How Brush Master Began, 40 Years Ago

A story from our owner, Paul Luedemann.

People ask me how Brush Masters started.

Truth is, there wasn’t some big plan.

Right out of high school, a friend asked what I was doing for the summer. I didn’t have much going on. She said her dad was a painter but had lost his license and needed someone to drive his trucks. So, I started driving him and his son to jobsites every morning.

After a couple days, he said, “If I’m paying you all day, why don’t you come help us paint?”

That sounded better than sitting in the truck.

Back then, everything was brushed. This was around 1970. No sprayers. Six-panel doors with four coats, primer, and multiple finish coats, all brushed by hand. It was slow work, but that’s how it was done.

After a couple of years, I broke off and started doing some painting on my own for the builders we were working with. For a long time, I bounced between painting and trucking depending on how the economy was doing. When housing slowed down, I drove truck. When work picked up, I painted.

In 1986, I officially started Brush Masters.

Our first office was a small place down the street from here in Maple Grove. We didn’t last there long because the neighbors complained about the paint smell, so we moved again and eventually ended up in Hamel.

Right around then, we got hit with our first big lesson. We painted three large houses, and I had a check coming for about $38,000. I’d already paid my guys and bought the paint, so I figured I’d finally have some money left over.

Then the 1987 market crash happened.

Those houses never closed, and I never saw that money. The government still wanted its taxes, though, and for a couple of years, I had a tax lien that made getting credit almost impossible. I was living in my dad’s basement at the time and even borrowed his credit card to buy one of our first sprayers.

But we kept going.

Soon, builders started giving us more work. Tony Aydin was building big custom houses, and we started painting those. Then another builder asked if we’d paint their homes. So, I hired more people.

Then Lundgren Builders came along.

At first, I told them I didn’t have enough employees to handle their work. But they kept asking. Finally, I hired enough guys and said we could try a few houses. Next thing I knew, they handed me plans and said we were doing all of them.

They were building 35 to 50 houses a year at the time, and eventually it grew to nearly 100 a year. That relationship helped build the company.

In the mid-90s, Lundgren offered to buy the company as part of bringing trades under their umbrella. I wasn’t sure about it, but if I didn’t sell, they were going to buy another painting company anyway. So, around 1994, they bought Brush Masters.

The business kept growing. At one point, we had around 250 employees.

Eventually, the parent company that bought Lundgren decided they didn’t want trade companies anymore, so they asked if I wanted to buy it back. With the help of a partner who handled the financial side, we were able to do it around 2000.

Then came the 2007 housing crash.

A lot of builders were stuck with houses they couldn’t sell. Some invoices got settled for 50 cents on the dollar, sometimes less. We survived partly because of our partnership with Marvin Windows, which helped keep things going during those slow years.

In 2012, we moved from Plymouth to our current location.

Since then, we’ve worked through the 2020 jobsite chaos, shifting markets, and the normal ups and downs of construction. In 2023, we made the decision to move away from production work and focus on building stronger partnerships with custom builders and remodelers and growing our commercial work.

Looking back now, it’s been 40 years since I officially started the company.

There have been plenty of highs and plenty of lows.

But we wouldn’t still be here without the people who worked alongside us all these years — our team and the builders who trusted us with their projects.

It’s been a good ride, and we are still going!