This mirrors the full working plan, written so you can read it without decoding anything. Everything here has a source and a date behind it in the long version. Nothing in it is decided.
4 August 2026 · read this, then answer the questions
→ The 22 decisions waiting on youMost have a recommendation attached. Three of them block the next piece of building — and four are new as of 5 August, from the billing report.
→ The verification verdict — read this one firstSix researchers, six skeptics, 449 source checks. It went against us. What survived, what was fabricated, why this might not work as a business, and the legal finding that changes the pricing model.
→ Work done, never billed — the original reportThe biggest lever, taken apart: what it looks like, why it happens, how we'd fix it, whether we can take a percentage, how long the money takes to arrive. Partly superseded — it carries a banner listing what died.
We sell an operating layer that goes inside a mid-sized service business and finds three things: money they've already earned but aren't collecting, revenue that never became a job, and work they're paying people to do that a system should do. We run it, we prove every dollar in a shared ledger, and we take a share of what we produce.
They pay nothing up front except a refundable commitment that proves they're serious. No retainer. No lock-in clause. They can leave whenever they want.
This is the part that changed most. On a restoration company, the two biggest costs are field crews and the estimating software the insurance carriers effectively require — and we can't touch either one. Software and payment fees, which the old plan led with, come to about 3% of what's available.
Here's the real map, on a $15 million independent restoration company.
| Where | What it is | Year one |
|---|---|---|
| Money already earned, not collected | Supplements and overhead-and-profit they're entitled to but don't document · files that survive a carrier audit · equipment days they can't prove · unpaid deductibles · the handoff from drying the house to rebuilding it | $250–500K |
| Revenue that never became a job | Missed and after-hours calls · the referral engine nobody runs, when 93% of their leads are referrals · marketing money pouring into the most expensive channel they have | $200–600K |
| Cash sitting still | Insurers pay in 60–120 days. The best operators get it to about 32. | $120–150K |
| Cost and capacity | Back-office labour · crews losing half a day a week to admin and driving · lost equipment · and, small: software and card fees | $180–500K |
| Knowing anything | 62% of them cannot calculate profit on a single job | $150–450K |
| Total we'd find | $900K–$2.2M | |
| What we could defensibly claim | $400–900K | |
| Our share at 20–30% | $80–270K per client, per year | |
About 9 in 10 restoration companies are independent — roughly 54,000 of them against about 6,000 franchise locations. That closes a worry the plan was carrying: avoiding franchises costs us about a tenth of the market, and it's worth it, because franchisees are contractually forced onto their franchisor's software and run 8–14% lower profit on royalties they can't cut.
On size: $5 million and up for the full offer. A $2M company yields maybe $12–30K a year to us while the audit, the build and the operator cost almost exactly what they cost at $15M. That's break-even at best. But $1–3M isn't wasted — it's the productised, low-touch tier, which is the community idea you raised on Sunday. Thousands of potential members instead of hundreds of clients.
On vertical: restoration has your story, but insurance sets their prices and cash takes four months. Foundation repair is customer-paid, so nobody controls their price, margins are better, cash is fast, and their main constraint is cost per lead — your decade, not something we'd learn. My suggestion is to lead the marketing with restoration and run the first paying pilot on foundation repair.
A refundable commitment first — around $7,500 for smaller companies, more as they get bigger. It's not a fee and not a retainer. If we don't hit the number in 90 days they can take it back. It exists so they commit.
Then a share of what we produce — and this is where your rolling-clock idea lands, with one change.
Things we hand over (a switched payment processor, a killed subscription) run whether we're there or not, so only a clock keeps us paid. Things we operate (claims recovery, the referral engine, AR chasing) stop the month we stop — so they're already permanent and already cancel-anytime, with no clock needed. On a restoration company the handed-over stuff is that 3% again.
| Everything on 24 months | Everything on 5 years | Split them | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five-year total | ~$394K | ~$894K | ~$803K |
| Shape | Peaks year 2, then collapses | Grows | Grows |
| Can they cancel? | Only by waiting it out | Only by waiting it out | Any time |
| How hard to sell | Medium | Hardest | Easiest |
The first column is the trap: a pure rolling-clock model pays us for finding and nothing for running. The moment we stop finding new things, revenue decays to nothing no matter how well the systems are still working — and findings taper on every account.
I went into your business files for this. It's never about how long the contract runs. It's about paying when they can't see anything happening. Bob Brown, more than once: "Kate has produced nothing recently" and "you are evading my question about costs." Mike, in July: spending is "very, very high in actuality compared to what we discuss in the meetings." And your own words about that account — "they're good until the end of the year currently." Annual horizons. Not five-year ones.
So the rule is: never let the fee outlive the visible work. A fee on savings from eighteen months ago is a fee with nothing attached to it — which is exactly the conversation Bob was already having with us on a live engagement.
The thing we sell with and the thing we report with are the same picture — the web you already have running here. They pitch on a web of what they're losing, then watch it fill in with what we actually recovered.
Then there is no report. There's a live link that's always current — a report can be late, a live page can't. Monthly is one line and one link. Quarterly, new strands appear, which is your rolling line-item idea made visible and the proof we're still finding rather than coasting.
Twenty-two questions, most with a recommendation you can just tick. Answers save as you type — hit "copy all" when you're done and paste them back to me.