NEWBERRY COUNTY — When most people hear of a flooded basement or a kitchen that recently suffered a fire they run in the opposite direction but that is not the case for Gordon Blackwell Johnson Jr. who goes running toward those issues with his new ServiceMaster business.
“ServiceMaster is a restoration and cleaning company. Restoration is a fancy term for cleaning up. The big three are water damage (floods, leaks), fire damage (smoke, soot, odors) and cleaning,” Johnson said.
ServiceMaster typically gets involved after an insurance claim is filed. They will come in and mediate the damage and then clean everything up.
“So stopping the water from continuing, stopping potential of mold and then the back side of that is the reconstruction. We as ServiceMaster can do all of it,” Johnson said.
ServiceMaster has been in business in Newberry since Jan. 1, but Johnson was unable to take business until March 1 because he had training at ServiceMaster’s main office in Memphis, Tenn. Once Johnson completed the training he was certified.
Before Johnson, who goes by his middle name, got involved with ServiceMaster when he grew up in Newberry. He went to Clemson University and ended up in Charlotte, N.C., working for a construction company. However, when the market crashed in 2008, he moved back home to Newberry and began working for Servpro.
“Kind of with that construction background, it was a perfect fit into my first restoration experience,” Johnson said.
Johnson would end up marrying his wife, Alison, and together they moved to Charleston so she could go to school. During that time, Johnson continued working in the restoration industry.
While working in Charleston, Johnson said they did a lot of work on The Battery and he was able to work in homes that were 200 to 250 years old.
“I walked into a house to do an inspection in Charleston, on the walls were all these pictures, newspaper clippings and articles in Russian, and there was this huge buffalo skin. We were trying to figure out what was going on with all this stuff,” Johnson said. “The guy comes in and we ask him, and he worked for CNN in Russia in the mid 1980s. We also asked about the buffalo skin and he said his family owned land in Montana and he bought the skin out there. Turns out it was Teddy Turner IV.”
After Johnson’s wife finished school, they moved back to the Upstate and he began working for a restoration company in Columbia.
“I worked in Columbia because we did not know where we were going to settle, either in Newberry or Columbia. Once we decided Newberry is where we wanted to set our roots, we got a job back again with Servpro, where I started,” Johnson said. “The whole time I never thought I wanted to own my own business. After a couple of months of being back home, we decided it was time to start our own business.”
Johnson began calling around with one goal in mind: serving the area he knew and loved. ServiceMaster gave him that opportunity. He said ServiceMaster gave him Newberry and Lexington counties, but their offices are here in Newberry.
“I do like ServiceMaster because the founder, Marion Wade, was a big Christian and his mantra was, ‘you have to master your service to service the Master,’” Johnson said. “To do that you have to be great at what you do. You cannot go in and halfway clean somebody’s house and expect to be a good example for Christ. You have to first provide great service that will then be a good reflection on those Christian values.”
Since being in Newberry, ServiceMaster has had between one to two jobs a week. Some have been bigger, and some have been smaller. They have cleaned up mold in crawlspaces, mold inside homes and cleaned up biological messes.
“We also do estate clean ups. We had a family the mother passed away, the father passed away a few years ago, and they had a house, a big workshop, a pool and a pool house. The family over the years gathered a lot of stuff, and it was too much stuff for them to deal with,” Johnson said. “So we came in and cleaned all that stuff out. We cleaned the house up and got it ready to sell.”
In the restoration business, Johnson said he is able to work with the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. However, he said no matter who you are, how much money you have, where you are from or what family you are a part of, there are great people from top to bottom.
“What I love about this job is that when my phone rings, something bad has happened and somebody is going through a potentially traumatic situation. I get the opportunity to meet you, in your home, somebody I probably would not get to meet in my entire life. I have the opportunity to come in and take a really bad situation and turn it around and make it as good as possible,” Johnson said. “Hopefully you have a relationship with that person that will last a long time and make a good impression and a friend.”
The big picture for Johnson is that in the restoration industry, all of the companies do the same thing for the same price. Insurance companies dictate how much they can charge for what they do.
“I think that what is going to make us different, because we are so small and so new at this point, I get to have the opportunity to go to every job, meet every homeowner, meet every customer and make sure that they are taken care of before anything else is decided,” he said.