Expanding My Business to a New State

Recently my company experienced tremendous growth. We are now servicing customers in our entire state and just received several large contracts in a neighboring state. With this exponential growth I have decided to expand and establish an office in this new territory. I began researching corporate relocation. I wanted this to run as smoothly as possible and minimize my costs to maintain my profit margin.

Establishing a new office in another state takes time and organization. The first step is to research business requirements in the new state. This includes required business licenses, professional licensure, state tax laws and assistance for those employees who would be transferring to the new location. The key to a successful move like this will be to ensure the satisfaction of all employees involved. I enlisted the help of a company that specialized in corporate relocation.

This company was able to provide a number of services to the employees who are being transferred to the new state. They assisted with the sales of their homes, locating new homes, moving companies and gave everyone a single point of contact to use. This made the advanced team feel comfortable with their decision to accept their new assignment. I appreciated the invoice auditing services. I had authorized payment to the various moving companies, realty services, and other necessary services to make this transition as effortless as possible.

Corporate relocation takes quite a bit of organization. I established small teams within the advanced team. The first team was assigned to establish a location that would be convenient for traveling between both offices. The second team was responsible for obtaining all proper licensure for the business, employees and establishing our general business presence. One team was established to purchase the necessary office and service equipment. We wanted to provide a few employment opportunities in our new location. So it required an established human resource team.

After three months of planning, construction of new offices, preparing employees for their move and hiring some additional staff from the locality the move began. The corporate relocation company that we were using for our employees had hired top real estate agents that worked closely with everyone and most had sold their homes and purchased new ones. Moving companies were carefully packing and loading personal belongings. I received invoice audits for review to ensure proper payment. The new human resource team acquired the necessary accounts to ensure continued medical and financial benefits.
Finally we completed corporate relocation. All employees old and new were established in the new office building. Services went uninterrupted, customers were pleased, employees were satisfied with their decisions and we were granted more contracts it another state. The ordeal of opening yet another office loomed before us. We felt confident that we could do this again. We have already established a handbook for our company that will make this next transition go as smoothly as the first one.

International Moving

How to Sell a Moldy Home

Selling a home that you no longer want or need can be a hassle all by itself, but when you add mold contamination to the mix, it just gets ugly.  It is not easy getting rid of a home that is contaminated with mold at the price that you want and a lot of times, you have to lower the price that you ask for it before you can even get anyone to come near it.  There is hope, however, for those of you who are willing to do a little work.

If you do happen to find a buyer, you should make sure that an environmental inspection clause is included in the sales contract.  This will assure the buyer that they will have a two to three week period where they can have an inspector come to take a look around the property and examine it for mold or any other hazards that could possibly exist.  If they or the inspector see that mold exists on the property without testing, then the only test that should be performed is to determine whether the mold is toxic.  Even if the mold does not happen to be toxic, it still needs to be removed due to the structural damage that it can do to the building materials the home is made out of.  Drywall that becomes infected usually needs to be replaced and so does any wood or other materials. 

Whatever you do, do not try to hide the mold contamination from your buyer by trying to cover it up or remove the mold superficially.  Even if you remove the mold off of the surface of a piece of drywall, odds are good that the whole depth of the sheet has been contaminated because drywall is a porous surface covered with paper both on the front and the back.  If your buyer discovers there is mold on the property and you mentioned nothing about it, they may suspect that you are hiding other things about the home, as well, and you will have lost your buyer.

You should also have a clause in your sales contract that says that neither you, your lender, or your real estate agent is responsible for any complications caused by mold after the home is sold.  Listing all mold and water damage that has been done to the home in the past and what you have done to fix the problems should be enough.

 White Plains Basement Flooding Emergency Service

Where Water Damage Is Most Common

Your kitchen and bathroom are the two most common areas to find water damage in your home and preventing it is probably a lot easier than you think.  It might be a little annoying to have to remember to do these things on a semi-regular basis, but you won’t regret it when you realize how much money you’ll be saving.  Water damage restoration can be expensive and why pay those costs when you can take a few minutes every now and then to make sure your two most at risk areas are covered? 

If you’re lucky enough to have a dishwasher, you know that sometimes you’re unlucky enough for it to leak water out into your kitchen floor.  If you do, it’s best to get this taken care of as soon as possible.  The longer you allow your dishwasher to leak water into the floor, the more susceptible that area of the floor will be to water damage.  Check the hose or pipes that lead to the dishwasher and see if those are leaking or have any weak spots.

One trick to use to see if you have any hidden leaks in your home is to turn off any and everything in your home that uses water (don’t even flush the toilet) and check what your water meter says.  Leave these things off for about an hour and then go back and check your meter again.  If the numbers have changed, you have a leak somewhere in your home. 

The ice maker in your refrigerator can cause water damage a lot easier than you might think.  The water line to this part of the refrigerator can rupture or like any other water line in your house, a connection can be lose and cause water to spew into the floor.  If the door to your freezer doesn’t shut completely, then everything in your freezer will thaw. 

A lot of water damage in the bathroom can be caused by a toilet that keeps overflowing over time.  If you have small children in the house, make sure to supervise them while they’re in the bathroom.  Most people know that babies putting objects into the toilet that do not belong there is a common occurrence and isn’t to be taken lightly.  A piece of jewelry or a toy car can be the cause of a series of toilet backups and as a result, water damage around the base of the toilet.  This will eventually cause the wood to rot if you don’t have a tile floor or if the tile around the base of the toilet is not sealed properly.

NJ Basement Flooding Emergency

Mold Dogs Are Not Used By Professionals

If you think that your home or business may have a problem with mold, you might hire the first mold remediation company that you can find to come and take a look at your property, but how do you know if they are truly professionals or not?  One obvious way to tell is whether or not they employ the use of dogs in order to locate mold in a building. 

The use of these “mold dogs” is not only inhumane, but very unprofessional.  There are plenty of other techniques that can be used to detect the presence of mold in a household or a business and true professionals know this.  Professional companies often have mycologists on hand to determine just what kind of mold that you are dealing with and how dangerous it can be to your health.  Mold dogs only detect if mold exists on the property, not how much exists or how toxic it is. 

The use of dogs to locate mold in the home is also obviously detrimental to the health of the dog.  Dogs and other animals are no less susceptible to the health effect of mold than human beings and often by the time the mold infection in a dog or cat is recognized by the owner, it is too late and beyond treatment.  Dogs that are used to sniff out mold are very likely to develop respiratory infections and skin infections, especially around the nose and mouth.  The purpose of a mold dog is to actively inhale the mold spores and this is EXACTLY what people are advised not to do when they are performing mold remediation.  This is all but the deliberate infection of an animal that cannot do anything to help itself if it needs medical attention.  Dogs and other animals are not aware of the existence of medical treatment and cannot alert their owners that something is wrong with them.  It is up to human beings to care for them, since we are the only species on the planet capable of caring for another, especially when it does not benefit us. 

There are many other methods used to detect mold, such as mold testing kits that you can put around your home after stirring up the air in the room.  Mold spores will drop onto these tests and begin to grow.  When sent to a laboratory, they will let you know what kind of mold is in your home and also what level of toxicity you are dealing with.

Any company who uses mold dogs is not a professional company that you want to use to remove mold from your home.  Support the humane treatment of animals and help stop the use of mold dogs.

Houston Water Damage 

A Short History of Penicillin

Since the early 1900’s, we have been using a drug called Penicillin to treat bacterial infections in the human body, but something a lot of people don’t know is that it was discovered quite by accident by a Scottish scientist named Sir Alexander Fleming in the year 1928.

In his laboratory in St. Mary’s Hospital in London, he discovered that the mold Penicillium notatum had found its way into a culture dish of Staphylococcus and was inhibiting its growth. He thought initially that it could be a good disinfectant and noted that it was highly effective, but was minimally toxic. The importance of his discovery was not really known at the time and the use of penicillin did not really begin until the 1940’s. Howard Florey and three of his colleagues at Oxford University started to research further into penicillin. The ability that it had to kill infectious bacteria was particularly interesting, but since the country was in the middle of World War II, it was unable to gather the funds necessary to produce mass amounts of the penicillin required for clinical trials and looked to the United States for assistance.

A search worldwide began for the perfect strain of penicillin mold that would produce the largest amount of the mold when it was grown in a vat containing corn steep liquor and strangely, it was not found abroad, but right at home in Peoria in a market next to the lab assisting Oxford with the production of the mold.

By almost the end of 1941, Andrew J. Moyer, a mold nutrition expert, succeeded in multiplying the penicillin production by 10 times and by the year 1943, the clinical trials needed to approve the penicillin doses for public use. These doses were extremely expensive in the year 1940, but as time went on, they became much less costly, being around $20 a dose in July of 1943, and around fifty cents per dose in 1946.

About four years after penicillin had begun being produced on a large scale in 1943, bacteria and other microbes started resisting it. Staphylococcus aureus was one of the first to effectively battle penicillin and while it is a normal, mostly harmless inhabitant of the human body, it can cause pneumonia or TSS (toxic shock syndrome, associated with the use of tampons) when it begins to multiply in large numbers. It then begins to produce a toxin and this is what makes the person ill.

Flooded Basement