If your home or business suffers from a fire, or a flood, this is often a devastating blow from which you’ll want to recover as quickly as possible. You’ll want to get your home back, or get your business up and running again to try to resume a normal life. However, that means making a critical decision right at the start.

Restoration or damage mitigation for properties is a “multi-disciplinary” activity. After all, if a fire incurs roof damage, plumbing damage, electrical damage, smoke damage, and even water damage. This will mean having to repair or replace many different aspects of a property, from replacing and repairing plumbing pipes to constructing new drywall, to laying out new electrical wiring and power points.

Job Specialization Matters

What this means to you is that you’re unlikely to find a single person capable of every single type of repair. In most cases, the restoration or damage mitigation of an entire property will require an entire team to be done in a reasonable time frame. But even an entire team may not have the expertise to rebuild a roof and know how to repair a foundation or install new natural gas pipelines.

This means that the job will need to be done by experts in various fields. And this means that you will have to ask yourself a question very early on in the planning phases of restoration or damage mitigation. Do you go for an “all under one roof” solution or source individual teams to get different jobs done?

The Pros

Going with different teams has the virtue of often having lower costs. It’s not unusual for the grand total on a project to be lower with different teams on the job, as opposed to a single, “under one roof” solution. 

On the other hand, working with a turnkey solution, where one organization has access to numerous different teams, under-one-roof can be faster. Rather than having to source many reliable different forms of expertise yourself, this is all taken care of for you.

The Cons

Choosing to go with different teams can sometimes mean you lose the benefit of the “big picture” planning. A bigger company may be able to lay out a more precise plan for repairing a foundation, for example, then logically moving on to plumbing. If you get different teams to handle this, they may not coordinate well with each other.

Working with an all-in-one solution can sometimes bring with it conflict-of-interest issues. Damage mitigation is different from restoration, and in some cases, less ethical businesses may call for less work in the damage mitigation stage, for more sizable, expensive work getting done in the restoration phase.

Ultimately, you have to look at what’s right for you and your property. Assess what your project needs, and find the people that are capable of performing the job you have in mind, at the budget level you have allowed, within the timeframe that you want. These are always good criteria to start with when looking at potential candidates.