How a Carpet Cleaner Discovered The Secret To Daily Calls and Built a Marketing Agency From It

Before Grandir Solutions existed, 18 year-old Christian Galvan (CEO) was on his hands and knees cleaning carpets—trying to figure out how to get his next customer for his carpet cleaning business. He was paying for leads on Yelp and Angi’s that only burned a hole in his already frail wallet…

But then, one conversation with a friend of his older sister changed everything. It led to one eye-opening Google search that made his business go from scrambling to scrubbing. Today, it’s not a carpet cleaning business. It’s one of Madison Wisconsin’s top rated marketing agencies. And it’s all because of one overlooked “secret” most contractors never find out about until it’s too late.

Here’s how he did it.

Would This Pandemic Side Hustle Pay Off?

2020 is an unforgettable year for mostly the wrong reasons. It was COVID, no one was hiring. And like a lot of people at the time, Christian was just trying to find a way to make money during his senior year of high school. 

“I was delivering pizzas for Papa John’s,” Christian said. “But I was only working like eight hours a week. I knew I wanted to do something more.”

So he started researching. All night. Literally.

“I pulled an all-nighter looking into different businesses,” he said. “And once I landed on carpet cleaning, I was like—this is it.”

By 8 a.m. the next morning, dead tired but business-wired, he was knocking on his friend Jaime’s door.

A $400 Cleaning Machine and a Dream

Carpet cleaning wasn’t glamorous. But it checked the boxes. It was considered essential during COVID (so you could do it legally). It was simple to learn. And most importantly, it was something he could start immediately. Which is what he did.

So after pitching Jaime the business idea at the crack of dawn, he took almost everything he had—about $300 to $400—and bought a carpet cleaning machine from a pawn shop in Everett, Washington.

“That was basically all the money I had,” he said. “But I felt like I was on top of the world.” CJ’s Carpets was born.

Not as a lifelong dream—but as a 12-month experiment. “I told Jaime straight up,” Christian said. “I’m probably going to do something else one day. But I want this to make me money and teach me how to run a business.”

The (Harsh) Reality of Starting From Zero

While the idea of starting a business is thrilling, the first few months weren’t pretty. Quite dirty actually. “We had no idea what we were doing,” he said.

Their first jobs came from:

• Their own homes (as practice and as a portfolio piece)
  

• Friends of their parents with a $100 tip they split and celebrated like they had won the Super Bowl

They ironed logos onto plain white polos because they couldn’t afford uniforms. They spent five hours cleaning a single house just trying to get it right.

And every morning, the same thought: “We need another customer.” That was the game for the next few months.

The Contractor’s Rookie Mistake (Most Don’t Realize Until They’ve Spent Hundreds)

At first, getting customers meant buying leads through Yelp, HomeAdvisor, and cold calls. On paper, it made sense.

“If we make $400 on a job and a lead costs $50, why wouldn’t we do that?” Christian said. But reality hit fast. He later found out he was making a rookie mistake—those leads were shared. Meaning every other carpet cleaner using Yelp and HomeAdvisor also got those leads. So even though Christian had leads, he had to compete to actually turn them into customers.

As he’d also come to realize, this was downright unreliable. “You’d call someone and they’d say, ‘Oh, I already booked with someone else,’” he said. “And you’re like… I just paid for that.”

Some days, there were no jobs at all.

“No jobs in the pipeline meant no revenue that day,” he said. “And I didn’t know where to spend my time to fix it.”

The Hour-Long Conversation That Changed Everything

The turning point didn’t come from a course or a book. It came from a conversation in a basement.

Christian’s older sister had a friend who ran a mobile detailing business. After bugging his sister day after day to introduce them, they were finally able to meet. Christian sat down next to him and watched him pull something up on his computer.

“He typed in ‘luxury car detailing Bellevue,’” Christian said. “And his website was at the top.”

No ads. No paying for leads. Just… there. So whenever someone would search up “luxury car detailing Bellevue” his business would show up at the top, every time. And this leads to hundreds of new customers and inquiries every month.

“I remember thinking—that’s magic,” he said. “How do you make it so people find you like that?”

That was his introduction to SEO.

From Chasing Customers to Customers Calling You

After learning from his sister’s friend for the next hour, Christian discovered the underground railroad that would allow him to skip the line of all his competitors at this customer gold mine.

The task was simple: Rank #1 on Google for carpet cleaners in his area. But it definitely wasn’t easy. At first, nothing changed overnight. But Christian went all in.

He optimized CJ’s Carpets’ Google Business Profile.

• Asked every past customer for reviews.

• Added photos.

• Fixed their website.

“It was everything with the Google page,” he said.

Then, about a month and a half later—it happened. A call. Then another.

And then, one day, now during football practice at the University of Washington, he checked his phone.

“I had over ten missed calls,” he said. That’s when it clicked. This was the marketing strategy he didn’t even know existed.

The Tide-Turner Most Contractors Never Experience

Before SEO, CJ’s Carpets had to chase every job. After SEO, customers came to them. Daily. 

And that changed everything. “You get your pricing power back,” Christian said. Instead of competing on price for shared leads, his business was found at the right time, trusted before the call even happened, and most importantly—chosen—not compared.

Eventually, the business stabilized at 1–2 jobs per day—a massive jump from the early days of scraping for customers, which was 1-2 jobs per month.

The Grind Behind the Growth

But success didn’t make things easier. Not for Christian. Nor any small business owner.

At one point, Christian was:

• Waking up at 4:30 a.m. for football lifts

• Attending classes

• Practicing for hours

• Driving 40 minutes up north to clean carpets at night

• Then commuting all the way back down

• Returning to his dorm at 10 p.m.

• Doing invoicing before sleeping after showering. This was around midnight to 2am some nights.

  Then waking up and doing it all again.

Today, many contractors still rely on:

• Lead aggregators like Yelp and Angies

• Paid ads

• Word of mouth

But those channels come with limits. “With paid leads, you can only grow as much as you can afford,” Christian said. “But with SEO, your cost per lead is essentially zero.”

More importantly, it creates something most businesses never build: Inbound demand. Making customers want to get work done from you.

• His experience running a service business

• His growing understanding of SEO

• His athlete’s competitiveness and conviction

• His confidence in sales from door-to-door work with a Pest Control company

“That’s when it clicked,” he said. “I could do this for other businesses.” What started as freelance work—helping local businesses get found online—quickly evolved.

The Birth of Grandir Solutions

Eventually, CJ’s Carpets ran its course, and even made enough to donate a good chunk to American Red Cross for Covid victims at the time. Christian went on to his second university at Drake University in Iowa, where he combined his new superpowers:

The Bigger Lesson

For Christian, CJ’s Carpets was never meant to be the final destination.

It was the training grounds. A place to fail. Learn. Experiment. The type of learning a business class can’t teach you. And most importantly—understand what actually drives growth.

“If you’re behind on SEO,” he said, “the gap is only getting bigger.”

“Start SEO Before You ‘Need’ It”

Unlike ads, SEO can take months to build. And competitors who started earlier have a head start.

That’s why the timing matters more than anything. “The earlier you start, the better,” he said. Because once it kicks in, it doesn’t just bring leads—it stabilizes your business.

CJ’s Carpet Cleaning door flyers!

Playing D1 football while running a carpet cleaning business?! It can be done.

The original team on a Google Meeting \ Grandir Solutions V.1

He built a website, brought on his first salesperson, Mike, a football teammate. Then someone to help with social media, a connection from the University of Washington.

Grandir Solutions was born.

Why This Story Matters for Contractors

Christian’s story isn’t unique because he started a business.

It’s powerful because he lived the exact problem most contractors face:

• Not knowing where your next job will come from

• Wasting money on low-quality leads

• Feeling stuck between working and growing

• Unsure of where to spend your time that would actually grow the business

Fortunately for Christian… he found a better way.

What Most Contracting Businesses Still Get Wrong About Growth

The (at the time, small) team on their first company offsite in Phoenix, Arizona.

And that’s what separates a business that survives vs. a business that scales (and can eventually be sold for millions of dollars).

Don’t worry, this good looking team can help you with that.

Christian’s Advice to Struggling Contractors

For contractors, Christian’s story is a hard look in the mirror. Because the same problems he faced with CJ’s Carpets still exist today for tens of thousands of contractors globally:

• The phone isn’t ringing consistently

• Leads feel expensive and unpredictable

• The path to growth is confusing

So what would he tell someone in that position right now?

What This Means Today

At its core, everything Christian learned comes back to one idea: Most contractors aren’t struggling because they’re bad at what they do. They’re struggling because they don’t have a reliable way to get in front of the right people—at the right time. And once that’s solved, everything else gets easier.

But this modern marketing magic doesn’t just work for luxury car detailers or carpet cleaners. It’s how we’ve helped RichCo, Greater Houston Flooring, and hundreds of other contracting businesses across the U.S. rank on Google and get thousands of customers coming to them. (Ask us for case studies!)

And that stability is what allows you to:

• Charge more for what you do without doing extra work

• Be more selective with jobs

• And focus on growing without worrying about where your next job is coming

And if business is really tight: “Don’t be afraid to start knocking on doors again”

The team is only getting bigger and bigger! Oh yeah, we went to Mexico.

Final Thoughts

Today, Christian’s carpet cleaning business turned top rated marketing agency helps local service businesses all across the country shortcut their way past slow months and get more customers coming to them. We don’t clean carpets anymore, but we will tidy up your online presence so that you can get back to doing what you do best.

If there’s one thing you can take away from this story, it’s this: No matter how hard your situation might be, no matter how chaotic life can get, there is a path to success.

If you want to see how we can make life easier for you, let us be that one magical conversation like Chrisitan and the car detailer. Get in touch with us (before your competitors find us first…).