Childhood friends beat leukemia and build a business

By Kevin Hoffman

The Hyundai Accent wasn’t exactly a standard-issue work truck. With two doors, barely enough legroom for passengers, and a ladder strapped precariously to its roof, it looked more like a college kid’s DIY attempt at a paint van.

“I would go and pick up [the crew] in the morning and cram them into my two-door Hyundai Accent and strap a ladder to the top of it,” Josh Angeli remembers. “And I would drive them to the job site and hope to hell that nothing went wrong.”

From a rented 800-square-foot house near campus, Josh and his childhood friend Mason Marquis launched their painting company. 

“We were in college and he had this wild idea to start a business,” Josh says. “He’s very much the visionary and I’ve always been the right-hand man.”

The two entrepreneurs would need the kind of determination and loyalty forged under fire. They’d already been through worse.

Modest Beginnings

Before they were business partners, Josh and Mason were fourth graders pretending to be in a rock band.

“We’ve known each other since the fourth grade,” Josh says. “We formed a band with a couple other kids that were in our class.”

The band didn’t play many gigs. In fact, they didn’t really play music at all.

“I don’t think we really did much music playing,” Josh laughs. “I think we just got together and hung out with a couple other friends.”

By high school, their friendship had evolved into working together in a local lawn mowing business. 

“My mom used some sort of Windows Outlook or something and made us some business cards,” Josh recalls. “And then from there we went around knocking doors trying to sell lawn care to his neighborhood and mine.”

The two teenagers landed a few clients and earned a solid summer income. They had been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

Meanwhile, Mason was already showing signs of the businessman he’d become.

“He was the kid that had very crisp dollar bills and he was always ironing his money,” Josh says. “Looking back, I’m like, ‘It’s no wonder that we’re running a business now.’”

The Diagnosis

At 15, Josh was wrapping up his freshman year of high school. He had long hair, a part-time job on the horizon, and a bright future.

Then came a fever that wouldn’t go away. A blood test would change everything.

It started with body aches and chronic exhaustion. The doctors at the Houston hospital brushed it off as a bout of bronchitis. But when Josh and his family got home to Austin, his parents took him for a second opinion.

“As soon as they drew blood, they could tell something was not right,” Josh recalls. “As soon as they got the results back, they knew exactly what it was.”

Leukemia. You have leukemia.

“I don’t even remember the exact conversation, but I remember the feeling: It was just one of total uncertainty and fear,” Josh remembers. “I think I just immediately took this approach of, ‘I gotta keep a good attitude. Stay strong. And yeah, it’s taken me a long time to kind of process even what I was feeling at that moment.”

But if Josh was quietly bracing for battle, Mason was already suiting up. “I remember telling him, and he was devastated,” Josh says. “He was immediately more emotional than I was. And it seemed like it almost shook him more than it shook me.”

College Bound

They fought through it together. Josh responded well to chemotherapy. Within a year the chemo put the cancer into remission and Josh picked up his life where he left off.

He made his way to the University of North Texas, where Mason had already enrolled. Though neither was particularly excited about classes, they signed up for the business program.

Instead of studying hard, they joined a fraternity. But it wasn’t the typical keg-party Greek life. “It was more like finding connection and getting to know a solid group of guys,” Josh says.

That sense of purpose followed Mason outside the fraternity house, too. By the end of junior year, he was ready to launch a new business, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what that would be.

“Mason decides that he wants to start a home service company,” Josh recalls. “It was just kind of a general home service company. Go sell and produce anything that we can.”

Together Strong

The business wasn’t much to speak of in the beginning. There was no real office, little in the way of equipment. It was just two scrappy college kids in a tiny rented house with a shared dream.

Mason took the lead on marketing and sales, while Josh handled the back end. At first, they called themselves Denton Texas Painting — DTX. The ambition was real, even if the skills were not.

“We bought Painting Business Pro and that was kind of like, ‘Here’s how you can do this,’” Josh says.

The course gave them just enough structure to get the business off the ground.

“We’d sell another paint job and we’d keep going,” Josh says. “We were super resilient.”

By 2020, Spray Tex Painting was starting to take off, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. The world was about to shut down.

COVID-19 brought fear and uncertainty. Like a lot of businesses during that time, Spray Tex had to come up with new standard operating procedures on the fly.

“There were so many logistic challenges,” Josh says. “We wore masks. We rolled out a sanitation program.”

Even as the headlines warned of economic collapse, Spray Tex was still growing the business, almost doubling during the time everyone was forced to look at the four walls of their home all day.

But all that growth came with a cost: they were exhausted. They felt like they were playing at a level above their heads, like they leaped straight from high school into the NBA.

So in 2021, they made a deliberate shift: “Let’s get better before we get bigger.”

Human Evolution

Ask Josh about the future of Spray Tex, and you won’t hear about early retirement or a big buyout. “There aren’t any plans to sell currently,” he says.

What you will hear is an ambitious plan for growth. The goal over the next three years is to continue to scale residential while also launching a commercial division.

But the next evolution isn’t just in scale. It’s about people.

“It’s not necessarily about money,” Josh says. “It’s about making the biggest impact that we can on our customers and our team.”

Josh Angeli never expected cancer to shape his future. At 15, he was just trying to survive one day at a time.

“I was thinking very much in the moment: ‘Am I going to be okay? What is life going to look like?’”

Mason was by Josh’s side through it all, but so was someone else. Just a few months after he was diagnosed with cancer, Josh started dating Avery. 

“She was dating this bald cancer kid,” Josh jokes.

They stayed together through it all. Many years later, when Josh and Avery got married, Mason stood by his side once again.

“Mason was my best man.”