It's sort of a running joke here that most of our blog entries end up somewhat...hagiographic.  Is it humanly possible that we really are as happy as we say we are about being as great as we say we are?  That's a question for another day, but for now we'll take a side door through to a more modest statement:

We don't employ superstars. 

Not in the conventional sense of the term, anyhow.   And by way of explanation, I'm going to be a bit lazy (see...gaining modesty!) and fall back on an easy sports angle, and since it's winter in Boston I'll make it a hockey reference--we employ grinders.

Now let's take a step back before we unpack the grinder.  Remember that hockey's the Canadian national pastime and its rinks are the weekend morning destination for countless Northeastern and Midwestern parents and their little rink rats.  In other words, when you go in on hockey, you go all in on hockey.  And out of those teeming, shivering hordes, we've got less than a thousand men playing the sport at its highest professional level here in America.  Put another way, that means every single guy in the National Hockey League is already a true outlier, the 1% of the 1% best at what he does.

But among these superstars-in-any-other-context, there are the grinders: the guys who don't pot 50 goals a year or stop 95 out of every 100 shots; the guys who don't get the big headlines, not for lack of talent but for want of the need to stand out in an arena within which they already do; the guys who simply show up every day and play a solid two-way game. The grinder is never more noticeable than when he is absent.

Looking through a slate of recent customer evaluations, I am struck by how often the phrase "fit right in," or a variation thereof, comes up; similarly, customers on several occasions have mentioned how much they miss our house painters after their project has been completed. 

To me, this makes perfect sense.  Our men and women are certainly the 1% of the 1% of the best in terms of their ability to put paint to substrate; on talent and talent alone, surely they are superstars (and just as surely, there are other painting companies who might say as much).  But in point of fact, in what our folks do, in how they conduct themselves and practice their craft onsite, they are grinders--they do all the little things well, they function as a team, and their true worth is often most evident once the proverbial paint has dried and the next project has begun.