The Best Business to Start After AI Takes Your Job

AI Is Crushing Graphic Design Jobs — Here’s the Business I’d Start Instead

AI has already started commoditizing large parts of graphic design. Canva and AI tools can now produce “good enough” design work in minutes — forcing companies to rethink why they pay full-time designers.

So what’s the move if you’re a designer seeing the shift?

In this episode of JackQuisitions, Jack Carr explains why starting a painting business could be one of the smartest pivots for creative professionals.

Painting is simple to sell, demand is constant, and the industry is full of companies that struggle with branding, marketing, and presentation — exactly where designers have an edge.

Jack breaks down why painting is such a strong entry point into business ownership, how designers can leverage their skills to build a premium brand, and what it takes to turn a simple service into a scalable company.

Topics Covered

• Why AI is disrupting graphic design
• Why painting is a strong business opportunity
• The hidden advantage designers have in home services
• How branding and positioning drive higher prices
• Turning a small painting operation into a real business

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Transcript

 Hot take alert. Graphic design is getting smoked, not because design is useless, not because creative is gone, but because AI has changed the market, a huge chunk of design work has now become cheap, fast, and the worst part. Just good enough. Canva has eaten the low end. AI is eating all that concept. Art and templates have ate a bunch of the custom work.

I can get good enough with a prompt and $12, and companies that used to pay for full-time staff member, designer, maybe three or four of them are now asking the question, what are we paying someone's salary for when we can get this done? In 10 minutes and cheaper. Unfortunately, for most graphic designers, that's the reality and that is the trend.

So if you're in graphic design and you just got laid off, or you feel that the walls are closing in, I wouldn't spend the next nine months pretending that the old market is coming back. I'd pivot and one of the best pivots you can make is into painting, not as an employee. But as a business owner, because if the market stops valuing your intellectual labor, the answer is not to beg for another job, it's to own the business.

And painting is one of the cleanest entry points in America today to do that. And here's why.

First off, painting's simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's customer has an ugly house. Ugly room, ugly cabinets. Ugly exterior, ugly wall. You can make it look better, and that is a very easy thing to sell. If it looks bad now, it looks good. Pay me money. And that matters more than people think because simple businesses scale better because customers can understand the value immediately.

And second, with painting the barrier to entry's low, you don't need 10 years of school. You don't need a warehouse full of equipment. You don't need a manufacturing line. You don't need to wait for some special certification in electrical or plumbing or whatever. You just need some tools. You need to learn the basics.

You need to not suck. Immediately. And number three, the demand is real. Homes need paint. Rentals always need turns. HOAs need work. Property managers need work. Commercial buildings need refresh. Commercial buildings need to wow employees sometimes. People always want their house to look newer, cleaner, more expensive.

They want that value when they're going to sell. And unlike a lot of white collar jobs. None of this can be shored. I mean, this is the real world and it's tied to real world assets and that's why I'm so bullish on this, especially for people who are in white collar jobs right now. 'cause a lot of white collar jobs, they learn this, this painful lesson that if your work lives on the screen, you're way more exposed than what you thought.

You're way more exposed than what we were grown up being told. We were grown up being told, go to college, get that white collar job, but. Now AI is threatening a lot of it, and so this is where it gets interesting though, a graphic designer. In my opinion has a huge edge in painting. And most people miss this because they're thinking too literally.

Well, design and designing logos or designing spreadsheets or designing X, Y, and Z is unrelated to painting. But that's where I think that you are wrong or the general consensus is wrong. It's more relatable than people think, but it's more relatable to the business side. Why? Because the best graphic designers are not just software operators.

They're not just good at ex uh, Photoshop or illustrator. They have taste, they understand color and palettes and contrast and visual harmony. And even more important than all of the, the good parts of that is they understand presentation and they understand perceived quality. They under, that's a huge advantage in painting because most painters are.

Not great at helping homeowners make aesthetic decisions, whereas a designer or somebody who understands graphics and understands those, those concepts can walk into a house and say. Here's the right color white, or this will match your floors, or here's how I would modernize this room. Here's why your trim color is wrong.

Here's an exterior palette that doesn't look so dated, and that's almost more valuable than the paint itself because you're not just selling labor, you're selling. And judgment. And judgment gets paid way better than painting does. Now, that's where you take your branding, right? Most painting companies, they have garbage branding.

I've seen them. I've worked with them really, really bad. Branding, bad logos, bad website, bad yard sides, bad truck wraps, bad estimates, procedures, bad social media. It's because they don't understand the customer. You do, it's the same paint, just a different perception from the customer's point of view. And with perception, that's what drives price.

A designer, a graphic designer specifically, can come into this industry and they can instantly look premium to half of the market. And not because they paint better. They may have paint, never painted a day in their life. It's because they package better and that's the real edge and, and that's. Before you even touch marketing.

'cause this is where the opportunity gets absolutely stupid in a, in a good way, in my opinion, is most home service businesses, they don't lose because the work is hard. They don't lose 'cause they can't plum or they can't be a painter. They can't cut lawns. They lose because they can't market. They don't know how to follow up.

They don't know how to present, they don't know how to sell things. And a designer, specifically designers who already have done contract work, which I know a ton of, you have a designer. Already knows how to make those things look good. They already know how to change their outgoing perception. And this matters a lot in painting because painting is purely visual.

You can run your social media with before and after content, which awesome works. Awesome. You can do transformation content, which works awesome. You can do color education content, exterior makeover content. I mean, this business is one of the few businesses where the marketing assets is literally built into the job and.

Th there's such a huge gap in painting right now where a lot of painters don't understand this. So if you can, every job becomes content. Every ugly before becomes an ad, and every finished room becomes video or, or social media, proof of concept, proof of your business. And that's a huge advantage if you can capture it and package it.

So. Let's break this down. We'll get practical with it. You get laid off today or you see the writing on the wall. I don't wanna say you're getting laid off today 'cause I don't think it's, it's now, but it potentially is in the future. So what do you do? My belief is this is what moves I would make, is I would buy a painting business.

That is the easiest way. You have your painters in already in stock. You're already getting people calling in for your business. You already have a bunch of assets, like the website and everything and and reviews and people. You already have that social proof to have people calling day one, and then you add your premium touch.

You turn this into a painting business, into a premium painting business, and you continue doing what you were doing at the business. You just offer an additional package that they weren't able to offer before. Driving more revenue and more margin. So you don't buy day one. You build and you grab that margin yourself.

And the goal is to learn just enough painting to be dangerous. So you start learning, painting, uh, you go on YouTube, uh, you figure out the basics. You watch prop painters, you learn prep, cutting in. You learn how to properly mask and how about finishes? You learn what separate separates a hack job from a clean job you want.

To be dangerous in painting, but not a master craftsman, not an elite painter. That's not the goal here. The goal is to just get your feet under you to be able to start this business. So. You do that, you learn and then you get reps. Paint your own garage. Paint your own house. If you wanna focus on exteriors, paint the exterior of your own house.

If you wanna focus on interiors, paint the interiors of your house or your sister's house. Or your friend's house. Do an accent wall. Do some trim finishes. Go offer a property manager to do turnovers on their vacant properties. They're not gonna say no, they, they need those cheap. Turnover. So they will let you try.

You're not trying to become Picasso here, guys. You're just trying to become competent enough that you can manage a simple service, because that's the big difference is you need to be competent to handle the initial mass, the initial service. Then it's time for your first job and know you don't need some crazy guru hack here.

You just need proof. Proof of concept posting on Facebook, your friends, families, text to coworkers, your first goal's not margin. It's. To gain evidence and reviews. You need photos, you need reviews, and you need testimonials. You need completed jobs, and you need a little bit of momentum. And once you have that, now you focus on the design advantage.

This is where this starts compounding like crazy because now you can market where everyone else is, just business cards and maybe LSA. Maybe Google LSA. You don't need to be generic paint company number 52 or 47, no Joe's painting. You need to position yourself around a premium concept, whether it's modern interiors, color consulting, high-end repaints, high-end rental turnovers.

The goal. Is to become the owner of a niche painting company because as soon as the leads start flowing in and the leads start working, and your marketing starts working, you're gonna want to think about getting outta production. You're gonna hire your first helper, you're gonna get a subcontract crew to do some of this.

The generalized work for you, you're gonna hire a lead painter to start running some jobs. Your role changes. Again, you want to focus on you being the judgment, not being the actual physical labor. And so you don't need to be rolling walls. Year seven. You need to be the one doing the estimates and working on the business and helping customers with their colors and closing details and creating content, and building the brand and driving leads.

That's the business and that's where you will excel because at that point, you're no longer really painting houses. You're marketing, sales, and operations business. Painting, just the vehicle for you and a vehicle that you understand and you can compound your leverage. And this is why I think a lot of people in blue collar creative, specifically the creative fields.

They're looking at AI in the wrong way. They think that the answer is to defend the old model. I don't. I think the answer is to take the parts of the skills that you learn and that still matter, and move them into industries where you can create that leverage. Graphic design itself didn't get cheaper.

The taste didn't get cheaper. The how you sell the product didn't get cheaper. Branding of your company didn't get cheaper. The positioning didn't get cheaper, the customers didn't, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Home service is is still one of the best places in this country to be able to apply those skills to a huge fragmented market that still poorly operates.

And if you use your modern branding and your competent execution, you can win fast.

Could this be a real business? Absolutely. Absolutely. You're one, you could walk away with a hundred grand at high margin, especially if you're doing all the work yourself. You figure out how to estimate. You figure out how to paint. Get a little marketing engine going, a one, two man show. This is completely possible.

Year two, half a million, a million's, not off the table. You can actually sell, recruit and manage. You get systems in place and you're ready to go. This isn't fantasy people. Are buying and building businesses like this every single day. In Jack acquisitions, I see this regularly, people are getting SBA loans approved for 1, 2, 3, $4 million to go buy these massive painting companies and create generational wealth for themselves, but also create job security.

And the best part is, is you're no longer sitting around waiting on someone to hire you. You're building, you're building an asset, you're the boss, and this is the whole game. So if AI took my graphic designer job. Here's my view. Don't waste a whole year trying to reevaluate a market that's already commoditized.

Take the skill, it still matters, and plug it in to a different asset where you can drive leverage, go build something that people need, and that's not getting eaten by ai. And painting is one of the best ways to do that because you don't need another employer. You need a truck, a website, a few jobs, and the willingness to give it a shot.

If you like what you heard, like sub comment where I'm right, or where you think I'm way off, and how graphic designers shouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole because you're a painter of 30 years and you know better than I do. Also, if you are just a different white collar industry, or you want to see where I think a different white collar industry should pivot, comment below.

Let me know where you think they should go. Or don't let me know and just ask me. Thanks guys. Like sub.