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In our experience, jobs go wrong between the steps more often than in the work itself. Run every job in the same order, with an owner on each step, and production stops depending on who happens to be on the truck.

A RocketLevel playbook for restoration owners and the people who run production, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 12-minute read.

A job moves through the same stages whether it is a supply line in a ranch house or a sprinkler break across three floors of an office building. Somebody answers the phone. Somebody shows up. The building gets dried, handed off, rebuilt, walked and billed. Every shop has those stages. The shops that run clean put a name on the gap between each one.

This page follows a job in that order, from the first ring to the final walk, and then steps back to the system that runs all of the jobs at once. It works for a water-only shop and a full-service shop, for mitigation and rebuild, residential and commercial. At each stage you get the reason it breaks, what good looks like, the one or two decisions the owner has to make, and the pages in this library that go deep. It does not replace any of those pages; it puts them in order.

The seven stages of a restoration job: the call and dispatch, day one on site, drying and monitoring, the handoff, the rebuild, final walk and closeout, and running production as a system underneath them all

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Who this is for. Owners who are still the operating system for production and want to stop being it, and the production managers, project managers (PMs) and crew leads who run jobs day to day. If you only do part of the job, mitigation only or no contents, skip ahead to If you only do part of this to see which stages are yours.

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Set this before you use the playbook:

• Who owns production, by name. One person who answers for every job on the board.
• Our arrival promise, from the call to someone at the door:
• The large-loss line, above which the owner or general manager signs off before we commit:
• The day and time of our weekly production meeting:
• The stage where our jobs sit longest today (a guess is fine until you measure it):
• 📑 Jump to a section

1. The call and dispatch

What this stage is for: turning a phone call into the right crew at the right address, with a promise the caller can hold you to.

The first call sets the clock on the whole job. A missed call goes to the next company on the screen, and a call answered by someone who does not capture the address, the source of the water and who can sign leaves the crew guessing on arrival. Plenty of intake failures come down to a blank field on the intake form.

Good intake produces the same things every time: a live answer or a fast human callback, the fields captured, a safety check, a named owner, an arrival time the caller hears out loud and then gets in writing. Then dispatch matches the job to a crew that is actually cleared to work it. Availability is the last filter, not the first. A Category 3 loss needs someone medically cleared and fit tested for the respirator that job calls for. A healthcare building may need a badge and an orientation your crew does not have yet.

Separate the schedule from the dispatch. The schedule is the plan for the week. Dispatch is who goes where this morning. Run both from one board everyone trusts, keep a little slack for the emergency that always comes, and put the daily monitoring visits for every active dry-out on that board with the same weight as a new loss.