2026 Restoration Industry Leaders Review: Bioteam

Most restoration companies grow by adding services. Krystie Reeves continues to build BioteamAZ by refusing to do so.

Krystie Reeves

The Phoenix-based company, with a satellite operation in Oregon, has handled biohazard remediation across Arizona since 2011. Reeves, who owns it with her husband, Matthew, keeps its scope deliberately tight. “We have not expanded our scope,” she explained. “We have a niche market. We only handle biohazard remediation.”

That discipline is the whole idea. “A lot of companies may have a sector where they run 10 to 20 jobs a year because they have one person who is certified or not,” Reeves explained. “This is all we do, and all of our technicians are certified.”

Probate law

Reeves did not set out to run a cleanup company. She started as a legal assistant for a probate attorney at 21, collecting insurance paperwork from biohazard scenes. Her first job left an impression.

“I’ll never forget the odor that I smelled at that time,” she grimaced. “It stuck with me since.”

She went on to become an attorney working in probate—what she calls death law—and spent years hiring, representing, and suing biohazard companies before buying Bioteam in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. The founders had built a strong operation, and she framed her goal in plain terms. “When we purchased the company, we knew it was a very good company striving to be better. And now, where we are is we’re striving to be the best,” Reeves said.

The onboarding call

Taking on serious restoration challenges is what makes Bioteam shine.

For Bioteam, the work begins before anyone reaches a property. Reeves and her small team answer the phones themselves rather than routing calls to a service. “When you call us, you’re getting us,” she clarified.

That first conversation does more than book a job. “The intake call is the onboarding call,” Reeves explained. “You have to have that emotional experience. You have to be able to read the person.”

Scripted sympathy also can backfire. “When you say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ it can’t be a canned response, because maybe they’re not sorry for the loss,” she explained.  “So, you have to be able to read the room.”

One voice on every job

Once a crew is dispatched, Bioteam assigns a single point of contact, a role the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration (IICRC) calls a talking technician. “We don’t want five different people saying five different things,” Reeves said.

New technicians train for roughly six months before taking that role, shadowing Reeves, then Matthew, and finally a senior technician. Nobody is forced into it. “If a technician does not want to take that role on, we absolutely don’t permit them to take that role on,” Reeves said.

Boundaries run through the operation. Reeves and Matthew personally oversee any job involving children, and technicians can step away from a scene at any point. The team debriefs after every job. “Where are you at emotionally? Was this hard?” Reeves asks her team. Additionally, when intake calls run long and raw, she pulls staff off primary duty to rest before sending them back out.

No cut corners

Bioteam is proud of its team of skilled technicians.

The toughest challenge Reeves names is not demand. It is conduct. “The biggest challenge is unethical competition and unethical employees,” she commented. Because the field is largely unregulated, bad actors can operate with ease, and price often signals corner-cutting.

“I know when somebody is bidding against a job and whether or not they’re going to dispose of the biohazard correctly based on their price, because I know what it costs to do that,” Reeves said.

Bioteam declines jobs and clients that fall short of its standards. Reeves also leans on relationships with competitors she trusts. “I have very good relationships with quite a few competitors here,” she confirmed. “We talk a lot, because we all have the same goal in mind.”

Her marketing follows the same ethic. The company invests in search, paid advertising, and a deep referral network, but draws a hard line at sensationalism. “I disagree with shifting toward the gore factor,” Reeves insisted. “We don’t post anything that is scene-related.”

Referral partners matter on both ends of a job—the attorneys, fiduciaries, and property managers who send work, and the vetted contractors Bioteam hands clients to afterward, since it does not do build-back itself. “When you have a bad forward referral network, that reflects on you,” Reeves said.

Advice for the next operator

High-quality training and education are investments Bioteam believes in.

For newcomers, Reeves leads with safety as No. 1 priority, citing fentanyl exposure as a daily reality on the job. After that comes regulatory compliance, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules, proper licensing, and the right insurance. “We need pollution liability,” she explained. “We’re dealing with blood-borne pathogens and viruses.”

Above all, operators must know their limits, and many in the biohazard restoration community can assist. Reeves has flown to other states to work side by side with operators learning the trade and built a national network of specialists she can call when a scene exceeds her own training.

Going deeper

Bioteam’s next chapter pushes further into specialty work rather than out into new lines. Reeves wants to build out forensic restoration, decontamination, and abatement, with a focus on indoor air quality, which she said is often overlooked outside of mold work. The shift is driven partly by what crews now encounter. During the last two years, the team has run into illicit drugs on at least half of its jobs, Reeves admitted. This has forced new training and updated personal protective equipment protocols.

The goal is to become the company other restorers call when a scene goes beyond what they can safely handle. “When they walk in, and they can’t deal with it, we can,” Reeves emphasized.

The Bioteam mission is to provide its clients with the best possible care, helping them navigate the difficult situations they face.

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