We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dustin Pratt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dustin below.

Dustin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

While working at Tesla in 2017, selling solar and cars for them, I decided to start a side hustle of cleaning solar panels. I bought a small pressure washer on Amazon for $69 and a few cleaning supplies and I put an ad out on Yelp. We had a few customer calls. But the pricing just didn’t make sense for homeowners as it was just too expensive to get your solar panels cleaned. I kept the ads running for a few months and had only about two customers. On the third month A homeowner called me from Valley village, Los Angeles and said : “hi. I know you’re a solar panel cleaning company. But I was wondering if you could pressure wash my house? ” I told her just to wait a moment and I Googled how to pressure wash a house and watched a short YouTube video and left her on hold for about one minute 30 seconds. I went back to the line and told her “Yes, I can totally do it.” Then she asked me how much do you charge? I told her to wait a moment and I went to Google and I looked up the average price of a home pressure wash in the US and then added a couple bucks because we live in LA and it’s more expensive here. I went back to the line and told her $600 She said “deal! “when can you start? I told her I can start right now. What’s your address and I went over there and had my first client pay me $600 cash that day. Now the cleaning was a struggle. And I looked ridiculous doing it probably because I had no idea what I was doing. I kept going back to my car to watch cleaning videos so how to clean windows without breaking them. How to Clean gutters without ripping them down. I had basically no experience in cleaning a home with a pressure washer. But I figured it out on the spot. After that I changed the name of the company from United panel cleaners to Pratt facility services a few weeks later on Yelp. Once I did that I started getting a steady stream of clients. The pandemic took a massive toll on my business however, and I had to close it down for an entire year in 20, but now we’re back up and running and have been doing great since 2021.

I originally started the business to do solar panels but didn’t see the demand and quickly pivoted once I saw that there was demand in another area I had to change my path but I never changed my goal of creating my own business and controlinh my own time with my family.

Dustin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Dustin Pratt. I was born in the Philippines and moved to Cohasset, Massachusetts when I was one year old I got into the industry I’m in now, which is pressure washing and graffiti removal kind of by accident. After moving to LA in 2010, I worked a series of corporate jobs for seven years, companies like Time Warner Cable, at&t fiber optic sales and Tesla car and solar sales while at Tesla, I noticed a lot of the homeowners I was selling solar panels to were asking me how to get them cleaned a few months later. There were a few solar panel cleaning companies out there, but surprisingly, they would not respond to calls or contact through Yelp or Google, which I found very strange. I decided to start my own white glove solar panel cleaning company called United panel cleaners with a few friends who I had met outside of Tesla. We bought a pressure washer, and some equipment. And we ran an ad on Yelp for about $150 a month. We got a couple calls but people were quite disappointed with the price. We were charging seven to $9 per panel and a homeowner that has 40 or 50 panels. They just found that price to be too high. For regular cleanings. We knew that maybe in the market was soft in that way that why there wasn’t so many people doing it is because there really wasn’t any money in solar panel cleaning. The economics just don’t make sense. You get solar panels to save money, but if you have to spend three to $500 a year to keep them clean, what’s the point? So one day I just got a call from a customer who wanted her house pressure washed and that’s pretty much the direction the business took because I saw that there was a lot of opportunity in that area. Now we’ve been in business for about six years now and we provide full pressure washing services on a weekly, monthly or BI monthly basis for some of our clients. We also do graffiti mitigation and removal, human waste pickup and trash removal. All these services beyond the pressure washing came from our customers asking us if we could do them. We saw a lot of opportunity with facilities managers who just needed a reliable person to do the pressure washing, remove the graffiti and clean up the area. Surprisingly janitorial services are not equipped to do large trash pickups. Human waste removal or graffiti removal and most janitorial services are just there to sweep up a little bit and take the trash out. They don’t have the equipment, the training or the personal protective equipment to do things like remove human waste, so we found a real opportunity there. The reason I called the company prep facility services is that I saw that there was other needs. Small to medium sized businesses have that are outside of pressure washing and I didn’t want to pigeonhole the company into one service and call it like Dustin’s pressure washing. I wanted it to be broad in general. So that’s why we chose the name prep facility services so we can provide an unlimited amount of services in the future based on what the client needs. Each client has particular needs. That can’t be met with traditional janitorial or landscaping services and that’s where we fit in right between landscaping and janitorial. The thing I’m most proud of in the business is that we get our hands dirty and do the jobs that no one wants to do. If there’s a dumpster that’s been ransacked by homeless people covered in feces, and they need it cleaned up tomorrow for an event where the company people call we have the right equipment and protective gear where our staff are completely isolated from any pathogens or contaminants. And we’re shielded with our PPE suits, masks, gloves, goggles, breathing apparatus, everything you pretty much need to do a dirty job we have the equipment for and a lot of companies are just not prepared to do that and a lot of employees out there don’t want to get their hands dirty. Like we do 99% of our clients now are large commercial clients who have signed up for long term subscription services. So this is not a one time pressure wash of a house business anymore. We’re doing three to four year contracts. And protecting. For one client alone over 3.5 million square feet of commercial real estate. We protect it from human waste. We protect it from graffiti, and we keep it clean with regular on time and reliable pressure washing services. So for example, a parking lot will sign up and request that a certain area be pressure washed every week or every month with soap and disinfectant and then fragrance. You can see some of our work on our Tiktok page. PFS clean. And we’re going to start live streaming cleanings on Instagram, on our Instagram channel PFS clean we’re looking to hire people who just love cleaning and have OCD. Sometimes if I cut a corner I’ll think about it for hours. So now I make sure to go above and beyond cleaning a place and do as much as I can. So when I am done at the end of the day, I feel good about the work. I know I gave it my all and my team gave it their all and we have no regrets when leaving a customer site that we could have done more we’re looking for people that are hard working and love cleaning things and making a difference. Helping facilities stay clean. During this really tough time in LA where we have a homeless problem and we have 1000s of people out on the street with drug and mental health issues, littering buildings, using them as toilets and basically destroying them every single day. It’s nice to know that we’re out there helping to restore Los Angeles back to its former glory

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

The best way to build reputation is just to go above and beyond with a customer expects if they expect 10 give them 12 make them happy and smile from here to ear it’s just that simple when you cut corners people notice even when you think they don’t notice they do You want people to talk about you in the best possible way when it comes to business you never want to do anything that shady or goes against your values just to make it a little extra money we always make sure that our customers are happy when we leave their properties and if they’re not we stay in make it right we don’t charge them more we just stay and fix the problem until they’re smiling again And we always ask for reviews . One pissed off car American create a ripple effect that will affect your entire business not just online but internally you need to make sure that you don’t have even a single single unhappy customer out there you really got to reach out find out the problem and make it right again even if it cost you money.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I started the business with a $79 Pressure Washer I bought on Amazon took the money I made for my first job which was $600 and bought a better pressure pressure washer for $450 took another hundred dollars and put it into Yelp pads and then I got my first commercial client which was a school With several locations then I took that money from their monthly subscription they were paying me and imported into more advertising which led to more commercial clients I’m not over simplifying it that’s exactly what I did .

Contact Info:

• Website: PFSclean.com
• Other: TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@pfsclean?_t=8huVgTSZ2jq&_r=1

Image Credits
I took these photos