When I moved back home to Wyoming, I started contracting but missed working on the store side. In 2015, I went back to Big Horn.
Going back in 2015, I noticed a huge difference in the store. There had been a significant decline in sales during the time I was gone. The owner was burned out and was doing nothing to maintain his customers. This really worried me!
So, in 2017, I went ahead and bought the shop from the owner. This was a very rough transition—the shop was in a bad state, and it was hard trying to turn it around. The big thing we did to get customers to come back was advertise the new ownership for a while. People really started coming back once they knew there had been a change. We closed the shop under its old name and reopened it as Big Horn, and people came back—literally, the next day, the store was full!
There was a real need for change at the shop. We started hiring people who valued and were driven by customer experience—basically hiring based on personality instead of experience. I grew up in this town, and it’s a very small community, so I have lots of contacts here, and we are extremely customer-driven (I know the names of around 95% of my customers). This change for the better and valuing customer experience was amazing for the business. It was so good that we had to move shops! We moved from a 2,000 sq ft shop to a 6,000 sq ft shop, and it went from just me working there to now having eight employees. In the new shop, it’s actually really cool. My wife, who as I mentioned before is also into painting, has a business on the side where she offers hands-on classes and sells different kinds of paint for art! Like I said, it’s truly a family business!
As part of the process to enhance our shop under new ownership, staying updated with technology was crucial. We had been using Intuit’s QuickBooks for a while but started realizing that there were better solutions available. This prompted me to research for around three to four years, exploring other point-of-sale systems. I even became deeply engaged with a competitor for a couple of months. However, as we were about to go live, I discovered that the company had provided false information about what it could do. This left me annoyed but also disheartened, making me lean toward sticking with QuickBooks temporarily.
Then, my friend Justin from Billings Paint Centre introduced me to Rundoo. He let me know he was looking into it, and I joined him to watch the Rundoo team show their software. After watching the demo and spending half a day working on it, I truly loved the process.
What appealed to me the most about the system were the individuals behind it. A group of young, dedicated people determined to put in the hard work. I watched Justin be tough on the guys and saw them work around him. I could tell that these guys truly cared. In contrast, dealing with Intuit would take hours on the phone with little progress. The contrast was striking, and I could tell the difference. I expressed my interest the next day and went live on June 1st. Incredibly, by the time of the go-live, Rundoo had already transferred 98% of my data. I was thoroughly impressed.
Unlike many others, we were eager to change, and nothing was going to stop our progress. Rundoo's efficient data transfer prior to the go-live made the process feel effortless. They managed to transfer all our historical sales, products, and customer data into their system without us having to do anything!
Something I really want to emphasize is how much of a pleasure it is to work with another small business that genuinely cares about what we’re doing. It’s a great process—they want to do their thing, and they want to do it right. I can't express enough how much I appreciate everything they do for me.
