Twelve hours changed how I run my painting company

By Ron Yarbrough — Pro-Spec Painting Corporation, Vineland, NJ

Member story · as told to the PDCA Commercial Forum · July 2026 · 4 min read

I started in this trade at sixteen — a summer laborer for a commercial painting contractor who noticed I would work. I served a full apprenticeship, worked commercial and industrial jobs, and in May of 1980 I formed Pro-Spec Painting with a stepladder, my hand tools, and $10,000 in savings. I could paint; I could not estimate. So I found a two-week estimating school in New Hampshire and learned. That has been the pattern of my whole career: when the company needed something I did not know, I went and learned it — and when a door opened, I said yes.

This is not my first new tool

In 1985 I was doing the bookkeeping and payroll on an Apple II Plus and printing proposals on a dot-matrix printer. In 1998 we put in a small server with shared modems, gave every foreman a computer, and made every form we had electronic. That is how a six-person office in Vineland ran painting projects in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Nebraska. Every generation of tools, the contractors who picked them up early got the work.

February 2026

Then came AI, and I watched it the way I have watched everything else — waiting for it to get useful. In February of this year, it did. I had been listening to a podcast called Leveraging AI, hosted by Isar Meitis — he talks to small companies like ours, not enterprise software departments. He said something that stopped me: he had never written a line of code, and he was using a tool called Claude Code.

Claude Code is what is called an AI agent. An agent is not a chatbot that answers questions — it is a program that does things. You tell it what you want in plain English, and it goes and does the work: reads your files, writes your documents, runs your software, and reports back.

I found an article on Substack — a website where independent writers publish — that walked through the setup step by step. Then I found a course that is taught by the tool itself: you type in a few lines to start, and from then on Claude Code teaches you, in English, like the best tutor you have ever had. Two lessons, about twelve hours over two days. I learned more in those twelve hours than I have learned in weeks of any classroom.

Then it built this website

I have paid $4,500 to have a website built by a developer — more than once. A developer needs you to hand him everything: the photographs, the history, the meeting dates, the write-ups. This time I pointed the agent at the folders where our records and photographs already live and told it, in plain English, what this organization is. It read everything. It picked the photographs. It wrote; I corrected. It put the dues payment — credit cards — on the membership page. Part of it was built while I was on the road: I set it working before I left the office, and it kept working while I drove. The result is the website you are reading right now.

I still decide everything. The agent does not run the company — it does the work I point it at. What it replaced is not my judgment. It replaced the typing, the waiting, and the $4,500 invoice.

Where to start — the same two doors I walked through

The setup, step by step: “Claude Code for Everything (Finally)” by Hannah Stulberg on Substack.

The course, taught inside Claude Code itself: Claude Code for Everyone.

And bring your questions to the Peer Exchange — that is what it is for.