How a late-night phone call named Stanley Steemer
The carpet cleaner Jack Bates started in Ohio in 1947 got its name from a machine he built with his son, and from the customers who wrote the checks.
Dublin, OH
Wesley Bates remembered the hour of the call. It was 9:30, maybe 10 at night, and his father, Jack, was on the line with an idea. The two men had built their own carpet-cleaning machine, and Jack had come up with two names for it. One was Jack Rabbit Cleaner, after himself. The other was Stanley Steemer, partly a bow to the old Stanley Steamer automobile and partly inspired by the way the machine cleaned with water.
Wesley turned down Jack Rabbit in blunt terms, he told The Columbus Dispatch in 2009, and his father agreed on the spot to go with Stanley Steemer.
The name was meant for a machine. Within a few years it belonged to the company, which grew into a national franchise system with its own equipment plant in Dublin, Ohio. It started with one man cleaning carpets in central Ohio in 1947. Stanley Steemer is privately held and, by its own description, family owned and operated.
Jack Bates started the business in 1947 as the Jack Bates Carpet Cleaning Company. In 1970, his son Wesley graduated from Wittenberg University and came to work with him.
The company’s own history says Wesley had the idea to engineer a carpet-cleaning machine nobody had seen before. He and his father built their own, a truck-mounted unit that pumped water into carpet and pulled it back out. That was the machine Jack named on the phone that night.
At first the name went only on the equipment. The family’s trucks carried a longer legend, and customers shortened it on their own.
The family put “Jack Bates’ Stanley Steemer” on its two trucks, and customers writing checks simply made them out to “Stanley Steemer,” Wesley Bates told the Dispatch. Eventually he told his father they needed to make it simpler, and from then on it was easy to adopt Stanley Steemer as the company name.
The business was incorporated as Stanley Steemer International, Inc. in 1972. The same year, it began selling franchises.
One of the early franchisees gave the company its look. A friend of Wesley’s who bought a franchise in Springfield, Ohio, came up with the yellow and black vans, borrowing the colors from his high school.
The machine kept changing. After some tinkering, the company’s signature truck-mounted, dual-wand cleaning system debuted in 1976. Stanley Steemer has long built its own equipment at its Dublin headquarters and outfitted its vans there. The company says making its own machines gives it control over quality and keeps the cleaning process the same from one location to the next.
There is a small irony in the name, and the company says so plainly. Stanley Steemer does not steam clean carpet. The process it uses is hot water extraction. People see vapor rising as the crews work and call it steam, but the cleaning is done with hot water.
By the company’s account of a carpet job, technicians walk the rooms with the homeowner first and move as much furniture as they can. They spot-treat the worst areas. Then the company’s patented machines pump hot water into the fibers to loosen the dirt and pull the water back out, along with what it carried. The suction removes enough water that the carpet dries within hours. At the end, the technician inspects the carpet again with the customer.
Upholstery gets a similar treatment, after the technician checks the fabric type, color and age of a couch or chair. Hardwood is different. Crews vacuum the floor with the truck-mounted system, run an auto scrubber with the company’s wood floor cleaner and hot water, and dry the boards with a microfiber mop so the floor can be walked on right away.
The company kept adding to what the vans could do. In 1998 it introduced duct-cleaning add-on licenses for franchisees. That same year, Success magazine ranked Stanley Steemer the third-best franchise in America in its “Franchise Gold 100.” In 2014 the company announced it had become the first carpet cleaning service to earn the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America’s asthma & allergy friendly certification for professional carpet cleaning.
Leadership stayed in the family. Wesley Bates became president and CEO in 1985. In 2007, his son Justin Bates was named president.
Franchise owners carried the name well beyond Ohio. Scott Sorenson first worked for Stanley Steemer out of Minneapolis after serving in field artillery in the U.S. Marines. In 1988, he and his wife, Colleen Kelley, started their own Stanley Steemer in St. Cloud, Minnesota. They lived in a modest apartment and ate a lot of ramen noodles, their son Derek Sorenson told the Duluth News Tribune in 2022.
The business grew. Over the years the couple added locations in Brainerd, Alexandria and Elk River, among others, and in 2022 they opened one in Hermantown, near Duluth, serving a 90-mile radius. Derek was by then the general manager. The Hermantown shop was managed by Nikolas Johnson, a longtime family friend who had grown up playing hockey with Derek. Johnson started out working for the couple in St. Cloud and transferred to the corporate Stanley Steemer in Fort Collins, Colorado, before coming back to Minnesota.
Sports ran through the family. Derek and his sister grew up playing hockey, baseball, soccer and more, and the franchise sponsored youth and adult athletics.
“We like to make sure kids get the proper equipment, jerseys and have the opportunity to get out and play for those who are less fortunate,” he told the News Tribune.
That support helped earn Colleen Kelley the company’s Maxine Bates Award, chosen from among more than 300 Stanley Steemer locations. The award recognizes women in the franchise system. It is named for Jack Bates’ wife, Maxine, whose obituary in The Herald described what she did for the business.
“No job was beneath her,” it read. “She did it all from booking jobs to washing the crews’ uniforms and cleaning the bathrooms.”