Brush with success: College student paints his way to good business By MATT ARMES Staff Writer
The long and hot summer days of landscaping and house repair are approaching fast. Brian Richardson is ready for them.
The 20-year-old junior at Towson University and Bowie resident has already assembled a few work crews of several college students and supervisors ready to tackle a multitude of landscaping and home maintenance jobs this summer.
Thanks to a flier on campus he read last year offering aspiring entrepreneurs the chance to run their own business, Richardson took a chance and now serves as the manager of his own painting company.
"Running my own business was something that I had wanted to do for a long time," he said.
"Even though it seemed like a lot for me to take on at the time, I still wanted to give it a try because I really wanted to find out if I was really cut out for entrepreneurship or not."
He connected with Collegiate Entrepreneurs Inc., a national company that provides unique and exciting opportunities to college students by allowing them to run their own painting branches for the summer.
Not only did CE give him the training he needed, but also provided Richardson with health insurance, workman's compensation and accounting assistance.
"After those three training sessions last spring, I was responsible for marketing in order to find customers, then of course doing the estimates and selling the work," he said. "I also had to find all of my employees all on my own."
Last May found Richardson networking with college buddies and friends from high school who eventually composed a team of nine workers who covered everything from full exterior/interior painting to deck staining and power washing throughout the summer.
"I trained them to paint, then took them to the job sites," he said. "From there, they painted and I checked on them periodically to gauge their performance."
Richardson's responsibilities went beyond simply making sure his crew was doing its job. His biggest priorities entailed door-to-door marketing, selling his company's services, providing work estimates and job completion dates.
"I did whatever I could to make sure my guys had work," he said. "My main goal was to help them out."
Richardson admitted that despite the business he helped secure for his work crews, the initial experience of running his company proved a bit bumpy at times.
"Organization was a big problem of mine when I started," he said. "I ended up running into situations where I would spend more time on my crew than marketing, which put me in a situation where they would ask 'What are we doing tomorrow?' "
He explained that a wallpaper job proved to be much trickier, and much costlier, than he had imagined.
"It took my painters over 40 hours to finish the job after an estimate of 20 hours," he said. "The customer ended up getting very frustrated. We ended up losing a lot of money on that job."
But, Richardson also learned that hard work and honesty can pay off quite well. During his three summer months in operation, he sold more than $50,000 worth of services, for which he was rewarded with an all-expenses paid cruise to the Bahamas.
"I was really surprised about that," he said. "The company told me that I was the second person in Maryland to ever go over $50,000 in his first year. That was also my first cruise and it was a blast!"
Looking back, Richardson didn't cite the cruise as the biggest highlight of his summer. Instead, it was being a positive influence to his employees.
"At the end of the summer, one of my painters came up to me and said, 'You changed my life, man.' "
Richardson explained that the employee had just finished high school and had difficulty adjusting to life after graduating.
"I told him that this is no part-time job, and this isn't a joke," he said. "By the end of the summer, he learned how to be a businessman. At the end of the day, I had never thought I'd hear someone say that about me."
Now as a junior continuing his studies as a business major at Towson, Richardson has his work crews assembled and is already looking forward to running his company this summer with even higher goals.
"I'm actually training three other guys to do exactly what I did," he said. "I'm also going to sell $120,000 worth of business. That's my personal goal."
Although he had never painted in his life before starting his own company last summer, Richardson also learned several valuable life lessons.
"You have to learn how to hang out long enough when things aren't going your way," he said. "I also learned how to let things go and not let them get to me. I chose to do this, no one paid me to do this, but I like doing it. My goal is to be successful."
He added that balancing the business while attending classes full-time was undoubtedly the hardest thing he had ever done.
"When you're growing up, you only worry about you," he explained. "When you run a business, you have you and everyone else under you. The way I've handled it, I'm only one person, and I get done what I can get done."
He added, "The experience was something that I wouldn't change for the world."
