Complaint Rating:

College Pro Painters is an aweful company. Their goal is to lure naive college students into thinking that they can make thousands of dollars during the course of a summer running a franchise under them. What they don't tell you is that they have such high start-up costs and franchise fees, it takes a liar, a theif, and a dishonest person to come out above negative. They don't tell you that it will cost 15, 000 dollars to start up the business (which is a LOT for a poor college student already in thousands of dollars in debt). Ok, ok, starting a business is expensive, and 15, 000 might be ok, but its the franchise fee on top of it that is astronomical. Out of every job you paint, you automatically send them 31% of the total job. On top of that, they encourage you to pay your painters 30%. If everything goes as according to plan (which seldom does), you look at making about 25% max per job. That's aweful! They don't tell you until after you sign on that you have to pay all of this. We went through break-even points in one of the training sessions and I calculated mine to be about 54, 000 bucks. Thats right $54, 000 in business before you see any money at all! And that's if you get good people who actually work hard. Anything goes wrong (employees slow, or wasting materials), you can kiss that $54, 000 goodbye. I found that in order to make money under this company, you have to lie, you have to be dishonest, and you have to cut corners. I am not surprised when I read the many complaints about dishonest managers, because they have to do it if they want to make money. I myself do not tolerate it. Working for the people they have hired is a nightmare. The guys above you (your general manager) is supposed to be there to help you in case you start going under. According to them they "have a system in which they can tell as soon as you start losing money" so that they can "help you get back to where you need to be". That is complete bull crap. They wait until you are $22, 000 in debt (my experience), before they offer any help at all. By then its too late for anything. And even when they started "helping" me, they took over job sites of mine and gave me "free" labor at the price of having to fix my managers mistakes. That's right! I had to FIX my manager's painting mistakes, who was supposed to be the "all-star painter". Thankfully the homeowner trusted me because he almost filed a lawsuit against the company for the damage they had done to my job site and the lies they told the homeowner to cover it up. This happened to me on 2 different job sites, and I was the one who had to spend the time fixing the mistakes of them. Getting compensated for my time to fix all this was like pulling teeth. They didn't want to give up any of the money they had made off of me. And again, the only reason I was in the negative in the first place was because I was honest. I even had a friend as a manager who ran a quarter million dollar business and only came out with 10 grand. If you have to run that size a business to see any money at all, something is wrong. I managed 44 jobs last summer and out of those, I had to paint or fix 32 of them. And I still came out above a 90% satisfaction rating. I even had to take a semester off of school to make up for the debt they caused me. I could have either stayed at my 22 grand and gone back, or I could've worked to hopefully pay it down. I wasn't lazy and it wasn't like I didn't know how to manage. I did everything they told me. They even encouraged me at times to go against their own contract. Oh and one other thing, if you have any debt with them, they let you keep NOTHING. This means that if you have to pay for gas, food, or even rent during the course of the summer, good luck getting them to let you have any money for it whatsoever. This company preys on unsuspecting college students who think they can make money doing this. My advice, STAY AWAY. DO NOT give them any business and certainly DO NOT work for them. YOU WILL get screwed in some way.