Air Date: 10-28-2011| Episode: 225
Will Lamb took a huge financial gamble and as a result has built one of the most successful contents cleaning and restoration firms in the country...
Full Description:
Will Lamb took a huge financial gamble and as a result has built one of the most successful contents cleaning and restoration firms in the country. Will walked away from his family’s prospering carpet cleaning and water damage restoration business, to follow his dream by starting a business in personal property restoration, a market sector that he felt was under served. Will Lamb’s business AmRestore does contents restoration and only contents cleaning and restoration. Over the course of his experience in the field, Will has moved to the head of the pack amassing the secrets of success: two of those secrets are developing technical processes and facilities second to none.
Z-Man’s Blog:
Back to the future
When I entered the disaster restoration field in the early 1970s, there were some definite lines of business demarcation. General contractors did demolition, reconstruction and painting while cleaning contractors washed the structure, cleaned the contents and handled smoke odor removal. There were two differing approaches to the restoration of contents and personal property. In cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago the contractors’ preference was to routinely pack and transport personal property to large facilities for cleaning, restoration and storage. Elsewhere contractors preferring to do the work on location whenever practical. Between 1970s-80s a restoration firm with a furniture refinishing shop and ultrasonic cleaning capability was pretty much as sophisticated as it got. Now the cleaning and restoration of contents has really come of age and Will Lamb is a new age contents restoration pioneer.
Will Lamb’s firm AMRestore of Maryland routinely cleans and restores a wide range of personal property previously considered either un-restorable or which needed to be subcontracted to a specialist at great cost. Will has acquired costly specialized equipment and processes to clean and restore electronics, photographic media, clothing, etc., sent staff to Florence, Italy to learn art conservation and developed proprietary cleaning and inventory management processes. Will has five attributes that impress me: the guts to believe in and follow his dream, the creativity to develop new and better processes, the passion to seek ongoing improvement, the vision to recognize valuable technology and resources in related fields and the patience to develop and stick to his plan.
Nuggets mined from today’s interview include:
•Set the customer’s expectations, under promise and over deliver.
•Learn to follow your instincts and turn down jobs that don’t feel right.
•Search and adapt technology from other industries.
•CHAT- the components of cleaning are Chemistry, Heat, Agitation and Time.
•Pack contents to attain processing efficiency.
•Documentation, documentation, documentation.
Today’s introductory comments: “Stuff” by the late, great comedic genius George Carlin.
Z-Man signing off
