Jason Earle

Every now and then, when I answer a stranger’s question about what I do for a living, and I say, “Mold detection,” I get the raised eyebrow, and sometimes an incredulous question, like: “Really? There’s a business in that?”

Indeed there is, and the demand for what we do is growing exponentially every day, it seems. But that’s not why I’m in the mold-detection business. Yes, I like to make money, but I learned in my decade on Wall Street that life isn’t about money. It’s about how you feel about yourself at the end of every day.

I watched so many talented young stockbrokers burn through their money, as well as their livers and brain cells, so fast that they literally had nothing left. Some ended up in jail or rehab. And it was all because what they were doing was meaningless, and often unethical or illegal. As these realizations sank in, I broke away from the herd and started my own firm, specializing in environmentally responsible companies.

After the dot-com bust took away everything I had built, it was time to regroup again. I spent some time in Hawaii, where the raging mold problem in the Hilton Tower in Honolulu was all over the news, and this is where I learned about the connection between mold and illness.

Around this time, I asked my father, “Was our house in West Windsor moldy?” and he laughed out loud. It was a 1950s Cape Cod with a dug well in the basement (this was a three-foot diameter, 16-foot deep pit with a pump next to it), which was pretty standard for its time. There was no chance that basement was anything but damp, and there were tons of things down there to feed the mold, not the least of which was the laundry.

The reason I had asked was that I was trying to understand my own childhood illness – asthma and allergies – which had begun as pneumonia at age four, followed by a false diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, and then years of drugs, inhalers, coughing and wheezing. When I left that house, my health improved dramatically.

I stumbled into the basement “waterproofing” (in quotes because there is no such thing) business, because it looked like a viable way to help people with mold problems.  I went to work selling the service, which included mapping out detailed plans for the work crews.

But one nagging mystery remained. Having seen lots of houses with mold problems that didn’t seem to go away completely no matter what was done to the basements, I wanted to know how to find hidden mold in a house. Discovering the magic of Mold Dogs™ cracked that case. I flew to Florida, picked up Oreo, and began to build a business around her. That’s her silhouette in our logo, and she’s still with me.

All of which is a long way of getting around to answering the question in the headline. It’s about the people who live in mold-infested homes, the people who are ill because of it, and who get well when we do our job. That’s why we do what we do.

One of the best examples of this is Caitlin Murray, whose story we published in our first edition of Habitat Quarterly. I can’t do that story justice in this space, so click on over to our articles section and read Caitlin’s story there.