JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have on with us today Jim Bodden. Jim is the owner and the founder of 1 DAY Painters and 1DAYPainters.com. It’s a great website. I’m on it right now, but he has a great service to tell us about. Jim, welcome to Green is Good. JIM BODDEN: Thank you very much. Glad to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, so Jim, I’m on your website. This is just great stuff. It’s 1-888-WOW1DAY and then the website for our listeners who want to follow along, www.WOW1DAYPainters.com. This is really fun and this is great, and it’s also environmental. Walk us a little bit into the Jim Bodden story. How did you even come up with this? How did you get to where you are today? JIM BODDEN: Yeah, I guess about 23 years ago, I was student back in Hamilton, Ontario, just outside of Toronto, and I needed a summer job and I looked at painting and I got a job with a student painting company and after about a couple weeks of doing that, I decided, hey, I’m gonna do this on my own and I launched my own student painting company and that kind of morphed into 23 years of dabbling in paint. But, over the last 18 years or so, I’ve been in the painting business, and five years ago, I was really trying to differentiate myself from all the other painting companies out there and I decided I was gonna sit down and pen to paper and figure this thing out and try to make myself really stand out and I wrote down three words. I wrote down “price, quality and service” and I eliminated the first two because I didn’t want to try to undercut everyone within price. I didn’t want to try to win jobs that way, and I thought quality wise, we’re already doing such great work that’s not gonna work either, because there’s nothing better that we can do with our business so I looked at the service component. One day driving home, it hit me. Why not get in and out of the house as quickly as possible, reduce the mess, the stress, the disruption, and I took that one step further and I thought, one-day painting, what a great service model. It’s gotta be the epitome of great service. If you can get in and out of someone’s house in one day while still providing high-quality work because that’s obviously what everyone wants, that’s gotta be a fantastic model, so I did a couple of tests on that and about five years later, here we are now. I met Brian Skidmore, the CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, about three years ago now and he was looking for a second brand. 1-800-GOT-JUNK’s a wildly successful franchise organization in North America. Every single major market is covered, including Australia, and he was looking for a second brand and we got talking and next thing I know, we’re business partners and there are 21 franchises in North America right now and growing every month, and we see great things to come. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, so this is just an amazing and classic entrepreneurial, ecopreneurial story and I want to get to the eco part in a second, but you’re differentiation is service? One day, you’re in and out of someone’s home or apartment, whatever it is? You can get in and out in one day no matter the size? JIM BODDEN: There are some limitations, but we tell people in general, we can do probably 85% of the jobs we start on, we can do in one day, and there are some limitations, of course. We don’t want to scrimp on quality whatsoever, so if we need to go in and it’s an exterior and we have to do any scraping, that type of stuff, or lots of different prep work, we’ll take care of that the day before and then we come in and do the painting. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Regardless, what would have taken five for others, you take a day-and-a-half. It’s still you get in, you get out? JIM BODDEN: Exactly. Yeah, so that’s the whole idea. Instead of bringing three guys in for four days, we’ll bring 12 guys in for one day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh man, this is just wonderful. This is just a great story. So, what’s it like being partners with Brian? We’ve had Brian on the show before. Brian is, again, one of the great young entrepreneurs in North America. Brilliant guy, done brilliant things with his wonderful brand, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and he’s a good friend. What’s it like being partners with Brian? JIM BODDEN: Well, it’s been fantastic. Brian’s a real visionary. Of course, he’s limited in the amount of time he has in his day, but he is very much involved in our brand in a vision capacity. We meet with him on a daily basis and he definitely drives the vision of our brand and he taught me that you can’t drive a franchise business based on just putting tons of advertising out there. There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ve learned a lot from him over the last five years and I’m glad we got into this partnership. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You said you meet with him every day, so your offices are over close to his offices? JIM BODDEN: Yeah, we share a space within the 1-800-GOT-JUNK offices. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. Okay, got it. The name of the show is Green is Good. I know this is a very green concept also, and a very green business also. Talk a little bit about the eco-benefits of WOW 1 DAY and again, let me just give for our listeners out there, we’re so excited to have ecopreneur, Jim Bodden, on with us. He’s the owner of WOW 1 DAY Painters and you can go on his website. I’m on it right now. It’s www.wow1daypainters.com. Talk about the green benefits of your great service, Jim. JIM BODDEN: Yeah, sure. Well, typically, a typical company will be painting on a site for say, four days and a lot of that means that they have to set up and clean up every day and lots of times they’re taping and masking and using lots of plastic on every day whereas we can do it all in one day and we’ve really noticed that we can use far less of those materials in a day so that can really, of course, reduce the amount of bad stuff that goes in the landfill. We also have an advantage that we can recycle a lot of the materials that we use as opposed to if it’s someone is doing it over four days that a lot of it’s gonna get wrecked by weather if it stays up for too long so that’s one big thing for sure. I mentioned 12 painters. If you have 12 painters on a site, normally you can have some savings in terms of carpooling, so what we’ll do is our typical process is to meet offsite in a coffee shop or a big box store parking lot, something like that, and then we carpool to the site, so instead of say, four individual trips on four different days, we’re doing one trip with those guys in one day, so it does have some savings there for sure. I would say those are the big two. Of course, in the painting industry over the last 10 years, with the more prevalence of acrylic-based paints, we don’t use any oil-based paints anymore, which have high VOC levels, what you call volatile organic compounds, so the painting industry as a whole has dramatically improved in that aspect. Both the U.S. and Canadian governments have come up with very strict environmental standards that certain consumer-based paints can only have certain levels of VOCs in the paint, and that’s just made it great for everyone and it’s a bonus for us because 10 years ago, our model would not exist because it’s a drying time on oil-based paints would not allow us to put two coats on in a day. It’s only because of acrylic-based paints now, so it’s good for us. It’s certainly good for the environment to have acrylic-based paints and strict VOC levels mandated by government. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you use paints that are either zero- or low-VOC paints? Is that correct? JIM BODDEN: That’s right. Yeah. Absolutely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, so as you said, because you come in with 12 guys at once to do a job, you’re saving tape, paper, plastic, roller sleeves, all that kind of stuff, so there’s lots of savings with regards to all the materials that go into painting jobs? JIM BODDEN: Absolutely, yep, and it’s part of our policies, procedures that all our franchise partners, we instruct them to recycle as much as possible so of course, if we do have to plastic up a house to paint it, we are taking the plastic down, folding it up or bagging it up, and using it on the next project as well and I’m afraid that a lot of painting companies don’t do that, which is unfortunate. We certainly want all our franchise partners doing that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. Talk a little bit about the future. This is a great concept. You said you’ve got 21 franchisees now, and obviously, it’s also very green. For our listeners out there around the nation, we got listeners coast to coast and we got listeners around the world, frankly. Jim, talk a little bit about your vision for growth. What’s your growth strategy? When you go to bed at night, what’s your vision here for your great brand, WOW 1DAY Painting? JIM BODDEN: Well, you know, Brian, as you mentioned, is a visionary. He often mentions that when he drives around, he doesn’t see a lot of junk out there. 1-800-GOT-JUNK is a great successful franchise business. He thinks — and I believe this as well — that there’s far more painting to be done out there than there is junk, so we see it as a tremendous opportunity for growth, especially with our model. We think that a lot of people are frankly tired of how most contractors run their businesses. They either not show up on time or not show up at all or show up one day and then disappear for three days or not come back, so we see a massive potential for growth. Our strategy, our goals, by 2017, we want to be at 150 franchises throughout North America. We’ll probably be in Australia as well by then, following 1-800-GOT-JUNK’s lead. Yeah, so it’s ambitious goals, but we certainly think they’re reachable, especially when we look at 1-800-GOT-JUNK and what Brian has done there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah, so it comes down to, like you said, when you first had the vision for this and you wrote down price, quality and service. So, this is a whole service model. This makes it seamless. Twenty-one franchisees. Now, are they located in a certain area? Because our listeners are gonna want to get their house painted now that you’ve made it easy and sorted out. Where are the franchises now? JIM BODDEN: Well, they’re actually spread out all over North America. We have pretty much all four corners. We have one in Miami, San Diego, Seattle, Boston, Washington, Detroit. We have two in Toronto, so all over the place. I think that there’s six in Canada right now, six or seven in Canada, and 14 in the States, so we’ve got a pretty good footprint, but of course, there’s many, many more metros to be covered. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, if there’s listeners out there that want to become a franchisee, they go on your great website and they could apply if they’re listening to this show and they go, ah, I think I want to be part of that? JIM BODDEN: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a form on our website that that interested party would fill out and then our franchise development team would contact them and arrange for a call. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jim, we’re down to the last minute or so. Any final thoughts on being a fast-growing ecopreneur here? JIM BODDEN: Well, I guess what I would say is stick to your model. There’s gonna be lots of people who will be cynics of the model. The one thing that we have in our business is other painters are always our worst cynics and what I tell them is I ask them can you paint one room in one day? And, they look at me and go well, of course I can, and I say well, why can’t you put 10 painters on a house and paint that in 10 days? It’s a matter of breaking it up into smaller components, so stick to your model, stick to your dream, and push on and success will follow you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. For our listeners out there, if you want to have a great painting experience, please go to Jim’s great website, www.wow1daypainters.com or if you want to be one of his franchisees and apply, go to that same great website. Jim Bodden, you are a painting ecopreneur and truly living proof that green is good.