LIME Painting – Adding Colors To The American Dream

A paint job is essential to maintain the aesthetics of space; however, not many understand the value it adds to our most valuable assets. Well, someone does.

LIME Painting is a residential and commercial painting company specializing in the industry’s best products and procedures. Having realized that there are plenty of painting franchise opportunities, LIME decided to focus solely on high-end homes and businesses with values of over $1 Million and set up a franchising model in that space. Within the first six years since opening in 2014, LIME’s two founding locations generated $9 million in gross sales and $1.12 million in net profits!

The Founder and The Canvass:

When Nick Lopez, Founder of LIME Painting, graduated high school and left Colorado to join Michigan State University, he was planning on walking onto the wrestling team as a way to pay for his college tuition and cost of living. Unfortunately, Nick soon apprehended that a wrestling scholarship was a couple of years away. Needing a way to meet his expenses, he decided to hang up his wrestling shoes and embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

Nick founded his first painting company, Spartan College Painters, LLC, at age 19. With hard work, a willingness to serve, and a little luck, Nick happened to stumble upon a massive need in the market. High-end property owners were struggling to find a consistent, high-quality painting company that also provided custom coatings and restoration solutions. It was from this moment that Nick began to focus on a business that would blow past the status-quo.

Nick used his years at the university as a way to refine his business model. After finishing his degree, Nick decided to move back to Colorado soon, launched LIME Painting in Denver, to establish the scalable model that he had developed earlier. It soon became abundantly clear that Nick needed to share this model with the rest of the country, which is why the decision was made to open the business up to franchising.

The Milestones in The Journey:

After a year of launching the franchise, LIME’s single location in Denver has expanded to other cities like Castle Rock, Boulder, Ft. Collins, and Boise. LIME has become a vehicle for stability and career growth for its painters, location employees, and franchise owners. The services LIME offers have compounded, their technology has become more robust, their systems more refined, their marketing has become very clear, and their brand has developed a reputation for being a leader in the high-end painting and coatings and surface restoration industry. The collaborative effort from everyone at LIME has resulted in many local and national awards.

The Roadblocks:

LIME’s challenges have been related to the process of vetting and establishing quality solutions for custom properties. At times, to add new services to serve clients and offer more value, LIME has had to fail to learn how to do the service correctly. From LIME’s corporate location standpoint, this was a challenge, but from a big picture and franchise standpoint, this has been priceless as the process for those services has been established and laid out for franchise owners to implement. This reality is what makes franchising much more successful than starting a business from scratch. Franchisees join a community of other owners with whom they can collaborate, and they are given a proven-out model that they can learn and execute.

The Palette of Services:

LIME’s luxury approach revolves around meticulous preparation, process, and product selection, which are unique to each project and client as they execute tailor-made results. LIME focuses on painting, coatings, and surface restoration for the interior and exterior of custom residential and commercial properties. Many different surfaces make up that property if you think about just the exterior of a multi-million-dollar home. For example, to name a few, the home could have metal, masonry, stucco, and wooden surfaces that all deteriorate over time and need to be restored. Once the property’s surfaces have been restored, they then need to be coated to protect them and renew their aesthetic appeal. As a result, LIME has diligently vetted quality solutions for servicing custom properties and offers over 40 different services.

Adding the Special LIME Touch:

Painting is traditionally an old school business without any technology to streamline systems and processes. LIME has developed technology to enhance their experience from a client’s first interaction with LIME to the final step. Every LIME location is able to automate their sales processes and stay on top of scheduling and production, and LIME’s technology gives clients and employees access to live updates. LIME maintains the old school quality and work ethic but modernizes the industry with a technology focus. LIME branding and marketing focuses on empowering the client to express their personality through their property. LIME’s innovative visual reality consultation artistically and visually shapes the client’s imagination and brings their vision to life.

The ethos at the Crossroads of Art & Business:

LIME is a values-based company. In fact, LIME stands for Love, Integrity, Mission, Excellence, and is the foundation for how LIME interacts with its employees, customers, and the community. LIME is a culture-based company, and people are at the center. For LIME, the franchises that LIME stewards are a vehicle for providing jobs and excellent service within the communities. Each LIME franchise owner is able to give back to its community through LIME’s nonprofit – LIME Light Outreach, Inc., which focuses on empowering the youth through LIME Light’s 4 Pillars of Knowledge: Faith, Family, Patriotism, and Prosperity.

Nick’s Thoughts About Entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship is hard, gritty, non-glamorous, lonely, expensive and full of trial and error. On the other hand, franchising marries entrepreneurship and a community of business owners, which minimizes a lot of what makes entrepreneurship so tricky. The most important element of a successful franchise concept is that the model is proven, backed with technology, has comprehensive marketing, cultivates collaboration amongst franchisees, emphasizes training and support, and leadership remains innovative.