Five Star Painting Training and Family Time

Putting this painting company together has been a lot of work! Before the training, the company sent Ryan all kinds of training materials that he worked through. Lucky for him he doesn't have a job right now, so it's given him a lot of time to do it. The training was Dec. 3-7. Ryan went out for the whole week, but I couldn't take all the time off work, so I flew out Tuesday after work and joined him for the last 3 days. The great thing about all this---the training was in Utah. Can you believe it? The company happens to be located in Spanish Fork, UT, of all places. The guys who started it are all LDS, which we found out during our validation process, and they are all great. We were lucky because we had family to stay with, so we didn't have to pay a hotel, my brother Matt let us borrow a car, and we flew out on plane vouchers from when we got bumped on the flight to Cameron's wedding in AZ in August. So for us, it was a low cost trip, which was great because we are totally in budget mode right now.

The training was great. We learned TONS! All about paint, setting up the business, how to estimate a job, how to present the sale. And that's just for starters. Ryan's got another training he'll go to in January to fine tune the estimating and sales training. I think learning the estimating was the most fun part of the training for me. We went to Scott's house, the CEO, and Chad's, another exec. and put together interior and exterior quotes for painting their homes. There were 3 other guys out there for training also, so we'd all compare quotes and usually we were within about $100 or less of each other on price.

Here's one of my favorite aspects of the training. So like I said, almost all of the guys at Five Star are LDS. On Monday one of them told the crew (none of them LDS), "Hey tomorrow night at my church a bunch of guys are getting together to play basketball. You should come!" One guy spoke up and said he'd read about Mormon church ball on the internet (no way!) and he understood it could get pretty brutal. Haha! Well, I think most of them went and played. (Ryan did not as he was picking me up from the airport that night.) Wednesday night, the company took us to dinner at Tucano's. Oh, I love it. Well, of course none of these guys drink, plus we're in Utah, so no one even asks really. All the execs order lemonades, as do Ryan and I, so the other guys mostly follow suit. Later the one that didn't order lemonade and just had a coke or something, asked if there was alcohol in the drinks. The CEO was like, "Nah, of course not. It's lemonade!" Then after dinner, the CEO invited everyone over to his house to watch a movie in his theatre room in the basement. Ryan and I passed because we were seeing family that night, but the other three guys went. The next day we asked them how the movie was. One guy said, it was great, but they started late because on the way over, Scott (CEO) remembered he needed to set up chairs for the church Christmas party, which was the next night. So he just took everyone with him and put them to work for an hour setting up all the tables and chairs for the party! And then of course, the next night everyone was invited to the party. I love how natural it was to just involve all the guys in church stuff on this 5 day trip they were in Utah. So funny. Welcome to the Kingdom.

The trip was also great because we got to spend time with may family and also see Ryan's brother Cameron and his wife. It was so fun to have my parents come down since we were so close. We all had some time to spend with Matt's family and with Grandma Stewart. Jason is such a cute little man. He was pretty excited about his "Neeeuuuwww Uncle Rynan!" I think he loved playing with Ryan. We were only missing Dan at this get together, but we had fun with having as many as we did together.