Essentials – Home Maintenance Made Easy
Mary McCombs
Essentials
Proactive home maintenance is essential to preserving the value of your home. Without it, a home could lose 10% of its value. Like oil changes for your car, your home needs routine checkups and repairs. Regular, routine maintenance enhances curb appeal, ensures safety and prevents neglected upkeep from turning into costly major repairs.
Essentials, LLC, (EssentialsHomeServices.com) offers a proactive home maintenance service for homeowners in the Lincoln area. The mission of Essentials is to stop problems before they start.
Tell us a little about your business.
Essentials offers home maintenance membership to help homeowners free up valuable time while keeping their homes in peak condition. It’s a subscription-based program we developed to be ideal for busy individuals/professionals, seniors, new homeowners and deployed military personnel.
During every scheduled quarterly visit, Essentials focuses on a number of critical checkpoints in the areas of indoor maintenance, exterior maintenance and life safety checks.
Essentials also offers our comprehensive Peace of Mind Home Watch program. Routine inspections and regular home maintenance checks for your home are conducted by our team of professionals while you are away. If your home is going to be empty for any length of time, from a week to several months, we’ll put your mind at ease by regularly visiting your home. If you are gone for an extended length of time, we can take pictures and/or videos and e-mail them to you. We customize the program to fit the varying needs of our clients. Concierge services can be added, such as housekeeping services before or after your arrival/departure, snow removal prior to your arrival, setting your thermostat to the perfect temperature or even buying groceries the day before you arrive.
How long have you been in Lincoln?
We established McCombs Commercial Realty over 30 years ago, serving as a brokerage but also specializing in commercial property and community association management services. Essentials is a new company we started in the fall of 2017, and it’s been so exciting to see how well it’s been received so far!
Who are the owners/important executives?
We are proud to be family-owned! Essentials is locally owned and operated by Bennie, Mary and Chris McCombs.
What do you think makes you different from other companies similar to yours?
Here in Lincoln, there really aren’t any companies doing what we do, which is why we started Essentials in the first place. That being said, having been in the property management business for over three decades, we’ve been fortunate to develop relationships within the industry and have a great network of contractors that we utilize. Our clients are able to benefit from all of that expertise with just one point of contact to manage everything, which alleviates all of the hassle and worry that comes along with logistics. There’s also not a lot we haven’t seen, and being service-oriented, we understand the needs of our clients and their properties. With access to reliable professionals who provide quality service, and working together to be able to offer fantastic prices and support each other’s businesses, we’ve assembled a great team that has all of the bases covered with respect to our core offering at Essentials, proactive home maintenance.
What do you like about doing business in Lincoln?
We have raised our families in Lincoln and love the closeness of everyone here. Even though Lincoln has grown quite a bit, it’s still a very friendly community with a small town feel.
What kind of community organizations/groups are you involved with?
We are actively involved with the Home Builders Association of Lincoln (HBAL) and the Lincoln Independent Business Association (LIBA), and are also passionate about supporting the People’s City Mission.
Do you have a business philosophy or mission statement?
Our mission is to listen to our clients’ needs, to have open communication and accomplish the highest quality work by taking care of their homes and belongings as if they were our own, operating with honesty and integrity at all times. Our goal is to help new, busy and/or aging homeowners take better care of their most valuable asset – their homes. Lacking the time or expertise to properly care for their homes, our customers depend on their dedicated Essentials Technician to keep their homes healthy and safe all year round.
What changes have you seen in the industry and your company in the past few years?
Technology now plays such a critical role in all aspects of our industry. It has so many uses that benefit our team and our clients. For example, Essentials offers a secure portal where the customer can track all maintenance records, pictures and comments made by their Technician. There they can also simply click to submit a request to their Technician and will then receive emails regarding when their next inspection will take place.
What is one of the biggest challenges that your company has faced?
So far it’s been educating potential customers on the importance of performing proactive home maintenance instead of reactive home maintenance.
What has been your most important achievement as a business?
Gaining our first handful of clients and feeling that confidence of being on the road to success!
What is the most unique or interesting thing about your business that most people don’t know?
We have been asked so many times if we are franchise, which we are not. It’s a very common assumption, actually, but we are a locally-grown, family-owned business and we strongly support our fellow local businesses.
To sum it all up, what is the one thing you want our readers to know about your business?
We started Essentials with the goal of helping people take care of their home. A home is where you raise your family, socialize with friends and most importantly create lots of memories. The purpose of Essentials is to ensure you have a safe and happy home so that you can continue to make wonderful lasting memories for years to come.
We would love getting to know more of the wonderful people who call Lincoln home, and look forward to the opportunity to partner with them to achieve the goals of a safe and happy home!