Coltin Cunningham says he hopes his new business, Alpha Dog Inspections,
will help others avoid the challenges that his family
had to face.
“It was a seven-year saga with
our little girl,”
Cunningham said. Shortly
after he and his wife brought their youngest child
home from the hospital, she began experiencing numerous health problems and symptoms that doctors couldn’t explain. Early on, her pediatrician
suggested that mold might be a factor, but routine tests of the family home found nothing amiss.
Then, after years of what Cunningham describes as “mystery illnesses, missed diagnoses and medical dead-ends,” the family heard about something new
– mold detection dogs.
“We heard they were having wild success finding mold when
others couldn’t. Like bomb-sniffing dogs but trained to detect toxic mold,” he
said. There were only a few in the country, but a handler in Florida agreed to
bring his dog to the family’s home in Sherman. “We didn’t know what else to
try, so we had nothing to lose,” Cunningham said.”
The dog
alerted at the wall next to
the girl’s bed. Cunningham said they
opened up the wall and found “a massive mold colony – nearly the entire wall – black, green, white,
blooming behind the vapor barrier. Right where our
daughter laid her head every night.”
Cunningham’s background is in the HVAC industry, having
worked at Airmasters for more than a decade and then as director of operations
for Henson Robinson. He left that position at the
end of 2024 and began making plans
to launch his own business.
He worked with the dog handler and trainer from
Florida who had helped their family;
Cunningham said he is known for “training special forces dogs all over the world.”
Cunningham said mold
is a “hidden epidemic” with “at least 50% of homes, even
nice, newer, beautiful homes,” affected by it. He noted that his family lived
in a home that was only nine years old when the mold was discovered, but he has since learned that lumber that is left sitting out on construction sites
and gets wet can lead to mold developing in even
newly built houses.
“We want to raise more awareness around it,” he said. “Once it
was happening to us, we realized how much need
there was. Had we started
with this mold dog, we could have saved ourselves
tens of thousands of dollars, plus a lot of sleepless
nights, pain and heartache.”
Cunningham said Alpha Dog Inspections will provide
inspections for both
residential and commercial properties and even cars,
RVs and boats, which are considered high-risk environments for mold due to
moisture and porous
materials. The company is
based in Springfield but services a 350-mile radius, and Cunningham said he is willing to travel further if needed.
He said his family’s
own experience with mold exposure also put them in contact with companies that can help address the next steps once
it’s discovered.
“We can help people connect with the right
resources for remediation and detoxing. We know the people in the industry to go to for that,” he
said.
Cunningham said that
while most people choose to start a new business
venture based on potential return on investment,
Alpha Dog Inspections is a passion project.
“It was so life-changing for us, we had to bring it to other
people,” he said.
