A customer once called Mohammad Abdallah to say her hot water heater had stopped working. It was a gas unit. Abdallah, who runs MA Premier Choices Property Maintenance in Hollywood, Florida, talked her through relighting the pilot light without going to the house.
Calls like that, he says, are what set the business apart. He doesn’t point to a skill or a service. “I would say how readily available I am,” he says. “No matter what time a customer calls, I’m usually on the phone. I answer.” Some callers have a small problem he can sort out from wherever he happens to be. “I could just walk them over the phone,” he says. “I won’t charge them nothing on how to fix it.”
Sometimes the whole problem is a tripped GFCI button that has cut power to someone’s refrigerator.
The habit carries over to house calls. One homeowner who called about a leaking kitchen faucet, braced for a replacement, wrote afterward that the company found it needed only an adjustment and didn’t charge for the fix.
Not every problem can be talked through. The hard part of the trade, Abdallah says, is what you can’t see before you start. “You’ll bid a job to fix drywall, and then you open up the drywall and the framing’s all rotted out, so then you have to stop and do a change order.”
He runs crews sized to the job and says he teaches by showing. When a customer is unhappy with something, he puts the question to his employees directly. “How would you feel if this was your house? Would you leave it like this? Would you accept this?” The aim, he says, is to leave a site better than they found it. Customers get a one-hour arrival window, and he says showing up inside it has never been the problem.
He learned the customer side of the work early. As a boy he worked in his father’s retail stores, going in after school and on weekends. “I used to stand on a milk crate to ring up customers,” he says. He picked up bookkeeping and customer service there. He was also the one who fixed things, on cars and around houses, and he says he usually found a way to solve whatever was broken.
He worked as a handyman for another company before going out on his own full-time, and he has been in business since 2018. The work now runs from repairs, painting and carpentry to installations, pressure washing and soft washing, residential and commercial, inside and out. He tries to stay in Broward County, though a big enough job will take him to West Palm Beach or Miami-Dade.
Some of the calls have nothing to do with a house. He has heard from people in Southwest Ranches whose fields flood and leave their horses standing in water, and he gives them ideas for getting the water out. “The horses, their feet’s not good to be standing in water like that for long periods of time,” he says.