By Ron Yarbrough
This year I ran an experiment with AI in my painting business. It started with an article I wrote, “12 Hours That Changed How I Run My Business.” What followed was an aha moment.
That moment came from two applications: Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex. They are called coding tools for developers. They are nothing of the sort. You talk to them in plain English, and they use code to carry out what you need done. I learned by doing.
What talking to a computer actually gets you
My Morning Review is now a web page that opens each day — every item listed by date, with the background of where I stand. It replaced my notes application entirely.
I had AI install an automation server (software called n8n that lets business systems and email inboxes trigger actions in each other automatically) on our own office server — something I had no clue how to do. I told my AI agent, Mark, to handle it, and it got done. Mark handles all of my IT now. Any time I need IT services, I call in my AI agent Mark.
We had several sales inboxes for the types of painting work we do — commercial, industrial, lead abatement — and we were overwhelmed with leads, usually fifteen to twenty a day. AI took over opening and reviewing them. It reads the inboxes, transcribes the customer service calls, and builds a twice-daily review page where we say yes, we are bidding, or no, we are not. On a yes, AI creates the job folders, sets up the record in our CRM (customer relationship management software — we use HubSpot) with Google Maps and Google Earth links so we can see the project, and enters it in our bid calendar. Work that people had to do, done and improved by AI.
AI ended my paper filing. We were a paper office for years, and going paperless meant dealing with every document that reaches us — paper or digital. Today I put a stack in the scanner and tell AI to file it. It reads each document, names it, makes it searchable (OCR — optical character recognition, which turns a scanned page into searchable text), files it by our naming system, and flags anything needing immediate action. The digital forms we receive flow into the same system. An administrative process, fully automated.
Our bookkeeping runs on Sage 100 Contractor. Bank statements import, credit card transactions stream in and post to the right equipment, jobs, and vehicles — service records updated with the cycle date, perfectly.
And our websites: I could never afford a full-time web designer, and editing pages myself was a struggle. AI rebuilt the sites, installed the plugins, updated the security.
Those were the low-hanging time eaters — and that is before Estimating, takeoffs, and too many things to mention here.
The aha moment
That is what led me here. The idea: build a trade organization 90 percent created and managed by AI, 10 percent by volunteers — and use the organization itself as the example of what can be done.
We rebuilt two nonprofit organizations — the PDCA Commercial Forum and South Jersey PDCA. AI helped create the websites, the membership systems, the governance and policy updates, the CRM records, the email systems, the meetings, the branding, the member badges, the media library, and the knowledge video library. And it maintains the technology behind it all.
All I do is show up for the meetings and enjoy the networking and the connections we gain at both organizations.
This is what we will be talking about and sharing at our Peer Exchange and our in-person meetings. Consider it a lab, where painting contractors come and learn by example.
I look forward to hearing how you are using AI in your business at our next Peer Exchange.
Commercial painting contractors: apply to join.