🏠 GEM Resource Hub · 📚 Library · 📘 About RocketLevel · 📘 Playbooks · 🗺️ What's Your Market Worth? · 📅 Book a Call
The editorial standard for the GEM Resource Hub. About a 4-minute read.
Contractors use this library to price jobs, sign subcontracts, set lien calendars, buy insurance limits and put crews in respirators. A figure that sounds right and is wrong costs real money in this trade, so GEM runs on one rule: a reader should be able to tell, at the number itself, whether it came from a published source, from a rule you have to look up for your own state, or from RocketLevel's own programs.
Cited. A statute, a federal regulation, a consensus standard, an agency page, a court opinion, or a named industry report with its edition and year. The source is named in the sentence and linked where a public copy exists. When you see "the 2025 Restoration Industry Association (RIA) Cost of Doing Business Report puts average total overhead at 38.53%," that is a cited figure, and you can pull the report and check the page yourself. That one is printed page 37, and the 2025 report is a free download from the RIA's report download page (checked September 25, 2026), so the link goes there.
Pointer. Where a rule changes from state to state, such as lien deadlines, licensing, non-compete enforceability or sales tax on labor, we usually do not state the rule. We tell you where it lives and who can answer it for your state. A page that says "look up your state's notice deadline before the crew mobilizes" is doing that on purpose.
RocketLevel working figure. Some numbers come from the commercial programs RocketLevel runs rather than from a published study. The four to eight touches it usually takes to book a first commercial meeting is one of them. Those are labeled as ours in the sentence where they appear, and they are a starting point to measure your own book against, not a benchmark.
If a number could not be put in one of those three buckets, it was cut.
A red box on a page marks a decision you cannot easily undo: signing a waiver, letting a deadline run, withholding a payment, choosing respiratory protection. It sits at the passage where that decision happens, not in a footer, and it says what is settled and what varies. We keep those boxes short and use them only where the stakes justify them, so they still get read.
Gray and blue boxes are working notes: how to use a template, where a figure's weaknesses are, which companion page to open next.
Industry surveys move every year and regulations get amended. So cited figures carry the edition or year they come from, and pages with regulatory content end with a line stating the date the rules on that page were last checked against the source text. That date only advances when the whole page was rechecked.
Every page in the library also shows a Last reviewed date in its header. That is the date the page last went through a full editorial review for accuracy, sourcing and language.
The sources the library leans on hardest are rechecked when each new edition lands:
| Source | What it anchors | When we recheck |
|---|---|---|
| RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, a free download from the RIA | Margins, overhead, net income, time to payment, revenue mix | When each new edition is released |
| C&R State of the Industry Report, from Cleaning & Restoration (C&R) magazine, powered by KnowHow, downloaded through a sign-up form | Owner-reported trends, residential and commercial mix | When each new edition is released |
| Cleanfax Restoration Benchmarking Survey, most recently the 2026 report | Operating benchmarks | Each summer, on publication |
| OSHA penalty amounts and enforcement data | Penalty ceilings, citation counts, most-cited standards | Each January for penalty adjustments, each fall for the most-cited list |
| IICRC standards and certification rules | Which edition governs, continuing education requirements | When a revision is published |
| Published mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and valuation reports | Multiples and deal structure | Each quarter |
On top of that, the whole library is reviewed each quarter against a register of every figure that appears on more than one page, so a number corrected in one place gets corrected everywhere it appears.