For more than 30 years, PPC magazine has been on job sites throughout the U.S. and Canada asking residential and commercial paint pros to share their stories. This issue: Chris Berry, owner of B&K Painting, Boise, Idaho.
Building a company… and a brand
Even if the name Chris Berry doesn’t ring familiar, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled upon, engaged with or even purchased something from the Boise, Idaho-based painter at some point in your career. For over a decade, Berry has become more widely known as The Idaho Painter, a moniker that has grown to encompass a multifaceted brand that’s dedicated to helping educate, empower and equip fellow painters.
Over the years, Berry has amassed an impressive following within the painting industry. When he began producing instructional videos for his Paint Life TV channel on YouTube in 2011, it became clear that he’d struck a chord with his target audience. Berry was particularly interested in catering to the painting novices and DIYers who were eager to hone their skills and broaden their knowledge of the trade.
In the decade since his channel launched, Berry – alongside his wife and business/marketing manager, Lisa – has earned a massive audience on his social media channels (442,000 YouTube subscribers and a combined 437,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram) and has even grown to include eCommerce and brick-and-mortar storefronts for Paint Life Supply Co., his signature line of painting supplies and apparel.
You don’t have to be new to the industry to benefit from The Idaho Painter’s advice. In addition to how-to videos and product reviews, Berry offers insight on becoming a self-sustaining painting business, inspired by the missteps, pitfalls and hard lessons he learned while getting his own painting operation off the ground. He is a firm believer in sharing the knowledge he’s gained along the way so that anyone who wants to make a living by painting all by themselves is situated to succeed.
Here are three tried and true pillars that Berry has relied on for growing both his painting skills and his business.
1. Learn to fail well
It’s almost hard to believe that the 55-year-old painting veteran who now makes a living by sharing his expertise in the trade was once himself a budding, inexperienced painter. But before The Idaho Painter was making waves as one of the painting industry’s most influential presences on social media, Chris Berry, the husband and father of three, was a college-educated, white-collar-job expatriate and former Boise police officer who had grown tired of the formalities of the corporate world and was in desperate need of a change.
“So, I decided to start a painting company,” Berry says.
Berry co-founded B&K Painting in 2003 with a longtime friend who was a painter’s apprentice at the time. Despite having no painting experience to bring to the table, Berry had gleaned some familiarity with working in the trades thanks to earlier jobs he had worked for his dad’s contracting business. Coupled with a disciplined work ethic and an openness to making mistakes, Berry was determined to make it work at all costs.
“We were both self-taught painters, but after my partner left to pursue other endeavors just two years into it, I was left to figure it out and learn on my own,” says Berry. “I never worked for a journeyman painter or was given advice on how to do things the ‘right’ way, so there was a lot of trial and error. It was five years of making a lot of mistakes.”
Berry recalls being kicked off jobsites by builders due to his lack of experience. But rather than allowing his missteps to discourage him, he used them as motivation, embracing the fact that no matter who you are or what you are doing, failure is unavoidable.
“You’re going to fail in life,” he says. “I was highly motivated to be the best painter in the state of Idaho, and failures were only a way to learn to become better. I just continued to learn from my mistakes.”
2. Fill your skills gaps (and help others, too)
Like failure, embracing what you don’t know – yet – is an integral part of the learning process in the business. For Berry, he learned this lesson the hard way the very first time he had rented and used an airless paint sprayer.
“I decided to spray my very first trim package,” Berry recalls. “You have the option to brush and roll or to spray, and my perception was that you spray everything, because I didn’t know any better. It turned out to be a big disaster – probably one of the worst trim packages I’ve every sprayed.”
Informing a client that you are out of your comfort zone with a project may seem like an uncomfortable conversation, but by failing to do so, you risk losing your client’s trust in your handiwork, losing your profit margin as you double back to fix your mistakes and losing out on a good referral for future business. But trial and error seemed the only way to learn – Berry found early on in his career that many of his peers weren’t always interested in sharing their secrets.
“I knew there were a lot of people out there who were like me,” he says. “They have no idea what they are doing and they want to learn, but when you walk into a paint store, nobody was talking to anybody – the information is very guarded.”
One day, Berry had a chance encounter with a painter who gave him some pointers on how to bid a stair package for a new-construction job. “I was so grateful that he was willing to share when nobody else would. I knew I wanted to be just like him and help other painters, too.”
3. Choose the path that’s right for you
While Berry has flooded the internet with technical how-to videos for novice painters, he also offers an abundance of tips and tutorials for building a self-sustaining business, even if you’re looking to work all by yourself.
“We’re showing a perspective that not only can you paint a house by yourself,” he explains, “but you can actually make a lot of money doing this.”
While Berry regularly tackles topics like bidding and estimating in the videos he posts, he also offers bid packets for a wide array of jobs (fences and decks, cabinets, exteriors, etc.), along with templates for invoices and timesheets, all for sale on the Paint Life Supply Co. online store.
But don’t think Berry is out to convince anyone working for a larger painting company to quit and branch out on their own. At the end of the day, Chris and Lisa Berry’s mission to “educate, empower and equip” painters means that they want them to feel confident and capable of choosing the career path that’s best for them.
“We believe a large percentage of our audience is subcontractors who don’t yet have the confidence to build a business, run a business or get the business,” says Lisa Berry. “We want to help those individuals out so they can get over that hump, get their own work and not have to rely on other people to get the jobs and just take a percentage of the profits.”
This article was published in the Summer 2023 issue of PPC magazine. ©2023 Randall Reilly. Story by Diane Walsh, Vice President, Market & Channel Development for Shurtape Technologies, LLC, maker of FrogTape® brand Painter’s Tape. She also serves as director of the Shurtape Professional Paint Advisory Board, working with leading contractors across the country to explore industry trends and share innovations for the benefit of the entire trade. She is a frequent contributor to PPC magazine. Read more about what pro painters have discovered on the job in the PPC magazine archive.