How to use commercial wall printing to transform a building into a billboard.

Welcome to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve. Our guests share their practical insights and tools which you can use straight away. Your host is international entrepreneur, podcast host, and author Jim James. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me here in the UK, Jim James. And we're going to Wilmington in North Carolina on the east side of America to meet Paul Barron, who is the the CEO and founder of a company called The Wallprinter. Paul, welcome to the show.

Jim, pleasure to be here with you and your audience.

Well, it's my pleasure because you're going to explain to us this amazing product called The Wallprinter. I've never seen anything like it. So why don't you explain what The Wallprinter is, how it revolutionizes kind of marketing opportunities, especially in retail or location-based, and how you've managed to introduce this new business during lockdown and making this such a success. So, Paul, please explain what is the wall printer for those of us that have never seen one before?

So 4 years ago, I was that person who never saw a wall printer, never knew what it was. I was approached by a German company that is now a competitor of ours with a machine that they wanted to market and introduce into the United States. It is basically a vertical printing machine. It's your desktop printer on steroids, if you will. And as you see in the video, it comes on tracks and wheels that are able to provide stability to a perfectly printed image that will go onto any wall, indoors or outdoors, any size at all. It's not limited by anything other than the user's imagination as to what a customer might need. We actually have a floor printer, which was just flashed across, which actually will print digital art onto floors of concrete, wood, metal, tile, and again, we print on anything— indoors, outdoors, glass, brick, wood, wallboard, any surface at all. All you need is a digital image that's created in a format that will allow it to enlarge to whatever the customer wants, and it'll print. And it is a very creative machine. I had not known anything about this. I was approached to try to introduce it to market here. By a manufacturer. I could not make the deal that I wanted with them to represent them properly because I don't work as a commissioned salesperson for businesses. I usually see something that I like or create something, but I want ownership of it because I want to control the customer support, the service, the quality of delivery, and the business that our customers will benefit from by purchasing the equipment that I might sell. So when I saw this, I learned that there were only a handful of companies in the world that actually developed this type of technology. And none of them were in the United States. None of them were in North or South America. In fact, there was the company that approached me that was a German company. And no disrespect to anybody on your international audience that might have German heritage. I drive a BMW. I cook with Henckels knives. I think they're the best in the world. But just because something says Made in Germany, I am not going to just on the face of it say, oh, that's worth $70,000, which is what this machine cost from the German manufacturer. So I did my homework. I said, well, who else is doing this? Why haven't I seen anything like this before? And it turned out that it was a machine that really does require a lot of support, a lot of training, to have parts and inks to use the machine properly manufactured and available. To its users. And so I discovered that there were only 3 or 4 other companies in the world. And the originator of the technology, which predated the German machine by about 10 years and about 1,000 customers, was in China. And so I visited the other companies, and I found that this originator of the technology was, in fact, the best machine out there. It was the most reliable. It had the most robust features, the best printing resolution. And it had features that the German product did not have. I don't need to get into the technology in this conversation because it's more about the business opportunity and my journey to developing this as a base for an entrepreneur other than myself to see this as something that could provide wall art in their communities. And so I created a business model with this machine, developed a relationship with the Chinese manufacturer. At this stage, 3 years into it, we have over 120 customers throughout Canada, the United States, and South America, and Mexico, and the Caribbean. We have developed a floor printing machine. I co-own 3 patents with the Chinese manufacturer, which is not patting myself on the back necessarily, but it's a credit to the relationship between we have with the manufacturer where we are the sole and exclusive distributor and developer of the product now for North and South America. And so we are growing businesses one at a time. We sell about 2 of these every week. We provide exclusive territories for entrepreneurs who see this as an innovative solution to delivering wall art into their communities, to people's homes, restaurants, schools, hospitals, medical offices, gymnasiums, event spaces. Or half of our customers come from existing businesses that may be painters, general contractors, people who are in interior arts, interior decorating, or people who see this as an add-on to their existing business. They might be muralists, photographers, and then they purchase this machine to more quickly and reliably deliver the art onto walls in people's homes or these other places I described, but don't have to actually hand paint something or use some of the traditional means to put art on walls like posters or vinyl stickers or wallpaper. There are very few ways to put art on the walls. This is just one very, very innovative way to do that.

Yeah, Paul, I love that. And I'm showing the videos. So if anyone's listening, they can also go to watch the YouTube video that we have of the show. Because this is amazing, because it's replacing the need for printing posters and trying to stick them on or maybe painting on brickwork, for example.

Yeah, there's no cost advantage to these traditional means over wall printing. Ink is very inexpensive. It costs 40 to 50 cents per square foot to print this. Our printers print at 20 square feet per hour. So you can do a nice small wall mural for somebody, a little 5 by 8 print or something like that. You can do that in 2 hours. It would take an artist 2 weeks to do something like that, and they wouldn't get the clarity and the precision that you can get from ours. And our customers are providing creativity beyond anything we envisioned initially. You just saw a video a moment ago of a ceiling print that was done because somebody wanted to put 2 ceilings in his mansion that looked like the Sistine Chapel. And so our wall printer decided to print on the wall some pieces of board, 8 feet by 8 feet, approximately 3 meters by 3 meters for the metric audience outside of the United States. And they took those boards with the wall printing and then hired a general contractor to put it up into the ceiling and put the gentleman's molding like the rest of his house around the picture. And now he got a ceiling print out of a wall print. I don't want people to think when they see that video that our printer will print on the ceiling. It does not. It prints on a wall.

Then you put that piece of wood or tile or whatever So, Paul, it's an amazing technology and makes a lot of sense. And presumably this is, you know, waterproof, water-resistant, so it can be cleaned in a way that traditional, you know, posters—

Yeah, it's non-toxic. These are called UV inks, which dry like a hard shell, like an oil painting. And they can be covered over also with a protective coating of a polyurethane for additional protection. But the inks are generally rated to 2 to 3 years outdoors under the harshest of conditions before they'll fade or crack, and then indoors, 12 to 15 years. And so we've experienced that ourselves where we have prints on the outside of our own warehouse that's gone through 3 hurricanes here in North Carolina and 3 summers of 100-degree-plus days of temperature, and they've lasted without fading or cracking until about 3 years or so, and then they have to be redone.

Paul, that's wonderful, and thanks for sharing that, and well done to you for finding this you know, technology and bring it into the market. But the journey to bringing the wall printer to the market has not been an easy one because you started this business on the eve of COVID So why not tell us, you know, how you managed to get this business noticed when people couldn't come and notice it?

Yeah, when I find a product or a technology or a service or something that I think is innovative and that meets a market gap, first and foremost, There has to be some type of market demand for something, or you have to be offering— whether you're a software developer, or you want to start a restaurant, or you want to be a plumber or an electrician, you must be filling a market demand where there's either a gap in the market that you can provide a better product, a better service, a better quality of service. Whatever you're going to do, it has to be a solution to a problem. You can't go chasing or creating problems and then going ahead and finding something for it. There has to be a real market need. And so again, I thought right from the start, you know, not too many ways to put art on walls. This was very innovative. It was a way for people to make money doing this. So it seemed like a good idea. When I shared that with my wife and I said, Maureen, come take a look at this, what do you think? Instead of coming to take a look at this, she invariably cuts up my credit cards and hides the bank account from me because she goes, here we go again, Paul's gonna invest in something crazy. But this time she was all in. And she saw the opportunity as I did, and she said, yeah, let's go for it. And like you just said, this was in late 2019 after I did about a year of research on these types of technologies and decided to bring it here to the United States. And December of 2019, I received my first shipment of machines, which was the result of a substantial investment. And not only that, but just the relationship that I formed with the manufacturer. And then January of 2020, after I started to learn how to use these machines, the world stopped with COVID and the pandemic. So here I was with a product that nobody's ever seen or heard about before. Nobody knew what it did or what the benefits were. I was pretty much the only one. But while people were laying off workers or working remotely, I decided to build my team. And because I was heavily invested in this, and I said, well, this is going to end sooner or later, and we'll be able— people will be able to come and visit and see what this is all about. Or maybe trade shows will start again, and I can show people what this is and go out into the community with it. But in the meantime, when nobody could go into— and restaurants were closing, and you couldn't go out to people's homes with something as a service because everybody was in lockdown mode. So what we did is I built the team. It took about 10 months, 8 months I'd say. We got our first customer in August of 2020, and in those 8 months I not only built the team to support the products, learn how to use it, translated everything out of Chinese into English, French Canadian, Spanish, Portuguese, which are all the markets that I'm servicing, but then we went to social media. We went to social media very heavily— YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, went to all our own website, optimizing that with search engine optimization, Google Ads, letting people know what this was so that we could find out who wants it. Even though we did have 14 years of history in Southeast Asia and in Europe where there was some traction for these machines, they didn't exist here in North and South America though. So we had to go ahead and communicate the value to people. And we did it through video and through just getting people interested in it. Today we get about 150 inquiries every single day. Now granted, 140 of those 150 see that this is a $30,000 machine, which is half the price of that original German machine that approached me. But at the same time, it is a $30,000 machine. This is a serious investment for somebody because that's only the machine. That's not the whole investment that people are going to make. for what they need to do to have a business, like a vehicle to transport the machine and food to feed your family while you're building your business and everything else that goes along with having a business. But the machine was a considerable investment. It wasn't the $100 desktop printer that you can buy from Hewlett-Packard or Canon or Epson or one of these companies. And so 140 of those people were people who said, oh, that's really cool, but I don't have $30,000 to invest. 10 of those though, every single day, say, I see it's a business, $30,000 to $50,000 to invest in having an exclusive territory, which is our preferred business model, to give people the exclusive rights to build this business in their backyards, whether it be a city, county, state, town, whatever. We give them the exclusive rights to be the only ones to do this. We're not a franchise. That's not our business model. But we do offer exclusivity where they're the only ones we sell machines to, to help them grow and build their business. And so 10 of those people say, the investment doesn't scare me, tell me more. And so we have conversations just like, Jim, you and I are having today, and I explain what it's all about. And they started buying, they started coming to visit us little by little from August of 2020 on. And now we're at the point where we're delivering about 1 to 2 new machines every week. building businesses one at a time in various communities throughout North and South America. And our customers are successfully doing that, delivering the services, engaging in partnerships with painters and interior decorators and artists and muralists and photographers, general contractors, interior designers, and helping businesses get wall art.

Paul, what a great story. Now, you've made it sound effortless. And I will say to my listeners, you know, Paul is a very, you know, energetic and energized young man. Paul, I'm going to ask you to maybe just let us know where you're at in your life in terms of life stage, and if there's a lesson that you've learned about doing something that didn't go quite as planned, because we've all got experiences of businesses that have not worked out, and that's as often as valuable as the ones that have to learn from.

Yeah, I don't want anybody to misjudge the trajectory that my current business venture might appear to be taking. Even this venture was not without its pitfalls, not the least of which was supply chain issues, getting parts, building up inventory, things like that. These are challenges you also have to face, especially when you're not the manufacturer, or until you are the manufacturer. We're getting closer and closer to that point ourselves, and we manufacture our own inks, but these are things we discovered along the way. Were part of the necessary elements to not only be successful, but also to make our customers successful and have what they needed when they needed it. Along with the support and the knowledge and the training that we provide, they also have to have the parts and the inks and all the facilities to keep their businesses going. But I've had businesses also in the past where sometimes it was because the partnership wasn't right. That happened to me on one business venture. Where I engaged for financial reasons, a specific partner who was an investor, but they had other motivations other than the success of the business. From a financial perspective, they were able to tolerate a loss where I was not. And so you have to be very careful, you know, about that. You have to do the market research. I was in the restaurant business in New York for 12 years, very successful, made a lot of money. Then I decided to sell my business to my partner at the time and relocate because I wanted to live in Florida. And play tennis every day. And so I did that. And I was still in my 30s, 40s. And I moved to Florida. And I opened up another restaurant down there. I said, well, I did that, had a really good business in New York. I'm gonna open a restaurant here in Florida. Didn't do any market research, didn't understand the culture of the community and all of that. And what I made in 12 years, I lost in 1 year in Florida. That was a learning experience. I don't like to look at these things as failures, because we're learning experiences. It's not how many times you fall down, it's how many you get up. I know it's a trite expression, but it's very true. You have to be willing to have confidence in yourself. And sometimes, very honestly, those learning experiences, as I call them, did not lead me to opening up and establishing a new business right away or discovering a new product or creating a new software solution or something. It got me to the point where I went to work for somebody. Number one, because that was a financial necessity. And it was also something in my growth path where I wanted to learn Well, okay, this didn't work for me. Let's see what some other people are doing and learn that by going to work for other people. My personality, soon I realized that I could do something better than somebody else could do it. And so I get restless and I decide that I need to be doing it myself and have more control. And so invariably I would go through this stepladder approach to creating something, working for somebody, For leaving that, creating something again, working for somebody again, and learning along the path. Well, that's carried me. I'm 71 years old now, so I don't have a lot of runs like this left in me. Fortunately, the one I'm doing now appears to be very successful, and so this may very well be my last hurrah. But according to my wife, you know, I always wake up in the morning figuring, what's Paul going to do when he grows up? And so, you know, I hope I always do have the passion to try to find something to keep me motivated. And that's one of the most important things, you know, for your audience, for anybody. Find what, what are you passionate about? Um, and then go with that. Is it because you want to live in a certain place? Is it one you want to do certain thing? You have an education that's led you into a certain way, uh, a certain path, but you have to feel good about yourself. You have to get excited about it. Again, trite expression, but if you love what you're doing, you never work a day in your life. I don't think anything is more true than that. And the last thing I'll say is network, network all the time, get connected to people. You don't know who you can learn from or who can learn from you. Giving back is something I learned is really important. Right now I'm a mentor at the local university here in North Carolina, where students, faculty, and local community business people face some pain points in their own entrepreneurial journey. And so I wear the sales and marketing hats. I'm very good at identifying customers and partnerships and vendors and developing those relationships. And I'm happy to share that experience and help people in their own. I tell people when they say, what do I do? You know, I'm generally product and service agnostic. It doesn't matter to me what the product is. Today it's a wall printing machine. Okay. But yesterday it was a self-service dog wash. Before that, it was a Chinese headband headphone for children. Before that, it was an innovative baby bottle that was manufactured in Austria. All of these things, the common thread was that I took these products, identified the market, the vendors, the sources for manufacturing here in the United States, some element that would then let that product fill a market gap better than it had previously. And that's what it's about.

Paul, well, I was gonna ask you for your number one tip, but you've talked about networking. It sounds like that's What you've done brilliantly throughout all of your entrepreneurial career.

Networking is not only something you do for the commercial benefits and for your career benefits, but financial and emotional. You know, family, friends, these are people who are going to be there for you, whether it means just an attaboy, you're doing a good job, and you need that little bit of motivation and confidence building when you don't have it one day. For whatever reason that might be, people that could prop you up a little bit, that's important. People that you can rely on perhaps that have confidence in you. And when you don't, and will help you maybe financially. That's been a part of my life as well from friends and family. It's not just about the business aspects of things, but about the life and the life you choose to live. And if you connect well with people, you never know who you met today that 10 years from now is going to become a resource. or who you can be a trusted resource to today, because it's going to come back in spades to benefit you. So just, you know, networking, I think, is probably the most important thing. And most people do it whether they know it or not, from the time they're born and they're in school and grade school. You develop relationships with people, nurture those relationships. You never know where they're going to go.

Paul Barron in Wilmington, North Carolina. I didn't know where our conversation was going to go when I saw the wall printer As a guest, and what an inspiring conversation on lots of levels. If you want to find out more about you, Paul Barron, where can they do that?

Well, if you want to connect with me, I'm happy always to do that. LinkedIn— not an advertisement for LinkedIn, but it's a good professional network. I suggest that you get a profile on there if you don't have one today, whether it's for career, business, or just for networking. But you can always reach out. You can find me, Paul Barron, My spelling is up there somewhere on the name, but I'm sure if you Google it or search it on LinkedIn, you'll find me. And I'm happy to connect with people, happy to have conversations, whether it be about my path or yours. I'm happy to do that. If you are interested in anything about the Wall Printer and want to learn more about this specific venture of mine, just go to thewallprinter.com. There's a contact form, there are videos that Jim was kind enough to display during this conversation, but you could learn more about this technology on our website, thewallprinter.com.

Paul Barron joining me from Wilmington, North Carolina. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you, Jim. I enjoyed it.

Me too. Well, and I'm sure that my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs have as well. So thank you for listening. Fascinating. Check out thewallprinter.com. It's amazing to see. You can see this as well on the YouTube videos. We will put links to Paul in the show notes and his company. And please do refer this to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur and review it on an app if you've enjoyed the show, because it really helps us to let Apple and Spotify know that we've got listeners. And until we meet again on the mic, just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.