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Business Voices is the Juneau Chamber of Commerce podcast focused on the people, ideas, and decisions shaping Juneau’s economy.
Each episode features thoughtful conversations with local business owners, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers who are working to build a stronger, more diverse, and more resilient business community.
This show reflects the Chamber’s larger mission: to support entrepreneurship, encourage responsible and sustainable development, improve the business climate, and help make Juneau a better place to work, live, shop, and invest.
Business Voices is a forum for insight, leadership, and shared perspective, connecting the people who care about Juneau’s economic future and the quality of life that makes this community worth building.
Welcome to Business Voices Juno, the podcast of the Juno Chamber of Commerce hosted by executive director Becca Parks. From entrepreneurship and leadership to growth, resilience, and innovation, this podcast shines a light on the businesses and voices helping define Juno's economic future.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thanks to everyone, and welcome back to another week on Business Voices. And this week, we have Charlie Williams from Valley Paint here. Thanks for coming on, Charlie.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:And, you know, we always just kind of start these off with, you own a paint store. Can you tell us your your story?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I didn't set out to be a paint store owner. I was I learned to paint in California and I worked there for about four years doing large construction sites and that sort of thing. Then came back to Juneau, was gonna become a fisherman. But at that time in 1981, there really wasn't a whole lot of money to be made in fishing And so I decided, well, I'll just stay with painting.
Speaker 3:So went out, got a contractor's license, was doing the painting. I was buying from a local store that had been in business for about ten, fifteen years called Southeast Paint Center. And they were really busy some days and so they taught me how to mix my own paint, do my own color matching, otherwise I would have to wait hours to get my paint and don't make money standing in the paint store. I learned those skills not knowing that eventually they would serve me because about 1985, the paint store had to shut down and left Juno without a paint store and I didn't see any future in purchasing paint from a hardware store. And so put together the idea of just opening my own paint store, which I did in April 04/02/1986.
Speaker 3:I didn't wanna open on April 1 and be in April fools, so I I held off. Even though I was ready, I held off and opened the store and and have had the store now for forty years and lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of learning along the way. You know, you think you know everything, but you learn a lot if you're in business selling paint to the community of any community that for that matter.
Speaker 2:And you've been in business for a long time now.
Speaker 3:Yes. I
Speaker 2:have. You just had a big anniversary, right?
Speaker 3:Correct. We had our fortieth anniversary. It was it was a great time. We had good food and gave away a lot of food and some door prizes and and it was it was good for us and good for the community to come over and celebrate with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm curious, you know, we've had couple of different entrepreneurs on that have all found capital to get started in different ways. What was that opening process like for you?
Speaker 3:It was challenging with you know, it's kind of the catch 22 chicken and egg thing. You don't really have any credit for that sort of thing. And so in order to get credit, you have to have credit. Anyway, so I I wound up borrowing some money from a friend and bought a bunch of inventory and a little bit of business equipment. And when I first opened, I was across the street from where Superberry is now in a little 1,100 square foot store.
Speaker 3:So so getting that local financing was very very helpful for me to get started. And then as time went on, was able to establish credit and do the things that normal businesses do when you need to expand, when you need to buy another building or build another building, get financing.
Speaker 2:And at this point, you've sort of done it all. You've done all those different things. Did you have business training before opening the store? How do you figure those steps out?
Speaker 3:I had I had contracting experience, was definitely the school of hard knocks and learned a bunch of about business and and, how to conduct yourself in business. And and then just kinda grew that grew on that. You know, right away I saw that, you know, I needed more training in accounting. So I took some classes at UAS. I I think it's six or seven accounting classes out there.
Speaker 3:And of course, you take Microsoft Word and Excel and all those things back in the eighties. That was when they first started using those platforms. I guess it was early nineties that started. And then we got our first computer in 1993, which was a whole new world. And we were able to switch over from an all paper platform to keeping records on the computer, which really made my job a lot easier because when we first started, we literally one of the things that we do that was what our predecessor had started is we track all the colors for everybody and we track what kind of paint they used and how much paint they used.
Speaker 3:And we've had customers that are now on their third paint job after forty years and, you know, some of them wanna have that same color. Well, how much did I use last time? Well, it's in the computer. In the old days, it was in the paper files. So we would spend over two hours a day putting papers in and taking papers out of the file.
Speaker 3:And heaven help you if somebody files it wrong because you're never gonna find it again.
Speaker 2:But that resource in Juno is amazing. As a homeowner, when we bought our house, we were able to go into Valley Paint and find out what the previous homeowners had used.
Speaker 3:Yes. Well, you know, we have an interesting situation now because we have Home Depot for the last oh, I guess it's been almost twenty years that Home Depot has been here. And many of our customers are transplants that move here and they don't know about us. But when they go over to Home Depot and they can't find what they're trying to figure out and they can't understand what they need to do. They start talking about their friends and their friends all say, go to Valley Paint.
Speaker 3:Don't buy paint from Home Depot because Valley Paint's gonna store your information for me for you for you as well as we're going to offer you a lot of advice that you can't get anywhere else that will help you get your job done a lot faster, a lot easier.
Speaker 2:And there seems to be a lot of passion. I recently picked out a new accent wall color and I must have gone in five times to get samples and Mhmm. You develop a rapport and there's some interest in what color you end up with.
Speaker 3:Probably one of my favorite things about the business is that rapport that you develop. I mean, forty years, some of these customers that I've had for so long, you really get to know a lot about them and you have a personal relationship as opposed to just a business relationship. You know, honestly, if anybody were to ask me what it is about business that's good to have in your business is that personal relationship with your customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I feel like especially in a town our size and isolated the way we are, it's even more important.
Speaker 3:You bet. It's been really cool lately because I've even had children that I supported when they were playing soccer. Know, their parents were coming in buying paint and we have always kept a little toy box and they would go play in the corner while the parents pick the colors. And now those children are having children of their own and coming into Valley Paint and it's just kind of that is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:You have certain associations of like personalities or careers where you can pick out like, oh, they're gonna get this color?
Speaker 3:No, it isn't really Color choice isn't really necessarily specific to accountants would pick these colors and contractors would pick those colors and car dealerships would pick it isn't like that. People have different reasons for liking what they like and it's more specific to what it is they're trying to accomplish you know, if they're working inside the house or outside the house, that sort of thing. And there are trends. I will say there's trends that in the eighties, it was all pinks and grays, you know. In the nineties, it was all these rainbow colors, these really bright vibrant colors, you know.
Speaker 3:Now we're on the lot of blacks and lot of dark grays for exterior type painting. Even for inside, you see a lot of grays and a lot of darker colors to accent with. And, it's you kinda neat from that perspective to see the trends and how they develop and you always wonder, we've done all these things, what's next? There be more ideas.
Speaker 2:Is it like fashion? Do you see it cycle back through?
Speaker 3:You yes, it is. I mean, the grays that we're seeing now were the grays that were popular in the eighties. So
Speaker 2:And have you felt your own preferences changed through those times?
Speaker 3:No. I pretty much have always stayed pretty pretty specific to what I like, but I don't really actually decorate with color very much. I mean, I have the store interior, but I like to rely on what Benjamin that, you know, they have a in Benjamin Moore, we have a color selection called Affinity. And Affinity is a 144 colors that a panel of architects and designers picked all that go with each other. So all my store colors inside are Affinity.
Speaker 3:And so we know that they will work together really well and and they'll be very complimentary just about anything you put with them.
Speaker 2:That's a good trick to know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it is helpful to have that up your sleeve.
Speaker 2:Well, and just that inventory you were telling me before we started, you have how many different products that you carry?
Speaker 3:We carry around 3,500 to 4,000 items, different items that we have in stock in the store at any given time because we don't just do house paint. We don't just sell paint for walls of the interior of your house. We sell paint for offices, you know, commercial type stuff. We sell paint for roofs. We sell paints for floors.
Speaker 3:We even have paints that you can use outdoor on driveways. We have we have we just have a just a very large variety of items that people can choose from. We sell automotive paint, we sell boat paint. You know, if it's a coating, I tell people, come see me because more than likely I'll have some in stock.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's amazing. And the fact, I mean, you know all these products and
Speaker 3:That's one of my what I would say has really helped me to be successful is that I've used all these products because I didn't just stop contracting the day I opened the paint store. I continued contracting alongside. I would work all day and then I'd go work all night and it took me a long time to build up to the, you know, inventory that I have. You know, in the paint world, there's only a 20 to 30% margin. And there's not much room there because there's so much pressure on the prices of paint.
Speaker 3:In the forty years that I've been, we have not kept up with what everything else has done regarding inflation. So, and so having used all the products, you know, I didn't stop paint contracting until 2001. And so having experience using all these products and I've had my successes, I've had my failures just like everybody who uses paint. If you do enough painting, you're gonna have something go sideways on you eventually. And that, you know, not not only do I have my own experience to rely on, but if somebody else has a problem and I can't figure it out, I have resources in the industry that have been in the industry as long as I have.
Speaker 3:And and it's great to be able to touch base with them and, you know, puzzle out where what's causing a particular problem. And, you know, paint does get manufactured wrong every now and then. It's only about maybe one to 2% of the time. Most of the times when people people have problems with paint, it's user usually user induced. So but there are times when there's actually something wrong with the paint.
Speaker 3:And if you if you can identify what that problem is and you can you can figure it out and get through it and be successful in the end. Is it like a bad wine where
Speaker 2:you open it and you know right away?
Speaker 3:We actually have some paints that every once in a while get a an odor to them. There's an anaerobic bacteria that somehow got introduced and there's only two two companies in the country that make plastic buckets. And somehow it got introduced in their factories and they can't get rid of it. It's just been there forever. They sterilize their buckets, they clean their buckets, but every once in a while, we get a can, you open it up and it smells like sour milk.
Speaker 3:And it's that anaerobic bacteria that can exist without any oxygen because obviously it's a closed can. There's not a whole lot of oxygen in there. But, so, yeah, there's things like that. There's things like the paint is just super watery where so you use, you know, thickening agents and things like that in your paint just like you do when you're making gravy, you put a little cornstarch in and the same thing happens in the paint world, additives that for some reason the additive wasn't manufactured right or something happened to it chemically. And so, yeah, the paint, literally could run uphill.
Speaker 2:Oh, man. The teacher in me wants to write a whole unit on paint mixtures.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I thinking about that and thinking about the cans and everything else, somebody told me they were like, Charlie's coming on. You gotta talk to him about waste.
Speaker 3:Oh, paint waste, yeah.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:right now the way you dispose of waste is basically twofold either. You put a paint hardener in there and harden it up so it can go into landfill or you take it to hazard ous waste. Because once it's hard and it's not a liquid anymore, it's not hazardous waste, which is interesting because paint really doesn't have most, you know, your waterborne paints don't have hazard. They're not a hazard. They just really aren't.
Speaker 3:Just the fact that they're liquid makes them a hazard. So if you if you paint it on the wall, your wall is not hazardous because it has paint on it. It's it's it's know, it's dried, it's inert. And you know, essentially when you take it to the hazardous, many of the times they they just put they've they've got big bins of the stuff and they just harden the paint up and now it's no longer hazardous. So it is a challenge to get rid of hazardous paints but at least we do have the hazardous waste disposal site here in Juneau.
Speaker 3:And and if you're a homeowner, you're lucky enough that you don't even have to pay for it when you take it down there because everybody pays for part of that in their in their sewer bills. So unfortunately, if you're a business, you cannot take advantage of that. You have to pay and it's it's expensive. It's like, something like, I don't know, $10 a no. Stop.
Speaker 3:Maybe maybe $10 a pound. I'm not sure. I can't remember exactly how much it is. But every once in while, I get a manufacturer that will have made some paint that's bad. And, like, we get these epoxy kits.
Speaker 3:And when you go to and they're in these silly little burst bags and so you roll them together and they they mixes the epoxy together. Well, sometimes the seal goes bad between them. So then when you get these packages sometimes through jostling and the seal wasn't created right and they start hardening up. You know, I I mean, I've I've had to take thousands of dollars for that type of stuff to hazardous because you there's nothing you can do really to make it hard because it's not a water base. Right.
Speaker 3:And you can't you know, it's just a liquid that's never gonna because a lot of epoxies never harden up if you don't catalyze them. So if you don't have the right catalyst to harden it, it's never gonna harden it. If you don't have the right resin to put it with the catalyst that's not hard, it's never gonna get hard. So you have to take those to the to the hazardous disposal.
Speaker 2:And will that you know, even as a chamber, we're concerned about the landfill. It's one of our priorities for this year and upcoming years. How do you see that impacting your business? And have rules with the changes at the landfill impacted you yet?
Speaker 3:I'm fortunate that I don't really generate that much Okay. Hazardous. Like, for instance, if we mix a gallon of paint wrong, which happens, you know, you type the wrong number in, you know, we try to be very careful and and always check the name against the number. But sometimes you get in a hurry and you don't do all your steps and so you wind up the can of paint that is mismixed to not the right color. Nothing wrong with the color.
Speaker 3:It's just it's not what the customer wanted. So we put that in the little area and we get a lot of people that come in that are doing art projects. We get students that are, you know, doing plays, things like that. And, you know, people that, perhaps don't have the the disposable income right now to do some painting, but they'll come in and look at our our junk pile, we call it, and they'll pick some paint out of it and and go make use of that paint. So they keep that pick we because we've been we've had that available for so long, we don't charge anything for that.
Speaker 3:So it's it's pretty picked over, so there's not that much there. So we don't have to get the only thing we really ever have to get rid of is when they went like well, I had a situation where a 100 gallons came up frozen. And and once paint freezes, it kinda turns to a cottage cheese consistency and there's no bringing it back. And so, you have no choice but to take it to to the hazardous and that 100 gallons cost something like $3,000 to get rid of at the hazardous. But that was something that the cost was borne by the freight company or the manufacturer who delivered it.
Speaker 3:And so not something I had to had to eat, thank goodness. I didn't have to absorb that cost.
Speaker 2:What are thinking about shipping too?
Speaker 3:Shipping has become a major challenge. When we had two shipping companies, I was able to have a really good sweet deal for me where because I was moving over a million pounds of freight a year, they would off they offered me a small amount to ships minimum shipments. And so that was like $25 and I had that same amount for like fifteen, twenty years. The day they bought the the company that we have now bought the other company, my freight minimum went to a $100. And now that same freight minimum, I paid a $190 a few weeks ago for a box of two gallons of paint.
Speaker 3:And it's something that freight has become very, very challenging for us, and it has become a larger portion of the cost of doing business for us. And, you know, the local people, you know, there's nothing they can do about it. They are told what the rules are and they follow the rules and that's all there is to it. But I will just tell you that has become very very challenging and very difficult as we knew it would. I was on the chamber when when that was allowed to happen.
Speaker 3:And, you know, it's just challenging when you have a monopoly controlling a sector or segment of the market. And so there's nothing we can do, but it is it is a cost driver. And, you know, when people come in to buy paint and say they pay a $100 for their paint, I don't get to keep a $100, you know.
Speaker 2:Wouldn't that be nice?
Speaker 3:I get to keep 20% of that and with that, I have to pay the freight and I have to pay the building costs and I have to pay the insurance and I have to pay all of the overhead. And it's it's I would tell anybody who's thinking about going into business, those are the ones those are the things that will make it with that will make you either profitable or not, how you cover those expenses. And they are also that which makes doing business in Juneau, Alaska more expensive than anywhere else. And even like just raising our property taxes, my property tax got bumped up almost 50% more than what I was paying before. And it could be argued that I wasn't paying my fair share, but the reality is is I don't pay that tax.
Speaker 3:My customers pay that tax. So when I come in and and I find out that I have to pay another $10,000 for property tax this year, that's gonna get put into my cost of goods sold. There isn't enough margin or enough profit in my business that I can just eat that, you know. And recently, we had a situation where one of my larger paint companies decided to add a fuel surcharge to their every gallon of paint they sell me, every quart of paint they sell me, it gets a two and a half percent fuel charge. So how can I eat that?
Speaker 3:I I I didn't wanna just raise the prices across the board, so I created a fuel surcharge that matches theirs and, you know but but I think that is probably something that most consumers don't consider when they're doing business with a company is what what that overhead what the overhead like credit card companies. Three and a half to four and a half to five and a half percent on credit card fees. And I haven't done it yet, but I'm thinking about possibly just putting in a discount process. You pay with a with cash or with a debit card, because debit cards they only charge us like 30 or 40¢. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Instead of that percentage fee. Then I can give you a discount so you don't have to pay all those fees because those fees have gotten to be just very significant.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I mean, everybody is feeling rising costs so the sound of a discount sounds pretty nice.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They say that if you had $50 worth of goods and you sold it and then somebody else sold it and then somebody else sold it, by the time it had been sold 20 times, there would be you would have that's how much you'll be paying the same amount for fees. So it's really extremely impactful.
Speaker 2:And does and yet we're here where we know cost of living is higher. There are these challenges that you're gonna face in Juneau. Yes. But why are you still here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I guess the the reason I would think that I'm still here is because I've always been really fair with my pricing. And I've heard it said, here's most expensive store in town. Well, that's true. If you buy the most expensive paint that I sell, I will be the most expensive store in town.
Speaker 3:But I sell the less expensive paint too, but oftentimes, it's much smarter for an individual instead of buying three gallons to do it three times, just buy one, you know, three gallons at $25 a gallon is $75. Why not just buy one gallon for 65 and just do it once? And so I quite often convince people that's the way to go and many times I don't convince them and they find out on their own. But I will tell you that just being responsive to what the customer's needs are and trying to toe the line on on pricing has really helped me to be successful. I have to sell a lot of paint, realize, in order to be profitable.
Speaker 3:So if I don't sell thirty, thirty five thousand gallons of paint in a year's time, I can't be profitable. And so, you know, there's two theories in in in business. You can sell one widget at a $100 or 10 widgets at $10 and, you know, which one is gonna be the best one for you. I've always succumbed to the, I'll sell you 10 widgets for $10, because ultimately, I'm a consumer also. I don't like to go to a store and feel like I I'm being taken advantage of.
Speaker 3:And I like to maintain my pricing as close to lower $4.88 pricing as as possible. Although people are shocked how much lower 48 pricing has escalated over the last twenty years. It's gone up down a lot down there as well. So so I would say having good prices is probably and then having the service that we offer, you know, the the ability for people to come in and ask, you know, I just bought this house. Do you have any colors on file?
Speaker 3:Well, yes, we do. There's 30 different colors. Which which room are you trying to work in? Oh, the master bedroom? Oh, the family room?
Speaker 3:Oh, the exterior? The trim? We have all that for any of our customers. We've been we've been tracking that information for forty years and, that's unbelievably valuable. Especially now, it seems like people don't keep houses for more than three to five years.
Speaker 3:They go move into another house or they sell this house. Well, when you go to sell the house, which would you prefer? Try and figure out where that paint what that paint is, which if you bought it from a box store or you know you know, a hardware store, they're not gonna have that information. And so you probably are gonna wind up repainting the entire room or touching it up so that it looks like a patchwork quilt in there. And so ultimately, if you can just go and get a quart of paint, it may not match a 100% because there are batch variations from years to years, but it Benjamin Moore does a really good job of making the same batch batch, you know, having good batch consistency where, you know, paint that they made five year ten, fifteen years ago actually can still be touched up.
Speaker 3:So it's a lot easier for people to have us as a resource for for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you mentioned too, it's not just you, it's have us. Your workforce is Exactly. A veteran workforce and they know Juno.
Speaker 3:Yep. I have one fellow who's been with me for more than twenty years, another one is going on ten years almost. And then I've got a new young guy that's being trained fairly well right now and and he's picking it up, but you know, it it's obvious to most people right away whether he's gonna be able to answer their questions and if not, he's he understands that, hey, if I don't know, we'll get to somebody who does. And people have really come to rely on us for information.
Speaker 2:Had one final thing. Have you ever read The Big Orange Splat? You know that book?
Speaker 3:I have not. Have not.
Speaker 2:Well, you might get it as a gift in the mail soon. I encourage it. But it's this great children's book Mhmm. About, a man who decides he gets to paint his house on this very cookie cutter street to whatever meet his wildest dreams. And then he slowly convinces all his neighbors to paint their houses and he's got a palm tree and an alligator in front and it starts with this big orange splot that gets dropped by a bird.
Speaker 2:Can you think of that like the most outrageous paint job that you've seen or that you would dream up? I mean, that
Speaker 3:I would say probably not. Most people are pretty conventional. Yeah. There is an occasional bright chartreuse house. There is an occasional pink house.
Speaker 3:I would say probably the worst experience I would think that or the worst thing I ever heard of, there was a lady who painted her entire house this brilliant pink inside. And I thought that was very outrageous and I didn't know how anybody could live with that, but she liked it and she was happy. And I guess I guess ultimately that that kind of brings home the the idea that color is a personal choice and what some people like, you may not like.
Speaker 2:And if they want it, you have it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and I did something funny along those lines about twenty years ago. I had a house where I had an upstairs bathroom that was just a, you know, occasional used bathroom and I painted it really bright lime green and really super fluorescent pinkish red. Two walls green, two walls red. And every single person that walked into that bathroom then came out had a smile on their face.
Speaker 3:They were either laughing because they thought that was the most hideous thing I ever saw or laughing because they thought that was the most fun thing they ever saw. And that just brings home my point of, you know, everybody has their preferences on what they like and but but even if they don't like it, you can still get a good good reaction out of them. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a good fun. My bathroom's the next one for me to paint, so we'll see. Okay. With that, I think we're we're at our time. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:That was Charlie Williams from Valley Paint. Is there anything else you want folks to know about the store?
Speaker 3:You know, there's one thing that I that I cannot get out to my customers as a message as often as I would like to. And that is before you start a project, before you take that first step and wash the interior walls or try to clean the outside, ready to paint the outside, come see us first because we can save you a lot of a lot of time, a lot of angst, by helping you to understand what we believe are the right steps to get your house ready to do whatever it is you wanna do. And I can't tell you every week, I get at least five to 10 people coming in that have started the process before they started talking before they talked with us and have done many unnecessary steps or done them incorrectly using the wrong types of cleaners, doing the, you know so my suggestion is if at all possible, come see us first before you start and and talk to us about your projects so that we can help you do it in the least amount of time with the least amount of angst, you know, and as inexpensively as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, we appreciate the expertise in town and the longevity of the store. So Thank you. We'll see you out there soon.
Speaker 3:Alright. Sounds great. Thanks.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Business Voices Juno. Subscribe everywhere you listen to your favorite broadcast. Share the episode and learn more about the Juno Chamber of Commerce at junochamber.com.