CertaPro Painters Brand Guidelines: A 1992 FirstService Franchise With College Pro Roots

A student painting system, then a franchise for professionals.

CertaPro Painters is a residential and commercial painting franchise that began in 1992. Entrepreneur, in its 2026 Franchise 500 profile of the company, gives 1992 as both its founding year and the year it began franchising, and says that in 1992 FirstService started CertaPro Painters as a new company. Its parent today is FirstService Brands, a division of the Toronto-based FirstService Corporation.

Painting at FirstService is older than CertaPro. FirstService’s annual information form, dated February 2026, says its predecessor company was launched in 1989 by Jay S. Hennick, starting from a Toronto commercial swimming pool and recreational facility management business that he had founded as a teenager in 1972. In 1989 that predecessor acquired the College Pro Painters franchise system and set up what became FirstService Brands.

College Pro was built around students. An early CertaPro franchisee told Entrepreneur in October 2014 that he had paid his university tuition in full by running a College Pro Painters business for four years, hiring college students to paint houses. The same interview, part of the magazine’s Franchise Players column by Kate Taylor, links the two businesses through people: the franchisee, who ran CertaPro Painters of the Main Line in Pennsylvania, said he knew the founder of CertaPro Painters, Charlie Chase, through his time with College Pro Painters, and that he had believed in him.

He described joining in the company’s very early days. He said he was the third person to sign a contract with CertaPro Painters, that he signed fresh out of college, and that he had owned his franchise for 22 years by the time of the interview. His early challenge, he said, was finding painters and learning to manage a crew, which he and other owners worked out with help from the franchisor.

English Wikipedia says FirstService held its initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1993 and that, through the 1990s, it expanded into other residential service franchises, partly through a subsidiary called The Franchise Company, later renamed FirstService Brands. In 1996 it added residential property management by buying two Florida firms, the annual information form says.

Territories, training and a two-year workmanship guarantee.

CertaPro is a franchise system: local businesses trade under the CertaPro Painters name and pay royalties to the franchisor. FirstService’s February 2026 filing says royalties are earned as a percentage of franchisee gross revenues or as a fixed monthly fee, plus administrative fees for ancillary services, and that the network then had 333 franchises operating in major markets across the United States and Canada. Entrepreneur’s 2026 profile gives 322 units. The filing describes CertaPro’s focus as high-end residential and commercial painting and decorating work.

The Entrepreneur profile sets out how a franchise is structured. Agreements run for ten years and can be renewed if both sides wish. Each franchisee is given an assigned territory for residential painting that other franchisees cannot work in, while commercial painting may not be tied to those territories. New owners go through in-person training, interviews and a series of webinars on customer service, business operations, team leadership and goal setting, which the profile lists as 40 hours of on-the-job and 80 hours of classroom training, with further training on clients, location and business skills.

Not every CertaPro business is independently owned. At the time of its February 2026 filing, FirstService Brands owned three CertaPro Painters operations in major metropolitan markets in the United States and Canada, acquired mainly from franchisees, alongside company-owned California Closets and Paul Davis Restoration businesses. The filing gives the aim of those purchases as speeding up revenue growth and widening operating margins.

Home-service franchises.

Home-service franchises sell work that happens inside someone else’s house, out of sight of the wider public, so much of their identity lives on the things that travel: the vehicle parked outside, the clothes the crew wears, the forms and checklists left behind, and the photographs of finished jobs that the companies publish on their own sites. The service itself is the product, and the brand has to stand in for it before the door opens.

Vehicles can carry much of that load. The Maids, the Omaha cleaning franchise founded in 1979, says on its franchise site that its four-person teams and a recognisable yellow company car became its calling card in the early years. The company still tells its founding story through that car, alongside the team of four.

Naming can be plain and functional, and some brands turn a method into a branded product: The Maids describes a numbered 22-Step Cleaning Process, and MaidPro, founded in Boston in 1991, cleans to what it calls a 49-Point Checklist, marked as a trademark. In both cases the company presents the routine as something every franchisee follows in the same order.

Behind the local names sit owners and parent groups, and their corporate pages are part of the picture. MaidPro has belonged since 2021 to Threshold Brands, a multi-brand franchise platform launched by the Riverside Company, Private Equity Wire reported in April 2021. The Maids was acquired in March 2020 in a deal backed by Gladstone Investment Corporation, which lists it on its portfolio pages. Customers meet the local franchise; the parent appears in investor releases, franchise-recruitment sites and the small print.

One of five franchise networks inside FirstService Brands.

FirstService Corporation took its present form on 1 June 2015, when its predecessor was split into two separately listed companies, FirstService and Colliers International Group, the annual information form says. FirstService kept the residential property management business, FirstService Residential, and the FirstService Brands division. It is listed on the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange and is based in Toronto, English Wikipedia says.

Within FirstService Brands, CertaPro sits beside other names that work on homes and buildings. The February 2026 filing lists five franchise networks: Paul Davis Restoration, CertaPro Painters, California Closets, Floor Coverings International and Pillar to Post Home Inspectors. The division also runs company-owned businesses, including First Onsite Restoration and Roofing Corp of America. In that group, CertaPro is the painting brand; its siblings restore, floor, organise and inspect homes.

The name travels locally. Each franchise trades as CertaPro Painters followed by a place, as in the Main Line business in Pennsylvania that Entrepreneur profiled in 2014, so the national mark and the local territory appear together. The brand has a parent with a stock listing and an owner on each local job.

For a design guide, CertaPro Painters shows how a franchise name can carry a parent group’s history while each local owner adds a place name to it. Compare Window Genie, another home-exterior franchise, and Mr. Handyman, a franchise that fixes and maintains homes. For this guide we use a deep slate blue, a primer white and a wet-paint gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CertaPro Painters’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.