Sixteen years on the ladder. Six years with his name on the truck.
Richwood, Ohio
When RJ McElroy drives through downtown Richwood, he sees his résumé.
The job he did on a storefront three winters ago. The trim on a building he repainted twice because the first owner liked the color and then the second owner liked a different one. The exterior of a family business whose owner offered him advertising space on the side of the wall, free, because the work had spoken for itself. About half the businesses on the main strip have at one point or another hired him. He is thirty-nine years old, born here, raised here, and the relationship he has with his hometown is one most contractors would describe as inseparable from the business itself.
McElroy did not always own the company. He worked the trade for sixteen years, a stretch of them inside Union Local 1275 in Columbus, where he ran commercial projects on a scale that taught him how a job site is actually managed. The union work was a graduate school in execution. You learn budgets. You learn pace. You learn how to talk to a project manager who is having a worse day than you are. He liked the structure. He was good at it. He probably could have stayed.
The voices that pulled him out of it were not foremen. They were business owners. Other people who had once been him, who had stood on his side of a ladder, and who had eventually asked the question he was not yet asking himself. Why are you doing this for someone else? He stayed inside that question for a long time. About six years ago, he stepped out of it. He started McElroy Painting and Epoxies LLC. He kept his standards. He swapped the security of the union for the responsibility of his own name on the invoice.
Not every painter is suited to every wall. McElroy splits his crew by temperament and skill. The exterior team handles altitude: tall ladders, lifts, high gable ends, the work that requires a steady stomach more than fine motor control. The interior team is a different population entirely. They are the careful ones. The kind of painters you can trust inside a renovated farmhouse with new molding, or inside a hospital corridor where the standards are written into the contract. McElroy assigns the right hand to the right surface, and the results show.
Paint, in his view, is not a finish. It is a transaction of respect.
He uses that language unprompted. He compares it to holding a door for a stranger, or to saying thank you and meaning it. The brush is doing something. It is taking a tired surface and returning a piece of its dignity to it. That is not the language most contractors reach for, but McElroy is comfortable with it because he was raised in a town where care is read as character. You take care of what you said you would take care of. You finish the job. You go back if the customer is not happy. The Richwood DNA, as he puts it, is hardworking, honest, blue-collar. He built the company on that, not as a marketing line, but as an instruction set.
Ohio weather does not make any of this easy. A wet year is a calendar problem before it is a paint problem, and McElroy's response is communication. He calls. He rebooks. He keeps the customer in the conversation so the slip in the schedule does not become a slip in trust. The actual work is sequenced the way any veteran of the trade would tell you it has to be: power washing first, then masking, then a primer where the surface requires it, then the coats. The trim last, because trim is what people see.
He has a young son. The youngest of his kids. He has talked about wanting to leave that son something. Not a trust fund. A name on a truck. An operation. A reason for the kid to walk down the same main street his father has been repainting since he was old enough to hold a roller, and to see his own résumé out there too.
Most of his customers do not know the personal stakes. They notice the smaller things. The crew shows up when they said they would. The drop cloths are clean. The cuts at the ceiling are sharp. The deck stain went on without lap marks. The job ends with a walkthrough where McElroy actually wants to hear what they think.
In a town that pays attention, that is enough.
The work travels by word of mouth. The phone keeps ringing.
The map keeps filling in.
“Paint is not a finish. It is a transaction of respect.”
RJ McElroyInterviewed: RJ McElroy, Owner
Every business has a story worth telling. Apply for a feature.
Get Featured