A Letter from the Founder

I'm writing this from the cab of my truck, covered in grease, hands still smelling like degreaser—the same way most of you probably end your days. We're not office guys. We're the ones who show up when a family's ready to fire up their grill for the Fourth of July and nothing happens. We're the ones crawling under cook boxes in hundred-degree heat. We're the ones who know what really clean looks like, even when nobody else does.

And we're the ones who've had enough of watching our trade get dragged through the mud.

Last summer, in the middle of my busiest season, I worked two jobs that changed everything for me. The first was a neighbor pushing a perfectly good grill to the curb because some "grill guy" told him it was defective and that he'd need to buy a new $1,500 unit. I stopped, took a look, and cleared spider webs off the orifices. Five minutes later, that grill fired up like new. The second was a guy who'd been paying $300 quarterly for what he thought was professional service—turned out to be nothing more than a grate scrub and a vacuum job. When I actually disassembled his firebox, the pile of debris that came out of those burner tubes told the whole story. Nobody had ever gone below the surface.

Two jobs. Two different problems. Same damn issue: our industry has no standards, and our customers have no way to tell the difference between a professional and a pretender.

That night, I went home and I couldn't let it go. I kept thinking about that first guy, ready to throw away fifteen hundred bucks because he didn't know any better. I kept thinking about the second guy, paying premium prices for bottom-barrel work. And I kept thinking about all of us—the ones who do it right, who take pride in our work, who strip every component, who explain what we're doing and why it matters—and how we're all fighting uphill against an industry where anyone with a wire brush can call themselves a professional.

So I made a decision. I was going to build something real. Not another weekend certification course. Not some pay-to-play membership club. Not a certificate you frame and forget. I was going to build the real thing—an ANAB-accredited standards body that would mean something. The kind of credential that sits next to a doctor's MD or a mechanic's ASE certification. A mark that customers could trust and professionals could be proud of.

"I won't lie to you: it hasn't been cheap, and it hasn't been easy. I'm paying for this out of my own pocket—$50,000+ to do it right... Because shortcuts are what got us here in the first place."

This is about taking our trade back.

It's about saying that when someone calls themselves a grill service professional, it means they know how to diagnose a regulator issue, how to properly clean a venturi tube, how to reassemble a firebox so it's safer than when they found it. It's about creating a standard so clear, so rigorous, so respected that when a customer sees that AGSI certification, they know—without question—that they're getting someone who does this the right way.

But I can't do this alone. That's where you come in.

I'm looking for a founding cohort—a small class of professionals who believe what I believe. Who are tired of the race to the bottom. Who take pride in stripping a grill down to bare metal and putting it back together better than new. Who understand that this job isn't just about cleaning; it's about safety, about craftsmanship, about earning trust one grill at a time.

Will there be early hiccups? Probably. We're building something from the ground up, and that's never smooth. But that's what pioneers do. We don't wait for someone else to pave the road—we grab the shovel and we build it ourselves.

This is our moment to say: Here's what it means to be a grill service professional.

Not what some guy with a pressure washer says it means. Not what the lowest bidder on Facebook thinks it means. What it actually means—backed by rigorous standards, professional accreditation, and the collective commitment of the best in the business.

When customers see AGSI, they'll know they're getting someone who's been tested, who's been verified, who meets the highest standard in the industry. And when you earn that certification, you'll know you're standing shoulder to shoulder with the best this trade has to offer.

I started Husker Grill Cleaning because I wanted to do things right. I'm starting the American Grill Service Institute for the exact same reason—because right matters. Because our customers deserve better. Because we deserve better. Because this trade, this craft, this work we do every single day deserves to be recognized for what it really is: skilled, essential, professional work.

So if you're reading this and you're nodding your head—if you're one of the ones who goes the extra mile, who educates your customers, who takes before-and-after pictures not for marketing but because you're proud of the transformation—then I'm talking to you.