Why Most Restoration Training Fails—And What to Do Instead

The clock hit 9:45 a.m. Lisa Browning had been sitting alone in the restoration company’s conference room for about 45 minutes. The same owner who’d enthusiastically hired her was nowhere to be found. No one in the office even knew she was starting today.

So she did what any self-respecting professional would do: she walked out.

She eventually returned (after the owner’s profuse apology), but that moment made something painfully clear: in restoration, even good intentions get buried under the urgency of the day. When no one has time to prepare, follow through, or reinforce what matters, new hires end up forgotten, long before they ever get a chance to contribute.

“I vowed no employee would ever experience what I did,” says Lisa, now a restoration training professional with two decades in the industry. Yet this exact scenario still plays out in most restoration companies every day.

In a recent Cleanfax + KnowHow webinar, Lisa joined Leighton Healey (CEO of KnowHow), Travis Martin (VP of Product at KnowHow), and Davin Sullivan (Learning Program Manager at BluSky) to break down why most training fails and how to make it stick.

Why most training doesn’t stick

You’ve seen it: On Monday, your tech flawlessly performs moisture mapping during training. By Thursday, they’re botching placement zones and misreading moisture levels.

“We hit them with the fire hose,” Leighton explains, “then act surprised when they drown.”

Trainers overwhelm new hires with procedures, protocols, and every paperwork requirement imaginable. Under this information assault, learners retain just one thing: relief when it finally ends.

This isn’t your techs’ fault. The brains of today’s incoming workers are search-oriented: we remember where to find information, not the info itself. That means unless training is reinforced, it evaporates.

The four horsemen of retention

After watching countless orientations fail, Lisa discovered something transformative: people don’t remember what they hear once, and everyone learns differently.

Her solution? The IDEA method.

Instruct: First, clearly explain the process, why it matters, and what success looks like.

Demonstrate: Next, physically demonstrate because watching someone do something activates visual learning centers.

Experience: Then, let the learner perform the task themselves to create muscle memory.

Assess: Finally, provide specific, real-time feedback to the learner.

Each pass through the material cements the learning, Lisa emphasizes. Crucially, all these accommodate different learning styles and build stronger connections in the brain.

The knowledge bottleneck holding back growth

Every restoration company has at least one employee who knows everything. They’re invaluable, respected, and paradoxically, they’re suffocating your company’s growth.

“Our mitigation director was brilliant,” recalls Lisa, “but he created this massive bottleneck. New team members would wait days for his guidance while watching generic videos that didn’t address our specific processes.”

The solution isn’t cloning these unicorns. Rather, it’s teaching them how to teach others.

“Instead of being the hero who swoops in to fix everything, we trained them to become people who empower others to solve problems independently,” Davin explains, referencing her first-hand experience with a similar scenario.

This shift builds internal bench strength. It turns tribal knowledge into team knowledge. And it means fewer late-night panicked calls to supervisors.

From reactive scrambling to ready response

Most restoration training is reactive. Someone fumbles a Category 3 water loss, and suddenly the whole team gets “urgent” black water protocol retraining.

“We build band-aid trainings,” Davin admits. “We’re reactive, so we rush something together without considering the bigger picture.”

Leading companies flip the script. They use training tools (like KnowHow) to stay one step ahead of recurring challenges, proactively delivering lessons before mistakes happen and not after.

They also track behavior change through 30-60-90 day check-ins—not just to measure retention, but to catch problems before they become expensive rework.

The result? Fewer callbacks. Fewer surprises. And more confident operations.

The one place to start today

You don’t need to revolutionize everything overnight. All four experts agree on one simple starting point: Organize what you already have.

“Most restoration companies already possess 80% of what they need,” Lisa says. “It’s just scattered across random binders, hard drives, and employees’ heads.”

Creating a central, searchable knowledge hub means your techs can find answers precisely when they need them most, at 2 a.m. on a water loss site when no supervisor is awake to answer frantic texts.

And Leighton’s surprisingly effective bonus tip? “Have great snacks during training.” It sounds trivial until you realize it signals something profound to your team: their comfort and experience matter.

After all, retention isn’t just about keeping information in heads. It’s also about keeping valuable people on your team.

The bottom line

Training fails when it becomes a one-way dump of information. To make it stick:

• Design for search-oriented brains: Assume they’ll Google later, so make answers easy to find.
• Reinforce skills with the IDEA method: Instruct, Demonstrate, Experience, Assess.
• Measure real outcomes through behavior change, 30/60/90-day check-ins, and time to confidence.

Lisa Browning eventually returned to that empty conference room on her first day. But countless restoration professionals permanently walk away from companies because training failures signal a deeper truth: if you can’t remember them on day one, you probably won’t value them on day 1,000 either.

Fix your training, and you might just fix everything that follows.