Water restoration services: adding and retiring a line

What to take away

A water restoration company should add and retire services on purpose, because menus grow by accident. A crew does a favor, it becomes a habit, and a year later the company is selling something nobody decided to sell.

Water category, contamination and building materials are assessed on site by a qualified person. This is about structuring services, not about treating a specific building.

Audit the menu you already have

Before adding anything, list what the company already sells and write what ends each line. Strip the marketing away and every offer is a combination of activities, so each should break down the same way.

A service that cannot be described in those terms is a name rather than a service. Structural drying ends when materials reach the documented dry standard. Emergency response ends when standing water is out and the drying plan is written.

Decide first which business each line belongs to. Mitigation and reconstruction are two businesses, and they need different licenses, crews and cash cycles. An audit that mixes the two hides where the money and the risk actually sit.

The lines with no end point are the ones to question first. Contents handling, for instance, is a separate service with its own liability, so it should never be folded silently into a structural drying price.

Four conditions before you add a service

To add a service, four conditions must hold at once. Miss one and the service will quietly cost more than it earns.

On the standard, nothing is offered that the crew has not been trained for and certified in. For structural drying that means a technician holding the IICRC WRT (Water Restoration Technician) credential and, for the drying science behind the equipment, IICRC ASD (Applied Structural Drying).

On forms, the documents a crew will use are the proof that a service was delivered. A completion document that records the dry standard reached is what makes the work billable.

On permissions, anything touching microbial growth means the mold remediation license, certification or registration your state requires, confirmed with your state's contractor licensing board or environmental agency. A service you can only provide when the schedule is empty is not a service.

When a job belongs with someone else

The referral rule is a trigger written in advance. Refer a job out for contamination beyond what the crew is trained and equipped for, suspected microbial growth past a small isolated area, or any suspicion that disturbing materials could release asbestos or lead.

Water category is where most referral decisions start, because it describes contamination. In this trade it is the categories set out in the ANSI/IICRC S500 Standard for Professional Water Damage Restoration. Category can also change with time and temperature, so a clean-water loss left for days is not still a clean-water loss.

The extent of absorption describes how much material took on water and how tightly it holds it. A tiled floor over slab and a carpeted room with wet drywall to a height on the wall are different drying problems with the same puddle, so one call can sit inside the menu in one house and outside it in the next.

The dry standard describes where the job ends. It comes from measuring the same material in an unaffected part of the same building at the start, and it is the number that lets you say the work is finished rather than guessing.

Asbestos and lead are not judgment calls. The EPA's Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) Rule and the asbestos National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) set out when a certified firm and certified workers are required, and a job that needs them belongs with someone who holds those credentials.

For services that touch contamination, the EPA's guidance on floods and indoor air quality describes the exposures involved and the point at which a job needs qualified help. Take it as the boundary for what belongs on your menu today.

Deciding in the moment, on site, in front of a distressed customer, is how companies take jobs they should not.

Retiring a service, step by step

To retire a service, work backwards from the demand. Do not announce anything until the first step has told you who still depends on it.

A referral partner left with nowhere to send a job stops sending you the other ones too, which is why step three comes before step five. The habits behind earning referrals work in the other direction as well.

The usual candidates are contents storage, which carries liability out of proportion to its revenue in a small company, and reconstruction taken on to please one customer. Both tend to survive long past the point where anybody would choose them, because nobody ever decided to keep them.

The records that show which line to drop

Every service produces a record, and the records are what make a service billable. Job-level cost and revenue tracking is what later tells you which line is worth keeping, and costing each line on completed jobs gives the evidence.

The IRS says you may choose any recordkeeping system suited to your business that clearly shows your income and expenses. Choose how to file before a year of receipts builds up, not after.

The wider question sits alongside the records: which services will the demand in your own area actually buy? A line with no local buyers is a candidate for retirement before it is ever added.

Common questions

Should a new company offer reconstruction as well as mitigation?

Usually not at first. Reconstruction brings contractor licensing from your state's contractor licensing board, plus subcontractor management, a different payment structure and a much longer cash cycle. Many established firms handle mitigation and hand the rebuild to a partner on purpose.

What belongs in an emergency service call?

Arrival, a safety assessment, source verification, extraction of standing water, initial moisture readings and photographs, an equipment plan, and a written authorization signed before work begins. If any of those is routinely skipped, it is the one causing the disputes. What the visit includes is set out in packaging the offer.

How do we know a service has become a habit?

Ask whether it has an end point and a signed authorization. If it has neither, a crew did a favor once and it stuck.

Should we publish the jobs we refer out?

Yes. Referring out the jobs you are not equipped for protects the crew and keeps the referral source. Say so on the menu and in writing, so the trigger is known before a job starts.