Humans of New Ro:  James and Hugo

“We met each other in ninth grade English class. We shared similar interests, and we both have family in Mexico, so we just clicked. Now, everyday I work with my best friend. After high school, we went our own ways for a bit, but four years after graduating, I called Hugo to come join me at my painting job. While working together, we slowly started to do our own work on the side; once you get one side job, you get two side jobs, then you start requesting Friday off, then Thursday, and the next thing you know, it’s a full time job. It was a very scary decision to leave our 9-5 jobs, but we were hungry for work, and we expanded our business little by little. If people asked us to do tiles, we said sure! If people asked us to do kitchen cabinets, we said sure! We would watch YouTube videos and figure it out; our mentality was always finding solutions. We called our company Home Thesis. At the beginning it was just me and him. It was us buying the materials, doing the work, and calculating the sales. Now, we’ve been able to grow our team to the point where we can focus more on management. Our main philosophy is to treat the team like family. A lot of people have come in and gone right out because they weren’t reaching our standards. Once we have the right people though, we help our team as much as possible. Whatever they need, we’ll get it to make their jobs easier. We know how it feels when someone yells at you, so we know to treat everyone with respect. We currently operate four businesses. West Lane Cleaning came after Home Thesis. We noticed that whenever we finished a construction job, the cleaners would never clean to our standards; there would always be this fine dust left behind. So, at West Lane Cleaning, we do our own detailed cleaning, making sure that the house is ready for the client to move right back into. Our two recent businesses are The Gentleman’s Lab, a high end male grooming studio, and Final Take Studios, a podcast and content creation rental space. We’re always trying to see what services are relevant, and hop on those waves. We don’t know what we’re gonna open next, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something.” James and Hugo