🏠 GEM Resource Hub · 📚 Library · 📘 About RocketLevel · 📘 Playbooks · 🗺️ What's Your Market Worth? · 📅 Book a Call
A RocketLevel guide for restoration owners who have to commit to a three-year picture their branch managers, their lender, and their best lead can all check, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About an 8-minute read.
Plenty of owners can talk about the future of their company for ten minutes without saying a single figure. A branch manager cannot make a decision against a feeling, and your best lead cannot tell from it whether the future has them in it.
A three-year picture is worth something only when it resolves into numbers somebody can be held to. Six of them decide nearly everything else about a restoration company: how many crew leads you have, what mix of work pays you, how hard the fleet works, what each division actually earns, how exposed you are to one customer, and what you are building the thing for. Settle those six and the rest of the document comes easily.
The term Vivid Vision comes from Cameron Herold, and the present-tense, three-years-out format is his. This page adapts it to restoration and the things a shop like yours has to decide.
This document gets handed to recruits, which is both why it is useful and where it can get you in trouble.
Keep the financial section about the company rather than about any individual's pay. Describing profit sharing, bonuses, or an ownership path in a document you hand someone during hiring can be read later as a promise you made, and whether a written representation about compensation is enforceable, whatever you meant by it, is set by your state's wage law, so look up yours.
Illinois names earned bonuses in the statute itself, at 820 ILCS 115/2, which defines final compensation as wages, salaries, earned commissions, earned bonuses, and the monetary equivalent of earned vacation and holidays. California gets there through the breadth of Labor Code 200, with the payout clock set by Labor Code 201. Massachusetts is narrower than it usually gets described: M.G.L. c.149 section 148 covers commissions once definitely determined and due and payable, plus holiday and vacation pay, and does not name bonuses at all. Where a bonus does count as wages, a court deciding it was earned means it is not discretionary and not yours to withhold later because the year went badly.
Paint the picture of a business that shares its success. Leave the specific numbers to the offer letter. If you want an ownership path in writing, that is a document counsel drafts, not a paragraph in a recruiting piece.
Write the headcount by rung, because the total is not your capacity number.
The ladder in this trade runs helper, technician, lead, project manager, and the certifications hang off the rungs: Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) Water Damage Restoration Technician (WRT) and Applied Structural Drying (ASD) early, Applied Microbial Remediation Technician (AMRT) and Fire and Smoke Restoration Technician (FSRT) as a tech becomes useful across loss types, OSHA 30 and the commercial credentials at lead and above. The Restoration Certification Ladder: Which Credentials Your Techs Should Earn, and in What Order has a version you can adopt. Publish the pay band beside the certification that earns it, so the ladder means something to the crew.
The rung matters more than the total because you cannot run more simultaneous jobs than you have leads. A lead is the person who owns the moisture map, sets the scope, and can be left on a Category 3 loss or inside a badged building without supervision. Three more helpers do not add a job to the schedule, but one more lead does. In our experience, owners who feel understaffed are more often short a rung than short bodies.
Write down: at year three, the number of people at each rung and the certifications required at each. Then the ratio you are managing to, leads per technician. That ratio is your real capacity ceiling, and your dispatcher already knows it by feel.