The owners of a Ridgefield business built on creating boundaries wants to turn it into a venture with limitless possibilities.
Ridgefield residents Tom Darrow, Chris Couri, Craig Lenehan and Dan Rella are offering franchise opportunities for We Do Lines, a line-painting company they founded in 2008 that quickly has grown to stripe about 60 parking lots a month up and down the East Coast.
"As soon as we started developing operations and saw how the company was doing, we saw that this would be a great franchise opportunity," said Darrow, the company's chief executive officer and the owner ofPinnacle Landscaping Inc. "We decided why don't we put this out there to see who else is interested."
Couri, We Do Lines' chief operating officer, runs Young's of Ridgefield garden and feed supply shop with Rella, the company's chief financial officer. Lenehan ownsSmith Ridge Properties, a Ridgefield-based home construction firm.
Since launching the franchise effort with the help of consultant Skip Barrett, requests have been coming in from Florida and California and as far away as Venezuela to take advantage of the $29 billion industry, according to National Parking Association figures cited on We Do Lines' Web site.
A major reason for their success is the venture's catchy name, which immediately put them on the top of search engines and led to line-striping contracts with the Doral Golf Resort & Spa in Miami and LL Bean stores in Maine, Darrow said.
"We just looked at each other and thought we may not get schools and churches, but we went with it anyway," Darrow said of the business name. "Most of our first jobs were schools and churches."
The partners, who have hired three employees, are kept busy locally by maintaining about 60 lots in Ridgefield and lots in Danbury on a yearly basis, Darrow said. They also stripe all of the parking lots for Fairfield County Bank and have done work at the headquarters of Danbury-based construction firm Morganti Group and parking garages in Stamford, Bridgeport and New Haven, Darrow said.
"Now we are at the point where we're trying to figure out what to do with our day jobs," he said, adding that the company has painted lines for about 4,000 parking spaces so far. "Most of our work in Florida is doing golf-cart staging areas."
The four of them started the business by buying a Graco line-painting machine and taking lessons from the Graco sales representative, Darrow said.
"The most important thing is you have to walk a straight line," he said. "Once we figured that out, we haven't looked back."
Startup costs for a We Do Lines franchise range from $77,000 to $134,000, mainly for leasing a truck and line-painting equipment.
Setting up a franchise presents the challenge of producing an easily replicated business model, but when done correctly, it can become a powerful revenue generator for the franchisor, saidSteven Dubin, president of the New England Franchise Association in Kingston, Mass.
"You have those franchisees as your sales force," he said.
We Do Lines seems to have a viable business model that hopefully will become a successful franchise operation, said Marian Roth, executive director of the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce.
"I wish them well," she said. "Any company moving forward in this economy is a good thing."
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