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A resource from RocketLevel for restoration company owners and the people who help run the business, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 5-minute read.
Ask three people at a restoration company who owns collections, or who owns making sure every job is scoped fully, and you will often get three different answers, or a shrug. The work still happens, sort of, because someone picks it up. But when nobody in particular owns it, the gaps show up as missed deductibles, stalled jobs, and follow-ups that never happened. An accountability chart is the simple fix: a one-page map of the seats your business actually needs, with exactly one owner per seat.
The accountability-chart idea, defining the seats your business needs before you fill them, comes from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) model in Gino Wickman's Traction. What follows is how it applies to a restoration company.
The trap many owners fall into is drawing the chart around the people they have and the roles they happen to fill. An accountability chart works the other way. First you define the seats the business needs to run, no matter who fills them, then you put a name in each. In a restoration company the core seats are usually sales and business development, estimating, production and project management, field operations, office and administration, and finance and collections. One person may sit in three seats today, often the owner. That works for now. The trouble is a seat with no name, or with two names, because two owners usually means nobody owns it.
Every seat gets exactly one accountable owner, the person whose job it is to make sure that function works. That owner can hand off the work and still answers for the result. When collections has one owner, accounts receivable (AR) over 90 days becomes that person's number to answer for every week. When no one owns it, it drifts until the 90-day column is a crisis.
List the five to seven functions your business needs to run. Write the three to five outcomes each seat is accountable for; for finance and collections that might be clean books, on-time billing, and AR under a target. Put one name on each seat. Where you see your own name three or four times, you have just found your next hires, in priority order. Where you see two names on one seat, decide today who owns it. The chart is the document that makes your weekly meeting and your comp plan actually work, because both depend on knowing who answers for what.
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Make your own copy. Open the Restoration Accountability Chart. It opens a fresh, editable copy in your own Google Drive. Fill in the outcomes and one owner name per seat; the original stays unchanged.
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Do this: draw your accountability chart this week: the seats the business needs, the outcomes each one owns, and one name per seat. The seats with your name on them, in order of how much they are holding you back, are your hiring plan.
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A starting point to adapt to your business, not professional advice. Use your own judgment and the right advisor.
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Tools for this play
Keep going: pair this with Run Your Commercial Business on an Operating Rhythm so each seat owner answers for their numbers on a cadence, Growing Your People into Managers: Building Your Bench to build the bench that fills these seats, and The Numbers That Run a Restoration Company: Your Financial Scorecard for the numbers each seat is accountable for.
Do it yourself or have it done. You can draw this chart in an afternoon with the Restoration Accountability Chart copy above, and filling the seats is your hiring call. The seat plenty of owners struggle to fill is sales and business development, because a new rep needs meetings on the calendar before they can close anything. RocketLevel's inside sales team books those first meetings with property managers and facility directors, so whoever sits in that seat, a dedicated rep or you, spends their time across the table.
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Part of the free GEM Resource Hub by RocketLevel Commercial. Playbooks and tools for running the whole restoration business, A to Z, while specializing in building commercial revenue you own. RocketLevel is a bolt-on inside sales team that strengthens your commercial pipeline. Explore more in the GEM Resource Hub. New here? About RocketLevel and what the system has produced. When you're ready, see what your market is worth or book a Commercial Growth Call.
How we source figures: every number in this library names its source or is labeled as RocketLevel's own working figure. Read the sourcing standard.
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