Managing Your Restoration Business

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In disaster restoration, most negotiations occur between the contractor’s estimator or project manager and the insurance adjuster. The negotiation tends to be adversarial in nature, and generally ends with one of the parties feeling like they were cheated or taken advantage of.

I’ve been asked recently by a few people, quite understandably, why I started a new company: Haven Environmental. The conversations usually go down the same path, ending with a “you’re how old?” or “can you make a living at that?”

As a business consultant, I have noticed over the years there is a lot of misunderstanding around real accountability. Most people think about it one way then have to deal with the consequences of that thinking, and never connect the dots on the fact that their interpretation of accountability is creating the problems they don’t want in the first place.

Fire damage restoration seems pretty straight forward from the outside. Remove and clean the contents, clean and restore the home, remove odors, bring the contents back, and move on to the next job. Yes, that is a very high birds-eye view of the process, but covers the basic steps. 

A few years ago, a restoration client of mine asked me what he could do to speed up payment from bank escrow accounts for the insurance claim work he had done.