She built the company from close to zero dollars after hearing that water damage is usually covered by insurance, and she now runs ten employees and roughly fifteen projects a month, heading for forty-five.

What Ana covers

• The worst job she has taken on: a three-story, 4,000 square foot house, mold everywhere, around $200,000, where the plumber walked off and thirty minutes inside made you sick.
• Fighting the claim so the homeowner does not pay out of pocket, and why insurers cut estimates and stall.
• The early warning signs that actually matter: any leak in the last five to ten years, and a musty smell in a corner or under a sink.
• Why bleach is not a fix, and why remediation is sometimes a wipe-down and sometimes a demolition.
• Getting everything in writing. Signed agreements, a certificate of satisfaction, email confirmations, all of it, so a dispute never reaches a courtroom.
• Two months of do-it-yourself SEO with no money spent, already bringing in at least two leads a week, and why those leads close better than paid ones.
• The public adjuster who lost half his revenue overnight when a law changed, because every job he ever got came from referrals.

The part homeowners skip

Ana is blunt about what a flooded basement actually is. Clean water from a burst supply line is one problem. Water that has been sitting, or that came back up through a drain, is a different category, and the smell people describe as musty is often not just mold. Sewer gas is mostly hydrogen sulfide, and the reason industrial sites put a fixed hydrogen sulfide gas monitor on the wall rather than trusting a person's nose is that H2S deadens your sense of smell within minutes at higher concentrations. The warning disappears exactly when the situation gets worse. A restoration crew works that problem with instruments and containment. A homeowner poking around a wet crawlspace has neither.

Best line in the episode

"When I tried to think everything through to create a business plan, never works out for me. But when I do a business by accident, it works very well."

Find Ana

Total Home Rescue - totalhomerescue.pro
Her own writeup of this interview - the mold, water damage and insurance guide
Full recap on Unscripted Small Business - How I Built a Home Rescue Business By Accident

Unscripted TN talks with businesses across the Volunteer State about their history, their challenges and their wins. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Key takeaways

• Maintenance doubles pavement life. Seal it, repair the major cracks, keep water out.
• Parking lot appearance moves revenue. One property owner Jackson works with sees roughly a 20% lift from paint plus a redone lot.
• That value stays with the property at sale. Which turns maintenance from an expense into an investment.
• Not all sealer is the same. The Asphalt Team mixes its own with specific chemicals and sand rather than the standard practice of adding water.
• The lowest bid hides the real question. Ask what is in the material and what the process is.
• From 1990 to six states, and still taking residential driveways, which is the part most regional operators drop first.

On this page

• Why maintenance doubles the life of asphalt
• Where business is being done
• What separates a good asphalt job from a cheap one
• What to ask before you accept a bid
• Staying local while going regional
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why maintenance doubles the life of asphalt

If you’ll seal asphalt and keep it in good condition, repair any major cracks and things like that to prevent further water damage, you’ll double the life of that asphalt.

— Jackson Sherrell

Water is the enemy. It gets into a crack, freezes, widens the crack and gets into the base underneath. Once the base goes the repair is no longer a repair. Sealing and crack work are cheap precisely because they stop that sequence before it starts.

If you are a homeowner rather than a facility manager, the same logic applies at a smaller scale. There is a good rundown of the five signs a driveway needs professional repair.

Where business is being done

People want to do business where business is being done.

— Jackson Sherrell

Jackson attributes that line to a mentor he calls Crown Charlie, and it is the commercial argument in one sentence. A cracked, faded, weed-grown lot tells a customer something about the business inside before they reach the door.

He puts a number on it. A property owner who buys and sells grocery stores calls Jackson second, right after the painter, on every acquisition. Paint the building, redo the lot, and business goes up around 20%. The added value stays with the property when it sells, which is the part that matters if you are in commercial real estate.

And it is category-independent. The Asphalt Team has worked with restaurants, churches and cannabis shops. If customers cannot access your store comfortably, it costs you, and the same effect shows up on residential property value.

What separates a good asphalt job from a cheap one

Asked directly whether he sits at the higher end of a wide quality spectrum, Jackson said yes and then explained why. They mix their own materials with specific chemicals and sand. The standard practice in the trade is to add water to sealer, which stretches the material and thins the protection.

On a high-traffic commercial lot that difference shows up within a season. There is more on the science behind what actually makes a driveway last.

We really try to do it as if each one of those projects, regardless of the price, if it was a small driveway or a large parking lot, we do it as if it was my lot.

— Jackson Sherrell

What to ask before you accept a bid

His answer to what a consumer should educate themselves on: understand that not all products and processes are the same. The bids in front of you are not describing the same job.

• Ask what is in the sealer and whether it has been cut with water.
• Ask how cracks are prepared before anything goes over them.
• Ask what happens to the base if water has already got in.
• Ask how long the contractor expects the work to last, and what that estimate assumes.

Thirty years of asphalt work is the reason he can answer those without hedging.

Staying local while going regional

Commercially The Asphalt Team now covers Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia and Alabama. They have also specialised into pickleball and tennis court lining, which is a smart adjacency for a company that already owns the surface.

The part Jackson is deliberate about is keeping residential work in Sparta and Cookeville, right down to gravel driveway refurbishing. Most operators drop small jobs on the way to regional scale. He did not.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How often should asphalt be sealed?
• Does sealing really double the life of a parking lot?
• Does a parking lot affect how much business a store does?
• Is parking lot maintenance an expense or an investment?
• How do I tell a good asphalt contractor from a cheap one?
• What should I ask before accepting an asphalt bid?
• Does a driveway increase home value?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Ryan Steva on modern homesteading, the other long-form Unscripted TN interview.
• From a bucket to a business empire, the longer written version of how Jackson built this.
• A second interview with Jackson, on going from childhood interest to driveway expert.
• Oklahoma Heat, Air and Refrigeration, referenced in the episode as another owner-run trade business.

Find The Asphalt Team

Request a quote through the contact page. Commercial coverage is Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia and Alabama.

Cite this episode

Sherrell, Jackson. “Paving Excellence.” Unscripted TN, 2025. https://unscripted-tn.castos.com/episodes/paving-excellence-interview-with-the-asphalt-teams-jack-sherrell

Show Notes: Cookeville's Hidden History

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Need a quality driveway? Learn more about asphalt residential driveways from J's Driveways
• Putnam County Library 
• Cookeville History Museum

Historical Timeline:

• 1854: Major Richard Cooke surveys the area
• 1890: Tennessee Central Railway arrives
• 1893: Jere Whitson develops West Side
• 1909: Tennessee Tech (University of Dixie) founded
• 1930s: Cream City Ice Cream Company operations

Featured Locations:

• Historic Downtown Square
• Tennessee Tech University
• Historic West Side District
• Broad Street Historic District

Key takeaways

• A health crisis started it. Food as medicine was not a philosophy he adopted, it was a conclusion he was forced into.
• Three areas, not one: food, energy and permaculture design. Most beginners only think about food.
• His first garden failed, and he is straightforward that the failure taught more than the eventual success.
• Direct solar beats solar electricity for a beginner. Heating water or air directly skips the whole conversion loss and the battery bank.
• Skills beat stockpiles. His split between emergency preparedness and practical skill development lands firmly on skills.
• Soil management is the real lever on how efficient a growing system can ever be.

On this page

• The health crisis that started it
• Homesteading at any scale
• Permaculture design and soil
• Energy, and why direct solar comes first
• Skills over stockpiles
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The health crisis that started it

Ryan’s route in was not romantic. A health crisis pushed him into looking hard at what he was eating and where it came from, and the problems he found with the food system were structural rather than personal.

He now works as a Cookeville area home inspector alongside the consulting, which turns out to be a useful pairing. Both jobs are about looking at a property and seeing what it can and cannot do.

Homesteading at any scale

The most useful reframe in the episode is that modern homesteading is not gated behind acreage. An apartment balcony, a suburban garden and forty acres are three different scales of the same practice, and the principles do not change.

His first gardening attempt failed. He says so plainly, which is worth more than a success story, because the failure is the part every beginner is about to experience and nobody warns them about.

He works as a Cookeville service area business and runs free classes across Sparta, Cookeville, Spencer and Lebanon.

Permaculture design and soil

Permaculture gets used loosely. Ryan treats it as design: observing what a site already does, then arranging elements so each one serves several functions and the outputs of one become the inputs of another.

Underneath all of it is soil. An efficient growing system is mostly a soil management story, and no amount of effort above ground compensates for ignoring what is below it.

Energy, and why direct solar comes first

The section on home energy production has the most immediately usable advice. Most people jump straight to photovoltaic panels, an inverter and a battery bank, which is expensive and lossy.

Direct solar applications skip the conversion entirely. Heat water with the sun and use it as hot water. Heat air and use it as heat. You lose nothing to conversion and you buy almost nothing.

Skills over stockpiles

Ryan draws a line between emergency preparedness and practical skill development, and he comes down on skills. A stockpile has a finite size. A skill does not.

Where a beginner should start

• Grow one thing properly rather than ten things badly.
• Learn to preserve what you grow, or the surplus is wasted.
• Build the soil before expanding the beds.
• Take the direct-solar win before pricing a solar array.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Can you homestead in an apartment?
• Where should a beginner homesteader start?
• What is permaculture design in practical terms?
• Is direct solar better than solar panels for a beginner?
• How important is soil management?
• Is emergency preparedness or skill development more useful?
• What does a homesteading consultation involve?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jackson Sherrell of The Asphalt Team, the first Unscripted TN episode.
• The Homestead Consultant on YouTube and online, where the classes are listed.
• Save Fry Oil, a commercial restaurant cost-savings company referenced in the episode.

Find Ryan Steva

He runs free classes across Sparta, Cookeville, Spencer and Lebanon, Tennessee, and can be reached through thehomesteadconsultant.com.

Cite this episode

Steva, Ryan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “From Backyard to Self-Sufficiency.” Unscripted TN, 2025. https://unscripted-tn.castos.com/episodes/from-backyard-to-self-sufficiency-rethinking-modern-homesteading-with-ryan-steva