How a painter’s son from Asheville and a veterinary lab technician built one of the Upstate’s most thoroughly certified carpet care teams — and what they wish every homeowner knew before hiring a carpet cleaner.
Most people do not think much about their carpet until something goes wrong. A pet has an accident. A water line lets go under the dishwasher. A seam pulls apart in the hallway. Or the carpet simply stops looking the way it did, and it is time to do something about it.
At that point, a homeowner opens a search, finds a dozen companies that all promise roughly the same thing, and has almost no way to tell them apart. That is the moment where a lot of expensive mistakes get made — not because homeowners are careless, but because the differences between carpet cleaning companies are largely invisible from the outside.
Adam and Samantha Proehl have spent their careers on the other side of that decision. Foothills Carpet Care is a husband-and-wife business, and the way they built it explains a great deal about how they work today. Here is the story, along with the practical guidance they give homeowners who want to get it right the first time.
It Started on a Paint Crew in Asheville
Adam’s father is a painter in Asheville, North Carolina. His entire career has been spent in apartment complexes — painting units as tenants move out, turning them over for the next resident. It is steady, physical, deadline-driven work, and Adam grew up inside of it.
He started working alongside his dad as a boy and kept at it into his early twenties. He learned what a job site looks like when it is run well, and what it looks like when it is not.
On those same job sites, his father had a longstanding friendship with a carpet cleaner named Jim Dillon, who would come in behind the paint crew to clean the carpets before a unit was re-rented. The two men worked around each other for years. Jim watched Adam grow up on those crews.
One day Jim made an offhand comment: if Adam ever wanted to learn carpet care, he would apprentice him and help set him up in a different city.
I don’t know how serious he was, but as soon as I heard that, I was very serious.
— Adam Proehl
Adam took him up on it. He moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina and apprenticed under Jim Dillon for several months — learning the equipment, the chemistry, and the process from someone who had already spent a career doing it.
In 2008, with Jim’s help, Adam started Foothills Carpet Care in Greenville, South Carolina. He is now approaching twenty years in the industry.
Like his father, he began with apartment complexes. It was the work he knew. Over the years he added service after service, and the business grew busy. But by his own account, it did not fundamentally change until Samantha came aboard.
The Veterinary Lab Technician Who Rewrote the Standards
Samantha did not set out to work in flooring. She set out to be a veterinarian.
She went to college with that goal, then decided she did not love the classroom enough to stay in it for another decade. So she took a different route into the same field and trained as a veterinary technician. She spent roughly ten years working in animal hospitals and clinics.
When she and Adam married, she moved to Greenville — Foothills Carpet Care was already established here — and landed what she describes as her dream job: working in a veterinary diagnostic laboratory. She did that for a few years, until the lab closed. There was no comparable lab nearby.
Adam told her that if she was looking for work, he had work for her.
I had no plans, no thoughts about being a carpet flooring person. But I was bored at home, so I said, let me do something.
— Samantha Proehl
What she brought with her was a laboratory mindset. Diagnostic lab work is built on protocol: standardized procedures, controlled variables, documented results. You do not improvise. You follow the method, because the method is what makes the result trustworthy.
She walked into a carpet cleaning operation and immediately started asking a different kind of question.
I’m big on, if you’re going to do something, do it right. So when I started working with him I said, there’s got to be a standard here. What are we doing?
— Samantha Proehl
Adam is candid that his own approach at the time was looser — more comfortable winging it, moving fast, figuring it out on the fly. That works until it does not. Samantha wanted a defensible process behind every job.
The Decision That Changed the Business: Getting Certified
Samantha did the research and found formal industry training and certification available in Atlanta. Rather than certify in one narrow specialty, they made a deliberate choice: get certified across the full range of situations they might realistically walk into on an Upstate job.
Between them, that meant certification in:
- Carpet cleaning
- Upholstery cleaning
- Water damage
- Carpet repairs
- Fire and smoke damage
- Odor removal
- Crime scene cleanup
And certification was not a matter of paying a fee and receiving a card. The certification was the last step. Everything before it was classroom instruction, study, and testing — a great deal of all three.
Lots of classes. A lot of testing, a lot of studying. The certification was just the last step.
— Samantha and Adam Proehl
Samantha took the carpet repair course twice. Not because she failed it — because she enjoyed it and wanted to go through the material again. That detail says something about how this business is run.
Turning Toward Homes
After the training, Adam and Samantha brought in business coaching and took an honest look at where the company was headed. The conclusion was not to abandon apartment work — that was the foundation Adam had built on — but to deliberately shift the center of gravity toward residential customers.
That shift, combined with Samantha’s growing skill in repair work, moved the company into high-end residential repairs: the kind of work where the carpet or rug is a genuine investment and replacing it is not a casual option.
Which brings us to the part of the conversation most useful to homeowners.
How Do You Tell One Carpet Cleaning Company From Another?
Most homeowners have no idea that certifications exist in this industry. That is not a knock on homeowners — it is simply not information anyone hands you. So the question is worth asking directly: when every company’s website says roughly the same thing, what actually distinguishes them?
Start with the premise that no two jobs are identical
Samantha’s first answer goes to the heart of it: in most areas of life, one size does not fit all. Carpet is no exception.
The range of what a technician encounters in Upstate homes is enormous — different fiber types, different construction, different backing, different padding, different soil, different prior treatment history. A process that produces an excellent result on one carpet can damage another. The point of the training is not to memorize one method. It is to understand the underlying principles well enough to select the right method for what is actually in front of you.
Experience and certification are how you reduce the risk of damage
Adam is quick to say there are a lot of good carpet cleaners out there. His point is narrower and more practical: if what you want is to get it right the first time and not think about it again, experience and certification are the fastest way to narrow the field.
They’re not going to be as cheap as some of the discount places that send people that are brand new out. But you don’t have to have the anxiety of, is this person going to know what they’re doing?
— Adam Proehl
That anxiety is well founded. There is real risk any time someone brings equipment and chemistry into your home. Carpet can be damaged. Upholstery is even more vulnerable. Any textile can be harmed by the wrong solution, the wrong pH, too much water, or too little.
The questions asked before the work starts matter more than the equipment
Color loss is one of the most common forms of permanent damage, and it is almost always avoidable. Whether a cleaning agent is safe depends on the fiber content of the carpet — what the carpet is actually made of. A product that is perfectly appropriate for one fiber can strip color from another.
The training pays for itself here, and not in the way people expect. Its value is not primarily in knowing more cleaning techniques. It is in knowing which questions to ask before a single drop of anything touches the floor.
If a company shows up, unrolls a hose, and starts cleaning without asking a single question about your carpet, that tells you something.
Four Costly Mistakes Adam and Samantha See Again and Again
1. Too much soap
Some budget cleaners run a great deal of soap through their lines. There is a reason for it: heavy detergent cleans up beautifully, works fast, and makes the job easier. The carpet looks wonderful when the van pulls away.
The problem shows up later. Soap residue left in the fibers attracts dirt. The carpet re-soils quickly, and the homeowner concludes the carpet is simply worn out or that carpet cleaning does not last. Depending on how badly it was done, the residue can be very difficult to reverse — sometimes semi-permanently.
A carpet cleaner who’s just quick and cheap and doesn’t really know what they’re doing can cause permanent or semi-permanent damage that’s really difficult for an expert to even come in and fix.
— Adam Proehl
2. Too much water
One of the most common complaints Adam and Samantha hear from new customers is that their carpet stayed damp for days after a previous cleaning.
That is not a normal outcome. It is a process failure, and there are specific things a trained technician does to prevent it — properly maintained equipment, correct water pressure, correct extraction technique, and appropriate drying. There is, as Samantha puts it, a laundry list of practices behind a carpet that dries the way it should.
When carpet stays wet too long, odor follows. Adam has known homeowners who ultimately replaced carpet because of a smell that developed after a cleaning and could not be resolved.
3. The rental machine from the grocery store
Adam and Samantha do not recommend rental units. The conversation they have on the phone is almost scripted at this point: they ask when the carpet was last cleaned, and the homeowner says they do it themselves every few months. Then they ask when it was last cleaned professionally. The answer, often, is never.
The predictable result is soap residue — largely because of an intuitive but incorrect assumption.
People will think more is better. In this case, less is more. They’ll say, oh, it’s clean, and then in two weeks it looks bad again — and they don’t realize they’re actually causing that.
— Samantha Proehl
The advertised price at the grocery store or home improvement store looks like a bargain next to a professional cleaning. But once you account for your own time, the equipment rental, the cleaning products, the mediocre result, and the possibility of shortening the life of the carpet, the math rarely works out the way it appears.
4. Assuming cheaper is the same as less expensive
This is the thread running through all of it. Everyone likes cheaper. But the lowest quoted price is not the same as the lowest total cost, particularly when the risk includes damage that is difficult or impossible to undo.
The old carpenter’s adage applies cleanly here: measure twice, cut once. Paying somewhat more for someone who does it correctly the first time frequently costs less than paying twice — once for the cheap job, and again to correct it.
Repair First, Replace Last
When someone calls Foothills Carpet Care to clean or fix something, they are almost always calling about something they have invested in. It is their home. They chose that carpet and paid for it, and in many cases they are not remotely ready to part with it.
This is where repair capability changes the entire conversation. If a damaged area can be repaired, the homeowner keeps what they have and the problem is over. If it cannot, the alternative is replacement — an expense of a completely different magnitude, along with the disruption of moving furniture and re-flooring a room.
If I can come in and fix something that was damaged, it’s a lot easier for the homeowner to process that whole thing, as opposed to saying, oh no, it’s got to go.
— Samantha Proehl
It is worth knowing that many carpet cleaning companies do not perform repairs at all. Repair is a separate skill set with its own training — the course Samantha took twice — and it is one of the clearest practical reasons to ask about certifications before you hire.
The Single Best Thing You Can Do for New Carpet
If there is one piece of guidance in this entire conversation with the highest return, it is this: carpet that is maintained correctly can last roughly three times as long as carpet that is maintained poorly.
Not marginally longer. Three times.
That gap is not primarily about the carpet you bought or how much you spent on it. It is about what happens to it over the years — whether it is professionally cleaned on a sensible schedule, whether residue is being left behind in the fibers, whether it is being over-wet, and whether small problems are addressed before they become large ones.
Which means the decision you make about who cleans your carpet is not really a decision about one afternoon. It is a decision about how long your flooring lasts.
Talk to Adam and Samantha
Foothills Carpet Care is Adam and Samantha Proehl. When you call, you are speaking with the owners — the same people who did the training, hold the certifications, and will be responsible for the work in your home.
They serve homeowners, property managers, and businesses throughout the Greenville area and the greater Upstate of South Carolina, including Mauldin, Simpsonville, Greer, Travelers Rest, Spartanburg, and the surrounding communities.
Whether you need a routine cleaning, a stubborn stain or odor addressed, a repair you have been told is not fixable, or help after water damage, the best next step is simply to call and describe what you are dealing with. They will tell you honestly what is involved.
Call Foothills Carpet Care Today
864-569-9366
Serving Greenville and the Upstate since 2008
