Nelson Higgins, who has spent 40+ years in restoration, found a lot more companies struggling this year than he expected, because so many rely on storm activity. 

Todd, Nelson, Chris Tilkov, and I were each asked what 2026 has taught us and what restoration businesses should carry into the rest of the year and into 2027. Our answers came back to four areas worth working on.

1. Day-to-day work carries a company between storms

The companies Nelson sees waiting on the storm are missing out on getting day-to-day claims.

Nelson shared that relying less on storms allows you to open revenue to other streams of work. He pointed to renovations, condo buildings, flooding that doesn't go through insurance, and other types of work teams can take on without disrupting their insurance restoration work. Work that doesn't come directly from a carrier, like self-pay, helps companies grow commercially and residentially.

2. The top spots on a carrier's list are earned in the file

Nelson shared insights from his business mentor, from the years he owned his own company. Most carriers work with three or four restoration companies, and you need to be number one or two, because there's less rotation for the third and fourth. 

Nelson's advice for earning one of those spots starts with providing great documentation and covering the whole job:

• The file is complete and well documented.
• The team follows its timelines and SLAs.
• Nothing gets kicked back, and there's no argument over what was priced.
• The job gets done well, and the homeowner doesn't complain.

He added that the position can be harder to keep than to get. "Once you get there, you have to keep it," he said.

3. Slow periods are the time to find the bottleneck

When work slows down, teams rush to reduce expenses, and those cuts create looks like something the team can absorb. In my experience, cutting the expense leaves that work in place, loaded onto someone who is already working at capacity, and that's where the bottlenecks form.

A lot of offices don't have a dedicated job file coordinator, or "JFC," keeping every job file moving. The project manager wears that hat on top of managing active jobs, taking calls from technicians when something goes wrong, lining up subcontractors for the job site, giving the homeowner a timeline, and talking to insurance for updates and approvals. Then sketching goes to them too. They can't start until they're back at the office, where they pull the photos, piece the space together, sketch it, and write the estimate, and most of that happens after 5 p.m. It's stacked onto one person, after hours, where nobody could see it.

Todd’s question for owners heading into Q4 and beyond: “If someone on your team walked away today, would the rest of the team have what they need to keep rolling?”

The teams he’s heard from that handle busy seasons will tend to use slower weeks to get their processes dialed in. They make sure information is gathered consistently and that it gets to the people who need it.

One thing Todd continues to hear is how much easier it is to keep a job moving when the team has good information to work from. That means people know where things stand, what needs to happen next, and what they need to communicate to the homeowner.

In Q4 and into 2027, my advice is to write your processes down before cutting anything and  who owns each one. Most offices find the same name on all of them, and that's the bottleneck the expense was covering. Keeping that bottleneck covered leaves the team free to be out doing revenue-generating tasks.

4. AI will heighten the process you already have

Chris spent much of the first half of the year working on instant estimating and sketching. The goal he describes is an instant estimate that lands in front of an estimator, who makes the tweaks and changes needed to get it out the door faster and better. 

Chris points out that even as estimating technology advances, getting an estimate dialed in still comes down to industry knowledge: understanding carrier-specific requirements and the line items that have been added over time. With technology taking manual tasks off their plates, estimators can shift to focus on detailed review and take on more work.

The future looks like an estimator reviewing and finalizing anything AI helps produce, and that review is only as strong as the process, documentation, and scope behind it.

The companies that come out ahead build before the storm

In restoration, a company can make its revenue for the whole year in one quarter depending on weather events. When a storm does come, the companies that built their systems, infrastructure, and culture ahead of time are the ones that come out ahead. For Q4 and beyond, that comes down to four steps:

• Open revenue to other streams of work.
• Do great documentation on every file, and follow your timelines and SLAs.
• Before cutting any expense, write the steps down and name who owns each one.
• Dial in systems and processes before AI takes hold of the industry.

For owners who spent the first half waiting on storm work or cutting expenses to get through it, Q4 is the chance to take those steps, close 2026 strong, and head into 2027 prepared.