Three years ago, Chris Couri, Tom Darrow and Dan Rella were commercial landscapers with too much time on their hands. One workless day in the winter, an idea occurred to the longtime Ridgefield residents. They were staring at the faded lines of a parking lot when they started thinking, who’s out there repainting all these stripes?
That thought led them to start a business they named We Do Lines, which has gone from “zero to six franchises” in the past six months, said Darrow, noting line stripping is a $700 million industry in the U.S.
The We Do Lines franchises are in Connecticut, Ohio and west and central Florida. Over the next three years, the owners plan to have nearly 200 franchises across the country.
“Tom came up with line striping. We knew nothing about it, so we started researching. We called a dozen line strippers in the area and no one really got back to me. I got the feeling that it was fragmented, that no one treated it like a business,” said Rella.
With a $20,000 investment, the three partners were able to start a business by reaching out to their landscaping customers, many of whom hired them immediately to paint the lines of their businesses’ parking lots. The team also developed an unusual marketing plan. They began painting customer’s parking lot lines during daytime hours as a way to stir up interest in their business.
“Immediately, we started getting interest from people who have never seen a line stripper. Not too many people know line strippers because they’re done at night. What we started to do is create a buzz with our logo, name on the truck,” said Rella. “As a part-time business, we hit solid numbers, validating why it could be full-time. That’s when we decided to start a franchise model. We started hard selling those in October.”
The franchise fee for We Do Lines according to the owners is $25,000 and additional operating expenses range from $50,000 to $75,000. From year one to year two in their business, the founders said they have hit almost a 100 percent revenue growth rate. A franchisee of their company could earn up to $300,000 annually, they said, if he or she is willing to work hard at selling and hire a full and part-time employee.
One element of their business success has been their ability to sell. The founders all agree that line painting is mainly a sales job. Although initially they relied on accounts they already had through their landscaping business, as soon as they booked up Fairfield and Ridgefield, they focused on Internet marketing strategies to expand throughout the state and beyond.
“What ended up happening — probably because of our catchy name and because we were doing a hard sell on these lines, most guys just wait for the phone to ring — is we started getting a lot of work. We got LAZ parking and from our website we got a huge job in Stamford, a $65 million project on East Main Street. That was a $15,000 sale we got off the Internet,” Darrow said, noting it’s the largest one they’ve made to date.
“We ended up getting booked completely through the winter. Once we saturated Connecticut, we started getting inquiries from all over the U.S. We ended up working in Maine and Florida. Before we knew it, we were working and were getting so much work that we knew we needed the infantry in the field. The only way we could get national would be to franchise.”
In Connecticut, the most common size parking lot job We Do Lines lands is in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, Darrow said. Connecticut customers are numerous and include Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and Stop & Shops. Depending on the weather, conditions of the parking lot and high traffic, a parking lot’s lines need to be repainted at least once a year or they can start to look sloppy, according to the company.
The founders say that the line stripping industry is an important one, especially from an entrepreneurial standpoint because it’s off the radar. Yet at the same time, well painted parking lot lines are a necessity for meeting safety needs, compliance codes and aesthetics of business and state operations. The owners are quick to point out that the return on investment is big for this line of work.
Joanna Smiley writes the weekly Local Insight column. Reach her at jsmiley@HartfordBusiness.com.
