Adam Berg was running Bay Area Exterior Cleaning on the side when his main job ended. The obvious move was to find another one. He didn’t.
“I didn’t want to get another job,” he says. “I already had something decent going. So I was like, let’s just see how this works.”
The business wasn’t his idea. A friend named Joey started it, and Berg went to work for it. When Joey left for college, he offered to let Berg take it over, and Berg bought it. The company dates itself to 2018. It is based in San Jose and works across Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties.
Pressure washing is the work Berg likes most, “just because that’s what I started on,” he says. He also cleans gutters and solar panels, hauls junk and takes small handyman jobs, some of it learned working with contractors on fences and building projects. But when he talks about which customers he prefers, the answer is about the calendar.
“Commercial is probably my favorite,” he says. A homeowner’s job happens once. “I get a call, I do it and I’m not going to pressure wash the driveway for three years,” he says. Commercial sites come back. “A lot of them are reoccurring,” he says, “like it’s every week, every other week, every other month.” He finds that work “a lot more straightforward,” with a set schedule.
Gas stations were on that schedule before Berg owned the company. In a 2022 review, the owner of eight South Bay gas stations described hiring it to wash fuel islands and sidewalks once a month and credited Joey and his crew with being quick to respond and on time. The company now describes that work as night cleaning of fuel islands, pump pads, canopies and car washes with 200-degree water, with the runoff vacuumed up before it reaches a drain. The hot water is what matters on that kind of site. It breaks down the grease and motor oil that cold water just moves around.
Berg keeps the operation small. “I’m not a huge organization with a fleet of trucks and a lot of employees and a giant warehouse,” he says. He has no business partners. When a project needs more hands, he brings in a couple of guys, and nearly all of them are friends. “I help them out with whatever they need, they help me out with whatever I need,” he says.
He also answers the messages himself. “That no-show will never happen to me,” he says. If the phone rings while he’s on a job, he tries to get back to the caller “within minutes.” Owning the work changes how he handles it, he says. “When you actually own the business and your reputation, you’re going to care a lot more.”
The recurring accounts give him a reason to keep showing up.
“Gas stations, dumpster pads, restaurants, they get dirty in a week,” he says. “So you have to be back there.”