William Dunn left wine and spirits at 50 to buy a cleaning company. Two years later it had doubled.

In early 2022, William Dunn and his leadership team pulled themselves headfirst through a mud pit on national television. The setting was CNBC's No Retreat: Business Bootcamp, a reality series hosted by Spartan Race founder Joe De Sena, and CNS Cleaning Company was one of only six businesses chosen from across the country to compete. Crawling through mud is an odd look for the president of a commercial cleaning company. Dunn signed up anyway.

That willingness to get dirty in public, for the sake of his team, says a lot about how William Dunn runs CNS. He had bought the company only months earlier, at an age when most executives are protecting what they have built rather than starting over. He had spent decades selling wine and spirits, not scrubbing food processing plants. He did not bring industry pedigree to commercial cleaning. He brought a conviction about how a service business should treat the people who depend on it.

From a farm and a wine list to a cleaning company

Dunn's work ethic started on a farm his parents still own and operate. He was nine when he began mowing lawns, harvesting hay, and helping neighbors with their animals. At 14 he was working at his father's truck stop. That early habit of showing up and doing the work followed him into a long corporate career in the wine and spirits industry, where he spent years recruiting, training, and mentoring people who went on to lead.

The dream underneath all of it was to own something himself. As he neared 50, Dunn realized the window was closing, and that waiting would only make the leap harder. So in 2021 he and his wife Kim took the largest financial risk of their lives and bought CNS Cleaning Company, a commercial cleaning and janitorial business that had operated in the Philadelphia area since 1983. In his first two years running it, the company doubled.

A reliability business, not a price war

Ask Dunn what is wrong with much of the commercial cleaning market and he does not hedge. Too many providers, he says, compete on price rather than problem solving, which leaves facilities managers frustrated when the service cannot meet regulatory or production standards.

The complaint he hears most from clients is not about a single missed cleaning. It is about what happens next. "Clients often say the real frustration isn't a missed cleaning. It's the aftermath," he explains. "Think slow replies, poor follow through, and feeling like they have to manage the service themselves."

CNS is built to remove that burden. Every client gets a dedicated supervisor, a real person who answers the phone, and issue resolution measured in hours rather than days. Support runs around the clock. Call CNS at any hour, on any day, and a live person picks up. There is no voicemail system and no AI generated answering service, only someone happy to take your call, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Clients say it is one of the things they love most about CNS, and one of the clearest ways the company sets itself apart from nearly everyone else in the market. For Dunn, that structure is about risk, not convenience. A food plant facing a compliance inspection, or a manufacturer running a tight production schedule, cannot afford to chase a vendor for a callback.

CNS works across a wide range of sites, from small offices and retail spaces to warehouses, manufacturing plants, and food processing campuses that exceed a million square feet. It matches its methods to each one. In regulated environments where a traditional cleaning would cause downtime or fail inspection, CNS uses dry ice blasting, which cleans without water and creates very little waste. At one large protein processing plant plagued by sanitation and inspection failures, CNS introduced dry ice blasting alongside a custom schedule that kept the line running while bringing the facility back into compliance. What started as a trial became a long relationship. Dunn sums up the operating principle in a single line: "Responsiveness isn't a feature. It's our promise."

The CNS Way, in print

In October 2024, Dunn added author to his title. He contributed a chapter called "The CNS Way" to The E-Myth Evolution, a business book led by Michael E. Gerber, whose original E-Myth work has shaped how a generation of owners think about building companies that can run without them. The book reached Amazon best seller status shortly after its release and topped several new release categories, including entrepreneurship and marketing.

The fit is not a coincidence. Gerber's central argument is that most small businesses stall because the owner keeps working in the business instead of on it, doing the technical tasks rather than designing the system that makes the work repeatable. That is essentially the problem Dunn set out to solve at CNS, turning responsive service into a defined process rather than a personal favor. His chapter lays out how he did it, written for owners trying to build something that holds up as it grows.

What he is proudest of

Dunn is clear eyed about what he has and what he still wants. The company has grown, but he talks less about size than about the people it has lifted along the way, the supervisors and crew members whose work has changed their livelihoods. That, he says, is the part he is proudest of. He is betting that in a market where clean floors are expected but dependable service is rare, the companies that answer the phone and fix the problem will keep winning the work. For a man who spent decades in wine and spirits before he ever managed a cleaning crew, and who was willing to crawl through a mud pit to prove he meant it, that bet looks less like a gamble and more like the whole point.