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A RocketLevel field guide for restoration owners and commercial reps, backed by decades of experience in the trade. Where to aim first, why, and how to actually get in the door, drawn from what has worked for contractors running a commercial motion in 2025 and 2026.

Start here: three decisions, made together

Plenty of contractors approach commercial like a menu: pick the right vertical, point the team at it, wait for jobs. The shops that keep growing treat three things as one decision.

The entry service sets your speed. How fast you land a first win depends less on the vertical and more on the size of the ask. A low-barrier service (duct or carpet cleaning, an Emergency Response Plan, a maintenance-team training) gets a yes in weeks. A Master Service Agreement (MSA) gets a yes in months, whatever the vertical.

The vertical sets your ceiling. Some verticals are single-building, one and done. Others have portfolio leverage: one relationship unlocks many properties. That difference decides whether a vertical is worth a quarter of your team's time, however friendly the first call was.

Weigh the ceiling in dollars too. These are the spread of individual commercial project sizes by vertical, RocketLevel working figures drawn from our program data: property management $30K to $150K, multifamily $20K to $100K, healthcare and senior living $30K to $250K, hospitality $25K to $150K, schools $15K to $100K, industrial $50K to $500K and up, retail $10K to $75K, office $15K to $100K, government $25K to $250K. When you size a market, model with an average job value instead, about $18K to $70K by segment for organizations with 20 or more employees, with organizations under 20 employees at a lower loss rate and a capped job value (real estate and property management stays at the higher rate at every size, since many firms manage several buildings), because most losses are small and a few are very large. For scale, see The Hartford's small-business claim averages for 2020 to 2024, which count repair and replacement only. Full build detail lives in How to Build Your Commercial TAM.

Geography sets your efficiency. A perfect vertical spread across a two-hour drive radius will quietly kill a rep. The real unit of focus is a vertical inside a drivable cluster, run long enough that your reps can talk about it in their sleep.

Once those three are set, check who you are actually meeting with. A common reason commercial pipelines stall is great meetings with people who cannot sign anything. Aim for ownership, regional, or facilities leadership who can put their name on an agreement, not the first friendly voice who answers.

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Ask it this way instead. Skip "which vertical is best" and ask: what is the smallest yes I can win this month (entry service), inside a vertical that multiplies (ceiling), inside a radius my team can own (geography), with a person who can actually sign (authority)?

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Score a vertical before you commit. Rate it on the four levers, 1 to 5 each, total it out of 20, and get a tier read. Open The Vertical Prioritization Scorecard, make your own copy in Google Sheets or print it, and score every vertical in your radius in one table.

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Pick your first verticals with your own numbers

The four levers tell you how a vertical behaves. They do not tell you where the money in your territory actually sits. Do that part in order.

  1. Rank by modeled demand among your priority accounts. Keep only the organizations with 20 or more employees, group them by vertical, and run the same line of math for each one: accounts × average job value × yearly loss rate. Sort highest to lowest. How to Build Your Commercial TAM has the math and where the inputs come from. Job values and loss rates are working assumptions until your own job history replaces them.
  2. Weigh that against fit. A vertical at the top of the dollar list does you no good if your crews have not done that work, you lack the credentials it asks for, or you cannot answer at its scale at 2 a.m. Score fit honestly and move anything you cannot serve today down the list, whatever it is worth.
  3. Start with three, or however many you are comfortable starting with. Three is the suggested default: enough for a rep to learn the language and few enough to stay in long enough to earn a reference. A thinner team can start with one or two. Widen once each one has a named account you can point to.
  4. Check the public verticals for locked doors. Public school districts, cities and counties, and public health systems often buy through cooperative purchasing contracts. Where restoration sits under one of those, the vertical can rank high on dollars and still be closed to you until that contract comes up again or you get onto it. Ask the procurement office before you count it. Breaking Into Government and Institutional Work covers the gate.

The fast-win tier: where to point a new program

These verticals reward a standing start. They share a profile: enough process to take a contractor seriously, without so much bureaucracy that you spend a year in procurement. If you are building a commercial motion from scratch, start here.