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The RocketLevel field guide to building commercial restoration revenue that is more predictable, whether or not it storms. Written for owners and the people who run their commercial pipeline, backed by decades of experience in the trade.
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You're on the complete playbook, the recommended in-depth read, the whole commercial motion in one place, start to finish. In a hurry? The 3 Stages of Commercial Growth is the 3-minute overview of the same system, but this is the page to actually work from. Want it broken into chapters with the deeper pages for each? The Commercial Growth Guide lays out the same motion in eight.
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By the end you will know why commercial is the revenue that changes a restoration business, who you are actually selling to, the four parts of a real commercial engine, the honest timeline, and the exact next move for where you sit today.
The book runs in three stages, because that is how commercial actually gets built:
Each stage ends with a short readiness check so you can see which parts you have built and which are still a gap. If at any point you decide you would rather have the engine built and run for you, the closing section covers that.
Three frames run through the library, and they answer different questions. The eight chapters of The Commercial Growth Guide are the path. The three Stages here are the motion. The four Levels in The Four Levels of Commercial Health are where your business stands today. The readiness checks below sort you into a Foundation, Building, or Compounding phase inside the motion.
You have probably felt some version of this. The residential, insurance, and third-party administrator (TPA) work is less predictable than it used to be. The commercial accounts actually worth having are hard to get in front of. Prospecting comes in bursts, then stalls the minute jobs pile up. And too much of the book still rides on referrals you do not control.
That is a systems problem, and many shops have never had the system. The operators who do well in commercial built one and then ran it on a rhythm, in the busy quarters as well as the slow ones. This playbook is a plain look at what that system is, so you can see whether you are building it or just working harder.
Start with the number. In the 2026 State of the Industry Report from C&R (Cleaning & Restoration) magazine, powered by KnowHow and covering 2025, 67.31% of restoration companies reported that 75% or more of their work was residential (pages 8 and 9 of the report). When work tightened, the instinct across the industry was to double down on residential and grind harder. The Restoration Industry Association (RIA) Cost of Doing Business data points the other way. On page 14 of the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, based on FY2024 data, companies above fifty million in revenue run 57% commercial against 35% residential, while companies under a million run 86% residential.
That is one survey year cut by company size, so it shows larger companies reporting a different mix rather than proving a shop's mix changes as it grows. The pattern is still hard to miss, and it points away from the instinct to grind harder on residential. A concentrated, price-shopped residential book gets unwound by adding a different kind of revenue alongside it, and that takes a different kind of work.