Three Decades in the Trade
Jason started painting houses in college at Penn State, spending summers working through College Pro Painting, a student-run painting program. It was the kind of job a lot of students take for extra cash. For Jason, it turned into a career.
By the time he graduated, he had job offers on the table, including one from one of the very first painting franchises in the country, CertaPro Painters. He took the offer, and in 1997, opened the first CertaPro location in Charleston. He ran it for nearly nine years, building it into a real business before deciding to take a new path. Jason sold his franchise to focus on real estate development full-time.
Then 2008 happened.
Like a lot of people who had built something in real estate, Jason lost most of what he had when the market crashed. But instead of starting over from scratch in a new direction, he went straight back to his roots: painting.
In 2012, he started Charleston Paint Masters from the ground up, just himself and one or two guys, applying the same operating principles he’d learned running a franchise, but building it his way this time. It worked. The business grew steadily, and at one point Jason had scaled up to 16 employees.
And then he did something most business owners wouldn’t: he scaled back down.
Why Smaller?
At 16 employees, Jason found himself spending most of his time in the office, managing, scheduling, and running the business, instead of out on job sites where he actually wanted to be. So he made a deliberate choice to shrink the company back down. Today, Charleston Paint Masters runs with around six painters, with room to grow to maybe eight, but not much further than that, on purpose.
“I want to be able to visit every job, do the estimates myself, and actually talk to my guys,” is the plain version of how Jason explains it. Staying small means every client who hires Charleston Paint Masters can still interact directly with the person whose name is on the door, not a sales rep, not a project manager who’s never picked up a brush, but Jason himself.
It also means that every painter on your project works for Charleston Paint Masters, not as a subcontractor hired for the day.
That distinction is a big deal. When a painting company subcontracts out the work, the people doing the actual painting are often paid by the job, not the hour, which creates a real incentive to move fast rather than move carefully. This raises questions about the quality of the job, the safety of the workers, and whether they have real workers’ comp. In a lot of subcontracting arrangements, the answer is no. Workers get paid in cash, off the books, with no real coverage. If someone gets hurt on your property, that’s a liability most homeowners don’t realize they might be taking on.
Jason built Charleston Paint Masters specifically to avoid that setup. His guys are his employees. He trains them, he manages them, and he’s legally and personally responsible for them, which means a level of quality control and accountability that a shifting crew of subcontractors often can’t match.
Projects That Matter
For someone who has been painting for as long as Jason, he has done thousands of projects for many different clients. He’s done residential and commercial, interior and exterior, and just about everything in between. Through all of this experience, there are a few projects that stick out, projects that demonstrate real skill, experience, and patience.
One that comes to mind is the historic three-story corner building at 273 King Street, right at King and Wentworth in the heart of downtown Charleston. It’s a striking building, painted in a distinctive warm pink, with an ornate bracketed cornice, a bay window, and navy awnings shading the ground-floor storefronts.
It also represents one of the more technically demanding jobs Jason’s tackled. Thanks to a maze of power lines running directly around the structure, painting a building like that is far from straightforward, and it goes beyond just picking a color. It takes real judgment about access, safety, and sequencing to do it properly without a single misstep. It’s the kind of job that highlights the expertise that comes with every Charleston Paint Masters project.
Jason’s been painting professionally since 1994, spanning his early days in college, his years running a CertaPro franchise, a stretch in real estate development as a general contractor, and now over a decade building Charleston Paint Masters on his own terms. That’s a lot of buildings, a lot of homeowners, and a lot of lessons learned about how to do the job right.
Jason’s Home
Jason has lived in Charleston for 27 years now, long enough to know the city intimately, from its historic downtown homes to its barrier islands. He actually chose Charleston deliberately, identifying it as a fast-growing location worth putting down roots. Looking at how the city has grown since, it’s safe to say that he made a good decision.
When he’s not painting some of Charleston’s flagship buildings or historic homes, you’ll usually find him out on the water or spending time with his family. Jason’s an avid boater who loves nothing more than being out on the Charleston coast.
The Bottom Line
When you hire Charleston Paint Masters, you’re not hiring a call center that dispatches whoever’s available. You’re hiring a company built and run by someone with decades in the trade, who shows up to your estimate personally, staffs your job with his own trained employees, and has structured his entire business around staying small enough to keep that level of care intact.
That’s not a slogan. It’s just how Jason’s chosen to run things, on purpose, for over a decade now.
Ready to work with a painter who actually shows up? Request your free estimate today.
