6 minute read
Keeping it Clean
Restoration company aims to take the 'str3ess from the mess' when disaster strikes.
Story by Bob Luder
photography by Sarah Reeves
Sitting in a small meeting room inside their office building in west Shawnee, Greg Marsden and Doug Day illustrate that looks can be deceiving. They speak readily and easily, yet quietly and controlled. One would never know by their appearance that—at all hours of any day—they and their company, Frontier Restoration, tackle what most would consider some of the most weighty, gritty, and, most importantly, vital work for residences and businesses throughout the Kansas City area and beyond.
In the movies, they would be considered cleaners. When disaster or tragedy strikes, whether natural or manmade, they and their team descend on the scene to return order to chaos, adding sheen and fresh scents where there had been grime and pungent odors. They come in at some of the lowest points of people’s lives and try to make things better, close to the way they were before calamity struck.
“It’s not unlike a body shop for cars,” says Marsden, who owns Frontier Restoration with Day. “We have projects that run from $500 duct and carpet cleaning to multi-million-dollar jobs cleaning up fires at apartment complexes. As diverse as our services are, so are the sizes of the jobs,” he says.
Frontier Restoration offers a wide range of services. Some are mundane—the aforementioned duct cleaning, mold remediation, and general contracting services that include hardwood floor installments and countertops. Other services are responses to disasters or other crises— cleanups from fires and floods, crime scenes, suicides, and other biohazards.
Usually Frontier serves an eight-county area throughout metropolitan Kansas City—as far south as Paola, north to Smithville, east to Grain Valley, and west to Lawrence. But it’s not unusual for their services to go regional; the company has completed projects in Topeka and at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Marsden and Day combined more than 30 years of experience and created Frontier Restoration in 2013 after meeting through a mutual friend and working together for six years at another restoration company. Marsden, a lifelong Shawnee resident, and Day, who grew up in Paola, saw a need in the area for a “one-stop shop” for disaster cleanup and reconstruction. Their stated goal is to streamline the process, making it as direct as possible to give victims of home or business damage and destruction some peace of mind along with a single point of contact, from start to finish. “Taking the stress from the mess,” as they like to say.
That goes a long way toward explaining why Frontier’s tagline is, “Restoring your space, your life, your story.”
“We started with some lawn chairs, folding tables, and four employees in Lenexa,” Day says.
Marsden adds, “We bought some used equipment from a guy we knew who was getting out of the business. It’s not too exciting, but it has been a fun adventure growing from four employees to 25 a decade later.”
Why Frontier?
“We brainstormed some names and wrote down about 10 on a piece of paper,” Day says. “We named it Frontier because that was the only name that turned out not to be taken yet. I remember us drawing up our first logo on a napkin.”
Memorable Projects
The kinds of jobs the Frontier team undertake are as diverse as the length of time and amount of effort they take to complete. It can be anything from one employee and a couple hours spent cleaning air ducts or drying carpet to projects that take weeks, even months, to perform clean-up of an entire apartment complex or office building destroyed by fire, wind, water, or you name it.
Then, there are the crime scenes and cleaning blood and gore—some sights nearly impossible to believe or describe, according to Marsden and Day—or biohazards where safety measures and thoroughness are critically important.
Over Frontier’s 10 years, there have been a few projects that stand out in memory, whether for their uniqueness or level of challenge.
A recent project involved cleaning a storage room that contained hundreds, if not thousands, of vintage, classic films from the 1930s. They were owned by a Kansas City man who used to trade and sell them, some to Hollywood luminaries.
Frontier also has completed clean-up and restoration work for several Kansas City Chiefs players, coaches, and officials. But it was another project related to the Kansas City Royals that Marsden remembers.
“It was during the Royals championship parade in 2015,” he says. “Westport got so busy that the sewers couldn’t handle it. We were walking in poop up to our ankles that day.”
Another memorable incident occurred when a car barreled completely through a jewelry store from one end to the other in the middle of a busy business day, yet not one person was hit or injured.
“Empathy is the biggest thing (to have in our roles),” says Marsden, who was a Shawnee volunteer firefighter from 1992 to 2010. “We’re working with people at some low times in their lives. Things like pet deaths. And we have diverse demographics we work with, which takes shifts in mentality and empathy.
“Our least favorite are crime scene jobs just because of the emotional aspect.”
Often, the most difficult part of the business, according to the owners, is getting paid. They typically must go through multiple steps with multiple entities, the least of which are mortgage companies that must inspect the project and issue payment out of escrow, which can take time. But, in the end, they do get paid. Business has grown every year for the last 10, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it thrived. Marsden and Day say Frontier did $6 million in revenue in 2022.
Shawnee Proud
Frontier has forged a good relationship with Shawnee since moving its offices from Olathe nearly a year ago, and the company is a valued member of the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce, according to the Chamber’s director of marketing and events, Chris DiMaso.
“Frontier Restoration is active in our community as well as the Chamber,” DiMaso says. “We know we can count on them for their support.”
Marsden says, “We’ve enjoyed our relationship with the Chamber. They’ve been very positive with giving us referrals. We receive referrals from the fire department. The mayor referred us for some work at City Hall. We’ve worked with Sunflower House. We’ve done work at Old Shawnee Town.
“Shawnee’s been very good to us.”
FOR MORE
FRONTIER RESTORATION
6443 Vista Drive
Shawnee, KS 66218
913-800-4980
egreg@frontierrestorationkc.com
www.frontierrestorationkc.com
