What Most Restoration Teams Get Wrong About Training

She was the best technician Alpine Cleaning & Restoration Specialists had.

After three years of standout work, Ken Carlson, general manager at Alpine, helped her land a promotion. It was a significant opportunity: A role as an adjuster with a major insurance company. Better title. Better pay. A step up.

A few years later, she walked back into his office, shaking her head. “I hate this. I’m not happy,” she told him.

She didn’t want the prestige or fancy title. She just wanted her old job back. “I just loved what I did,” she said.

Carlson shakes his head at the memory. “I didn’t understand her,” he admits. “I thought money was her solution, when it wasn’t.”

That moment captures what most restoration companies get wrong about retention, and what Alpine gets right.

In a recent Cleanfax + KnowHow webinar on building training programs that drive retention and career growth, Carlson joined executive coach Zac Johnson from Cultivate Advis and KnowHow’s Leighton Healey and Travis Martin to break down how companies can transform from six-month turnover cycles to multi-year retention through intentional training and career building.

The six-month graveyard

Most restoration companies live in what Healey, CEO of KnowHow, calls “a vicious cycle.” High turnover creates a mentality where managers think: “I can’t take my best people and constantly be pairing them up with someone who is only going to be at my company for six to eight months.”

The logic seems sound. Train minimally, get productivity fast, and accept that people will leave. Rinse and repeat.

The result, Healey said, is “a perpetual state of chaos and panic”—what he calls “learned helplessness,” where leaders stop believing anyone will stay, so they stop trying.

But as Carlson puts it: “If you’re having high turnover, you need to look in the mirror.” At Alpine, even technicians stay for years. Managers stay for decades.

The difference? Alpine trains people as if they’re going to be around for years, and the people end up staying around for years.

From paycheck to purpose

Skill-building matters. But skills alone don’t make people stay.

“There are a lot of young workers in the trades who are super skeptical of traditional employment,” Johnson said. “People come for a paycheck. They stay for a purpose.”

That purpose is directional. It’s knowing where this job could take you, and what it takes to get there.

“You don’t need to want a career to grow one,” Johnson explained. “You just need someone to show you what’s possible.”

The problem isn’t that young workers lack ambition—the issue, he explained, is “perceived optionality” without real roadmaps. Johnson uses what he calls “the coffee beans procedure” as an example: many young people say they’d like to run a coffee shop someday, but can’t answer basic questions about espresso machines, point-of-sale systems, or supply chains.

The same applies in the trades. Big talk about “someday” doesn’t stick. But specificity does.

“Companies, especially in the trades, that actually have [training] broken down as optionality with internal case studies do incredibly well,” Johnson said. “Instead of vague promises, it’s: ‘You could be like Joe—Joe was in your shoes two years ago.’”

That’s how Alpine does it. Through a structured technician advancement program, they provide individuals with a clear path to visualize progress and move toward it.

“It’s clearly defined,” Carlson said. “These are things you need to know, this information and this information, how to handle this situation. They check that off with that manager. Then they jump into the next criterion.”

Hurricane-resistant training

But how does structured development survive an industry built on emergencies? Mike Tyson’s famous quote applies perfectly to restoration: “Everyone’s got a plan till they get punched in the face.”

In other words, everyone has the perfect training program until a CAT event or a storm comes along over the weekend.

Alpine’s solution required a cultural shift, but also a technological one. “Having this database where you can search all of Alpine’s procedures,” Carlson explained. “That’s been huge.”

He’s talking about KnowHow, the tool Alpine uses to document and deliver its SOPs, role expectations, and jobsite processes.

“I can’t go ask Google or Grok, ‘Hey, what does Alpine do in this scenario?’ They don’t know what we do,” he said. “But KnowHow does.”

The difference is company-specific knowledge. Alpine isn’t just storing general knowledge. It’s making its way of doing things accessible—on demand, in the field, no matter what storm just rolled in.

Having the right tool means your people don’t have to guess, and training doesn’t rely on perfect conditions. When you combine that kind of consistency with the culture Alpine has built, the investment pays off fast.

Carlson estimates that their weekly all-hands training—with 100 people clocked in—costs the company a significant amount of money. “We’re getting that money back within a day or two on productivity and lack of turnover,” he said.

Your first three moves

For companies ready to break their retention cycle, all three experts recommend starting small:

• Create airspace first. “Start by creating airspace,” Healey advised, “Use that airspace to outline what competent looks like for the two to three upcoming roles you’re planning to hire for.” Tools like KnowHow make delegation easier, freeing up management time to focus on developing people instead of constantly putting out fires.
• Know your people. Carlson’s lesson from his returning technician: “You got to learn you got to know your people first. What are their fears, and what are their loves, and what do they like to do?”
• Start embarrassingly small. “Record less than you want to begin with and train less than you want to begin with,” Johnson recommended. “Don’t go whole hog out of the gate.”

The real ROI

That technician who came back? She’s proof that when you invest in people as whole humans rather than just workers, they remember. Even when they leave, they often realize what they had.

As Carlson learned, sometimes the best promotion isn’t up the ladder—it’s deeper into work they already love, with people who invested in helping them excel at it.