Every company should have a health & safety program

Carrying out a demolition isn’t just about razing a building or structure to the ground. A skillfully executed demolition project requires careful pre-planning, attention to detail, risk assessments, safety precautions, and responsible recycling.  

If their roster of beaming reviews is anything to go by, Demo For Your Reno has been doing all of that and more for their customers since April 2018. 

“We’re a women-led, lean-oriented, soft interior demolition company that operates in Ontario,” says Punam Pathak, the CEO and Chief Vision Officer at Demo for Your Reno. “We deliver services for local master home builders, general contractors, and renovators.” 

Demo For Your Reno became a Peninsula client in 2020. 

Punam says the company wasn’t facing any specific HR or health & safety challenges per say, but there was an overall need for these services. Signing up with Peninsula just made good business sense.  

“I come from many years of corporate Canada background,” says Punam. “When I started my business, I knew that the vision was to scale the brand. I knew I needed to lay the foundational work of HR, health & safety policies, and procedures and I didn’t have the time. I knew I needed a partner – an individual or a company – that would provide that service to me at a cost that wasn’t prohibitive. That’s where Peninsula came in,” she says.     

“Peninsula used to come up a lot in my social media feed before I started Demo for Your Reno,” she says. “I remember thinking ‘oh that’s a really good idea’. Having HR, health & safety and legal assistance is critical to a small business. Getting them at a fraction of the cost of hiring full-fledged departments was incredible.” 

Health & Safety 

“Every company should have a health & safety program,” says Punam. “Being in the construction industry, more often than not, it is an absolute requirement. We didn’t have the time or the know-how to start writing a policy,” she says.  

Besides saving them time, money, and the hassle of writing up policies or paying lawyers to do so, Punam says having Peninsula’s expert support during COVID-19 was a boon. 

“Having Peninsula around during COVID-19 was just worth its weight in gold. It was amazing to have someone who understood all of the ins and outs of what was happening during COVID-19 and was able to put it clearly into a document that I could put my letterhead on and quickly disperse to the frontlines. It was just brilliant,” she says. 

HR 

“A contract is 20 or 30 pages,” says Punam. “I do not have the time as a small business operator, nor the inclination, to sit down and write all of this legalese. It is important to have professional HR support if you are looking to scale your business,” she says.  

While Peninsula helped the company with their employment contracts, HR policies and documentation, Punam says access to 24/7 expert advice is another benefit.  

“The big thing for me when to comes to HR is knowing that I have a group of people I can call who are informed and have the ability to guide me on how to deal with precarious situations. Knowing I have that back up is really empowering,” she says.