169: Navigating Mold on a Budget

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

How do I just handle this whole process? How do I afford this thing? It seems unattainable, it seems undoable. So I, I want to spend a little time going through that. So the first piece, and this is what I see happen a lot is so step number one is to get it done right the first time. I cannot tell you how many clients we've worked with that have had two, three, four inspections, multiple remediations. They've paid this person, they've paid this person, they've paid this person, and by the time they get to us, they're already in like 50 grand. And then we come in and there's these things and we find out that it wasn't done properly. They missed a whole lot of stuff and ultimately they just kind of like wasted that $50,000. So what I would say the first thing here is to make sure that you're actually getting it done right the first time. And I know it sounds very easy, like Brian, well, how do I know if I'm doing that? Well, then it goes to step two, which is all around testing and making sure that we're getting the right information that we need that's going to drive the decisions on what we're remediating and how we're prioritizing and all of that stuff. If you're not getting a thorough inspection and testing done at the front, then you're not going to know where the problems are and you're not even going to be able to understand which ones you should be attacking first, right? So then what happens is that you have, you go through this process, going back to step one and you remediate something that either wasn't a big problem or wasn't the biggest problem in relation to other things in your house. And you come back in your house and you're still sick, right? And then you keep this like endless cycle that starts going on. So the second part in the inspection testing, the way that I look at it, first off, that is the cheaper piece of this process, right? So if I'm looking at two costs and I have one cost over here, that's a fraction of the other cost, I want to make sure that I'm not cutting away at the fraction of the cost because it's that idea of. What's it called when you do that, you like something to. I forgot the saying. But you limit something over here and in doing so, you screw this up over here, right? You make this not work. And this is where the bulk of your cost is. It's on the remediation side. So we have to make sure that we're testing and inspecting properly on the front side to allow us to then make sure that what we're doing on the remediation side is correct. Effective, prioritized correctly, is spending your dollars in the place that you're going to get the most impact for it. Okay, so that's what I would say the second piece is, is making sure that your foundational data and knowledge that you're getting from your home is correct. That's going to be the jumping point, the launching point on all the future decisions that you're going to make. If this information is wrong at the front, every decision you make off of it is then also not going to be correct. And it's going to end up costing you more money, more time. Right now on the inspection piece, we know that it's obviously not cheap to do all the time, right? Like this is about an affordability conversation. So one thing that I want to share with you guys, which I don't know if we really talked about it a whole lot publicly, but we've actually partnered with a medical financing company. They only finance typically health providers for providing health services like surgeries and medical interventions. And they're really focused on that type of financing. We Inspect is the only business that is not a direct health provider in terms of 100% like to your body healthcare service that this financing partner has allowed to come in and access their financing to provide out to our clients. And the reason is because they view us as a health provider, they view what we do as a direct impact on someone's health, even though we're not in pout, even though we aren't like working on the body directly. And it was an amazing thing that this happened. And now we are literally the only company that exists from the inspection testing point of view that has the ability to offer financing out to people. What does that mean? That means you can spread your payments out for an inspection. And by doing that with no interest by the way, and by doing that, what it does is it allows you to have a larger chunk of money available to you. To where if you do need to attack him, to the remediation piece, you're not taking like a whole piece out over here. Then having to take a whole piece out over here, it allows you to stagger it and it allows you to get the information you need up front in a cost effective way to make the smarter decisions about how you remediate on the back end. So that's something that I've been really excited about. We've had it available now for a couple months. We have a limited amount of financing that we are offered. Right. So we can offer it to every single person. But if it fits your needs, it's something that we can talk about and offer. So that's one thing to help manage the cost. Because we know affordability is a big component of this. Now once you get through the testing, we're gonna get into to part three of this, which is the remediation component. Again, this is where the bulk of the spend happens, right? This is where the bulk of your money goes. It goes on remediation. It doesn't go in testing, it goes into remediation. That's where the bulk of it is. So how do we get smarter about how we're spending that money? Take a step back. The only reason that you're doing any of this is because you're having a health issue. That's why you're doing this. Right? So what we need to do, instead of looking at a house and looking at it in a vacuum and saying here's 20 problems in your house, you have to fix every single problem or else you're not going to fix them all. Like technically. Is that true? Sure. Like if you don't fix something, it's still there, but you're not doing it. So you can have a check mark, clean bill of health on your house in a vacuum. You're doing it so when you walk into your house, you, you feel better, you're doing it for you, you're not doing it for your house. And so then what we need to do is, is really understand that you don't have to remediate every single thing in your house. You have to remediate enough so your body can bounce back and start feeling good again. Most of our clients do not remediate everything that we find. And I think that's part of the anxiety and the frustration, the fear that somebody might have going into this process is it's going to cost so much money to do the remediation on the back end and do everything. And yeah, I mean, it's, there's an expense, I'm not going to lie, like there's an expense there. But there's a way to structure your remediation plan where you're not hitting every single thing and you're focusing on the highest priority stuff. So the way that we help with that is when we deliver a report that goes to our clients. We're delivering cover page remediation priority, right? Yeah. We might have found 10, 15 things. These are the three or four things that we think are the most important things that need to be addressed. Right. And how do we come up with that? It's a combination of the raw data from the lab results, which areas are the worst. But then it's also thinking about our conversations that we've had with you over time. Right. When you come in and start working with us, we have an initial call with you to figure out what are your goals, what are your challenges, who's sick in your house, what type of symptoms do they have? Are they only feeling in certain areas of the house? And then what we do is, let's say, for example, your child is the reason that you came into this. They're having some sort of, you know, mold related issue, health issue. So then we come through, we get all your test results and your test results come out and they say, hey, your kitchen's really bad and this area in your living room is really bad and this is really bad. And then your kid's bedroom, while it might not be the worst in terms of like the highest levels, there was also some problems in there. Well, if I'm creating a priority list for you, I'm prioritizing your kid over the area on the other side of your house that they don't, they don't spend a lot of time in. So when you talk about the priority list, now their room comes to the top of the priority list, even though it might not be the highest concentrated level of mold that we found. Because we're overlaying your real life issue and situation and goal and objective with the data that we find in the inspection and the testing. And we create a personalized priority method for you internally. We call this our rpm, our remediation priority method, where we take those two things, merge them together and come up with a personalized prioritization for you. So that's what that looks like. And what does that mean? So when you have a prioritize, a prioritization now you can go in and really what you're doing at that point is, is Kind of thinking like the 8020 concept at that point. Right. It's like the 8020 concept is basically there's a large portion of things that are causing the problem. And yeah, there's some other problems over here, but if the bulk of the problem is happening over here, I'm going to focus my energy over there and I'm going to get the biggest impact because I've removed the biggest chunk of the problem. Right. And that's the idea when we create a priority method is to figure out the areas that we feel are going to have the biggest impact on your goal of which is most times coming back in your house and feeling better without necessarily saying that you have to fix every single thing that we find in the house. Right. So when you're talking about managing cost and managing budget and figure out how to handle something that can be expensive, it's really about going into it and being able to be smart enough about it to say, yes, maybe there's 10 things I need to handle. And if I had to handle all 10 of those things, let's say it was going to cost $100,000, but maybe I only need to focus on four of those things and the four of those things are going to cost $20,000. Well, we just saved $80,000 in being smart about how we test and identify what's going on and then how we apply that information to the recommendations and the protocols that come out right now. Still $20,000, a lot of money. I get it. And at some point when we're trying to deal with this and there needs to be remediation work, then there is going to be a cost associated with it. What we try to do is figure out how to mitigate that cost and to help reframe your plan of attack to reduce the overall cost that you're going to have both on the testing side by being able to offer 0% financing that no other company has that can, that that can offer and then on the back end being able to give you a stair step plan that allows you to ease into remediation so you're not throwing everything at the wall at once, but you're being really smart about how you're targeting stuff and you're getting the best value for your dollar. So that was, that was a larger explanation, but it's something that I think is important. I think a lot of people need to hear it. And this is a lot of the conversations that, you know, that I would have with clients that I'm consulting with them and wanted to share that with you guys here. So, yeah, it was a really good question. Glad I could. Glad I could give you some, some help, hopefully on that one.

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