Paint Garden

Paint Garden was supposed to open in January of 2020. It opened in June, because the world spent that spring closing everything else, and a new paint store in Temecula had to wait its turn along with the rest of it. The first year turned out solid anyway, helped along by manufacturers like Benjamin Moore who walked the new store through the choices a first-time owner does not know are choices yet, from the shelving on the floor to the software behind the counter.

From movie sets to Temecula

Russell had been in paint for decades by then. He started in a paint store right after high school, moved on to a company in Hollywood that specialized in paint for movie sets, worked his way up to manager, and eventually into international sales, which is a long way from the counter he started on. Not long before COVID he found himself at a crossroads, weighing whether to go start his own store after a whole career spent building someone else's. He took the leap, and Paint Garden is what came of it.

The engineering student who took the job

Frank Machado was in engineering school at the time and struggling to hold his focus through everything the pandemic was doing to a class schedule. Russell, his father-in-law, offered him and his wife Sarah, who is Russell's daughter, jobs at the new store, and the two of them took it as a chance to try something they had never pictured themselves doing.

"I never expected to end up in the paint industry, but life has a way of taking unexpected turns."

Frank is the general manager now, which means the store's day-to-day operations run through him, unexpected turn and all.

The system that came with the shelving

For its point of sale, Paint Garden started out on one of the legacy systems paint stores had been running for years, the sort of choice a new store makes when it is following the recommendations it was handed.

"I didn't have much experience with POS software, but even I could tell it felt outdated."

The old-school Windows look was the giveaway, and the limited flexibility was what came after it. Russell was comfortable with it, but as the store grew Frank kept running into the edges of it, because it was not easy to modify and it lacked the sort of modern technology that lets a small business scale without adding headcount to every process.

The second phone call

Rundoo had been reaching out to Paint Garden for a while before any of that came to a head, and the answer for a long time was that the store was not ready to make a change. A year or two later the team checked back in. This time the timing lined up, and Paint Garden decided to switch.

Looking back, Frank counts it among the best decisions the store has made. The transition went smoothly, with the few hiccups clustering around how formulas had been recorded in the old system, which is the kind of mess that only surfaces when you finally go looking. Rundoo's reporting tools and Excel exports made the cleanup navigable, the support team stayed on it, and the store worked through everything quickly.

The store in his pocket

What Frank values most is the flexibility and the modern feature set, and the piece he reaches for most often is the Staff app, because the work no longer waits for him to be standing at the counter.

"Being able to manage discounts, margins, and inventory from my phone makes running the business so much easier."

Sales have been seamless since the switch and the whole crew adapted to the new system without drama. The workflow is tighter, the control is finer, and Paint Garden is growing with the tools to keep going.

Years on from an opening the pandemic pushed back by half a year, a Hollywood paint veteran, his daughter, and the engineering student who never planned on any of this are running a store that has outgrown the software it started with, which is the good kind of problem to have had.