Restoration Rundown Podcast

Most people in restoration have one story about how they got into the industry. This week's guest has three careers behind him before this one. Jason Floyd spent ten years as a Military Policeman in the U.S. Army, five at West Point, five in Germany, was Soldier of the Quarter six times, Soldier of the Year for all of U.S. Army Europe, and was personally selected as Presidential Guard and Escort for President Bill Clinton during the 1999 US-Russia summit. After the Army, five years as a Sheriff's Deputy in Colorado, then fourteen years as a Logistics Manager for one of the largest produce shippers in the country. Five years ago, a friend finally talked him into restoration, and today he's leading FP Property Restoration's commercial division after three years running their Southwest Florida operations. In this episode, Jason walks through all three careers before restoration, the hardest lesson restoration taught him that none of his other careers could have (hint: speed), and his own take on two real problems facing the restoration industry today, the lack of uniformity across IICRC standards, and companies failing to put real technology in the hands of their newest techs. He also shares what it actually takes for someone to succeed in restoration without twenty years of experience or family ties already in the business, and closes with a free Emergency Response Plan offer for any commercial property in Florida.

Your restoration company's website might be bringing in plenty of traffic and losing almost all of it before anyone calls. In this episode of the Restoration Rundown, Ben Ricciardi breaks down the 6 most common website mistakes costing restoration contractors real jobs, and exactly how to fix each one. If your site isn't turning visitors into booked jobs, this episode walks through the leaks, one hole at a time.

Every restoration contractor knows this moment: a homeowner has a flood or a fire, they call three companies back to back, and whoever answers first and answers well usually wins the job. On this episode, Ben talks with Nick D'Urbano, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Distance, an AI platform already trusted by brands like SERVPRO and Green State Restoration to answer calls, texts, and chats around the clock. Nick spent over 15 years in investment banking and venture backed growth, scaling companies from startup to eight and nine figures across the US, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa before building Distance. He breaks down real numbers, including how missing just two recon leads a month on a $12,000 average job can quietly cost a company six figures a year, and shares results from actual clients: Green State Restoration converted two of six AI handled calls in their first month into five figures of revenue, and one Alabama client caught a $100,000 fire job with reconstruction built in on just the second call after switching on the system. Nick also explains new capabilities like emotion detection, where the AI adjusts its tone based on how upset a caller sounds, and why some customers now call back asking for the AI agent by name without realizing it wasn't a person. 🔗 Learn more: distance.so

Last time Doug Weatherman, COO of Rare Restoration, was on the show, he ended the conversation with a tease: something called Justified was coming, built to give restoration contractors a real weapon against AI driven claims systems like Elysian and Guidewire ClaimCenter. That product is here, and it's called JSTFYD. In this episode, Doug returns alongside Carlos Ramirez, owner of Pure Restore in Denver and the creator of JSTFYD, and Max Pena, who leads marketing for the platform. Carlos built JSTFYD to solve bottlenecks inside his own restoration company, and the results speak for themselves: Pure Restore's net margin went from 11 percent in 2024 to a projected 35 percent in 2025, without a major jump in revenue, largely by catching missed line items, cutting collections staffing from three full time employees down to about 27 hours a week, and hiring for culture instead of restoration experience. Carlos, Max, and Doug break down the four core features of JSTFYD, including a restoration specific AI assistant, a final review tool that has found between 800 and 3,000 dollars in missed scope per job, automated adjuster response drafting that fights delay, deny, and defend tactics, and a comparative tool that flags every discrepancy between two estimates in five to seven minutes. 🔗 JSTFYD: jstfyd.com

Nobody goes broke because of a slow season. They go broke because of what they skipped building during the busy one. In this episode, Ben Ricciardi, founder of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, breaks down why so many restoration companies boom during cat season and go quiet six weeks later, and introduces the Ironclad Domination System, built around three pillars: Clarity, Trust, and Control. Ben walks through what he calls the disconnected signal problem, where a company's website, ads, Google Business Profile, and social media all send Google slightly different messages about what the business actually does, and why that confusion costs companies page one rankings and AI recommendations alike. He covers the four signals of clarity including the newest one, AI visibility through AEO and GEO, the three trust signals that separate companies Google sends emergency losses to, and the three control levers that let a company keep trucks moving even when the phone stops ringing on its own. This is the same system Ben will be presenting live at the Experience Restoration Conference in Las Vegas this September, and a preview of his upcoming book, Built to Win.