People ask me why I built MCR System. The honest answer: because I couldn't stand running my hood cleaning company without it. And then once I sold the company, I realized every hood cleaner in the country was suffering from the same problem.
The story
I started D&E Hood Cleaning in 2012 with a used pressure washer and my brother's pickup truck. Seven years in, we were doing 200+ customers a month. By 2019 we had 4 trucks and 6 techs.
The work was the easy part. Hoods are dirty. We cleaned them. NFPA 96 has specific rules. We followed them. The challenge was never the cleaning.
The challenge was everything else. Scheduling 6 techs across 50 customers a week. Keeping track of which customer was due next. Making sure every job had photos, signatures, certificates. Sending invoices. Following up on late payments. Coordinating with insurance auditors. Pulling 5 years of records when a fire marshal called.
I tried it on paper. I tried it in Google Sheets. I tried 4 different "field service" software platforms — none of them understood what NFPA 96 documentation actually required. I hired an office manager. She quit because the system was a mess. I hired another. Same outcome.
The breaking point
In 2023, I lost a $40k annual contract because we missed a quarterly cleaning. The customer's facilities manager had emailed our scheduling email asking to confirm the date. The email got buried in a folder we hadn't checked. We didn't show up. Two weeks later, the inspector showed up at the customer's site. Their hood was overdue. They got fined. They fired us.
That night I sat in my truck in the driveway and realized I'd been running a $700k business on duct tape and willpower. I had no system. I'd been winging it for 11 years and somehow it had worked. But it wouldn't keep working.
The decision
I had two options. Spend the next 2 years building the system in-house and risk burning out. Or sell the company while it was at peak revenue and build the system outside, where I could give it to every hood cleaner in the country.
I sold the company in early 2024 to a regional consolidator. Took the cash. Hired one developer. Started building MCR System.
The system I wish I'd had
MCR System isn't generic field service software. It's built specifically for hood cleaning operations. Every screen, every field, every workflow comes from a real problem I had at D&E:
- Customer record with hood specs and grease history — I always wanted to know "is their grease load increasing?" Now you can see it at a glance.
- NFPA 96 certificate generation — date-stamped photos, GPS, signatures, inaccessible area notations, all auto-attached. Inspector calls? Pull it up in 3 seconds.
- Recurring schedule by code — quarterly for medium-volume kitchens, monthly for high-volume, automatic.
- Tech mobile app — tablet-friendly, works in basement kitchens with no signal, syncs when back online.
- Invoice auto-generation and payment tracking — no more chasing $1,800 invoices for 90 days.
- Customer self-service portal — they log in, see history, download certificates. Saves you 5 hours a week.
Why I'm telling you this
If you're running a hood cleaning company on paper, on Google Calendar, on Quickbooks plus a notepad — I've been you. It works until it doesn't. The day it doesn't, you lose a customer or a contract or worse.
You don't need to live through the breaking point to fix it. Get on a system early. The companies in our industry that hit $1M+ all have one thing in common: they invested in operations before they had to.
Run your hood cleaning company on a real system.
Built by a founder who ran one for 12 years. 30 days free, no credit card.
Start MCR System free →— Darlan Posso, CEO & Founder, MCR System
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