Angel Pagan does not book the kind of arrival window that eats a customer’s whole morning. “I’m not a four hour window or five hour window,” he says. He usually gives customers one hour, and they hear about it the night before.
The routine continues from there. In the morning, the customer gets an update on the arrival time that either confirms what they were told or flags a change. Thirty minutes before the crew pulls up, there is one more notice. “No matter what obstacles we come across, we get to the jobs,” Pagan says.
He has lived in Orlando for more than 50 years, and most of his working life was spent in the hotel and restaurant business, where he worked as a general manager and a district manager. “I was in the restaurant business and I was high up in management,” he says. “I understand customer service.” The habit of showing up goes back further than that. He traces it to elementary school, where he didn’t show up late and didn’t miss class “no matter what.”
Experience explains only part of it, in his view. “A lot of that stuff has to do with the individuals too,” he says. Some customers just want somebody to show up and shampoo the carpet and don’t much care about the details. Many others do care, and they notice that the person at the door owns the company. One reviewer singled out the way Pagan explains the whole process before any work begins.
Pagan is out on jobs himself and does most of the work. “No one does work better than the owner,” he says. “They have the most pride, they do the most.” His son and another technician work with him, and the plan is to hand the business to his son, who has been learning it, along with the equipment and the vehicles, and then retire. When he talks to someone about joining the team, he says, he can tell quickly. “I almost know immediately within seconds that they’re the right person for the job.”
He came to carpet cleaning from that management career with an eye on what he could start without spending a lot of money up front. He looked into options that included cleaning pools, settled on carpets and began by himself. The company, Eco Friendly Green DryMaster Carpet Cleaning, is affiliated with DryMaster, a low-moisture system, and has since added tile and grout, air duct and dryer vent cleaning. Most of its work is residential.
Customers like the method, he says. The detergents are eco-friendly and non-toxic, and not harmful to pets or people. The shampoo carries a drying agent, so carpets dry fast. The company’s site describes equipment that works the shampoo down to the base of the carpet while vacuuming up shampoo and dirt in the same pass.
The territory is wide. The company lists Orlando, Windermere, Kissimmee and Deltona, and Pagan says the crew will go 70 miles for a job. “It’s a big range,” he says.
Commercial work is a smaller share, and some of it runs on someone else’s clock. At a senior living facility, where the job is tile and grout plus some carpet, the crew starts in the evening and works into the night. “You have to wait till the seniors eat and have their social hour, around five to six,” he says, “and then we can get started.”