--- title: "Nobody Knows the Number" description: "In restoration, you don't get paid when the work is done. You get paid when the fight ends. Why we built Wave, from a family that lived it." publishedAt: "2026-07-20" author: "Albert Aguilera" category: "Founder POV" tags: ["founder", "restoration", "cashflow", "manifesto"] ogImage: "/og/nobody-knows-the-number.png" heroImage: "/images/blog/what-will-it-cost.jpg" heroImageAlt: "Illustration of a game show called What Will It Cost, with a host at a Verisk podium and a homeowner, contractor, and adjuster each guessing a different price" status: "published" --- There's a moment I've lived a thousand times. A homeowner is standing in two inches of water, and they ask the only question that matters: how much is this going to cost? And the honest answer, the one this entire industry gives, is: we'll work it out with your insurance. That's not an answer. That's a stall. But it's the only one we can give, because in restoration, nobody knows the number. Not on day one. Not the homeowner deciding whether to open a claim. Not the contractor deciding whether the job is worth the risk. Not the carrier setting a reserve. A real estimate takes a trained specialist four to eight hours in software that takes weeks to learn, and it can't even be finished until demolition and drying are done. So the homeowner signs their life away and hopes. Sometimes insurance doesn't cover it, and a family gets surprised with a five or ten thousand dollar bill they never saw coming. They suffer for our inefficiency. I know this because it's my family's business. My parents came from Mexico, built a company from nothing, and bought a restoration franchise in SoCal almost twenty years ago. My brother and I run it today. We've grown it every single year since 2020. This year, we're projected to do $12 million. Well past anything our parents reached at their peak. Better team, better systems, better everything. And the cash hasn't gotten better. Here's what nobody tells you about this industry: past a couple million in volume, you don't run a restoration company anymore. You run a bank. You finance ten, twenty, forty projects at a time, out of your own pocket, at zero interest, for insurance carriers worth billions. Average payment takes three to eight weeks. If an adjuster doesn't like you, twenty. We just got paid for a fire we billed in 2024. We followed up nearly every single day. And this is normal. And while you wait, you fly blind. Your P&L is a lie, because every invoice you send is subject to being adjusted down after the fact. A carrier can pay sixty or seventy percent of what you billed, offer no explanation, and leave you to chase the rest, which means your receivables report is less a financial statement and more a wish list. I learned how deep this goes when I looked at acquiring a business whose owner was depositing two hundred grand a month. Those deposits turned out to be checks from jobs finished anywhere from a few weeks to a year earlier, and there was no way to tell what was real recurring income and what was old money finally arriving. This industry is full of smoke. You can be great at the work and never know if you're actually profitable. I don't think the people at the insurance companies are villains. Property carriers are paying out 97 to 103 cents of every premium dollar in claims. They're squeezed too. That's exactly the point. The homeowner signs blind. The contractor gambles and finances. The carrier, trying to protect itself, forces everyone through a workflow so slow and adversarial that it drives up costs for all three, and your rising premiums are the receipt. Ninety percent of claims in this industry flow through one piece of software, built decades ago, owned by one company. And it's not just the software. It's a universal workflow, set by them, that every claim gets funneled through no matter who you are. Every party's truth has to pass through it, and it delivers that truth weeks or years late. Delayed truth is the disease. The delay is what makes everyone the villain in someone else's story. So here's what we believe, and what we built Wave to do: The number should exist on day one. The homeowner should know what it costs while they're still standing in the water. The contractor should know their scope and their margin before the crew loads the truck. The carrier should be able to trust an estimate the day the loss happens, not fight it for months afterward. When the number arrives on day one, everything downstream changes. Homeowners stop signing blind. Contractors stop being banks. Carriers stop paying for a war of attrition. The work speaks for itself, and being good at it is finally enough. I spent years thinking we just had to run our company better. We did, and it didn't fix it, because the problem was never us. It's a system built on delayed truth, and it's time for it to change. We're building the tools to change it. And we're not going to stop at software. If you've ever chased a check for work you finished months ago, you already know why. [Come build this with us.](https://go.buildwithwave.com/signup) Wave is live. Your first three estimates are free.