Our story

AllTrade Services Co. started in Marcus Dahl's Bay View garage in 2012 with a single work truck and a list of repeat customers who had followed him from his previous employer. Marcus had spent a decade running service crews across Milwaukee, and the one thing he could not get comfortable with was walk-away surprises — the jobs that started at one price and ended at another. When he went out on his own, he made the flat-rate-before-we-start rule the whole foundation of the business. Customers noticed immediately. The reviews started appearing, the referrals started multiplying, and by year two he had hired Rachel for finish work and Jerome for exteriors.

Growth happened slowly and deliberately. Marcus turned down a private equity conversation in 2019 because it would have required a franchisable service model, and AllTrade's value is the opposite: a small crew that knows Milwaukee's housing stock deeply, keeps job histories for every customer, and sends the same faces back to the same houses. That knowledge compounds. When Rachel shows up to a Shorewood bungalow she has visited three times, she knows the plaster mix, the paint formula on file, and the doorframe that runs tight in summer. That is not scalable in the standard sense — it is just very good service.

Twelve years and eighteen hundred clients later, AllTrade is still owner-operated and still growing on word of mouth. We have never run a discount ad. Our longest-running property-manager client found us because a tenant called us directly and liked the work. We are genuinely proud of that — and we know the fastest way to lose it is to cut a corner.