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The working companion to Why Good Restoration Techs Leave, and How to Keep Them. The guide explains why trained techs walk. This is where you find out whether yours is the shop they walk from.
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How to use this. Print this page or save it as a PDF (Ctrl+P, or Cmd+P on a Mac) and work from your copy. Fill the tables in, tick the boxes, and the page becomes the record of what you found and what you changed.
Read the guide first if you have not. The audit assumes it.
Score the shop as it runs today, not as you intend it to run next month.
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Before you decide retention is too expensive to invest in, cost out the alternative. Fill the right column for one field tech, using your own numbers.
| Cost line | What to count | Your number |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiting | Ad spend, recruiter fees, and the hours someone spent sourcing | |
| Interviewing | Your hours and your managers' hours, at what those hours are worth | |
| Onboarding and training wages | What you paid the new hire, plus the senior tech pulled off production to train them | |
| Ramp | The months before the new person works at the speed of the one who left, times what that output gap costs you per month | |
| The empty seat | Overtime paid to cover, jobs that stalled, work you turned down | |
| Total, one replacement | Add the five lines above |
Techs who left in the last twelve months:
My cost per replacement:
What last year's turnover cost me:
Techs who left, times your cost per replacement, is what last year's turnover cost you.
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A yardstick, and be clear about where it comes from. There is no audited restoration-specific figure for the cost of replacing a field tech. The general HR benchmark runs from about a third of annual salary to a full year of it. Work Institute's Retention Report is where the 33 percent low end comes from. The top end is softer: Gallup says one-half to two times salary and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says 50 to 200 percent, and none of the three publishes a sample or a method. The range circulates widely without one authoritative source behind it, so trust the table you just filled in over the band. Apply that to your own numbers rather than to somebody's average: take what you actually pay the tech who left, multiply by 0.33 for the low end and by 1.0 for the high end, and see whether the total you built in the table above lands inside that band. On a $50,000 tech that band is roughly $16,500 to $50,000. The 2026 C&R State of the Industry Report, powered by KnowHow, which covers calendar 2025, is the closest restoration-specific read on tenure and staffing, and it is worth pulling directly rather than taking anyone's summary of it, this page included. If your figure came in low, check that you counted ramp and the empty seat. Those two are the ones owners leave out, and they are usually the biggest lines on the list.
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Tick only what is true today. Leave anything unticked that you would have to argue for.