real-time business experience that he said just can’t be taught in a classroom. In his sophomore year of college, The McIlhenny Co. offered Overman what was then the fourth franchise of their Tabasco Country Store, a touristy outlet that sells merchandise emblazoned with the Tabasco logo. With help from his parents, Overman and a cousin started their Tabasco Store in Branson, Mo. He was just 19 at the time. It was a great concept and a great market, Overman said, but the location they picked wasn’t the best. The store did OK, but not terrific. Still, running his own business at that age taught him a lot about the rigors and responsibilities involved in keeping a business afloat. After graduating from college, Overman followed his dream of playing professional golf to South America. He spent 11 weeks there on the South American Tour, with sponsorship from Tabasco, before he realized the hard truth about himself. “It was one of those deals where you can’t look in the mirror and lie to yourself,” he said. “I’ll never forget it. I was in Brazil. I’d just played my tail off, probably the best I’d played down there, and I was in a tie for 34th or something.
I said to myself then: This is not really what I want to do.” Overman came home, and went to work at his father’s small, family-run janitorial business. “It wasn’t a week before he said, ‘Dad, the real thing is to get into restoration,’ ” Ben Overman recalls. Everybody dreads the idea of something terrible happening in their home — a fire that soots up the place but doesn’t destroy it, a sewage leak that fills up the basement with dark swill, even — God forbid — a traumatic event that leaves the walls and carpets soaked with blood. Even so, not many homeowners have given much thought to how they might get their house back to square one if any of those things happened. That, in a nutshell, is where Brett Overman was coming from when he got the idea for AllClean USA. There were other restoration companies, of course, but Brett wanted to do it better. His father, he recalls, was skeptical at first. “He said, ‘You didn’t go to school for that, Brett. You’re not a carpenter. You’re not a contractor,’ ” Overman said. “I probably couldn’t spell restoration, but I’d seen another company there in my
hometown do it and do it well. You hear things about different people, and I’d heard there was a demand for a serviceoriented company at the time to do that.” Still, he knew his dad was right. He wasn’t a painter, or a carpenter, or a plumber, and didn’t know the first thing about putting a house or business right after a disaster. He needed on-theground experience. So, just after Christmas 1998, Overman started cold-calling restoration companies in Lafayette, La., offering to come down and work for them for free. After getting rebuffed by several businesses, Overman finally found an owner who knew him from his golfplaying days in Lafayette. He’s friends with the owner now, and they joke about the fact that when Overman first called and offered himself up as an unpaid intern, he thought it was a prank call and almost hung up. After listening for a while, though, the man on the other end of the line told Overman to show up ready to work the next morning at 8:30 a.m. That first day was a quick education. The second call of the day was a CONTINUED ON PAGE 16
OVERMAN: A self-made man.
BRIAN CHILSON
15 years old that he was going to live there, and he’s lived there the last nine or 10 years.” In high school, Brett took some ribbing from the football players for being on the golf team, but it stopped when he got a full-ride scholarship to play golf at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “All the football players would tease me: ‘Hey, Brett, come play football. Why you playing that sissy game?’ ” he said. “Shortly after, knowing I was going off on a college scholarship, my phone would ring, and they’d say: ‘Hey, can you teach me? Can you give me some lessons?’ ” After just two weeks in Lafayette, Brett’s friend — former PGA Tour pro Craig Perks — introduced him to executives with the McIlhenny Co., the family behind the famous Tabasco sauce, made and bottled on Avery Island in South Louisiana. The McIlhennys were soon close friends with the likeable Arkansan. “Literally for five years, I had a key to Avery Island,” Overman said. “That was a huge culture thing for me. And once again, it traced back to the game of golf.” Overman would travel all over the world with McIlhenny executives during his time in Lafayette, getting
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