Shared text from several sites related to painting contractor warranties: "Another type of warranty is offered by the professional painting contractor. This warranty can be a gimmick, designed to entice the sale, or an honest attempt to be responsible for the quality of the job."

New England by large, and its Greater Boston area as microcosm, present very real weather concerns to the exterior painting project, particularly those projects begun later in the season as days are shortening and temperatures dropping.  To us, warrantying such a project for however many years is as much an attempt at responsibility as it is a leap of faith--faith that our men and women will read and follow material instructions to the letter and allow discretion to be the better part of valor when planning for the elements.

And what a pleasure to have one's faith rewarded, time and again.  We are proud to offer a three-year warranty on all exterior work, mindful that our ability to do so is a direct function of the attention to detail and superior customer service practiced by all of our house painters.  They make us look great, and of course, they do that by taking the care to make your house look great!

Growing up in New England, one feels a certain obligation towards sarcasm and the greater tickle at the back of its throat we charitably call cynicism.  Maybe it's the harsh winters, maybe it's the baffling political machinery, maybe it's just what we do--whatever the impetus, there's a black, bitten humor particular to these parts.

I'm of the opinion that sarcasm and cynicism are like salt: a dash makes the dish; more than a handful renders the meal inedible.  Without belaboring my time on the soapbox, I'll note how happy I was to hear Conan O'Brien's closing thoughts from his last Tonight Show:

"All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere," he concluded. "Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

I think Conan's talking about the pitfalls of cynicism as a strategy, a lens through which we view and engage with our world, and to that end we at Catchlight endeavor towards what customer service maven Jeanne Bliss posits as the first of five decisions that set beloved companies apart: We decide to believe in our customers.  From her book I Love You More Than My Dog:

"Beloved companies...decide to believe.  They believe their employees and they believe their customers.  And they practice this by suspending cynicism.  By deciding to trust customers, they are freed from extra rules, policies, and layers of bureaucracy that create a barrier between them and their customers."

And in large part, we are able to put this decision into practice daily because of our men and women in the field.  We are privileged to send out Boston's best house painters, as kind as they are skilled, to be sure, but more still, as willing to listen to their customers as they are capable of acting on your wishes.

Nigel puts it very succinctly in this entry: we take credit for our hires, but our men and women deserve all manner of hosannas for their kindnesses in the field each and every day.

From our company page (emphasis mine): "Your home is your greatest investment, a pride and a joy, the realization of dreams and hard work: at Catchlight, Inc., its beautification and restoration is, quite simply, our craft--the fine art of house painting."

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to guess that most of our customers see the duality of a house painting project in a similar light: beautification and restoration; art and practicality.

Today, I'd like to suggest a third function: the painting project as a diagnostic.  And sue me for excessive kitsch if you like, but I'll cop to it--I got the idea from an old episode of The Brady Bunch the other day.  You see, Mike and Carol were painting the bedroom, the hallway, some such, and at episode's end (before Mike went in for the kiss), Carol said "well now that we've painted the bedroom, we're going to have to do (this, that, or the other thing)."  I suppose that's less a diagnostic than a terrifically resilient stereotype at work, but my larger point stands; as often as not, the painting project doesn't so much pull a room together as it indicates just how much pulling together may be in the offing.

It's a good first step sometimes, this wall painting business.  And we're happy to lead your home improvement charge by sending out a crew of Boston's best painters to get your work done.

Icicles sure do look purty in the winter but unfortunately, more often than not, they indicate the incipient arrival of an ice dam--hazard to roof and interior alike.

Here then, a ice dam primer from Energy Star.  The house painters here at Catchlight are happy to consult with you on any of your exterior and interior needs related to ice dam prevention, mitigation, or damage--email at info@catchlightpainting.com with "Ice Dam" in the subject heading, or simply call at 617-734-1696.

CNN posted an oddly poignant article the other day: among the kajillions and jillions of folks who have seen Avatar, a growing number find themselves confronting a post-cinematic depression syndrome, such as it is.

From the link above:

"A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film...'it's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie,' Elequin posted."

To a degree, it's not terribly hard to empathize.  Part and parcel of the wonder of film is its ability to transfix and ultimately transport; a larger-than-life science fiction blockbuster may well be Gilligan's three hour tour made manifest.  Who doesn't want at least a little of what Elequin's having?

In the everyday, moments of surpassing awe are few and far between. Things are smaller, days are shorter; your neighborhood grocer probably doesn't look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.  We take what we can get, and quite often without really, truly being honed in on what it is we're admiring.

One of my favorite authors, the short-story king Raymond Carver, writes of eating during a time of loss as "a small, good thing."  Within a different context, we see house painting done well as another small, good thing.  The happiness upon entry into a freshly-painted living room, the serenity of an evening spent reading under a newly faux-finished ceiling, or perhaps the simple joy of a great-looking exterior to come home to after a long winter's worth of cracking, peeling, and the like--our ultimate aim, as Nigel writes in the entry below, is to 'ooh' and 'aah' you in the everyday.

Tipping our hat to Fred Reichenfelder of Bain and Company, his book The Ultimate Question suggests we conclude our customer experience surveys with the question 'would you refer us to friends and associates?".  This creates a Net Promoter Score(NPS) that gauges our success in creating Boston's best customer-centric painting company.

The ultimate reward of course is customer retention - repeat business with a loyal and trusting clientele who will recommend our service to others.

It's the content and comments on the surveys that give our people the most mileage however.  Hours spent prepping yields a carefully applied finish and the oohs and aahs we strive for.

To wit, "the quality of the work - excellent!  Dawn does beautiful work and communicates well."

Our thanks to Dawn Labenski, artist and craftswoman, for dedication to her work and our customers, and to our client Marie, for her trust in our service.  We look forward to working with you again, Marie.

From Business Week's 2007 ranking of the 25 Companies Where Customers Come First: "Technology is leveling the barriers between alpha companies and also-rans, making great customer service one of the few ways companies can distinguish themselves. Retail, online and phone shopping channels are expanding, increasingly prompting customers to demand a seamless -- and painless -- experience."

The citation of technology is a pertinent one: nearly every customer comes to transaction with a well-developed sense of what ought and ought not stick, technologically-speaking.  A server outage that delays an order for the better part of an afternoon?  Not ideal, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility.  But a company whose intranet goes belly-up for days on end during the holiday season will likely find their next stack of holiday receipts quite a bit shorter, absent some dramatic change and damage control.

While house painting is a relatively low-tech endeavor, the challenge comes to our table just the same--how might we provide something seamless and painless to customers whose order history has been significantly leavened by technology; in short, how might we provide a service that mirrors, say, the caliber of an LL Bean experience or a call to USAA?  If technology's great gift is that it allows a company to call its customers by name (and remember their favorite colors) across every medium...well, we're in Boston and you may recall a little television show called Cheers...

Catchlight Painting...Where Everyone Knows Your Name.  We won't try to sell this as our new tagline for 2010, but the sentiment stands.

Here in New England there is almost a veneration for oil-based paints.  Intuitively perhaps, we honor the age of our century-old homes and assume that the best protection is afforded by oil formulations, the same as the paints originally applied.

Paint is changing, however, and and the 'old' paints are no longer available.  The removal of lead reduced oil paint's elasticity and durability.  Now, clean air regulations have altered and, many would argue, diminished the performance of oil-based materials.

From a green perspective, the demise of oil based coatings is appropriate.  Prodded by the strictures of the California Air Resources Board, national paint manufacturers turned their attention to products containing significantly lower volatile organic compounds.  Research and development in latex or water-based paints led to the formulation of the next iteration of 'waterborne' coatings and the evolution of the lowly latex paint into a new, sophisticated and multifaceted coating that exceeds oil based paints by most measurements. 

It's worth remembering however, that production, transportation and application still generate a size 11 carbon footprint.  How best to minimize this footprint?  Paint less frequently!   Investing in a thorough, preparation-focused house painting protocol will yield the best and most durable results.

Concurrent with our own focus on minimizing our footprint,  is an effort to invest in 'green' ancillary painting products - zero-VOC primers, low-VOC paint thinners(when necessary), caulking, recycled nylon brushes made with FSC hardwood handles, recycled polyester roller covers, cardboard paint trays, etc.  You'll find all of these products in our inventory as we strive to reduce our carbon shoe size.

We're still stuck driving old fashioned gas-powered vans however - our company's Toyota Prius is the harbinger of the eventual conversion of all our vehicles to hybrid technology - we'll be the first in line to upgrade our fleet when these commercial vehicles become available. 

Postscript - we tried putting roof racks and ladders on the Prius but that didn't work out so well. 

For some background--recently I've been reading up on the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an interesting thinker set aside from a rather uninspiring lot of financial prognosticators and apologists.  His most recent work, The Black Swan, takes its title from that occurrence for which we can neither prepare nor accomodate: the Black Swan among a gaggle of white.

And so I'll borrow Taleb's term for this unexpected event of surpassing magnitude and color it differently: the Purple Swan is the Black Swan we handle in a completely expected, unimaginative, and prosaic fashion by talking it to death.  The grisly demise of Michael Jackson seems to me the best, most recent example of this death of a thousand cuts--you'll pardon the pun, please.

The corporate world finds its corollary to Purple Swan behavior in the endless skein of meetings that inevitably follow a dramatic success or calamity.  I well remember the heady days of the dot-com boom in Manhattan; each morning seemed to bring three or four reports from various boroughs--'Company X just fired half of its support staff'; 'Company Y's creditors are at the door with baseball bats'; 'Company Z did so well this last quarter that the whole office went to Bermuda for the rest of the month.'  And so on and so forth.  An endless dialogue that would catalyze itself into the dreaded 'Death By Meeting.'

Our house painters are asked to resist the (very human) impulse to color a black swan purple; when encountering something theretofore unencountered onsite, our men and women consistently take a step back, ask questions if necessary, and make a considered move rather than tread the (very human) path of least resistance: a quick nod of the head and the rush to an illusory 'oh yeah, yeah, I know what this is and we'll take care of it' while lulling the customer into somnolence with a tedious, drawn out explication.  Sometimes, things happen.  We're proud to have a staff of men and women who are not too proud to seek each other's counsel when the Black Swan beckons.

Driving through Newton as I do each Wednesday morning around 8:30 can occasionally feel like navigating a boogie board through a sea of white vans, some well-appointed, others not: it's not unusual for my merge onto Route 9 to be subject to several residential painters, a contractor or two, a plumber, an electrician, and the like.  All vans, all right lane drivers.  And me in my little Toyota, waiting...

For the self-starter interested in hiring a house painter of any stripe, I imagine the decision process might feel similarly intimidating.  So many outfits, so many advertisements, so many prices.

Immodestly, we'll point to our testimonials as bona fides for our service; to the greater point, we're of the opinion that a testimonial from a trusted corner is worth its weight in gold, and solicitation of such is a far better first step for the self-starter than a trip through Google, Big Yellow, or the like.

Ask a friend, ask a neighbor, ask a colleague: who have you used, would you use them again, and why?  The converse is worth asking as well: who won't you consider again, and why not?