Long ride

[Greg Cole]

Well after 5 years without a hard freeze we finally hit 3 degrees on Tuesday.
We have completed 150+ jobs
2 of which are huge commercial.
Have a waiting list 100 deep.
My water techs are exhausted but still going. Working 20 hours a day!
NEVER seen it this bad!
So glad I partnered the restoration side to create DONE RESTORATION
luckiest move I ever made...




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[Mikey P]

How many WD techs do you have?
Are most of them on location cleaners as well?

 

[Desk Jockey]

Damn that's killer!

I wouldn't worry too much about that list.

Every day time passes that list gets shorter and shorter. By the time you start calling them because their number has come up you'll be lucky to get 15-20 out of the hundred.

At least that's been our experiences over the years.


We only did 24, but it petered out Wednesday, did a few Thursday and only one yesterday.

We did get some big ones so early on I don't know if we could have handled much more. There were big office suites, a car dealership, military base, a few very large homes but most just average homes.

We're about half way complete, 11-are done and ready to bill. Most of the remaining will finish over the weekend. A few of the large ones have upholstery, partitions to clean and contents to reposition, 5000sq/ft of carpet to clean at one Monday and some oriental rugs yet to clean and return on a few residential losses. Tuesday-Wednesday I think they should all be done.

Most technicians doubled their pay check this week. Half the guys took home checks that made mine look small.

Good start to the year, validates all the planning we do to ready for this sort of deal. We'll get everything back, get it cleaned and put away and figure out what we could have done better, so we will be ready for the next go around.

 

[Greg Cole]

How many WD techs do you have?
Are most of them on location cleaners as well?

We have 8 leads. 6 helpers. 3 demo guys and 2 ladies that do detail cleanings. Only 1 guy cleans carpet.
Put my bus partner in charge of the large commercial losses.




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[handdi]

I'm glad to see Richards post
we hear here that the franchise company's are runnin 80 to90 jobs
that is goin to really damage their reputation when all the dust settles
we did 7 or 8 and they are almost finished. I know what we can handle
and not to handle but all of my equipment is bein rented out to a friend of mine now
we did a water extraction this am the house will be gutted I'm sure been
Iike this since tues but the owner wanted the water out.

 

[Desk Jockey]

There are limits to what you can do no matter what size you are.

We pulled back Tuesday night, we felt the guys were toasted, already a couple of late night days of work and we were worried we might be taking on more work than we could comfortably complete... without complaints.

I'd much rather have a complaint that they tried to contact us to do their home but we were too busy, than to get the complaint we were too busy to do their job right.

20-years ago we had two strong thunderstorms that dropped several inches of water within an hours time within two weeks of each other. We processed 157 jobs from that storm, it was a nightmare. We extended ourselves too far, we didn't know when to quit (greed).

We just kept extracting jobs and drying with little thought as to how we would monitor them all. We got through it but not without several complaints of us not getting to there home when we should have. Its amazing when they are flooded you're the hero. Once dry its "get that noisy junk out of my house".

We leaned a a valuable lesson, you have to keep monitoring as priority 1, if you have the staff to cover that, then continue to take on new losses.

The other thing is, if you're tired you become less efficient, your work gets ragged and you're not delivering what you're selling. The greedy part of me would like to never say no to a job BUT our name is on the service and I want the service we are selling to be as good a product in the middle of a big storm, as it is when it's the only loss.

We never did run out of equipment this time, I had water trucks too. Just no crews that had any life in them to process any more work, so we had to say "when".

As much as I'd like to, we can't do them all.

 

[Askal]

I agree Richard. In one two week pay period my top 3 guys had 160 hours each in a two week period. I actually turned down some good jobs for the first time in 35 years. I have been going 7 days a week 6 to 8 hrs a day for 6 weeks. Going on vacation in Feb. so I don't feel too bad. We did about 65 in a 5 week period. We will lose some of the reconstruction because some will not want to wait.

 

[Desk Jockey]

Thats amazing Al. Congrats!

 

[Greg Cole]

Our guys are burnt. We have a huge commercial loss that alone exceeded our projected revenue for the first quarter! When the dust setles believe we may have even met the 1/2 year mark.
The smartest decision i made regarding this time around was to NOT buy any equipment when we ran out. It's always been our knee jerk reaction during catastrophes. Howver, Ive learned you often get stuck working for the equipment because the supply house are charging full retail because they can easily get it.
In 2009 ( our flooding due to rain) I bought just under $750 k equipment. I wasn't able to sell it because te market was flooded with equipment so we were forced to keep it. The problem is that we couldn't deduct all of that and it was considered profit. This resulted in a HUGE tax liability that we had to pay out of the the actual profits of the jobs.

 

[Desk Jockey]

We try not to make emotional purchase either. We don't buy during a run unless we will use the purchased items enough during that time to pay for it. We prefer to evaluate where we were short and put together a package of "could use more of" items and then get a loan or lease to have the stuff without losing a chunk of the profits.

You're right Greg you can't make good deal when demand is high. You're much better off when they have been sitting on it a while. Or a stock up day or when they are putting together an order. In peak demand they will sell it all with or without you.

 

[amygeorge]

Atlanta was a hot mess. I was at the Reets Drying Academy when the ball dropped. I have never seen anything like it. Their command center was on fire! They stopped answering the phones because they couldn’t handle anymore work - well over 100. I’m surprised Jeremy didn’t pull us out of class and give us some serious hands on training! Many of the folks in my class were from Tennessee, North Carolina and Minnesota - they were so glad to be in class that week, but felt sorry for their co-workers.

Back home and no water calls… waiting for a hot water heater line to burst - as usual.

Amygeorge

 

[Desk Jockey]

Everyone has their limits, size of the the company, number of tech's, number of extraction units, size of the drying fleet, all play into how many you can reasonably handle. Take on too many and you're playing with fire.

Ask me how I know.................no, please don't.

I thought we were all done with extractions, we didn't get one call over the weekend but a commercial loss just called in. 2000sq/ft wet at an office building, rolling a truck to them right now.

Crazy...just crazy!