Water Damage Reviews

My husband Randall has done water work for 16 years, which means 16 years of the phone ringing at hours when normal people are asleep, and Randall answering it standing in our bedroom in one sock, trying to sound awake. He is good in a flooded house, calm as anything, but at 2 in the morning on the telephone he sounds like a man being robbed. Homeowners would hang up scared and call the next name, and I would lie there doing math on a job we never got. The storm in April put half the county under water in one night. The Voice AI Launchbarr set up answered while Randall was out on a job, took a call from an older lady in the next town over whose water heater had let go, and talked her through shutting her water off at the meter, clear and slow. She left a review the next week about the woman who answered at 2 in the morning being the calmest person she had ever talked to. That woman does not exist. Well. She does now, I guess. Randall sleeps with his phone on the dresser now instead of under his pillow, which after 16 years is a sentence I never thought I would say. He told his brother, "The phone voice is better at being me at 2 a.m. than I am." He is not even mad about it. That might be the strangest part.

Water work runs on promises. A family is standing in an inch of water at midnight and I tell them we will be back at eight to check the drying, and if nobody comes at eight I have lost that street. I used to make call backs from the truck, one hand on the wheel, reading moisture numbers off a notebook while my tech waited. The call backs and reminders happen now. The homeowner hears from us before the crew is due, the recheck gets confirmed, and a man down the coast told me his insurance agent asked who our office manager was because she was on top of everything. I do not have an office manager. It is me, a crew of four, and a system that does not forget while I am under a house. He signed our paperwork for his rental property, for whenever it floods, and on this coast it is whenever, not if.

My wife Carla started this company out of our garage, and I am her lead tech and her husband, in that order on site. A deductible is a hard thing to collect in a flooded kitchen while a woman holds a mop like it will help. People slow paid us for weeks after. Now she can pay it online while the crew is pulling baseboards, and mostly they do, quick, like ripping a bandage. Nobody has the money talk twice. Carla says that is the only part of this job that got easier. She owns the place. She would know.

My brother Dale and I own this company together. He runs crews, I keep the books, and his boys are two of our techs. I spent years financing other people's floods. That is what program work is, nobody says it out loud. We would dry a house, document every reading like good soldiers, and then some reviewer three states away who has never stood in sewage would cut two drying days off the bill and we would wait until day 90 to get paid what was left. Our payroll is Friday. Friday does not accept a desk reviewer's feelings as currency. I nearly sold my half in 2023. What changed was not more calls. It was whose calls. A property manager a few towns away found us online looking for somebody local after a pipe froze in one of his buildings, and he told me straight that he picked us because we were clearly ours, our name, our town, our reviews from people here. He pays at his own rates, in days. Then his insurer's local agent started giving our number out for the first call, before the claim machine starts. My nephews are still with us, which in this industry right now is half the battle. Dale said it best at Christmas: "We still stand in the same water. We just quit standing in it for free." He is not wrong, and I am keeping his line.

I have been in water work fourteen years and I still believed the owner had to answer every call himself, because a flooded homeowner can hear panic and I thought they could hear voicemail even faster. So I slept with the phone on my chest like a heart monitor. My wife said I flinched in my sleep every time it buzzed, even when it was just the weather app. The freeze in January changed the math. I was in a crawlspace one town over with a busted line still spraying when the next three calls came in, and the voice Launchbarr put on our phones got every one of them. She got the addresses, asked what was wet, told a lady across the county how to shut her water off at the street, and had the jobs lined up in order when I crawled out. One man told me at his door that whoever answered his call at 3 a.m. was the reason he did not call the big franchise. He meant a voice that is not a person. I still take the calls I can take. But I stopped believing my gravel voice at 3 a.m. was the professional one. It never was. It was just the tired one.

Monsoon season here, a supply line pops and the homeowner calls four companies in four minutes. Whoever talks to her first gets the job, and I was losing those races because I was already standing in somebody else's water. The text that goes out the second we miss a call changed that. It says we got the call, asks what is wet, and keeps her talking to us instead of the next name on her screen. A lady in the next town over told me she was dialing the second company when our text landed. She stayed. We were drying her laundry room by lunch.

My husband Wayne answers a phone like a man defusing something. Short answers, no warmth, all business, and for years our reviews sounded like they were about a tow truck company. Then the review requests started going out on their own after every job, and the reviews changed because they started coming from the people Wayne actually charms, the ones who watched him save a hardwood floor at midnight. A man two towns over wrote that Wayne explained every reading on the moisture meter like a teacher. Wayne, a teacher. I read that one out loud at supper twice.

I am not a Google person. I am barely a phone person. But a custodian at a church across the river found us on the map listing, not the website, not an ad, just the map, after Launchbarr cleaned up our profile with the right categories and photos of our actual crew and equipment. He told me we were the only company whose listing showed real drying work instead of a stock photo of a mop. That church has called us three times since, and their daycare once. All from a map pin I never looked at.

My partner Ray and I started this company with one van and a disagreement about everything except the work. He runs crews, I chase the money, and the money chase used to mean me driving a paper invoice across the river to a landlord while the deductible sat unpaid and the dehumidifiers sat in his units burning my fuel and my patience. Now the deductible link goes out before the first fan is set. The landlord across the river paid it from his phone while Ray was still taping off the kitchen. Ray called me and said the man paid before the plastic was up, which in fourteen years had never happened. I do not drive invoices across the river anymore. I spend that time the way Ray always said I should, on the phone with the next referral source instead of the last unpaid bill.

I write a scope, I send a scope, and then I used to do what every restorer does, I called twice, got busy, and let it die in the pile. The supplement fights ate my follow up whole. Now the follow ups go out on their own, polite, spaced out, and they keep going until somebody answers. A property manager two towns over approved a drying plan I had written off six weeks earlier, all because a message asked her one more time. She said she thought we had forgotten her. We had. The system had not.

I am the son, which means I got handed the phone nobody wanted. Dad writes estimates on a clipboard. The scope goes out by text from the driveway. First time, the homeowner signed before Dad got his boots off in the truck. He stared at it and said, so the paper was the slow part. Yeah, Dad. The paper was the slow part.

Everything used to live in my head and a spiral notebook that got wet. Now every lead and every job sits on one board and my lead tech can see what I see. A homeowner asked me how many days her kitchen had been drying and I answered from the truck. Guessing was my whole office system for eleven years. Nobody misses it.

I answer the phones here, and I used to answer them in five places, the office line, two cell phones, a Facebook page Gordy checks never, and an email nobody opened until Friday. Now every call, text, and message lands in one place and I can see all of it from my desk. During the spring melt I booked three jobs before Gordy finished his coffee because nothing was hiding in an inbox. He thinks I got faster. I did not get faster. The messages just stopped playing hide and seek.

I hate posting pictures of disasters, so our page sat empty for two years. Now the finished work goes out on its own and neighbors comment. A woman two streets over called about her water heater because she had seen our post about one we replaced on her own street. She said it felt like calling somebody she already knew.

My wife Denise started this outfit after twenty years running claims desks, and I am her operations man and, on paper, her employee, which she reminds me of at tax time. She always said we did not need more calls, we needed the right calls, houses in our part of town with owners who answer their phones. The local ads Launchbarr runs brought us a run of calls from our own zip codes instead of water heaters an hour away. A realtor Denise knows from church asked what changed, said our name kept coming up for her sellers with wet floors. Denise just smiled. She had been saying for years the work was here. Now the phone agrees with her.

Our old website had a picture of a waterfall on it. A waterfall. The new one shows our crew, our fans, a gutted bathroom in the next town over that we dried. A homeowner the next town over told me she picked us because the site looked like people who had actually been wet before. Her words. I think about that waterfall a lot.

I am the wife, which at our house means I was the after hours office for a decade, taking the panic calls at the kitchen table and writing addresses on the grocery list. My husband Joe would rather stand in sewage than work a calendar. Now homeowners book the rechecks and the estimate visits on the online calendar themselves, and the panic calls I do still take come with the visit already set. A lady last week booked her own drying check for Tuesday and apologized for calling at all. Ten years of grocery list addresses, and the calendar did what I could not. It retired me kindly.

Roy here, I own the name half, Vernon owns the patience half. Vernon's reminder system used to be me yelling across the shop. Now the homeowner gets a message before every recheck and a text when the truck is on its way, and our no shows basically ended. An older man across the county told Vernon he appreciated the warning because he wanted the dog put up and the gate open. That is a small thing until you have climbed over a locked gate with a moisture meter in your teeth. Then it is not small at all.

I am a lead tech, not an owner. The QR code on our truck and on the invoice takes the homeowner straight to leave a review while I am coiling hoses. A man in the next town scanned it and wrote the review before we pulled out. The man mentioned the plastic runners by name. Nobody mentions the runners. I put those down.

I never asked a soul to put their kind words where a stranger could read them, it felt like bragging with extra steps. The reviews now show right on our website, and the man who runs the hardware store told me he read three of them before he called about his rental house. He said he did not know we had done work for people he knew. Neither did I, out loud anyway. The proof was sitting there the whole time, just never where anybody could see it.

When my brother retired I took over his book of business and his filing cabinet, which was a real cabinet, with folders going back to jobs I helped on as a girl. My flaw is loyalty to paper. I trusted the cabinet more than any computer my nephew showed me. Launchbarr put those past customers into a system that sends a thank you after the job and checks in later, and the check ins started bringing the cabinet back to life. A woman we dried out in 2019 called about her mother's house because a message had asked how her kitchen was holding up. She said nobody from any company had ever asked her that after the bill was paid. My nephew says the cabinet is a museum now. Maybe it is. But the people in it keep calling, so I am keeping both.

I am Vernon's nephew and Roy's problem, depending on the day. I take the night calls rotation with two techs, and the night calls used to be a graveyard, people in a panic at midnight leaving a message and then calling a franchise at dawn because a human voice, any human voice, beat our silence. The call that sold me came at 1:40 in the morning, a busted washing machine hose the next town over, water running under the hardwood while the homeowner stood in it in her socks. The voice on our line got her name, her address, what was wet, and talked her through killing the water at the main while I was still lacing my boots. By the time I rolled up, the job was booked, the notes were written down better than I write them, and she was calmer than I was. She told me the lady on the phone said a tech was coming and then a tech came, and that is apparently the whole secret to this business. Roy says I sleep better now. Roy is right, and I hate giving him the satisfaction, so tell him the boots thing was the real improvement.

I run dispatch for two crews. The slow weeks used to terrify me because I had nothing to send out. Last slow stretch, a message went to past customers about checking the hoses and heaters before winter, and my board filled with inspection visits and two real leaks found early. I booked them all between coffee and lunch. Slow week, my foot.

Christmas Eve, a pipe let go in a house where the family was three states away, and a neighbor called it in. Our line answered, got the neighbor talking, and had me paged with an address and a key location before the water reached the good furniture. The family came home to a dry house and a stack of photos proving what we did. The daughter wrote in her review that the shop was closed for Christmas but somehow still came. We were closed. The doors were. The phone was not.