Why This Restoration Contractor Answers to the House, Not the Carrier

Restoration contractors do more than dry out basements and rebuild fire-damaged rooms. They also have to document what they find, justify the work they perform and communicate with insurers without crossing legal lines. For Scott Huml, owner of TACMIT (Tactical Mitigation Services) in Southern California, one rule guides all of it: the client is the policyholder, not the carrier.

The house decides, not the carrier

“I don’t care what the lawyers or the PA or the insurance company says,” Huml said. “I care what the experts and the hygienist and the testing and the house tells me what to do.”

Huml calls that a straightforward test for conflict of interest. When a carrier dictates what a preferred vendor can and can’t do on a loss, he said, the vendor stops working purely for the person on the other end of the phone call. TACMIT isn’t a preferred vendor for any carrier, and Huml said that distance is deliberate.

Onboarding sets expectations early

TACMIT’s process starts before anyone pumps water or hauls out debris, Huml said. He calls it onboarding the client: walking a policyholder through their obligations under the policy, the documentation they’ll need to produce and the pushback they should expect once a claim is underway. Even with attorneys, public adjusters and vendors involved, Huml said, the policyholder still has to supply basic facts about their own home and belongings — how old something was, what it cost, how it was used — because nobody else knows those details better.

Prove the loss instead of describing it

Insurers now expect contractors to demonstrate damage rather than describe it, Huml said. Talking through what might be behind a wall or under a floor doesn’t carry the weight it used to; carriers want crews to open it up, document what they find and build a record as the work happens. Huml said that shift is squeezing out the contractors who used to get by on a wish list of hypothetical scope, and rewarding the ones willing to do the legwork of proving a loss rather than just describing it.

The industry is under a microscope

Huml has spent this fire season working with wildfire survivors in the Pacific Palisades, an assignment that has sharpened his read on where the industry stands. Carriers have grown far less tolerant of inflated estimates, unnecessary scope creep and billing for work that never happened, he said, and they’re actively working to weed out the contractors who do it. His advice for other restoration companies: stay ahead of the claim, document the loss as it happens, keep the scope of work reasonable — don’t cut into an unaffected room because the kitchen next door flooded — and communicate clearly with everyone involved. Insurers are watching more closely than they used to, Huml said, and the companies that can’t back up their invoices with documentation are the ones getting flagged.

Reliability still separates contractors

Some of what sets TACMIT apart, Huml said, comes down to fundamentals other companies skip. “It’s as simple as answering your phone when people call you,” Huml said. “It’s amazing how often it doesn’t happen. But if you take priority in getting back to somebody quick, you separate yourself from 90% of the people.”

TACMIT is a family operation. Huml and his wife have run the company together for 25 years, pricing jobs through standardized Xactimate estimates rather than setting their own rates. “We don’t bill for work we don’t do, but we expect to get paid for the work that we do,” Huml said.

Huml didn’t find the restoration industry until he was 30, after working sales for large-loss companies whose tactics he wanted no part of. He built TACMIT over the past 10 years into a vendor with enough of a reputation in the Southern California market to compete with national players, and he’s planning to add locations beyond its current Westlake Village base.