 and welcome to Condo Insider on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we are going to discuss COVID-19 health concerns related to remediation and also just a better understanding of remediation companies and restoration companies and the services they provide. So today we have Anthony Nelson with Premier Restoration Hawaii. He is the Chief Commercial Officer. Welcome Anthony, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Can you hear me? I'm excited to be here. Yes, I can. Okay, great. Well, before we get started, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself, how long we've been in Hawaii, how you got into the business? I always joke with everybody and say nobody was sitting in the sandbox when they're three and four years old going, I want to get into property restoration when I get older. Everybody comes up here, much like condo management stuff, you find a niche, there's something about it that you really enjoy and you decide to stick with it. So for me, I started in property restoration straight out of high school. I will be 38 in a few days and so that'll make 20 years that I've been doing this. My wife and I, we moved here in 2009. I started working with a company called Maui Fire and Flood and that was kind of the building blocks that became premier restoration. And where did you move from just out of curiosity? Just outside of Detroit, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oh wow, boy, big difference. Okay, well, thank you. Can you let folks know, before I got into, I'm more on the real estate rental management side of things, but before I got in the business, I didn't even know these type of businesses were even around and what they did. Can you just give us a general idea of what all of the different facets that your company supports? Absolutely. So whenever anybody asks what I do for a living, I say I fix homes and businesses after they have a water or fire incident. And so those are typically, they encapsulate a majority of our services. So we're segregated in the four different divisions. We have mitigation services, which is everything to get a property clean, safe and dry. We have reconstruction services, which is everything to put back what the mitigation guys had to take out to get it clean, safe and dry. We also have contents, which is hacking and moving, as well as restoration of personal property. So if we need to remove somebody's floor, we have a team of guys that'll come and move that stuff. And then more out of frustration of just watching projects get delayed, we started an abatement division that does asbestos and lead abatement about three years ago, just so then that way those hazards when we run into them, they don't get in our way anymore and we can just keep moving. Wow, okay, that's great. And you also, we just were speaking a little bit before we started that you handle trauma, as you call it, trauma cleaning as well. So that's an extra one. And now with the whole COVID-19 pandemic, I'm sure your business has changed somewhat. So how has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business from an operational standpoint and how you do business and then in terms of the business that you're doing? So internally, we, you know, a majority of our teams were kind of used to working remotely. So when we said, hey, if you don't have to be in the office, don't come into the office. Most of our team adapted to that well. You know, those of us that have young children that are struggling and trying to find that balance, just like everybody else in the world. But for the most part, we did okay with that transition. It's the, we're based in safety. And so a lot of the things that we do are relative to safety. So for us to implement some additional social distancing, wearing face masks, taking temperatures every day. A lot of the guys were like, oh, okay, cool. This is just like this that we do on asbestos abatement projects. It makes sense. You know, for our teams, it was the bigger curve was explaining exactly what the virus was, how it moves and how they could use the PPE they already have to keep themselves safe. Because the number one thing that we're always concerned about at Premier is making sure whatever environment our technicians are in and whatever hazards are present there, they make sure that they don't bring that stuff home to their families. Oh yeah, my gosh, absolutely. Do you, I would think typically you're not dealing with occupied properties. However, if there's some kind of a flood situation you may have tenants that you've got to have packed up and move to another location. And so in terms of how you are, how you are when you're interacting with them, has that changed as far as before COVID-19? Yeah, and so we're actually working in more occupied spaces now than we ever have. Most people in this environment don't want to move out. You know, even if we're having to take their kitchen out because they had a water event, most folks are choosing to stay in because they'd rather be at home during these times than trying to get relocated to a hotel or something. We did a, we looked at our numbers. This was probably six months ago. And one in three of our customers chooses to remain at home while we're performing work. And that's because most folks just they don't wanna leave home. You know, we have pets, you know, our kids, they have the routines. And so if we can create an environment where you can live a semi-normal life and we can get work done, that's usually the best of both worlds. Wow, that's interesting. Who are your typical clients? Who's picking up the phone and calling you? So we, all across the board, we have some insurance customers that make referrals to us, building managers, property managers. We do a lot of work with plumbers because they're on the front lines catching these water damage leaks. You know, anybody that has a finger in property, whatsoever, they're usually the folks who are calling us. And is it always safe for people to stay in their homes? You know, what if you're doing some type of mold remediation or even like the asbestos or something like that? I mean, are there times when you just have to say, listen, you're just not gonna be able to stay in your home safely? Absolutely, you know, significant events like fires, the majority of the fires folks end up having to move out. Significant water damage events, they end up having to move out in the pre-COVID-19 world if you didn't have a functioning kitchen or bathroom. Yeah, you're probably gonna, you're not gonna wanna be there. And so, yeah. And I'm gonna look at it from a rental manager's perspective. If we're to call you and, you know, of course the insurance company typically wants us to react right away, stop the leak and begin efforts, which sometimes owners don't understand that. They think they need to wait for some type of approval, but the insurance companies actually like to see that you've taken action. Tell me about your relationship and communication with insurance companies in a situation or a scenario, as I just mentioned, like once you've been brought in, do you then communicate directly with the insurance company? Typically we will, and we like to keep, so we have a project management platform that we keep all of our communication in, and our communication is usually both ways, both to our customers and to our insurance folks the justers that are working on those projects. And the main reason for that is, is you can envision a scenario in which we're trying to meet the needs of our customer, and the needs of our insurance customer are two different things. And so we like to be actively involved in those conversations and making sure that our customers understand why maybe the terms and provisions of their policy won't afford them to replace their laminate floor with ceramic top. Yes, because they'll only typically put it back to whatever it was when it was built, and originally, yeah, the original condition, but it is a good time to upgrade if they're thinking of doing that, and they have the funds to do that. So, and so you handle everything to the end to flooring, cabinetry, painting, everything. Your company does all that, or do you sub some of it out, or is it all folks within your organization? So we self-perform 80% of our work. Some of the larger stuff that we do, like we have guys that are used to doing drywall, but not used to doing a whole house worth of drywall. They're used to doing drywall in a kitchen or a bathroom. So smaller stuff, we self-produce. All of our mitigation contents and abatement we self-produce, but a section of the reconstruction work, if the project is larger, we'll subcontract it out just because the emphasis that we have is more multi-trade, whereas if we can part it out and make it more efficient and move faster by bringing more bodies on site, it makes sense. When you have water type of situations, do you have an opinion or do you have thoughts on, wow, if they had just done this or just done that, this situation would have been, would not have happened, it would not have occurred. And if so, just give a couple of little hints that you would suggest to people so they don't have to call you for your services. How trying to take business away from you? No, no, no, no, no. I like to take pride in being the one and done. Like if somebody has a fire, I usually tell them, well, cool, you got this done. You'll never have to deal with this again, right? Because the odds are just crazy if you have to. So the first thing I always tell people is there always seems to be some apprehension and actually calling us in when a water damage event has occurred. And I can tell you that for every 24 hours that goes by that you delay, you multiply, you can effectively multiply the cost of that project by three. So if you wait a full 72 hours, the cost of that project could go from $1,000 to $10,000, simply because things that I could have been able to save on day one, I now have to remove because they've started to grow mold or they have concerns with bacteria. Right, and there's also a chance that the insurance company won't cover it. They wanna see an active leak, right? They don't want it a month later when this whole nightmare has occurred or even weeks later. I know they want it to deal with it when it's active immediately. So yeah, yeah. And so regarding some of the things that you've put into place since COVID, you didn't have in place prior to COVID-19, tell us a little bit about that. So our social safety program, we've got an internal document that is more oriented towards the social safety of our office space and our staff as they're moving and working in our office space. Externally for our technicians, it's pretty simple. We started taking temperatures for everybody. We did involve a health questionnaire that everybody can go through. We're doing weekly safety trainings and since this became an issue, every single one of our safety trainings has been about COVID-19. Some of it is just updates letting the technicians know. The other one was, hey, if you get into a pinch and you're going directly to a job site, you don't have access to a thermometer, here's how you can use your thermal imaging camera to check the temperatures of everybody on the site, so then that way you know they're safe. Every technician received several face masks. We did want to give our technicians branded face masks, but there was a lead time, so we got some and then we got another rush of them. And then we're also helping our customers if some of our customers don't have a face mask, we'll supply that for them. And then we're doing courtesy disinfection of all the key touch points on every job site we go to. Door knobs, like if the techs are there for a long period of time, we'll clean the bathrooms, make sure the bathrooms are clean. And that takes care of both our concerns and making sure that our technicians are staying safe, as well as the concerns of making sure that everything's safe for our customers. And I've seen, because I get your notices, that you're also, I believe, you're also providing training to people outside of your organization. Is that correct? Absolutely. Am I correct in that? Yeah. Yeah, I've never have been like a big media guy, but I've had more opportunities to talk to folks in the past couple of weeks than I think ever in my professional history. And I take it, we take our responsibility to our communities very seriously. And usually the way this comes out is there will be mask flooding, like a couple of years ago, we had mask flooding in East Oahu. And I said, okay, our job is to go into these neighborhoods and make sure everybody knows of all the hazards that are present and how to mitigate against them. And if they're doing the work themselves great, like let's figure out a way to give them some knowledge that keeps them safe. And then, obviously we get so busy during those periods that we have more work than we can shake a stick at. In this environment, most people don't have the working knowledge of how a disinfectant works. And so we're putting a lot of our time and energy into that and just making sure everybody knows exactly how a disinfectant works and what you need to do to make sure that you're doing what you wanna do. Absolutely. Anthony, I'm gonna stop. I wanna get back to this, but we're gonna take a short little break. And we're gonna come back to this subject. So thank you everyone for staying with us and continuing the second half, condo insider with Anthony Nelson, and we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and finding greatness. I feature a wide range of amazing guests who share valuable insights about how going beyond the lines leads to success in everything you do in life. I'm looking forward to you joining me every Monday at 11 a.m., aloha. Condo Insider on Think Tech Hawaii, and we're here with Anthony Nelson with Premier Restoration Hawaii. And before the break, we were discussing some trainings that he's doing, and also I wanted Anthony to tell us about additional sanitation services that you're offering communities and businesses and whatnot, so go ahead. Thank you so much. So we have our background in making things clean and making things safe, whether that's a mold remediation project where we're having to critically clean every surface or abatement. And then we also do sewer backups, which we have the direct exposure and risk to bacteria, viruses. And so for us to step into our new world of COVID-19 and offer cleaning services, a lot of our guys have already have that base knowledge training and know exactly how to clean and disinfect. So we decided, we were looking at it, we wanted to be real with our customers. I feel like now is a time when you see a lot of folks trying to capitalize on fear. And that bothers me. And so I wanted to make sure that we were very deliberate with our service offerings. So we have three different levels of cleaning that we're offering. Tier one is just cleaning and disinfection of the key touch points in your office or whatever space you have. And then that also comes, we do send our technicians out and we tell them to educate everybody on site exactly what they're doing and why. The intention is, look, I know that our service is expensive and you're probably not gonna call us to do this every week. I wanna give you the tools and knowledge so then that way you can continue to do this every week. That's great. Tier two is the same cleaning and disinfection of key touch points along with a deep clean of all areas that you specify. And this is more to assist with the perception these are maybe high net worth clients that wanna want the assurance of knowing that a space has been cleaned and that a third party did it. We're providing that. And then our tier three service is only for suspect and confirmed COVID-19 exposures. And that is cleaning and disinfection of everything, every service. And who typically is calling you to do that type of service? Is it someone who's had a tenant and then they vacated and they need to re-rent it? Or, I mean, what? It's been a mixed bag, honestly. It's been, we've had situations like that. We've had situations in hospitality. We've had situations in like commercial office spaces where somebody showed up and they didn't know that they were ill and they found out after the fact and we went in and cleaned up after them. So, and a lot of it was very, very precautionary, which was good. It was good to see folks alarmed and making the right call. No, that's great. Are you, is your company only in Oahu or are you on other islands as well? So, Oahu, Maui and Kona. Oh, really? And I am in Kona right now, as a matter of fact. Awesome. He knows that. Okay, well, I was gonna say, talked about the training. Somebody wanted to participate or view one of your trainings. Are they available as like webinars or how do they participate in that? So, right now, well, a lot of it has just been me on the phone and on Zoom calls recently. We did wanna prepare like some more formal education. So, we will have a, we're structuring it as a template. So, if you're a business and you have a space that is facing the public and you're saying, hey, I wanna have a programmer, a policy, a guideline that I can use to make sure that my space is clean for people when they come in. We're assembling that guideline and I hope to have it up on our website or our social media for free download by tomorrow. So, that's just our commitment to our communities and making sure that we're giving knowledge where we can. That's great. I could see how just that alone could snowball into almost like a little sub-business where I can see in the future, everything's changing, everybody's thinking outside the box where you would wanna have a company with 300 people or a large company almost go through the training and receive some type of certification that they've had that training. I could see in condo buildings, all of the security staff and the people in the lobby, maintenance people, maybe them requiring them to take some type of an actual formal, almost like a continuing education class or certification. So that, I don't know if you wanna get that deep into it but that could be something. And that's the next part we are, so we wanna give this document for free to anybody who needs it. And then if you say, hey, look, I want more or I want somebody to help me prepare this document and actually show up on site and show us how to do this. The way that we're structuring it is we will show up, we will do the initial clean with you, we will spend time to train your staff, we will help you identify key touch points that you need to clean daily, we'll help you identify those areas that you should be deep cleaning weekly and assemble that document and give you a certification that you've received some education. Because I'm not ignorant to the fact that if a lot of business owners are concerned about making sure that they're informing their customers that their space is clean too. And we wanna give that peace of mind if somebody's willing to go through the education. Yeah, I think that going forward, if I knew once the restaurant's open, for example, that a restaurant had gone through some deep cleaning maybe like your level three, that would maybe make me feel better than just having their employees come in a day or two before and just not necessarily following a specific process. I was talking to somebody earlier today that was stating that that's really a problem that there aren't specific processes in place. Actually, I was talking to you earlier just basically, yeah, clean it. Well, what does that mean to what level? It's so vague. So needs to have a bit more structure, I feel like for the health department or somebody. Yeah, and the structure, like the CDC's done a good job of putting recommendations out, but they're vague and they're broad because it's coming from the federal government and they're not specific to your place. Like the CDC website says, clean and disinfect key touch points. Well, what are the key touch points in my business? What should I be concerned about? And that's where I think a lot of folks are kind of clamming up and they're getting lost and they're just looking for some answer. And that's what our intent is, is to give people a good like to stand on so then that way they can do the right thing. Because I think everybody, everybody I've talked to about this, nobody sitting here going, I want to take advantage of this situation. Everybody sitting there going, oh my gosh, if somebody showed up and got a plate lunch from my place and then got sick because I didn't do what I was supposed to do, I'm going to feel horrible. And I want to be able to make sure that that doesn't happen as much as possible. Yeah, and you know, it's funny, you don't think about things when there isn't a fear out there, but now just hugging someone or you do realize going from, you're going to the grocery store, how many things you touch, you're touching cans, you may be looking at something, putting it back. I mean, just, it's just amazing how many things you touch every day. And you just take it for granted, you took it for granted in the past. A lot of curiosities is kind of off the subject of the COVID-19, but what percentage of those categories that you mentioned at the beginning, what percentage of your efforts out in the field, which one takes up majority of your time? Is it leaks? Is it fire? Is it asbestos? So a majority of our time is spent with water damage removal. I'm going to pull up my pictures here. So image six is a good example of our emergency water damage response. So a majority of our work is us showing up and extracting water and drying structures. That's 80% of our mitigation business. Image number nine is of our fire damage response. That's the other side of our business that is bigger, is us showing up to sites, making sure that they're secure and making sure that they're safe. How soon upon a phone call, how soon do you get to a property to start mitigation efforts for water? Within two hours, and usually we have technicians across, like I have technicians all the way out in Makaha, I have some downtown. So within two hours, we respond to 98% of our calls. The other 2%, if you called me and you said, Anthony, can you go to Hana and take care of this for me? Yeah, absolutely, I can, but I can't be there in two hours. So there are, and you being in Kona, like if we got a bang over the saddle to get to Hilo, yeah, it might not be there in two hours, but three, yeah, we'll be there. Yeah, no, I totally understand, especially here. I'm normally in Honolulu, but I just happen to be here right now. Until Inner Island, travel begins again, so without quarantine. So anyway, are there any interesting, we only have about a minute and a half left, but is there anything else that you'd really like to say to the community right now? So the number one thing, like if there's one thing I wish everybody in the world knew right now, is that cleaning and disinfecting are two completely different things. So if you go and you apply a disinfectant to a surface that is not clean, there's the possibility that that disinfectant won't disinfect that surface. It'll just disinfect whatever soil has accumulated on that surface. The way that these disinfectants are designed to work is to work on a previously clean surface. So tell me what product is used preferably to clean it, and then what product is used, common product is used preferably to disinfect. I have one here, like this is, I'm at home. So at home we use mires to clean off our kitchen countertop, so this is what we're gonna clean. And most durable surfaces, you can use anything, you can use pledge, whatever is normally under your cabinet to clean, you can use that. And then we ran out of disinfectant at my house, so I made the CDC recommended disinfectant, which is four tablespoons of bleach into a quart of water, and that's what we're using to disinfect at home. I love it. That's worth watching the whole show for just to get that tip at the end. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate working with you and your crew before we even got to this point of the interview and providing such great information. We really appreciate all your efforts supporting the community and educating everyone. And I know I'll see you out and about in town once I get back. So thanks so much, Anthony. Yeah, thank you for having me. All right, thank you everyone. Thank you for joining us at Condo Insider and we will see you soon here on Think Tech Kauai, aloha.