Find Out How We Painted A Baby!
We painted a baby. Yes, it is a true story. What had happened was this: We were painting for a couple with children in Windsor. On this particular Wednesday, we were painting trim and her doors. There was a door that entered through the back of the garage that Raul was getting ready to spray black. He loaded his paint sprayer with the black paint, stood about a foot away from the door and pulled the trigger. Raul didn’t know two things. The homeowner was checking in and standing five or six feet behind him with her nine-month-old baby girl was the first thing Raul did not know. The second was that the spray gun’s tip was jammed and slightly off-center which, as soon as he pulled the trigger, exploded and splattered paint everywhere except where it was supposed to go.
Moments after he pulled the trigger, everything was covered with black paint. The house, the concrete, the landscape, Raul, all his equipment and tools, as well as the baby!
Raul called me and I rushed over to the home. When I arrived the homeowner was already inside with the baby and cleaning her up in the bath tub. My first question to Raul and to the baby’s mom was, “Is the baby ok, is mom okay, are you and the painters okay?” Thankfully everybody was fine, and nobody was injured from the paint explosion.
That has been the worst day we have experienced, so why do I share this story? Why would I want anybody to know about our most embarrassing, shocking and potentially reputation damaging event that has occurred in our many years of business? It’s the truth. Things do not always go as planned. We make promises and set expectations in business and they do not always happen. This is not intentional. We set out every day as a company to not just meet, but to exceed our customer’s expectations. We are passionate and dedicated to exceeding expectations on every project. We are also humans serving humans. We are not perfect; we mess up, get it wrong. Yes, we did it and we take ownership of it. We take ownership when we screw up, just as much as we do when we get it right.
We believe that a phenomenal project is the expectation and it’s very easy to take ownership, accountability and responsibility when the project goes exactly as planned. But what happens when a project doesn’t go exactly as planned? We are all humans and make mistakes at times. We believe that a company truly shines and shows its integrity when things don’t go as planned. Here at M&E Painting, we take just as much ownership, accountability and responsibility for our mistakes and imperfections as we do our excellent projects and fantastic reviews. Everybody has a “Painted Baby” story, but not everybody will take ownership of that story and use the story as an example of how they step up and serve their customers and their community.
To close, no babies were harmed in the making of this story or the photos you see around town and in ads. The baby we painted is perfectly fine and the customers could not be more pleased with their house. We did end up having a big mess and got every single bit of black paint cleaned up. We also paid to replace all of the clothes that were permanently damaged from the paint as well as sent this nice family to dinner on us as a show of appreciation, understanding, and for their forgiveness of the incident. This mistake allowed M & E Painting to show our customer what we were truly made of, and how we reacted to a situation filled with high stress, emotion and things not going as planned. This mistake allowed us to show, not just what we say we value, but what we actually value and put that into action.
That is our “Painted Baby Story”. We are honored to share it with you, and hope that you see the value of how we operate as a company and how we serve our customers, team and community in our successes as well as our mistakes.