The backdrop

Paint is not shampoo. A $50 gilded bottle of shampoo can feel like a luxurious “treat yourself” purchase. But if you don’t like it, you’re out $50 and you move on to the next brand. Paint is more than the brand; it needs to perform. Paint goes on your walls and impacts your property values. It involves costly labor and errors are visible and expensive.

In a sea of big box rivals in Atlanta, Georgia, Ron Soto and his team at AllPro Paints understand the importance of not only quality products that are durable, long-lasting, and color-retentive, but also the importance of quality service that emphasizes industry expertise, personalization, and proactive solutions. The introduction of Rundoo AI to Ron’s operations has bubbled up new opportunities and proactive strategies to re-engage customers and build back sales.

The situation

In 2022, the supply chain chaos that left Sherwin-Williams with product availability issues resulted in a positive wave of business for Ron from painters who simply needed paint. Later, as competitors restocked and convenience returned, some of those accounts quietly drifted away.

The hard part wasn’t accepting that customers come and go. It was the operational reality that when you’re running a busy store and when you’re a first-time paint store owner, you don’t always notice when an account has gone dark and why. And when the drift happens across dozens of customers, you can’t rely on memory alone.

The simple question

When Rundoo AI launched in December 2025, Ron started asking the questions he didn’t have time to investigate. He asked about top-selling SKUs, year-over-year growth, and “crazy stuff” he didn’t even know how to phrase until he typed them in and the AI still found the answer. The question that changed the game was: “Who were my top spenders in 2022 who aren’t buying from me in 2025?”

2022 was the “capture year”, the moment when competitors couldn’t supply and Ron could. It became the benchmark for: Which relationships do I need to reclaim? So when Rundoo AI returned a top list (20 accounts), Ron got what he needed in seconds. Without manually comparing years and running multiple reports, or going customer by customer, he received an actionable hit list for re-engagement.

The actions

When Ron asked Rundoo AI for the top spenders from 2022 who weren’t buying in 2025, he expected the usual suspects, names he remembered. But he also got names he should have remembered and didn’t.

With the list in hand, Ron picked up the phone and started calling. His script was direct and respectful, noting the business activity in previous years, but not in the last year, and inquiring about the current buying behaviors. “Where are you shopping now? What made you stop coming by?” Pricing popped up as explanations, but he was already competitive with the main SKUs like Ultra Spec versus Sherwin-Williams’ SuperPaint. The chief factor he discovered was convenience. “You’re too far,” he’d hear. “It’s easier for me to send my guys to Sherwin down the road”. And that was the reality. There was one Sherwin a mile away in one direction and another Sherwin a mile and a half away in the other. Surrounded by Sherwins, Ron adapted and said he’d come to his customers instead. When the geography was working against him, he went on the offensive and started offering deliveries to combat the chains.

The “churn and return” in real numbers

With clarifying phone calls and deliveries as the new arrow in his quiver, Ron started building back relationships and revenue. From the list of 20 drifted high-value accounts, half made purchases in the three months following the initial outreach. One customer, who Ron hadn’t remembered, had spent over $15K in 2022, but then next to nothing in the subsequent years. When Ron called him, convenience was to blame. The counter solution of deliveries plus Ron’s industry knowledge and exceptional customer care quickly but unsurprisingly led to Ron winning their upcoming job that same week. Within the first two months after Ron’s outreach, the customer purchased more than $3K, with those sales coming through the new delivery service. The first two months of 2026 were already better than all of 2025 for this customer.

The operational changes

The impact was clear. Rundoo AI didn’t replace Ron’s instincts. It tightened them. It reinforced the power of data-driven insights and made it easier to act on them.

Ron described it as feeling like the tool “reads my mind” and that sometimes it gives him an answer that’s even better than the question he thought he was asking. It gave him speed with business decisions and freedom from hours printing reports, cross-checking histories, tedious mining for answers, letting him focus on the work that matters: calling, reconnecting, closing the loop, and driving loyalty.

Day-to-day visibility into customer relationships isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s core to protecting his business in a hyper competitive market, with 70% of revenue coming from repeat contractor and commercial customers.

The overall impact

Rundoo AI created a repeatable motion for Ron: identify drifting accounts, understand why, determine the solution, and bring the customer back. Rundoo AI ran the customer audit for him and created a “churn and return” outcome, powered by real data and achieved through real conversations. With each new insight about his business, Ron can outperform competitors and stay, unlike shampoo brands, head and shoulders above them.