Pros
Experience. There's quite literally nothing else a college student can find to match running their own business at Student Painters. Trust me, I looked. The job required everything I do in my current job 8-10 years later. Hiring/managing people, managing finances of a business, marketing and sales, customer relations, objection handling, problem solving, customer/employee disputes, project management and estimating. The experience can't be beat. I learned more running my business and overseeing others than I did in college and they paid me (410,000+/summer, other made more) to do it! For the right person, with the right support, this can be a very lucrative and successful venture.
Cons
In hindsight, transparency and overall moral practices. There are a number of things going on behind the scenes that now, knowing what I do, don't make sense. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure how they pull off some of what they practice. I'd be very curious what an audit of finances and business practices would produce. Managers who fail often ended up "owing the company money" (they leave that part out of the sales pitch) or "breaking even." As a employee of the company (we were not 1099 or the like) managers should be subject to minimum wage. They monitored this (I believe) in the summer months, but not in the spring/winter when marketing and training were being done. In fact, they encouraged Branch Managers not to "pay themselves" out of their branch's budget for marketing in the off-season as it would "hurt overall profits in the summer." However, if the production season went south, that money was never made up. I would venture to guess you could find many stories of students who worked the better part of a year (or longer) and did not average minimum wage for their time. Frankly, anyone who has left Student Painters and gone into HR must cringe at some of their memories.