This summer, PPC hit the road for two days with Noah Kanter, a contractor serving residential customers in northern Vermont. In this article, we talk with him about his go-to coatings and the role his paint supplier plays in his success.

What are your go-to paint products and how do these help you provide consistent quality work for your customers?

For interiors, my go-to products are Cashmere® for the walls and I’m starting to really love the Emerald® Urethane Trim Enamel for trim. That combination cannot be beat on all levels and clients love it.

For exteriors, one product that really stands out to me is Snap Dry™ Door and Trim Paint. That product allows me to paint doors – I usually spray paint them – and close them an hour later and not worry about it. That really increases my efficiency on exterior projects. I don’t have to prop the door open for three hours and let all the flies in the clients’ homes. I can spray out a beautiful metallic looking factory finish and walk away after an hour. That helps me out a lot.

In what other ways does your paint supplier play a role in your success?

Sherwin-Williams helps me on two different levels. The first is the local level, at each individual store. All of the sales clerks and the managers are knowledgeable and fast at turning around orders. That really matters if you’re a paint contractor. You have a lot of stuff to do.

The reps too, have also been a fabulous asset to me. I can think of one story: on a Friday, in early afternoon, I was spraying out a job with a handheld gun and it broke. I called my rep Cody Marchand and a few minutes later he was on a ferry going from Burlington to New York to Plattsburgh to get me a new gun and drive it back down so I could finish this job on a Friday. That is the job of the rep. It’s to put out fires like that and solve problems for you. And that is a level of service that is just unexpected, which is what makes it special. That’s Sherwin at the local level to me.

At the corporate level, it’s even better almost. Because the reason I’m here doing this interview is because I heard their VP of Marketing, Jeff Winter, on a PCA podcast talking about the topic of young people in the skilled trades at a level of depth that I thought I was only thinking about. And the fact that their upper management is out there doing that and implementing programs to really dive deep on this topic like I am, that means a lot.

Noah Kanter is the owner of Nth Degree Painting in Burlington, Vermont. See more stories in our series of interviews with Noah.