I started my first carpet cleaning business two weeks before my 16th birthday in Galva Illinois. I partnered with my older brother who funded it. Once he realized how much work it was he didn’t want anything to do with it. I had about 15 minutes of training on the new dry foam portable machine. I remember having to get my mom to drive me to jobs a couple of times before I could get my drivers license. I only had one competitor and he was at the very tail end of his career. I charged what the people who sold me the equipment said I should and I got it. I would run classified ads upside down in the local paper and they didn’t charge me any extra and they really stood out. Carpet cleaning was much more seasonal there and it was feast or famine. Then I got out of it for a while after a bad car accident, that left me with back problems.
After trying some other career choices I took a job working for a company that had 5 truck mounted steam machines mounted in little pickups with manual transmissions. The machines were powerful but very crude and breakdown prone. These machines were so much more powerful than the portable machines I had used previously.
Shortly after I started working there came the Star Chart, the owner of the company had the office workers call all of the residential customers 2-3 days after their job was done and based on their responses to a questionnaire each cleaner was assessed points. If the customer was generally happy you got 1 point, if they said something like awesome or exceptional you got 2 points, if they said something negative you got deducted 1 point, if they wanted you to come back and try some more you got deducted 2 points and If they wanted somebody else to come back you were deducted 4 points. Every Friday when I finished my schedule and came back to the shop there would be a big poster with everyone's score for the week.
I really applied myself and really studied the ergonomics of the task at hand. I used to keep a record of how many times I walked between the truck and the wand and I got more organized and efficient the way I did my job. I’d show up to work 10 minutes early and give all of the filters in the machine a good cleaning to make sure everything was flowing the best it could. This company didn’t use water softeners so the heating coil in the burner of the machine was always in varying degrees of being clogged up with scale from all the minerals in the water. So I kept a notebook and everyday I tracked what pressure the machine would free flow at (at full throttle) so I would be able to know when it was scaled up so I could keep my machine in better shape than my co workers I was competing with. I very quickly learned the procedure of descaling and really kept on top of it.
These machines were so basic the only gauge they had was a pressure gauge. The challenge was finding that magic pressure that the burner could just barely maintain at the temperature that was the most you could run for the type of carpet you were on. I could wright a book on all of things I had to do to to get the most out of a machine that didn’t have a temperature gauge.
Before long I consistently ranked on top of that Chart and I and was promoted to shop supervised. It became my job to train all of the new employees and the company quickly grew to a 22 truck company. That Star Chart was a very important part who I am today as a cleaner. It also gave me experience with a lot of different brands and types of equipment. It taught me the importance of maintenance and accountability.
I trained about 70 cleaners while there. Among those were 4 IICRC certified cleaners and one of them had his “Master Cleaner” Certificate. He was a really likable guy but, like the others, he couldn’t cut it and on his second round of training he brought in (and loaned me) all of his training curriculum which I spent a lot of time going through. The IICRC is a trade organization run by “leaders of the industry” there is no incentive to make people better cleaners but a huge incentive to make them more dependent on the equipment and chemicals that those leaders of the industry profit by selling. They were dead wrong about what actually works. The bad consequences of running hotter than they said was ok were easily avoided by making a few simple and easy changes, developing some new skills and being aware and knowing what to look for. It’s pure silliness yet most cleaners today buy it hook line and sinker. I used to go to carpet cleaning seminars with the owner, they are a complete joke! Leaders of the industry have a responsibility to their shareholders, NOT the cleaner, and certainly Not You!
The owner credited me with a big part of the incredible growth of the company but he was terrible about maintaining his equipment and it was constant chaos. He also had extremely little experience actually using any of his equipment and believed what the people running the classes and seminars were preaching and started replacing the fleet with newer style equipment that promised lower maintenance and operating cost. These new machines took twice as long to do half as good of a job and I got forced into using one of these new machines for a few months it was horrible. It did however cement my appreciation of power. I saw the writing on the wall and started planning my exit. I bought an old Prochem 100A (my favorite machine, I’d ever operated) that badly needed overhauled. While overhauling it I made a lot of changes to drastically improve it’s performance. One of my best friends was a mechanic who worked on these machines who previously worked for the company who built it. My friend taught me a lot of things that most mechanics don’t tell their customers, that proved to be very helpful. I added heat exchangers to recycle wasted or already used heat to preheat the incoming water. I could heat the water hotter and flow more of it. One of the first things I bought for that machine was a very large high quality accurate temperature gauge.
In 1993 I left my job and started Melton’s Carpet Cleaning and focused on lowering chemical use and improving both quality and productivity. I originally focused on very upscale houses. In 2009 when the economy was terrible, I started doing mostly tile cleaning for a huge investment company who was buying bank owned homes in huge bundles. That came to an end near the end of 2013 when the banks stopped selling homes in bundles. I had lost most of my residential customers because I had very little availability during those years so it was almost like starting over. It was a hard lesson of having too many eggs in one basket, a mistake I learned from and won’t make again. Just after Thanksgiving of 2013 I re launched my business focusing on Water Only Cleanings for east valley houses. That’s also when I started on Facebook and I’ve been regularly posting pictures and videos of my work ever since.
A machine is only as powerful as it’s weakest link. And when you remove the weak link (and replace it with something better) You have a new weak link somewhere else. Most cleaning machines trudge along like tractors, mine is set up like a race car and it’s maintained like a race car too. I track every gallon of water that goes through my machine so I know exactly when to recharge the water Softener and change the Carbon and KDF Water Filters. Compared to most carpet cleaners, I have very few breakdowns because I know the importance of maintenance.
I’d like to also point out than in 32 years of cleaning carpet I’ve never been sued nor have I had a work related insurance claim. I am insured and BBB A+ Rated.
After trying some other career choices I took a job working for a company that had 5 truck mounted steam machines mounted in little pickups with manual transmissions. The machines were powerful but very crude and breakdown prone. These machines were so much more powerful than the portable machines I had used previously.
Shortly after I started working there came the Star Chart, the owner of the company had the office workers call all of the residential customers 2-3 days after their job was done and based on their responses to a questionnaire each cleaner was assessed points. If the customer was generally happy you got 1 point, if they said something like awesome or exceptional you got 2 points, if they said something negative you got deducted 1 point, if they wanted you to come back and try some more you got deducted 2 points and If they wanted somebody else to come back you were deducted 4 points. Every Friday when I finished my schedule and came back to the shop there would be a big poster with everyone's score for the week.
I really applied myself and really studied the ergonomics of the task at hand. I used to keep a record of how many times I walked between the truck and the wand and I got more organized and efficient the way I did my job. I’d show up to work 10 minutes early and give all of the filters in the machine a good cleaning to make sure everything was flowing the best it could. This company didn’t use water softeners so the heating coil in the burner of the machine was always in varying degrees of being clogged up with scale from all the minerals in the water. So I kept a notebook and everyday I tracked what pressure the machine would free flow at (at full throttle) so I would be able to know when it was scaled up so I could keep my machine in better shape than my co workers I was competing with. I very quickly learned the procedure of descaling and really kept on top of it.
These machines were so basic the only gauge they had was a pressure gauge. The challenge was finding that magic pressure that the burner could just barely maintain at the temperature that was the most you could run for the type of carpet you were on. I could wright a book on all of things I had to do to to get the most out of a machine that didn’t have a temperature gauge.
Before long I consistently ranked on top of that Chart and I and was promoted to shop supervised. It became my job to train all of the new employees and the company quickly grew to a 22 truck company. That Star Chart was a very important part who I am today as a cleaner. It also gave me experience with a lot of different brands and types of equipment. It taught me the importance of maintenance and accountability.
I trained about 70 cleaners while there. Among those were 4 IICRC certified cleaners and one of them had his “Master Cleaner” Certificate. He was a really likable guy but, like the others, he couldn’t cut it and on his second round of training he brought in (and loaned me) all of his training curriculum which I spent a lot of time going through. The IICRC is a trade organization run by “leaders of the industry” there is no incentive to make people better cleaners but a huge incentive to make them more dependent on the equipment and chemicals that those leaders of the industry profit by selling. They were dead wrong about what actually works. The bad consequences of running hotter than they said was ok were easily avoided by making a few simple and easy changes, developing some new skills and being aware and knowing what to look for. It’s pure silliness yet most cleaners today buy it hook line and sinker. I used to go to carpet cleaning seminars with the owner, they are a complete joke! Leaders of the industry have a responsibility to their shareholders, NOT the cleaner, and certainly Not You!
The owner credited me with a big part of the incredible growth of the company but he was terrible about maintaining his equipment and it was constant chaos. He also had extremely little experience actually using any of his equipment and believed what the people running the classes and seminars were preaching and started replacing the fleet with newer style equipment that promised lower maintenance and operating cost. These new machines took twice as long to do half as good of a job and I got forced into using one of these new machines for a few months it was horrible. It did however cement my appreciation of power. I saw the writing on the wall and started planning my exit. I bought an old Prochem 100A (my favorite machine, I’d ever operated) that badly needed overhauled. While overhauling it I made a lot of changes to drastically improve it’s performance. One of my best friends was a mechanic who worked on these machines who previously worked for the company who built it. My friend taught me a lot of things that most mechanics don’t tell their customers, that proved to be very helpful. I added heat exchangers to recycle wasted or already used heat to preheat the incoming water. I could heat the water hotter and flow more of it. One of the first things I bought for that machine was a very large high quality accurate temperature gauge.
In 1993 I left my job and started Melton’s Carpet Cleaning and focused on lowering chemical use and improving both quality and productivity. I originally focused on very upscale houses. In 2009 when the economy was terrible, I started doing mostly tile cleaning for a huge investment company who was buying bank owned homes in huge bundles. That came to an end near the end of 2013 when the banks stopped selling homes in bundles. I had lost most of my residential customers because I had very little availability during those years so it was almost like starting over. It was a hard lesson of having too many eggs in one basket, a mistake I learned from and won’t make again. Just after Thanksgiving of 2013 I re launched my business focusing on Water Only Cleanings for east valley houses. That’s also when I started on Facebook and I’ve been regularly posting pictures and videos of my work ever since.
A machine is only as powerful as it’s weakest link. And when you remove the weak link (and replace it with something better) You have a new weak link somewhere else. Most cleaning machines trudge along like tractors, mine is set up like a race car and it’s maintained like a race car too. I track every gallon of water that goes through my machine so I know exactly when to recharge the water Softener and change the Carbon and KDF Water Filters. Compared to most carpet cleaners, I have very few breakdowns because I know the importance of maintenance.
I’d like to also point out than in 32 years of cleaning carpet I’ve never been sued nor have I had a work related insurance claim. I am insured and BBB A+ Rated.
To schedule an appointment:
Text(preferred)/Call: 480-203-1030
Payments accepted: Zelle, Cash, Check, MasterCard, Visa, AMEX, and Discover
Text(preferred)/Call: 480-203-1030
Payments accepted: Zelle, Cash, Check, MasterCard, Visa, AMEX, and Discover