Restoration Owners Edge is an independent publication for people who own water, fire and mold restoration companies. It is not a franchise newsletter, not a lead aggregator, and not a sales funnel with a blog bolted on. The goal is to give the owner of a two-truck mitigation company the marketing information the national brands pay consultants for, in plain language, with numbers that can be checked.
Who writes it
Steven Von is the editor. He has spent years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, restoration companies among them, and has watched a lot of mitigation owners spend money in the wrong order. Ads before answering. A new logo before a single review. A lead aggregator contract before the Google profile was even claimed. The guides here are written to correct that order, and every one of them is edited by him.
Where the benchmark numbers come from
The benchmark report is built from public Google Business Profile listings. Each month we search Google Maps for restoration companies in every US state, under the water damage restoration and fire damage restoration categories, collect the public fields on each listing (review count, rating, website link, listed hours, category, city and state), remove duplicate places, and compute the statistics shown in the tables. Nothing is pulled from behind a login and no customer data is involved. The current set holds 18,405 listings across 51 states. At that scale a few listings are miscategorized or stale, so read every percentage as accurate to within a point, not to the decimal.
One restoration-specific caution: listing counts in big metros are inflated by franchise territories that each carry their own profile.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No company, software vendor or franchise can buy a mention, a ranking or a recommendation.
- Every number traces to our dataset or to a primary source such as Google's own help documentation or a government statistic. Opinions are labeled as opinions.
- No invented case studies. If a guide gives an example job, it is a worked example with made-up round numbers, and it says so.
- Prices are given as ranges because a mitigation job in Boise and one in Miami do not cost the same.
- Guides are updated when Google, Meta or the insurance carriers change something that matters, and the update is dated.
How the free 14-day trial works
Every marketing and back-office service described on this site can be tried free for 14 days. You text or call (385) 855-2416, we do a short setup call, and the service runs in your own accounts for two weeks. No card is taken. Nothing renews on its own. At the end you see what happened, in your own ad account, your own Google profile or your own phone log, and you decide whether to keep going at a monthly rate.
The trial exists because restoration owners have been burned. Most have paid an agency a retainer for three months and received a report full of impressions, or paid a lead company for jobs that were already sold to three competitors. A trial puts the risk on us, where it belongs. If the service does not produce anything you can see, you have lost a 20-minute call and nothing else. The same number takes corrections to the data and questions about any guide, and a person replies.