If you travel back in time to February 2016, you will find the first published article by The Intentional Restorer in the annals of Restoration & Remediation. I submitted a piece about our internal experiment with shared office space. I expected to be rejected, but was pleasantly surprised when the article was posted and the feedback was positive. The question I asked all those years ago was, “Could restoration companies benefit from a non-traditional workplace?” 

For reference, in our industry, it was commonplace to have the crew out in the warehouse in some ram-shamble “breakroom” and operations such as project managers in haphazard cubicles. Meanwhile, the important staff, the estimators, had secluded offices with air conditioning. Here we are on the brink of 2022, with resources at the ready to make in-house estimators all but obsolete, and not much has changed in the status quo dynamics of the average restoration company. I was a renegade in my own office and yet I am one of two still directly working on this “side” of the industry from the management team I was a part of at the time.