NEWLYWEDS WASTE LITTLE TIME IN PAINTING FUTURE AS ENTREPRENEURS

Some people like to take things slowly, but if the recent past is any indication, that’s not the mindset of Brad and Jenny Aldredge.

High school friends from San Diego, California the two reconnected 25 years after graduating in a way that couldn’t have been imagined 25 years ago but today is considered just everyday happenstance: playing word games on their phones.

Eleven months later, they were married in July 2014 on a beach in Florida. And just seven months after that, in February 2015, the newly married couple became entrepreneurs, leaving their careers to become franchise owners with CertaPro Painters, America’s largest and North America’s most-referred painting company.

Headquartered in San Juan Capistrano and having just celebrated its one-year anniversary, CertaPro Painters of Laguna Nigel serves residential and business customers in San Juan Capistrano, Capistrano Beach, Laguna Niguel, Dana Point and San Clemente.

“We just discovered the CertaPro opportunity and never looked back,” Jenny Aldredge said.

Commercial and residential painting is an estimated $40 billion industry in the U.S. and Canada. CertaPro has been ranked No. 1 by Entrepreneur magazine in its category for the last three years and boasts a customer referral rate that exceeds 95 percent. After deciding to become small-business owners, the Aldredges did their own necessary due diligence and targeted CertaPro Painters with the help of a franchise consultant.

“We liked the culture of the business and we saw a need in this community for a painting company that delivers beyond expectations,” Brad Aldredge said.

Brad spent 16 years at Sony Computer Entertainment America. As a sound design supervisor for PlayStation game development, he managed design teams that produced game audio for the brand’s most popular titles. Jenny owned and operated her own professional pet care business for five years. Before that, she spent more than 20 years in various management and customer-related service industries.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of actively employed painting and wall-covering contractors will increase by 38.5 percent during the 10-year period from 2010 to 2020. The bureau further concluded that sales of residential painting services are likely to increase by an annual rate of three to four percent during the same period.

“With my management background, love for team-building and desire for growth, I wanted to seek bigger and better things,” Brad said. “My father had his own Real Estate Brokerage company and I like to think I inherited his entrepreneurial spirit.”

While projections point to strong growth, the painting industry remains highly fragmented with many small contractors. According to estimates, the largest painting companies have less than one percent market share and more than 76 percent of businesses in the painting industry have four employees or fewer. But best-in-class operational systems and procedures make CertaPro the most professional business model in the industry and its satisfied customers are the direct benefactors.

“CertaPro Painters of Laguna Nigel aims to bring a level of customer service to the painting industry that is not commonly found in the trades,” Jenny said. “One of our favorite things about being CertaPro Painters owners is the ability to affect people’s lives in a positive manner. It ranges from the customer who loves their recently beautified home and has a new sense of pride in it to the family atmosphere we have with our employees and the difference we strive to make in their lives.”

The Aldredges are active in the community, participating in The Walk for Hunger, as well as volunteering during Earth Day activities at the Laguna Niguel Botanical Gardens. Nationally, CertaPro Painters is a corporate partner of Homes for Our Troops, which builds specially adapted, mortgage-free homes nationwide for severely injured veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given their own successful track record for handling change on the fly, Jenny said they have no problem serving the various requests of homeowners when it comes to the color.

“Color trends change frequently,” she said. “Different people have different preferences and we are here to make it easy to meet their individual tastes or needs, whatever they might be.”