A house in crisis doesn’t care what else is happening in your life. Pipes burst during chemo. Sump pumps fail the week your newborn comes home. Ceilings collapse during an ordinary Tuesday night dinner. All of a sudden, time blurs, and you need two kinds of help at once: the kind that brings meters, equipment, and a plan…and the kind that looks you in the eye and asks, Are you okay?
That balance is exactly what Ryan and Megan Dean offer. They own RestoPros of Oakland and Macomb, helping homes in Oakland and Macomb Counties recover from fires, water and storm damage—all the moments where life at home turns upside down.
Ryan left a fifteen-year corporate career because, as he puts it, “I felt disconnected. I'd work on projects that would improve the mortgage process, save time, but I never met the homeowner we were saving time for. I wanted something local, where I could see the people I was helping.” He went all-in, obtaining every certification himself: water, mold, fire, storm. “Anything I expect an employee to do, I need to know how to do myself first,” Ryan declares.
Megan kept her full-time mental health job, so she’s the behind-the-scenes partner: helping with big decisions, listening to stories at the dinner table, and often reminding Ryan of the human side when he’s in full fix-it mode.
“When he comes home talking about a burst pipe and which rooms are wet, my first question is always, ‘Are they okay? Do they have a place to stay?’” she says. That perspective comes naturally to Megan; she grew up in a single-parent household where needs often outweighed resources. “That’s where my empathy began,” she says. “You see what people carry and what they lack. I can’t turn that off when we’re helping families through a disaster.”
The Deans focus on both science and advocacy. The science means understanding the issues the damage itself can cause. “Carpet and pad can hold ten times their weight in water,” Ryan explains. “You can run a shop vac over it and still have gallons trapped underneath.” The same goes for drywall: “You can dry almost anything, but if it came in contact with contaminated water, you’re risking microbial growth behind the walls.”
Then there’s the advocacy: when insurers push back, RestoPros fights back with data, like daily moisture readings and exhaustive photo documentation. “Insurance companies aren’t remediation experts,” Ryan says. “Our job is to be the homeowner’s advocate with the insurance company: make sure they understand the scope of damage, and what needs to happen to get the place back to pre-crisis condition.”
So RestoPros takes homeowners down the most thorough path, not the cheapest one. And clients notice: reviews consistently mention their fast response and professionalism. “We’re in the emergency-response business,” Ryan says simply. “Homeowners’ lives stop when these things happen. We get them started again.”
This being the thankful issue, I ask Ryan and Megan for stories that have stuck with them. They’ve got a bunch. Like the homeowner who was undergoing cancer treatment when sewage filled her basement. She disappeared for months into hospitalization. “We kept checking in, kept documenting for her insurance,” Megan recalls. “When she was finally able to call, she said how much it meant that we didn’t give up on her.”
There was the attic mold case where the homeowners chose a cheaper bid elsewhere, only to fail their inspection when selling. Months later, they called RestoPros back, and when Ryan’s team treated the problem thoroughly, the family kept the home instead of selling. “We might not be the cheapest,” Ryan says, “but we wear it as a badge of honor that we get it done the right way.”
The homeowner they’ll both never forget: an elderly man with a 1970s-style finished basement, a failing sump pump, and a lifetime of stories. “He even claimed he had once advised Ronald Reagan,” Megan recalls. But when the conversation turned to the restoration, the Deans got a story of their own: the man was battling terminal cancer, and what mattered most was leaving his daughter in New York with an easy home sale.
“Make it all unfinished,” he told them. “Take out the walls, the ceiling tiles, everything. I want it clean and simple for her when she sells it.”
Disaster work shifts your perspective. “Now I look around our own home and see every problem, but also how lucky we are,” Ryan says. Megan adds, “We’ve seen families juggling health issues, financial stress, and then a flood on top of it. It makes me grateful for what we have, and passionate about helping families who don’t.”
Megan dreams of bridging restoration and mental-health support by eventually building programs for under-insured families. “Healthy homes, healthy minds,” Megan says. “That’s where we want to go.”
For now, the Deans will keep answering the phone, day or night, with fans, tools, and the unique ability to care about both the problem and the people living through it.
If your home’s in crisis, call RestoPros of Oakland and Macomb, 24/7/365, at (248) 970-0555. You can also visit restopros.co/mi-sterlingheights
RestoPros of Oakland & Macomb is the crew you call when the unexpected shows up uninvited: a flood in the basement, smoke in the kitchen, a storm that completely rearranged your living room. They’re on duty 24/7, rolling in with fans, tools, and calm voices that make the chaos feel manageable. Certified and IICRC-trained, they tackle water, fire, mold, storm messes—whatever disaster your house finds itself in. They even wrangle the insurance paperwork so you don’t have to. Homeowners say the Deans and their team bring humor, heart, and a clear plan you can trust. And in this season of gratitude, nothing's better than a company that restores both your house, and just as importantly, your peace of mind.
“Healthy homes, healthy minds. That’s where we want to go.”
“Homeowners’ lives stop when these things happen. We get them started again.”