Thirty years on base. Then all of South Texas.

Our military and commercial building work started in the 1990s at Fort Sam Houston. We received a call for a small carpet cleaning job on the base from one of the contracting officers. I responded and did the carpet cleaning myself. The contracting officer was very happy and continued to call with more carpet cleaning jobs. He was a very personable person, and I explained to him that we could provide other services such as water damage and air duct cleaning.

The DOC and DPW agents were very close and recommended contractors to each other. The word got around about our services, and we were on the base weekly providing services at the General's Mansions, officers' homes, enlisted housing, and buildings on base — air duct cleaning, mold issues, hardwood flooring, carpet replacement and more. When they called, we jumped. The individual building managers would call us in for various odd jobs, if you will, in addition to our regular services. I have all the files in my office of every building we worked in at the base for years.

At some point the military changed their contracting procedures to Joint Base operations and did away with the individual base contracting in DPW. Our primary contact moved from civil service at the base to a property manager position for AT&T, which at that time had its headquarters here in San Antonio. He was the person who made the initial call for the first carpet cleaning job we did at Fort Sam. Once he was at AT&T, he brought us in as a vendor and eventually introduced us to every building manager. We eventually became the primary service-related contractor for every building in San Antonio for AT&T, providing the same services we did at Fort Sam and more. This continued until AT&T moved their headquarters to Dallas in 2008.