Climbing Down to Scale Up | Garcia Painting Services
By LISA LOEWEN | Photos by BRIAN PETERS
By the time Eddie Garcia graduated high school, he had already painted more than 100 houses — a strong resume for an 18-year-old that would eventually become the foundation for Garcia Painting Services, which officially launched in 2023.
Eddie was born in San Antonio, Texas, but his family moved to California shortly after he was born to look for better job opportunities. While his father managed to create a good life for them there, it required working two to three jobs to cover California’s high cost of living. When Eddie’s maternal grandmother became ill in 2005, the family decided to move to Kansas to help care for her.
“My dad sold our property in California right before the real estate market tanked, so he was able to take that money and invest it in rental properties in Topeka,” Eddie said.
Eddie, then in fourth grade, began helping his father maintain those rental properties by mowing grass and assisting with small repairs. As he grew older, his responsibilities expanded to include patching drywall and painting both interior and exterior surfaces. When he wasn’t in school, Eddie was on a job site with his father, not because he had to but because he wanted to help.
“Those years working with my father taught me the value of a strong work ethic,” Eddie said. “He taught me that I could do anything, be anything, if I was willing to work for it.”
During his teenage years, Eddie continued working on his father’s properties while also taking on jobs from local builders who hired his father to do the cleaning, trim work and door installation.
“Those jobs helped me sharpen my skills because, over time, we ended up painting entire developments,” Eddie said. “All of those properties in the Montara area, I painted every single one of those with my dad, interior and exterior.”
PRIMING THE BUSINESS SPIRIT
Those early lessons on the value of hard work imparted by his father, combined with the on-the-job training Eddie received while growing up, led him to turn his love of painting into a successful career.
Recognizing that he needed to gain more experience before he could start his own painting business, Eddie started working for a commercial painting company in Topeka, where he gained more experience by working on projects at Seaman High School, the Iron Rail and the Cyrus Hotel.
However, Eddie couldn’t ignore the part of him that still wanted to launch his own business. He started to pick up small jobs on the side, until one day the manager of CiCi’s Pizza reached out to ask him if he could paint the restaurant, working after hours so it wouldn’t disrupt the restaurant’s operations.
“Over the next five days, I worked from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. at CiCi’s and then went home, showered and headed to my day job from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.,” Eddie said. “I didn’t get much sleep, but it was worth it. That was when I knew I could do this on my own.”
The company he was working for didn’t approve of Eddie’s moonlighting, so they let him go. Now, Eddie had to make a choice: either find another job or build something on his own. He chose the latter.
“I opened my phone book and started making calls,” Eddie said. “I called every contractor, every apartment complex, every landlord and every single real estate agent that I could think of.”
The cold calls paid off. His first client came from a Keller Williams real estate agent who gave him an opportunity to prove his professional painting skills. One job led to another and Eddie’s business began to grow.
“My dad told me that if I focused on giving a five-star experience to every client, I would never run out of work,” Eddie said. “And I haven’t.”
GETTING OFF THE LADDER
Most 23-year-olds might feel a little intimidated by the thought of starting their own business, but not Eddie. After all, he’d been doing this type of work for half his life. He spent the next two years taking on more projects but, like most entrepreneurs, his business growth eventually outpaced the number of hours in a day.
“Because I was doing this all by myself, I couldn’t take the business to the next level. I would do the legwork to bring in a new client, but then couldn’t focus on adding any more customers until I had completed the work. It became a vicious cycle,” Eddie said.
That changed when his dad fell ill.“One of the last things he told me was that he wanted me to get off the ladder,” Eddie said. “He wanted me to build a team and focus on sales so that I wouldn’t be stuck in that solopreneur phase.”
When his dad passed away, Eddie hit a wall and wasn’t sure he could continue moving forward with the pressure of owning his own business. He decided to take a break and reflect on his options. He began working as a project manager for another painting company in town, but that only lasted two and a half weeks before he reconsidered his decision.
“I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow I was letting my dad down by not continuing this legacy I had started with him,” Eddie said.
He reopened Garcia Painting in 2023 with a plan to build out an entire team of painters, training and developing people so he could get out of the production side. His first hire came after he landed the contract to paint the Plaza Building next to Walmart on 37th Street.
“I knew I couldn’t handle that job all by myself, so I hired a painter with some residential experience to help me out,” Eddie said. “It was just him and me on ladders for 13 straight days.”
Once that job was done, he sought two more painters to complete his first team. They went through a 90-day training process to ensure they followed Eddie’s exact procedures to provide the customer experience he was committed to giving every client.
“I was part painter, part project manager and part sales during that time,” Eddie said. “But once that training period was over, I took my dad’s advice and officially got off the ladder, only six months after he passed away.”
A NEW CAN OF PAINT
Leaving the ladder meant Eddie could focus on marketing his business. Fascinated by web design and digital marketing since high school, Eddie already had photography and videography skills and was able to produce social media content to promote his business and drive customer engagement.
Knowing that the commercial painting space was highly competitive, he decided to focus his marketing efforts on residential repaints.
“I quickly realized that even though there are a lot of local painting companies out there, very few of them are good at marketing their businesses,” Eddie said. “Either they don’t know how to run their social media, or they just don’t have anyone in place to do that.”
He built a company website and invested in business coaching to help him learn how to run a successful business, how to sell high-end projects, how to manage projects and how to offer the best customer experience.
“When you sell multiple large jobs at once, it gets complicated to schedule them and manage the timelines so you complete each job in the timeframe you promised,” Eddie said. “Those coaching sessions helped me learn to work through that process, which helped me provide that five-star experience.”
Out of all the painting projects Eddie has handled, one still stands out in his mind: the Plaza Building job.
“That was one of the biggest projects I have ever taken on by myself. Being able to complete that, especially after losing my dad and almost giving up on the company I had started, was proof that I really could make this work,” Eddie said.
He says the hardest lesson he’s had to learn is how to delegate and trust others to do the work.
For Eddie, being able to delegate — and step in to correct mistakes if necessary — is part of good leadership.
His goal is to eventually hire two sales people and two project managers to lead a crew of six teams. That would almost double his existing staff of 13 employees.
That might sound like an ambitious goal, but he says his marketing efforts and word-of-mouth referrals have helped him win jobs in not only Topeka but also Lawrence, Kansas City, Meriden, Rossville and beyond.
His latest venture is the development of a marketing company designed to help contractors promote their businesses.
“I love marketing,” Eddie said. “I can’t think of anything more rewarding than using my skills to help those small contractors, concrete workers and construction guys who are still on the ladder build their brand and grow their business.”
He says his father always told him that if he wanted to succeed, he would have to make it happen.
“If my dad was still here today,” Eddie said, “I’d tell him ‘Hey dad, I made it happen. I got off the ladder!’”
