Patrick judges a wash by how he feels walking away from it. “I personally don’t want to oversell something that when I walk away from the job site, I have questions in my head whether that was done right or not,” he says. “That is the last thing that we’re trying to do.”
He took over Spartan Soft Wash, a soft-washing and pressure-washing company based in Mount Pleasant, in 2026. The brand dates to around 2022 and was originally veteran-owned. It passed through a second owner before it reached Patrick, who was looking to work for himself. Now he and his wife run most of it between them.
The size of the operation shapes what he will promise. “If we can’t do it, I won’t shy away from that,” he says. He would rather tell a customer plainly what Spartan can and can’t do than stretch to win the job. “We just kind of like to stick to what we know we’re kind of good at for now, while it’s just my wife and I,” he says.
When a job does push past familiar ground, he slows it down. One homeowner had rust stains running from a second-story emergency drain, fed by an overflowing HVAC condensate line, down her light green Hardie Plank siding, onto her fence and across her white hurricane shutters. She later wrote that she had expected to replace the siding. It was Patrick’s first time using that rust-removal product on Hardie Plank. Before he started, he covered her plants, tested a small area, made sure the product was safe for the siding and checked with another professional who had used it on that material. His wife had called her back first, the homeowner recalled, and Patrick followed within minutes on a Sunday he wasn’t working.
He applies the same thinking after the work is done. If he missed a spot, or a customer isn’t fully satisfied, he says he will gladly go back and touch it up.
Asked what sets Spartan apart, he talks about pace. “The biggest thing we like to do is just slow down,” he says. “In a world filled with AI, it’s very easy to get carried away and try to just automate everything and make everything as quick as humanly possible.”
He tries to keep the methods plain. He follows industry standards and keeps up with new technology, he says, but he doesn’t reach for the newest, flashiest chemical. The company’s site lays out the basic split: roofs and siding get low-pressure soft washing, under 100 PSI, and real pressure is saved for concrete. The crew washes houses, roofs, driveways, patios and gutters from Summerville out to Sullivan’s Island.
Residential work is the bread and butter. Patrick says Spartan has grown through a few neighborhoods where it now works closely with the residents. He wants more commercial work, especially for other small, locally owned businesses.
His caution comes partly from having been on the other side of the transaction. He has owned homes and rented them, and he remembers how hard reliable help could be to find. “It’s tough sometimes to get a good solid contractor or handyman that when you want something fixed, you can just call them up, they fix it and that’s it,” he says. “You don’t have to have that extra worry.” He would like to treat others the way he would like to be treated himself.
He has already thought about how that carries over once he hires. Standards, he says, have to be set early and held consistently. When something goes wrong, he would rather understand what the person was thinking and explain why an approach would or wouldn’t work. “It’s not my way or the highway type of thing, but rather let’s collaborate to achieve a common goal,” he says.
For now the business is still two people deep, and the phone reflects it. “If you call us up, there’s a good chance you’ll end up catching my wife,” he says.