Family-Owned, Long Island-Rooted: The Story Behind ATC Rug Washing
April 17th, 2026
Patrick Santoro Jr.
Co-Owner of Around The Clock
There’s a version of this story where I tell you we always knew we’d end up in the rug business. That some vision guided us here from the start.
That’s not what happened.
What actually happened is that a pandemic wiped out a 43-year-old family business in about two months, and my father and I decided we weren’t going to let that be the end of the story.
Where We Come From
When COVID-19 hit, our commercial janitorial business didn’t slow down — it collapsed. Office buildings went dark overnight. Contracts we’d held for years disappeared. The business our family had spent decades building was in freefall, and there was no traditional way to stop it.
But here’s what we noticed while everyone else was in survival mode: people weren’t going to offices anymore. They were home. And if they were home, they were looking at their floors, their rugs, the things in their houses they’d been meaning to take care of for years.
We weren’t going to sit and wait for the offices to come back. We were going to go into people’s homes instead.
Why We Went Into Rug Cleaning
Before we committed, we looked hard at the Long Island market. What we found surprised us and motivated us.
Nobody in our market was actually doing rug cleaning properly.
There were plenty of carpet cleaners advertising rug services. Plenty of guys with truck-mounted steam units who would come to your house, run a wand over your Persian rug, and call it a day. But that’s not rug cleaning. That’s carpet cleaning applied to something that deserves far better.
Real rug cleaning means understanding that a hand-knotted wool rug and a synthetic wall-to-wall carpet are not the same thing. It means knowing how different fibers absorb water, how dyes react under heat, how pet urine crystals embed themselves into a rug’s foundation in a way that surface extraction will never reach. It means having the space, the equipment, and the expertise to do it right — in a facility built specifically for that purpose.
We had something most people entering a new industry don’t have: generations of cleaning knowledge, existing space, and a willingness to invest in doing it right.
We weren’t new to cleaning. We were new to doing it the right way for rugs.
The People Behind It
This is a two-person operation at its core. My father and I built the facility, developed the process, handled the early pickups and deliveries, and edited video content at night. For a long time, we were the technicians, the drivers, the customer service team, and the marketing department simultaneously.
That hasn’t entirely changed. We’ve grown the team and the operation, but the way we think about this business is still the same way my great-uncle thought about the office cleaning company he started in 1978. You show up. You do the work the right way. You build a reputation by being consistent, not by talking about being consistent.
What has changed is the scope of what we’re able to offer. We’ve invested in better equipment as we grew. We joined ARCS, the Association of Rug Care Specialists, which requires members to show that rug cleaning is their primary business rather than a sideline. Our technicians carry IICRC certifications. We brought in Luxe PFAS-free fiber protection for customers who care about what goes back onto their rugs after washing. We added a 100% odor removal guarantee for pet-stained rugs because we knew we could back it up. This year I also founded the Textile Cleaning Research and Education Institute, TCREI, because I believe this industry deserves a real educational foundation and proper training standards, and I didn’t want to wait for someone else to build it.
We’re also in the early stages of helping build the Textile Cleaning Research and Education Institute, because we believe this industry deserves real training standards, and we want to be part of creating them.
What Family-Owned Actually Means Here
It gets said a lot. Family-owned. Local. Small business. It can start to sound like marketing language.
For us it means that when something goes wrong, there is no corporate chain to blame it on. My father and I are accountable to every customer, personally. It means we made decisions about what equipment to buy, what certifications to pursue, and what guarantees to offer based on what we believed was right for the customer, not what protected the bottom line.
It means we are building something we intend to still be here for in another 47 years.
We’re at 54 Sarah Drive in Farmingdale. We serve all of Nassau and Suffolk County. We offer free pickup and delivery seven days a week, and a 20% discount if you drop your rug off yourself.
The family that started cleaning Long Island in 1978 is still here. We just learned a better way to do it.
