Growing a Restoration Company is not as easy as it once was. Go back 20 years, and the Insurance Restoration Industry was a completely different animal. Gone are the days of just naming your price and running the job as you please. Now contractors have to work off of standardized pricing databases while jumping through more and more hoops to meet the industry standard, and that does not even address program work.
So how do you grow a Restoration Company in this new environment—get more or better people or build better processes? To answer this question we can look to other industries for guidance. The Restoration Industry is not the only one facing changes that lower the ease of turning a profit. Companies like GE, Toyota, and other giants have spent years streamlining their processes to produce quality efficiently and with more technology and less people. Because Restoration is a service business, the idea is not to eliminate people but to increase capacity to promote growth. Having the right processes in place will allow Restoration Companies to produce better service, at a higher profit, with less people. This means that Restoration companies can grow their business through process development and not by simply adding staff.
