Michael Murray has spent 20 years building Textbook Painting in Cleveland. Here is what he has learned about splitting roles, hiring ahead of need, and protecting margin while the company grows.
There is a stage in a painting company where the numbers look fine but the work stops feeling fine. Haakon Hansen, who hosts Aleph Ventures TV, calls the stretch from roughly two or three million to six million a transitional period: multiple salespeople, multiple project managers, crew leads taking on more ownership. It is also where a lot of owners add revenue and make less money.
Michael Murray, founder and owner of Textbook Painting in Cleveland, Ohio, has been through it. He started it after graduating in 2006, ran it for about 12 years on a college painting model, and by 2017 had, in his words, a couple hundred thousand dollars of debt to show for it. Instead of going bankrupt, he pivoted. He says the company will do about six to six and a half million this year, almost all residential, with about 40 full-time painters. Here is what he told us about getting past the ceiling.
For a stretch, Michael’s longtime sales manager, Tyler, oversaw both sales and production. Then the company outgrew one person doing both. Michael says they hit all of their goals last year, and still:
“It was a really good year like on paper, you know, on the P&L and things, but if you were a part of the day-to-day, it was hard.”
Michael read the stress and frustration as a sign that something had to change. He and Tyler split the role back apart. Michael expected Tyler to choose production, where he had grown up in the business; Tyler chose sales, to systematize the sales process. Textbook then hired an operations manager over the winter.
The lesson: when the year looks good on paper and the team is stretched thin, look at the structure, not just the numbers.
Michael is candid that he is not a great people manager. He loves teaching — onboarding a new hire, showing a salesperson everything they need to know — but he loses focus on the weekly check-ins, one-on-ones, and ride-alongs that long-term accountability takes.
“Mediocre performers can kind of like coast if they’re under me because I’m over here focused on something else and not maybe paying as much attention as I should be.”
That is why, about three years ago, he asked Tyler to take over sales management on top of production, and he says Tyler did better at it than he had. Today Michael sits in a president or GM role. He no longer does anything customer-facing, and says the company can sell and produce work while he is away. Where he still matters, he says, is long-term vision, goal setting, and challenging assumptions about what is possible.
To apply it, ask which recurring management work you will actually do every week. Whatever falls outside that is the first seat to fill.
This year Textbook invested heavily in its org chart, including a new operations manager. Michael says the result is a leadership structure built for a much bigger company than the one it is today:
“We have enough overhead right now at least at like the high level to go to like the 10 million plus revenue number.”
As revenue grows, he expects to add a sales rep or two and another field or project manager, and they will slot into a structure that already exists.
The cost is real, and Michael doesn’t hide it. He says the company is overhead-heavy this year, that it lost money in the first half while growing into those hires, and that it may miss its operating profit goal — which they knew going in. Haakon’s point from the conversation applies: once you spend that cash, you have to see the growth all the way through to get the reward on the other side.
If you hire ahead of need, decide up front that it is an investment year and watch whether revenue is catching up to the overhead you added.
Michael’s guardrail is gross profit. If it falls as the company grows, he treats that as a problem. He believes a business needs to be right around 50% gross profit or better, and says Textbook has held that through each stage with job costing and a monthly look at the numbers.
His biggest lever is price. Labor, paint, and software costs have all gone up, and he says it is easy to wait too long, look at pricing only quarterly or annually, and then wonder where all the money went — something he admits Textbook did in its early years. Textbook is always asking whether to raise prices, even when it doesn’t. But price has to come with value:
“If we’re going to raise our prices, we have to raise our value. … Customers will always say your price is too high, but it’s not always true.”
In practice, Michael described several ways Textbook does it:
A bigger org chart only works if people meet. Michael holds weekly GSR meetings with his direct reports, and managers hold them with theirs. The company runs on EOS, with leadership and operations L10s, a weekly sales meeting, and crew leader meetings focused on leadership development.
The one he is proudest of is a monthly company-wide meeting they call Third Thursday. After seeing culture suffer during COVID, they brought it back bigger: 50-plus people, a catered meal, gifts for birthdays, work anniversaries, and Google reviews, projects of the month, and a learning topic — safety, or personal development such as credit counselors and mortgage bankers for team members who want to buy a first home.
He also measures more than revenue. Every year his goals include a best-place-to-work award, a fastest-growing-company award, and a business excellence certification from his peer group that weighs profit, balance sheet, employee and customer satisfaction, and safety. Textbook has earned it four of the last five years; he expects this year’s overhead investment to cost them this one.
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