Dave Zinzola worked for three other carpet cleaners before he went out on his own, and he has run Integrity Carpet Cleaning for more than 18 years. At the Cheektowaga business, the man who calls customers back is the same man who shows up with the hoses.
He chose the name for what it says. “I call it integrity because integrity is trustworthy,” he says. He is just as plain about why he works alone: “I just like being on my own.”
The whole business rests on that arrangement. “They get the owner to do the cleaning, not an employee,” he says. His reasoning has to do with the second visit as much as the first. “I want to see the customer again,” he says. “I’m not a one-time person that just cares about your money and then goodbye.”
The work is hot water extraction, the method most people call steam cleaning, on carpets and upholstery in homes and offices. Asked which he prefers, he picks commercial jobs, for a practical reason. “You’re at one spot, you’re not driving all over the place,” he says. Then he lets the preference go: “But work is work, so it doesn’t matter.”
A smaller habit says as much about how he operates. Customers often tell him, he says, “Oh, I’m so glad you called me back.” He doesn’t promise an instant reply. He returns calls the same day.
A customer who posted a testimonial on his site recounted how that works when the calendar is full. She called on a Friday, before 1 p.m., and he told her the earliest he could come was Monday morning. She said she needed the carpets done sooner and thanked him for his time. Not long after they hung up, he called back to ask whether she had found anyone, and offered to come Saturday morning. She took him up on it.
The arrangement that keeps him close to every customer also makes growth complicated. A business that sells the owner cannot add a second cleaner the way a larger outfit adds a crew, and Zinzola has been turning the question over. “I might hire somebody to help me on the truck, but I don’t know yet,” he says. “I’m thinking about it.”
The question he keeps coming back to is who that person would be, standing in a customer’s living room under a name he picked because it means trustworthy.
“You gotta find the good help,” he says. “You gotta find someone that you can trust.”