Meet the Team - DryMark Restoration Hackensack

Meet the Hackensack Team Behind DryMark Restoration Hackensack

We’re the crew that shows up when your basement’s under three inches of Hackensack River backflow or when a kitchen fire in Fair Lawn has left your cabinets smelling like a campfire nobody asked for. What ties us together isn’t a handbook. It’s that every one of us has seen what happens when restoration work gets rushed, undocumented, or sold on a handshake. We don’t do any of that. Alicia Brennan built this team around The Haven Standard, and we enforce it on each other before any customer has to ask.

Our People

Alicia Brennan, Owner

I started DryMark Restoration Hackensack in 2011 after six years as a claims adjuster, mostly sitting across from homeowners who’d lost their documentation battle with carriers. The gap was predictable: crews would tear out wet drywall, dry what was left, and leave nothing behind but an invoice the adjuster could dispute. I built this company to close that gap. The Haven Standard started as a checklist I wrote on a legal pad, and it’s now a signed warranty on every job. I’m still on-site for the complicated ones, the Category 3 losses in Hackensack’s flood-prone pockets near the river, the mold jobs where someone already tried bleach and made it worse. I keep a moisture meter in my truck and I use it. My least favorite phrase in restoration is “looks dry.” The numbers tell the story, and if they don’t, we keep drying.

Marcus T., Lead Water Technician

Marcus has been running extraction and drying crews for nine years, the last four with us in Hackensack. He’s IICRC-certified in Water Damage Restoration (WRT) and Applied Structural Drying (ASD), which means he can read a psychrometric chart the way most people read a weather app: vapor pressure differential, specific humidity, grain depression. He translates all of it for customers without making them feel stupid. Marcus grew up in Teaneck and still lives there, so he knows which Hackensack neighborhoods sit low enough to get sewer backup during heavy rain and which ones have the older clay lateral lines that fail first. He once spent fourteen hours on a job in South Hackensack tracking a moisture migration pattern behind a tile shower that three other companies had missed. His drying logs from that job got the homeowner’s full replacement coverage approved. Off the truck, he’s restoring a 1978 Chevy Nova and will talk about it longer than you’d expect.

Diana R., Senior Installer & Reconstruction Lead

Diana handles the rebuild side after mitigation finishes, which means she’s the one making sure your kitchen doesn’t look like a construction zone for two months. She’s been in the trades for twelve years, started as a carpenter’s helper in Paterson, and holds RIA certification in structural repair and content restoration. She knows the difference between actual oak and the engineered stuff that swells at the first humidity spike, and she’ll tell you which one the insurance estimate is actually paying for. Diana’s particular skill is matching existing finishes in Hackensack’s older housing stock, the pre-war colonials and 1960s ranches where “white paint” covers forty years of slightly different whites. She keeps a photo library of her own from past jobs. Her human detail: she has a dog named Sheetrock, and no, she didn’t name him. Her nephew did, and the name stuck.

James K., Service Coordinator

James answers the phones and dispatches crews, which sounds administrative until you realize he’s the one deciding whether your call at 2 a.m. needs a truck rolling in twenty minutes or a scheduled assessment at 8 a.m. He’s been with us three years, came from a medical dispatch background, and treats emergency triage the same way: ask the right questions fast, don’t guess, get the right resource moving. James knows every technician’s current location, equipment availability, and which jobs are running long. He’s also the one who follows up with adjusters, sends photo records, and makes sure the documentation packet is complete before anyone asks for it. He lives in Hackensack, takes the bus to work when his car’s in the shop, and has memorized the NJ Transit 76 route schedule with unsettling precision. Customers sometimes ask for him by name after their first call.

Elena V., Apprentice Technician

Elena joined us eight months ago after completing the IICRC WRT course on her own dime while working retail. She’s our newest crew member and our most meticulous. Marcus says she takes moisture readings at intervals he’d skip, and she’s already caught two jobs where secondary moisture pockets would have turned into mold calls in six weeks. She’s training on Injectidry systems and has started handling the contained drying setups for hardwood floors, which require negative air pressure and daily moisture mapping that would bore a less careful technician. Elena grew up in a first-floor apartment in Hackensack that flooded twice, so she doesn’t need convincing that documentation matters. Her landlord got nothing from the insurance company either time. She’s working toward her ASD certification and asks better questions than some techs with five years on the job.

One Standard, Every Job

The Haven Standard isn’t a poster in our break room. It’s the structure that lets a crew this varied work across Hackensack and the broader NJ network without turning into nineteen different companies pretending to share a logo. Haven Standard, Clause 1: written price before work begins. That means Marcus doesn’t start extracting until the homeowner has seen the scope and signed it. Diana doesn’t order materials for a rebuild without a written estimate the adjuster has already received. Haven Standard, Clause 2: documented photo record on every visit. Elena learned this on day three. James checks the upload before he closes the job file. Haven Standard, Clause 3: 365-Day Done Right Promise. If we miss something, we come back. Not because we’re nice. Because it’s signed.

We’re independently owned and operated. Alicia’s name is on the license. The equipment in our trucks, Dri-Eaz, Phoenix, XPOWER, B-Air, Injectidry, is logged and maintained to IICRC, RIA, and IFA standards. The drying logs we produce are formatted for adjuster review because that’s how claims get paid. If you’ve got a competitor’s estimate and you’re not sure what you’re reading, bring it in. Free Second Opinion, Haven Standard, Clause 4. We’ll tell you what’s missing.

Written by Alicia Brennan, Owner at DryMark Restoration Hackensack, serving Hackensack and northern New Jersey since 2011.