Profile: Extreme Clean USA

Yesterday, Matt Peach, Vice President and Owner of Extreme Clean USA, the event and venue cleaning company, was painting trash cans for Walt Disney World®. If he tells you it is an endless job, that’s because it truly is an endless job. When he and his team finish refurbishing the 17,900 trash receptacles that grace the entire Orlando resort, they start right over, repairing and painting each one again. About 300 to 400 containers a week enter Extreme Clean’s MAACO Collision Repair Shop and come out ready to return to the job of keeping the famous resort as spotless as Disney World’s reputation demands.

And that level of clean is what Extreme Clean USA’s own standards demand. Whether it’s the Talladega Superspeedway, Disney’s Wide World of Sports, the New York Yankees’ Legends Field or the State Fair of Virginia, Matt’s superior cleaning teams have received accolades from event-goers and clients again and again.

Before he established Extreme Clean USA about ten years ago, Matt Peach spent most of his life getting ready for this career. He worked for his father’s cleaning company in rural Indiana when he was a kid, picking up the basics of techniques and equipment. He honed his custodial, managerial and special events capabilities during several years on staff at Walt Disney World, overseeing the cleaning companies that took care of the huge resort. His time at Disney, a stint with another event cleaning company, and some practical experience working the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, convinced him he was ready.

“I came back and thought I’d do it myself,” Matt says. Apparently, his timing was perfection itself. “It blew up overnight.”  

Ten years later, Extreme Clean USA has contracts with famous racetracks, popular state and county fairs and well-known sports events and venues. Although most of its clients are major events—more than a million people—some are as small as just 300 people.

Cleaning and more
The company also does much more than just pre-event cleaning; it also maintains the venues during the events and post-event clean-up. It has expanded to include Distinct Decorators, which builds sets and installs them for events, and the MAACO body shop that also paints thirty to forty cars a week. The newest branch, Extreme Green USA, began last fall in response to a need for recycling services for its clients.

“Recycling is finally hitting the event industry,” explains Matt. “Partnering with Coca Cola, we now handle the recycling at all the racetracks and fairs. It’s a very big challenge to turn it around.” For example, Talladega Superspeedway sports a mile-long grandstand: “We have to go through it twice, once to pick up the recycling and once to clean and sweep it.”

Extreme Clean has a core group of eight full-time managers in different regions around the country. “That’s who runs the show on the road for me. They live in New York, Indiana, Alabama—wherever—and we fly them into the event, or they drive in if they have one of my pickups.”

The company operates with a full-time staff of thirty. However, give the team a race at Daytona International Speedway or a New York Yankees’ Spring Training weekend and the staff suddenly swells to as many as 1,300 workers. And this is where Caroline Peach, Matt’s wife and the “numbers person” for the business, really shines. Caroline is responsible for locating local nonprofit organizations to staff about 75 percent of the part-time workforce—a feature that makes Extreme Clean different from all the rest.

Unique way to “give back”
“We don’t use a bunch of day laborers,” says Matt. “We employ mostly local high school kids, church groups and military personnel and give that money back to the community. Every single race at Richmond International Raceway, we’re able to give a huge donation so all the military families can attend without paying at all,” because the local military personnel, under the supervision of their drill sergeants, serve as Extreme Clean’s temporary workers.

“There’s a church group that works two races a year for us at Talladega. The pastor told me that what they did for us paid the church’s mortgage and all its utilities for an entire year.

“We pay them the same hourly wage we’d pay any temps. They work hard for us. That’s a win-win for all of us.”

Matt is responsible for contract negotiations—“we’ve never lost a contract”—and customer relations, along with budget and staffing.

With the economic downturn, he’s found that “everyone wants discounts.” So he works with them.  “Caroline prints out the P&L sheets, and I show them to the client. I tell them what I need for the project to be profitable, and I suggest options to save them money. We work it out.”

In pursuit of excellence and customer satisfaction, Matt knows that successful communication is a key feature.  “I don’t stress out about anything. If there’s a problem, we fix it.”

Extreme Clean USA and its subsidiaries are based in Okahumpka, Florida, northwest of Orlando. For more information, visit the website: www.ExtremeCleanUSA.com or contact Caroline Peach at 407.832.0590 or CarolinePeach@ExtremeCleanUSA.com.

Story by Anne Biggs