Influential Woman · CleaningRestoration
Erica Thomas
Vice President, Voda Cleaning and Restoration
Greenville, NC
Her Story
About Erica
My love for interacting with people and my really strong background in customer service is what drew me to this work. We go into homes on the restoration side when customers are in the middle of a crisis - whether it's a toilet overflow flooding into bedrooms, mold mitigation, or fire damage. We put their house back together, work with their insurance company, and in the end, the satisfaction of knowing that we helped save their home is what made me want to jump in and take part in the day-to-day activities. I handle a lot of the administrative side, working with numbers, taking customers' calls when they have questions on the cleaning side of things. My main area of expertise is flooring - I worked for a big box retail company for many, many years, about 13, and headed the specialty side of sales quite a bit. I did a lot of hands-on training throughout the years, learning how to cut tile, cut carpet, install a toilet, all pretty much hands-on in the field. A typical day starts at 5 AM with a quick workout, taking care of our dogs, then I'm either on the computer going through estimates, calling customers, taking care of payroll, or we're visiting job sites and networking with apartment complexes. We're busy until about 8 or 9 o'clock at night, and since we're a 24-hour water emergency service, sometimes we get calls at midnight or 1 AM and we're up and running.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Erica
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would have to say it's the satisfaction of building relationships in our community. Our reviews that we have on Google are well-earned, and it just speaks for how well we're integrated into the community here, where word of mouth is the biggest form of advertisement that we have. I get 4 or 5 phone calls a day where someone says they heard that their neighbor used us, or they spoke to their sister and got our number. For me, the most self-rewarding achievement is knowing that we genuinely care, because we are in the community. Everybody that we network with recommends us, so we have an image that we want to maintain, and we want that image to be true to who we are at the core - we take care of our customers because they take care of us. I don't have to come from a lot to make something meaningful happen, because I came from pretty much nothing when I was younger, and I said that's not the kind of legacy or life that I want to leave behind for my children or my grandchildren. I want to be remembered for hard work, dedication, and being there as a support system for other women.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Hiring the proper talent has been a little challenging. The guys that we have on board now are fantastic, but we have had some bad apples. It's really hard to find somebody who is genuinely going to be there to help support your business, and not just get a paycheck. We do make it worthwhile - we take very good care of our guys, we make sure that they are compensated very well for what they do, and we take care of them with team building and bonuses to keep the morale up. But it's hard finding those people that are really dedicated to kind of growing with the company. Balancing my home life with helping run a business is probably one of the biggest challenges, because I don't feel like I have enough time for myself at all. From the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, it's this company, and we have the phone 24 hours a day because we are a water emergency. The balance will eventually get there when we get people to kind of step into our roles a little bit so we can take a step back. We're working towards getting everything to learn how to run itself and having an operations manager on site.
Keep Exploring
More Influential Women · North Carolina
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.