Sharing Our Cabinet Painting Secret Sauce

I have learned that the real secret of a company’s secret sauce is that there really isn’t any secret sauce. With remarkable regularity, the best stores attract the most customers and the best-selling products are a combination of value and quality.

When 2 Cabinet Girls started out, we struggled to figure out the best way to paint cabinets that produced great results and that we could afford on our budget of basically zero. Over the past 5 years we’ve experimented with different brands of cabinet paints, dozens of paint rollers and dozens of different paint brushes, and even using a combination of them both. At the shop we have gone through 6 or 7 different spraying methods before getting to the current cabinet painting results which look like a factory finish.

Make it as easy as possible

All along the way, we’ve shared our experiences with our customers through this blog and in-person. We love being as transparent as possible so that visitors will know as much as possible about our company, our team of professional painters and how we do what we do.

A big step in that process was when we rolled out what we call the Ballpark Estimator. It’s a super-simple, 1 field form where you get an estimate for painting your kitchen cabinets without giving us any information – we don’t ask for your email or phone number, we just give you an estimate. Why would we do that? Because we want to make it easy on you, and to be honest, easy on us.

If you use our cabinet painting quote form and it’s realize that the cost is not in your budget, you’ve wasted roughly 2 minutes (and didn’t even need to change out of your t-shirt and pajama bottoms). You didn’t have to make an appointment for us to come visit your home and stand in your kitchen until we give you a number and then you tell us, “I’ll think about it and let you know.” Even better is when you see the ballpark quote and think, “perfect, I’m ready to go.”

Don’t punish your customers because of your competitors

Do our competitors use our estimator? Yes they do. We are not blind to how competitive the kitchen cabinet painting marketplace is. We see the same computers coming to our quote page and using it for different numbers, and that’s ok. It feels good to be the go-to company that is setting cabinet painting prices in the Raleigh-Durham area. Now that you know that, you should ask our competitors for a discount 🙂

If you talk with our competitors you may notice that they are using McCormick Paint. You probably had never heard of that brand of paint before, we certainly hadn’t before we started this business. Since we rave about how great McCormick’s customer service is and how the paint performs better than Benjamin-Moore and Sherwin Williams is it any surprise that our competitors are now using it?

Sometimes we’ll get long emails from someone who says they’re trying to paint their cabinets on their own. They ask a lot of very technical questions that make us start to think that it may actually be a competitor, not a homeowner. We still answer the questions, because there’s a chance it’s a super detailed homeowner who wants to do the best job possible painting their kitchen cabinets, in fact we wrote a long article with step-by-step instructions on painting your kitchen cabinets like a pro.

Is being responsive to people considered a secret sauce?

Do you remember buying things 20 years ago? Especially online the process was frightfully bad. Then Amazon and Zappos and few others said, “we can do better.” Now everyone online has to be pretty good and they better deliver in 2 days!

We do everything we can to be as responsive as possible. We hate it when you don’t hear back from contractors for days (or ever), so we text and email all day long and often well into the evening and on weekends (yes, when you text me at 7am on Sunday it buzzes on my nightstand).

Our goal is to build a strong company built on excellent service and uncompromising quality. We know that there are house painters who can paint your cabinets for less money or smaller companies that don’t have the overhead of a professional spray booth, specialized delivery vans and a 2 million dollar insurance property to protect their customers – and we’re ok with that. Not everyone needs the best, sometimes you just need “good enough”.

Being responsive doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. Like everyone, we’re human. Where we try to set 2 Cabinet Girls apart is how we handle them. When we make a mistake, we acknowledge it and try to move on to the most important part – solving the problem. We know that after a mistake, the customer may not love us as much as we hope, but we want them to feel like we fixed the problem and their cabinets look terrific regardless.