Pros
- Helps improve sales skills as well as one's ability to speak to the public in general - Will improve your leadership skills, dramatically - Marketing materials (flyers, door hangers, lawn signs) - Handles legal maters (insurance, work's comp, taxes, etc.)
Cons
There are many issues regarding this company, the following will be in the format of : -Title summary full - Hidden Costs You are expected to spend upwards of $500 dollars, despite the company repeated saying otherwise in the beginning. One of the first things the company will tell you is that they do not want you to invest any money into your branch. This statement is repeated and reinforced all the way through the pre-Season (the time before you begin painting), and as mentioned in the Pros, all marketing material is provided for free. However the moment you enter the painting season, the company all of a sudden expects you to spend upwards of $500 for materials (unless you're lucky enough to have a bunch of ladders lying around at home). Now, you might say this this is a choice... however by this point you have spent at least 3 months marketing, dropping thousands of flyers (I'm not being hyperbolic, the expectation is 1,000 per weekend) as well as countless hours knocking on doors. Fact is that by this point, you are bought in, you can either let countless hours of work go for nothing (you don't get paid during pre-season, I'll get more into that after) or like every single MA branch manager (and I do mean 100%), you will spend this extra money on equipment. - You don't get paid (Pre-Season) You will start work no later then the beginning of March. You are expected to work around 10-18 hours on weekends during the Pre-Season. You will NEVER be paid for those hours even though you are officially employed by the company. You do get paid during the painting season but I will get into that later. During the pre-Season you will go and work 10-18 hours on each weekend up until the end of the Spring Semester (keep in mind that most of us lived on campus, a decent drive away from the town we were running our branch). During this period you will be expected to spend at least 8 hours knocking on doors as well as getting out 1,000 flyers each weekend, (the time to place flyers varies on location, areas with road side mailboxes are a lot faster than those with mailboxes attached to houses, typically 2 hours per 500 for the first scenario, 3-5 for the latter). This is all great and all but you don't get paid for the time you put into this, I do mean the literally. The company had us use "Map my Run" that can accurately track which areas we covered and how much time we spent on them, yet despite keeping track of our work hours, we NEVER got paid for them. The company's argument was that you would be paid those hours via your profit during the painting season, which is not even remotely true (I personally was luckier than others, however there was one girl who was a branch manager, read the "UnHelpful Help" section below for more details, long story short, she was forced by the company to quit. Even though she put well over a hundred hours of work into marketing, (which the company did track) she was never paid for those hours. - UnHelpful Help The people who are supposed to help you only do so when it is convenient to them. If you get stuck in a situation in which you are too inexperience to solve, you'd best be hoping they aren't "too busy" to do their job. That and all the executive (the people supposed to be helping you) are located in Michigan... Not Massachusetts, good luck if you need any sort of help other then a laundry list of platitudes in a phone call. As part of working as a branch manager you get "help" from mentors/executives, branch managers from latter years who have wholeheartedly bought into the company (for better and worse). The price of this is a 40% royalty (this is widely available figure that you can find on Google in less than 10 seconds), of course you also get insurance, that being said College Pro, a competitor (I have never worked for them) only charges 24% (again, widely available on Google), and yes they do also get insurance for that. So what does that extra 16% buy us? Not much, especially since all the executives (the ones that are supposedly helping us) are all in Michigan (no, seriously, we at best get to see one of them once every 2 weeks for about 4 hours, 3 of those they are on the phone talking to branch managers in Michigan). If that wasn't enough, they will never even pick up the phone if they don't want to. I personally was lucky that I never had a situation which I desperately needed help, however I did mention that girl (for obvious reasons I will not reveal her name). She had the misfortune of underestimate her first painting job (the first one that she had begun to paint). Now I say misfortune because the people who have estimated wonderfully, and those like me who did a middle of the road estimation have done so purely based on luck. We get about 5 hours worth of estimation training over the course of a single. Keep in mind we have never painted in out lives (that was all of us this year) and we have never tried to sell a contractor job before. The result of this is that we get maybe 2 hours of actual estimation training and 3 hours of sales. The problem with the estimation is that its the difference succeeding and failing, since we don't actually know how long thing take to paint until we actually paint, the accuracy of our estimation is purely luck based. Now back to the girl, once she started painting her first job site. Midway through the job she realized that her hours were drastically off, so she decided to call her executive, no answer. Next she went and sent a message to our company group chat, and then another one, pleading for help. She finally got a response... her executive told her that they were too BUSY at the moment. As you can guess, this didn't end well and she ended up finishing the job on her own, ~$2000 in debt (luckily in debt on her company account and not her own). She ended up being forced to quit - I do mean "forced", instead of firing her, the company tried to the most disgusting I've witness so far... they asked her to pay the debt from her own pocket. - Dangerously UnTrained You will never be properly trained to anything over the course of the internship. As far as marketing goes, not a problem, you'll figure it out or you'll quit. When it comes to painting, you'd best hope you figure it out before some get seriously hurt. To this day I am surprised no one has died while working for this company. When you begin working for Student Painters, you are told that you will be trained by Sherwin Williams professional staff. Sound great, problem is that's an outright lie. This year, we were quite literally not trained until the opening day. And even using the word training in that sense is hyperbolic. It can be best summed up as, this is how you lift a ladder, this is what a brush looks like, this is how you open a paint can. Congrats after 30 minutes of training you can now climb up a 32 ft ladder and start painting. And yes this is exactly as dangerous as it sounds. I've been lucky so far in the sense that the only times that a ladder has tipped over for me is when everyone was already on the ground. I know that two branch managers have had their painters fall off ladders, luckily one of them had a fall harness (which can with our minimal training can be extremely dangerous to set up) and the other only injured his arm (the painter still needed to go to the hospital, but they're currently back to work). CONCLUSION: If you're convinced you want to start a painting business, just start one, fact is that with Student Painters you are barely trained and are still obligated to dump at least $500 into the internship (not even beginning to count gas money). At least if you were to start your own business you would not have to deal with the insanely high royalty, not to mention you would have better control over how you want to run your company. If you're doing this as an internship for the sake of having and internship (like I and the rest of us did) either go with option a, and start your own business (seriously, it can't be worse than Student Painters already is) or pick another internship. I made friends and I did learn a fair bit during the time I spent on this internship, however I did so despite this internship rather then because of it. There are so many great internships out there, don't get stuck with the one who's sole purpose is to profit off of your hard work. If you still decide to ignore all the warnings (like I did), you will at least come out of this with a more realistic perspective of the world.