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A RocketLevel playbook for restoration owners and commercial sales leads, backed by decades of experience in the trade. Map your commercial market, the properties, the people, and the risk, so you know exactly who to go after. About a 9-minute read.
Your commercial total addressable market (commercial TAM) is every commercial property and decision maker in your territory that could realistically send you commercial restoration work. It is the whole map, which runs a lot bigger than the 50 buildings you already know.
Plenty of shops do the opposite. They write down a few big names they've heard of and chase them. That answers one question, "who do I think I want?", and skips the better one: "out of everything in my market, where is the work most likely to come from, and who controls it?" The map answers that.
You build a TAM so the right doors surface themselves, ranked by fit and by risk, instead of you guessing. It has five layers, then you triage, then you put a dollar figure on it, because the dollar figure is what an owner can plan against.
Start with the ground you can actually serve, a drivable radius or a set of zip codes and counties you can respond to quickly. Draw that boundary first. Everything else lives inside it. If you run more than one location, do this once per location.
Then check the boundary against your licenses before you map a single building. A drivable radius crosses state lines in a lot of markets, and a state line is a licensing line. Confirm which classifications each state inside your boundary requires for the scopes you sell, whether your qualifying individual covers them, and whether any reciprocity you are relying on is real and current. This is not paperwork you can catch up on after you win the job. In California, an unlicensed contractor cannot bring or maintain any action to collect compensation for the work, and the customer can separately sue to recover everything already paid, no matter how good the work was (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 7031(a) and (b)). Whether your state has its own version, and with what penalties, is set by its contractor licensing law, so look up yours.
So you are drawing two lines, not one, and they answer different questions. The drivable line is who you can physically reach inside the response window you are willing to commit to in writing. The licensed line is who you are legally allowed to perform for and collect from. Your territory is the overlap. Where the drivable line runs past the licensed one, that ground stays off the map until you license into it. Where the licensed line runs past the drivable one, it is real market you are choosing not to serve yet, so record it rather than losing it. Decide the gap deliberately and in writing, once, instead of discovering it on a job. Build Your Commercial TAM: The Working Map has a field for each line and for the gap between them.
Then size the ground in rings. Start with your home county, because that is where your crews already run and where your first references will come from. Then count the ground within 25, 50 and 100 miles of your headquarters as separate pieces. They behave like different markets. Inside the first ring you can hit the response window you put in writing. Out at 100 miles, a job only pays when it is big enough to justify the drive, like a large loss or an account with several sites. Give each ring its own count and its own dollar figure, and push outward once local wins give you names to point to.
If you run a franchise with assigned ZIP codes, your territory agreement draws the line, not a radius. Size the opportunity by the ZIP codes you are assigned, and leave anything outside them off the working list, however close it sits.
Now pull every commercial property inside that boundary. For each one you want the basics: address, property type, rough size, and who owns or manages it.
Where to get it, free or close to it: