Meet Tony Busnardo | Owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Tony Busnardo and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tony, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Kent and I are best friends from college. After traveling a number of years post-graduation, we really hoped we could share life together in an intentional and meaningful way. The business was just an afterthought. We had some friends doing interesting things in Breckenridge, so we decided to move there. Both of us grew up painting, so it seemed a way to be together and hopefully pay the bills.

Truthfully, we never thought of it as a business. It was a way to share life together in a place that we quickly loved. Even when Kent and his wife had their first kid, the goal of the business wasn’t monetary, but rather was about friendship and sharing that. As we started to need employees to take on volume, we kept camaraderie and friendship the main focus. We really didn’t know any different. It’s what we valued.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
In terms of business, I feel the most important thing we did was not start out to make a business. We started out to cultivate a good friendship. That was and is our center. A lot of people express surprise that Kent and I have managed to stay business partners for so long. I think we have because we aren’t business partners at heart. We are friends, who choose each other, the deeper things of life, and play over money and growth and all the stuff normally associated with business.

Having said that, we do everything we can to keep schedules with clients. We do quality work. We show up on time. We are clean. We are able to do all of this fairly easily by not over-committing, not over-promising, and speaking forthrightly with clients. We got all the better at these details when we started learning to say no to work.

It has also helped to take with a grain of salt the old adage that says the client is always right. Truthfully, the client is rarely right, especially in this day and age when unknowledgeable people post DIY info on the internet all the time. True painting is actually a highly skilled endeavor that necessitates a wealth of knowledge concerning thousands of potential products and years of experience. That’s not often the general consensus, so it can be a challenge at times to help clients see that. Those who don’t want to see it are the clients to whom to say “no.” It’s dangerous to let a client tell me how to do what I expertly know how to do, and I don’t want to convince people that I know what I’m doing. That would mean we won’t start with trust. As I said before, where you start is where you finish.

There are plenty of lessons we learned along the way. Three stick out.

The first is the 80/20 rule. Since we had no business background, we’d never heard of this. We rediscovered this basic principle when I sat down to analyze (for the first time… and years in) different kinds of jobs. I discovered we put 80% of our energy into work that was at best marginally profitable. This was also the least enjoyable work, and the work with the most complications and hassles. I also discovered that 20% of our work covered more than 80% of our profits. This work happened to be way more enjoyable. I realized we needed to chase that 20% and make it our 80% or more.

At the same time, Kent was meeting with local businessmen and asking for advice. One of them told him we only needed to know one thing–the 80/20 rule.

The second lesson is directly about clients. Instead of waiting for clients to contact us, it is much better for clients and our business when we proactively contact our them. This communicates our care for our clients, and helps us direct our energies towards work that is already there. That’s a very easy way to chase the 20%.

The third lesson is one we struggled with for almost 20 years–creating true ownership in our employees. In the end, the buck always fell to Kent and I, which made us lose focus on areas of the business better deserving of our energies. It’s only in the last year that we have really rounded this corner.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I would take them backpacking in a nearby mountain range for 4 days. Afterwards we’d take a day to hit the amazing breweries in the county. Options in Breck for a true ski-town restaurant are getting slim (Angels Hollow I drop a tear daily since you closed doors), but we still have Northside Pizza (lunch with two slices and a Pabst), or maybe the deck at Kenosha. Day 6 we would drive to Chaffee County for a day at the Mt. Princeton Hot Springs. Day 7–still way too many options! I’d lay them out and see what they’d want to do.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Kent and I went to school in Nebraska, but both are from Colorado. We quickly became fast friends in Nebraska. At school we came across some people involved with something called the Nebraska Leadership Conference who encouraged students to commit to each other above all other ventures in school and life. That really stuck with us, and became a major endeavor in our lives. In terms of practical reality, it’s influenced us as much as anything else.

We also spent some time at a place in Denver called the Downing House. It was a sort of retreat. We helped run the operation, and in-between duties lived a fairly regimented and intentional life that involved committing to other helpers there, participating in scheduled discussions, times of silence, times of prayer, and engaging with national speakers. A couple named Mike and Kate Glerup led that space, and were mentors in furthering our journey forward. They eventually moved to Breckenridge to do somewhat similar things, and we decided a while later to move up and help.

Once we were in Breckenridge, we quickly met a lot of people and soon found ourselves with a great group of friends who had the similar ideas as us. Relationships, and play, and meaningful living all take precedence over work. Here we are, over 20 years later, and a larger portion of us are all still living life together at its core much the same way, even after marriages and kids and all the stuff that comes with it.

Website: www.oldworldpaintingcolorado.com