You’ve been interested in starting a restoration company for a while. You’ve been looking for a new challenge. And so you’ve finally decided that this will be the year when you start an insurance restoration business of your own. But you want to do it right. How can you set yourself up for success as when starting a restoration company? Here are a few ways to prepare yourself to do great work in this industry.
Start With a Detailed Plan
Businesses don’t succeed on a whim. Growing your business and doing quality insurance restoration work requires a road map. Before you ink a deal or canvas a neighborhood, your business needs a detailed, focused plan.
Resource: How to Build and Grow an Insurance Restoration Business
The more specific your plan is, the better. How many jobs do you want to sell in your first year? What’s your revenue target? How will you reach potential customers and convince them to buy? Who and what do you need to make this happen? Combine your dreams and vision for the business with practical, concrete steps to lay out your road map to success. Business experts say you should make your goals SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. When you set goals like this for your insurance restoration business, you have a much greater likelihood of achieving them.
Equip Yourself with Insurance Restoration Tools
Once you set your goals for your business, you’ll probably find yourself in need of tools and technology to help you achieve them. Finding the right technology when starting a restoration company is a crucial part of achieving success. The best tools can help you work more efficiently, deliver a better customer experience, and reduce the time you spend on trivial or repetitive tasks.
Insurance restoration roofing software like AccuLynx is a great foundation for your new business. With the dashboard feature, it’s easy to see how your jobs are progressing through the pipeline, and make sure you are handling your work well. Features like SmartDocs enable you to create, send and sign documents electronically from pre-made custom templates, so you spend less time on paperwork and more time working on roofs. And the cloud-based storage system keeps everything in one place, so you don’t have to scramble for your files or risk losing important business information. Adopting a software system like AccuLynx right from the start gives your new insurance restoration business a foundation for sustainable growth and success.
Be Ready for Storms
One of the most exciting—and most challenging—parts of starting a restoration company is its dependence on storms and weather events. If the skies are clear and there’s no inclement weather, your business has nothing to do. But if there are storms, you have to be prepared to act as soon as they pass. Your competitors will be pursuing the same customers, and if you aren’t ready to reach out to homeowners, you’ll miss out on valuable business and could even be shut out of your own market.
An important tool in the insurance restoration toolbox are hail and weather reports. Services like HailWatch and CoreLogic Hail Maps offer reports of storm damage, helping you identify which neighborhoods to target and how you might be able to help the homeowners in those areas. Using these reports can prepare you for busy storm seasons and ensure a prompt response on your part. AccuLynx features an integration with HailWatch and CoreLogic, enabling you to view reports directly from the software interface. This saves you time, as well as keeping all the information about your jobs in one place. And time is of the essence when responding to storms.
Hire the Best Employees
A successful business takes more than one person. You need a team around you that can support your efforts, drive each other to do great things, and join you in making your goals for the business a reality. When starting a restoration company, it’s especially crucial to have a great sales team and great crews. With a great sales team, you’ll be able to reach more people and convince them that your business is the one they should trust to repair their damage. And with great crews, you’ll be able to live up to that trust and do high-quality work.
Identifying employees that can be part of these rockstar teams is your first task once the structure of your business is in place. Take the hiring process seriously, and use trusted sources to find members of these teams. Don’t be afraid to ask detailed questions as you try to build a successful sales team and crews; it’s better to be a little harsh up front than to regret your decisions later.
But a great team is about more than just the people. It’s also about communication, collaboration, and making sure everyone is on the same page. AccuLynx offers mobile apps that can help your teams work smarter from the field. Our Field App lets salespeople take the power of AccuLynx with them in the field, ensuring they stay in touch with the office and always have the business information they need to close deals and find new leads. And our mobile Crew App helps subcontractors and crews stay on the same page as the rest of the teams, with easy access to job instructions, directions to the job site, and ways to send and receive messages within the AccuLynx platform. Your teams will be able to perform to their highest potential with tools like these—and your business can reach new heights as a result.
Learn more about how AccuLynx can help your insurance restoration business grow.
Starting a restoration company can seem daunting. But with a solid business plan, the right business management technology, preparation for big storms, and talented people on your side, you’ll be able to tackle your new business venture and reach your goals.
