Joe Longo can explain the biggest decision his family business ever made in one sentence. Carpets, air ducts and mold in a house all bear on the air inside it, he says, and they are “the things that you can’t see.”
His father opened Longo Carpet Cleaning in 1986. For a long time the work was what the name suggests, along with water damage jobs and mold remediation. In 2008 the family got a chance to buy Affordable Duct Cleaning and took it. “We really made our company air quality based,” Longo says. Affordable Duct Cleaning now runs as a division of Longo Carpet Cleaning & Restoration, based in Agawam and working across western Massachusetts and into northern Connecticut.
Work nobody can see is hard to sell, because the customer has no way of knowing it happened. Longo’s answer is a rule about proof. “We don’t say it’s clean unless you lay your eyes on it and it’s clean,” he says.
The 12-step process the company publishes shows what that means on a job. It starts with a camera sent into the supply and return runs, and the homeowner sees photos of what is in there before the crew begins. The work is done under negative pressure with truck-mounted extraction, so debris is pulled out to the truck instead of drifting back into the house. It ends with more photos and a walk-through of what was found.
One homeowner, whose dryer vent climbs a floor and exits through the roof, described getting that treatment from two technicians: before-and-after photos, plus an airflow measurement taken on the spot.
After the purchase, Longo says, the family set out to become experts in the field, and getting NADCA certified was part of that. The National Air Duct Cleaners Association certifies duct cleaning technicians. As the company brought people on, he says, “we were just training them the right way to do this.”
He would not pick between commercial and residential work, and he says he would hate to shortchange homeowners. Still, he names the commercial side as the wheelhouse: “big grocery stores, banks.” The company also cleans commercial kitchen exhaust, where the proof takes paper form. Most restaurant accounts are cleaned overnight, and the crew leaves a dated certificate of cleaning for the inspector.
The guarantee is the other half of the proof. A customer who is not satisfied gets the money back. “You can’t do that unless you know that you’re doing a great job,” Longo says.
He traces that attitude to the company’s smallest days. “It’s ingrained into this business since it was a one-man truck,” he says.
His partner is his father, and the two are in the middle of a second-generation handoff. Longo says they are not looking to sell and want to keep it a family business for as long as possible. The growth he talks about is mostly a push to raise the quality of the work and let the rest follow.
New hires, he says, figure out fast whether they belong. “If you’re not on the train, you gotta either get on or jump off. That’s what we say around here.”