Paris Painting: From Building a Job to Building an Asset
In 2016, Jason Paris made a pivotal shift: he stopped building a job and started building an asset. Today Paris Painting exceeds $17M in annual revenue. Here’s what changed, and what it means for your company.
- Paris Painting, in Minneapolis, MN, is where Aleph started.
- The turning point in 2016 wasn’t a new tactic. It was a new goal: build an asset, not a job.
- Partnership and a vested leadership team brought scalable growth and long-term stability.
- Today the company exceeds $17M in annual revenue.
The starting point
Like many founders, Jason Paris built Paris Painting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, through hard work, client focus and team leadership.
That’s how most good painting companies get built. The owner works harder than anyone, takes care of every customer, and leads the crew from the front. It works, up to a point. The company grows as far as the owner can carry it, and the owner ends up carrying everything.
If you own a painting company, you probably know the feeling. Every hire, every bid and every problem lands on your desk. Step away and the business stalls.
The shift: from a job to an asset
In 2016, Jason made a pivotal shift: he stopped building a job and started building an asset.
The difference sounds small. It isn’t. A job pays you as long as you keep showing up. An asset pays you because of what it is: a business with a team that runs the work, profit that shows up year after year, and a reputation that brings customers back. A job depends on you. An asset is worth something without you in the middle of it every day.
That’s the same test we put to every company today. The Stability Scorecard grades a painting business on the five things that make it worth owning: the team, gross margin, sales & marketing cost on margin, brand equity, and net profit.
What a vested leadership team means
Paris Painting got there by embracing partnership and developing a vested leadership team.
“Vested” is the key word. A vested leader isn’t just a manager with a title. Their outcome rises and falls with the company’s, so they show up like owners. With leaders like that in the key seats, the business stops depending on one person for every decision.
That idea became the model for Aleph. Our partnerships bring a vested management team to the operations of a painting company, with a big-company bench working inside the business: CEO, CFO, COO, recruiting, marketing and a development team. The founder stays in charge: our joint ventures are manager-managed, with the founding partner named as the manager. Partners typically see a 2–4 year runway to building a management team with Aleph that lets them become mostly passive in their business.
Jason is part of that bench today. He serves on Aleph’s Technology team and our Board of Advisors. Meet the people on our team, or see how the whole bench works inside a partner company.
The result
Paris Painting achieved scalable growth and long-term stability. Today the company exceeds $17M in annual revenue and operates as the kind of durable asset most founders hope to create.
Its crews also give their trade. Through Paint It Forward, a Painting Contractors Association program, Paris Painting has painted homes for deserving neighbors, free, including Judith’s home in Paint It Forward 2026 and, with Sherwin-Williams, a home for a Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge family. You can watch both films on our homepage.
And it’s where Aleph started. The orange you see across our site is a nod to Paris Painting: our small, standing homage to the first proof that a trade can become an asset.
What it means for your company
You don’t need to be at Paris Painting’s size to make the same shift. You need to decide what you’re building, then measure it honestly.
- See where you stand. The free Value Score takes about three minutes and shows how your business measures up on the five things that make a painting company worth owning, and what would raise it.
- Grade it against the benchmarks. The Stability Scorecard shows the numbers a stable painting company hits, from a 40%+ gross margin to 15%+ net profit, with 80% or more of the team at the standard for their role.
- Plan the next seat. Our guide on how to grow a painting business walks through what breaks at each stage and who to hire next.
If you’d like a partner to build it with, see how a partnership works or start a conversation.
How valuable is your painting company today?
Answer a few questions about margin, profit, team and reputation and get your Value Score: how your business measures up on the five things that make a painting company worth owning, and what would raise it.
Let’s build something durable.
If you’ve built a great brand and a durable team, we should talk. No exit clock. No strip-and-flip. Just partners who yoke up and stay.