Micron Powder Coating

In January 2018 I left South Florida for Decherd, Tennessee, and stayed seven months. The building was not a powder coating shop yet. The property was still being built, the equipment was still being assembled, and what already existed was a name and a logo.

My dad had asked me in 2016 if I wanted to help him and my uncle start a company. My uncle ran a machining company in California, Micron Machining, and wanted a powder coating business in Tennessee, where my family lived at the time. My dad, my uncle and I opened Micron Powder Coating in April 2018.

The name and the mark came over from Micron Machining. My uncle set both before the rest of it started. Everything the brand had to live on after that was mine.

Creating the marketing materials

Business cards came first, and not because cards matter most. They were the only piece that could do any work while the property was still being built. Somebody had to be able to hand the name to a person in town.

I ran the powder gun myself, and worked out orange peel, the pebbled finish a bad coat leaves, with the equipment vendor. Then I designed the manuals for several of the machines: the large gas oven, the sandblasting unit, and others.

Creating a simple informative website

I put the site on WordPress so whoever was standing in the shop could change it, not whoever wrote the code. It said what the shop did, showed a gallery of before and after, and carried a quote form.

The brand work was the visible half. The rest was what a business needs before it can open: the domains, the company email, the internet line I negotiated, QuickBooks, the merchant account, the Google and Instagram listings. I placed the Craigslist ads and answered them myself.

I went home to Florida in August 2018 and kept supporting the shop from there. It ran for years after that. My sister took it over, and she and my dad closed it when he was well past retirement age.