My Journey from 0 Dollars to 1 Million - How I Grew My Line Striping Company

Everything changed on February 5th, 2018.

It was Monday - the day after the Philadelphia Eagles shocked the New England Patriots in the Superbowl. Work started like most days - roll into the glass shop around 7 am, and hang out with the guys until 7:30, which is when we got our work orders for the day. I was 27, more eager and determined than most of my coworkers, and on track to carve out a long career with the company I loved working at.

I had been tasked the week before with starting a complicated staircase glass scope at a new elementary school in Fort St. John, BC, Canada, where I had grown up and still lived. This was a stressful scope of work - no one at the shop was ever comfortable trying to measure up staircase glass. This particular staircase was even more difficult - over 100 feet in length, multiple angles, and very specific welds on the steel posts where the fabrication team would have to perfectly notch the glass out to hold it in place before having it tempered and installed.

I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was using all my combined experiences with angles, measuring, and taking templates to try and make it work. After struggling with this on the previous Friday, I decided I was going to ensure that I wasn’t responsible for thousands of dollars of glass being ordered incorrectly, so I was going to cut “templates” into the staircase steel posts, made out of thin MDF sheets, and we would ship those templates to the supplier.

And so I began upstairs, alone at the shop, where we kept a lot of larger tools and materials, including the table saw. I began ripping the sheets down to the proper length, but after just 1 or 2, I had a problem - the thin sheet had “wedged” under the fence of the large, King table saw. I remember analyzing it, with that 10” blade spinning at thousands of rotations per minute, that I could likely “pull” the sheet out from the fence. As I leaned over and began to guide it out, it happened.

What happened, exactly?

To this day, I don’t know. Perhaps I leaned over too far. Perhaps the sheet got thrown forward. Either way, I heard a loud “BANG” noise, immediately assuming that something metal had hit the blade, or a piece had been kicked back into the metal bench behind me. Something caused me to look down, however, and I saw the damage:

My left index finger dangling at the mid-knuckle, the middle finger cut about halfway through, and the top 1/4 of my left thumb missing.

And so began a long rehab and recovery, flights to Vancouver General for multiple surgeries, in an effort to keep my fingers that they had sewn back on. As time went by, sitting at home with my wife, and 2 young daughters, fighting an odd mixture of guilt, annoyance, and impatience, all I wanted to do was go back to work - but boredom quickly set in.

That’s when my mind drifted back to the parking lot striping.

You see, when I was 21, I was working at the main shopping mall in town - and there were no parking lines painted anywhere. The asphalt was too old, and the site conditions were always dirty from the harsh climate and environment in northern Canada, but mostly - my boss didn’t want to hire the only local line striper. He didn’t like the guy’s attitude, comments, or business approach - and so he simply refused to have any parking lines painted. But one spring, my boss decided to give him a shot. While it didn’t go great (I don’t remember the specifics), all I could think of at the time was “How can this be the only guy painting parking lines in a town of 25,000 people? There are too many parking lots for 1 guy.”

That thought lodged in my brain for the next 6 years. I always knew it would be a great business in my market, and one I could do after hours and on weekends. So when I was sitting at home in February 2018, with a large bandage on my left hand and boredom setting in, I decided to take action. My wife, Robyn, encouraged me that “there is no better time than now to get everything started.” So, I went to VistaPrint and made a logo based on a business name I thought sounded cool - Laser Line Painting. (I didn’t even know lasers were even used on equipment at the time.)

I took that logo, put it on some marketing flyers and business cards, and ordered them to my door.

I made a cheap website on Weebly, registered the domain, and designed a catchy layout based on some of the other contracting websites I thought looked cool.

I ordered Dan Zurcher’s incredible book, “How I Stripe a Parking Lot By Myself”, and read it in 2 days.

I spoke with friends, business contacts, and people online that I was going to start painting parking lots. I would drop cards off on the way home from work at gas stations, local businesses, general contractors, and anywhere I saw new asphalt.

I bought a brand new Graco 3400 with all the money we had in savings.

Finally, in May 2018, I took it to my first parking lot - the very shopping mall where the idea was born. My old boss, in fact, sealed the deal for me, telling me in February “If you buy a machine to paint the lines, the job is all yours.”

2018 was a wild ride, for many great and many bad reasons. I fell in love with striping. I worked entirely by myself, re-striping everything I could get my hands on in my evenings and weekends. I agonized for hours at my first new layout, checking, re-checking, snapping chalk lines, re-measuring, snapping more chalk lines, and painting brand new stripes on fresh blacktop. I loved it. There were some brutally long days trying to do a day job and striping on the side. One shift in particular, between my two jobs, lasted 7 am-3 am the next day. After a quick 3 hours of sleep, I was back at the glass shop at 7 am the next day.

Snow began hitting the ground in November, and my mind the entire winter was on how I could do more striping in 2019. I started bidding on projects in other small cities. I had been given a chance by the local civil contractors and paving companies on some jobs, and I followed up with them multiple times, ensuring that I would be locked in for their future parking lot striping work. I began experimenting with online ads, cold calls, and cold emails.

By the time I got to February 2019, I knew something had to give - I was not going to be able to continue to work at the glass shop AND run this business. Jobs were already booked for April, May, and June. I already was having difficult mental health issues by the end of 2018 related to the injury on my hand, and trying to force more work into my already busy schedule was not going to work.

So, once again, with my wife’s encouragement, I gave my notice to my employer and began my journey as a self-employed entrepreneur. 2019 was completely exhilarating. It was a feeling that I had never had before to be 100% responsible for my own income, instead of just supplementing my day job. I kept up my determination to grow the business. I would do all of my striping in the evening and overnight, using the time during the day to work on quotes, build more relationships, and find other ways to grow. I started performing some jobs in other small towns, including the municipal paint markings for small towns, which gave me around $20,000 in revenue - a pretty great payday for somebody just starting their own business full-time. My expenses were low, there is very little competition, and at the end of October, I saw around $90,000 in revenue for the 6 to 7 months of striping.

The next challenge in the business came on Halloween in 2019, as my family of four moved 300 miles south to a new city. We had been in Fort St John for too long and wanted to be closer to family. I also knew that this larger city, Prince George, didn't have a lot of options for line striping either. There was one company that had been in business for 50 years that offered line striping, and ended up performing the lion's share of work in the market. However, the challenge was going to be trying to establish brand new business contacts and sales opportunities in a city where I had none the day I moved. I was still confident, however, that between my ability to return to my old Hometown to continue to serve that market, and working hard at breaking ground into Prince George, I could continue a successful operation, and hopefully hit $100,000 in Revenue.

And then came COVID.

To say that I was nervous was an understatement. When the coronavirus really broke out in March 2020, I had already established some small jobs in Prince George with hotels and shopping centers. By mid-march, nearly all of them had canceled. I remember talking with my wife, family, and friends, telling them I'm really not sure what was going to happen with my business, but I also might not be able to go find a job if the entire world is shutting down. I applied for some jobs just in case.

After doing on the situation for a number of days, I decided that I was not going to back down, and I was going to remain committed to making this work. I purchased some sales courses from Jeffrey Gitomer, the king of sales. I also bought his best-selling book, the Little Red Book of Selling. I figured that if other businesses were able to continue to operate throughout the pandemic, I was stubborn and motivated enough to join them. Buying some courses on selling might help me improve my ability to sell projects in a difficult environment, and I was willing to invest the $500 to try it.

Using my newfound knowledge, along with connecting with other people online who I saw succeeding throughout the pandemic, propelled Laser to over $100,000 in Revenue by the end of July alone. As the month rolled into august, I was having a lot of problems, however. At this point, I was still the primary operator. I had hired a friend that I knew, a 17-year-old, to begin working with me on-site in the evenings and overnight, as I had recently bought a second paint machine. But even with my helper, I was falling behind in the schedule. Jobs were piling up, and some of them were far away, causing difficulties and trying to manage the schedule and demands of all of these clients, well also juggling weather forecasts, other quotations, and everything else happening in the business.

That's when I connected with Nik Biddinger, who was working with Winrate Consulting at the time, and he offered to set up a meeting with Mike Claudio, the founder and business coach of Winrate. I resisted for a couple of weeks, as I had been used to the pushy sales pitches in my DMs and emails over the last 2 years. But something clicked with what Nick was saying, and I decided to take a meeting with Mike, fully expecting to not sign up for any expensive services. At best, I would sign up for one of his group training programs, which was around $150 a month.

That meeting with Mike lasted around 50 minutes, and I had already verbally agreed to sign up for his one-on-one coaching services after about 25 minutes, even though it was going to set me back $2,500 a month American - around $3,000 Canadian.

How did I change my mind so quickly?

Mike listened empathetically while I explained to him the troubles I was having in the business. Yes, business was growing, money was coming in, and it was profitable. But I simply didn't have the tools and resources to keep up with it anymore, and I knew that I was about to start letting people down, which I had avoided completely to this point. I remember telling Mike that I refused to overbook myself because that would just damage relationships and future opportunities, and I wanted to be a company that delivered on what they said they would do.

He offered a couple of suggestions right off the start, but most importantly, he asked a couple of questions that were simple, and got right to the root of the problems that I was facing. It was eye-opening, to say the least. To this point, no one had asked me tough questions. All people saw was my flashy website, my cool logo, and some attractive pictures on social media, and assumed that everything was perfect. I wasn't accountable to anyone but myself. And to be totally honest, I felt a little silly knowing that I was crushing my original revenue target so early in the year, yet was still unhappy with how things were going because of my inability to control it anymore.

Make assured me that that feeling of having things slip away, and losing control, happens to every contracting business eventually - if they don’t have the knowledge to deal with it. When it's just you as a business owner, and the business is small, it's easy to manage. But as things grow, you need to start building actual systems and processes and plugging in talented people to help facilitate the growth and prevent you from burning out.

I didn't know how to implement those systems and processes, and I was already terrified of hiring more people - it was difficult enough hiring a 17-year-old helper, as I felt like I owed him the world. But Mike assured me that he would work with me one-on-one giving me access to him at any time that I needed. We would have a weekly call for an hour every week where he would set up systematic targets and plans based on what I needed to finish out the year. More importantly, he also discussed with me how we would build out a revenue stream for this company throughout the winter, which had never happened to this point.

To sum up, working with Mike Claudio changed my business and changed my life. I now had someone in my corner who understood the problems I was facing and had the solutions for all of those problems. We began tackling things one by one, such as my time management, my selling process, my pricing, my follow-up methods, my documentation of procedures, how I would begin hiring more people, how to set up the winter program, and everything else in between.

Without Mike, I probably would have finished the year with around $140,000 in Revenue. By implementing some of the immediate strategies, and more importantly pricing changes, in the first few weeks, I was able to finish the calendar year with just a shade under $200,000 in revenue. Mike helped me uncover around $25,000 in additional revenue - and actually fulfill the work - in the first 8 weeks.

We continue to work throughout the winter on what the 2021 program would look like, and begin building out entirely new systems for the business which got me very excited. I was learning how to stop being the technician, and feeling like I always had to be out in the field or I was going to be letting my employees and clients down. By the time we got to the end of the painting season in 2021, our revenue was well over $350,000, and we had more coming in from the snow season which was approaching.

I've continued to work with Winrate Consulting to this day. Our calendar year revenue in 2022 is over a million dollars now. There are a lot more challenges that come up, and just like it was two or three years ago, they can be stressful. I don't always have an immediate answer on what to do. I still need to rely on other people in my network who have been tremendously helpful in figuring out how to solve those problems and continue the trajectory of the business.

My business has shifted its focus from 1 guy painting parking lots to becoming a solution provider for hundreds of clients in central British Columbia That desire to provide solutions with precision is what drives us forward collectively.

The ride from 0 to 1 million has been fun - but we're just getting started!