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Okay. Awesome. We are in a bit of a tight timeline today here, so, we’ll keep things moving as people keep filtering in here. They’re obviously more than welcome to join. We’ve got a really jam packed schedule. So, first off, I wanna welcome everyone to our first ever operator boot camp here at ºÚÁϳԹÏ. We had over 500 people registered for today’s sessions, today’s session, so that’s, fantastic to see. What you can expect to get out of today’s session, you’re gonna hear directly from some experienced operators and industry experts on decisions, systems, strategies that help restoration companies become consistently profitable. Couple things that we’re gonna be covering here, what top operators are doing differently and how to apply apply it, industry shifts that you should be paying attention to, how to run a profitable business with or without TPA work, what it takes to build a strong culture that keeps your best people, and practical ways to improve operations and take action right away. Alright. Without further ado, we’re gonna bring in our first speaker here of the day, Borree. For you for those of you that do not know Coyne, he is the Head of Service Environmental at Guardian Restoration Partners. Coyne founded, Midwest Restoration in 2008, which was a solo operation out of Wisconsin and grew to an eight figure revenue company with over 30 employees, before its acquisition in 2024 by Guardian Restoration Partners. Coyne is an IICRC master in fire, water, and textile restoration and now serves as the head of service environmental for Guardian, overseeing national growth in over fifteen partner companies. His tenure involves several, incorporated five thousand recognitions along with his philanthropic efforts, including establishing a nonprofit foundation that has contributed over one million dollars to his local community. Coyne, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah. Can you hear me okay, Chris? Audio is coming through loud and clear, man. Alright. Good. Well, with the introduction, thank you. And I know we have a limited time or 20 minutes or so. So if I go down rabbit holes or get too long winded, just just say the word. So okay. Alright. So k. Today, we’re gonna talk about how to and how I successfully built a strong company culture that drives retention, reputation, and growth. It’s not about perks or slogans, but the way your our team behaves every day. And when done right, I’m I’m living proof that culture does drive retention, quality, and growth all at once. So let’s go to my slide here. I’m trying to follow all the slides. Okay. So why culture matters? Strong culture leads to higher employee retention. Customers can actually feel your culture through your people. I don’t know how many you I’m sure you guys have all experienced it that and you if people customers hear back hear back from them saying, wow. Your your employees are great. They really care about me or my house or my cat or my dog or whatnot. And it it does show back to yourselves. They provide better quality work. If your team cares at shows, if they don’t, that shows too, unfortunately. Overall, it’s gonna give you a stronger reputation in the market. It’s and it’s you know, this culture isn’t a a nice to have perk. It’s directly tied to performance and profitability. And like I said, the takeaway from this is companies with strong culture will overperform outperform competitors over time, and we’ll get into that in the further we go here. So alright. Next one, Chris. K. Hiring people who fit your culture. Skills can be trained. Values and attitude are harder to change. So let’s define what your culture actually is. K? So one of my biggest things is accountability. I also like to pair this one with reliability. K? Now there here’s the cheat code for this business and what I did over my career. And to some people, it’s probably gonna sound really simple, but I’m telling you, it it’s it’s a lost art. We gotta answer emails quickly, show up on time, do what you said, do what you say, keep small promises, and remember the details. In a world where everyone is so flaky, accountability and reliability, this age, it looks like you’re a genius. And okay. Next one, ownership. My first rule of ownership, and then this might sound negative, but first rule of ownership is everything is my fault. If we miss goals, my fault. If we have bad culture, my fault. Top performer leaves, my fault. It’s it’s about taking responsibility when things go wrong, not just taking credit for when things go right. The best leaders that I’ve seen, we don’t we don’t blame the market, the leads that we get. We don’t blame the economy or their people or their staff. We we look in the mirror first because once you own it or once you own the problem, then you know there’s a problem, and and you can fix it. So team first mindset. Yeah. Most leaders, what I’ve seen, they think their job is to manage people, and really it’s not. Our job is to build people. The the best leaders don’t create followers. They create leaders. And when you invest in the people, something really, really powerful happens. You don’t have to push the team in. The team starts pushing itself. And I meant to get a picture of this to the ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï staff. It was too late. But one thing I really, really recommend, and I’ll I’ll give you my email at the end here. I encourage everybody to reach out. But we I’ve I’ve I’ve worked off of an inverted org chart. Okay? Typically, the leader, the ownership is at the top. Subconsciously, that creates you looking down on people and compared to if you’re at the bottom. That’s we’re actually at the bottom. Right? Our job is to support the people above us. Okay? And this is where it comes down to. If if something crumbles, it comes back on us. And I think we need that reminder. And and not to mention, the the production, I’m gonna say, is the most important piece of this business too. So I really, really encourage you to put an inverted org chart in place, explain to your staff. And, again, I’ll give them all all my email at the end this. Email me. I’ll give you every secret that I have. K. Pride and workmanship. You won’t see pride because someone says they have it. You’ll see it in in in what they do what they consistently do. When there’s no one watching or when the standards aren’t enforced, that’s when you know how some when you have something or someone really, really special. So takeaway for this one, interview for behavior, not just experience. We can teach technical skills. There’s train there’s ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï University for that. There’s IICRC classes. There’s RIA. There’s all these great organizations. Right? We can teach that. We cannot easily teach work ethic or care. Alright. Next one, Chris. K. Building a team that cares about quality. Culture sets a standard for what good looks like. K? And we have to reinforce that quality through a certain amount of things. My top hits are clear expectations. People can’t hit the targets they can’t see. If you don’t see them, employees will fill in the gaps themselves, which will it’ll lead to inconsistent performance. They’re gonna have to redo the rework, and they’re gonna be frustrated. And when they get frustrated, you’re gonna get frustrated, and it creates nothing good. Consistent accountability. One of my Coyne-isms that my staff or even people I work with now know that accountability is one of my biggest biggest hits and and from success and just across every organization from production to ownership and leadership. It builds trust. Accountability has gotta be consistent, though, and it it has to be applied the same way to everyone. People stop worrying about favoritism or unpredictability. If they know the rules, the standards are in place, and those standards won’t suddenly change depending on mood or who’s involved. I can guarantee anybody majority of people on this call can see it randomly, and that and that leads to job and security too for people. They don’t know if somebody’s gonna go off the handle or who’s gonna get in trouble today, but he won’t get in trouble because or he won’t be held accountable. Sorry. Not in trouble. Held accountable because they make a lot of sales or they’ve been here for 20 years. That’s gonna all go away. You’re only as good as your last sale and you’re as good as you are today. Recognition of great work. Recognition is just important as correction and accountability. Celebrate quality visibly. You’d be surprised. And this is even after I sell the company and became personal friends with some people there that their best days are when the production people in the morning meeting just get a good job in front of the whole in front of the whole staff from from anybody. It’s not just leaders. If anybody throughout the organization. So what might be little to you or us, it might it might send this person home to his other half and say, man, I made it. A coin called me out in front of morning meeting today and said that a great job for staying late yesterday or not going home till the job is done. Most important one on this one or not most important, they’re all important. Leaders must, must, must model the standard. This is huge. Your team just I just say this is just like children. If you guys don’t have children or you’re going to eventually, you’ll you’ll get it eventually. K? Your team watches you watches what you allow more than what you say. If shortcuts are tolerated, rules are bent for certain individuals, well, guess what? This just became your new norm, and your staff will follow you. So take away, what you tolerate is the culture. Let’s go to slide eight, Chris. K. And what I should’ve I didn’t really go over everybody else’s slides, so hopefully, they don’t overlap some people here or contradict them. But, alright, retaining technicians in the competitive labor market. Technicians do not leave for money. They do. But more importantly, I’ve seen technicians leave for poor leadership. I’ve I’ve put some quotes in that I’ve seen across the way from my own mistakes, but others do. I stopped looking up because there’s nobody to look up to. Now great leaders are gonna set a direction, model the integrity, and earn respect every day. Text technicians leave for lack of respect. I don’t need to explain that. I think we all know what we’re talking about. Tax lead for no growth opportunities. I want to grow, but they never wanted me to stay the same. Now great leaders build career paths and invest in the growth early, which brings to the other side of the retention strategy. Career path and invest advancements. This needs to begin the interview process. Every interview I ever done or hired anybody, it’s where do you wanna see yourself? Whether that’s and that’s not just five years. That’s not the typical question where you see yourself in five years, ten years. That’s six months. Do you wanna be management? You’d be you’d be really surprised when you ask this question. For instance, we had my last year of the company, we hired someone with a college degree in business, four years, two years out of business school. Guess what? She didn’t wanna be management. She wants to be a straight up hourly employee that just wants to go to work, come home every day, and work 40, 50 hours a week and just advance the company. Okay. Well, let’s career path that and get you where you wanna go. Other people might come in with a high school degree like myself and say, hey. I’m just gonna work circles around everyone, and I wanna be ops manager or whatever else. So let’s make sure we we don’t take that lightly and and follow-up with it, which goes to consistent feedback and communication. I was in the room but never really felt to be a part of things. We have to make sure we create an environment where everybody’s voice is heard and valued. K? Competitive pay and meaningful recognition. They said they valued me and a raise was coming, but not enough to show it to actually do it. Now one of my another Coyne-isms. We need to pay people what they’re worth. Now we can get them for. If somebody accepts accepts a job for 20 dollars an hour, and within 30 days, they’re outperforming your lead technicians, you better start paying them. Because eventually, they’re gonna realize it, and they’re gonna start looking elsewhere. Take away, people stay where they feel valued and see a future. And that’s just not technicians. That’s even the even the level that I’m at right now with Guardian as a corporate position. Man, I love what I do. I I do feel valued with it with my leadership team above me. Right? So there’s enough for that one. Let’s go to the next one, Chris. K. Gotta keep this. Creating, buying, and ownership. Employees act like owners, not just workers. This is another next level when you get this this this organization. How to do this? Give technicians ownership over their work. Giving ownership changes behavior immediately. You’ll see leaders rise up that you never saw coming because maybe the the the whole phrase of, you know, closed mouth, don’t get fed. People are afraid sometimes to open their mouth and ask for it. So get them involved in the conversation. Ask them questions, and they said they’re gonna rise up, and you’re gonna be very surprised and very, very happy once you do it. Involve the team in problem solving. Involvement builds commitment. K? They just don’t wanna be they don’t wanna be the problem. They wanna be part of the solution. People support what they create. For instance, I would never make a change in how we document a job without consulting the actual production. I’m not in the field with production at work. So you know what? I don’t know how they actually I don’t I don’t know the best practices, what they’re doing, or what what what they would like to change. So let’s get them involved. And very important on this one as well, communicate the why behind the decisions made. When people I I see to this date as many companies I can sell throughout the Guardian brand. This is something I try to teach as well. When people understand the actual why, they will make better decisions without supervision, and you won’t have to ask them or babysit them so much. Rather than telling the staff we we can’t buy more equipment, that’s a close end of the statement. Explain to them why. Maybe is it a cash flow low for last month or whatever the reason is. Because if you don’t get them involved in the why, they’re gonna create their own narrative, and then it turns into your telephone, and you might be, like you know, then then you’re then you’re the bad guy. Next slide. K. Anybody knows me knows that this is a big one for me too. Community involvement equals business growth. K. Community communication examples, local events and sponsorships. Sometimes as leadership, we get so caught up that, you know, we we we forget that we forget to look at things through our customers or consumers’ eyes. Especially in local service businesses, visibility matters. When when people see your name in the community, see you at a parade, see you sponsoring events for whatever the organizations might be, or partnering up with nonprofits for fundraisers, that’s the trust that’s gonna be built before you ever get the call. It’s long term branding, not short term marketing. And I know we all want ROI overnight, but this is not not an as much as an emergency and immediate immediate response game, that is not how we build it. Okay? There’s there’s not a whole lot of lead sources that we’re gonna start paying someone for tomorrow that they’re gonna have they’re gonna have ROI the next day. And if they do, please email me. I’d love to roll out everywhere. Supporting schools, nonprofits, emergency response visibility, basically just just incorporated what I just said. But consumers hire companies they recognize and trust. If I’m getting close to time, Chris, let me know. I’m gonna go down a little bit of a hole right now. So when I first I first started the company in two thousand eight, we had the most generic brand on the side of the vehicle. Name, phone number, maybe a website if we’ve had one, and maybe the service is waterfall WaterFireMold. K? Was it about seven years after that? So let’s say two thousand thirteen ish. I think that’s where the wrap phase became the craze that came out it came into play. So we ripped all the standard basic generic stuff off the vans, trucks, and got these awesome wraps. Right? At one point, I pulled out of the parking lot and saw what I thought was a restoration company going out the go down the street. I chased him down, see who who this new guy was in the community. Nope. It was a heating and cooling company, I couldn’t figure it out until I was within a vehicle’s distance from them. So what we’re getting at is sometimes we gotta keep it simple, stupid. Okay? And just because the flashy trends or whatnot, like, stick to basics. And we get so emotionally attached. I mean, of all people that know given all that attached to our ideas, and we always think, oh, it’s the best. I thought about it. Right? Sometimes we get back to basics. So what I did after that point, I brought a two two pictures of the vans. Right? My original OG one with the just the basic name number services, and then the updated one with the wrap on it. Printed it off on a full sheet of paper, went to your local chamber of commerce in front of 10 people in the group. I showed them both both pictures for for five seconds. K? The original one, they said, yep. Your name is Midwest something. Maybe Midwest restoration. We saw a fire water mold, and we recognized the nine two zero Midwest phone number. The second one with the wrap, one of them thought we were a pool company. The other one just said we saw Midwest, and it’s basically nothing. So at that point, obviously, I ripped everything off the vans, went back to generic, and that’s where the company still is now. So I said, sometimes, you said, you don’t have to always follow the trends. Look at yourself. Take an unbiased approach from somebody else other than yourselves. K. Next one, Chris. K. Let’s turn the community into referrals. K? Trust leads referrals. Referrals are everybody knows this, lower cost, higher conversion, stronger long term relationships. K? Takeaway. Community presence fuels your pipeline. Referrals are your highest quality leads, hands down. You and but we can’t just hope for them and and, you know, and wish for them. We have to ask for them and track track them. A strong community presence we just talked on the last slide, combined with a five star reputation at four point eight, whatever it might be, will create a steady organic pipeline. Case in point, I sold Midwest Restoration just over two years ago. And to this date, I still receive an average of one point five to two million dollars of work annually coming to my to my personal cell phone from calls I hear. Well, my friend said you helped them out with their house a couple years ago. Can you help me? Now, obviously, I refer that back to Midwest Restoration, but we’ve done a great job over the year with taking care of those referrals. And I said, I don’t know who they are, but the job we did do was very well in having the a well known brand and reputation in that community. The rest is game over. Go to next slide. Oh, yeah. And you don’t have to pay referral thousand dollar referral fees. K. Culture has a competitive advantage. Competitors can copy pricing and services, but guess what? They can’t copy culture. Strong culture creates consistency, trust, and loyalty from employees and customers. Culture comp owns over time. Anyone anyone can match our pricing or services. Right? We’re in 2026, especially in the world of OpenAI, ChatGPT. Hell, there are and just the networking events, RA next week. Hope to see you guys there. If you do, come find me. But, like, there is no industry secrets anymore, but very few can replicate a discipline, high performing culture. I’ve seen competitors take out geofencing, now hiring, like, ads around their competitors building. It’s no joke. It happened locally. This is crazy talk. What what are we trying to do? And I always said, if these people focused on their business and their culture as much as they focused on mine, they’d actually have one. Humbly just a humble brag. I hope you guys can do it too. But you gotta build the culture, and and this is a real long term advantage to build. Do something that that employees, they wanna they want their friends to work there. You know? One thing one of my other Coyne-ism is I wanted to make it so that when when people when people go out on a Friday night or weekend, what’s the two most things that I’ve seen that people talk about? Either how much they don’t like their spouse or the relationship they’re in. And number two, how much they don’t like their boss or hate their job. Let’s let’s let’s let’s turn that around. Let’s spin it so that when that does come up, we have our employees saying, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I love my boss. I respect he respects me or he or she, and I love the company I work for. We do a lot of good stuff. And then you have a machine that that won’t stop. Alright, Chris. Last one. Alright. So key takeaways. Companies with strong cultures outperform competitors over time. No questions asked. Big one here. Interfer interview for behavior, not experience. Remember, we can teach them anything, but we can’t teach them how to be a good person and a good work ethic. What you tolerate becomes a culture. Look at yourself first. What they said, people follow people follow your lead. People stay where they feel valued and see a future. Give them their career path, talk to them. Making sure that make sure that they feel part of the actual team, and they’re not just dictating stuff that let’s collaborate, not dictate. Consumers hire companies to recognize the trust. Get get out there in the community. Do what other people’s do. Do do what other people don’t. Go to an event on a Saturday. Have your staff volunteer for stuff. You know what? I guarantee you not only will you sleep better, but after a while, your staff will come to you and say, this is pretty cool. This is awesome. I didn’t realize the boss here or the leadership team actually cared this much, and they’re in the community. Make them all feel involved. Not just the sales team, not just the management team. Get them all involved. Community presence fills your pipeline, and culture compounds over time. What you do today is gonna pay you back and pay you back and pay you back if you put time into it. Takeaway. Main takeaway. Strong culture isn’t optional. It is your next competitive advantage. Like I said, there’s no secrets anymore. So how do you get the how do you get the advantage of your competitor? Right here. It’s your people. Invest in them. Your people are gonna create the reputation, your growth, and your results. They’re gonna do everything for you. So there’s my secret sauce. That’s it. Am I good am I good with time, Chris? You are all good. And, again, there’s my email. Feel free to take a picture of it, screenshot it. I will be at the RIA next week, Monday Monday afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday. I think our Guardian, we do have our own meeting room, I believe. So hit me up if you guys wanna talk talk whatever you wanna do. We’d love to meet you guys. Awesome. Thank you so much, Coyne. We’ve got a a few questions in relation to culture. We’re totally good on time here. Thank you so much for the presentation. I think I learned a a lot as well. First first question that we had, we’ve kinda got a mix from stuff we gathered before the webinar and then some real time questions coming in. What is your strategy to dealing with a bad hire? I’m sure you’ve experienced it in your in your time at Midwest. How would you recommend people go about dealing with those scenarios? A a bad hire? Now, you know, this might lead me to more questions. But overall, the old the old phrase, like, even if you don’t hire slow, you gotta fire fast. When when you if if you’re if you’re gonna ask yourself that question, you already know the answer to it. And as hard as it might be, you got you have to you you have to and I know, like, a smaller smaller businesses or family culture per se, which that’s how I built mine. It was tough. It still was. You know? And and one thing I learned after Guardian acquired Midwest, I ran the business a lot better. And this is me saying I I I grew myself because at that point, wasn’t emotionally I I try not to emotionally attach to it. I made a commitment to Guardian that they acquired they acquired Midwest. They said, I’m gonna run this. I’m gonna be the best operator you have, and and and that’s where I had to. You know? It’s it’s not a matter of it’s it’s performance all day and results matter. Absolutely. How would you say I guess you’ve got some experiences. A question that just came in from the group. When you’re dealing with a a multilocation operation operation as as Guardian has often become, you guys have the national footprint. How do you, bring recognition to the location level? You guys obviously have technicians all across the country, but you guys have expanded. How do you ensure that the operators at each location are still able to individually recognize the, you know, the technicians, the project manager, the admin staff that are doing the work? It’s it’s not a it’s not a question. It’s mandatory. It’s again, like, the first the first question, you know, and this is this is what I try to promote too. When you when you come in for a weekend, Monday morning meeting, whatever, how how that works, the cadence in your company, the first thing you should not be doing is how many jobs we get this weekend, or how much was that big flood build out at? Hey. Do you guys get the board up? Why’d we lose this job? Absolutely not. He said we gotta we gotta make sure we are not robotic because if we if we’re robotic as leaders, all it’s gonna turn into is your staff’s gonna be robotic. We have to be human. We have to have compassion and empathy. The first question should be, how’s your weekend? Are you guys catching the draft this week? You know, I heard you I heard your brother’s birthday. How’s how’s the wedding? And I’m not saying you sit there and have coffee talk for an hour to delay productivity, but the little touches here and there go a hell of a long way. Absolutely. Then last question, if you guys have more questions for we’re still good on time, so feel free to throw them throw them in the the q and a, box. What is your what was your strategy to build out your business development team? There’s a lot of, organizations here that are kind of 50/50 on if they’re doing program work or if they’re not. How did you build out that team, motivate them, and make that a, you know, a large part of your your company’s revenue? Yeah. So two parts to it. I didn’t even have a business development team or a single sales rep for the first eight years of the company. K? Now this was before Google Ads, okay, and and all the instant gratification we get now. How to build it out? It wasn’t I didn’t do it as didn’t have a sales team. So we incorporated the entire company. When I say team okay. So usually, if if sales are slow, I think either the sales team and or the leadership team gets a blame for it. Right? Why are we slow? What are we doing? But let’s incorporate the whole team. So whether we have 10 employees or 30 employees, I’m assuming 25% of them probably have an insurance agent for something or I hope they do. Somebody knows a plumber. Maybe they’re married to police or fire department. You know? And there’s there’s refer I think there’s the answers are usually within the room already as far as where the referrals can come from that we didn’t know. We have we already have the revenue within the company. We just gotta figure out where it is. So as far as that, we can’t just compensate the sales team. We gotta compensate all the employees as well. So there’s there’s a system set up at different locations through Guardian as well. And I do this at Midwest that if anybody, any employee brings a job in, you know, we’d make sure to compensate it for it. If we know there’s three inches of rain out there, well, guess what? Every single employee better be on social media saying, hey. If anybody needs help, you know, shoot me a message. This is what I work for. And it goes back to, like I said, let’s pay people what they’re worth, not what we can get them for or or how much we can potentially take away from them. The only reason I started Midwest because I wasn’t I didn’t get my commission check. So that’s why we’re here. So great question. Awesome. I think those are the questions that we have. Coyne, thank you so much for joining us. Like I said, it’s really generous of you to also include your your email address. If you guys are at RIA next week, you’re not gonna miss him. He’ll be a head taller than everyone else. So please come up and, and chat with the Guardian crew. But, Coyne, thanks so much, man, and look forward to seeing you in Savannah next week. That was awesome. Absolutely. And my plug for ºÚÁϳԹÏ, I said, this is one of the you guys have been instrumental. I think when I met Dave, Carol, and Paul way back today, years ago or so in Vegas, but you guys have been instrumental to my documentation process and still a massive help to Guardian and putting up new service lines with us too. So thank you then. Thank you for the invite. Thank you for support overall. And, yeah, shoot me an email, and I’ll see you guys next week. Awesome. Thanks, Coyne. Appreciate it. Later. Okay. Fantastic. We’re gonna keep things moving along here. That was a great start. Next up, we have Taylor Carmichael, who’s the Director of Systems for Southeast Restoration. For those of you that don’t know Southeast, they are a full service contractor specializing in insurance repair. They were founded in 1999, and Southeast now has seven locations across Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. That is a mouthful. At Southeast, Taylor leads the integration of technology and operations across their cleaning and restoration division. She has a master’s of information systems and over a decade of industry experience. Taylor focuses on building practical, scalable solutions that reduce friction, improve communication, and turn operational data into meaningful insight. She is also a frequently contributing author to C&R Magazine. I really recommend reading your articles. They are consistently fantastic, and she will be a speaker at the upcoming RIA convention. She’s super passionate about helping restoration teams adopt technology in a way that strengthens day to day execution while laying the groundwork for operational growth. Taylor, thanks so much for joining us. The floor is yours. First, I do want to thank the ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï team for having me today. I really genuinely appreciate the opportunity to be a part of today’s conversation. But I wanna start out with something that I hear all the time when talking to fellow restorers across the industry. It’s that everything looks right on paper. The scope is written. Communication is sent. The team is moving. But somewhere along the way, things start to drift. Updates aren’t in real time. Decisions are being made on yesterday’s information. And before anyone realizes it, the job gets behind, not because lack of effort, but it’s behind because of lack of visibility. And what’s interesting to me is that’s not a people problem. That’s a systems problem. It’s a process problem. Because the way the industry has operated historically, reactive, fragmented, relying on manual updates, it’s starting to break under the speed and the complexity of the environment that we are seeing today. So I want to shift gears for a few minutes and talk about where our industry is actually going. Not just trends for the sake of trends, but what they actually mean for how we run our businesses day to day and how we make decisions, and ultimately, how we show up for customers when they need us most. So I think a lot of us expected things to normalize after the last few years that we would reset, catch our breath, and get back to business as usual, but that’s not what happened. The industry accelerated. And on top of that, our claim volume has been low in many areas, which only adds more pressure. What I’ve been hearing consistently across the industry is that jobs are more complex, not simpler. There are more stakeholders, more documentation, more back and forth. Our timelines are getting shorter. Excuse me. Our timelines are not getting shorter, but they’re stretching, but our margins are tighter. Insurance carriers are asking for more, and they’re asking for it faster. Our customers expect clarity, speed, communication at a level that we’ve never seen before. So if it feels harder to make money right now, you’re not crazy. It’s not because we’re doing bad work. It’s because the environment is changing. And this is not a temporary shift that we can just wait out. This is our new operating environment. So if this is the environment that we are operating in, the question becomes, well, what actually matters the most now? Because it’s not just about working harder. Most teams are already working very hard. The real shift underneath all of this is speed. And I don’t mean just moving fast. I mean how quickly you document, how quickly you make decisions, and how quickly a job moves from start to finish. Because here’s what’s happening. Every hour a job sits, your margin is quietly eroding. Delays don’t just pause the job, they compound. They create rework. They create confusion, and they create more communication just to fix what broken the gap. So in reality, speed is no longer just a competitive advantage. Speed is the business model, and speed is absolutely tied directly to our profitability. But here’s the tension that I think everyone on this boot camp feels. Everyone can relate to this. We’ve added more technology than ever before, more tools, more data, more artificial intelligence, and yet performance hasn’t improved the way we expected. And in some cases, it even feels harder to operate. So the question is, why? Because technology doesn’t fix broken systems. It exposes them. When you layer more tools on top of inconsistent workflows, unclear expectations, and fragmented communication, you don’t create that speed. You just create noise. You create more places for things to break, more places for information to get lost, and more friction in the day to day of your people. So the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough technology. The problem is that we haven’t built the foundation that allows technology to actually show up and work in the way that it’s supposed to. So if more technology isn’t the answer, what is? It’s not more tools. It’s not more data. It is clarity. Clarity in what matters, clarity in expectations, clarity in your process, and ultimately, in execution. Because when there’s clarity, your teams can move faster. Decisions can get made quicker, and work actually flows the way that it’s supposed to. And here’s the reality that we can’t lose sight of. Our customers, they don’t care about our dashboards. They don’t care about our scoreboards, our data. They don’t care about how many tools you have or how advanced your tech stack is. They care about one thing. Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you deliver on your promise? That’s it. And everything that we build, every process, every system, every piece of technology, it should be in service of that. And this is where the industry, it makes the critical mistake. We chase tools instead of fixing systems. We look for the next piece of technology to solve the problem when the real issue is how the work is actually getting done. Because tools don’t fix your broken workflows. They’re going to amplify them. If the system is broken, adding more technology on top of that, it’s unfortunately just going to help help you fail fast. But when you have a strong system, everything changes. You get consistency, and consistency is what helps you build trust, whether that’s with your team, with insurance carriers, with your property owners. And that trust is what drives referrals, repeat work, and long term growth for your business. So speed doesn’t come from tools. Speed doesn’t come from technology. Speed comes from your systems and your processes. And when I say system, I don’t just mean software. I mean how the work is actually getting done, the sequence, the expectations, who does what and when, and how a job moves forward without getting stuck. Because the best teams are not the ones with the most tools. They’re the ones where everyone knows exactly what happens next without having to pause and ask. And while we are trying to figure that out internally, the environment around us is not standing still. At the same time, carriers are evolving, and they’re evolving rapidly. They’re not just processing claims anymore. They are analyzing them. AI driven claim evaluation, predictive modeling, increased scrutiny on our billing, they are using data to evaluate performance at a level we haven’t seen before. Insurance carriers are not guessing anymore. They are measuring. So while our margins are tightening and our jobs are getting more complex, they are getting faster, sharper, and more precise in how they assess everything that contractors do. And that gap, that difference between how fast they are evolving and how we are operating, that is unfortunately where we are seeing contractors starting to lose. So the question becomes, well, what are we going to do about it? We have to start running our business the same way they are evaluating it. That means using our data proactively, not just to report on what already happened, but to manage performance in real time. We should be identifying issues before submission, validating documentation before it ever leaves the office, and aligning our teams to clear consistent standards so there’s less variability in how our work is getting done. And what that looks like in practice, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. You’re building checkpoints into your process. You’re creating visibility into your jobs before they become problems. You’re making sure the estimate, the documentation, and the story all line up before anyone else puts their eyes on it. Because the reality is every file is being evaluated the moment it’s submitted. And if the carrier is the first one to find that home, then it’s already too late. And this is where most companies really struggle, not just with tools, but with their data. Because no matter how advanced your technology is, if your inputs aren’t clean, nothing works the way it should. Your reporting becomes unreliable. Pricing gets inconsistent. And the numbers you are looking at, they don’t tell the full story. And now with AI and the mix of things, that gap only gets bigger. Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data you feed it. So if your data is inconsistent or incomplete or entered differently across the many softwares, the output will be inconsistent as well. And at that point, it’s not just an inconvenience, but it’s a risk. Because if you can’t trust your own data, then you cannot trust your own decisions. Also, as we push further into the digital space, we also become more exposed. And that’s the part that people don’t always think about. Every photo you take, every document that you upload, every software you connect, that’s data. And more data means more risk. It’s not just an IT problem anymore, but it is a business problem that you do need to be mindful of. Because security is it’s no longer operational. The more advanced your tech stack becomes, the more accountable you are to protect it. Your customers trust you with their property, their information, and their lives during a really vulnerable time. And now that trust extends to how you handle their data as well. So as we adopt more technology, we have to raise our standard on how we secure it. Because the more capable you become, the more exposed you are, and the more responsibility you must carry with it. So I’ll leave you with this. Technology, it is not going to replace people in this industry, and I am a firm believer in that. Even though I am a fellow technologist, technology is not going to replace our greatest asset of our people, but it is going to separate companies. And if we’re being honest, it already is. The gap isn’t tools. It’s not software. It’s how those tools are being used. The companies pulling ahead are not the ones chasing every new platform, but they are the ones who have created clarity. They’ve slowed down long enough to build systems, to build processes that help their teams move faster, think clearer, and deliver when it matters most to our customers. Because at the end of the day, technology, it’s not about doing more. It’s about removing friction. Friction in communication, friction in handoffs, friction in decision making. It’s about eliminating those moments where something gets missed, where a customer has to call twice, where a team member is guessing instead of knowing. And when you remove that friction, something powerful happens. Your team doesn’t just get more efficient. They get more confident, more consistent, and more present in moments that actually matter. Because in the restoration industry, we don’t just complete jobs. We walk into chaos. We walk into uncertainty. We often walk into someone’s worst day, and we’re expected to bring clarity to that. And customers don’t remember your software or your dashboard. They remember you. They remember how you showed up. Did you communicate clearly? Did you follow through? Did things feel organized, or did it feel chaotic? That’s what sticks with them. So when we talk about technology, that’s the lens. Not tools for the sake of tools, but systems that support people in showing up at their best. So here’s the question that I will leave you with. Where is friction slowing you down today? Where are things breaking? Where are things getting stuck? Where are you relying too much on someone to just figure it out? And more importantly, what would it look like if that friction was gone? What would it look like if that friction was eliminated from your day to day? Because the companies that take the time to answer that question, the ones that build with intention, that create clarity instead of adding complexity, those are the ones that are going to win. Not just in efficiency, but in trust, in reputation, and in long term business growth. Because how you show up, it points to something greater than ourselves, and it’s what your customers are going to remember. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Tara. That was great. On our pre event survey, I think we had the most questions about technology. So if you don’t mind here, I might just kinda wrap and fire some questions over to you, and Alright. We can get your take on it. First off, very topical question at the moment. In your opinion, has AI had any effect, good or bad, on the restoration industry? Yes. I would say on the good side, AI, it’s already helping teams move faster and be more consistent. It can absolutely assist with scoping, summarizing documentation, comparing estimates, drafting communications, and help surface what’s missing. It can reduce your admin time, tighten those job cycle time frames, and help teams focus more so on customers instead of day to day paperwork. I am a firm believer that AI can help create margin both in profits, but also time. That time margin is something that I think a lot of people lose sight of. But when you have time margin back, it helps you focus more so on being present with your customers. But on the on the challenging side, I do see the biggest risk. It’s not just the technology itself, but rather in how we use it. Artificial intelligence can sound absolutely confident even when it is dead wrong. So if teams rely on it without reviewing it, mistakes can scale rather quickly. And, of course, there are data security considerations if teams are using tools outside of a controlled environment. We need to think of AI as it’s a multiplier. If your processes are strong, it can help make you faster, better. But if your processes are messy, AI is only going to amplify that chaos. And right now, the company’s seeing the most benefit. They’re not the ones using the most AI. They’re the ones using it intentionally with very clear guardrails and keeping a human in the loop where it matters the most. There is a book that I would like to recommend. It’s called the AI driven leader by Jeff Woods. And in that book, it talks about we are the thought leaders, and artificial intelligence can come alongside of us and just be our thought partner. And that book really helps us understand better how we can use artificial intelligence in our day to day to help make us better, but not overly rely on it. So the AI driven leader by Jeff Woods. Check it out. Awesome. It’s a great recommendation. I’m gonna kinda mash two questions together. One was from before the event, and the other one just came in. What is your opinion on how AI will be affecting the industry over the next few years? Specifically, the question from Jason was how do you feel adjusters are gonna be using AI to review claim documentation and make claim decisions? Yeah. AI is definitely going to shift our industry from being more reactive to more predictive and, I would even say, standardized. We are already seeing faster scoping, better documentation, and more data driven estimate reviews. On the carrier side, AI is is being used today to analyze our estimate. It’s flagging inconsistencies, benchmarking pricing, which means reviews are happening faster and really with more scrutiny. And where this is headed is a more aligned workflow between the contractor and the carrier. We are certainly not fully there yet. There’s still friction, supplements, back and forth. But the difference is that both sides are starting to work off of more structured data, which I believe will eventually reduce that gap, but it’s gonna take time to get us there. AI will certainly help us reduce administrative burdens, shorten job cycle times, but it’s also gonna raise the bar. Customers will expect clearer communication, faster updates, more consistency. The the companies that win are going to be the one that pair strong processes with artificial intelligence and not just adopt more tools. Absolutely agree. I got a question here from Mark, and and, obviously, Southeast is a multilocation operation, so I think this applies really well. There’s a gap right now in the workflow between field documentation and accounting. And a lot of the the current tools that are in market, there’s maybe been a gap in their ability to integrate. There’s not something that’s been built to close that gap automatically. So as it’s a manual process, how do you build clarity in the process to tackle workflows that live between systems rather than inside of them? Yeah. That’s a really good question. I would you gotta start by asking yourself, where do things break most? And it sounds like that’s already been defined by this question, but you can’t try to fix everything all at one time. You need to pick one part of your process. And in this case, it sounds like disjointed systems. I would argue, how can you leverage someone on your team? If you have a a technology team or someone that’s good with automation, but how can you bridge two systems together maybe that aren’t necessarily integrated? There’s got to be some way at at Southeast Restoration, we’re a Microsoft shop, and I don’t wanna get too heavy into tools, but be more agnostic when I speak about software tools. But we are a Microsoft shop, and I might have two disparate systems that aren’t connected. But I’m gonna find a way to connect those together. Perhaps that’s through a power automate that I can create for when something triggers on this system for a power automate to grab that and then go create a task that allows my team to give them clarity on this is my expectation. When this trigger fires, this is my expectation for what good looks like. Zapier is also another system that can help bridge two disconnected systems together. But if you are finding that your softwares aren’t connected, whether it’s job documentation all the way through accounting, I would argue to find how those can become connected, create a automation for when this trigger fires, then it defines what are your expectations for your estimating department for preproduction for accounting, and then really just reduce your expectations to writing. Once your teams have that clarity and the the next steps and you hold them accountable to that, that can certainly help bridge the gap and bridge any friction that it sounds like you are experiencing. Awesome. Taylor, thank you so much. These were some great takeaways. I think we could, probably just interview you for the entire afternoon. Like, we said earlier, Taylor has put her, contact information up on the slide, which is super generous. She will also be speaking at RIA next week. I’m sure you’ll see the southeast crowd around. So if you are at the show, please come up and introduce yourself, Taylor. Thank you so much for your time today. This was awesome. Thank you. Okay. Moving right along. Guys, thank you so much. Just a reminder, as people are talking, as you think of questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. I know we’ve had a few kind of come in, as question period ends. I will make sure that I get to them, once the, the presentations have wrapped up. Next up, we have Steve Glozik. For those of you that do not know Steve, he is the Founder and President of FP Property Restoration. As President at FP, Steve leads the commercial division while continuing to work with his team on systems, process, to improve service level experience for all stakeholders. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, Chris. So gonna jump right into some things today. One of my key responsibilities at FP is I kinda bridge the gap between admin and field team, and that’s fairly important, when we’re talking about, TPAs. So, you know, I wanna talk first about just these negative condensation nations around TPAs in general and remove some of the myths. For years, I think when when people have heard the term TPA, there’s a little bit of cringe. We’ve been working with many of the prominent TPAs for 10 years now. One of the things that we found is when exploring a relationship with any TPA, you need me to make for sure it’s beneficial for you, the TPA, the carrier. Not all these are are good fits. We don’t work with every TPA. A matter of fact, we have turned ourselves off for some of them just because our processes, our core values didn’t align with with some of their quest. But every TPA and and carrier, they release guidelines. And these guidelines tell you what you can do. A lot of contractors, they’ll spend a lot of time focused on what you what it says you can’t do. Like, these are the rules. If you’re gonna come and you’re gonna provide services for our mutual clients, these are how these are the steps and processes that the TPAs and carriers encourage. And and when you’re able to align with those, we’re able to provide services faster for our common client. And the ever changing restoration ecosystem, the existence of TPAs is only gonna be enhanced. So operating in a manner that opens more doors may be the difference maker for your company. You know, I’ve heard several contractors and restoration companies this year saying that their their claim volume’s down, and and maybe that is the case. But, you know, obviously, we all we all wanna grow our business to some extent, and we found that certain TPA relationships have given us the opportunity to do so. So one of the things that that we have found that helps us when working with TPAs is we wanna make for sure that our goals are similar. So I’ll speak predominantly about FP property restoration. We wanna be fast to losses. Like, when someone calls with a with a flood or a fire or even mold, we kinda we wanna be out there fast. We wanna get in front of the customer. We wanna contact them. We wanna get on-site. We wanna inspect, and then we wanna provide an accurate estimate to the client so that we can start the job fast. I mean, that that’s that’s one of the key things in restoration. I don’t think any of us on our websites or side of our trucks say we’re slow or we’ll be the slowest any job. So we have very similar interest in TPA and carrier clients do. Most TPAs are front loaded on the front end of a project in regards to, like I said before, contact, arrive on-site and inspect, upload estimate, and then start job. And and we have found that internally at FP, those are very important for us as well and our clients. Again, we don’t have clients that call in organically and say they wanna move slow. Everyone everyone wants faster services these days. Also, people want us to communicate a high level. And, again, TPAs and carriers expecting this high level of communication. This is this is a plethora of of emails. It is video conferences. It’s phone calls. It’s text message. It’s using services like Engage. We’re we’re letting them know our our technicians on the way and even providing them a live map of of their arrival time. And then complete all phases of the project in a timely manner. It is great if you can speed up to the start of the project, but when that project starts, there’s a reasonable amount of time that anyone’s gonna expect their mold, water, fire, or repairs to be completed. You know? They don’t wanna fly through the first part and then sit for six, seven, eight months and wait for the project to get done. And then ensure at the end of the project, everyone’s satisfied with the completed work. Obviously, again, we we know the importance of Google reviews and surveys. So so when we’re looking at at at these four bullet points that I put together, I don’t think anyone from a contractor restoration standpoint would say none of this is important to them. It is. It’s it’s very important. So too many times when we start a process, we try to fit it to a certain client, and and that’s not something that we did here at FP. We we looked at all the TPAs, all of our carriers, and outside of our TPAs, our commercial clients. We look at our organic clients, our cash clients, and we look at all of our service divisions, we line them up. And we say, okay. You know, where are all the similar opportunities here to be successful? And, typically, you’re gonna find that they they line up very well. People want you to to call, contact, communicate at a high level, get on-site, provide accurate estimates, ample documentation, and then they also want to make for sure that the focus is on customer service at the end. So an alignment an example of aligning your goals around TPAs, and this is how we built our processes over 10 years, is we didn’t start out and just start to build a process for, let’s say, an Alacrity or a Sedgwick or or or any of those TPAs. We stepped back and we saw where there’s an alignment. So in many cases, your performance your performance is being measured in minutes by TPAs. We’re a control point of difference between good and bad. What is being measured are actions that universally are believed important to a project well done for a cost for good customer service. So at FP restoration, our mitigation team thinks they arrive on-site fast. Then a key part to our system for all projects is to be in real time hitting our date or control points. I know that when we talk about control points, you know, we tend to, again, get a little cringe about, oh, we have these control points we have to hit, and it doesn’t it doesn’t affect what happens in the field. But without that control point, there’s this gray area of whether we’re fast or not. So so FP and TPAs have a similar goal, and we’re aligned around the meaning that it’s not a TPA process. It becomes an FP process. That FP process is that we’re gonna arrive on on-site fast at our projects. We’re gonna get there in under two hours. And how do we know that? Well, we’re gonna hit an applicable control point that allows us to determine if we’re arriving fast or not. We’re not gonna it’s gonna take the homeowner or the technician’s word for it. We wanna be on-site install start all projects fast for customers. So then the data points the data points in relation to these matter for all projects. So, again, we don’t encourage our our technicians to only hit control points or our PMs to only hit control points because they’re on a t and a or a t TPA project. It’s all projects. When someone calls through Google or someone calls one of our commercial clients call, we expect our team to hit the applicable data point that allows us to know we are arriving on-site fast. So this is what I’m talking about with alignment of goals. Again, this is one of probably 20 data points that a TPA uses, but this is one that that we have found that we align with with TPAs. And when we’re really good at it, it makes a difference. So reviewing your team in relations to t to TPAs, how do you handle a project all the way until start? I I hinted around this earlier that that many TPAs are front loaded prior to start with a number of these control points that affect your your score, you know, like, the POM scores, whatever a TPA might refer to them as. You know, we have contact, we have arrive on-site, we have inspected, and then we have estimate. Do your team does your team do these fast, and can you capture those data points? Many times, we found in the course of our growth that we were really great arriving on-site, really great at inspecting, getting estimates in, but we were struggling with these control points. So, you know, again, how do we prove it to a TPA? We had to we had to back up, look at the softwares, look at our process, and and figure out who who is responsible for said control point, who is responsible for capturing it, and who’s responsible for verifying that it was done on time. You know, how do you can communicate with the stakeholder? Obviously, fifteen years of working in the industry, we we’ve we’ve had many different people at our organization. They’ve come from many different companies, competitors. We’ve we’ve we’ve grown town organically. And good communication can have a different definition for everyone. We have found that here at FP, it’s a mixture. It’s our admin team, QA calls every job once a week and enters a note, positive or negative. Whatever the feedback is, it goes in our notes, and we’re being transparent to all stakeholders what the voice of the customer is. Our our PMs have to be on-site multiple times a week, customer facing. If the customer’s remote, they’re required to do some level of video call, whether it be a FaceTime, Google, Zoom, and review with the customer what’s going on. If a customer prefers text message, sure. We’ll we’ll text message with them, but those text messages have to be screenshot and then upload in the notes again so it’s transparent communication. And finally, we wanna be sending out videos and pictures to all stakeholders as the project progresses. That is a form of communication. And with the videos, we when we use our ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï video, we do a voice over as well. But the communication with the stakeholders, one thing that people leave out, they get stuck in this, have to make the homeowner happy or the property owner happy. We have a property owner. We have a TPA relationship, and then we have an adjuster. There are three different stakeholders in these relationships and we have to make sure that everyone can see the communication and also everyone can participate in the communication. That can be a little tricky. You know, you have adjusters that wanna communicate sometimes by phone, sometimes by email, sometimes through XA. And we have to make for sure that that as a company, we’re also taking those communications, capturing, putting them in the notes. So again, it’s transparent to the TPA, to the customer, and everyone, and we wanna see what’s going on. Communication only works if everyone has access to it. Now this one’s big, documentation and being on an ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï webinar. We we full transparency, we love ºÚÁϳԹÏ. We use it for all of our documentation. Does your team capture ongoing photos, video, and 360 photos that allow remote adjusters and partners to make timely decisions? We take great pride in our documentation here at FP. That didn’t happen easily. That didn’t happen over one year or two years. We made a a decision, a business decision, you know, years ago. It did not revolve around TPAs. It was just that we were gonna be really good at documentation. We’re gonna find the software that had enough of the features we needed to capture in in in one software and produce these amazing reports that tell the story. Well, for us, again, it’s ºÚÁϳԹÏ, and we have found that TPAs also like those reports. And and, you know, we don’t just give them a a a static picture. We give them a video. We don’t just give them a video. We give them a video with a voice over. So we’re telling the story. And then we have our 360 cameras hooked to ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï as well. So if I’m looking in a room, now I have a static picture. I have a video with a voice over, and I can tour the the room in a 360 manner. What that does, it allows remote adjusters who these days after COVID are working, you know, off hours, sometimes weekends. They don’t have to pick up the phone and wait to ask a question. They have everything in front of them to make a coverage decision or supplement decision. And in turn, that allows us to continue to move the project fast. And, again, I’ve never met a property owner that calls in to FP restoration and says, hey. I wanna move slow. They wanna move fast. So one of our responsibilities in doing that is to ensure that all stakeholders involved in this have the documentation to make decisions and move things along. So if you’re new to TPAs or if you’re having a rough time with it, I would say start with these areas right here because this is the foundation. This is what is consistent amongst all TPAs is the speed to start communication and documentation. And if you start there and you can master those, as you move on, you’re gonna have an easier time building layers that are gonna allow you to get more projects or more valuable projects. So big piece of advice for me would be to eliminate the hard when working with TPAs or any carriers direct and just keep in mind that the customer is most important. Yes, I said we have three stakeholders. You have the carrier, you have the TPA and you have the property owner. But at the end of the day, the person that’s a property owner is also a person in your community that could be a repeat customer. And we all know that, you know, good reviews can can help your business. So keep the customer first. You know, do what’s in their best interest. Your field team, I’m talking about your first responders, your technicians, your project managers, they need to be built on speed and documentation. So in at FP, we want our technicians to be able to get to a job site fast and document fast. And by document fast, it’s capture those videos with voice overs, those calls, those floor plans, those 360 videos. I don’t need them to know fifteen softwares to make a customer happy. A matter of fact, little secret, I’ve never met a customer that cares what software we use. They like the end result. So they may not know what ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï is, but they know what the ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï report is that allows them to see the process whether they’re on-site or not. So select a software that allows you to capture everything in real time. You know? Again, we have these live links that we’re able to send to remote customers or adjusters, and we can take pictures and videos. A matter of seconds, they’re looking at what we’re looking at as we’re uploading it. So what we do again is is we want our our field teams and and includes our project managers be on-site fast, win fast, and then win at documentation. So then behind them, we build our processes behind the customer facing team to distribute the documentation in a timely manner. Well, I’m talking about all those TPA portals. We’re all aware that most TPAs now have the proprietary portals that whether it be a LACnet, you have Xact Analysis, you know, AccuServe has a portal they want you in. And those portals can be a little cumbersome to ask your field team to to document. So when I’m waking someone at 2:00 AM to go out to a flood, I don’t wanna have to sit there, and I don’t wanna have to to explain to them what software to use and hope they know how to use it because their performance or whether they use the software is gonna determine if we get more work. So at FP, we build process behind our field facing team to take that information, take that data that we’re capturing in ºÚÁϳԹÏ, and and then move it into these portals. That’s our that’s our support team, our administrative staff, and we have a a support staff on on call 24/7. So our our normal business hours, Monday through Friday, we have a full team in person here at our admin center. And then we always have someone on call 24/7 that when the when a flood comes in, they’re also on call. They’re watching the information come in. They’re pushing it to a portal. They’re hitting the control points. They’re doing all those things that matter in scoring us as a company. My field facing team, they’re doing what matters to the customer. They’re providing fast services. They’re, you know, they’re they’re empathetic, and they’re on-site documenting to help that adjuster, those stakeholders make decisions. Be consistent. You know, through our TPAs, I believe right now, we have 30 or 40 different carriers that technically we can get work from. I I can’t expect our staff to memorize 50 different carriers’ guidelines or 50 different carriers’ control points or what the hours are. So what we do is we line them up, like I said before, and we determine, okay. This is a consistency across all these carriers, adjusters, and TPAs, and this is what we’re gonna train our team to. So I don’t we don’t train our team around a progressive or an Allstate or a Tar Heel. We say, listen. This is the the strictest one we have. This is the strictest carrier TPA. Everyone adhere to these guidelines, and all the rest fall in line because we’re adhering to the strictest control points or or prerequisites that we have. This way your team improves overall. You’re improving your your standard with with the TPAs as well. And, again, if you’re sitting there and you’re actually improving your team on every project, your commercial division benefits from this. Your organic customers benefit from this, and your referral partners benefit from this. Because, again, when a call comes in, your team’s on-site documenting, communicating. And several times, we’ve had non TPA adjusters, referral partners for us from out of state say, wow. You know, your team at FP does an amazing job of communicating and documenting. And, man, they are fast to get there. Well, it’s ingrained in their culture because we’ve aligned our company around some of the strictest standards that exist in the industry. And and that’s one of those hidden benefits from when you are doing CPA work and you are doing carrier work is, yeah, you’re you’re gonna have to adhere to these these standards, and you’re gonna have to use control points to prove it. And that just only benefits your company in the end. Awesome. Steve, thank you so much. This was, fantastic. We have a few questions. We had some questions ahead of time as well, that relate to TPA work. The first one was for new locations that are trying to, earn some TPA market share or lead share. How do you recommend that they are able to gain some of that when they’re dealing when they’re already competing against other TPA heavy restoration companies? I think you you provide samples of your work. You provide samples of your documentation. You know, if you’re really proud of your documentation, you get that in front of in front of the decision maker. You track your data points internally, you know, whether you’re using ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï or using Dash, whatever. You track the data points that we discussed, and you go back to someone and say, hey. I wanna give you a a a snippet of a month’s worth of data here of what my company does. And if you think this will benefit your your customers, I think you should onboard us. And and, you know, many times you’re you’re gonna be told you’re gonna be sitting on the bench. Okay. Start at the bench, but but continue to start at the bench and work through it and know that your time’s gonna come up if the people in front of you start slipping. 100%. Question that came up from the pre event survey. I know you’ve got quite a large team, you know, multiple locations. What are some of your strategies to motivate technicians to use the software for documentation? We’re having trouble with technicians consistently incorrectly documenting jobs. It’s a culture. So, you know, if if you have individuals that are really great at documentation and we have a a team that’s really great at them, we have people that are just another level, you have to publicly, you know, make for sure that people know that’s important. Praise them. Give them thumbs up. And and you have to monitor. You know, inspect what you expect. I I pull reports at FP sometimes. I’ll be honest. I’m a little, like, well, that’s not great. We didn’t do a voice over on a video. So you have to constantly be auditing your team, constant training. I know, again, I’ll I’ll speak about ºÚÁϳԹÏ. Weekly, they have live webinars that you can use, but we we always when we’re doing training, we have our documentation open. And and many of our operational staff, they’re monitoring projects remotely through the documentation. So they’re able to see if a video is missing, if there’s a note missing or a photo. And I just think it’s something you continue to enhance, enhance, enhance. You know? What you’re adding value every time to those reports. And and and we just figure out something within ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï after the years we’ve been with you guys the other night. Accidentally, we’re like, wow. This is a game changer. There’s a 24 hour report that we can add in there. And it’s like, if we’re stacking those reports and documentation is important to everyone and being transparent, I mean, that’s what your your team should rally around. Yeah. 100%. I loved the few times you brought up there that no one in this industry wants the job done slower. Right? Whether it’s the customer, whether it’s, you know, the carrier, whether it’s yourself. Right? So enabling your teams with tools to meet that level of urgency is is so important. Yeah. We got a we have a manager, Jason. He’s probably half of JNS, and he likes to say, we’re all go, no show, which means we gotta go. You know, don’t just talk about it. Get moving. Totally. Last question for you, Steve. Do you have any tips for people that are thinking about getting into TPA work, or any, consideration that people should be aware of ahead of time? Make for sure it’s a good fit for your organization. You know, like I said, we we’ve we’ve had great relationships that that over time we said aren’t a great fit. And make for sure it’s value add to everyone. Right? If you’re just doing it for revenue, I I don’t think that’s a great idea. I think that has to be opportunities that you want and that your team can actually benefit from, and then make for sure that you can actually service the clients the way they need to be serviced. At the end of the day, don’t put yourself in a situation that you’re gonna question what you’re doing or you have to give these alternative directions to your team. Like, that is the gray area that inhibits us from providing good services to customers. Absolutely. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. Steve has also put up his contact information. If you do have any questions, even put up his cell phone, so that’s super generous. Steve, will you be in Savannah next week? I’ll see you in Savannah. I will see you in Savannah. If you are, there, please stop by and say hi to the FD restoration team. I know they will all be there. So I look forward to it. Thanks so much, Steve. Really appreciate the time today. Bye. Awesome. Okay. We’re gonna go to the other side of the coin here. We’re gonna go to growing without TPA work. Our host, for this session is Lukas Szczurowski. Lukas is an innovator and entrepreneur. He founded Sanktum as well as Luxor CRM, which was acquired by NextGear in 2016. He served as the board of directors on the entrepreneur organization and brings over 25 years of sales experience. Lukas developed the proven sales methodology, the restoration industry probe selling, which has helped business development teams and managers across the restoration industry consistently exceed their sales goals. Originally built for commercial restoration, the RIPS methodology is now being applied successfully across a variety of industries. Lukas, thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours. Thanks so much, Chris, and thank you to, to ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï for having me back. Really like this subject, of course. If we can go to the next slide right away, I know we have only 25 minutes, so I’m gonna dive right into it. So for those of you that may have not had an opportunity to meet my me or anyone from our Sanktum team, just to give a little bit of a background, we help restoration contractors, build highly performing business development teams. And when looking at our data and in the subject that we’re covering today, we evaluate, what makes many of these companies really perform at the level that they do. And to give you guys some numbers and some context, we publish these numbers every single year. And in 2025, we managed, our consulting division managed just over 300 business development reps, across 62, restoration companies, I believe. We produced just shy of one point three billion, and we averaged about 4.2 to 4.5 million dollars per BD in 2025. So the question is, what is it about those companies that allows them to achieve these kind of numbers? Because that isn’t the norm in our industry. I think the the norm in the industry remains to be at just below a million dollars per BD. And I like to focus on really five pillars of everything we do when we work with a client. Of course, we don’t have time to cover every one of those today, so I’m gonna focus on few of those. But in a nutshell, when I look at somebody that performs at that top one percent of the industry, they really dial in all five things that you see in front of you here, which is the systems. They dial in their strategy, so really they really understand what it is that they want, what kind of business, where they’re gonna get it from. They have a process sales process, and we’ll talk about sales process today. They align compensation with all of this, and they have very strict and very clearly defined accountability structure. And while there are a number of companies that may be successful, that may be doing only few of those things, I think the real magic happens when you’re able to dial in all five of these these pieces. So diving into the first one, which will be systems, if we can move to the next slide. When we talk systems, and I and I see this mistake made a lot by many companies that are that are starting out in particular, but we also see it with companies that are, you know, at 20 million dollars and already have a sales team in place, and still haven’t figured out the basics or have not done the basics correctly. So when I talk about the basics, one, it’s the technology, which is the CRM systems and how to utilize them, but, really, it’s the policies and procedures that relate to that CRM technology. And the main one that I always tend to focus on would be probably tracking and defending the integrity of your data. I think many companies attempt to do this, maybe have all the right intentions, but don’t do as good of a job at this as they need to in order to propel the company forward as they should. And when I’m talking about, integrity of data, I really wanna focus on understanding where your business comes from. Back in the Luxor days, you know, we had a process which we would teach called the audit procedure, where every single job lead that is created in the system required to have a referral source captured. And if the referral source indicates an influencer, we must have the influencer’s name, and we gotta understand who was the person that actually influenced the work coming our way. And while any of these processes can be implemented, a lot of people approach these as a project, which means they go and do this and then they move on to something else. The reality is any of these processes, while they have to be implemented, you have to actually do them and have other processes and policies and place to validate that this is actually getting done day in and day out until it becomes second nature in your business. Because in most cases, restoration companies are good at creating the first job or the job or the initial call that comes in, the FNOL, in order to be able to respond to that loss, but then they don’t pay enough attention to ask the right questions when that phone call comes in and figure out how did you learn about us. If they say, you know, I found you on Google. Did you look us up or did somebody tell you our name and then you looked up our name on Google? Going to that level of detail. When you’re tracking that data and doing this in the right CRM system, and, of course, there’s a number of CRM systems out there. There are industry specific CRM systems, but there are also systems like Salesforce and HubSpot and so on that are general CRM systems. And while they’ll be great and a lot of people implement them, the primary objective that they address is activity tracking. Because unless they are completely integrated with your job management system, you’re gonna be missing out on being able to understand who are the people that are giving you business and more importantly, what is the referral frequency and how much attention you need to pay to them. So going back to what I said previously, even when you’re starting out in the restoration business and, you know, usually you may be getting some program work or you’ll get that first two or three people that send you business, whether it’s a adjuster or a agent broker that gives you work or a plumber. Right? And when you’re starting out, it’s easy to remember the three people that are calling you. But eventually, you do work for one person, they introduce you to another, and next thing you know, have 10 people sending you work. If the first person that was sending you work every three weeks, all of a sudden stops or it’s been six weeks since they’ve sent you work, you can’t possibly know that. You may know that when you only have three people sending you work, but you can’t know that when you have 20. Right? So without the proper systems, it is extremely hard to be able to pay attention to the work that you’ve done to gain some of your clients and actually keep them while everybody focuses normally on going out there and finding new people. It’s like operating a boat, you know, and trying to cross the ocean with a big hole at the bottom. Right? It’s gonna get tough, and, and I think you can solve that issue by implementing some of these processes. And, again, the main one would be the audit procedure, being able to understand where your business comes from and having this as a procedure that’s done daily. It’s tasked to somebody that’s an administrative person, that’s a claims coordinator or whatever, and they’re responsible for actually collecting that information. Now this is not a big process. Just to give you guys a example for a company that receives, let’s say, 10 to 20 new assignments, referrals, leads, whatever we wanna call it, per week, this is a process that takes on average about 10 minutes per day. Okay? When you obviously grow and your numbers expand, way past that, that number is gonna go up, but it is not something that’s a full time job. It is something that just needs to get done so that you completely understand who are your referrers, how often are they referring, and so on. If we move to the next slide, you can see that a proper CRM system and, again, there are a number of them out there, but a proper CRM system shouldn’t just be about activity tracking and understanding how many route stops we’re doing. While that’s beneficial, really understanding, for example, that a client on average, if you see in the second highlighted column here, if a client on average sends you work, let’s say, every 45 days, but it’s been 90 days since the last referral, that tells you something. And it allows you to act on this because something’s changed. And even though we may have relationships with people, when things go sideways, which they will, some people will not pick up the phone and communicate that they’re dissatisfied. They just change their patterns and they start calling somebody else. So fixing or implementing this as the first step is critical to the overall growth and making sure that you’re not hitting a wall, and throw more money at it by just hiring more people and produce providing you know, capturing more clients and doing more activity, really making sure that you’re preserving the clients that you’ve worked so hard to to actually gain. We move to the next slide. The next piece that I wanna talk about is process, and that’s kind of really near and dear to my heart because I believe that there is a need for a massive change in the restoration industry. Over the last multiple decades, what I call sales, most people in our industry refer to as marketing, and it’s because sales was done through the means of actually marketing where people would actually group a lot of people into what we would call daily routes or weekly routes, and they would go in circles and visit these individuals or continue to do so, by the way, and, you know, drop off goodies and stay in front of them with hopes that that continuous presence not only develops a relationship but keeps us front and center in front of the clients so when they actually have something occur that they think of us and call us. And that is not sales. There’s a very big difference between that, which we call marketing, and actually selling. And the main difference is that our industry’s problem is that we treat everybody with the same amount of attention. And what I mean by that is as a salesperson or as a marketer in this in this space, we tend to hog a lot of information. We wanna have a database of, let’s say, 500 or 600 people that we’re continuously visiting and checking in with with hopes to make sure that we catch them at the right time when they have an event and that they send something to us. And realistically speaking, no rep can manage 600 people. Definitely, they cannot do that effectively. Yeah. Just to give you guys an example, a four to five million dollar producer that’s managed by our team will do four to five million dollars and achieve that number with no more than approximately 80 to 100 relationships. It would be very rare to see that kind of book of business come from anything more than 110 or 115. So implementing a sales process and for those of you that have never used the sales process, it doesn’t have to be RIPS, which is our process. We’ve created it because there was nothing in the industry. It can be any process, but the point of a sales process is to have a repeatable sequence of steps that you take a potential client through in order to guide them from being a potential client to being a lifelong, you know, refer client, somebody that continues to send business to you. Now most people think a sales process and selling is all about winning. And I think, again, that’s another misconception. The reason why a sales process is so critical in our space is because winning or losing, in fact, is just as important as winning. A sales process forces you to actually evaluate the client and really try to understand if they are not only the right client for you, but hopefully allows you to understand what’s the potential size of the opportunity here. And when we say size of the opportunity, we’re not necessarily talking in terms of, how much money we’re gonna be able to make off them because we have no idea. But every client we put through the sales process or the way we teach it is to, is a client that goes through a process and we very quickly identify that this client has the potential to refer six jobs a year to us. This one’s four jobs a year. This one’s three jobs a year and so understanding that early on allows us to move away from clients that, for example, don’t meet the criteria or threshold that we establish. And for most of our clients, we set that threshold at approximately four referrals per year. And whenever you come across a client that can’t meet that criteria, we probably should be focused on somebody else and get away from the mentality of what if this client has that million dollar loss? Because that mentality is exactly what prevents the business development reps in our industry from achieving the four to five million dollar numbers because they’re trying to service everybody. And when we think about it, you could be sitting on a bench at your kid’s, you know, baseball game and the parents sitting next to you, any of them could have a flood, but you can’t possibly give them the same amount amount of attention as you would to a property manager or an adjuster or an agent because these individuals will have a loss maybe once every 10 years if that. You gotta focus on the people that can actually produce the work for you, and having a sales process is gonna make that critical. Now another thing I wanna point out is the people that even consider themselves as being sophisticated when it comes to sales in our industry primarily focus their attention on activity and results. So most people, even those that have CRM systems, will focus on how many visits we’re doing or how many meetings we’re having and how many referrals we’re getting. And while that’s already really good, where the real magic happens is the stuff in between. And unless you have a defined process like RIPS or something else, you cannot understand what’s happening in between. So in our case, just quickly touch on a couple of the stages just to showcase some of this, every single client you come across is identified as a prospect identified. The next step isn’t to spend money on them and wine and dine them. It is to schedule what we call a probe meeting. And a probe meeting is all about doing a discovery with the client and figure out everything about them, who are they currently using, what do they like about them, what they dislike about them, but more importantly, asking them questions that allow us to understand that based on everything we understand about this client, this client is likely to have six events a year where they need the responsible restoration contractor. We eventually do a presentation. We eventually conduct the presentation and if the client is responsive to what we are offering, we obtain what’s called an initial commitment where we ask the client to commit to giving us only a trial job, but that being the next event. Eventually, we receive that first referral. And once that first referral is done and completed, we do a first job review. And then and only then do we actually engage the client with an emergency response plan, priority service agreement, or actually gain them as a client in our books. Right? So the understanding of what happens between meeting somebody and actually getting business from them and what is the defined sequence of steps and having everybody go exactly through the same steps eliminates focus on people that are probably gonna be a waste of your time, lowers the amount of people you’re focused on and puts you in front of the people that are probably gonna give you the most amount of business. If we could move to the next slide, which is the third kind of pillar that I talked about, at the beginning, and that would be accountability. Let’s just give it a second here. We can move to the yeah. Thank you. Accountability is kind of the third part. And I think, you know, when people ask me out of all the things that we implement when we work with a client, which one moves the needle the most? I always probably land on this one. This one is the biggest one because a team that isn’t properly managed usually is managed by an owner that doesn’t have the the time or the amount of attention that they can give salespeople. Mostly, those meetings are kinda like, so how are things going out there? And the response is, you know, it’s you know, people are not busy or nothing’s happening. I’m visiting people, they don’t have any losses. Right? And that’s really the essence of a sales meeting. The accountability becomes a really key piece. Now what you’re seeing on the screen is, RIPS OS, which is kind of our operating system, which our clients get for free, anybody that’s either learning our process and so on. But that RIPS OS or the operating system is a means to track the results of the business development rep, but not the results you’re seeing in the CRM system. And that is actually a real unique way of looking at this because if you think about a CRM and the effort that the BD is doing in the field, which is logged as activities, meetings, and so on, and who are they spending time with, is representation of what the BD says that they’ve done. The manager’s job is to actually meet once a week with that BD, evaluate what they were supposed to do last week, validate that what they were supposed to they did, and then validate the depth of those meetings, for example. So the same you know, if you have two different salespeople and both of them have a meeting with their client, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that meeting went exactly the same way. So there should be some qualifying factors of what determines a good meeting and what was our intent in that meeting and did we actually achieve it. And tracking those results is kind of key. So our consulting team, for example, uses this or companies that are in our academy that have learned and implemented our process, the managers, the owners that are running their teams themselves will utilize the system to look at the CRM data, but then again capture information such as, you know, how many pro meetings did you have and how many first referrals did you receive in the last seven days, but not necessarily that the exact, copy of what you’re seeing in the CRM system. And if we go to the next slide, this kind of showcases a little bit, and I think there there may be if you could click one more, it no. Sorry. I think this one kind of highlights what we’re doing. We’re managing and understanding the conversion rates that you’re seeing kinda on top, from booking meetings to actually having meetings. Right? If we think about a salesperson, right, the first thing we need to learn about a salesperson is are they able to walk into a room, for example, and where they don’t know anybody and walk out with three friends and six meetings? Right? If they can do that, if they’ve booked six meetings, are they able to actually have those meetings happen, or did the people give those meetings to them because they were trying to get them out the door? Right? So there’s all kinds of steps throughout the process that allows us to understand where are the weaknesses of our BDs, of our salespeople. And there is no BD that is perfect at every part of the sales process. Some people may be very good at booking meetings. Some people may be very good at actually conducting the meeting and extracting the information, but may not be very good at obtaining a commitment, may not be very good at having tough conversations with a client that made a commitment to giving you the next job, but we haven’t seen anything from that client even though we’ve established by when we should be able to actually see that first referral from them. Right? So being able to do this is critical. And I know a lot of you are probably listening to this and going, oh my god. This is intense, and there’s a lot of oversight and micromanagement and so on. And many of you probably interviewed salespeople, and many of you probably heard in those interviews that that, you know, the worst thing that a salesperson, doesn’t want in their new job is a manager that’s gonna micromanage them. And while to some degree that’s true, I can officially tell you that salespeople require direction, and they gotta understand and have support. If you hired a salesperson that can step into your business, figure everything out, go out there and generate a lot of work for you, One, you’re lucky. Two, you’ve hired yourself an entrepreneur, not a salesperson. And you are likely to lose that individual. Right? That’s a person that was able to figure everything out and they have an entrepreneurial mind and they’re unlikely to stay with you for a lengthy period of time. And most importantly, when you hire your second salesperson or third, there’ll be a clash between those individuals and it’ll cause turmoil. Right? So most salespeople require direction. And if that direction comes from somebody they respect and listen to, wonderful things happen. But this concept and idea of a salesperson not being managed and not being monitored is probably the part that plays the biggest biggest part in clients or restoration companies’ inability to experience the kind of growth that we’re seeing with our clients. I’m not sure where we are for time, probably knocking at 25 minutes, so maybe we’ll move on to some questions. And, again, we’ve touched briefly on the three of the five that I’ve talked about, but if any of you have any questions or would like to, would like to learn a little bit more, I will be at RIA. I’m sure Chris is gonna ask me that, but I will be at RIA, as well. So I can answer those or you can connect with me directly. Awesome. Lukas, thank you so much. There’s a few, questions here from the group and a few that came in beforehand. The first question is from Jeff. What is the typical yearly revenue for a Sanktum trained business development rep, and what is the industry average for a business development rep? So the industry average for a BD and, again, it depends what vertical they’re selling into. But if we look at somebody that spends, let’s say, 60% selling to multifamily and, you know, 40% to class a or somebody that sells to agents mostly and maybe some plumbers and adjusters, that average still sits below a million dollars if you look at the whole industry, and that number has been our been there for over a decade. So there’s a precise reason for that. For us, that rep, of course, it depends on how long they’ve been on our platform, but that rep within three years, if they get hired, they don’t inherit any business and they have to develop everything from scratch, they will reach that four million dollars to five million dollars mark within three years. Okay? The first year, that number will look closer to probably about 700 thousand in the first twelve months of employment. So just to prequalify this, 30 days of that employment will be onboarding. It’ll take them three months to get out on their own and start generating that first referral, which means they’ll only be producing work for about seven months out of the first twelve. And in those seven months, they should be able to produce no no less than about 700 thousand by year two at 2.3 million and then by year three, over 3.5 to 4 million. Awesome. We’ve got a few questions about driving more organic leads in their business, getting away from DPA work. What what would you say is the, single largest thing that companies need to change when you come in and start consulting with them in order to drive more organic leads through the doors? Yeah. I think, you know, we have a lot of companies come to us because we’re known as the company that you go to if you wanna generate commercial business, and we have a lot of people that never done commercial and wanna get into it and reach out to us. And I think the most important part is to align your expectations with what you can produce and how you produce work. So if you’re already doing a lot of TPA and residential work and you wanna breach into that commercial market, the natural progression would be to go after condo and multifamily, maybe senior living, assisted living, maybe section eight, and so on because that is a residential dwelling, but the source of the job comes through a property manager or a maintenance director, so it’s considered commercial. Right? I’m sorry, Chris. Repeat that question. I don’t know if I’m addressing that. So what would be the number one thing that they should do? Is that Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think aligning who you’re gonna go after and having a clear and realistic set of expectations what it takes to generate this and don’t change it. Don’t be the guy that comes in and says, I’m gonna go after this. And then within three weeks, you’re like, I need you to stop this and go focus on this. Because anything in sales is just like pushing a train. It’s a momentum game. Right? If you do something today, the end result or the results start showing up within, you know, eight to twelve weeks from when you’re doing stuff. So that would be number one. And again, going back to my first point would be data. Understanding where your work’s coming from so that you can validate that what you’re doing out there is actually working. It’s one thing to go out there and coach everybody and get a bunch of work, but being able to pinpoint and confidently be able to say this job came as a result of this this effort is the key. 100%. Last question for you here. I think there’s this is a big topic for a lot of people. What do you look for when you’re hiring a new salesperson? What indicators, are you looking for if they will or will not be successful? Yeah. So I think that’s a that’s a loaded question. We have a whole kind of, section of our academy that teaches this, we obviously do this for our clients as well. But I think the most important part is that you’re looking for somebody that can build relationships very quickly, okay, and easily, somebody that can be a bit of a chameleon and can adapt to various situations. I kind of touched on the fact that they should be able to walk into a room of 200 people that they’ve never met and be able to quickly establish certain relationships. They have to align with your core values of your company because you could hire a superstar salesperson, but if they don’t align with how you operate and what what’s important to you, that’s all gonna blow up. And the last thing I would say, which people you know, again, I see a lot of mistakes, is a lot of people think that they wanna hire a superstar. Let me tell you, if you’re building a team, you’re better off hiring decent salespeople that you’re gonna eventually make good and great and not try to find a superstar. You may lock out and out of the eight people that you have on your team, you’ll have one that’s, you know, doing extremely well and is the the the kind of jam, but you can’t build a team that way. You would spend all your life trying if you wanted to put together a team of seven people like this. Our top producers, we had about seven people, I believe, that were over 20 million last year, that were producing, but that’s not normal. Right? Normal would be for us, it’s four to five million bucks. That’s the norm. So there’s a number of factors. I think it’s a loaded question. Happy to have that discussion, if you wanna reach out and show you. We do follow a method called WHO. So for those of you that are listening, if you’ve never read the book WHO, WHO, the a method of hiring by Randy Streets and Jeff Smart, that’s the method we teach, for hiring salespeople. That’s the scorecard we’ve built, but we’ve adapted it precisely for our industry and for this position. And we have a series of recruiting firms that, that we’ve trained and that help us hire specifically for business development people. So reach out to us. We can connect you with these individuals. Awesome. Lukas, thank you so much for the time today. If anyone does wanna get in touch with Lukas, he will be at RIA next week, and, you can also look up Sanktum partners. We’ll make sure we include the information in the follow-up email. Lukas, thanks so much. This was awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. Thanks, everybody. Perfect. Okay. Moving on. The next up, we have James LaRosa, who is the CEO of Restoration Growth Partners. He’s gonna be speaking on how to grow your restoration business profitably. Restoration Growth Partners is an all in one digital growth partner exclusively built for restoration contractors, delivering ROI first digital marketing that helps businesses grow faster and smarter with over 30 million generated in revenue for their clients in 2024. They provide a comprehensive suite of services, AI search engine optimization, Google Ads, local service ad management, SEO, review generation, and transparent reporting through their ROI tracking portal, ensuring every campaign drives measurable revenue growth. James, thank you for joining us here today. I really look forward to the topic. Awesome. Thank you for having me, Chris, and thank you for everybody attending. Cool. So what we’re first gonna start with is what I’d like to identify as profit leaks for restoration companies. So obviously, we’re a marketing company, and so people hire us to do marketing, but at the end of the day, it’s they’re giving us a dollar and they want 10 dollars out. Right? We’re we’re supposed to make you more money. But what we typically see is when a lot of companies come to us, yes, they do need more lead generation, but they’re also lacking in some other ways from their current sources where they’re kind of bleeding potential revenue and also potential jobs. Right? So these are kind of the three main ones that we see across the board that typically pop up for our clients. So the first one is gonna be missed calls. This is the the biggest one. You know, in today’s age, everybody wants everything now. It’s kinda like an like an instantaneous economy, right, which isn’t always the best thing. But when it comes to restoration, that’s also very true with the nature of the restoration industry. Right? If you’re focusing on, for example, water damage restoration, most of those are emergency type situations, and people need a solution ASAP. Right? They don’t have time to wait around. So what we’ve seen a lot of time is the clients that have the best success when it comes to digital marketing, over 97% of the time, they are answering the call the first time it calls in. Right? I’m not talking about the first time it rings, but the first ringing session, they answer the phone 97% or more of the time. The reason for this is due to the nature of it being an emergency situation for the for the homeowner or property owner. If you do not pick up the phone, even if you call back within a minute, two minutes, the five minutes, they’re most likely gonna be on the phone with one of your competitors. Right? It’s an emergency situation. They don’t have the time to wait around. We’ve even seen clients before where they say, well, you know, we call back everybody within within a minute. Even calling back that fast, which is a fast callback time, it’s still not enough for the nature of this industry. So if you’re not picking up the phone during the first session of them calling you, you’re missing a potential job, and you’re also wasting money because in some capacity, whether it’s you’re doing paid advertising or even SEO, you’re wasting money to generate that phone call. So you’re losing money, and you’re also losing out on a potential job. Closing rate is one of the other big things, and this is something we have been pushing really hard in our clients recently in the company. So there is a large difference in terms of the profitability of campaigns depending on your closing rate. Right? And these are two examples that I have, which is a 30% closing rate and then a 60% closing rate. If you’re closing at 30%, your CAC, your cost to acquire a customer, is gonna be twice as high as somebody else who’s closing at 60%. So that essentially means that you’re spending double the amount of money to get the same result, and that’s ultimately hurting your bottom line, the profit that you’re making from these type of jobs. Right? I like to kinda call this a a leaky funnel. And as all of you know, this also varies depending on the service type or the service request. Right? Your water damage jobs versus your mold versus your fire versus your bio versus your build back, they’re all gonna have different types of conversion rates and you need to track those independently of each other. You don’t wanna just see them like rolled together into one because when you’re spending money to generate leads, you have to know what your closing rates are on a per service type basis, so then you need to so then it’ll allow you to know, okay, well, how much can I actually spend to profitably acquire a customer? The third thing is going to be reporting and kinda calls. Right? So what we see a lot of the time is whenever we’re going through a standard market analysis with our clients where we’re auditing their campaigns, showing them their potential in their market for lead generation, a lot of times, we’ll have potential clients say, well, last month, our marketing agency reported we spent one thousand dollars and we got 100 phone calls. So our cost per call is really cheap. It’s a really good campaign. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll then find out, well, those calls aren’t translating to actual revenue, paying jobs for the business. Right? This is because if you’re just looking at a metric of conversions or calls, that is a really poor metric to be looking at. And unfortunately, we see the majority of people that we come across, that is the metric that they’re looking at and they’re optimizing for, both as a restoration company and unfortunately, marketing companies as well. The reason you don’t want to look at that and optimize for that is because a phone call is not a market qualified lead. A phone call can be somebody who’s looking for a job. It could be a robocaller. It could also be somebody who needs your services, so in this case, water damage as an example, but they live three hours away and they’re not in a serviceable territory for your business. So that is also not a market qualified lead. So you need to be able to track this in order to really figure out, okay, what’s working and what’s not working as they are two completely different metrics for your business. Cool. Kind of to bring this together is this is the only funnel that really matters. It’s, one, being able to track the calls that come in two, being able to qualify the leads that come in. We this question asked a lot is, okay, well, how do you qualify leads that are coming in? The way that we do it at Restoration Growth Partners is every call that comes in is obviously recorded. That’s a very basic thing nowadays. But on top of that is what we have is we have an AI with a custom prompt and also training on past calls that listens to the call, it’ll transcribe it, and then it’s going to grade that call against a set of criteria points. So it’ll come back to us, it’ll give us a summary, criteria points, and then it’ll say this is a 10 out of 10 qualified lead, this is a 5 out of 10 qualified lead, so on and so forth. We then have a human on top of that who monitors all those leads and makes the final say of, yes, this is a qualified lead, or no, this is not a qualified lead. Then being able to track closed jobs and their revenue is extremely important because again, everything when it comes to business is dollars in dollars out. So you have to be able to know, you know, when I put a dollar into this funnel, how much money is it bringing back to my business, right? And on the next slide here, we’re gonna talk about not only do you have to look at it as the entire pie, so to speak, of a marketing campaign, but you need to actually break it down by individual sources. So if you looked at a marketing campaign, and let’s say it’s getting a 10 to 1 return on investment, for most businesses, that’s going to be a good return on investment for the campaign. It’s going to be profitable depending on your margins. When we’re talking about water damage, that’s profitable for most companies depending on their scale. But you need to break it down further to see the truth of that return on investment because on the surface, it sounds really good. What you can see is once you’re able to track your leads on a source by source basis, then you’re able to qualify those leads on a source by source basis, and then you’re able to see what the revenue was on a source by source basis and how much you paid per source, then you can get really powerful with your marketing, and this is how you scale marketing campaigns profitably. What you might see is that looking at these four here, your website, your Google Ads, your local service ads, and your Google business profile. And this example I’m going to give is you may look at this and you may say for your business, well, you know, my website and my Google business profiles, they’re generating me a twenty to one return on investment. Then when you look at your Google Ads and your local service ads, you might see that they’re only returning a three to one return on investment. So that is a very large difference that you wouldn’t see if you were just looking at the overall blended return on investment for your business. So once you have that data, you’re then able to make a few different decisions. One, you get to see what’s outperforming and then double down on that and expand it because it’s already profitable and it’s showing you promise for the future. Number two is gonna be you look at the underperforming sources and then you really have two choices to make. It’s can we turn this around and edit these campaigns and do it differently to get better results? Or have we been running this long enough, we’ve done enough work, we’ve put in enough time where it’s simply not working, so we’re gonna cut it out of our stack and reinvest the money spent better else on our other higher performing channels. And then this is another thing that we get asked a lot. When it comes to digital marketing in particular, you really have two different ways to generate leads. You have paid advertising, and then you also have organic on the other side of things. It’s really important to understand that these are two separate things. They’re both very powerful, and they work in conjunction with each other. Depending on the size of your business and also, you know, how much money you have to spend, it can make sense to focus on one versus the other for a certain period of time. The beauty about paid advertising is when it’s done right, you can scale very fast with it. You’re you’re essentially paying to win. So if you’re doing it in a correct manner, you’re paying money, you’re getting qualified leads in through the door at an acceptable price, those are converting into paying jobs, and the ROI is there for your business. Right? Then what you’re able to do is you can scale that by essentially just throwing more money at it. If it’s working from the beginning, you scale, scale, scale. And as the numbers and the metrics are staying within acceptable KPI ranges, then you can keep on scaling. What you will find out is there is kind of a cap to that. Right? We like to call this diminishing returns. Any market, you know, we’re restoration companies are in local markets. Right? So there’s only so much demand that is there for your services. And what you’ll get to at a certain point with paid advertising is you can keep on throwing more money at it, but then your other metrics, your return on investment, your cost per qualified lead, those are gonna start going haywire. That is where you really find out that, sure, I can throw more money at it, but it’s not profitable anymore and we’ve really hit diminishing returns. This is where the organic side really comes into play. And just to classify organic for everybody, this is traditional SEO, which is ranking your website on Google. This is your Google Business Profile. This is also showing up in AI search engines, so your ChatGPT, your Claude, your Gemini, your Grok. All the other countless ones that are out there, it also classifies as organic. The downside to organic is it is not fast like paid advertising. It is a medium to long term game for your business. Right? You’re paying a fixed cost to eventually get results down the road. Why this is important is because as time goes on, you can look at it over month to month or we’d like to look at it quarter over quarter, is what you’re gonna be seeing is your lead flow from organic is going to be increasing quarter over quarter. So your lead flow is increasing, but your cost is fixed. So your cost per qualified lead is actually dropping and your lead flow is actually increasing. Right? So this is completely opposite to paid advertising, which is you’re spending more money to get more leads. This is you’re paying a fixed cost to generate more leads, and your cost per lead is actually diving down. Over time, what you’re going to see is the majority your best ROI and about 70% of all of your qualified lead flow coming from digital marketing is gonna be organic. So it’s going to eventually surpass paid advertising as your main lead provider, and it’s going to be extremely more cost effective as well. So we see this working on both sides for operators. You can run both at the same time, and in the next slide, I’ll kind of break down how that typically looks in a timeline. We like to call this the 90 day sprint strategy. So if you see down here on the left hand side, this is phase one. And again, this is different depending on the company as different companies have different goals. If you’re a larger restoration company, then you could probably afford to run paid advertising and run SEO alongside. If you’re a smaller company and you’re trying to grow and you have to be more meaningful with where you’re putting your dollars, what we typically will see is and what we’ll recommend is start with paid advertising. This is because you’ll get the fastest dollars in dollars out for your business, and you can, month over month, increase the revenue of your business. Then what you can do is, in parallel, bolt on organic SEO to your marketing campaign, right? What this is going to allow you to do is you continue to run paid advertising and so your business continues growing with it. And then what you’re waiting for is the medium to long term growth of your business through SEO. Right? You don’t ditch paid ads. You keep them on as SEO starts to build up over time. Then what you’ll see in phase three is the organic side of things starts to take over. You’ll see that it has your best return on investment. You’ll also see that its lead flow for your business is greater than paid advertising. So at this point, what you can actually do is scale back your paid advertising sum so you can even save more money and continue to grow your business by doing more advanced SEO tactics and other things to get better results when it comes to digital marketing. And to kind of just wrap it all home, the most important thing to do to make these decisions of, you know, should I do paid advertising? Should I do organic? Should I do this? Is, one, you gotta be picking up the phone and answering the customer when they first call you, or you’re not gonna even have the opportunity to land that job. Number two is you need to be tracking your qualified calls, your qualified leads, alongside of your return on investment. Right? Once you’re able to tie everything in to return on investment, it becomes a very simple conversation of this is working, so let’s double down, or this is not working, so let’s cut it out. And, again, if you’re just if you’re not tracking return on investment on a source by source basis, then you’re kinda just shooting in the dark when it comes to marketing. Awesome. Thank you, Jay. That was great, guys. Please keep some of those questions going in the, the chat. We had a few, come in here. First off, what is your opinion on how AEO changes organic traffic and lead generation? Yeah. Great question. So when we look at home services in general, specifically restoration, you still say that Google is king. There’s a lot more search volume on Google than there is these other AI engines. But there’s two things that you’ll obviously see is, number one, more and more people will use AI, so there’s gonna be more demand on those platforms. Number two, what you’ll see is people who are, like, typing into AI are typically a lot higher intent than Google. Google is still a very high intent platform, but with AI, there’s reports of anywhere between 15 to 30 times higher conversion on there. So while it’s still a small part of the pie, you need to start getting ready now, or what’s gonna happen is your competitors are gonna start getting ready now, and you’re gonna be playing catch up for for years to come. Kind of, similar to that, when you see companies making investments in various marketing efforts, where do you often see companies overspending in paid ads without necessarily realizing that it’s hurting their margins? That’s that’s a great question. What we typically see is and, you know, this is mostly on the marketing company’s fault because this is what they like to report and optimize for is they’re reporting on raw conversions, which a conversion is a phone call. Right? That’s a really easy metric to make look good, and so they report that to the restoration company and they think everything is fine. The marketing companies are not tying it back to qualified leads and then ultimately tying it into revenue. Obviously, revenue is affected by closing rate. So if there’s a really low closing rate, that might mean you need to fix things internally rather than marketing wise. But if you’re not tracking those two metrics, then it’s just a really big disconnect. 100%. What do you see, and and feel free to to plug, what you guys are doing, but what’s one improvement in follow-up or intake that you think can significantly improve increase revenue from existing leads? So if the phone is ringing, what are the things that you think companies need to do to convert that into paying customers? Yeah. That’s a great question. So I think number one is obviously having an automated system that can qualify the leads for you, which we do inside of our system with an AI in human. I also think that it’s really important to get the people booked the first time they call. We do hear sometimes where somebody will call and they’ll say, well, I have a ceiling leak, there’s water pooling on my ceiling, it’s starting to trickle down, and that initial request isn’t really handled super well. It’s either the restoration company doesn’t have a preferred plumbing partner who they can work with to get out there alongside of them. They kind of dance around that question and the homeowner will say, well, let me call so and so, then I’ll call you back. And, like, 9 out of 10 times, they do not call back. So it’s being able to get that scheduled on the phone the first time they called in. Definitely. I think if if anyone if you gotta hear any of Steve’s earlier, right, there’s there’s no one in this industry that wants a slower process. Right? Like, everyone wants their issue dealt with now. So whoever the first person is that’s able to, to pick up the phone and convert it is is, definitely the clear winner. For sure. Another one from the the q and a here, and maybe you’ll understand this one better than me, James, is what is your take on diversifying platforms for voice search? I believe we’ve had saturation and have requested an audit by the franchise. I feel the marketing team is not as focused. Thoughts on voice search? Is that For sure. Yeah, Robert. I I think that’s a great question. We’ve seen voice search if you can just look up the statistics, it’s grown year over year, especially, like, you know, Google rolled out voice search, Bing rolled out voice search, but it was very just one way. It was I talk to my phone, it types it out, and it searches. Now with AIs, you actually have something talking back to you, which is completely different than just voice to text. The good thing about diversifying for voice search is when it comes to showing up in AI, about 90% of the tactics that work for SEO also work for these AI engines. There’s about another 10% of some specialty things that you need to do to actually get performance out of it, But it’s really not that big of a difference in order to get those results you’re looking for. Awesome. And then last question, do you have any thoughts on Google’s pay per click performance max? Is there anything that business should be aware? Maybe maybe there’s a can of worms I open here. Yeah. I’ll keep it short. I know Brandon’s waiting. So we have seen that Performance Max does typically does not work well in the majority of markets. Google pushed this really hard. I think it was more for the stock price and shareholders than it was for the average business. When they first rolled out Performance Max, it was we choose where to advertise you. You have no control over your placements. You have no control over your titles of your ads. They’ve gotten better since then. But to us, we still see the number one conversion opportunity on Google is once you have enough revenue reported back is optimizing for return on ad spend and not performance max. And we do test this. We just continue seeing accounts that have enough revenue in them. It’s return on ad spend that matters most, not performance max. Awesome. I think we could probably go all afternoon here. So if anyone does wanna get in touch with James, here’s his contact information. Please feel free to reach out with him and get in touch with Restoration Growth Partners. James, thank you so much for the time today. It was super informative. I know I learned lots. Cool. Thank you, everybody. Chris, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening, everyone. Awesome. Moving on here to our our final speaker of the day, and it’s a great one. So I really appreciate everyone, kicking around. We’ve got Brandon Reece, who is the CEO at FP Property Restoration. For those of you that do not know Brandon, he’s an accomplished entrepreneur and executive leader with over two decades of experience driving growth, operational excellence, and strategic transformation within the disaster restoration and home services sector. As the CEO of FP Property Restoration, Brandon leads the company’s mission to deliver industry leading emergency response, mitigation, and full service restoration solutions across Florida and beyond. Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, crew. Yeah. Excited to be here, man. This is gonna be fun. Alright. So let’s jump right into this. I’m gonna I’m gonna come at this just slightly different angle. You guys have been listening to a bunch of awesome presenters, people with just a ton of robust experience in the industry. You’ve probably already heard a ton of things that you wanna deploy in your own businesses as you take this out into market. And so my thought was, I’m gonna slow down a little bit, and I’m gonna kinda walk through some things that we can do as operators to ensure that some of these tactics and strategies that we’ve heard that we wanna deploy in our businesses are gonna actually stick, take root, and and actually create the change that we’re looking for in our organization. So I’m just gonna walk through probably five examples of things that we can do as operators to make sure that the team really deploys these actively and we start netting the the result. So the the first one I wanna tie into is this idea of making sure that when we’re solving a problem or delivering on a new tool, resource, or tactic, that we identify very specifically what it is that this is going to create in terms of an outcome or what it’s gonna actually solve. So as you guys know and have probably experienced firsthand, a lot of times our teams are motivated. Like, leadership will go out to conferences, will go out to events, and we come back with all these great ideas and things that we wanna throw at some of the problems we have in our business. And we never really slow down to really tie the team in and help them understand how this is gonna solve a problem that they’re experiencing firsthand, that our client is experiencing firsthand. Kinda similar to the whole buy in equation. We really need to give them the why behind adopting this is gonna be so important to us as an organization. So really starting with the why and pulling them into the thought process so that they can identify for themselves or ask the questions that they need to to understand why it is that this thing is going to be so effective in in solving our problem, and then making sure that we’re tying that to a real life example at the level that our team is participating in. Right? So things like missed margins, job close rates, you know, maybe client experience in terms of time frames and and commitments in terms of service offering. But we gotta make sure that they understand that by employing or deploying this tactic, by them investing their time and energy, that there’s a net result that’s gonna help them help our client and help the way that they’re basically showing up and deploying on a regular basis. So we really want to quantify that as well whenever possible. Meaning, instead of it being like a 30 thousand foot discussion, we want to get into the weeds with them and help them identify, hey, when we deploy this thing, when we do this consistently, here’s the type of measurable result or gain that we should be able to experience as a team. So example here that I’m I I thought of that most of us have wrestled with to some extent is, you know, proper documentation, let’s say, from the field. There’s a reason that we wanna deploy and make sure that we’re gathering great documentation in terms of, like, our moisture measurements in in the field. There’s real life net gains to our profitability, to our revenue generation. And for a lot of our team members, that then, as a result, is more income for them, higher pay and compensation, things like that. And so what we would wanna do, an example of, know, let’s say, adopting a new method, let’s say, using ºÚÁϳԹÏ, for instance, to gather great moisture documentation from the field, we can actually give them specifics. Hey. By using this tool, we have an opportunity to increase total revenue by x dollars. Or say something like an example of last year, we lost so many dollars because of post invoice negotiations related to missing documentation. And so by us adopting this tool as a team, we could save that money, earn that money, and in return, that’s resources that we can redeploy into pay, into comp. All of us have heard that idea, like, what’s in it for me? I think one of the things that happens as leaders is we become a little bit too legacy in the sense that we want our employees to just buy into the vision that we have for the business, and we forget that they’re just people. They have lives and families outside of our companies, and we need to make sure that we tie these ideas and tactics back to something that makes sense to them and that’s valuable to them. So just seems like an obvious thing, but I think it’s very easy for us as leaders to to miss the mark on that. I think another thing that we wanna consider in terms of ensuring that these tactics are remain sticky is this idea of building it into an existing workflow or process. And sometimes that means simply managing the perception around that. So example, at TeamFP, we’ve been working through a lot of updates and modifications and refinement to our systems and processes. It’s kinda like you you have to be moving forward, otherwise, you’re gonna die. Well, what can happen is is that when we show up into a meeting and present a modification, a change to process, the team kind of looks at these things more as an additive. And so their perception even, unless we really address this, is, oh, something new, another change, something else that we have to do, something else that I’m responsible for. And so it’s really important to ensure that we, one, we look and identify, is this new process or new tactic going to allow us to remove something that is already taking place? Right? And then if the answer is yes or even if this is a matter of a refinement and not a full blown change, we need to call that out and identify that elephant in the room with our team. Because inevitably, they’re walking out of every single meeting and saying, oh, great. Here’s here’s something else. And so instead of, like, allowing that perception of one more thing to pile up, we have an opportunity to attach it directly to an existing system, show them where it fits in the already existing process, and then be really clear to identify, hey, because we’re doing this, we now are able to stop doing x. Right? Remove these two things from the process itself. And if you do a really good job as a leadership team processing those and calling those out, you’re gonna identify that the team’s much quicker to respond, engage, and invest their time and energy because you’ve addressed this idea that we’re just always piling on more and more when we come back from these conferences or these webinars with new ideas. So instead of like, an example would be, instead of filling out this new form, it’s more like, hey. Now that we’ve added this signature document in our process in the field, we no longer have to upload this, email it to Jojo, do whatever. So the idea is in that moment, we’re doing a great job of saying, we’re removing this because this is being added and this is not on top of everything else that we’ve already talked about or act as if we’ve put into place. This this idea with this is that if we can be really good at tying these initiatives into a position or a place in an existing workflow, the team is much better at adopting that and understanding this is a slight behavior and modification. This isn’t a whole new platform or start from from scratch. Oh my gosh. We’re already getting questions, and they’re super tactical. That one specifically about mustache wax. I will fill you in at the end because it’s very important. Alright. Let’s jump to the next slide. Alright. Third item here, you guys, is we have to do a really good job as leadership, ensuring that our mid tier and really all the way to the top, depending on the size of your organization, that you guys are a really driving force to the change or the new system tool or resource that you’re adopting. And I’ve made this mistake. Maybe most of you listening, you don’t, but I’m like a natural born delegator. And so the reality for me is it’s very easy. I’m an optimist. So it’s like, when I roll out of a meeting and I’ve shared a good tactic or a system with the team, I kinda go into assumption mode that the team is gonna run with it. They’re gonna pick up the baton and be super excited about deploying it. And the reality of it is is that they may. They may, in that meeting, really see the value. I may have done a great job of tying them to the outcome and how it’s important for them, but I’m not gonna ever outperform the reality of just kind of human science. And the reality of it is is that it takes a long time to replace an old behavior or an old habit with a new one. And I think that we become a little bit numb to the fact that we have to stay connected to that performance or that new individual team members have had the opportunity and the time to turn that into a new behavior or a new habit because we’ve walked alongside of them long enough, and we’ve inspected it close enough to ensure that that adoption happened and took place. And so, you know, when you look at a lot of organizations, especially those that are excited about working with consultants and peers and partners, is they’re churning through a lot of ideas, but most of those ideas never make it beyond 60, 70% implementation. And that’s because we didn’t spend enough time being really engaged at the field level alongside our staff to make sure that that’s happening. So an example of that would be is that you’ve gotta increase your inspection cadence, and this has to be something that’s communicated and prepared for before you deploy the new tactic, new tool, new resource. Right? So example, let’s say if we were changing the way that we wanna communicate with a client prior to showing up on a project. Well, when we start that initiative, there’s got to be, one, an increased inspection cadence by the entire org. Two, we’ve gotta have a way to follow-up on that and and provide kudos and input and added girls and boys when we watch the team doing it live. And if you wait too long to provide that feedback, the positive reinforcement doesn’t come fast enough and the team’s slower to adopt and get excited about that new habit or that new behavior. And so, you know, by building in an inspection cadence inspection cadence and an expectation before we even roll something out is mission critical. Two, we gotta make sure that who’s engaged in that inspection cadence are the most influential people in the organization. They need to see from leadership that you think this is as serious as you’re promoting it to them. And then finally, this idea of as you’re inspecting this live, providing lots of consistent and honest feedback right away, right out of the gate, so that they can see that you’re affirming the positive behavior, they’re quicker to adopt that thing, and they’re seeing others getting attagirls and attaboys, right, from these things. And so they really get excited about that. And so these things almost work hand in hand. We’ve gotta be clear on what we’re inspecting, what the cadence is gonna be, and then being super aggressive about providing these really short feedback loops so that the team understands very quickly, I’m winning, I’m off track, I’m on track, and we can continue to reaffirm that. One thing I would just add to this too is that I I think it’s pretty common that we wanna deploy a new system, a new tool, new resource, but we don’t identify what about it that we can measure. Many of you are comfortable with or or familiar with this idea of a leading indicator versus a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is like this thing that we can measure or pay attention to in live or upfront that gives us a high chance or a high confidence level that what we’re doing is going to work or it’s going in the direction that we want it to go. And so when we can think about the adoption of a new tool or resource, and we’re gonna identify something that we can measure to hold the team accountable to that adoption, we want that to be a leading activity. Meaning, we want it to be something that we can see as close to live as possible so that we’re not waiting until a missed opportunity has already taken place to to deal with that. So so hopefully, that makes sense. So, again, the leaders have to be engaged. They have to be inspecting this at every level across the org, and then they need to be in these short feedback loops where they’re providing a lot of feedback on success or opportunities to improve while our team adopts this new behavior. One final thing I would add to this too is I think a lot of you have heard stories about, like, just as communities and kind of a social context, how we’ve moved away from these examples of ceremonial phases, like, let’s say, in in adolescence development. So you move from, like, you know, a a youth into a teenager and from a teenager to a young adult. And and how because there’s no ceremony or celebration or distinction between what was and what is going to be. Like, you see these long periods of time, right, of kids being of in these developmental phases. Okay. Well, we can apply that to this. If if we don’t do a really good job of telling the team, hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. This is what we’ve been inspecting to ensure that we’ve adopted, and then doing a great job of celebrating that, you guys, we have done it. This is now built into the DNA of our organization. We’re no longer what we were. We’re now this company that does this thing. And that’s kind of the final nail to show the team that they’ve moved into a formal adoption of a new tool, a new resource, or a new tactic. So hopefully that that made sense. Okay. We can trigger this last this last slide here. Okay. Alright. So this is not new information. Many of you that that care about your people have heard this over and over again, this difference between public wins and private corrections. And when we’re talking about adopting a new tool or resource, remember that our people are already operating a bit from fear or lack of comfort. Right? And so when a team member might be slightly intimidated or they’re looking at something that’s new that they have to adopt that they’ve never spent any time in grade learning or being exposed to before, there there can become this, like, fear of failing. And so one of the things that you can do to really hinder the opportunity or the success of your company adopting these new tools or resources is to kinda publicly I’m gonna use the word shame. I know that’s not what we any of us intend to do, but this public correcting or shaming of of a team member trying something for the first time or in the early phases of adoption. And that is really risky. The reality of it is is you almost affirm in that individual that they’re not capable, they’re not getting it, and that this thing is harder than it looks. And then they’re gonna become more fearful and more guarded and less likely to raise their hand or really lean in and engage. And so one of the things I would just say is be really aggressive about calling out in Slack, in your, you know, company messaging system, via email, when our team members are winning and deploying these tactics the way that we want them to. And what I would argue on this is that the more people with influence in the organization that you can attach to that call out, the better. Right? And so, like, for instance, when we have a team lead or a department manager calling out a team member that’s effectively deployed a new behavior, it’s even better if that individual, you know, adds the COO or the GM to that branch or other peers that maybe that individual has worked under. Just calling them out, telling them how great of a job they’ve done, and tying it very specifically to the thing that we’ve asked them to adopt and what they’re doing to be successful in that deployment. So one of the things that we would say with this is is that try to tie it back to company values, meaning core values, or the outcome that we proposed at the beginning when we said we wanted to deploy that tool or tactic. Meaning, it needs to be concrete, and it needs to tie to something that’s sticky and tactical for the business. Not just a, hey, great job. Right? Shout out to Mike. Perfect documentation on that commercial loss. That’s exactly what we’re after. Great example. Right? We’re asking the team to behave and deploy in a certain way, and we’re reaffirming that success when we watch them do it the way that we’ve asked or intended. And being very specific in that is awesome. Now when we have an opportunity to make a correction, because inevitably we will when a team member’s adopting a new tool or resource, we’re just gonna pull them off to the side in a nonpublic manner, be very specific about where the miss was, where the opportunity to improve is. And then in my book, I love following those things up with a simple email. Again, I’m not attaching it to HR and sending it out to everybody and their dog. I’m just simply saying, hey, we discussed this deployment of this process. We were 50% this time. Next time, we’re going to go 100%, and here’s what you and I talked about in order for you to be more successful in that on our next time. It’s just a great way to formalize the coaching or the improvement discussion that you had with that individual, but it’s not so invasive that it feels like a formal warning or a formal write up. Because again, this is the team adopting new behaviors. We don’t want to to make this a life or death thing. It really needs to be more about support, encouragement, and removing the barriers of entry for that team member to adopt this new tool or behavior inside the organization. So kind of fast and furious, but here’s what this all kind of boils down to. When we’re getting ready to deploy something new, really process through what we need to do in order for the team to adopt it. Not just sharing with them what the thing is and what you need from them, but be really clear about how it ties into their success, their performance, what kind of measurable gains in terms of customer experience, differentiation from our competitors that that tool or resource is going to provide, and then show them where you’re actively removing redundancy or other things that they’ve had to use in the past so that this is clearly not an add on. And then finally, make sure that you’re inspecting it and providing really awesome feedback quickly so that the team can continue to adopt aggressively and make really quick progress in terms of that becoming a new fully adopted tool or resource inside the org. Boom. There we go. Fast and furious. Thank you so much, Brandon. That was great. I I think I learned a lot as well. If there is any questions, feel free to throw them in. We have a few questions from before the chat, before the webinar, that I think would, be super relevant. The first one for you, Brandon, obviously, we’re dealing with the disaster restoration industry. It’s very tough to sometimes implement change as your team is dealing in these very chaotic environments. How do you kind of look at, you know, process change and breaking it up into bite sized pieces so your team is able to digest it and implement it over, you know, an acceptable period of time? Yeah. That is definitely Pandora’s box. But what I would just say is, how can we break it into steps that build on each other? So, like, example would be if if, you know, whatever. Let’s say we’re adopting a new way to document in in the field. I think what you would need to do is identifying that, like, what are all the different phases for this to be a fully adopted thing? Meaning, we’re gonna train academically on the basics, like, what the tool is, expose the team to it. Then we might move into role playing live training phase of that particular item. So now we’re getting hands on. We’re removing some of the angst that the team member has before deploying or trying the thing. And then third, we’ll move into a high inspection cadence where, you know, think of it almost as a this is how you do it. Watch me. I’ll show you. And then you move into, I’m gonna walk alongside of you as you do it, and I’m gonna be providing you coaching and feedback in real time as you become more successful. And then that final phase being, okay. You’re good at the basics. Now let’s iterate to really take this to an elite level in terms of consistency, output, things like that. So what I would say is break it into far smaller chunks than you would probably, by default, assume needs to be had, and then work through phases. I think one of the things that we try to do as well is we act like we’re not gonna be able to make adjustments to our schedules in order to adopt and train on things, and I just that’s not true. And so there has to be a global recognition that this thing’s important enough to the business that we’re gonna be willing to modify our schedule at whatever appropriate level is necessary to invest the time and energy. Could be I’m gonna invest a half hour, two mornings a week for six weeks as we onboard or train through this versus we’re gonna do a four hour training on Friday and assume the team got it. Hopefully, that helps. 100%. What kind of feedback mechanisms do you like to build in these processes? So as you as you launch a new process, as you go through this Internet of training, how are you taking feedback from the field and getting it back to, you know, management level decisions? So several different ways you can do this. A lot of us run, like, a morning stand up with our mitigation teams as an example, like, before we head out the door, that morning prep cycle that you go through as a company. So it’s very you could easily be developing this into a little bit of we do some training. The next morning, we build in some q and a associated with the training that we discussed at yesterday’s morning stand up. So I think you use your normal meeting cadences to reaffirm or solicit feedback on these items. So you build that into your agenda intentionally. Probably, like, the way that that FP does it, we’re a heavy Slack using organization. And so a lot of our feedback loops actually exist on on Slack. So as team members are reporting back certain phases of the job throughout the day, then we’re jumping in right away as they complete that item and doing, like, a, hey. Did you validate this? Did you ensure you tried this? Hey. Great job. I saw how you were successful here. Don’t hear micromanagement there. I’m saying when we’re adopting a new cadence or a behavior, right, we’re we’re interacting with those almost milestones or or or touch points throughout the day with, like, a a global messaging system. And then kinda like third fail safe is, well, when we’re adopting something and we have a, like, a developmental phase, we build in a meeting specifically for circling the wagons and conducting what we would call an after action review on whatever phase of adoption that we’re in. Makes sense. And then final question. Obviously, the FP team is located in the southeast. You know, you guys deal with, you know, high volume events. What how do you kinda plan your process change or your implementations ahead of these high volume events so your team is scaled, you know, when hurricane season ends up coming? Yeah. That’s a really good question. So one of the superpowers at FP is honestly our Founder, Steve. He’s lived and operated around kind of the cat and storm environments for so long. He’s gotten really good at understanding, like, when heavy prep time starts. And so for us, it’s our our annual calendar around cat prep is really consistent. And so we just know, like, when we’re building kind of our strategic objectives for the year or whatever and and or reviewing and talking about the different things that we’re adopting in the company, we identify very clearly that there are just moments in time you as an organization should not be pulling on a new tool or resource. Like, you’re never gonna catch us in August rolling out some new thing at FP. We’re just gonna constantly be reaffirming at that point. But it’s it’s really a global I mean, I literally got an an email this morning from Steve. Like, hey. Here are the three things that we need to be training on in each market because these this segment of employee base hasn’t been exposed to this and storm season’s coming. So super proactive, and don’t try to adopt something new when you’re in the heart of the chaos. That that is a recipe for disaster. Awesome. Brandon, thank you so much. There was a ton of great content here. Brandon’s contact info is up on the screen. I also believe he’ll be at RIA next week. Just look out for the best mustache at the trade show, and you’ll be able to find find him. No problem. Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. Appreciate it. Right on. As a little bonus actually here, thank you for everyone that’s attended. We’ve had, most people stay for the entire thing, which is fantastic. The recording will be going out. We did want to give some helpful takeaways when it comes to utilizing technology, for the group. So if you go here to the next slide. Obviously, everyone is getting inundated with technology at the moment. There’s a ton of technology that’s entering the space, and I think it’s really important to level set with what does technology currently do well. First up, it speeds up your documentation, especially scoping. It can really help your team standardize process. It can improve communication, and it also creates accountability and traceability in a very chaotic environment. Although it does all these things really well, there’s tons of things that technology does not do well. Without human intervention, technology can capture the data but can’t interpret nuance. So if we look at the restoration industry, it’s extremely chaotic. It’s extremely complex. We’ll always need the expert guiding the technology through the process to give you a valuable output on the other side. It’s really not great at assessing unusual or evolving conditions. It does not build reputation and trust with the homeowners or adjusters, and it cannot make judgment calls in ambiguous situations. Love this this quote. A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision. We see technology as a way to, help your teams become more productive, to supercharge your team’s current ability, but not replace the expertise that your team brings. Our, thoughts when it comes to technology is to keep a human in the loop. We think the tech can amplify the human expertise. Experts can use tools to make faster and better decision, and technology be can can become more meaningful when guided by human expertise. So, utilizing technology with a human in the loop will lead to significantly greater outcomes for your team. Perfect. If there’s no other questions, I just wanna thank everyone again for joining us. Hopefully, we’ll see everyone on May thirteenth. And if you are gonna be in Savannah next week, we would love to see you there as well. Please stop by the ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï booth and say hi.