Today we’d like to introduce you to Cedric Smith.
Hi Cedric, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up in Lansdowne, right outside of Philadelphia. Penn Wood School District, I played football, typical DELCO youth. During the summer I was always looking for a way to make some extra money. My older brothers worked for an Electrostatic Painting company that had a garage right across the street from the house I grew up in. When I turned 15 I got a job there as well. My Current partner, Tommy DeStefano’s family owned the company and we worked there together for 15/20 years. We decided to go out our own after years of dreaming it up on the long rides home trying to keep each other awake driving. 6 years ago we pulled the trigger and opened up The Electrostatic Painter
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
They say you need to put in 5 years before you can expect to see a return and it turned out to be true for us. We started with nothing. No book of business, no leads, we just got our hands on an Electrostatic Gun and we used Tommy’s Honda Pilot. T made up a website and the work trickled in. First year was proof of concept. We figured out that we can survive. Year 2 and 3 we had times when we were flush and times when we were waiting on invoices and it was killing us. But it always felt better to work for yourself. Did we struggle, yes we struggled. the Net 45, Net 90 payment terms made life difficult at times but we keep our heads down and we did good quality work. It ended up paying off. Our book of business got bigger and bigger as the years went on. Old clients stayed on board as we welcomed new ones and the compounding kept us busy. Today we dont have many off days and that’s all you can ask for.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
The company we started is called The Electrostatic Painter. We do metal refinishing, we paint metal, and we’re the best at it. We specialize in doing store fronts and we have contracts with some large companies. If you’ve visited a Warby Parker in the Philadelphia area there’s a good chance that we did the windows and entry doors. We’ve recently did the Footlockers Flagship Store in Manhattan and also Ray Bans Flagship store in SoHo. Those were big jobs that we are pretty proud of. Stores turn over alot, they move around and when they are moving in to a new place we spray the store front window mullions and doors usually in the company’s signature colors. For a year straight we did the check out lanes at Giant Food Stores in the middle of the night all over PA and Maryland. We have done the Rowan stores that are popping up in all the malls, the Free People Movement stores, The JD Sports and American Eagles. We can take an old store front and make it look brand new. We can put a factory finish on metal and we can do it on site with out it ever looking like we were there. And we care about what it looks like. We take pride in the finished product.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
We had a crash course in Electrostatic Painting working for Tommy’s father for 15 years, Big T. We got to see how the business works from the ground up and we did every job you can think of. We’ve had everything that can go wrong go wrong and a boss that didn’t want to hear it. Get the job done because you’re going some where else tomorrow. JR is always saying no one has held a Ransburg #2 Electrostatic gun for more hours than I have. He’s willing to bet no one has shoot the number of gallons that I have either. He’s our sales guy but he may be right. Electrostatic Guns are very expensive, $22,000 a piece. When we first started one of our old Bosses at Alternative Electrostatic who was a mentor to me, Anthony Paffas, had a brand new Electrostatic Gun. I told him what I wanted to do and he gave it to us and he let us pay him off 1 job at a time. If it wasn’t for Anthony we wouldn’t have made it as far as fast as we did. We owe him for the early education and for getting us started on our own
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.TheElectrostaticPainter.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_electrostatic_painter?igsh=bTVibmtkb21tYnB3&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1DtAFik4x5/?mibextid=wwXIfr
