Water Damage, Mold, and Winning the Insurance Fight - Anastasiia Schwab of Total Home Rescue

Cross-released from Unscripted Home Improvement, because the playbook in this one travels. Anastasiia Schwab, who goes by Ana, owns Total Home Rescue, a water damage restoration, mold remediation and build-back company working across DC, Virginia and Maryland. Tennessee gets the same burst pipes, the same summer humidity and the same insurance adjusters, so the tactics carry even though the truck does not.

She built the company from close to zero dollars after hearing that water damage is usually covered by insurance, and she now runs ten employees and roughly fifteen projects a month, heading for forty-five.

What Ana covers

• The worst job she has taken on: a three-story, 4,000 square foot house, mold everywhere, around $200,000, where the plumber walked off and thirty minutes inside made you sick.
• Fighting the claim so the homeowner does not pay out of pocket, and why insurers cut estimates and stall.
• The early warning signs that actually matter: any leak in the last five to ten years, and a musty smell in a corner or under a sink.
• Why bleach is not a fix, and why remediation is sometimes a wipe-down and sometimes a demolition.
• Getting everything in writing. Signed agreements, a certificate of satisfaction, email confirmations, all of it, so a dispute never reaches a courtroom.
• Two months of do-it-yourself SEO with no money spent, already bringing in at least two leads a week, and why those leads close better than paid ones.
• The public adjuster who lost half his revenue overnight when a law changed, because every job he ever got came from referrals.

The part homeowners skip

Ana is blunt about what a flooded basement actually is. Clean water from a burst supply line is one problem. Water that has been sitting, or that came back up through a drain, is a different category, and the smell people describe as musty is often not just mold. Sewer gas is mostly hydrogen sulfide, and the reason industrial sites put a fixed hydrogen sulfide gas monitor on the wall rather than trusting a person's nose is that H2S deadens your sense of smell within minutes at higher concentrations. The warning disappears exactly when the situation gets worse. A restoration crew works that problem with instruments and containment. A homeowner poking around a wet crawlspace has neither.

Best line in the episode

"When I tried to think everything through to create a business plan, never works out for me. But when I do a business by accident, it works very well."

Find Ana

Total Home Rescue - totalhomerescue.pro
Her own writeup of this interview - the mold, water damage and insurance guide
Full recap on Unscripted Small Business - How I Built a Home Rescue Business By Accident

Unscripted TN talks with businesses across the Volunteer State about their history, their challenges and their wins. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.