Meet the Team - Dryden Restoration Austin

Meet the Austin Team Behind Dryden Restoration Austin

We’re not a call center that dispatches strangers. When water is spreading across your floor in Mueller or a fire has damaged a kitchen in Crestview, the people who show up are the same people you’ll see again at the final walkthrough. Our Austin crew is small on purpose. Every technician is background-checked, uniformed, and trained to IICRC standards. They live in this city. They know what July humidity does to a drying plan. And they answer to Carl Brandt, the owner, who still walks jobs himself.

Our People

Marcus T. – Lead Water Damage Technician

Marcus has been drying houses in Central Texas for 14 years, nine of them with us. He holds IICRC certification in water damage restoration and applied structural drying, and he’s the one who trains every new technician on psychrometric drying – the science of measuring temperature, humidity, and airflow to dry a structure without over-drying the framing. In a Hill Country crawlspace or a South Congress pier-and-beam, Marcus is the guy who knows where the water traveled before the meter ever got plugged in. He’s also the crew’s unofficial brisket critic, which means he has opinions about every smokehouse within 45 minutes of the shop.

Dana R. – Senior Mold Remediation Specialist

Dana came to restoration from indoor air quality testing, which means she thinks about mold the way an investigator thinks about a case: where did the moisture come from, where is it going, and what’s hiding behind the drywall nobody wants to open. She’s certified through the IICRC in applied microbial remediation and she’s the reason our containment setups get inspected twice before anyone cuts a sheet of poly. When she’s not running negative air machines, she volunteers with a greyhound rescue and has a standing rule that no shop meeting runs past 5:30 on adoption days.

Elena S. – Service Coordinator

Elena is the voice on the phone when things are at their worst, and she’s been doing it for seven years. She schedules every job, tracks every crew’s location, and makes sure the arrival window we give you is one we actually keep. Before restoration, Elena managed schedules for a plumbing company in Round Rock, so she’s heard every version of “how fast can you get here” and knows the answer only counts if it’s true. She’s fluent in Spanish, which means half of our Austin customers can explain the problem in the language they’re most comfortable with. When the phones go quiet at night, she’s the one who routed your call to a live person instead of voicemail.

Antonio G. – Apprentice Technician

Antonio joined the crew two years ago after a stint in apartment maintenance, where he learned he liked fixing things more than patching them. He’s working toward his IICRC water restoration certification under Marcus’s supervision, and he’s already the go-to for setting up containment and logging moisture readings. His attention to detail is the reason he’s taking on more responsibility every month: he’s the one who notices the baseboard that’s still wet one inch higher than the meter says. Outside work, he’s rebuilding a 1978 Chevy truck in his garage, so he understands what it means to take something damaged and bring it back to solid.

One Standard, Every Job

The Kingswell Way is what ties every Dryden shop together, and in Austin it’s not a poster on the wall. We say the price before the work starts – a written number, not an estimate that shifts once the equipment arrives. We show up in the window we gave you. We leave the place cleaner than we found it, even if that means sweeping the same floor twice. We put the 365-Day Done Right Promise in writing on every single job: if a covered repair fails within a year, we come back and make it right at no charge. And we come back if it fails. You’ll deal with people who know your name, not a rotating cast of subcontractors. That’s the standard. That’s how we’ve run it since 2005.

Written by Carl Brandt, Owner at Dryden Restoration Austin, serving Austin since 2005.