Talk about humble beginnings. When Josh Kloos drove around the Minneapolis area seeking painting jobs in his Honda Civic, it was what would blossom into fast-growing KG Contracting (www.kgcontracting.com), which now boasts a five-star rating from customers for a variety of services.
“I went out and just booked some jobs by knocking on some doors for about two weeks,” reflected Kloos, a native of North Branch, Minn. “I booked about $11,000 worth of paint jobs and went and bought my truck. I painted the first house myself. I interviewed some employees, and then it just went on from there.”
The St. Paul-based company, which has evolved from door-knocking to going mostly virtual, now has seven full-time employees and a range of within 15 miles of the Twin Cities.
When Kloos launched his company, it was less on a whim and more the product of life experience.
He literally painted his way through the University of Minnesota, and continued plying that trade as far away as Iowa and Georgia. He sold real estate for a time, and also did roofing work in Florida and North Carolina before coming back to Minnesota with a plan.
He recalled: “It finally got to the point where I said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this for somebody else? I’ve done the sales. I’ve done the labor.’ I had pretty much done everything. The only difference was that I was putting my own name on the contract, instead of somebody else’s.”
What he learned from working for others was the value of empathy for those paying for the services.
“We are really good at customer service, and we are really good at getting a job done,” he said. “We are still a small construction company, we do a lot of things – roofing, commercial jobs, apartment remodels, siding work … We’ve done a lot of trades.”
This also means promises are better kept, and not fitting into the negative stereotype of contractors who don’t deliver on the timetables they promised when contracts were signed.
“The important thing when working in construction – and I’ve probably worked with more than a thousand clients over the years – is that no two jobs are going to go exactly as the contractor or the homeowner planned,” he said. “What we are really good at is handling the situation when there is a question, or communicating that something may take 2-3 days longer.”
Because his company is still in the up-and-coming phase, Kloos looks toward an exciting future of more challenging projects without losing sight of its current bread and butter of residential painting and roofing.
He said: “Right now, the minimum that we will do is a basement repaint…but we can definitely do a whole house – inside or full exterior.”
The biggest hurdle to clear to get to where he wants KG Contracting to be is cutting through red tape involved with those bigger projects.
“We’d like to get more into working on commercial spaces, with commercial building owners, but it’s challenging to get into those jobs,” he said. “Commercial projects have a longer cycle. If a homeowner wants a house painted, they will make a decision within a week. On a commercial project, you first talk to a property manager. The property manager gives your bid to the owner to approve it. Sometimes, there are two or three owners. A commercial project we just got took about seven months to close.”
As he points KG Contracting toward the future, Kloos is proud of how he turned a personal weakness (lack of organization with paperwork) into a competitive edge.
What that translated into was going completely digital, which works out well for clients in today’s work.
He said: “We still have somebody go out and look at the project but, after that our clients can completely communicate with us – book the job, change orders, pay for the project – 100 percent through a digital account. It’s good for us too because we can send text messages through the program that we use. Our entire team can see it, and instead of one person, five different people can respond to it.”
He explained that someone from KG Contracting will look at a project and take the necessary measurements, notes and photos. After an estimate is written, they are available to text, call, e-mail, etc. It has been completely positive as Kloos says he finds clients respond better when you allow them to look at the estimate on their time.
Said Kloos: “I don’t run into a lot of companies that are doing it this way. We’re just starting it ourselves. We switched over to one hundred percent online about two months ago, and really like it.”
Kloos admits to not being handy (a reason he does almost all of the sales), but can look back and laugh at the fact that he ended up in a career that was a far cry from what he expected when he went to college.
“I never envisioned this,” he said. “I actually started college to be a biomedical engineer. I spent a couple years painting, and doing construction work, and ended up never leaving. I painted over the summers, and that’s how I worked my way through college. After that, I got a job as a maintenance guy. Oddly enough, that paid more than a job with my marketing degree would have. After 10 years of doing something you love, you may as well just keep on doing it.”
To contact KG Contracting visit kgcontractingmn.com or call (651) 207-3055