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A RocketLevel guide for owners deciding which commercial hire comes next, backed by decades of experience in the trade. Every seat below comes with the figure to pull before you post the job, because hiring these in the wrong order burns cash you will not get back. About a 7-minute read.
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The rule: hire the seat that is currently the bottleneck. In commercial, the first hire is usually not the salesperson, even though it is the one plenty of owners want first. Protect delivery first. A commercial account lost on delivery rarely comes back, and it takes the property manager's referral network with it.
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Plenty of owners justify this hire on speed and then hire too late. Justify it on margin instead, because the math is available to you tonight.
An owner writing estimates at eleven at night tends to write incomplete ones, and the omissions are consistent: antimicrobial application, content manipulation, equipment monitoring days, PPE, the second trip that actually happened. Every one of those is recoverable and every one of them quietly disappears when the person writing the scope has already worked a full day in the field.
Pull this number: take ten of your own recent estimates and count the line items that should have been on them and were not. Price those omissions and multiply by your annual job count. Compare that to a salary. If the priced omissions come out bigger than the salary, the seat was paying for itself before you ever posted it.
The second number is cycle time: days from site visit to uploaded estimate. It matters on its own, and on program work it can put you against a scorecard. Cycle-time requirements vary by program and we are not going to quote you a figure that will be wrong for your carrier. Pull your own average and ask your program contact what theirs is.
The usual trigger given for this hire is running several commercial jobs at once. The better signal is narrower and it is where commercial jobs actually die: the week between mitigation complete and reconstruction start.
Nobody owns that week by default. Mitigation considers itself finished, reconstruction has not been scheduled, and the customer or the property manager is looking at a torn-up space with no one calling them. That is the gap a project manager is bought to close, and it is why a project manager (PM) pays for the seat in retained accounts rather than in schedule efficiency.
There is a second trigger specific to commercial: more than one job running in a badged building at the same time. Badge clearances, escort windows, dock and freight elevator reservations do not survive being improvised by a dispatcher between phone calls.
Pull this number: average days from mitigation complete to reconstruction start across your last ten jobs. If that number is drifting up and nobody in the building can explain why, the seat is real.
Shops watch denied supplements. The money is in the ones nobody wrote.
Scope grows on a large share of restoration jobs, and the growth is legitimate. What kills the recovery is timing: a supplement raised before the additional work is done is a conversation, and the same work raised at invoicing is an argument you will often lose. A shop without somebody owning this discovers supplements at billing, which is structurally too late.
Pull this number: last twenty jobs, how many had scope growth, and how many had a filed supplement. The gap between those two numbers, priced, is the seat's salary and usually more.