Anybody can become a restorer. Go get an SBA loan, find your rich uncle, buy a truck, go to RIA, get your certs. That’s all just money. But success in this industry isn’t about any of that. Success is about how we make people feel in the process of delivering services.
And right now, most of us are competing at a level that doesn’t actually move the needle anymore.
Think about the numbers we hear thrown around at industry conference: 88% of homeowners say the contractor did what they said they would do. 92% of contractors say the process is fair. 84% of carriers say commitments are followed through on. On the face of it, those are actually pretty good — considering how hard what we do is, and how dependent we are on so many other people doing the right thing. There’s no such thing as a perfect restoration job. Even though most of us are general contractors, we don’t actually have absolute control over our projects. Things go wrong all the time, and we adapt and overcome.
But here’s the second pass. Haven’t these statements just become table stakes?
“Showing up on time, doing what you said, being honest, dressing professionally — these aren’t differentiators anymore. They’re the minimum entry fee.”
Since Yelp and Google reviews and Angie’s List and Thumbtack showed up, our customers will put us on blast the moment anything goes sideways. So honesty, promptness, alignment, integrity — all the things we used to think of as great service — every restorer in the country has to do those things just to stay in the game. Otherwise they get flamed publicly, and it has real consequences for the business.
So if that’s the floor, what’s the ceiling?
The Higher Order: Help People Feel Understood To us, a restoration job is just another lap around the track. To Mr. and Mrs. Jones, it’s one of the most disruptive things that’s ever happened to them. They’re in a state of shock, grief, frustration, anger. And that’s our platform for creating a differentiated experience.
The higher order of customer experience is when we help people feel understood. We see their pain. We see their frustration. And we’re present enough to try and do something about it.
A senior tech on our team, Kevin Hall, was wrapping up a small water damage repair. Every day his crew came through a side gate that was hanging off its hinge. It wasn’t in our scope. But Kevin noticed. He stopped at Home Depot, grabbed some hardware, and after his helpers went home, he spent 30 minutes fixing it. When he walked Mrs. Jones over to show her, she teared up and gave him a bear hug. She’d been harassing her husband to fix that gate for six years.
Many people walked through that same gate. It took somebody with their radar on and antenna up to notice the opportunity.
“Radar on, antenna up. We’re listening for the expressed and the unexpressed needs of our clients. That’s not table stakes. That’s NBA-level play.”
Steal From Ritz-Carlton
Ritz-Carlton is the icon for customer experience, and they operate in an industry every bit as challenging as ours. There’s a story you can find online about a couple in their 70s who visited the Ritz-Carlton in Dubai. The wife was in a wheelchair. They were rolling along the sidewalk by the beach, and she said to her husband, Oh, I wish I could dangle my toes in the water
A groundskeeper trimming flowers nearby overheard her. He radioed his supervisor. The supervisor called the GM. The GM called the food and beverage manager. By that evening, the couple was being escorted onto a makeshift boardwalk to a private dinner tent on the sand, with the tide timed so the water would lap right at her feet.
How many people did that couple tell about that vacation when they got home? Every single person they know.
Here’s what I want you to notice: none of that happens if the groundskeeper isn’t listening. Radar on, antenna up. Every layer of that company is trained to catch the unexpressed need and act on it.
The Peak-End Rule Changes Everything
Daniel Kahneman’s research found something most of us still operate against. Customers don’t remember experiences as a running tally of debits and credits, with a positive balance equaling a happy customer. They remember two things — the peak emotional moment and the end. Everything else fades.
Now layer that on top of our industry. Something is always going to go wrong. Back-ordered materials. A bad coverage write-up from a former insurance rep. An adjuster having a hard week. Some of it’s our fault, some of it isn’t. But if we know things will go wrong, how much more important is it that we train our team to proactively create a peak positive emotional moment during the job — and to absolutely nail the end?
That’s why a welcome-home dinner from a local restaurant, served by their staff while the project manager dropped off the keys and left the family alone, generated a three-page handwritten letter of gratitude from the homeowner. That’s why a $4 bag of carrots for a displaced client’s horse can land harder than any status update ever will.
Empower the People Closest to the Customer
None of this happens if your frontline can’t actually act on what they see. That’s why we issued company credit cards to every single employee. Stole the idea from Ritz-Carlton, where every employee — from day porters sweeping the lobby to general managers running the property — can spend up to $2,000 per guest without manager approval.
We were nervous. We budgeted $9,000 that first year for about 30 employees. We spent $4,500. Our people had never been trusted like that before, and it took a full year of coaching before they really knew what to do with it. The first wave was Starbucks cards and pizzas — predictable stuff. But as we kept telling stories at our all-company meetings about the good ones, the bonsai trees and the carrots and the fixed gates, our team’s instincts sharpened. The stories started compounding on each other.
“We thought we were a disaster restoration company. We were actually an experience company. We just happened to do disaster restoration.”
And here’s the byproduct nobody expects: when you build a real customer experience culture, all the mundane, irritating stuff — the booties, the daily photos, the documentation requirements, the daily customer updates — stops being annoying compliance. It becomes a source of pride. Our team started saying, we’re great because we’re willing to do the things other companies aren’t willing to do. We even made T-shirts. The whole mood of our company shifted.
Where To Start This Week
You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Pick the moves that match where your team actually is right now:
- Adopt “radar on, antenna up” as a mantra. Say it at every huddle, every meeting, every text thread. Repetition is how you build a culture.
- Teach the three universal questions. Can I trust you? Do you care about me? Can you help me? Your team is being judged on these in the first five seconds of every encounter, whether they know it or not.
- Train every PM and tech to ask: “Has anything like this ever happened to you before?” It surfaces past bad experiences with other contractors before they tank yours.
- Lead with the hard parts. Walk customers through the silent phase, the scope negotiations, the things that will frustrate them — before they happen. When the hard stuff arrives, it won’t feel as hard.
- Pilot a “Ritz card” program with a small monthly budget. Coach the team on what to look for. Memorialize the wins publicly at all-company meetings.
- Send one team member to the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Institute. Bring back what they learn and adapt it to your shop.
- Be present when trades wrap. Have your PM inspect on the day the work is finishing — every time. Catch the issue before the customer does, and you turn a service-recovery problem into a trust-building moment.
Chris Nordyke
Chris Nordyke is the co-Founder and President of Floodlight Consulting Group and Floodlight Sales Partners. Chris speaks throughout the year at industry events, and conducts live workshops focused on commercial sales and ops, customer experience strategy and building enterprise value. He is also the co-Host of the Head Heart & Boots podcast, a popular restoration industry show. For more information on Floodlight’s fractional sales management solution, visit https://www.floodlightgrp.com/
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