CDRG two years later
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In 2008, ILSTV featured the fledgling Canadian Disaster Restoration Group, or CDRG. We caught up with Simon Frigon, President and Founding Member of CDRG to see how the organization was doing.
Simon Frigon: I think what happened in the last two years is the fact that we’ve attracted these restoration icons within the group. That has helped attract more restoration firms that have that clout. So companies like Canstar have attracted a lot of good quality restoration firms in BC.
We still have a (long) ways to go to get to where we’re at. We’re up to 150 service locations and we think in the next six months we’ll get up to 200.
The other thing that’s been very positive in the group is the fact that we now have a COO. A person that has this insurance background that is not self-serving. Whenever I go and see the insurance companies I am wearing two hats. I’m wearing the hat of the restorer and the hat of the CDRG founder, and that was causing some type of conflict because for insurance companies they wanted to deal with the person in charge, but doesn’t have that biased opinion on the restoration part. Dave has come in and in a very short period of time and already we’re seeing some results from his meetings simply because he can attract the right type of insurance companies to come to the table and talk to us.
The industry is changing. It’s going towards square footage. We’ve been proactive in that. We’ve formed a committee for performance drying. And this committee is headed up by all these founding members of CDRG. These are 30-40 year old companies that have dedicated one person per company to figure out a way to adapt to this performance drying change in industry. We’re not against that. We’re just saying we need to come up with solutions and be transparent and be accountable for our services; because right now all our members are still in reality independent and they have dealings with their own insurance companies on a one-on-one basis, but now we need to tie that in with the national image of CDRG. So we’re being considered as a national firm because of our capacities and because of our membership. But now we need to find the tool or the platform to be able to sell that to insurance company and find that cohesiveness to take it to the next level. We’re at that stage now where we’ve turned that page and we’re moving forward. It’s very positive.
