Breaking Away: How Restoration Contractors Are Growing Without TPAs or Franchises

A growing movement in the restoration industry is happening—one that says independent contractors don’t need a franchise or a TPA to build a thriving business. Trusted Restorer has been making that case for years, and under its recently refreshed identity, the platform is reaching more contractors than ever with a simple but powerful message: you can scale, compete, and win on your own terms.

Darcy Koan, vice president and general manager of Trusted Restorer, sat down with Cleanfax to talk about the company’s evolution, what it offers members, and why the timing for this kind of alternative has never been better.

From the ground up

Koan’s path to Trusted Restorer wasn’t a straight line—it was a decade of working from the inside out. She started at Power Dry, a Kansas City-based restoration company and sister brand, where she served as a strategic project manager. Her job was to modernize the business: implementing job management systems, CRMs, vehicle tracking, and workflow efficiencies that would move the company forward.

From there, she moved to High Ground, the parent company, where she took on a brand support manager role—essentially doing the same work, but for 13 different brands at once. That breadth of experience gave her a deep understanding of what makes restoration companies tick, and what holds them back.

“It aligned perfectly, honestly, Koan said. “From when I was at Power Dry to now at Trusted Restorer, I was very intimate with all of the workflows and processes and strategies. I knew the why behind it. I worked very closely with Greg and Cliff, the founders, and learned directly from them. I saw how it could be done successfully.”

Now, as the head of Trusted Restorer, she’s taking those lessons directly to independent operators across the country.

A rebrand built around members

The company was previously known as More Floods—a name that reflected its original focus but no longer captured what its membership looked like. As the member base grew and diversified, it became clear the brand needed to grow with it.

“A lot of our members now offer multiple service lines,” Koan said. “We wanted to fully represent what our membership base represented.”

The rebrand to Trusted Restorer opened the door to expand playbooks and training materials across service lines beyond water damage—including reconstruction, mold remediation, asbestos, and commercial work. Sister company Power Dry had already gone full-service, and Trusted Restorer wanted to reflect that same range for its members.

The alternative to franchising

At its core, Trusted Restorer positions itself as a franchise alternative,a model that gives independent contractors the systems, support, and community of a franchise without surrendering ownership or autonomy. That model has taken on renewed relevance in recent years as claim volume has dropped and contractors who relied heavily on TPAs or single referral sources have felt the squeeze.

“It’s more important now than ever to be diversifying your revenue streams,” Koan said. “Claim volume was down last year. People are very hesitant to file a claim right now, and so being fully reliant on even just one referral source is scary.”

Some Trusted Restorer members do TPA work—Koan isn’t dismissive of that revenue channel—but the platform’s focus is on teaching contractors how to build their own pipeline of daily revenue that isn’t dependent on any single partner or program.

What membership looks like

Trusted Restorer offers members a comprehensive suite of operational and marketing systems, as well as unlimited business consulting. The operational side covers everything from how to answer the phone and approach a loss site, to job documentation templates, work authorizations and contracts, job descriptions, pay structures, scorecards, and employee incentive strategies.

The marketing systems address who to hire, how to train them, what conversations they should be having in the field, and how to hold them accountable. And behind all of it is a team of experienced consultants available to help members implement what they’re learning.

“Our team is experienced in their field and help implement the roadmap and the system so that every one of our members will see growth, no matter where they’re at,” Koan said. “We’ll meet you where you’re at and jump in with both feet.”

The hidden money problem

One area where Koan said many contractors are leaving real money on the table is in job documentation and billing. It’s a problem that shows up even at well-run companies: crews do the work, but the estimate doesn’t fully capture it, or the billing package doesn’t go out with enough documentation behind it.

“We spend a lot of time on maximizing your current leads and having accurate billing packages that go out, how to document correctly and efficiently, having multiple eyes on that estimate before sending it out, and getting paid for the work that your crews are doing,” Koan said.

The business case is straightforward: once you’ve rolled a truck and paid the labor, failing to fully document and bill the job doesn’t save anyone anything. It just costs the company money it already spent.

“You’re already spending the money to get this truck out to that house,” she said. “To not maximize that lead and secure that lead on site is a huge detriment to the company.”

What members are saying

Shelton Bischof, with Quality Restoration, a Trusted Restorer member since 2019, said the platform changed his business in ways he hadn’t anticipated when he first joined—admittedly under some pressure from a persistent salesperson.

“Once we joined, it pretty drastically changed our business,” Bischof said. “We completely revamped our shop. We completely revamped our trucks because the model that we saw just worked. That turned kind of affected every aspect of our business from there—we changed our marketing program entirely, which made a tremendous difference in our revenue. Our referring parties more than doubled.”

Bischof’s company has since participated in four elite trainings in addition to foundations training, sending members of the management team so that everyone operates from the same playbook.

“They don’t make the same mistake we did,” he said. “Join right away instead of waiting for a number of years.”

James Kennedy, with KPM Restoration, said he joined after hearing success stories from a friend and watching that business grow rapidly. His own company has since doubled in size, with three marketers across three different branches.

“We have once or twice a week meetings, and anything I have to get better, they help me out,” he said. “The strategies we have and new things we’re putting in place is growing my business.”

Finding your own pathway

For contractors looking for more than what a TPA relationship or franchise model can offer, Trusted Restorer is making the case that there’s another way. The company is actively accepting new members and encourages contractors to check territory availability and reach out to see if there’s a fit.

Learn more about Trusted Restorer here.

Watch the interview and listen to the podcast: