A friend of this industry, Scott Maysura, just wrote the companion piece to everything we’ve been saying about the claims market. His article in C&R Magazine is called The Work Didn’t Disappear. The Buyer Changed. — and he brought numbers.
The flip, in one company’s books
Scott worked with a restoration company whose 2025 mix was roughly 70% insurance claims, 30% self-pay. By the middle of 2026, those numbers had almost completely flipped.
Here’s the part that matters: their overall opportunity count stayed stable. Same market. Similar average job size. They didn’t have an opportunity problem — they had a changing-customer problem. As Scott puts it, it’s easy to blame marketing or push the business development team harder when the real shift is who’s standing in front of you.
The close rate is the whole story
Historically, that company closed 60% to 70% of its opportunities. By mid-2026, the close rate had fallen into the low 50s.
Scott ran the math: a company with 1,000 opportunities a year and a $4,500 average job generates $2.925 million at a 65% close rate. At 55%, that’s $2.475 million. Same opportunities, same market — $450,000 left on the table, explained by ten points of close rate.
Before you spend another dollar chasing leads, figure out why you aren’t converting the ones you already have.
The question customers are actually asking
Scott says he’s hearing something from property owners he rarely heard a few years ago: “Can you tell me what this is going to cost before I call my insurance company?”
That question is the whole market shift in one sentence. The GAO reported in 2026 that homeowner’s insurance is getting less affordable and less available. Higher deductibles, rising premiums, coverage changes — the customer is more cost-conscious, more selective, and more involved before they ever call their carrier. The work hasn’t disappeared. Pipes still break. The buyer changed.
Order takers vs. sales organizations
Scott’s bluntest line: for years, insurance brought the customer to the table, and it let a lot of us become very good order takers instead of intentional sales organizations. “We became experts at performing the work; however, it didn’t require us to become experts at earning the work.”
A self-pay buyer asks different questions — do I really need all of this, what if I do nothing, is financing available — and “sometimes they are not shopping for a contractor, they’re shopping for information.” His prescription: sell to the customer’s why, get estimates out within 24 hours, build a real follow-up process (hope is not a sales strategy), and offer financing — ServiceTitan’s 2026 analysis found contractors with integrated financing saw roughly 15% higher close rates among customers who used it.
Read the whole thing
Scott’s full article has seven starting priorities, from knowing your numbers to the after-action review on every lost job. It’s worth your twenty minutes:
- The article: The Work Didn’t Disappear. The Buyer Changed. (C&R Magazine)
- Scott’s firm: Clarity Business Solutions on LinkedIn
- His site: 4yourbusinessclarity.com
Scott is a business advisor and fractional executive — 25+ years across restoration, construction, plumbing and HVAC, IICRC Triple Master Restorer — and through Clarity Business Solutions he works with owners and leadership teams on exactly this stuff: financial visibility, operations, and the systems that turn opportunities into revenue.
We’ll close with his question, because it’s the right one: the question isn’t “How do we get more work?” It’s “Are we building an organization that’s prepared to win the work already in front of us?”