I used to be a school teacher, and how I got into basement crack repair wasn't a straight line for me. As a kid I always loved having a business going, may it be lawn mowing jobs. I got too many jobs and had kids mowing lawns for me. That was when I was about 11.
I started buying apartment buildings and started doing flips before the word even came into play. We bought a house that had a fire and we knocked the house down but kept the foundation. The people wanted a finished basement, but the basement foundation had cracks in it. So, I talked to chemists, suppliers, and engineers and I fixed it. I had breakfast with a friend of mine who builds houses and he said, he had a bunch of homes that had cracks in the foundations and he asked if I could fix them. I said yes.
It dawned on me: there are a lot of homes with cracks in the foundations that no one is really addressing. So that is how I started. Then I started marketing it and it blossomed to MA, NH, CT and RI.
I love this business. What I think I love about this business is that I can see this business grow. I enjoy making the relationships with my customers, with other businesses that refer business to me. I enjoy solving a problem and getting it fixed. Problems that are annoying to people and that can also be a health issue. Not only that, I have seen my employees flourish with me in their personal lives and financial lives. It strikes me as unusual to see people who have a passion about this business like I have, fixing foundation cracks. Now I have second generation people working for me, which brings me a whole other avenue of enjoyment.
I have nurtured relationships in other industries. I start out marketing to realtors and other industries that deal with houses like pest control companies. We get referred to them by their customers. We always find out how people have heard of us, we do a survey about "how did we do" and we get back to those people. Then they have more faith in referring business to us.
We have done seminars to educate realtors and structural engineers so they can have an expert on their team who can deal with these problems. Everything is about service today. one thing that makes us different is that we answer the phone so you get to talk to a live person.
I also like to give back to the community. We do a lot with Habitat with Humanity. I'm asked to go into high schools and talk to kids who are taking business management courses or entrepreneurial course and we talk about success, what is success. I talk about my story. One thing I see is that a lot of these young adults have no idea that they can open their eyes, see an opportunity and take action to have a career out of solving somebody else's problems. There is also a huge need for people going into the trades. With supply and demand, labor rates going up, if someone wants to start a business in the trades they can be the next blue collar millionaire. I've had lots of kids shadow me and I have a great time doing that.