When a job needs more hands than his regular crew has, the owner of Primeline Maintenance & Janitorial sometimes turns to people who work or volunteer at the local homeless shelter. He knows the place well. He and his wife volunteer there twice a week, working in the kitchen, “just to help with the community,” he says.
The people he brings in are not picked at random. He says they are screened, people who work or volunteer at the shelter themselves, success stories who have turned their lives around. A day of work with Primeline, he says, helps them earn some extra money.
The owner is Matt, and the regular crew is small: Matt, his wife and two other employees. The extra hands from the shelter are occasional and come job by job.
Anyone who works a Primeline job gets the same training and the same standard. “I don’t nitpick. I will train them. If they don’t get it and don’t do a good job, I just won’t bring the person back to work. That goes for anyone,” he says.
Doing the job himself is the norm. Primeline does commercial work only, with no residential accounts. Its customers are offices, medical facilities, retail spaces and commercial buildings, plus some cleanup after events, across 17 cities in the Central Valley and East Contra Costa County. Wherever the job is, Matt is on it. “I am hands on and I’m on every single job site cleaning as the owner,” he says. His wife works the sites with him.
A woman whose Stockton church they cleaned described what that looked like. In her review, she said the couple sent her progress photos throughout the day. They helped move the organ and cabinets out of the way and then set them back in place. They also lifted the seat cushions around the edges of the room to clean underneath, a spot she had not thought to ask about.
He talks about the size of the business the same way. “I’m more focused on quality over quantity,” he says. “I don’t really care about how many accounts that I have. I’m more worried about the quality of service that we provide.”
Primeline grew out of a lost job. Matt was a janitor in the Bay Area until the company he worked for closed. In early 2026, he says, “I started my own company instead of going on unemployment.”
He says he approaches it as something he means to finish. “If you’re going to start something you have to go all the way,” he says. “I don’t do this for the money. The money takes care of itself. I just try to provide a good finished product.”
Matt says he is in the process of opening a sober living house in Stockton, and the cleaning company is what makes that possible. “Janitorial is my way to be able to do the sober living and help people,” he says. “The sober living is to help people in need of housing that want to change their lives.”
Matt lost his sister, his mother and his father to addiction. One brother is left from his immediate family.
“The sober living means a lot to me,” he says.