The Great Oz
Member
I agree that some courses veer too far into minutia for my tastes, and your course may be a good starting point, just like an IICRC course. But, to complete the kicking...
The 'kid' washing the rugs at a rug plant might not be an expert, but he has someone nearby that he can ask, and the kid isn't the one making the cleaning method decisions or explaining limitations to the customer.
PS: This is your honest and honorable sales pitch. Try a cleaned up version of it as your website front page and see how you do:
I've worked almost exclusively with large carpet and rug cleaning operations over the past 12 years, and what was always interesting to me was who was actually cleaning the rugs in most of these plants... It wasn't some textile god!... No, it was some 23-year old kid that used to work in a video store.
The 'kid' washing the rugs at a rug plant might not be an expert, but he has someone nearby that he can ask, and the kid isn't the one making the cleaning method decisions or explaining limitations to the customer.
PS: This is your honest and honorable sales pitch. Try a cleaned up version of it as your website front page and see how you do:
Listen, I don't think anyone can take ONE class and have a path to riches. But can they at least learn how to not screw things up and start to clean most rugs they're likely to run across, without waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night for fear of screwing them up!
That's what this class does. It gets people started. Are they going to be able to give Randy a run for his money? No way, he's been doing it for years, and there's no way to buy experience. This is information, and that's something different entirely. You take the information and apply it, and then you get some experience, and there's no shortcut for that. It takes time and it takes work.
But people have to start somewhere, and right now, it's not very easy to get started cleaning rugs in the industry. Classes are expensive, and few and far between. Rugs are like most other things, once you know how, it's often easier than you thought.
Right now, most cleaners avoid them like the plague, and I don't think that's necessary. (Of course there are a few that cleaners SHOULD avoid like the plague, and hopefully if people get nothing more out of this class... they'll learn which ones those are!)
There are more and more hard floors out there, and like it or not, cleaners probably do need to move into rug cleaning more than most of them are right now.
My hope... is that I'm able to get a bunch more people started down the path of cleaning rugs. I can't see that would be a bad thing. People who do, have taken a first step towards becoming experts.
You really can make more cleaning a rug than you do cleaning a house of nylon carpet. People need to know that and use it to their benefit. That's all I'm saying.