2022 Restoration Industry Leaders Review: Remediation Specialists

July 28, 2022—Cleanfax Staff

Content created and produced by:

Jeff Cross, media director | Samantha Hager, associate editor | Amy Hughes, editorial assistant

Often considered some of the most sterile and safe places for health and wellbeing, medical facilities still require remediation specialists at times to uphold these safety standards. For Nick Levy, operations manager at Remediation Specialists, these projects are their specialty and the reason for their boutique restoration firm classification.

A leading team 15 years in the making

The Remediation Specialists brand began back in 2007 when David Williams, a part of a family-owned large waterproofing company based out of Winter Park, Florida, decided he wanted to spread his wings and have his own outfit. As Levy explains, “One of the questions they kept getting asked was, ‘since you’re doing the waterproofing and you found all this damage inside my building, why can’t you also fix it?’ So, we decided to add a restoration arm, Remediation Specialists, and he brought in my mentor in the industry, Mike Patrick, and myself. I was one of the first technicians here at the very beginning and it’s just kind of evolved and grown from there.”

As boasted on the company website, David Williams founded the firm on a few crucial principles — responsiveness, elite level customer service, and providing a solid product at a fair price. The company is proud of this. Williams has used these tenets as the building blocks of the business and has developed long-lasting relationships with property and facility owners and managers across the state of Florida.

As of now, the company is based out of Orlando and Tampa with a satellite office in Miami. “We went from two or three unique medical facilities that we had connections with and contracts with and we’ve evolved that into multiple medical chains and clients over the last fifteen years now,” Levy adds. “We are a boutique restoration firm specializing in medical facilities and high and large loss for construction builders.”

The main focus of the company is working with medical facilities, commercial real estate, and general contractors to eliminate mold and water damage while providing exterior waterproofing. In a state as weather active as Florida, these services are in high demand and require true professionals to perform them effectively. Which, for Levy and his team, is hardly a problem, “I don’t hire employees; I hire people to give them a career. We hire people to put them on the path to success over long periods of time. So, because of that, out of the eight lead technicians that we have, seven of them are only one class away from their triple master (IICRC designation). All of my PM’s (project managers) are triple masters. So, we focus very much on teaching our guys to be able to handle and run things by themselves to be able to be independent of needing somebody to hold their hand, and I think that’s why we’re so successful in the medical industry and medical fields. We’re able to have guys that can swift and shift as needed as the project expands and grows.” However, even the best and brightest in an industry face challenges. For Remediation Specialists, the biggest one stems from their boutique title and need for discretion.

Putting a ‘finger on the pulse’ of the industry

As a boutique firm that often uses discretion to keep clients content, it can be difficult to market in the same ways other remediation and restoration companies would. As Levy explains, “Because we are a boutique firm, one of the things that is different and unique about us is our marketing. We have a web page now, which we didn’t have for many many years because we don’t do a lot of marketing. If you look at all of my trucks when they show up, every single truck I have is white and we have no lettering or logos on them. We do that for the discretion of the medical facilities that we work in and the discretion of the buildings that we work in, so one of our challenges is we don’t have pay-per-click, we don’t have SEO, we don’t do insurance work, and we’re not working with TPAs.”

However, the company has opted to connect with the industry and clients on a personal level to counteract these setbacks. “For us, it’s about building long-term relationships that will eventually turn into revenue and having the wherewithal to do that over and over again as we grow. Then, also finding a market that isn’t already taken. A lot of these contracts that we go to, they’ve already got big contracts from the national side, so learning how to grow within our market without changing who we are as a company is crucial. Really, relationships are the only way we’ve done that. Years and years of proving what we do and why we do it.”

In an industry as close-knit as the restoration industry, relationships are everything and a brand’s ability to nurture them is the difference between success and failure. Levy also believes that the exciting growth of the industry has helped greatly in this regard as well.

Restoration growth and community connections

One of the most exciting aspects of the restoration industry is the diversity of the work that must be done daily. In regard to this, Levy exclaims, “I’ve got 21 years—coming up on 22 years—in the industry now. Every single day, it’s something different. After years and years of doing this, I’m still not coming across the same thing over and over again. Because of that, it’s always a new challenge and there’s always a new learning experience.”

The Remediation Specialists team also encourages the growth of the industry, advancements that come along with it, and the useful network nationwide that has begun to develop. “When you look at the things that have been coming out of Reets and the DeWalt Drying Academy and the knowledge and the technology that we have at our hands that we didn’t have years ago, it’s just absolutely amazing,” says Levy. “When I turn over to an adjuster 1,800 company cam pictures with a Matterport of every day on the project and a moisture map done through Encircle, it’s unbelievable. I had a pen and paper with some grid on it when I started many years ago, so to be able to see us grow as an industry and come together as an industry nationwide is phenomenal. My first 10 years, I don’t think I knew anybody in other cities, and now, I can say that I have friends in the restoration industry nationwide and we lean on each other, help each other, and call each other with questions regularly.”

The main thing that Levy and his team at Remediation Specialists urges is that new companies take the work as seriously as they do. For their team, company culture and education are what make all the difference. As Levy proclaims, “When you’re dealing with a medical facility, we always have somebody from Infection Prevention and they start every meeting with, ‘I want you guys to sit down and think about, what if your grandmother was in the next room?’ So, that puts a lot of weight on my guys, and they succeed. They pull through it because they care.”

Remediation Specialists also don the term “specialist” because of their commitment to the industry and their specialized equipment and team members. “I do get questions a lot because they call me the hospital guy, and Norris Gearhart [President/CEO, Gearhart & Associates, LLC] knows way more than me. He’s a friend and he’s a great guy, but people say ‘Where can I go take a class? Where can I do this, and where can I do that?’ If you’re thinking about getting into the medical field, you have to understand that it is a commitment,” Levy warns. “It is a very hard and very solid commitment. You can’t have somebody coming from Mrs. Jones’ house to go work inside an operating room. If it is something that you’re planning on looking at or expanding into, you have to take it very seriously and you have to be committed to that relationship if you’re going to go that route. Because that’s the biggest thing I hear is people saying, ‘Well, my guys didn’t have half the tools they needed when they showed up.’ Well, you sent them from Mrs. Jones’ house, and they weren’t set up to work in a hospital which has its own stricter regulations. So, if you’re going to do it, be mindful of that and make a full commitment to be a professional.”

Visualizing the future

The future for Remediation Specialists is structured for continual growth and success, with the main focus being building the network and enriching current relationships for organic marketing that just works. As Levy discussed when closing out his conversation with the Cleanfax team, “We’re continuing to build our network of relationships that we have through the facilities and through the trade networks that we’re associated with. So, we’re constantly in the Florida Hospital Engineers Association, the American Builders Society, and other things like that. And, yes, we want them to pick us, but we’re also kind of ‘choosey’ on who we pick. We’re focused very much on growth and building relationships.”

For now, the brand continues to offer consistent and comprehensive remediation services to the healthcare workers and facilities that Florida relies on most during these summer storm seasons and beyond.