Misty Poole, the owner of Steamatic of Arkansas, 112 Jefferson St., says running a successful business takes a lot of patience.
"It takes an attitude of not giving up because it is difficult, it is very difficult," Poole said. "Really the biggest thing that I can say that I feel like I've been successful in as an owner is just having a positive attitude with our employees and keeping our employees excited about working here and engaged. We are very particular about who we hire. So we look for people that if I wouldn't put them in my grandmother's house, then I'm not going to put them into your house."
Steamatic tries to find employees with very good character and high standards and focuses a tremendous amount on customer service, she said, noting that, unfortunately, in the service industry, customer service often gets pushed to the wayside.
"So we really, really, really focus a lot on customer service, but patience is probably the biggest thing about running a successful business because we have failed many more times than we have succeeded," Poole said.
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The business came together when Poole's father added carpet cleaning, she said, noting there are so many other services for homes that are needed that the community didn't really offer.
"We were one of the first companies to actually offer the truck mount units for carpet cleaning, which is the actual steam cleaning; it's a lot more powerful, more thorough, than the little portable ones that push behind that a lot of the companies here were using. We really prided ourselves on trying to stay on top of the latest trends, technology, equipment, chemicals, that kind of thing," she said.
Steamatic was able to take the things they were learning and expand the services from there. For the longest, carpet cleaning was the biggest portion of the business, but over the years, the trends in homes changed, and people started pulling out carpets, putting in tile and grout hardwood floors.
"So we had to adapt the business to account for the lack of carpet that was in houses. We have just learned so much over the years, especially with the water and fire restoration; that industry is always changing," Poole said.
"When we started out, we just did the basics. We ended up getting our contractor's license for actually being able to repair houses that had the fire just clean them. Content cleaning everything within the house, we were able to get to some classes and learn some things about that we invested in; we're probably one of the only ones around here, too, that has the ultrasonic machine that makes the cleaning process much more thorough and quicker, quicker turnaround time for people to get their contents back," she said.
When Steamatic first started doing air duct cleaning, they didn't sell UV lights, which became a big thing during the pandemic because they disinfect against the virus. Steamatic could not get them, she said, noting the minute they would get them in a loop, they would sell out and were on a 12- to 16-week wait from the factory.
"We have just kind of done some research and found a necessity in the community for and been able to expand our business that way," Poole said.
For carpet and air cleaning, the busy season starts March 1 and goes until around Christmastime. For the restoration side, there is no busy season because no one plans for a water pipe to burst or anything of that nature.
"When it's really, really cold, that's when restoration does well, but chimney fires, burst water pipes, things like that, when it gets below freezing for an extended period of time, two or three days, then usually that keeps us really busy, too," she said.
During the severe bout of winter weather in February, people started calling Steamatic workers on their cellphones at their homes on the first day, when 100 to 200 homes and businesses had busted water pipes, Poole said.
"We didn't have enough equipment; the snow was so bad that we couldn't actually drive our vans to the locations, but we had to have the equipment on the trucks to be able to extract water. So our employees were using their personal trucks and actually towing vans to people's houses and businesses to get the equipment there to be able to get the process started," she said.
Steamatic has the best staff the business has ever had, Poole said, noting the majority of employees are long-term, and for her are like extended family.
"A lot of us share personal stuff with each other, the birth of a child, the death of a family member, things like that, just because we are so close-knit. But I would say the majority of my employees have been here for anywhere from 10 to 15 years, which is pretty incredible for a service business," she said.
"But we just really try to treat our customers like family, we try to treat our employees like family and I think that's one of our biggest strong points that we have too is that we try to be family-oriented. ... We just really try to focus on the family atmosphere that we try to create for everybody," Poole said.
