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As the contractor approached the 20,000 square foot home, he saw a large, colorful, “ice ball” on the front lawn, just to one side of the front doors. It was later discovered that the ball was actually a wadded and frozen (it was winter) pile of priceless oriental rugs – well maybe they weren’t “priceless”, they were appraised at around $200,000.

Other contractors arrived on the scene and explained that the walls could not be saved, many artifacts were too far gone and the rugs were a loss. The contents pro just quietly assured the owner that he could save most, if not all of it.

He won the RIA’s coveted Phoenix award for his efforts and returned the oriental rugs in pre-loss condition. He turned the owner’s indoor basketball court into the world’s largest vortex drying facility and to this day he won’t say how much he saved or restored (he wants to respect the owner’s privacy), but he will admit to millions.

Insurance company administrators want that sort of ingenuity working for them! So they watch, they listen to what their adjusters and agents experience and they remember.

Sometimes the contents pros do something that only saves a few thousand dollars on a job – they restore a leather couch, they process and transport a masterpiece paining that was thought to be a total loss and in days the insurance company has saved a small fortune.

“It’s a question of attitude and training,” says Barb Jackson CR, a spokesperson for the contents industry. “Years ago restoration professionals and insurance adjusters alike, might look at a damaged art work or scorched furniture, or even saturated clothing, sheets and blankets, then say, ‘Just haul it away, it can’t be saved.’ And that was because they had spent so many years believing that contents were just ‘in the way’ of the structural work.

“Today, contents pros can save the insurance industry serious capital on virtually every job – but first they have to develop the attitude that allows them to believe that almost everything can be restored, instead of replaced. Once you begin to believe that, you begin to look for possibilities (and sometimes you just create a possibility where there was none only a moment ago).”

This was a training facility with a full-sized, 2 bedroom house inside, as well as several separate “transparent wall” stand-alone flood rooms. Students can see the effect of flooding on drywall, different types of insulation, and the contents in the rooms. It is a huge facility with a large, comfortable classroom. But what impressed me most was who built the training facility. This wasn’t a training center set up by an insurance institute or university. No, this was set up by a regional chapter of a restoration company franchise. They found a competitive difference when they added formalized training, especially in increased referrals from insurance companies. And they are seeing positive results in their bottom line as well: costs are down and profits are up.

But most companies can’t afford a large training facility like this one. Studies done by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) show that smaller companies devote much less time to training. The reason? On a cost-per-employee basis, it can cost more. But training still provides a good return on investment if you do it right.

Here are some tips:

• Focus on the areas where you need help (breakage, lost time waiting for equipment, etc.).
• Define your objective: do you want the training to save time or money? Do you want it to help retain good employees (and weed out the bad ones!).
• Leverage supervisor and team lead training by having them train others.
• Consider webinars, workshops, and other on-line training.
• Invest in on-site or remote intensive workshops, where your managers and supervisors are truly focused on the material.

We have seen dramatic improvements in performance and enthusiasm among our customer’s employees, and have testimonials from companies that have increased their bottom line by investing in training. Total Contentz offers quite a few options for personalized training, and we plan on adding more on-line training for front-line employees in the near future.

If you have a need for a specific topic that needs the “Total Contentz Touch”, be sure and let me know!

For example, let us imagine that “Grandpa” has a collection of now burned and water-logged Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines from a few decades ago, and he thinks they are collectors’ items. He values them at more than a thousand dollars.

The adjuster knows such things can be bought at a garage sale or flea market for a couple of hundred dollars. Tempers flare, Grandpa’s son (the homeowner) demands that an expert be brought in to value them.

The adjuster doesn’t feel that such an effort would be cost effective.

Then, a contents pro comes into the room and says, “Grandpa, I know where I can get a collection of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines from the 1940’s, some from the 1960’s and some from the 1970’s – there is even one with a story written by Dashiell Hammett – the guy who wrote the ‘Maltese Falcon’.

“They won’t be the ones you had, but they are a heck of a collection and they will have stories you have probably never seen before – I’m pretty sure I can get them for a price that the adjuster will find acceptable. What do you say?”

Where did she find such a collection at such a reasonable price? Ebay. They sell them by the hundreds.

Why didn’t anyone else think of that? Because they aren’t contents pros. Contents professionals are trained to deal with, well…contents.

They may not be experts in every case, but they know where to look for and find replacement items in many, many cases.

They prefer to restore rather than replace. But, when there is no other option – they often display skills that would baffle Sherlock Holmes!

Here are some of the best practices we recommend:

Be discreet. It’s important to ask permission before entering a room or opening a closet or drawer.

Be subtle. Don’t appear to give undue attention to the owner’s personal belongings, such as photos, letters and legal documents. Something as small as stopping the packing process to read the address on an envelope can make an owner who is feeling victimized and vulnerable suspicious that you are paying too much attention to his or her private items.

Avoid comments about the owner’s personal tastes. Most professionals know they should refrain from disparaging remarks about a person’s preferences for movies, music, art, books or home décor. However, some might think it builds rapport to say something like, “That is a terrific collection of Frank Sinatra records. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that they might be worth quite a bit, especially that one with the cover Mr. Sinatra signed himself.”

But what happens if that album goes missing, or the owner complains that the autographed cover was scuffed or damaged by the contents team? All that could have been avoided by simply doing an outstanding job of carefully packing each item without comment (and some digital photo inventory pictures of each item).

Eat only in designated areas. This may be counterintuitive for many restoration professionals. Structural restoration crews often eat where they work—on the roof, in the kitchen they are remodeling or on a roll of carpet they are about to install. Contents pros have to follow a different set of rules. It goes back to treating the owner’s valuables better than you would your own.

Picture this: You are taking a lunch break in the client’s fire-damaged bedroom. She walks in. It doesn’t matter that the walls are charred and the whole room smells like a campfire gone wrong. A stranger is casually eating fast food in her bedroom, the most private space in her home.

Items that have been declared total losses are not yours to take. Total loss items actually belong to the insurance companies. They paid for them when they cashed them out.

Don’t accept gifts from the insured. Thank the clients for their kindness, but respectfully decline. If they press the issue, explain that your company has a policy that does not allow you to accept gifts.

Give the insured their privacy. They are grieving. Do not eavesdrop, and do not loiter.

Handle the client’s belongings with care. You should treat the homeowner or business owner’s valuables better than your own. Also, don’t judge the owner’s items by your own values. If a client thinks something is important—it is! If an owner shows concern over particular items, immediately bring those items to the attention of the crew chief.

This last item is particularly important. We train contents team members that how they handle their clients’ belongings can affect the company’s chances of getting more jobs or getting blacklisted.

Wine bottles are a perfect example. If the owner of an expensive wine collection sees someone cramming the bottles into pasteboard boxes and hauling them out to the warm interior of a waiting truck, he knows his collection will decrease in value in a matter of minutes because the labels have been damaged. He will undoubtedly complain to the insurance company, which will in turn place the blame and insurance payment back on the contractor.

You may not know a 1787 Chateau Lafitte from a bottle of Thunderbird 2011, and it really doesn’t matter. With the proper training, you know that every bottle is handled the same way. It’s carefully wrapped and gently placed in a new shipping container to protect the bottle and the label. The client will notice this level of care being taken.

Wrapping an expensive bottle of wine carefully may seem like a no-brainer, but a wine collector expects the worst from non-collectors. If a worker does just one positive, unexpected thing, it can make all the difference. The owner will praise the agent and adjuster for choosing such a well-trained company. He will also tell all of his fellow oenophiles about the company that took such good care of his collection.

When you pay careful attention to the feelings of the clients during such difficult times in their lives, it pays big dividends to your company. It helps the insurance agent and adjuster because well-served clients renew their policies and refer friends and loved ones. When clients are happy, agents and adjusters are happy. When they are happy, contents pros get more jobs.

The castle took over 10 years to complete and included antique fireplaces, grand ceilings, massive custom-made furniture, hand cast moldings, Italian marble floors, stained glass, a vintage slate billiard table, Oriental rugs, tapestries, even an elegant, full-sized theater, an authentic Irish pub and an indoor basketball court.

Then, one cold January night, Mr. Grindstaff took his wife out for a dinner celebration and while they were away, lightning struck his home and started a fire that took 24 firefighters and 70,000 gallons of water to put out.

The house was saturated—so much so that the firemen cut holes in the structure just to let the water gush out before it began to tear the home apart.

What a man saves during a fire in his home says a lot about him. When Steven Grindstaff arrived on the scene, he didn’t try to get to his wife’s jewels. He didn’t grab a priceless painting or even a strongbox with important documents—no, Grindstaff went directly to the family dogs and got them out just fine. There were lots of other things that didn’t survive nearly as well.

The next day experts came in and told Grindstaff that walls would have to be torn out, “…down to the studs,” the beautiful molding would have to be destroyed, the wood floors were a total loss—and room by room they gave their dismal reports about what could not be saved.

But locally there was a fellow, Bob Pakrul, who had a restoration company, Spotless Carpet Cleaners and Janitorial Services, Inc., with a sterling reputation. He wasn’t the biggest in the area, or even the best known. He wasn’t even a full service contractor. The way Bob put it, “We are a drying out company – that’s what we do.”

He dries out contents, walls, floors – anything that is still standing. Any object that can be placed in a drying chamber is fair game. Pakrul says, “If it hasn’t already fallen down or isn’t about to fall, we can dry it and restore it.”

The experts pointed to things like a magnificent 20-foot “medallion” created from plaster and gold leaf by European artists and presented as part of one of the high arched ceilings – it was saturated and would have to go. Suspended from it was a grand chandelier (which was once seen in the motion picture, “The Haunting”). Maybe the chandelier could be salvaged – no one offered an opinion.

When Bob arrived on the scene, the first thing he saw was a pile of priceless Oriental rugs thrown carelessly into the front yard and so saturated with water that they had become a solid mass of ice and antique fabric.

Inside he saw the medallion in the ceiling. Could he do anything to save it?

“Yes,” Pakrul thought to himself.

“The theater?”

Pakrul nodded yes.

But surely he could not save the wood floors – the experts insisted that wood floors so thoroughly wet could not possibly be saved.

“Yes they can,” Pakrul answered.

The little pub? Pakrul said, “Yes.”

The upholstery? The wood furniture? The giant table that sat 18 people? The slate billiard table that was standing in a pool of water?

Pakrul went room to room, heard the experts, ignored them and assured Mr. Grindstaff that it all could be saved.

Steve was justifiably skeptical. On the one hand, here stood men of reputation and experience saying that it was all a “write off.” And there stood a man who owned a carpet cleaning and janitorial service saying he could restore it.

Pakrul was a one man minority. But there was that one thing – that one little problem – his reputation. He was known as a man who could do what he said he could do.

Grindstaff wanted Pakrul to be right. All these wonders that were built into his home were about to be trashed, unless this one man was right.

“Well, go ahead and get started and we’ll see how things go,” he said to Pakrul uncertainly.

And the job began.

Pakrul knew that Steve was self-insured and that with all the experts telling him he was crazy for trusting Bob, he was going to need some convincing before he would allow him to launch the “big plan.” So, he called his friend, one of the industry’s top experts, Chuck Dewald.

He swung in the next day and looked over Pakrul’s strategies—then he walked Mr. Grindstaff through the house, creating the vision of what Bob was going to do. Steve knew Chuck by reputation and through research (he had “checked him out.”) As the morning wore on, he moved from uneasy skepticism, to hope, to full support.

This was going to work.

The Oriental rugs were moved to Pakrul’s headquarters and his staff started to restore them – later, they would be returned in pre-loss condition.

At Total Contentz, we have a slogan, “Adapt, create, proceed.”When we told that to Bob Pakrul, he said, “This whole job was exactly that. There were no precedents for anything we did. We created all sorts of new things to make our plan work.”

His facility was fully equipped for contents jobs, with everything from dehumidifiers and carpet cleaning equipment, to a drying chamber, and even an ultrasonics machine—but it wasn’t big enough to hold the massive furniture, drapes, carpets, antiques and any number of assorted treasures.

But Pakrul adapted, created and proceeded. He saw that Mr. Grindstaff owned an indoor basketball court and wondered if he could turn it into the world’s largest drying chamber – and of course, that is precisely what he did…using Chuck Dewald’s vortex drying techniques.

Next, he hired the best subcontractor he could find to move the contents into the basketball court.

Meanwhile, another crew was brought in to carefully inspect, evaluate, clean, pack and prepare the antiques and other fragile items for pack out.

Finally, a moving-van style truck was used to carry the items 300 yards from the main house to the indoor court.

Big items, like the massive glass top for the dining room table, were unattached, carried by as many as eight men and moved to the drying area as well.

The antique pool table got the same meticulous treatment and the exhausted transport group doggedly moved each piece to safety.

The huge medallion in the ceiling of the entryway was saved, the wood floors were saved, the antiques, the china, the contents of the pub, the theater, the furniture, the mantel—everything that Bob Pakrul said could be saved, was.

When asked how much money he saved for Steven Grindstaff and his wife, Pakrul just said, “Out of respect for Mr. Grindstaff ’s privacy, I’m not going to share that, but I will say that if you go online, have a look at his home and see what thousands of other people have seen in recent months, you will have a pretty good idea of how well things turned out.”

Why did Steve choose Pakrul’s company over all the others—especially when all the experts said it was a foolish move? Some people think it was because he recognized a kindred spirit.

Pakrul doesn’t question it. He just knows he will do it again— when the job calls for it.

The Total Contentz philosophy has always been “restore more, replace less.” And now we would like to add our praise to the RIA’s highest honor—Bob Pakrul is this year’s Phoenix Award winner for “Innovation in Restoration.”

Congratulations Bob, Spotless Restoration and all who worked so professionally to complete this job!

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, insurance claims filing begins for homeowners.