Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of Tuscaloosa and Northport!
Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Crawlspace Medic: Aaron Davey's Guide to Protecting Your Home's Health from the Ground Up
Unlock the secrets of your home's hidden ecosystem with Aaron Davey, the expert behind Crawlspace Medic, as we uncover the critical role of crawl spaces and basements in maintaining a healthy home environment. From the silent threats of moisture and mold to the unseen damage caused by termites, Aaron sheds light on these often-neglected areas and shares invaluable insights on encapsulation, waterproofing, and dehumidification. Tune in to grasp the significance of air quality, structural integrity, and practical measures to safeguard the foundation of your living space.
Embark on a personal voyage with me as I recount my transition from a conventional career to the adventurous world of entrepreneurship, founding Crawlspace Medic. Hear how perseverance, family support, and a leap of faith helped me navigate the unpredictable tides of starting a business, and learn why seeking guidance from independent structural engineers is pivotal before initiating any repairs. Aaron Davey emphasizes the importance of transparency and practicality in home maintenance, offering a beacon of no-nonsense solutions for homeowners looking to protect their investment. Discover how Crawlspace Medic is revolutionizing the way we care for our homes from the ground up. #GNPNorthport #CrawlspaceMedic #BirminghamWaterproofing #Birmingham #BasementWaterproofing #VaporBarrier #Crawlspace #CrawlspaceEncapsulation
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Patricia Blondheim.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I'm your host, patricia Blondheim, and today we have good neighbor Aaron Davey, and Aaron is the owner of Crawl Space Medic here in Birmingham and in Tuscaloosa. Aaron, how are you this morning?
Speaker 3:I'm doing excellent, Patricia. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm so good. Thank you so much for coming by. I really want to tell our listeners about Crawl Space Medic and what makes it different. Tell me a little bit about what Crawl Space Medic is all about.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely so. Crawl Space Medic is all about. Yes, absolutely so. Crawl Space Medic is a crawl space and basement waterproofing and repair company. We specialize in providing customers with practical solutions to the most important areas of their home, which we believe are the crawl space and the basement.
Speaker 2:So you go in, you waterproof the foundation. We don't think about our foundation, very often our crawl spaces. Why is that important?
Speaker 3:Can't we just let the crawl space be the crawl space.
Speaker 3:Well, you can, and plenty of people actually do, which is why we have a business.
Speaker 3:So just a quick run through of our services and what we're actually addressing here is we do what's called we encapsulate, we waterproof with vapor barrier, which would be putting sheets of plastic down in the crawl space on the soil. We'd wrap the walls, interior walls of the foundation, and then we would install a dehumidifier or an interior drain system and sump pumps to manage moisture and humidity in the crawl space of the home. So the reason we do that is you exchange about 60% of the air with your crawl space between your crawl space and your home, so the moisture and humidity down in the crawl space can affect the rest of the home. The primary and most immediate issues that we typically notice is the wood framing of the crawl space can get damaged over time if the crawl space is left as the crawl space, if it's not touched, and so this could lead to sagging, rotten floors, termite damage, mold growth, and those are the main things that we want to prevent with what we do here.
Speaker 2:So over time there's like a whole sort of ecosystem that is going on underneath your feet that you don't even think about.
Speaker 3:That is correct. Yes, and most people typically don't know they have an issue until they have some other service Maybe it's a plumber or pest control company go out and say, hey, you've got some moisture under your home. And often that doesn't translate to the customer as hey, I need to take action on this. It usually just means there's some ambiguous issue, and so what we try to do is get under there and provide that transparency with photos, measurements, and really try to put the customer in the crawl space without physically putting them in the crawl space.
Speaker 2:Try to put the customer in the crawl space without physically putting them in the crawl space. So I'm going to bring up sort of a crawl space. Companies are kind of notorious for you know, you've heard, I'm sure we've spoken to friends who have homes and people who have had experience with crawl space companies where I mean it's scary to call them in because you end up knowing that you've got thousands of dollars worth of repairs that you have to do and that seems to be like a constant. Can you tell me a little bit about how Crawl Space Medic is different? Sure.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, I can I actually kind of write down. Write that down as a misconception, but generally speaking it's not a misconception will use fear or the scale of the issue to scare the customer into buying their solution that only that company can provide. That comes with a premium, and it's being presented to you by a commissioned salesperson who has a vested interest in selling that product at a premium. Now, those services are not necessarily bad, but they often are more than the customer needs. And so, with Crawl Space Medic, what we want to do is provide a large level of transparency with what we are actually providing, and so this means itemizing every line item that we're recommending to the customer, giving them photos and videos of conditions in the crawl space and then making additional recommendations.
Speaker 3:Say, you know, a structural issue is going on with the foundation wall of a home. We would recommend that that customer get a structural engineer out prior to taking any action on paying for a repair. And that's really what we see as being a difference in our approach is we're coming at it from. We understand what the issue is and we can provide you with a practical solution that's going to completely address the issue, rather than seeing how much we can, you know, I guess, upsell or beat the customer down with a large estimate that they really don't have a lot of insight into why, what all is coming with that. We use very simple terms. We're not branding all of our materials or products with some ambiguous jargon, it's all. Vapor barrier French drain subfloor repair joist repair. French drain subfloor repair joist repair things like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean these companies. They have engineers that work with them and you don't.
Speaker 3:Can you tell me why? Yes, yes, and the primary reason we don't. It would be nice to have a structural engineer on staff, but part of the reason is just we're a smaller company. Engineer on staff, but part of the reason is just we're a smaller company. But the primary reason we recommend someone going to consulting a structural engineer outside of, say, a foundation company would be the transparency that that brings to the customer. They can go to any structural engineer, have them, provide them with a report and then a drawing for the repair, and they can then take that to any company that they trust or have a good relationship with and present that to them. And so really, what what that does is give them some insight as to OK, this is actually what I need, not just what I was being sold that day. So that's the primary value there.
Speaker 3:And a lot of times just a quick bullet point here a lot of times that engineer is almost used as a weapon in the sales process, where the salesperson may say, hey, if we bring a structural engineer out here, it may cost X amount more. Or they may say it costs, you know, double what I'm quoting you, so you should just go with my solution, and that should not be the customer's feeling. If someone's going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on a solution, they should have that confidence that they are addressing the entire issue and they're not, you know, just adding on a bunch of things that aren't necessary and they're not, you know, just adding on a bunch of things that aren't necessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you know, I don't know what's going on when I look under my house Just a bunch of wood and some dirt and hopefully no snakes, and I really try to avoid it. But I think there are some companies out there that really capitalize on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right and Crawl Space Medic doesn't and we want to provide a refreshing, refreshingly high level of customer service and transparency transparency in our process. You know, our vision is to be the most trusted crawl space company in Birmingham and really the state state of Alabama and really to do that. We live and die by our customer service, by our reputation, so that's that's critically important to us and our sales process.
Speaker 2:Well, tell our listeners about your journey. Aaron, Were you born jacking up a pier? Or did you have a journey that brought you here.
Speaker 3:I did. I did have a journey. Yes. Ever since I was eight years old, all I could dream of was getting under a house and crawling through the mud, dodging snakes and repairing homes.
Speaker 2:No, that sounds like a typical eight year old boy, by the way.
Speaker 3:That's right. It was astronaut, paleontologist and crawlspace repair person. No, in reality, I had a background in the military. I thought that's what I was going to do. My education and everything was driving towards that direction. Once I got out, I was kind of looking, with my wife, I got married and was looking down what our trajectory would look like, and it looked like a you know, spending a lot of time in the Northeast, raising our children in the Northeast, and both sets of our parents are ones in South Alabama, ones in South Carolina, and we really wanted to stay closer to home and we're trying to figure out how to do that. And just before COVID, I started talking with my father-in-law and now business partner about getting started in Birmingham. So we jumped in from, I guess, the Florida Panhandle is where we were at the time and we moved up to Birmingham and got started here. In December of 2020 is when we bought our house, and January of 21 is when we actually opened the doors with Crawl Space Night.
Speaker 2:Well, aaron, what do you? I imagine you experienced some really great family time, is that?
Speaker 3:that, and what else do you do for fun? Well, so I have three children under the age of five. I've got three little girls, one's four, one's two and one's six months old. So the vast majority of my time is spent running with the girls. When I'm not working, I do like to go to the gym, but haven't in maybe a month and a half, two months. So right now it's enjoying whatever time I have with my wife. That's not running after children. Enjoying whatever time I have with my wife uh, that's not uh running after children. I go into, my oldest just started playing soccer, and so we've, we've uh done that, but beyond that, it's, it's, I'm a homebody well you're, you're a dado gym right now that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right, those kids as they get heavier, I get stronger right, yeah, you don't, you don't need no gym that's right they're dangling off of you and and let's uh sort of zoom out to um, you know the structure of your life and what, what. What brought you here in terms of you know, all of us got into the entrepreneurial field through challenges in our lives that have created, like this unique mindset. Do you have anything that you have encountered or hurtled?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, I think my, if I would have taken an aptitude test or, you know, a career finder survey, it would have never said starting a business. And really this was my, when we were taking stock of our life. What we wanted for us, my wife and I, what we wanted for us and for our children, we wanted to have more control, more autonomy and, you know, having a better financial security was, was a potential plus, but you're risking a lot more, and I came from a world that was very structured. You were really a cog in the machine as far as responsibility and accountability, and as long as you were staying within your narrow scope, you really didn't have any issues. And so starting this business, I would say, was the biggest challenge that I had to overcome is, I've never been in a position where, if I didn't get something done, one, it wouldn't get done and, two, my family would directly be affected by that. So the first thing I had to really reconcile was the accountability and the responsibility that came with entrepreneurship and starting a business. And you know, I I didn't have a business background. Um, it was.
Speaker 3:I was in a new city, I didn't have a network to lean on, and so all of that started.
Speaker 3:Day one was I had to go knock on doors, make cold calls and find a team to help me with the production and then the sales, and I had never done anything like that before.
Speaker 3:So the growth that I've had to endure at times but go through has really, I think, been a net positive for me individually and for my family as a whole, and it truly was by the grace of God that we even made it through. There were so many times that in that first year or two that I just didn't know what I was going to do. I felt like I wasn't always playing to my strengths. I love people, I love to solve problems, but having a structured routine on process from the sales side to the business development side, to the production side of our business were all new, not to mention the accounting side. I was hopeless there and it really took a good business partner my father-in-law is my business partner, has done things like this for a very long time and has a great strategic mindset and just leaning on him, leaning on my wife and really leaning on the Lord for guidance there.
Speaker 2:Well, what would you like our listeners to take away about Crawl Space Medic?
Speaker 3:So I would really like them to take away two things. They're both related, you know. But like you said at the beginning, you know why can't we let the crawl space be the crawl space? And really, to that I would say problems in your crawl space, problems in your basement, they don't go away, they just, you know, sometimes it's just incrementally get worse, it may take.
Speaker 3:You know, some of these homes were built in the 1920s and they're still standing. So, you know, the customer may tend to think well, it's been here 100 years, why should I? Why am I just now having this issue? And it's really because those problems don't go away, they compound and they get worse. But there's a better way to deal with it than you know, than making that phone call to that competitor or those competitors, and we can provide that. We'll sit down with you, we're not going to block off three hours to give you a high pressure sales pitch. You have a problem as the homeowner and we can provide you with a complete solution. And so we'll go through and make sure we're investigating every area of the crawl space, present you with a realistic and practical solution to addressing those issues and we'll get it taken care of and allow the homeowner or the realtor whoever's involved, the builder to just check that off their list of things they need to worry about, and that's everything from mold remediation, water intrusion to carpentry repair and encapsulation and moisture control.
Speaker 2:How can listeners learn more about Crawl Space Medic? Tell us how to contact you.
Speaker 3:Yes, Well, you can call our office at 205-987-2858, or customers can go online and fill out an estimate request if they know they have an issue. On our website at crawlspacemediccom. Forward slash, Birmingham, dash al A-L. And everything you know from what we do to our list of services would be posted on the website and they can schedule a call or schedule an estimate from there.
Speaker 2:Wonderful Aaron. Thank you so much for coming by and telling us about Crawl Space Medic. I know that there's a whole world of homeowners out there that are looking for you, but it's been a pleasure meeting you. You're a great guy.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, patricia. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpbirminghamcom. That's gnpbirminghamcom, or call 205-952-0148.