“It’s my business,” Philip Arms says. The Arms brothers, he explains, are his sons.
The name sounds like a partnership of siblings. It is one man’s company, named for his two small boys. “I just named it after them because I’m really doing it all for them,” Arms says.
He started it after years of factory shifts. “I was tired of working at a factory for 60 hours a week and decided to start my own business,” he says. The work he does now gives him back the hours he used to lose. “I’m able to spend as much time with my kids as most stay-at-home moms,” he says.
Using his surname was a choice he thought about. “I put my name on the company, my last name, so it doesn’t just represent me, it represents my family, and it’s not a reputation that I want to ruin,” he says. He grew up being told to “stand by your word.”
Most of what he sells starts with a correction. On a concrete driveway, he says, the dark patches people take for grime are something else. “That’s not actually dirt, that’s black algae.” Every driveway or concrete wash comes with a post-treatment, a chlorine-based algaecide that kills the growth the water leaves behind. By his account, a driveway washed without it stays clean for three to six months. With it, he says, the black stays away for three to five years under normal conditions.
Houses get the same algaecide at a fraction of the pressure. “We rarely, rarely, rarely put pressure on them,” Arms says. A soft wash means the crew is not “forcing water where it doesn’t want to be,” and it leaves no streaks. He says the results on siding are immediate and the walls stay free of growth for three to five years.
He tends to explain all this before the hose comes out. A Greatwood homeowner who booked a house wash while he would be away for a couple of days later recounted that Arms came by the day before to look the place over. He walked the homeowner through why the cleaning agents would keep algae from growing right back, where plain pressure washing only scrapes it off. The homeowner asked for before-and-after photos so he could see the change before he got home.
Behind the work is a 30-day guarantee. If a customer finds a spot the crew missed, they call within 30 days and the crew comes back. “There’s no back and forth, there’s no discussion about it. We just come and fix it,” Arms says. He says he has never really had a customer need it, “because we’re pretty thorough.”
The company takes commercial jobs, but Arms prefers houses, where “it’s more of a chance to interact with customers and everyday people,” he says. He works Sugar Land, Richmond and the rest of Fort Bend County, in neighborhoods such as Greatwood, First Colony and Riverstone. “We have roots here in Fort Bend County and Sugar Land,” he says.
The name follows him into hiring. Arms, who runs a veteran-owned company, says he leads by example and does not take a hands-off approach, though he only watches closely when someone is brand new and still learning. He hires only people he has judged completely trustworthy: “Somebody who I can trust to represent my last name.”
The boys it is named for are a long way from running a crew. He already knows what happens when they are ready. “I want to hand it down to my boys,” he says.