Does a Bigger Company Mean Better Results?

When 2 Cabinet Girls was just starting out, we thought we did a good job. Looking back, it’s obvious we had a lot to learn.

There are some serious advantages to becoming the well-known leader when it comes to painting cabinets. Most of those advantages were completely hidden from us until we got here.

A few years ago, when McCormick Paints reached out and wanted to supply us with their cabinet paint that was the first time it dawned on us that there was a “professional painter secret club” of sorts.

Better Connections

When McCormick decided to close the Raleigh location, we were contacted by six different suppliers about using their paints and supplies. We ended up going with a specialty paint shop that supplies professional painting shops and using a custom formulated cabinet paint that is unavailable to retail consumers.

We’ve almost completely stopped using the retail brushes and paint rollers that you see hanging in Home Depot, Lowes, and Sherwin-Williams. The better paint and supplies have allowed us to offer a product that is 10x better than it was when we started out.

Specialists

Because we have people who specialize in certain aspects of the production, they are also much better than someone who has to do a little bit of everything. When Heather shows up to remove your doors and drawers, there’s almost nothing that surprises her. When Kim is prepping the doors, she is drawing on years of experience with us as well as a lifetime of working with furniture refinishing. When Kristen Fox arrives with her team, they’ll be on-time, prepared, and ready to make that kitchen as beautiful as possible.

Even the newest painters, like Michele Serrano, have amazing skillsets that include degrees from NC State in Wood Products (Sustainable Materials & Technology) and designing experiments testing for dimensional variability in commercial wood species. I can’t imagine there are other professional cabinet painting companies out there that have a wood expert on their team.

Training

One of the best things we now do is continuous training of the teams. When we expanded to 6 jobs/week we knew we were asking a lot of the girls. So we also started setting aside some time each month for everyone to come into the shop and go over what’s working, what can be improved and trying out new paints and supplies if necessary.

This allows the experience to flow down to the new painters more easily without the pressure of being in a customer’s kitchen. It also allows the newbies a chance to offer up ideas about techniques or solutions that we had never even thought of before, or maybe we have and it didn’t work out.

We love to look back 6 months and say, “look how dumb we used to be.” Without the constant experimentation and passion of everyone at 2 Cabinet Girls we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today – the most successful cabinet painting company in North Carolina.

Helping Others

Last but not least is our desire to help everyone love their kitchen. We know not everyone can afford to have their kitchen cabinets painted professionally, so we recently offered a class that showed people our method for achieving professional results, while doing it themselves.

We also make ourselves available to retrieve old kitchen cabinets that people are getting rid of – at no cost to the homeowner. When you have to get 10 or 15 cabinets off the walls and to the dump it can kill an entire weekend, especially if you don’t have a big truck. Since we have all the trucks and trailers, we’ll come pick up your old cabinets for free – all you have to do is put them in the driveway.

In our case, “bigger” has certainly also meant “better”.