For 20 years, family-owned Right Choice Painting and Construction has navigated the ups and downs of business, but they say it has only brought them closer together as a family.
On March 22, Right Choice celebrated its 20th anniversary under the ownership of Jordan and Kyle Mederos.
Jordan is the daughter of Right Choice founders Jeff and Jan Adkinson. She was dating Kyle, who had hit it off with Jeff early on.
“Jeff and I’s relationship, if we weren’t working together, we were playing golf together,” said Kyle. “We were like two peas in a pod when it came to those two things.”
Jeff obviously like Kyle and soon invited him to join the Right Choice team, which he did.
“It is amazing how much Kyle is like my husband,” said Jan. “There was just something unique about Kyle that Jeff saw and he took a leap of faith.”
Soon after, Kyle and Jordan got married. Then, the two bought the company in 2019.
Taking over a successful company is hard enough, but Jordan and Kyle’s first years as the new owners of the family’s business were made especially difficult with the unexpected passing of Jeff, the COVID-19 pandemic and the freeze during the winter storm of 2021.
“That whole time frame was just pure chaos,” said Kyle. “Our industry got hit hard during the freeze. There was a point where we couldn’t get paint.”
Despite all the chaos, Jordan found some peace knowing she had the opportunity to work with the people she loved everyday and cherished the memories of working with her father.
“Getting to work with my parents was an incredible journey and a blessing to be able to spend that time with him,” she said. “It was really important fo us to be able to look back and realize that not very many people get to have all that time with their parents, so I feel it’s a very unique experience, and it’s awful to lose someone, but I feel like it gives you some peace knowing that you spent a good amount of time with them at work as well as at home.”
Kyle said the chaos at the beginning of their ownership tenure created an even stronger bond together and has prepared them for anything to come in the future.
“It’s made our family dynamic even stronger because we all have this goal that we like aim for as like a family business,” he said. “It leads to positive family experiences with each other, we all grow together and if it’s because of that strength that we had as a family that got us through the really hard times.”
Even though Kyle and Jordan have taken the company and made it their own, the Right Choice team continues to remember Jeff and think about what he would have wanted.
“We talk about Jeff often,” said Jan. “He’s very well-missed and when we get stumped, sometimes we’ll take a step back and we’ll think about how he would handle it because, he knew this industry inside and out.”
The company has continued to thrive under Jordan and Kyle’s leadership, which they attribute to their consistency and their customer base’s loyalty, which started with Jeff.
“He was in the painting industry for so long and was so well-known, his peers knew [Right Choice] was going to be successful,” said Jordan.
“We would be nothing without our customers – we would just be in an idea,” said Kyle. “We’ve made it to 20 years by giving our customers satisfactory service throughout the process, and that speaks volumes when they tell others to go with Right Choice. That’s the biggest compliment you could receive from any customer.”
Kyle said the key to their award-winning service is staying local and not leaving until the job is done right.
Though, the team has gone out of their about 20-mile radius limit to accommodate some regular customers, taking them out to Oklahoma or Michigan for some jobs.
“We work hard we always do the right thing, no matter what,” said Jan. “And we don’t leave a job until the customer is satisfied because we want to make sure that people are happy with the work.”
Though Kyle said he never saw himself working in construction or painting, all the cards seemed to be played at just the right time for him to end up doing it – and now it’s something he loves.
Kyle admitted owning a business isn’t easy, but him, Jordan and Jan all agree doing it as a family was the right choice.
