On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate — Episode 24
Host: All right, all right — welcome, listeners, to episode 24 of On Air with Team Jensen. Today we’ve got a couple folks with us from NCI — if you haven’t heard of them, you’re about to. Justin and Ruben, thanks for coming on with us. Justin, I’ll let you introduce yourself and jump into NCI and what you guys do.
Justin: Thanks for having us, fellas — definitely excited to be here. We were just talking about the amazing view you have up here over the city. Justin Maxon with NCI — that stands for National Catastrophe Restoration Incorporated. We’re the only woman-owned, multi-location, ISO-certified, full-service restoration and reconstruction contractor in the United States, and we’re located right here in Kansas City. We primarily service commercial clients in all 50 states, providing services for man-made or natural disasters — hurricanes, fire, water, wind, storm damage, tornadoes — basically everything from a small toilet overflow to an industrial building with a fire suppression system break. This is our 53rd year in business. We’re family owned and operated — my grandmother and grandfather started the company back in 1972. Today we’re about 100 full-time employees. With me is Ruben Kerbs, who handles our national accounts — he’s part of our family, brother from another mother kind of deal.
Ruben: Ruben Kerbs — I’ve been with the company over 18 years. My primary role is building the company on a national basis, without giving up on local relationships in Wichita or Kansas City. We work with many different verticals — property management, retail, manufacturing, warehouse, educational, government. If it’s a commercial building — and in Kansas we do residential too — but my primary focus, and the company’s focus outside Kansas, is national work: Fortune 100, Fortune 500, or single locations, doing pre-disaster work. We walk properties with clients ahead of time, so if a large loss happens, we already have a snapshot of what that building looks like — the type of roof, the structure, interior and exterior materials — so we can make an appropriate response instead of sending too many people or not enough.
Justin: Glad you said that, because I think that’s one of the biggest things people don’t understand about our industry — that we’re actually doing pre-planning.
Host: That’s where my mind was going — I was going to ask if you do preventative-maintenance-type steps with clients, and it sounds like knowing the building ahead of time is a big part of that.
Ruben: It’s amazing — sometimes it’s a new facility manager who’s never even thought about where the main water shut-off is, or where all the exits are, where trucks would park, whether there’s a security check-in, whether crews need to be badged beforehand. That’s the partnership piece — even with Fortune 100 and 500 clients, we’re still a family-owned company at the end of the day, so it’s that one-on-one relationship, having conversations with clients well before anything happens, not just when something bad occurs.
Host: Does that proactive work ever involve helping clients meet insurance requirements — especially in markets where hurricanes or wildfires have made insurance hard to get?
Justin: Actually, we just had a project on the coastline in Florida — that sparked my memory. But in general, yes — sometimes an insurance broker wants to see that their insured has a disaster recovery plan in place. We have a client here in Kansas City in the food industry business where our updated agreement with them goes into their disaster recovery plan annually, because their broker wants to see it every year and takes that to market hoping for lower rates.
Ruben: The other piece — take a senior living community, for example. Since we’re there doing inspections ahead of time, we may help identify out-of-compliance issues or code issues, since the state is going to inspect facilities like that regularly. There’s also an advantage to us being able to do the reconstruction work too — if there’s a state walkthrough and they get written up with a 30- or 45-day window to fix things, whether it’s flooring, paint, lighting, or outside work like concrete or asphalt, we can go do that. That’s the benefit of being a Class A general contractor, which is essentially what we’re classified as.
Host: Is Kansas City and Wichita where you have brick-and-mortar locations?
Justin: We actually have four locations. Our corporate office, where the company was founded, is in Wichita, Kansas — that’s our main office. We have our Kansas City headquarters here, and brick-and-mortar in Orlando, Florida and San Antonio. Outside of that, our national project manager teams are on the road 300-plus days a year, because in any major metro we typically commit to a zero-to-two-hour response time.
Host: Those guys must be incredibly valuable, being the boots on the ground with local sub connections in those markets.
Justin: Exactly — like a national builder with on-site superintendents across the country, but they’re the only person in that market.
Host: You mentioned Wichita being your headquarters — I’d guess a lot of folks in Orlando are surprised to hear that, since a lot of people outside Kansas may not have even heard of Wichita.
Justin: You’d be surprised, honestly — especially after a hurricane event in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina. Citizens and commercial property managers are very thankful we’re there, even though we’re from out of town, because when a hurricane impacts such a wide area, there aren’t enough local resources to get everybody back up and running quickly — the local resources have been impacted too. Folks down in Florida are just very grateful to our teams — everybody from the hotels we stay at to the people working at fast food restaurants helping our crews.
Host: Touching on family — we’re brothers, working with our dad Dan Jensen here too, and Kessinger Hunter is independently owned and operated, so we have a similar dynamic. How has being family-owned enabled you to be a better advocate for clients and more flexible than some of your bigger, conglomerate-owned competitors?
Justin: I’ll go into my usual spiel, then let Ruben add to it — being family-owned, with all the same resources as our competitors, whether that’s the red guys, the green guys, or the yellow guys — franchises or investment-bank or VC-owned, or publicly traded — we’re able to provide the same or better resources without all the red tape or franchise fees. At the end of the day, our clients know it’s Ruben, it’s Justin, it’s Eric, it’s Steve — specific individuals they can call, not an 800 number or a call center. In fact, we’ve never had a call center — for 53 years, a manager at NCI has actually answered the phones 365 days a year. Even at 100 employees, it’s usually one of our executives answering the phone, day or night. Call at 3 a.m., you get a decision-maker who can put resources on the ground immediately.
Host: That’s really unique — especially around the holidays. I think there’s real value there, when you need boots on the ground and someone across the globe in a call center just isn’t going to cut it.
Ruben: I call them unscheduled events — they don’t happen 8-to-5, Monday through Friday. They happen on weekends, on Christmas Eve, usually at 1 in the morning, and that’s when you need a real partner.
Host: Sticking with your history — your grandparents founded the company. I’m sure it started fairly organically in Wichita. Can you touch on how it started and grew into what it is today?
Justin: It’s a true rags-to-riches story, the original American Dream. They started in the spare bedroom of their home — it was called Nick’s Carpet Cleaning, a janitorial company cleaning carpets and commercial spaces. My grandfather was working third shift at Boeing and was also a K9 police officer at the same time. He started noticing he was making more money cleaning carpet on weekends than doing all that other work, so they took it full-time. As soon as they incorporated, it became Nick’s Carpet, Inc, and they started providing more services. As a company, we all kind of organically got the mantra from my grandfather: never say no. That’s still how we operate — if a client calls needing help, between our team, someone’s either experienced it or knows somebody who has.
There was an event at a large hotel in Wichita — 17 floors, a very large water loss. The insurance adjusters were on site, and the hotel chain called Nick’s Carpet, Inc for help, but the adjuster said, absolutely not, you’re not sending a carpet cleaning company to handle 17 floors — you need a big national company. My grandfather said, give us a little bit, we’ll figure something out. Within 24 to 48 hours, the team sat down and said, we need to change our name — they took the initials of Nick’s Carpet, Inc, and since they needed to sound like a big national company that handles catastrophes, they came up with National Catastrophe Restoration Incorporated — changed the name of the whole company to go handle that one client.
Host: That’s a cool story. Did your grandfather then start looking for that type of work more actively?
Justin: We were helping with some national work through an affiliate partner called Disaster Cleanup International, but our national accounts really didn’t start growing until we brought on folks like Ruben. I think our first hurricane job was around ’98 — my grandfather had been going to national conferences and shows, building relationships, and they brought on a couple of good-sized national accounts before Ruben joined in 2006. That’s really when we went all-in on pursuing national work on a day-to-day basis, everywhere from Miami to Seattle, versus just cat-event scenarios.
Host: I’d imagine some of that market reach comes from stepping in when a disaster happens, and some from proactively hiring someone knowledgeable in a market before something happens. Is that fair?
Ruben: There are two sides to it. A lot of companies on a national level “chase the work” — storm chasers who see a hurricane, get boots on the ground, hand out cards, try to get work. That still happens organically for us too — we’re on a large project in Georgia right now because one of our project managers was at a gas station and the facility manager of a university happened to ask if we did tree removal. A couple thousand trees later — never say no — and now, through two hurricanes in that area, we’ve done ongoing work with them, just by being at the right place at the right time.
Host: I’m sure you have to be sensitive about it too, since you’re stepping into high-emotion situations where people feel like they’re at their lowest.
Justin: Definitely — in areas where a hurricane or tornado hits, we may have clients there, but those same clients are personally impacted too — no power at their own house — while trying to manage their building and work with us, then go home to a dark house.
Host: You mentioned you do residential work in Kansas — is that a jurisdictional thing?
Justin: More of a jurisdictional piece — we have staff trim carpenters and painters at our brick-and-mortar locations, with partnerships with insurance carriers on the residential side locally. It also lets us keep staff available for large commercial claims without having to hire day labor. Facility managers and business owners with crucial operations want to get back in business quickly, so having full-time, background-checked staff doing the work is better for everyone — and now that we have full-time employees in Orlando and San Antonio, we’re opening up to that kind of work there too.
Host: This is kind of a double-edged question, not trying to put you in a tough spot, but — you’re an advocate for your end-user clients, but you also need a good working relationship with insurance companies, who a lot of people, especially lately, aren’t too fond of. What’s it like being in that middle position?
Justin: We’re always the fulcrum, doing the balancing act between the insurance carrier, the adjuster, and our client. We’re a client advocate, explaining the why behind everything taking place on the job to the insurance side, making sure everything’s interpreted correctly. But ultimately, it’s up to them what they pay for — we can’t interpret anybody’s policy. Our responsibility is to document everything as well as we can, to put the client in the best position possible, but at some point it’s out of our hands.
Ruben: I feel like over the last five to ten years, brokers have gotten more involved in claims than they used to be, since they have more direct access to carriers — adjusters are usually independent, not affiliated with the carrier on large losses — so brokers can sit in the middle with us and the client and act as a liaison, looking at it from a human standpoint, not just the red tape. Every insurance carrier also has its own rhyme or reason for what they will and won’t pay for, and that’s where NCI’s experience comes in — knowing how to verbalize things correctly to that specific carrier and adjusting company.
Host: I’m sure you have to find that perfect middle ground — similar to our world with tenants and landlords, brokers on each side, but you’re still doing what’s right long-term, even if it costs you a deal here or there.
Justin: Absolutely. It can get complicated with storm work — say a named hurricane where the deductible is 3-5% of the property value. If it’s a large building, that’s a lot of money up front. Sometimes our client is the tenant, but the building owner can’t afford the deductible to take care of everything else. It’s only getting worse in certain areas, with premiums so high that people don’t always carry the full extent of coverage they’d like.
Host: Not to spin off work too much — are you both originally from Wichita?
Justin: I grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, moved to Wichita in the summer of ’99, and played baseball at Wichita State.
Host: [baseball conversation — coaching, sons, high schools, mutual acquaintances]
Ruben: I was released from spring training in 2006, and it was almost like therapy — I connected with Justin through a summer baseball team, and it just felt meant to be. Being with Justin’s teams for a couple summers was really good for me, helping with recruiting and traveling around the country for tournaments.
Justin: We go way back.
Host: [continued personal/hometown conversation — Wichita, Maize schools, families]
Ruben: We’ve lived in Kansas City 12 years now. My wife was a teacher in Lee’s Summit for 10 years, and now she owns her own online boutique, Metallic Market — metallicmarket.com. We’ve got two kids, four and two.
Host: [continued casual conversation about summer baseball tournaments, KU/K-State rivalry, growing up in Kansas]
Host: Well, we’ve been talking about us — let’s hear how you guys got started working for your dad.
Kurt (Host’s brother): I’ll go first since I’ve technically been here a little longer, even though I’m younger. Growing up, our dad coached us in football and baseball, and we’d drive by sites he was developing. I needed an internship for business school, was over in England, and it was hard to line something up in Kansas City for the summer, so I spent the summer before senior year following one of the guys in the firm around, saw behind the curtain of what the day-to-day looked like, and knew it was something I wanted to do. Jumped in fresh out of school — had pros and cons, since a lot of people rightly want to work with someone experienced, and it was hard to project that fresh out of college. But it’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve grown a lot individually through it.
Stuart (Host): I’m only about two and a half years in — two classes ahead of Kurt in school. After college I got into outside sales with my uncle’s manufacturer’s rep company in Lenexa, selling computer-room HVAC, precision cooling units for data centers — I’m sure you guys have done recovery work in data centers, where timing is everything. I enjoyed it, but felt like I was plateauing, and on a family vacation I just asked if I could come work for the family business. It’s been fun, humbling at times learning from my younger brother — we have a good yin and yang, enough differences even though people say we sound identical.
Host: [conversation continues on family dynamic, KU/Mizzou allegiances, and transitions into deal stories]
Stuart: We try to be front of mind for clients, even when it feels like we might be wasting their time in the moment — we remind clients this is meant to be a long-term relationship, not something that has to resolve in the first 12 months. One of Dan’s biggest development projects was a 15-year pipe dream with a client — the Cargo Largo deal out on I-Road, where Dan had been working with the owner on his warehouse needs for years, helped him buy the ground, started planning a new headquarters, then the project froze during the housing crisis. Years later they revisited it, then COVID hit — but their e-commerce and truck-traffic-driven business actually grew significantly through COVID, so their needs grew even more from there.
Kurt: That’s really where we bring our most value — helping every step of the way, even the upfront work that isn’t the “meat and potatoes,” because we end up knowing the full story and what the client needs. Most clients only make a handful of commercial transactions in their career, while we’re doing it daily.
Host: Do you guys focus on a particular industry?
Kurt: We’re focused on industrial — warehouse, manufacturing-type product. Kessinger Hunter is independently owned and operated here in Kansas City, working around the country through the SIOR network. We were at one point the Cushman & Wakefield alliance firm in Kansas City, but wanted to stay independent. Big Fortune 500 companies with locations in 50 cities tend to want a big national firm, so we’ve really poured into local, organic growth — that’s where we think we provide the most value as local industrial operators. We do a lot of tenant rep, but full-service work on both sides of transactions, which is partly market-driven.
Host: We’ve had a lot of fun talking — before we wrap up, what have been some of NCI’s challenges the last couple years, and what are your goals for the next three to five to ten years?
Justin: During the pandemic — good thing Ruben and I are both here for this — our whole construction division shut down, but Ruben and I were literally on a plane to one of our largest trade shows, 15,000 people, when we landed in Orlando and got word the whole thing was canceled. We stayed one night, and in the hotel lobby, over a couple of beverages, we put together our entire disinfecting protocol and playbook, then started emailing clients. Within a week we were operating in 40 states — every technician we had, every chemical we could get our hands on. Supply chain was the tricky part, but we already had experience disinfecting after mold jobs, so we just looked at what the CDC was recommending and adapted. We bought tons of electric backpack sprayers.
Ruben: Our construction division shut down completely — nobody wanted us in their home or business — so everybody became a disinfecting technician. We had a financial partner with 35 locations just in Nevada that we were servicing two to three times a day for four months, and we were doing that kind of volume across the country.
Host: That’s a cool way to see you evolve as a company. Is there a vertical you think you can grow into over the next few years?
Justin: We’re growing pretty organically overall. Through the pandemic, a lot of venture capital firms noticed the restoration industry didn’t shut down and started acquiring companies, so a lot of our competitors got bought out — which came with cuts and red tape once ownership only cares about quarterly financials rather than the client. We’ve actually picked up clients purely because of that shift in the industry — we’re never going to sell out to a venture capital company or investment bank; it’s still Justin, Ruben, Steve, and Eric answering the phones. So we’re taking market share organically at what I think is the right pace, in the right markets, while still investing in updated software and technology. We’ve been in business 53 years for a reason, and I think we could take a pretty big leap in the next two to five years.
Host: What’s the hotline if someone needs you at 3 a.m.?
Justin: I won’t give out my cell number on air, but our main line is 1-800-598-6274, always answered by a full-time NCI manager, 365 days a year. Our Kansas City number is 913-663-4111, and our Wichita office is 316-636-5700. Most of our clients have our cell numbers directly, though.
Host: Justin, Ruben — appreciate you both coming on with us. Listeners, give us a follow on the On Air podcast with Team Jensen. Thanks, guys.
