Glendale Painting

Right out of high school, and at the suggestion of a friend, Rick joined the Painters' Union in Buffalo, NY.  After a 6-year stint in the union working in steel and chemical plants, painting everything from blast furnaces and ore bridges to pipe and tank farms, it was time to head south, and get out of the snow and cold. Sights were set on Tampa, FL

Upon arriving in 1985, Rick formed Glendale and started building the business.

The business started in 1985 chasing small new construction jobs and municipal repaint work.   After backlogging a fair amount of work, Rick called back up north to his brother Kevin and convinced him to move down and help out.  To be fair, a move from Buffalo, New York to Sunny Florida didn't need that much convincing. As soon as he landed, Kevin went to work with Glendale as the Vice President.

They were little more than "trunk painters" then, the industry insider's term for a painter that operates his business out of a car trunk or van, but hard work and ethics paid off. They grew fast. That first year they did a couple of commercial repaint projects for Pinellas County Schools, some Frank's Nursery and Crafts stores, and a strip center for a general contractor.

In 1987, Glendale performed its very first multi-unit residential new construction project. It was an apartment complex called Bridgewater Place in St. Petersburg.  We still have a foreman we hired from that project to this day.

Glendale marked its very first year of more than $1,000,000 in sales in 1990, 8 years after the company's founding.  It was a mixed of new construction and repaint projects.

In 1995 Glendale did it's first bonded new construction residential high rise project on Longboat Key. This was also the start of a new relationship with a builder that still exists today. It also proved to be the beginning of a niche market for Glendale.

Glendale was growing. In 1999, Rick was interviewed in the Contractor Forum section of Professional Painting Contractor Magazine. They asked him "How can we encourage young people to pursue a career as a professional painting contractor?"

Rick's answer? "Teach them." And he's been doing it ever since.

Countless former employees have gone on to start their own successful businesses. Glendale has never been afraid of letting it's employees go on to greater and higher heights. Rick and Kevin gain a sense of pride when one of their own starts a new business.

Glendale purchased a second company specializing in new construction apartments statewide. Having a longtime relationship with a competitor in a market segment Glendale moved away from years earlier, the two company owners got together to work out the acquisition. This move made Glendale one of the largest painting contractors in Florida, purchasing over 4 million dollars a year in paint alone.

In 2013, Glendale did it's largest repaint project to date, at over 1.5 million dollars.  The project located in Sarasota consisted of commercial office painting and industrial steel and floor coatings.