Restoration Rewind

Delta Development Group Monthly Newsletter

August 2014

One Year Down… And many more to go! It is said that the first year of running a brand new business is the hardest. If that is the case, we have a couple more offices that have surpassed that mark. In June, Delta Disaster Services of Salt Lake South and owner Shane McKnight reached one year in business. Shane and his staff have taken this new business by the reins and run with it. They ramped up very fast and have been running on all cylinders,

solidifying themselves as the premier restoration firm in the Salt Lake area.

Delta Disaster Services of Northern Colorado will also have one year candle on their cake as of mid-August. Within the first 30 days of the office opening their doors, the northern Colorado area was hit with a catastrophe level hail storm AND the history making Colorado floods. Adam and Caroline Hornback, owners, had to jump in head first and from there they never looked back. The two are very motivated, incredibly hard working and have met the challenge head on. Says Adam on the first year in business, “When I look back at this last year, I must say that our business has been growing

faster than I would have ever expected. We have quickly gained a reputation for our quick response times, positive attitudes, and high quality work. I have been complimented by both insurance agents and adjusters saying “I like what your company is doing”. This just re-affirms that the Delta way of doing business is turning heads up here. New referrals continue to come in every day and I don’t see things changing.”

His partner in business and in life, Caroline, echoed his thoughts with a quote from Henry David Thoreau, "Success usually comes to those too busy to be looking for it." She felt those words of wisdom speak exactly to their experience thus far. “Our first year has been exactly that...very busy and yet successful. We are rapidly emerging as Northern Colorado's premier full service restoration company and have established a trustworthy relationship with our clients, agents, employees and subcontractors. But, more importantly, we are recognized as a local company who is actively involved in and gives back to the very community that has helped make us successful. We are here today because of our families, friends, loyal and dedicated employees, the ongoing support from DDG and those in our community who have helped us achieve this level of success. We are grateful to every one of them and look forward to many more successful years.

We are very proud of these two, as we are with all of our offices. We will continue to celebrate as many succession points as we possibly can. If you have stories that you would like to share as well make sure that you send them over to us. We don’t want to miss anything!

Change is Good

There are many ways to build a successful restoration firm, and there are many options in marketing and attracting referral sources. Over the years, Delta Disaster Services of Denver has relied very heavily on vendor programs for business. Currently our book of business is about 60% vendor relationships or direct repair referrals. While there is a benefit in knowing that on the first of every month, you can wake up knowing that you will have X number of jobs coming in based on rotational losses in your market area. The vendor relationships also have many demanding requirements that the restoration contractor must adhere to. Contacting the customer within X number of minutes, uploading estimates within X number of days, making sure to use a particular carrier's guidelines and price lists, the list goes on and on.

Over the next months and extending into the coming years, we are going to put into motion new marketing plans that will help us lesson that 60% vendor dependency. We are going to start to market to additional referral sources to include property managers, HOA’s and create some aggressive plumbing programs. It is also our intention to begin aggressively optimizing our Denver website, company landing page, and also jump into the arena of Google ad words as well as other forms of social media.

We will be sure to keep you all abreast of our successes and learning curve as we go through this marketing shift. We feel that overall, non-vendor relationships are more sustainable in the long run. It also creates less stress in the work environment and consequently less turnover of employees.

Let the games begin!

Are you out there?

Our search for great contractors to join the Delta Disaster Services network never ends. The current efforts are everywhere, branching out into many different areas in order to find the right people. Steve Chapman, Vice President of Business Development, has been tirelessly working the rooms of some large home builder tradeshows spreading the message. At the PCBC Tradeshow in San Francisco California he walked away with some very encouraging leads for the California market. The best showing yet was at the Sunbelt Builders Tradeshow in San Antonio. Because of some direct mail, pre-marketing efforts, there were attendees that sought out our booth and engaged in conversation from the very beginning. Both are excellent markets for a Delta Disaster Services and we are very excited to see how those develop over the coming weeks.

Another focus has been on direct mailing efforts. Our specifically targeted mailing campaign runs over the course of about 8 weeks with those on the list receiving an informational postcard or letter approximately every other week throughout the campaign. Those promotions have been focused on Phoenix and Texas and have also produced a number of promising leads.

And we aren’t stopping there, we also have brought on an assistant for Steve who is going to work behind the scenes simply making cold calls to contractors in various markets. We have an email blast that goes out to all the members of NARI once a quarter. And an email blast dropping soon to architects. Whew!

All of these efforts cannot trump a solid referral. We offer a $1,000 referral fee to anyone who introduces us to a candidate who ends up being a match and joins the network. If you know someone who may be interested please direct them to the franchise website www.delta-us.com or feel free to put them in touch with Steve Chapman.

Golfing for Good

The first annual Delta Disaster Services of Northern Colorado Golf Tournament was held July 11th and was a phenomenal success. Hosting a golf tournament, or any charity event for that matter, is extremely hard work. The vigilant marketing efforts of Cammy Seaman and the rest of the staff definitely paid off.

This, their first tournament saw about 150 foursomes play the greens, and raised approximately $5,500 for The Kawasaki Kids Foundation. The Kawasaki Kids

Foundation is an organization formed to help the children and the families of the children diagnosed with Kawasaki disease. Kawasaki disease is a serious illness that causes inflammation of the entire body, including the coronary arteries. Kawasaki disease is the #1 acquired heart disease in children ages 0-6. The group is specially connected to this disease through a close friend whose son suffers from Kawasaki disease.

Many of our offices, have seen great success with golf tournaments as a charity event. We always encourage our offices to give back to the community that is supporting them. If you want to do your own charity event feel free to reach out to us or any of the locations that have hosted these tournaments. We can all work very hard to establish Delta as a strong member of any community they are in.

Content Inventory Systems

There are many ways to address the proper documentation of both restorable and non-restorable contents. All franchisees are introduced to the content processes during their initial training. However, it typically does not make sense until they get their first large fire loss, and then they need to figure things out in real time. Real quickly! A number of our offices have recently taken on large fire jobs this past month. Many of them included content evaluations, documentation, transportation and restoration at their facilities.

Our Denver location currently uses I-pads to document all contents taken off of site. Most franchisees, use handwritten inventory sheets to assess and document all contents on their job sites. As the world changes, so do the tools to address content inventories. Currently we are talking to a number of software companies to determine what program or programs are best to refer to our franchisees.

Contents restoration is a very profitable arena. The more volume you take on, the more you can reinvest in your operations, facilities and personnel. We will keep you abreast of our findings. However, if you would like to discuss this further or in more detail please contact Michael Mastous directly.

Bringing in the Biz

Check out this dashboard from Rosey Rubino, Business Development Specialist for Delta Disaster Services of Southern Colorado. Rosey has become known in her market and throughout the Delta network as a rock star when it comes to pounding the pavement, pressing for business and bringing in the jobs. GREAT WORK ROSEY! If anyone out there needs some marketing advice or wants to talk best practices feel free to contact Rosey. You can also start a forum with your question on the Intranet so that everyone can answer and share their thoughts. Keep up the great work!

New Referrals:

Name Referred by Type Date

Marian McAnally Kelly @ Sutherland SF Water 7/14/2014

Cullen Malone Scott Anderson Agency Water 7/15/2014

Michelle & Josh Ortiz Scott Anderson Agency Water 7/15/2014

Ken Slyvester Hope @ Brown SF Water 7/16/2014

Jean Raphel Brandon Crawford Farmers Water 7/17/2014

James Lloyd Sutherland SF Water 7/17/2014

Dee Brown Pat @ 1800 Water Damage Water 7/17/2014

Recap of Activities:

Marketing Calls Made: 7/14/2014 7/15/2014 7/16/2014 7/17/2014 7/18/2014 Totals Agents 0 0 0 0 12 12 Adjusters 0 0 0 0 0 0 Plumbers 0 0 0 0 0 0 Fire Departments 0 0 0 0 0 0 Property Manager 0 0 0 0 0 0 Events / Trade shows 0 0 0 0 0 0 Business Lunches 0 0 0 0 0 0 Other 0 0 0 0 0 0 Totals 0 0 0 0 12 12

Mortgage Companies…The Bane of Our Cash Flow

After having the “pleasure” of working directly with mortgage companies again over the past two weeks, I felt it relevant (at least top of mind for me) to talk again about mortgage companies. This seems to be something that everyone struggles with.

We have had numerous Go-to-Meetings, Wednesday Webinars and conversations about Mortgage Companies and Insurance Company Checks, but none of it seems to make sense when you are knee deep in the issue. If you ever have a problem with a mortgage company please do not hesitate to call and if you ever want to have additional training or just talk about the “process”, do not hesitate to call.

Some observations over the past weeks:

1. Every mortgage company has their own internal procedures. All are different but similar. Just when you think you have it figured out, it changes or you work with a different lender. Do not assume you know what you have to do… When in doubt ask.

2. IF you can get the customer to sign an “Authorization to Work Direct with Lender” form, it will help you expedite the process and get the money in quicker. This is your number one objective! If you cannot get them to sign the authorization, your next best option is to do conference calls with the customer and the mortgage company.

3. Sending everything to the lender at once is far more efficient and usually helps them keep things in order. However, you obviously cannot always do this. Send items as you get them and confirm they

were received. When they say they received it, document this; you may need that information later.

4. Never hesitate to argue with them and point out when they are in error. It may not get you anywhere but is always worth trying.

5. Never hesitate to ask for a supervisor.

6. Most mortgage companies use third party vendors to process all of the paperwork. Some of these vendors process checks for several mortgage companies.

Some General Assumptions you can make:

• It will take 48 hours for them to acknowledge anything you send. • Any claim over $10,000 will have a mortgage company (if there is one) on

the check(s). • Any check over $10,000 cannot be signed at a local branch bank. • Credit Unions are “usually” far easier to work with than the larger banks

(Wells, Chase, Citi, etc) • Any claim over $30,000 will have to have an inspection at the end. Jobs

larger than $30,000 may have two or three inspections. If you request draws, they will want to do an inspection for each draw. These are usually at 30%, 50% and 100%. You can always ask for draws.

Always remember your goal! Get the money into your office and bank account as soon as possible. This means you may have to do something that really does not make sense (such as a lien release on their form). Just do it and get it back to them! You will never win the argument.

Always remember their goal! These are “clerks” hired to track pieces of paper… They really do not have any power or ability to make a decision. The bank on the other hand wants to hold the money just as long as possible and keep their “deposits” as high as possible.

Hope this helps just a little! These processes have been developed over the years and we actually know as well as anyone out there how to collect the money and get the mortgage company to release it. This does not, however, remove or reduce the frustration. You always have the option of telling the home owner they have to pay you and work with the mortgage company themselves! However, most home owners do not have the funds to do this and it will limit the jobs and size of jobs you get.

Sometime in the next month, we will be updating the Intranet with Mortgage company contacts, forms that we have and information that hopefully will help everyone just a little more. If you have additional information we can add to the intranet, by all means let us know. There is no such thing as too much information!

We will leave you with this…

We can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the

very reason why you don't have something better.”

C. Joybell C.