Most of us run our businesses against internal reference points. Last year versus this year. Gut feel versus the one competitor whose numbers we think we know. It feels like measurement, but it is not comparison, and without comparison you cannot tell the difference between a number that is bad and a number that is simply unfamiliar.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Your bad debt sits at four percent of revenue, and you have decided that is the cost of doing business with carriers. Maybe it is. Or maybe companies your size in markets your size are running at 1.5%, and the difference is a collections process you never built because no one ever told you to. Your overhead is 34% of revenue, and you assume that is what it takes to run a real operation. Or your mitigation gross margin looks healthy right up until you learn that everyone else’s is eight points higher and yours is being eaten by production labor that you never separated out from project management labor.

None of that is visible from inside your own P&L. It only appears when you set your numbers next to a few hundred other companies.

This matters more this year than most. Margin compression is not a forecast in restoration; it is the present tense. The Cost of Doing Business data showed 52% of restoration companies operating below ten percent net income in 2024, and trending down. Half this industry is one bad quarter, one aggressive estimate reduction, or one carrier payment delay away from a genuine problem. If you are in that half, you need to know it before your banker tells you. If you are not, you need to know which of your competitors are, because that shapes what happens to pricing in your market over the next two years.

The 2025 Cost of Doing Business Survey is open now at CostofRestoration.com and closes August 17. It is the third year of the study, co-published by the Restoration Industry Association and KnowHow, and this year administered and analyzed by SIS International Research, an independent global research firm. Responses are anonymous and reported only in aggregate. No carrier, no competitor, and no association staffer ever sees your company’s individual numbers.

Every participant gets the finished report free. That is the trade: about an hour of your controller’s time for a benchmarking document that tells you where you actually stand on collection period, bad debt, gross margin by service line, overhead ratios, compensation, and the balance sheet. Because the question structure holds steady year over year, taking it annually gives you a trend line on yourself against the field.

You do not need to be an RIA member. Franchise, independent, one location or twelve, mitigation-only or full service. All of it counts, and the more varied the sample, the more useful the peer-group breakdowns become for everyone in it.

There is a second reason to do it, and I will be straightforward that I have a stake in it. I co-chair RIA’s Independent Pricing Taskforce, and this data is what the industry brings to carriers and to Verisk when it argues against blanket estimate reductions and discount programs. The last survey drew responses from roughly 100 companies, and that number has been used to dismiss the findings. Your submission fixes that at the same time it tells you something useful about your own business.

But take it for the first reason. Take it because you do not actually know whether your numbers are good, and an hour is a cheap price for finding out.

Before You Sit Down: What to Pull

• FY2025 income statement and year-end balance sheet
• Payroll and headcount summary, converted to FTEs at 2,080 hours
• Average mitigation job value and average reconstruction job value
• TPA versus non-TPA revenue split
• Line of credit statement, including rate and usage
• Prior-year P&L, for the trend questions

With those in hand the survey takes about an hour. Without them it takes considerably longer, which is the real reason most people abandon it.

If you want the longer version of that list, my team compiled a free guide to the survey along with a worksheet for documenting your answers before you visit the site. There is no cost and no email required. It is at pivotmybiz.com/codb-guide.