Treating Disaster Personally: BluSky Restoration

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For these compassionate emergency response contractors, taking ownership is at the heart of their restoration success.

The darkest day for a business often arrives in the form of a catastrophe. For facility managers and building owners, tenants, and residents, dealing with structural damage after a fire, flood, or another disaster is a unique challenge. Fortunately, the team at BluSky Restoration is properly prepared for these technically and emotionally demanding construction projects.

The award-winning Colorado-based firm provides coast-to-coast commercial restoration, renovation, environmental, and roofing services. BluSky is a five-time Inc. 5000 member, a five-time Denver Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Private Company, and Best of Centennial’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

The company motto, “we make it better,” reflects not only the company’s building expertise but also a deep sensitivity to the human side of loss.

“It gets very personal because we’re right in front of someone’s world: they have their own job duties already, they’ve got a work schedule that’s supposed to be happening, and now something has turned that on its ear,” explained BluSky COO Drew Bisping.

“We need to be there and help them through that emotional time, as well as be technical experts that can take their building apart properly and put it back together so they can move on with their lives and businesses.”

As a niche market of the general construction industry, emergency restoration is highly specialized, requiring workers to have the technical expertise to respond to situations where guidance and time may be limited.

“Unlike other parts of construction, where there are things like plans, designs, and spec books, we don’t really get that. We get ‘here’s the building, here’s what’s wrong,’ and we figure out how to make it better,” Bisping stated.

The way BluSky’s Chief Sales Officer, Dan Flanagan, sees it, the ability to work efficiently in an occupied space requires a high level of awareness and empathy.

“Our work is very high-touch,” he said. “It has a great potential for challenges because of the sensitivity of the environment in which we’re called to work.”

When Sava Senior Care, one of the largest skilled nursing and rehabilitation providers in the U.S. called BluSky, they had planned a roof renovation with a twist: relocation of their elder residents was not an option.

“We had to perform truss repair work, including a fire watch for 10 full days of construction. We cut into the ridge of the building; we built auxiliary walkways to code, and we also did asbestos abatement in a clean air or contained environment without moving any of the residents to another facility and without causing any closing of their business,” Flanagan revealed.

“It’s amazing what you can do when you put a plan together and work with the client to make it work for them.”

That spirit of partnership, coupled with a fierce dedication to corporate transparency, professionalism, and ethics, resulted in an important key performance metric: 96 percent of the company’s customers say they would use BluSky’s services again.

“As we’ve grown and competed with a bigger class of competitors, we have raised the bar in virtually every market we’ve entered,” said Flanagan. “We’re branded; our people are well spoken, they’re in uniforms, they are professionals.

“It’s a wide, sweeping concept but we’ve raised the bar in that realm too, as it relates to the ‘bedside manner’ that you want from somebody coming into an emergency situation.”

Thriving at the Intersection of Transparency and Magnetism

As BluSky expanded its network throughout the U.S. with offices in California, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee, management embraced the ideas of ‘ownership thinking’ popularized by the work of the late management consultant Brad Hams.

Customers are drawn to us because they want to be around good people who are happy to be there on their worst day. Call it magnetism or mojo—whatever it is, we attract really great people.

“Ownership thinking, at its core, is sharing the knowledge that an owner would have with all the employees of the company. It comes from the financial side, the performance of the business, customer service, and key metrics, sharing those with employees at all levels of the company,” noted Bisping.

“The idea was if we create a transparent culture where everyone knows what’s going on, and we hire people of exceptional character, they’re going to make the decisions that as senior management we would hope to make. And they’re going to do it when we’re not looking.”

By investing significant energy into creating a culture of fun and fairness with an ethical mandate to always “do the right thing,” BluSky Restoration is an in-demand employer.

At BluSky, said Bisping, “our employees are empowered to take care of customers and do the right thing from a place of integrity. We do what we say we’ll do as a senior leadership team and as a company.

“Customers are drawn to us because they want to be around good people who are happy to be there on their worst day. Call it magnetism or mojo—whatever it is, we attract really great people.”