About Prestige BBQ and Oven Cleaning

Up until then, I thought “cleaning the grill” meant running a grill brush across the cooking grates. Apparently, I had been badly mistaken.

I had no idea what products to use, what should come apart, or how any of it was supposed to be cleaned. What followed was an all-day project, several trips to the hardware store, and hours hunched over a chaise lounge scrubbing greasy grill parts in buckets of soap and water.

My back hurt. I was sunburned. I was exhausted.

And after four or five hours of work, the grill still looked terrible.

The next day, my wife and I went to the grocery store. I was too sore and tired to follow her up and down the aisles, so I wandered over to the magazine rack and started flipping through whatever was there.

Eventually, I picked up a small-business magazine.

I turned a page and saw an advertisement for a BBQ cleaning business opportunity.

I remember looking at it and blurting out:

“What the hell? I could have used that yesterday!”

That was the first time it occurred to me that somebody might actually pay another person to clean their grill.

Not that I wanted to be that person.

After the day I had just experienced, starting a grill-cleaning business was about the last thing on my mind.

I called the company anyway, mostly because I wanted to know if they had someone in Denver I could hire the next time my grill needed cleaning.

They didn’t.

At the time, that seemed to confirm what I already believed: there probably wasn’t much of a market for professional grill cleaning. Who would pay someone to do that anyways...am I right?

I figured I’d sooner throw the grill away and buy another one.

So I forgot about it.

Until 2012.

Two years later, my 14-year-old son was having a hard time finding an after-school job.

That strange little magazine ad came back to me.

I thought maybe we could put together a simple website, clean a few grills on evenings and weekends, make a little extra money, and give the two of us something to do together.

Nothing more ambitious than that.

Father and son bonding.

A few dirty grills...teach the little rascal about hard work.

A little spending money.

And some time together.

Then the phone started ringing.

Customers told their neighbors. People called us back the following year. One job became another, then another.

The little weekend project refused to stay little.

What began as a way for a father and son to make some extra money has now become a fourteen-year journey.

Today, Prestige has cleaned and serviced more than 10,000 grills and ovens throughout the Denver metro area. While my son has graduated from CU in Geology, I now leading a team of technicians who have turned what we learned over all those years into a professional service.

And strangely enough, the reason people call us today isn’t all that different from the reason I picked up that magazine in the grocery store all those years ago.

Cleaning a grill properly is dirty, difficult, time-consuming work—and most people would rather spend their Saturday doing just about anything else.

I understand.

That’s exactly how this whole thing started.