John Corcoran: 11:30
Oh yeah, for sure. Now, I mean, like.
Paul Thompson: 11:31
Nowadays it’s just a.
John Corcoran: 11:33
Crazy.
Paul Thompson: 11:33
Stinking is easy.
John Corcoran: 11:34
It’s it’s.
Paul Thompson: 11:34
Unbelievable.
John Corcoran: 11:35
I mean, I want to say to the young kids, like, you don’t know how it was back in my day, we had to use Google. We had to search blue links to figure out the answer to questions, you know? Yeah, exactly. Answer so quickly. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. That’s that’s interesting because you actually, you started your company in 2023, which actually is a, believe it or not a post ChatGPT world, right? Like, I don’t know if you were using it. That’s still early days, but it was November of 2022 that ChatGPT kind of took the world by storm. Was that something that you were using early on?
Paul Thompson: 12:09
You know, funny enough. No, not really. You know, it really has only been recently that, you know, I’ve been very, very tech forward in my thinking in terms of like even starting the company, I was going to be tech forward where tech forward home services company. And I say that with, with a certain measure, you know, approach, we’re, we’re very thoughtful in how we actually proceed with technology implementation and where, where it’s going to be. You know, I don’t know, I think I saw this stat that in 2025, I think it was somewhere between 40 and 50% of all AI initiatives were ultimately abandoned.
Maybe that number is a little bit off. I can’t quite remember.
John Corcoran: 12:53
There’s been some studies that have said that. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thompson: 12:56
It’s meaningful. Right. And so, you know, being in professional services and seeing things like, you know, private equity come in and on a post acquisition and do like an ERP implementation, there’s, there’s a roadmap that you have to take. And so for me, you know, technology roadmaps are very important. And so, you know, it’s something that we’ve been trying to be very intentional about and not just trying to slap like off the shelf AI products out on, on everything that we do and saying like, oh, there’s got to be an AI process for that.
Let’s do it. We’re really more or less taking like a data first approach, right? Are we collecting the data? How are we collecting the data? Where is it being, where’s the data lake, if you will, being stored in an unstructured fashion and things of that nature.
So we’re wrapping a lot of intentionality around, like accumulating the information first and then we can start to go and build native models on top of it. But we are using some, you know, off the shelf type things in order to come through some of that information. But, but yeah, no, I, you know, we, we didn’t use it. I wasn’t, I didn’t use ChatGPT right out of the gate, I thought, and some people could push back on this. I thought at the time it was, it was just like a novelty.
It was a toy, you know, I really didn’t. I knew from my time at Ernst & Young that AI was coming, you know, so I don’t think it was a big surprise. I think the big surprise has been over the course of the last, you know, 18 to 24 months where you’re getting meaningful business use cases out of it. And, and I think that’s where it’s really, you know, changed, changed our perspective on like, what, what is possible and how can we leverage it going forward?
John Corcoran: 14:44
Yeah, yeah. Because some people would look at a painting company and be like, oh, what is the what, how can you be a tech enabled painting company? You know, so but that’s an interesting differentiator, especially if your competitors are doing things on paper or they’re not accepting credit cards or something like that, which I’m sure you probably ran across that sort of thing with your competition.
Paul Thompson: 15:04
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, painting is one of these things where, you know, the data essentially shows that, you know, 85% of painters in a given market are just like a dude and like a helper in a pickup truck, right? You know, and then, and then you have, you know, the top probably 15% are almost exclusively, I say exclusively, that’s probably probably a little bit overhanded there, but it’s primarily just a lot of the franchises and stuff. So to come in and build a household name and a household brand, you know, and to try to, to play against the franchises, that’s kind of where we’re at right now. And so.
Go ahead.
John Corcoran: 15:47
So let’s, before we get to that, I want to hear about what you think the key was? I mean, how did you get it? This is phenomenal to go from zero to over 20 million in about a three year period. So what do you credit that to?
Paul Thompson: 16:02
You know, so all of my time in professional services, you know, we were very akin to the long sales cycles of selling into other businesses. Right. So, you know, for instance, Ernst & Young had some data on this. And typically it took them knowing how many touches it took and how many years it would take in order to flip an account. Right.
So, you know, if EY is trying to unseat Accenture on a technology consulting engagement or something like that, just for an example, they knew that it was going to take, you know, 85 different touches with however many levels in 2 to 3 years. And so there’s an element of just like, you know, playing the long game here, But all that to say, for me, it was like B2B, right? Just go to B2B right away. Focus on the commercial side of things, right? And the businesses that buy my services on a, on a recurring basis, right?
And so that’s where we focused and the, you know, the margins can be tighter and there’s a lot more that you have to put up with, if you will. But at the same time, you know, there’s a certain level of comfort knowing that a lot of this is going to be recurring in nature. And we don’t necessarily. And what we lose in margin is made up for not having to spend as much on marketing or, you know, things of that nature.
John Corcoran: 17:34
So still, though, even if you made this decision to go after B2B instead of residential, I’m sure there was competition. There’s other companies out there. So, you know, what do you credit to? I mean, are you a superstar salesperson? Did you hire a superstar salesperson?
Or did you keep yourself out of sales so that you could hire someone who was better at it than you? Like what? Yeah. Tease out a few other things that you think beyond just the decision to go after B2B that were the difference maker for you.
Paul Thompson: 18:05
Yeah. If I were going to, if I were going to say what, what the key difference was, and this is not in any way to try to toot my own horn, but it is the fact that I, you know, I would sit across the from from folks on the other side of the conference room table. And it’s basically like white collar background to the white collar guy, right. Or gal. And, and so that was a, that was a, a big differentiator from my perspective.
When I would go in there, I could talk about the technical components of painting and drywall engagement, but then also converse with them as comfortably as I’m conversing with you. And please excuse and I hope you understand where I’m about to say next. But you know, I’m, I’m not a painter. right? So I’m a businessman first.
And so I’m walking into these rooms and I’m talking to folks with tremendous purchasing authority, and I’m coming into them as a businessman and not and not as one who has been a painter for the last 20 years, trying to score a commercial.
John Corcoran: 19:07
Account or something like that. Yeah. And so, so then I’m getting the sense that you weren’t intimidated. You’re walking into like, you know, to bid on painting a Costco or a Best Buy or a target or something like that. And this isn’t the biggest fish that you’ve ever, you know, tried to hook before.
Paul Thompson: 19:25
Yeah, exactly. Or even in my time in the big four and consulting, you know, rubbing shoulders with, you know, well known high powered CFOs and things of that nature. Like even then, I mean, the, the scariest, I think I cut my teeth early on in the military when I was deployed and I was assigned to a special unit where I had to report daily to a two star admiral who was the fleet commander during the war.
John Corcoran: 19:56
And that makes sense. And that makes putting in a bid to a Costco not puts it in perspective.
Paul Thompson: 20:02
Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, like it’s nothing. Yeah. So you know, so it was weird because the guy was super nice. I mean, he being an admiral made it that far.
He was, but you know, I couldn’t, I couldn’t relax my deportment in front of him. You know, he could do whatever he wanted, you know. So I was standing at attention. And, you know, when he said at ease, I had, you know, a frame at ease, like, you know, you know, meat to meat behind the hand, like, you know, and he was just, you know, very comfortably moving around the room like, no big deal. And yeah, but you know.
John Corcoran: 20:37
Those experiences, you know, younger in life really, that you carry them with you for the rest of your life, you know, because you’re like, at least it’s not as bad as this. I’m not at war right now. I’m not, you know, haven’t been. I don’t like the consequences of that. It reminds me actually. So I worked in politics at the beginning of my career.
This is a picture of me. You can see over my shoulder in the Oval Office. I worked in the Clinton White House and before I had a job there, I was an intern in the speechwriting office. And while I was still an intern when I was, I think, 21 years old, I wrote a speech for the president. And the speechwriter who was ostensibly overseeing it said, I don’t know anything about this speech.
You wrote it over the weekend. You come with me down to the Oval Office because we need to brief the president. And we stood outside of the Oval Office for, I don’t know, it must have been 15 or 20 minutes while he was wrapping something up. And we were like, looking in, we could see like people in there. And I’m sweating bullets like, oh my God, what am I gonna do?
What is he gonna ask? Like, we have to walk into the Oval Office and he’s going to ask me a question. It was a little anticlimactic because then after about 15 minutes of that, the secretary came over and said, he’s got it. You know, you can go. And then we walked away and it was kind of like a mix of relief and also like, you know, just like it’s a little bit too bad that I didn’t get that opportunity.
But, but, you know, just like that intimidation, like, like surviving that made me feel stronger for the rest of my career. Yes. Yeah.
Paul Thompson: 22:02
Yeah. 100%, man. You’re exactly right.
John Corcoran: 22:05
So you mentioned that you have moved into the point where you’re competing with the franchise painting company, so you’re no longer competing with the mom and pop companies competing with bigger companies. How is that a big, a bigger dynamic or different dynamic for you?
Paul Thompson: 22:21
Yeah, you know, I, you know, at the end of the day, all the franchises, they’ve, they’ve got a certain little bit of staying power from a branding standpoint on digital marketing. You know, they have that domain confidence ranking that might beat out our own. But the thing with us is that we’re going to own our backyard. So as much as we battle on the, on the digital front, at the end of the day, we are coming at it too. We’re scrappy, right?
It’s kind of like guerrilla tactics. We’re on one. We’re on the ground. You know, meeting neighbors and being in the community. And that’s essentially how we’re how we’re, we’re winning the war on that front.
One one skirmish, one battle at a time for the privilege and the right to be in the neighborhood and to, and to be in these people’s homes and to service them and also for some of the commercial clients as well.
John Corcoran: 23:18
Yeah. And I’m curious, you know, you’re in South Carolina, I don’t detect a South Carolina drawl. I believe you said you grew up in the northeast. Am I right about that? Yeah.
Paul Thompson: 23:29
That’s right. Upstate New York.
John Corcoran: 23:30
Okay. So in South Carolina, I don’t know it intimately, but it has a reputation of being favorable to locals or, you know, people who are from South Carolina. And so did you run up against that? Like what you’re saying right now makes it sound like when the outside big franchise painting companies come in, that you have an advantage because you’re a local. But even without that, like the being a native from South Carolina, how have you managed to have that play that to your advantage?
Paul Thompson: 24:05
Yeah, I think, you know, let’s go back to some of the times that you were talking about, like some of those formative things that like these experiences that you, that you, that you’re able to obtain when you’re younger, right? So I’m in my early 20s in the Navy. I’m literally traveling the world. And one of the things that they instilled in me was like, you know, when we would pull into port and it says, it doesn’t matter whether or not, you know, local laws, you’re still going to be obligated to, to abide by them. You know, like ignorance is not, is not an excuse, if you will.
And so there’s this element of like fitting in being a chameleon, knowing, knowing who you’re in, knowing the demographics, things of that nature. And so when we go in, we try to be we try to recruit locally. We try to understand the local culture and. And so for me, it’s I’m, I’m adaptable. Right?
I think it’s a superpower. I try to adapt myself to the situation and to the community at hand and certainly to the folks that I’m having ultimately a conversation with, whether that’s leveling, leveling up or, or even or, or even coming down to earth a little bit.
John Corcoran: 25:14
I’m also curious to know about, you mentioned digital marketing has become more competitive and that’s changed. That landscape is changing dramatically right now as we’re in this major shift from people finding you through Google to now finding you through Google AI overviews and ChatGPT and things like that, and talk a little bit more about the how that has been been a challenge for you competing with the, with these other companies that maybe like a, you know, these big national painting companies that probably come in with a big budget.
Paul Thompson: 25:45
Yeah, I would say the biggest thing for us is like, you know, ultimately right now, it’s finding good marketing firms. Ultimately, we want to be able to bring that in-house. We’re not there yet. We’re getting very close. You know, so for us, we need a large enough sample set to see whether or not it’s going to be working.
So a lot of it is trial and error. And so being able to dedicate resources to marketing to find out like what channels are working, what’s your, what’s your ROAS versus your ROI, right? You could have a positive ROAS, but your ROI is negative, right? So, you know, balancing those two things, knowing your number, knowing your margins, things of that nature and finding out and being able to essentially, you know, full fledged attribution, right. Did that lead come in through Facebook?
How long did it take to interact with that customer? Close the customer, deliver on the customer’s needs? What was that? What was our revenue from there? What was our profit from there, you know, and to, and to tie it all back.
And so even internally, I would say, you know, how do we compete with that? It’s like it’s ever changing. It’s like, we can’t stop. We’ve got to have, excuse me, I’ve got a sales leader right now that is a, a digital or I would say a, not a digital, excuse me, a metrics hound. He’s constantly looking at the numbers, finding out what channels are working, what’s not working, testing different thumbnails, running videos. It’s a never ending job.
I’ve hired him internally in order to manage some of the external vendors that we have. And we’ve been through several vendors. And so I say, you know, some of these franchises will, for instance, try to vet some of these marketing agencies. And I would say one of the on the longer end of the time horizon, I think our advantage is going to be that we’re going to be able to bring it in-house and be marketing agencies are very programmatic in their approach, right?
They don’t offer real tailored solutions. And so you have, you know the, the stand in the van, you know, kind of working in living word of mouth and providing for his family. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. And then you’ve got the franchise that’s trying to grow a business that would probably compete with us, or we’d compete with them. And at the end of the day, it’s like they I don’t think they’re going to have the wherewithal to be able to bring some of those capabilities in-house.
And I think that on the longer end of the time horizon, we’re ultimately going to be able to pull ahead.
John Corcoran: 28:23
Well, definitely the case of the larger you get, the more resources you have to compete against the smaller mom and pops and, and yeah, certainly true. Where do you go from here? So, you know, you’ve, you’ve grown tremendously from zero to over 20 million in a three year period. What’s exciting? What’s challenging?
What’s the new frontier for Brightline?
Paul Thompson: 28:44
Yeah. So, you know, right now we’re looking at acquisitions into new markets. We’re looking at greenfield new markets. You know, it’s easier to go buy into a commercial penny company or drywall company into a new market that’s already pretty much established as opposed to working with homeowners where we kind of have, you know, the market data to understand. So it’s like, for instance, just an example, Starbucks.
Starbucks knows that it needs, you know, 30 to 40,000 cars passing by an intersection for them to understand that they need a, that that’s a good location, right? For them to be able to plant a store. For us it’s the same type of thing we’re looking at like, you know, future, future home development, number of rooftops, you know, concentration of, you know, average house value, things of that nature. Average age of home. And these are metrics that are pretty much well known, I think.
And so we’re trying to figure out, you know, proprietary modeling, like, you know what actually is going to increase our level of success. And a lot of that is really coming down to some of the things that I’ve, I’ve mentioned, but also understanding your marketing and how much, how much ROAS can we actually pull it out, pull out. Like for us, a five, a five, 5 to 1 ROAS is actually pretty bad. We’re usually able to get up close to ten, which is obviously really good.
John Corcoran: 30:16
Paul this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you, learn more about Brightline and connect with you if they have any questions?
Paul Thompson: 30:24
Yeah, absolutely. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m kind of flying incognito. You’ll see that I’m a managing partner there. And so I don’t list Brightline explicitly there, but I am on LinkedIn. BrightlinePainting.net is our website.
And I’m always happy to engage with folks. I’ve reached out several times to talk to people. Always happy to do podcasts. I think it’s a great opportunity to, to talk to the community, talk to other folks.
John Corcoran: 30:58
And, it’s great. to share your story. You know, one, people love to hear these stories and, and two, it’s a way of paying it forward, you know, sharing your lessons that you’ve had along the way.
Paul Thompson: 31:06
Yeah, 100%. I’ve been helped so much by folks being willing to jump on a podcast and talk about some of the pain and some of the suffering and what they’ve gone through and how they’ve been able to build it up. So yeah, no.
John Corcoran: 31:21
And I didn’t even mention he has five young kids at home, one more than me. And somehow you’ve managed to do all this with five young kids at home. That’s amazing.
Paul Thompson: 31:30
Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you for that. Yeah. It’s because I have a tremendous wife and, and life partner and she’s been terrific.
Very supportive. And yeah, for we’ve been able to do it. Yeah. So it’s been great.
John Corcoran: 31:47
Well, when people ask me, first of all, it’s always one more kid than what you have seems crazy. So, you know, like my wife a few months ago was saying that we were talking about someone that had five kids. She was like, oh my God, I can’t believe that they have five. I was like, it’s one more than you have, you know? And people with three will say the same thing to us.
You know, it’s always like one more seems like just absolutely nuts, you know? But I mean, I say to people all the time, like, yes, it is crazy. However, I wouldn’t give any of them back. You know, it’s just the way that I feel, you know? So yeah.
Paul Thompson: 32:18
Yeah, 100%. We feel the same way too. Kids are a lot of fun. We’re very thankful for all of them. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 32:24
Paul, thanks so much for your time.
Paul Thompson: 32:26
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Outro: 32:30
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.