Two calls, two customers, and neither one of them is holding the cheque
The first call is not shopping. Something let go while she was out, the ceiling is coming down in the kitchen, and she is working down the three restoration firms Google put at the top. She is hiring whoever picks up, and she is not leaving a voicemail to do it. What she actually wants to know before she stops dialling is whether this is two thousand dollars of extraction or twelve.
The second call has a date on it. A settlement is three weeks out and the buyer’s agent wants an air test, or a carrier has questioned a claim and somebody needs a report that survives being read with a loss estimate in the other hand. They are not the same customer and they should not share a form. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the dry-out asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the mold inspection carries the trip and the sampling pump inside its number instead of springing them at the door, and putting the house back afterwards goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The flow also asks for a photo of the wet floor or the stain on the ceiling, and the lead tells you to ask for those pictures on the callback — they are the same three your adjuster will want later. Attaching the image itself to the lead is on the roadmap, which is why it is not a tick in that list.
Every hour you are on a loss is an hour you cannot answer the phone.
Not answering is not rudeness in this trade, it is the job. You are on the wand, or you are in a category-three basement in a respirator and a suit with your phone sealed in a truck two floors up, or you are on your knees with a meter reading a wall and both hands full. The other two are carrying equipment. And the calls that come while you are in there are not idle ones: every person ringing has water moving through their house right now, and every one of them is ringing two other firms in the same ten minutes.
| What a missed restoration call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A Tuesday-morning supply line: 800 wet square feet, carpet out, four days of equipment | $3,475 – $4,423 |
| The same water, found on the third day, standing | $4,200 – $4,704 |
| Two air samples and one room, before a settlement date | $474 – $556 |
| One recovered dry-out pays for | 17 months of the bundle |
CallMitt™ writes back from your own texting number, a local number registered to your business and not a stranger’s 800 line, and the text opens with your business name, so she replies into the same thread as her quote. The message is picked by the hour and the day — the demo shop’s office runs 7am to 6pm, so a call that arrives after it closes gets the after-hours version that says somebody is on call rather than one that says the crew is out on a loss — and every version asks the two questions that sort your morning: what is wet, and is the water still running. Here is what is already true at 6am tomorrow:
Every missed call, in order, with the hour on it
You log the call and it takes its place in a list you can read down at six in the morning — who rang, from what number, at what time, and what was composed back. Nothing to reconstruct off a phone that shows nine names and no times.
A blocked message says why it was blocked
When a rule stops a message it is recorded as blocked with the reason written out in plain English — quiet hours where the caller is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. You are never left guessing whether something went out.
Her call and her website quote in one thread
The key is the phone number, so the eight dry-out questions she filled in at half past nine last night and the call she made at ten past six this morning are one conversation on one screen, instead of two records nobody ever joins up.
A tally that leaves your own tests out
Every send is tagged with where it came from, and the dashboard count excludes the ones you fired at yourself while setting it up. What is on the screen is real calls, which is the only figure worth looking at.
Straight about where this stands. We have no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today — you log the missed call and the reply is written, compliance-checked and held in your outbox where you can read it. Everything around it is built and running now: the five messages, the business-hours, weekend, holiday and vacation rules, the quiet hours, the opt-out handling, and the thread her reply lands in beside her quote. Two things that wording usually leaves out, and both of them are permanent: texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is — we read that off their area code — and no setting on our side relaxes it, so a call outside that window is recorded as blocked with the reason rather than queued and nothing re-attempts it in the morning; and a reply held longer than an hour is retired rather than delivered when sending switches on, because nobody wants a month-old “sorry we missed your call” landing on a customer’s phone. The code that answers a forwarded call and texts the caller back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks — it has no phone number to answer on yet, which is a paperwork problem rather than a software one.
Do not take our word for it. Set the clock to a late evening on the example business and watch the same rules record it as blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open that business’s real dashboard, no signup, at the example account’s own dashboard, then click CallMitt in the left menu and read its five text-back messages and its hours for yourself.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersEight questions set a dry-out number, and one of them sets nothing
What the water is, and where it came from
Clean supply water from a hose, a heater or an appliance; rain, storm or ground water through a wall; or a sewage backup. A pick-one, and a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because the category changes the respirators, the containment, the antimicrobial and how much porous material leaves the building all at once — 0, 12 and 35 percent on the demo. The money sits on the option she picks rather than on the rule, and on a pick-one the engine draws no per-unit distinction at all.
Wet finished floor, in square feet
The one genuinely per-unit line on the dry-out — your square-foot rate multiplied by however much floor is actually wet, $1.35 on the demo, capped at 50 to 3,000 with a step of fifty so nobody is typing 847. Paced out room by room, counting anywhere the baseboard has gone dark rather than only where there is standing water. It is the figure a homeowner is least able to guess and the first one your meter corrects.
What is on that floor
Bare concrete or tile, carpet and pad coming out, engineered wood or laminate, or solid hardwood you are trying to save with mats and panels. A pick-one carrying its own flat amount — $0, $420, $780 and $1,250 on the demo — priced once for the job however many rooms it runs through. Saving a hardwood floor costs more on the day and a great deal less than a new floor, which is a conversation better had on the form than in the driveway.
How far up the wall it went
Nothing up the wall, a flood cut two feet up, four feet up with the insulation soaked, or down through the ceiling. Another pick-one with its own flat amount — $640 for the two-foot cut on the demo — because wet insulation will not dry behind closed drywall, and the moment the wall opens you have stopped drying a room and started rebuilding part of one. It is the single most common reason an estimate gets revised standing in the basement.
Stored contents and furniture
A yes/no worth 15 percent on the demo, and a percentage rather than a fee because emptying, blocking and putting back twenty years of boxes is hours of labor spread across the whole job instead of one line of it. Percentages pool and land once on the whole subtotal, so a yes here and a sewage category do not compound one on top of the other — they are added together first and applied together.
Whether it stood more than 48 hours
A yes/no that raises the job minimum instead of adding a fee, which is a rule kind worth understanding. Two days is the line in the standard: past it, clean water is no longer treated as clean whatever it started as. On the demo a yes means the quote never comes back under $4,200. It adds nothing to the arithmetic. It puts a floor under the finished number, and the bottom of the published range then sits flat on that floor rather than 12 percent below the midpoint.
How long the equipment stays
Blowers and dehumidifiers multiplied by the days they stay — four blowers for three days is twelve equipment-days — asked as one compound number on purpose. The engine adds; it never multiplies one of her answers by another one. Two questions, "how many blowers" and "how many days", would add together rather than multiply, and the arithmetic further down this page would be visibly wrong. So the multiplication is done out loud in the help text, at $42 an equipment-day on the demo. This is the answer that moves the number more than any other.
Whether it is going through insurance
Asked, required, and deliberately carrying no rule at all: yes or no, the number does not move by a cent. It tells you to photograph and meter the damage the way an adjuster wants it, keep the daily readings in a form they will accept, and offer to meet hers on site. It is on the form precisely because the engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit, so the one thing it must never do is behave as though a claim changes the price. Travel zones sit on the account rather than the service, and price the trip from the ZIP she types.
A real dry-out, start to finish
Eight questions and a photo, about a minute. This is the exact sequence running on our own restoration demo account — and the total at the bottom is what the live pricing engine returns for these answers, not a figure anybody typed into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she picks | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is the water, and where did it come from? | A supply line, a water heater or an appliance hose | Clean supply water — the category percent is 0% on the demo |
| 2 | How much finished floor is wet? | 800 square feet | 800 × the square-foot rate — $1.35 on the demo, so $1,080 |
| 3 | What is on the wet floor? | Carpet and pad, coming out | A flat $420, once for the job |
| 4 | How far up the wall did the water go? | A flood cut two feet up, drywall and insulation out | A flat $640, once for the job |
| 5 | Is the wet area full of stored contents or furniture? | No | Nothing — the 15% only fires on yes |
| 6 | Had the water been standing more than 48 hours? | No | Nothing — the floor stays at the service minimum |
| 7 | How many equipment-days do you think it will take? | Thirty-two — six blowers and two dehumidifiers for four days | 32 × the equipment-day rate — $42 on the demo, so $1,344 |
| 8 | Are you putting this through insurance? | Yes | Nothing. It changes the photographs, not the price |
| 9 | Got a photo of the water, or of where it is coming in? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $465 call-out + $1,080 + $420 + $640 + $1,344 = $3,949, and no percentage answer fires on this one, so the midpoint stays $3,949 | ||
| She sees | $3,475 – $4,423 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all eight answers, the photo flag, and the disclaimer she was shown | ||
The square-foot rate, the tear-out amounts, the equipment-day rate and the category percentages above belong to the demo account, not to a Tailgate Office price list — you set every one of them in the dashboard and you can change an equipment-day rate without touching your website. What is not illustrative is the total: $3,475 to $4,423 is what the engine returns for those answers, and you can reproduce it yourself on the demo in about a minute. And one thing that band is not, on this trade above every other: it is not what she pays and it is not what you collect. It is what you bill. Her carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and her deductible comes off whatever they allow — the engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit, and the disclaimer under the number says so in your own words.
Would you rather try it than read about it? We keep a working example restoration company website with NapkinPrice embedded — the real engine, quoting live, on a page that is not ours. Put in those answers and see the same number come back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)Three services, and only two of them ever show a price
A first-day dry-out, a mold report with a settlement date on it and putting the house back afterwards are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a rebuild like a wet carpet.
Extraction and the first day of dry-out — quotes instantly
The call-out, the crew and the moisture survey live inside the number rather than turning up at the door — $465 on the demo — and there is a job floor underneath at $2,000, because a truck rolling and a room drying has never cost less than that. One answer moves that floor instead of the price: say the water had been standing more than 48 hours and the minimum goes to $4,200, which is a floor and not a fee. It adds nothing to the arithmetic. It flattens the bottom of the range — the smallest loss on the demo quotes $2,000 to $2,240, and a 48-hour yes comes back $4,200 to $4,704, flat along the bottom instead of 12 percent under the midpoint. Above the ceiling it stops pricing: past a $12,000 midpoint the widget routes the lead to you rather than publishing a number that big off eight answers, and on this service the thing that gets you there is the day count, not the square footage. Read every band on this page as what you bill: the carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and the homeowner pays a deductible against whatever they allow, which is a number no form can know.
Mold inspection and air test — quotes instantly
This is where restoration parts company with plumbing or electrical, and the divergence is honest: there is no cheap diagnostic call here, because the truck rolls and extraction starts. The nearest true equivalent is the inspection — a scheduled visit, a sampling pump and a written report — and it is the call that pays for itself before a settlement date. The trip and the pump sit in the service base fee, $225 on the demo, added once however many samples you end up drawing. The band is tighter than the dry-out at plus or minus 8 percent rather than 12, because a fixed time and a fixed report is a far better known job than a loss nobody has seen yet. Two samples and one room for a house sale quotes $474 to $556. There is a floor at $395 and a ceiling at $2,200, because past that it is a building survey and a survey gets a visit first.
Reconstruction after the dry-out — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer for putting a house back together: drywall, trim, paint, flooring, cabinets, sometimes a kitchen. The service still asks what came out during the dry-out, how many rooms have to go back, who is paying for it and whether anybody is living in there while the work goes on — none of which moves any money, all of which tells you what you are walking into and which format to write the scope in. She gets your own "we come and scope it once it is dry" message; you get a lead worth bidding, and the rebuild is usually a bigger job than the dry-out that came before it.
A service that quotes will not go live until it carries a real base fee or a real minimum. That is deliberate: a service with neither would happily return $0 to a homeowner, and one bad number on your website costs more than a day of setup.
The first thing to screen for here is not a ticket. It is whether he will do it
Restoration is not a licensed trade in most states, and a screening question that says it is would be false in the majority of them — so the first question is the one the work actually turns on. This is sewage water, respirators, and tearing wet drywall off a wall for a day. Plenty of good tradesmen will not do that, and finding out in week two costs you a truck, a fortnight and a loss you had to hand to somebody else.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the truck and the job box. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for sewage water and respirators and pulling out wet drywall, has he set air movers and dehumidifiers off moisture readings and logged a structure dry, how many years has he done restoration work, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three of those are knockouts — under 18, not willing to do the work, or living more than a set distance away — and the rest come back as a weighted fit score. The certification this trade actually runs on sits in the third question as a scored skill rather than a knockout, which is where it belongs when half the country asks for nothing.
Two things about that scoring are worth copying. Distance is a knockout and never a weight, because a number answer scores higher the bigger it is, so weighting miles would rank the man furthest away at the top. And free text carries no weight at all, because any non-empty answer scores full marks and a weighted text box quietly inflates every candidate who typed anything. Both of those are set that way on our own demo job, and every question on it carries a Spanish translation.
One honest note on delivery. There is no inbound SMS on our side yet, so today he answers those seven questions on your screening page rather than by text — same questions, same knockouts, same scoring, same pool. The keyword on the truck takes over the day your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
A dry-out gets its review once the claim is closed, not the day the blowers come out
The meters read dry, the structure is logged and the blowers are back on the truck. That is not the day to ask her for anything. She still has an adjuster on the phone, a wall open at the flood cut, a line-item schedule she has never seen before and a deductible coming off whatever they allow, and a review request that lands in the middle of that reads like one more bill. Once the carrier is done with her and the house is hers again, she remembers exactly who showed up with a wand at ten o’clock at night; that is the day to ask. The firm with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, once the claim is closed.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has got back in touch.
Review requests aren’t switched on yet, so none is sent today. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer agreed to texts, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered dry-out covers 17 months
And a single recovered air test more than covers the month it happened in. This is a trade where the arithmetic is not close.
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Water damage questions we get asked
Here is the honest state of it. The design is that your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now. You turn on forwarding for unanswered calls once, with a code the setup guide gives you, and from then on a call nobody answers in about twenty seconds passes to your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business. A short greeting, in place of your voicemail, tells the caller a text is on its way, and the reply goes out from that texting number. The caller dials one number and hears back from another. It works because the text opens with your business name and thanks them for calling. A ring group or a second phone is no obstacle, because the text only fires when nobody picks up. An answering service is one or the other for any given hour, since an unanswered call can only forward to one place: the forwarding is your own setting, a code switches it off, and the service keeps whatever hours you give it. What runs today is the half that needs no carrier: you log the missed call, CallMitt picks the right message for the hour and the day, checks your hours, the quiet hours, your opt-outs and your suppression list, and the message is composed and held in your outbox where you can read it. The code that answers a forwarded call and does all of that without you touching it is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks — it has no phone number to answer on yet. Better you read that here than find it out in week two.
It is recorded as blocked, with the reason, and that is the end of it. Texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is — read off their area code — and there is no setting on our side that relaxes it, so a two o’clock message is never queued in the first place. Nothing re-attempts it at eight either: a blocked record is final by design rather than by accident. And a message that did queue and then sat is retired rather than delivered once it is more than an hour old, because a "sorry we missed your call" that lands the next afternoon does more harm than silence. So say it plainly, because this is the trade it matters most on: if you advertise round-the-clock, a text-back is not your night shift — a human is. What this gives you at six in the morning is the list — who rang, at what time, and why nothing went out — so the two o’clock caller hears from you before she has finished ringing round.
It stops pricing and hands you the lead. Every instant service carries a ceiling, and on the demo the dry-out is set at a $12,000 midpoint — a category-three loss across two floors with three months of equipment on it goes straight past that, and she gets your own "this one needs somebody standing in it" message instead of a number. The ceiling is tested against the midpoint before the range is ever drawn, so it is a decision about the job rather than about the top of a band. Set yours where you would stop quoting over the phone, and remember that on this trade the thing that carries a job over the line is usually the day count rather than the floor area.
Because the engine adds and it does not multiply one of her answers by another one, and we would rather tell you that than hide it. A dry-out is billed as units times days, but there is no rule kind that reaches across to a second question — two questions, "how many blowers" and "how many days", would be added together and the arithmetic on this page would be visibly wrong. So it is asked as one compound number with the multiplication done out loud in the help text: four blowers for three days is twelve. It is a guess until the meters say otherwise, which the help text also says. If you would rather not ask a homeowner to do that sum at all, the other honest shape is one service per drying class with the days built into each.
It does not, and no form on the internet can tell you. What the widget prints is what the contractor bills. If the loss is going through insurance, the carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and your deductible comes off whatever they allow — so the number you actually pay is set by your policy, not by this. The engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit and does not pretend to: the insurance question on the form carries no pricing rule at all, and answering it yes or no does not move the total by a cent. What it does do is tell the contractor to photograph and meter the damage the way an adjuster wants it and to offer to meet yours on site.
You can price a range, and only a range. The widget shows a bracket and the disclaimer under it says the day count is what the meters say rather than what anybody guessed, because every wet material gets read before a single blower goes down and re-read every morning. Write that in your own words: the call-out and the survey in, the rebuild out, containment and negative air priced when the category says so. A homeowner who gets an honest bracket at half past nine at night stops calling down the list — and the one whose water is a mop and a fan finds that out on your website instead of on your morning, which is a kindness to both of you.
Call it fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and your hours, a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page, and about an hour to write the eight dry-out questions and load your square-foot rate, your tear-out amounts, your equipment-day rate and your travel zones. A service that quotes will not go live until it carries a real base fee or a real minimum, which is deliberate. No onboarding call, no setup fee and no contract: $199 a month buys all four tools.
Also do mold remediation, or sub the rebuild out? See all the trade pages, read the compliance page, or call (301) 268-1943.
Catch the call you could not take. Put a real number on the dry-out.
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