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National Fire & Water Repair Marks 100 Years
WARREN, Ohio -- While many businesses have relocated from the Mahoning Valley’s core cities to suburbs to avoid municipal income taxes, Paul Clouser says his desire to be an asset to Warren is why he located an office of his company, National Fire & Water Repair, downtown, and why its main offices remain in Youngstown.
“The success of this company, the reason why we’ve been in business 100 years, is because of the success of the cities and communities we live in, and running to the suburbs and hiding is not the answer here. We’ve got to rebuild our cities,” said Clouser, president of National Fire & Water Repair.
“We made a conscious decision that we were here to help this community. So we decided we were going to stay in the city of Youngstown and we’re going to stay in the city of Warren, the same as we staying in the city of Sharon.”
National Fire & Water Repair, founded 100 years ago by Ben Rudick, was operated by successive generations of the Rudick family until Clouser became it president six years ago, then purchased the business the following year. Since he began with the company in 1990, the business has changed dramatically, he noted. “There are far more competitors out there than 15 years ago,” he said. Profit margins are tighter as well.
Restoration work following fire or flooding presents “a unique set of challenges that most contractors don’t know how to deal with,” he added. The company does “far more water work than fire work,” but fire jobs are “usually much larger,” he said.
“We just finished a log home. Those are always challenging from a fire standpoint,” Clouser said.
Lenny DePinto, who recently retired as field supervisor with the company, was among those who attended an open house here Thursday to celebrate the company’s centennial. DePinto, who was with the company 30 years, said he tried to paint each house as though he was working on his own home. He took pride in seeing the results of a restoration following a fire, “especially in low-income places where they couldn’t afford to do this," he said.
Holly Clouser, Paul’s wife and the company’s director of business development, helps clients on the design end. “People can be a bit indecisive so we direct them in a way that will make them most happy with the end result,” she said.
People typically prepare mentally, physically and financially before building or remodeling a home, a process they don’t have when their home is suddenly damaged by a fire or flood, Paul Clouser said. “This happens in a heartbeat and suddenly -- where you’ve been going every day for how many years -- you can’t go there anymore,” he said.
“It’s a process and one of the things we tell people right off is it’s going to take you five days just to make you feel that you know what you’re doing again," he explained. “This is as much a counseling process as it is a selection process, and because Holly is fantastic with colors and that kind of thing, it’s a bonus to have her do that.”
Holly Clouser said they often meet people on the worst days of their lives and “a lot of counseling” goes into assisting them. “We have to help them make decisions about putting their house back together and a lot of counseling, yes, I would say goes into that,” she said.
“The most important thing we do is make surewe do our jobs correctly and the customers are satisfied with the work we perform,” she remarked.
National Fire & Warren added the Warren office last year, restoring a Courthouse Square building where the Clousers have an apartment on the third floor. “I’ve been a Warren resident all my life and so I wanted to have a footprint in Warren as well,” Paul Clouser said.
The company’s main offices remain in Youngstown, where the contents division is located. There, in a climate-controlled warehouse, people’s furnishings are restored following fire and water damage. The company has an office in Sharon, Pa., as well. The Warren office serves as a showroom, where customers can go make selections for interior and exterior finishes, including roofs.
“It makes it easier when they have a more comfortable environment, where they can see all their options,” Paul Clouser said. Sending customers to a store “can get overwhelming so this is a really nice alternative."
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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