“I made my LLC after I graduated college, and I started by knocking on doors,” says Mark Vallespir.
The company he formed, Pinnacle Pressure Washing, runs out of Northville, Michigan. Vallespir studied supply chain management at Michigan State University, and the company’s own account of its founding says he passed on a corporate track for outdoor work. He introduced himself to hundreds of Metro Detroit homeowners on their front steps.
Those porch conversations are still how he explains the business. Ask why a homeowner would hire Pinnacle over another washer and he answers with himself, not equipment. “They meet me, they like me,” he says. “A lot of it’s just they pick me as a person, basically.”
He is just as plain about showing up. Some contractors miss appointments or never arrive at all. Vallespir doesn’t dress up his reason for not being one of them: “I wouldn’t do that because I want to make money.”
The work is mostly residential, with some commercial jobs. Roof washes and house washes come up the most. Pinnacle uses a soft wash on roofs and siding, a cleaning solution followed by a low-pressure rinse rather than a hard blast, and its before-and-after photos run from brick in Plymouth to a moss-covered paver patio in South Lyon. The company works across Wayne, Oakland, Washtenaw and Livingston counties and will travel up to 50 miles from Northville.
Vallespir describes the routine when the crew arrives. “When we show up to a job, we tape off all the outlets, we rinse the gutters down, we do the roof, we’ll clean all the surfaces,” he says. The company also waters and covers plants near the house before any cleaner goes on. When the job is done, the crew walks it with the customer and asks for payment only once the customer is satisfied.
Pinnacle is his alone, though he has guys who work for him. His age is the first thing some customers notice. One homeowner admitted in a review to being nervous about it during their first conversation. The job turned out to be no “lazy quick job,” the reviewer wrote, and Vallespir stayed until the project was finished with care.
For now he plans to keep growing Pinnacle and go from there. A sale isn’t the obvious endgame. “It’s hard to sell a pressure washing company,” he says.