Ed Weingartner chases floods and hurricanes for a living--a good enough living to make him an Inc. 500 CEO. Hurricane Katrina, however, created a bigger mess and a stiffer challenge than he'd ever seen.
Barry Hillebrand didn't leadfoot all the way from his home in South Carolina right into the whipping tail of the worst natural disaster in American history to end up getting shot or thrown in jail. But right now, he's facing a loaded gun and a loaded question, and he's got three seconds to come up with the right answer. This is where the disaster reconstruction business gets tricky. "You with emergency response?" he's asked.
The National Guard soldier is at the window of Hillebrand's pickup, waiting for a reply. Behind him, two armored trucks are blocking the road and six other soldiers are standing by to shoot looters and turn back anyone--anyone--who's not saving lives or recovering bodies. Just yesterday, eight assumed looters had been gunned down 40 miles away, on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans.
But behind the blockade, tantalizingly close, are the ruined casinos and splintered beachfront mansions of Gulfport, Miss. Hillebrand tries to keep his face nonchalantly vague, while furiously scrawling a risk-benefit matrix across his mind's eye:
Option No. 1: Lie, get caught, have the truck impounded, and sit behind bars while the competition is snapping up contracts. This would be a bad scenario under normal circumstances, but it's especially bleak right now because the only person within 500 miles who could bail him out happens to be sitting right next to him: his boss, Ed Weingartner, the 36-year-old CEO of Dynamic Restoration.
Option No. 2: Tell the truth, and pass up the opportunity to be the only catastrophe contractor on the ground at the catastrophe of a lifetime. All day long, Weingartner and Hillebrand have seen swarms of bright-green ServPro vans whizzing around on the unrestricted side of town, hustling business from waterlogged apartments and deroofed homes. Even worse, they rounded a corner and were stung to find a team of black and yellow In-Star Services Group trucks not only here, but already at work on a big job, drying out the Hancock Bank.
No doubt about it, the disaster recovery game is on and the clock is ticking. The evacuees of Gulfport may still be waiting out of state for their city to dry, but the masters of disasters are arriving in force and moving fast. Millions are up for grabs--make that billions--but not for long. Emergency mold and repair work will be doled out at once, and the disaster contractor who gets his foot in the door with those patch jobs will be first in line if big-scale construction is needed afterward.
At the moment, all of the disaster specialists are fighting over the same, less severely hit inland swath of Gulfport, but if Hillebrand and Weingartner can somehow sliiiide on through this military blockade, they'll be the only team prowling the most horrific devastation along the beach. Ironically, that's one advantage their young company has; since all the cool corporate colors were already chosen by giants like In-Star and Belfor, Dynamic ended up with neutral white and blue, the stock paint job, coincidentally, of small-town cop cars. So while there's no way ServPro or InStar could fool the National Guard with their glaring vans, institutional-looking Dynamic might have a chance. Hillebrand decides how to answer so quickly he still has two seconds to spare.
"Yessir," he says, then adds, "See?"--which sounds like something real emergency responders would say. Except, of course, we're not. The soldier pokes his head inside the cab for a look. A thicket of technology is sprouting from the multiplug in the cigarette lighter--GPS, two BlackBerrys, two cell phones--while the pickup's bed is crammed with air movers and bottled water, exactly the stuff a smart thief would have hauled through the shattered window of his local Home Depot and would now be hawking in the disaster zone. What the soldier doesn't see is anything like defibrillators, cadaver dogs, or body exhumation tools.
But then, the soldier's eyes land on the truck's blue logo, which matches the blue polos of the guys in the front seat. You can almost see the wheels turning in his mind: "Dynamic Restoration? Restoring to life? Maybe?" He's got a sheriff's van waiting impatiently behind us, so he needs to make a call.
"Okay," the soldier says. "Stay safe, fellas." He spirals an arm over his head, signaling his colleagues in the armored trucks to spread and let us through.
"Ohhhh, man...," we start to exhale, until we see what lies ahead and suck in our breath again.
Ed Weingartner started Dynamic Restoration in 1994, after he spent a weekend hanging out with his buddy Fred Gunther at the Daytona 500. Fred was rolling in cash because he'd found a great new niche for his Grand Sport Auto Body shops: He'd begun specializing in insurance-referred rebuild jobs. It was a sweet set-up, Gunther said, because the money was guaranteed; insurance companies were much more reliable about writing checks than car owners. "You know, Ed, they do the same thing with houses," Gunther told him.
Weingartner's ears perked up. As a 26-year-old who'd graduated from Fairfield University a few years earlier, he'd been looking for a way to break from his father's suburban Philadelphia construction company. He'd tried an internship on Wall Street, but power ties and risky trades weren't for him. He liked to gamble, but on his own performance, not some other company's. He'd returned to working with his father, thinking he could control a few projects on his own, but his dad wasn't the delegating type.
So he gave his dad notice and rented office space inside a storage facility. Dynamic's founding headquarters were three 10 x 12 storage units that could have been veal calf cages, except for the phone lines. Weingartner hired a college kid to do the books and a former electrician as a project manager. As humble a start as that was, it soon deteriorated. Weingartner got the chance to bid on a few small residential jobs and found he didn't know the first thing about estimating. "I'm giving a lump sum like $5,000, and people are laughing at me," he recalls. "They're like, 'No, no, how much you charging me for 500 feet of soffit?' 'I don't know.' 'How much you charging me for flashing?' 'I don't know.' After two months of being ridiculed, I bought the estimating package and started doing my homework."
Luckily, Gunther helped him get a break. Big hailstorms had pummeled the Philly suburbs that winter, damaging so many homes that the insurance companies had to deputize some of their car adjusters and turn them, overnight, into house adjusters. They knew even less about home reconstruction than Weingartner did, so when they were asked to give the kid a break by their old auto body pal, Gunther, they began tossing Dynamic jobs.
