Hi, I'm Ben Kelly.
I run Strait Shine out of River Bourgeois. Owner-operated, fully insured, ground-based. When you call, you get me. When I show up, you get clean glass. That's the whole company.
I've spent the last nine years as a personal chef.
Private dinners, family events, corporate gigs, holiday meals, the kind of work that takes you all over Nova Scotia at all hours. I built that business from nothing and ran it for nearly a decade. It taught me everything I needed to know about running a service trade properly.
Strait Shine is the same standards in different clothes.
Two reasons.
I noticed a need. Nobody on the strait was doing dedicated window washing. People were getting it added on by the lawn-care folks or the painter who happened to own a squeegee, and the results showed. There was a clear gap for a proper, ground-based, locally-owned window-cleaning service that just did the work.
I wanted to be home. Cooking takes you everywhere except your own kitchen at suppertime. The personal chef business is great work, but it's late nights, weekends, holidays, and long drives across the province. I have a young family. Window washing is a clean local trade that keeps me on the strait and home for dinner.
So I built Strait Shine the same way I built the chef business. Plain pricing so nobody gets surprised. Honest answers to honest questions. A guarantee I'll actually honour. A truck that turns up when I said it would.
Nine years of running a service trade teaches you what matters.
Professionalism. Show up. Communicate. Confirm details before the day. Write the invoice on the spot, not three weeks after the fact.
An eye for detail. A clean window is exactly the same kind of work as a properly-finished plate. Either you noticed the smudge in the corner or you didn't. Either it's right or it's not. There's no middle.
Standards that don't drop. The tools are different. Squeegees instead of saucepans. The work itself is window cleaning, not cooking. But the bar I hold myself to is the same one I held for the dinner work, and that bar didn't move when the trade changed.
The short version.
Based in River Bourgeois. Live with my family. Still cook for friends most weekends. Drink coffee, not tea. Drive a small operation by design, not by accident — small means I can answer the phone myself, show up myself, and stand behind the work myself.
That's the whole company.
Want a quote?
Tell me about your windows. I'll have a price back within 24 hours. Or call 902·401·2141 and we can talk it through.
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