The owners of Presto Emergency Repair prepare for a job. Pictured (from left to right): CEO Bryan Biebl, President Isaac Weiss and Chief Financial Officer Alon Ben David.

A Presto Emergency Repair employee prepares for a job.

Major fires have torn their way through the West Coast in 2020, causing severe devastation.

Unfortunately for building owners in California, this scenario has become a regular occurrence.

What doesn’t receive as much attention is the water damage that can happen when a fire is extinguished. Meanwhile, the impact of everyday flooding problems is also an ongoing challenge.

Fortunately, for residential and business owners in the Los Angeles Metro area, Presto Emergency Repair (Presto) can help handle challenges and damages as a result of disasters at a rapid speed—and the team must often respond to disaster-related issues in the middle of the night.

“You know when the calls come in at that time, it’s typically life or death and pretty grim,” says Bryan Biebl, one of Presto’s three founders, who also holds the title of CEO. He explains that his team is called right after first responders have made sure immediate safety is assured. “Anything urgent is all hands on deck, and you need to go immediately.”

Fire, Then Water

Based in Los Angeles, and founded in 2017, Presto specializes in several remediation techniques that can help repair buildings.

Despite the attention that the fires receive in California, the solution to putting them out can cause additional problems. Presto specializes in the water damage that is often one of the results of these tragedies.

“With fire, water damage follows immediately, and any time you have water damage, mold is likely to happen, or mudslides, depending on the area,” Bryan says.

As a result, the Presto team has IICRC  (Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification) credentials.

Mold from water damage, it turns out, can be an added disaster, as it can cause asthma attacks and other major health problems, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Bryan says a lot of building owners try to take the DIY method toward mediating the growth of mold, but that’s not the best route for health safety.

“It’s a lot like medical issues, where you don’t want to self-diagnose because you’re probably going to scare yourself and head in the wrong direction and not the direction of the solution,” he remarks. “Anyone can go online and self-diagnose the problem, but oftentimes, they are approaching it wrong and are often incorrect.”

The approach that Presto uses is UV-C technology, which is a naturally occurring, short-wavelength light that is used to eradicate micro-
organisms such as pathogens, spores, molds and viruses.

That tech know-how helps the team understand the volatility of a water-damage occurrence, as well as how to eradicate the fungus.

Top to Bottom

The three founders of Presto, Bryan, along with Alon Ben David and Isaac Weiss, became acquainted as neighbors during holiday get-togethers.

“We were all next door to each other and were hanging out and talking during the holidays, and through our own experiences with fire and water problems, we decided that we could align three different philosophies and come up with a better and more streamlined experience for everybody,” Bryan says.

Among the three of them, they have experience in demolition, mold remediation and construction.

Seeing a need for a one-stop shop to take care of the difficulties suffered by property owners when disasters occur, they planned the company for about two years and started doing work in early 2019.

“What you want is one company that can handle all of it, rather than a revolving door of different people specializing in different things coming in and out,” Bryan says. “We are basically a one-stop shop with one point of contact with the client. It takes the stress out, and we can give them explanations when they need them with a phone call.”

"Those phone calls," he says, "can come at any time. It’s not unusual for Presto to field them as early as 3 a,m, in some cases.”

Some of the notable commercial projects that Presto has tackled include flooding repairs in major event spaces and religious centers in the Hollywood area.

Bryan also adds that, if needed, Presto can build a structure from the ground up, due to the company’s status as a licensed contractor, with the help of their fast-responding partners.

Says Rebecca Ben David, Presto’s Office Manager, who is also married to Alon: “What makes us special is the repair. A lot of restoration companies just come in and remediate, but they’re not doing the actual contracting work, so the customer has to find a different contractor. We can complete the job from the beginning to the end.”

Managing Stress

Bryan admits that it can be difficult to find employees who are equipped to handle the emotional nature of Presto’s work. After all, many people in the Los Angeles area have dealt with the personal distress from property damage occurrences.

It’s not just their acumen at certain tasks that helps Presto find staff members. Property devastation has a severe psychological impact on building owners, as their structures, and sometimes livelihoods, have been severely damaged.

“Everybody holds their buildings in a certain regard,” Bryan says. “If you’re meeting an on-site manager, or employee, in a commercial setting with flooding and fires, there is stress. You really get to know a person going into their business. You meet their employees, and you get an open door into their personalities and personal lives.”

That’s why it’s important for Presto to vet its employees very carefully before making them team members.

Bryan says that the key is “showing up and being composed and calm.” He continues, “We can’t be awestruck and shocked by what we see. It’s just a matter of using our structural knowledge, and our construction background, to really understand what needs to happen. That’s how we make a game plan from the get-go.”

Containing COVID

Though much of the work that Presto undertakes is residential, the firm is trying to use UV-C technology in helping building owners cope with COVID-19, and using the light rays to kill the virus, just as it does with mold.

Bryan says that most of the work the company has done in this fashion has been for medical marijuana dispensaries, restaurants and film-production soundstages.

He hopes to branch out into other facilities that are close to the Los Angeles community, such as schools, places of religious worship and gyms.

After all, the company was founded by a group of neighbors who had holiday gatherings and wanted to make their community safer.

“We are a family-oriented business, and we all have kids who go to school here locally,” Bryan says. “If we can educate enough on this application, we would love to do that. We are going to take them off that contact-tracing list. We want the smaller places off that list, and we all need to go back to the gym, so hopefully the gym can be off that list.”

When it comes to keeping employees safe during the pandemic, Bryan says that it’s not always easy because social distancing can be difficult during a fire and water demolition and rebuild, but Presto tries its best to ensure their well-being.

First responders to disasters don’t always have the option of social distancing from each other, and Presto executives make sure their employees are regularly tested for COVID-19 to prevent further outbreaks among the crew and its clients.

In the future, Presto has hopes to possibly expand out of Los Angeles County.

“Ideally, we’d like to go from state to state one day, but right now we are in the process of trying to perfect our formula and set standards and make sure people understand those standards,” Bryan says of the company’s potential expansion.