What Should a Restoration Company Build Before the Next Storm?

A restoration company can make its revenue for the whole year in one quarter, depending on the weather. That cuts both ways. When the storms don’t come, the companies built to wait for them run out of work — and in 2026, a veteran of the industry found more of them struggling than he expected.

Nelson Higgins, who has spent more than 40 years in restoration, told Restoration & Remediation Magazine that far more companies were struggling this year than he anticipated, because so many rely on storm activity. Meanwhile, his colleague Todd Sangid spoke with owners who brought in more revenue in the third quarter than in the first six months of the year combined — a reminder of how completely the weather can set a restoration company’s calendar.

Higgins, Sangid, Chris Tilkov, and the article’s author were each asked what 2026 taught them. Their answers came back to four areas — and all four are the same lesson stated four ways: the work that saves you in storm season gets built before it. That is the core of business continuity for an operator — not a binder, but a company that keeps functioning when conditions turn against it. Continuity Hub’s Business Continuity Planning guide makes the same point at program level: preparedness is everything that has to exist before the event, because none of it can be created during one.

Why do restoration companies that wait for storms struggle?

Because a storm-dependent company has a single point of failure in its revenue: the weather. If the quarter’s income depends on events nobody controls, a quiet season is not a slowdown — it is a disruption, functionally the same as losing a site or a key supplier. Continuity planning starts by naming that exposure honestly. Our guide to financial impact modeling in a business impact analysis shows how to put numbers on it: what each revenue stream contributes, and what a gap in it costs over time.

One caution belongs here. Insurance does not close this gap. As our Business Interruption Insurance guide explains, that coverage responds to covered physical loss — it does not pay because business is bad or a season is slow. A storm that never arrives is a planning problem, not a claim. The fix is built, not bought.

What carries a restoration company between storms?

Day-to-day claims work. That is the first of the four lessons, and Higgins’s point is direct: the companies waiting on the storm are missing out on the everyday jobs that carry a company through the quiet months.

Relying less on storms also opens revenue to other streams. Higgins pointed to renovations, condo buildings, flooding that doesn’t go through insurance, and other work a team can take on without disrupting its insurance restoration work. Work that doesn’t come directly from a carrier — self-pay work, for example — helps companies grow on both the commercial and residential side.

For an owner, the practical question is simple: if no storm hit your market for two quarters, what would your crews be doing next week? If the honest answer is “waiting,” that is the gap to close first — while the weather is calm. Storm frequency itself is shifting, too, which weakens the old assumption that a quiet year is just bad luck; our climate-adapted business continuity guide covers how planning assumptions about storm frequency are being revised.

How does a restoration company earn a top spot on a carrier’s list?

In the file. Most carriers work with three or four restoration companies, Higgins explained, drawing on advice from his business mentor from the years he owned his own company. You need to be number one or number two on that list, because there is less rotation for the third and fourth.

His advice for earning one of those spots starts with documentation and covering the whole job:

• The file is complete and well documented.
• The team follows its timelines and SLAs.
• Nothing gets kicked back, and there is no argument over what was priced.
• The job gets done well, and the homeowner doesn’t complain.

And the position is not permanent once earned. As Higgins put it: “Once you get there, you have to keep it” — he noted it can be harder to keep the spot than to get it. For continuity purposes, treat a top-two carrier position the way you would any critical dependency: it is an asset built in calm periods, maintained on every single job, and lost faster than it was won.

What should an owner fix during a slow period?

The bottleneck — and slow periods are when you can finally see it. When work slows down, teams rush to cut expenses. The problem, as the article’s author describes from experience, is that cutting an expense leaves the work in place, loaded onto someone who is already working at capacity. That is where bottlenecks form.

The clearest example is the job file. A lot of offices don’t have a dedicated job file coordinator — a “JFC” — keeping every job file moving. Instead the project manager wears that hat on top of everything else: managing active jobs, taking calls from technicians when something goes wrong, lining up subcontractors, giving the homeowner a timeline, and talking to insurance for updates and approvals. Then sketching lands on them too — and they can’t start it until they’re back at the office, where they pull the photos, piece the space together, sketch it, and write the estimate, most of it after 5 p.m. It is stacked onto one person, after hours, where nobody can see it.

Sangid’s test for owners in the fourth quarter and beyond is one question: “If someone on your team walked away today, would the rest of the team have what they need to keep rolling?”

The teams he hears from that handle busy seasons well use slower weeks to get their processes dialed in, making sure information is gathered consistently and gets to the people who need it. The author’s advice for Q4 and into 2027: before cutting anything, write your processes down, along with who owns each one. Most offices find the same name on all of them — and that name is the bottleneck the expense was covering. Keep that bottleneck covered, and the team stays free to do revenue-generating work instead.

What will AI change about estimating — and what won’t it change?

AI will heighten the process you already have. Tilkov spent much of the first half of the year working on instant estimating and sketching. The goal he describes is an instant estimate that lands in front of an estimator, who makes the tweaks and changes needed to get it out the door faster and better.

What it doesn’t change: getting an estimate dialed in still comes down to industry knowledge — understanding carrier-specific requirements and the line items that have been added over time. As technology takes manual tasks off their plates, estimators can shift toward detailed review and take on more work. The future, as the article frames it, is an estimator reviewing and finalizing anything AI helps produce — and that review is only as strong as the process, documentation, and scope behind it. In other words, AI applied to a broken process produces faster broken output. Applied to the documented process from the lesson above, it produces capacity. That is why the sequence matters: systems first, automation second.

The four moves

The article closes with the summary its four contributors converged on. When a storm does come, the companies that built their systems, infrastructure, and culture ahead of time are the ones that come out ahead. For the rest of 2026 and into 2027, that comes down to four steps:

1. Open revenue to other streams of work.
2. Do great documentation on every file, and follow your timelines and SLAs.
3. Before cutting any expense, write the steps down and name who owns each one.
4. Dial in systems and processes before AI takes hold of the industry.

For owners who spent the first half of the year waiting on storm work, or cutting expenses to get through it, the remaining quarter is the chance to take those steps, close the year strong, and head into 2027 prepared. None of the four moves requires a storm to start. All four are harder to start during one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the biggest risk of depending on storm work for revenue?
Concentration. If most of a company’s revenue arrives only when weather events hit its market, a quiet season stops income while rent, payroll, and other fixed costs continue. Higgins told R&R Magazine he found more companies struggling in 2026 than he expected, largely because so many rely on storm activity.

What kinds of work can carry a restoration company between storms?
Day-to-day claims work first. Beyond that, Higgins pointed to renovations, condo buildings, flooding that doesn’t go through insurance, and self-pay work that doesn’t come directly from a carrier — streams a team can run without disrupting its insurance restoration work.

How do carriers decide which restoration companies get the work?
Most carriers work with three or four restoration companies, and the top one or two get the rotation. According to Higgins, the spots are earned in the file: complete, well-documented jobs, timelines and SLAs met, nothing kicked back, no arguments over pricing, and no homeowner complaints.

What is a job file coordinator, and why does it matter?
It’s the dedicated role keeping every job file moving. Many offices don’t have one, so the work stacks onto the project manager — including sketching and estimating after hours. That hidden stack is one of the most common bottlenecks R&R’s contributors identified, and slow periods are the time to find it.

Should a restoration company adopt AI estimating tools now?
Only on top of a documented process. Tilkov’s work on instant estimating and sketching aims at an estimator reviewing and finalizing AI-produced work faster — and that review is only as strong as the process, documentation, and scope behind it. Dial in the system first; the tool amplifies whatever it finds.

Sources

• Restoration & Remediation Magazine, “Four Lessons from 2026 to Build a Stronger Business in 2027,” published October 28, 2026 — lessons and quotations from Nelson Higgins, Todd Sangid, and Chris Tilkov as reported there.
• Continuity Hub, “Business Continuity Planning: The Complete Professional Guide”
• Continuity Hub, “Business Interruption Insurance: The Complete Professional Guide”

Updated 2026-10-31: citation-QC refresh — unsupported claims tightened to sources.

Updated Nov 1, 2026 — added the free four moves quick card, storm-season builder pack, and storm-ready operator bot book downloads to this guide.