What PuroClean's CEO knows about your P&L that you might not
Thirty years in restoration gives you a different kind of clarity.
This week's signals come straight from Tamarac, Florida.
KnowHow CEO Leighton Healey flew down to PuroClean headquarters in April 2026 to sit down with Mark Davis, co-founder of Belfor in North America, Chairman & CEO of PuroClean, and one of the most experienced operators restoration has ever produced.
Here are three signals from that conversation that might change how you read the market—it's a hard-earned perspective from someone who's seen this industry at its best and its worst.
Success is the intersection of planning and opportunity
When Superstorm Sandy hit New York in 2012, Signal Restoration got a call to pump out a hospital basement in Brooklyn. That one job became $133 million. The only reason they could handle it was that six months earlier, Mark and his partner had hired eight commercial operations people outside of Michigan—before there was any job to justify it.
Most operators in the same market got the same call. They weren't ready.
Success is what you built before the moment arrived. The 2026 State of the Industry Report (SOTI) tells a similar story in numbers. Overall claim volume was down approximately 20% in 2025, and yet more than 80% of restorers expect to grow revenue in 2026. The ones who earned that optimism spent the year building so that they're not the ones who get the call and can't answer it.
There isn't a single restoration company that could survive on 10 and 10
Mark knows the P&L of roughly 600 restoration companies. His position on overhead and profit is blunt: there is not a single restoration company in the US or Canada that could survive on 10% overhead and 10% profit. Not one. When carriers out pressure on that number, what they're actually doing is making it economically impossible for professional operators to stay in the business.
📊 The 2026 State of the Industry Report is the restoration industry's most comprehensive annual benchmark—built by restorers, for restorers. Four years of data. Free download here.
Getting paid has overtaken hiring as the industry's number one pain point
The SOTI data reveals that 40.8% of restorers naming getting paid as their biggest challenge in 2025. Margin pressure, slower payments, and stretched AR processes are the operating reality. The companies that come out ahead are the ones treating it as a systems problem, not a cash flow problem.
No shareholders. No pressure. No shortcuts.
PuroClean has 520 locations, three of the top five carriers, and 64 multi-location owners. Mark and his partner Frank Tory are the only two shareholders. They went five years without taking a distribution and reinvested everything back into the brand, including technology infrastructure. When AI came up, they piloted KnowHow in Canada, got unanimous consent from franchisees in 90 days, and rolled out to 400 users when they expected 200.
That's what decisions look like when nobody is pressuring you for a quarterly return.
What Mark knows that most operators don't: when growth eats cash, patience is a strategy
Mark cut his salary to almost nothing to afford the right people at Rocky Mountain Catastrophe. He went five years without a distribution at PuroClean. He hired eight commercial operations people before there was a single job to justify it—and six months later, Superstorm Sandy called.
The constraint is never the opportunity. It's whether you were already building when it arrived.
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