From Painting Homes to Petting Dogs, Artisan Painting & Carpentry is in the Relationship Business
"We want to develop a relationship and trust over time. When a client needs something, there’s no question they’re going to call us."
If you visit Artisan Painting & Carpentry’s Instagram account, you realize pretty quickly that you’re dealing with a different kind of home improvement business. In between shots showing expertly renovated kitchens or the team hard at work painting a house, you are greeted with the faces of adorable dogs they meet while on the job. The “Job Dogs” even get their own highlight section in their Instastories.
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When the Main Line-based Artisan comes to work, they don’t just bring their expertise, but also their warm personality and the larger purpose of connection. Mike Lieber began Artisan—along with father and son partners John and Jon Dyer—back in 2014 to bring something sorely missing to the field of home improvement: the human connection. “There are not a lot of businesspeople in our trade who understand the bigger picture. We want to develop a relationship and trust over time. When a client needs something, there’s no question they’re going to call us.”
Often a client relationship begins with a simple job—someone wants a room painted, for example. But they will take the extra step to really talk it out, and where needed help with matters like color consulting and design (How will that shade of gray look on that wall?) until it is exactly what the client envisioned. “Anyone can paint a room; not everyone can anticipate what the client is going to need,” Lieber tells us. Sure enough, over time one room becomes the whole house, or they’re dreaming up a custom carpentry project like crown molding, wainscoting, or shadowboxing.
“The initial project size doesn’t matter. What matters is once we get there and start working with the client and they see how high-level follow-up we are, and that we actually do what we say we’re going to do, we are building confidence with the homeowner. There’s no doubt they’ll call us next time the next project comes around—a month, six months, a year later… they always come back.”
Though Artisan prides itself on its quality work and exceptional trade skills, they are equally proud of the relationships they have built over the years. With their personal, one-on-one approach to projects, Artisan not only can do it all, but they don’t leave until everything is perfect. Unlike many similar companies, they don’t “jump in and out of jobs,” but instead start and finish a job consecutively. This means a lot to clients who aren’t waiting around for their contractors to come back in a week to finish what was started—home becomes home again as soon as possible.
This has been especially crucial to their business now, when everyone’s home is now also their school, office, and everything else. “Construction is back, and everyone is home, staring at stuff they’ve been wanting to have done,” Lieber explains.
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Artisan has always gone the extra mile, making sure to cover things up and take all safety precautions before getting to work, and this meticulous approach is even more important when working around families in the midst of a pandemic. Tellingly, aside from the additional step of masking up, “it’s been a pretty easy transition of being aware and making sure everything is clean and disinfected,” since this is how Artisan has always operated.
As the weather warms, exterior work like painting and deck staining has been particularly popular, though Artisan reports a typically varied job list. One new service they have been providing due to COVID-19: High Temperature Disinfection. This uses steam instead of chemicals, making it an eco-friendly way to remove 99% of viruses, germs, bacteria, and pathogens from “high touch” areas. Unlike with procedures that do use harsh chemicals, there is no lag time before you can enter the space.
While they began providing this service for businesses getting set to re-open in the Yellow and Green phases, they have also expanded to homes as clients requested it. “It just seemed to kind of make sense that we had the availability to provide this service and help the community,” Lieber says. “We really came together in the construction field to continue to improve people’s lives.”
Photographs provided by Artisan Painting & Carpentry. Artisan Painting and Carpentry support the Main Line Parent Community.
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