Mold Remediation Blog

Why Poor Performance Is Rewarded In The Mold Industry

And Why We Refuse To Play Along

As you can well imagine, the DC area mold industry relies heavily on insurance work. The way it is billed and handled encourages half-hearted and incomplete methods for mold remediation.

The worst thing a remediation company could do financially is giving every job your all and engage in the practices necessary to do the job correctly. Sound crazy? Well, that’s only because it is, and we absolutely refuse to play along.

Proper Mold Remediation Is Labor Intensive

The heart of our mold remediation process is centered around cleaning. And cleaning. And cleaning again. All the machines in the world can’t do what a skilled mold technician can do with a HEPA vacuum, enough elbow grease and a little patience.

Mold is a living organism and, as do all living things, seeks to protect itself. For mold, that means releasing billions of mold spores when the colony is disturbed so it can grow elsewhere.

To remove the mold spores, you have to do a meticulous, thorough cleaning of every surface in the containment area. Stopping work after you’ve torn out the visible mold colony is stopping when you are only halfway done.

While this is the only sure way to do a complete mold remediation, it is also a major obstacle to running a profitable business.

How Mold Remediation Is Billed By Insurance Companies

Insurance billing is done through a preset system that “knows” the fair value of everything their contractors do.

Running a dehumidifier? There’s a code and cost just for that.

Need to tear out drywall? Code. Cost.

And so on down the line. Insurance billing is all about the equipment and has little respect for skilled labor. And as far as the cleaning and cleaning again required for mold, claiming each step looks, to them, like fraud.

“But you already cleaned it,” they’ll say. You can’t charge us for cleaning something that is already clean. So, to do a proper cleaning, we have to eat the extra labor.

A Bad Problem With A Worse Answer

So how do most mold remediation contractors deal with this billing debacle? They use the billing system’s prejudice for equipment against them. They cram your home with as many blowers, dryers, dehumidifiers, and negative air machines as they can and leave them in there for as long as possible.

But even then, they still skimp on the labor. Take a look at the image to the right. This isn’t our work, but an image sent to us from someone else’s unhappy customer. The blowers were running hard while obvious mold was still on the beams. Without, we might add, any containment at all.

Why would that be?

Simple, containment takes labor, cleaning takes labor, and insurance pays almost nothing for labor. But it does pay for running those blowers.

And since most mold companies exist because they see it as easy money, they don’t do what they can’t bill. Simple as that.

The “Mold Nerd” Difference

When we first entered the mold business, we were just as clueless as all the other guys. The field was new, lucrative, and with an endless demand for services. But, unlike the other guys, we wanted to do good work for a fair price, so we set about educating ourselves on the wonderful world of household mold – and what a world it was!

And as we learned more about our field and the dangers mold can pose to families, we learned that doing things just to get a properly profitable billing wasn’t serving the community.

That’s when we decided to go with a flat rate payment schedule. It no longer mattered how much labor we threw into the job or how much equipment we used on each job. All that mattered was that we did our level best to make a family’s home safe while making enough to keep our business afloat.

Yes, we are a business, but we’re also mold nerds. We’ve learned everything possible about household mold and how to bring it to its knees. To us, it’s a war against an implacable foe that we win one battle at a time. And we can’t do that if we are all wrapped up in making sure we can bill for this equipment or that machine.

Our flat rates let us focus on the job instead of the accounting, and we are, without a doubt, mold’s greatest enemy and your home’s best friend. Whatever it takes, we will make sure that your home is free of mold colonies and protected against their return.

If you live in the DC area and think your home has a mold problem, contact us at Valor Mold Removal for a free estimate.