Beyond Text: Building a Bulletproof File

Alrighty. Let’s get started. So welcome everyone to beyond text building a bulletproof file. My name is Kate. I am a Product and Content Marketing Manager here at Encircle. In the last session, we hosted Rethinking Scoping and Estimating. We walked through the nitty gritties of the differences between scoping and estimating, why they need to be two separate things, and why a scope is so important when it comes to submitting to the carrier. This session covers the practical side of things, so how to solidify that narrative, including strategies to capture more than just notes. With no further ado, let me introduce our guest today. So if you attended the last one, you guys know David. But for new folks, David Herring is the Founder of RiseDocs and WriteLoss ClaimWrite Inc, the largest provider of property insurance estimates in North America with 30 years of experience on both sides of complex claims. David holds level three Xactimate certification, professional GC licensure, and has been retained in over a thousand litigation matters as an expert witness and loss consultant. David is also also the author of the upcoming book, “Peel the Onion: A Methodology Guide for Negotiating Property Insurance Claims.” Welcome, David. It’s good to see you back. And – Good to be here. The floor is yours. Good to be here. Well, guys, I’m I’m glad that you’re here, and I’m glad that I saw a lot of names that I know in in the audience. You know, I was I was talking about it earlier. You know? Like, if you really think about it, probably since, I don’t know, the 70s, people have chased, you know, the the perfect scope sheet, you know, the perfect way to assess a loss. And it’s forever an improving thing, and we just today, we have technology at a level where it starts modifying our game to bring our game up a great deal. And so let’s get into it. So we’re gonna go over photos done right, video walk throughs, floor plans, AI documentation, then we’re gonna do a pretty long Q&A. So let’s let’s first jump into photos. Now there is a there’s gonna be a lot of you that do this differently. Okay? I’m gonna tell you what I suggest. You can take it or you can modify it, but I’m gonna tell you the why I do what I do. Okay? When we when we take pictures, we’re gonna always put do the one thing the adjusters always do. We’re gonna take the risk picture. It’s gonna be a picture of the front of the structure every single time. I’m probably jumping around here, and I apologize for that. We’re gonna wanna take pictures pre-loss, demo phase, and post-completion. I would rather you do on that. I would I would like for you to do 3D on each one of those. That’s probably your best your best possibility. But let’s talk about taking actual pictures on your job. We’re gonna talk about video as well, but let’s first talk mostly about pictures. Remember a couple of things about pictures that is gonna be really key to you. There’s a chance that the carrier folks aren’t gonna be able to see your videos. There’s a chance that the people are not gonna be able to see your 3D renderings. They do have a methodology to see your pictures. It’s easier for them. Not perfect, but it’s easier for them. So what I suggest when you take take pictures is you do something that is going to let you walk the entire job in order where whether it be a person or an AI assistant can be able to tell everywhere you were, when you were there, and what wall it’s on. Now we did this in the 80s because it worked. We do it in the 2000s because it worked still. The only thing we changed in the 2000s is we started doing because we like because we’re using more AI assistance is we started putting labels on the on the door frames to say which rooms we’re in. But this is super easy. Every time you walk into a structure, you’re gonna take a picture, a wide picture from the outside. You’re gonna step into the room, take a wide picture of the ceiling, a wide picture of the floor. Then you’re gonna go to your immediately to your left, and you’re gonna take a picture of the wall to the left and take a picture of any damage that’s there. Then you’re gonna go to your next one and the next one and the next one. And then you’re gonna do that room by room by room by room. Now a lot of you will not go into the rooms that are not specified as damaged. But I will suggest to you that you do all of these pictures just this way for two reasons. One, you don’t know about conditions that may actually that may actually be important. Like, what if the insured is a hoarder and we can’t move things around in the structure? But the second reason it’s important is because every time an adjuster goes to a loss, they’re obligated to look at the entire structure. And you’ve gotta understand that at a bare minimum, I don’t care where you are in the industry, you’re doing the carrier’s work to some degree. And by giving them all those pictures, you’ve done a complete job, and it makes them more comfortable with what you do. Can we go ahead and go to the pictures and talk about the pictures? You can look at this picture, and, obviously, we’ve got a water loss. Right? But you can also look at this picture, and you can also see that it doesn’t tell us anything about what’s going on in the rest of the room. It doesn’t it it hasn’t it hasn’t done the function I just told you about, which gave you that wide shot, that lower shot, and all these all these areas so that you could have perfect recall on how this how this room was. Somebody took that picture and thought they were doing a great job, by the way, because they could see all these things that were damaged, but it still left us wanting in a in a lot of ways. And the idea is that while we don’t wanna do wide shots normally, we do wanna do wide shots to at least figure out what’s going to get a relative understanding what what’s what’s where in the room. Let’s go to the next one. By any measure, this looks like a great picture. Right? And it kind of is. But if we had a loss and we were taking pictures on this loss, we know one thing, that that pipe right there is gonna be the subject of all conversation that happens on this loss from jump street on. So what we’re gonna do here is we’re we’re gonna instead of just taking that picture, we’re gonna get a close-up of it. We’re gonna take a picture from behind it as well, underneath it if we can, so we can see it in every way that it that it busted. For example, It has certain characteristics if it was freeze. It has certain characteristic if if it’s just if it just failed. And so having those pictures will help avoid those problems down the road where they say it’s one one thing or the other. And so it’s just that when you get to the source of the loss, you’ve gotta look at it from every perspective. Because if you don’t look at it from every perspective, when we’re passing it up the line, it lands on an examiner’s desk, they’re not gonna pay it. I want you to remember something always when we do this work is there was a time in the past where we met with an adjuster, an adjuster came up with a scope, an adjuster paid it. It basically went we we dealt with one person. But it is most common today that the person that’s making that decision will have never walked the loss. And so we have to do more documentation so that we have a non-controvertible, scope because somebody’s gonna look at it. You’ve gotta go through probably desk adjuster claims exam claims manager and examiner levels. And so there’s at least three people that are gonna look at that file that are that are have never gonna be there, and I think that’s just important. Can we go to the next one? This is a real good picture. It shows that a braided line, which is a culprit always, I don’t know why they still sell them. But if we were doing this inspection, there’s a couple of things we might note here and might make a note of. If you were to look at this, it would probably tell you without a lot of work that this might be a recurring problem because it looks like somebody DIY-ed some drywall repair, you know, in the not too distant past. And so at least that’s gonna need to be a discussion that’s had with the insured because we’re gonna need to know what we’re looking at to just make sure that nobody’s putting it in a classification of a of a long term issue. If we don’t do that, we probably are putting ourselves in a in a in a pretty bad spot. Incidentally, by the way, you’ll also notice here there’s something missing in this picture, and there’s there’s there’s no there’s no shutoff on this. So I think that will probably come into play as well. Okay. Next up. This is what I was talking to you about a few minutes ago. Now it’s just it’s super easy. Risk picture, wide shot wide shot of the ceiling, wide shot of the floor, and then shot shot of each wall when and you’re looking at the those. And you’re looking at the damages on each level. Now since I since I jumped ahead a little bit here, let me just let me just cover this for you. If I had my way, if I want if I’m gonna ever see your file, when it’s going to court, when it’s going when it’s going through appraisal, if it’s going through some kind of other alternative dispute, I’m gonna wanna see that you have pictures that are before you before you start doing any work, after you finish your demo, and after it’s repaired. Because if I have that same set and I can set those up properly, nobody’s ever gonna ask us any questions. I I reviewed before I did this today, I reviewed about 200 files that are in my shop. And I would say of the 200 files in my shop, about 80% of them are just pictures that are just dumped in a bucket. And you probably could pull we could pull metadata to see what day they were, so that helps. But you’re as apt to see, you know, pre to to in process to complete it in the same bucket, and those just should never be in the same bucket. And I think that that’s something most people really, really screw up. Everybody’s willing to go out and take three or four hundred pictures, but they’re not always willing to to catalog them in the place they’re need they’re needing to go. And you should be able today today, you should be able to take take pictures, and we should be able to use AI solutions to segment those pictures correctly if it can follow a path and then ultimately have that line up in Xactimate and be in the right location or in a Dropbox or Google Drive or on an app and get it get it to the right location so that it makes it easier to annotate the pictures and to know what they are. If we do that correctly, we also can use some automated annotation methods if we’ve if we’ve put them if we’ve gone to the effort to do that, but you gotta do that every single time. And, you know, here’s the thing I I I think about a lot. When you go to the doctor, the doctor’s gonna the doctor’s going to come in and and they’re gonna well, before you even get to see the doctor, they’re gonna take your weight. They’re gonna take your blood pressure. They’re gonna take your pulse. They’re gonna take your temperature because that’s basic triage. They do the same thing no matter why you come to them. And we need to treat every loss we have like triage to do the same exact thing because this is prior to us really making any scope notes, making any decisions, doing anything but just collecting the rawest data we can that’s gonna feed us down down the road. Okay. Next up. So let let’s talk about video, and let’s talk about where it’s in where it’s appropriate. Okay? I agree that you can go into a loss, and you can turn your turn your phone on edge, and you can you can walk around and talk about the entire loss. You can do a 15 or 20 minute video. Now when you do the 15 or 20 minute video, just recognize that you’ve created a big chunky file that is not as easy to process normally as it would be if they were shorter files. What what I have my people do, and I’ve been doing video videos of of losses for 10 years, is we start if we have exterior. We do exterior. We do roof if we have roof, and then we do interior, and we usually break that into, like, three videos of the interior. If it’s, like, multi locations, we’ll do it break it down by room. That way, we’ve got very segmented videos so somebody doesn’t have to look at the whole video to figure that out. It also it makes it easy for us to label it, upload it in the right place so when we use an AI assistant, it can pull pull that information out. Now I want you to think about this when you talk about talk about video. We’re gonna do the same thing when we talk about audio. If you’re going to walk the loss, I want you to remember that you’re telling a story. As you tell a story, that story doesn’t say we’re gonna have to move remove 32 square feet of half inch drywall and put two two air movers and one dehu and do containment on the each end of each room. Your story is a great deal different than that. And let me let me explain it to you like this. If any of you have children or have had children that were 12 years old, we’ve all been children that were 12 years old, you can get a 12 year old to do almost anything if you are explicit with them. And when you do this walkthrough, when you do this narrative, when you tell the story of the loss, what you wanna do when you’re doing this is you wanna actually tell the story, and you wanna tell it like you’re telling it to a 12 year 12 year old. So if you’re walking the loss, you wanna say, I walked in the in in the dining room, and I saw no damage. I walked in the main hall, and I saw damage on the ceiling and on the wall on the left hand side. I haven’t found where the where the source is just yet, but I’m I’m finding that water is there. I go to the next room, and I say, this mimics what we saw on the other side because we see damage to the wall on this side too. And then could you continue to tell that story. That story, that audio that you’re doing right there, the video is catching details, but that audio that you’re doing is perhaps the most giving thing that we’ve ever done when we assess claims, period. End of story. That because when we parse that out, that voice that you put in there when you explained it like that is going to speak to our AI assistants, and it’s going to write a scope that makes sense and that we can also use to communicate back to the carrier in a voice that works very good for what they need to see. It’s gonna tell the story. So a lot of people wanna walk a loss and wanna specify every single thing about that loss when they’re walking it. And I’m telling you that it’s more important that you tell the story of the loss than it is for you to go through and run through a bunch of line items and a bunch of equipment. That can come after, but you first your first cause is to tell the story. And the story can be told really well with video, but depending on the system you’re using, you wanna calibrate your video smaller instead of bigger. In our world, we get a 10 minute video, and it takes us processing time about four times longer. We get a four minute video, three minute video, and it moves really quickly. That’s that’s in my workflow. That might not be in yours. But I think that’s the I think that’s the first place to go. Go ahead. If you know, we talked about pictures a few minutes ago, and I want I wanted you to explain explain to you what what I do what we do or I do and my people do no matter what no matter what we do. K? Is I don’t care if it’s an interior water loss. I’m gonna still take a picture of the front of the building, the side of the building, the back of the building, and the other side of the building just because I may need it, and it takes no time to do. When you catch when you when you catch a a loss and you document it on that level, you get different respect when it lands at the carrier every time. I’ve got some good friends that work at the carrier and work as examiners, and they will always tell they always tell me the same thing, that the loss that’s documented in a way they cannot fight it is the loss they pay without fighting it. And that if we can if we if we’re always being fought on something, chances are good. There’s something we could do to could avoid that, and that’s just one of the many things that you could do. We we talk about being IICRC certified, but I’ve watched so many people just assume things about the extent of the water damage and the location of the water damage. I’ll give you a great example. We I had an expert job recently where the mitigation crew had come in. They had come in, and to their credit, they had showed up to the loss, like, 35 minutes after it was found. So some of the water had been there long enough to be CAT 3. Some of it hadn’t been, but they had come in and pulled some baseboards, not pulled any drywall, done some drying, antimicrobial, took out took out a floor that was just happened to be damaged, but was on its way out anyway, and, just made quick work of it. Three months later, everybody in the house is sick because nobody on the mitigation crew figured that they could just get in and out really easy, and it’s an easy water loss, wasn’t able to see that the back of the the back of the cabinets, which couldn’t be seen from the front, was completely eaten with mold. And we had someone in the house that had mold sensitivity, and the real the the real story here is that they knew where the water was coming from. It was coming from an HVAC system. They didn’t have a choice but to go all the way to the back of the cabinets because they couldn’t have seen behind those cabinets without at least removing some drywall, using a borescope, doing any number of things. But they had to move something to get there. And we used to have this thing that we did in the industry where the carrier would always pay for us to do an invasive testing or invasive discovery. And I think you need to force that issue with the carrier a lot of times because you have to know the the extent of the loss. If you cannot see it, if you cannot touch it, if you cannot use a a moisture meter on it, you cannot you cannot call it not okay. Incidentally, by the way, that loss, that they lined up for about $7,000, turned into a $79,000 loss before they did ALE, which was another $30,000. So it was it was sizably a different job and all because somebody didn’t go all the way to the path of path of the loss. Incidentally, they also developed a really crappy scope too, so they didn’t tell the story of their loss very well either. After you do your initial walkthrough after you do your initial walkthrough where you get that narrative, you’re gonna have to talk about your equipment. I want you to think about this and just remember this. Remember that in our industry, we’ve had a we’ve had a push down or a slow or muting of the of the growth in wages as it is so as it for our techs. In a lot of cases, we’re having a lost leader when we’re using our techs. On our equipment, we’ve had higher numbers. And so what happens is on every job we do, those machines that we set out there are the most important thing we have because that’s where our money is. That’s just the honest truth. But because of that, we have to do graduate level documentation on everything we do because there’s this always there’s always gonna be a thought because they know that’s where your money is that you’re using too much equipment. So part of writing that narrative initially and justifying your equipment thereafter, the narrative the narrative that you did earlier, the story that you did earlier is gonna justify your use of your equipment. But if you don’t do that story done like we talked about, what’s gonna happen to you, and I mean every single time, is they’re not gonna wanna pay it because they don’t understand the narrative of the story. And just imagine if you did what I said. If you did what I said on this, you could take an AI tool. You could pitch a scope out for an estimator. You could have the equipment justification spit out of that AI tool. You could have the pictures landing in the right place so that AI tool could could annotate them, and you could have that same tool write an email to the carrier that used your narrative and used all your equipment details. And you could do that in the stroke of a few buttons, whether you use an app or some other systems. But you’ve collected this data that you get to use on a level you never got to use it before. And I think it’s just it it it’s it’s mind blowing to me because everything I ever wanted, we can do now, and we can get there a lot of different ways. I wanted to just cover one thing here on pictures in general that you’re gonna wanna be aware of. If you can take your pictures and upload them to some third party so that the providence of those pictures go to the right go go to somebody else to authenticate that they were taken at a certain time and they weren’t altered, it’s gonna become more and more important. They did a poll. I think the New York Times did a poll about two months ago, and they said that two out of ten people would use AI to alter a loss picture, a claim picture, to bolster their claim. And so by being able to say that the pictures were uploaded to a system, nobody’s ever gonna be able to say that you that you that you altered an image. It will not be long before you get accused of that no matter what you do, but you need to have a good answer for it because because because that’s coming. We matter of fact, we have a I I have a litigation that I’m that I’m I’m being deposed on in two weeks where the actually, in this case, the carrier accused the mitigation contractor of altering images of the damage to get their to get their their their moneys up. They didn’t alter the they didn’t alter them. But what they did do is they had them on their phone, and they they traded them between they they traded them between phones, and it it didn’t have good meta metadata, and it looked like it would probably look like something had been done. But they didn’t they didn’t do anything wrong. What they did what they should have done is they should have had an app or they should have had a system where they could have could have uploaded those pictures. I mean, they could add something as simple as CompanyCam had Encircle. Something like that to just move stuff up would have would have been better. It wouldn’t have been as good if you’re doing something like Dropbox or Google Drive, but still that’s better than just having them sitting on a sitting sitting on a phone. Because as you know, we can do almost anything on our phone. We can ask ChatGPT to make me look like I have horns, and you could do it in about three seconds. I think some people think I have horns. Anyway, next up. When you walk the loss, you’ve you’re gonna wanna do this because you’ve always done this. You’re gonna wanna go in and you’re gonna wanna say, not that the drywall is saturated to 18 inches, but you’re gonna wanna say that the drywall is saturated to 18 inches. And and we need to do this and this and this and this and this and this. Initially, we don’t do that. But what you are gonna do while you’re doing that initial walk through is you are gonna be thinking about what equipment you’re gonna do, and you’re gonna be thinking about category and class. You know that of all the those files that I looked at, only 22% of those files dealt with class. They they always just dealt with category. And I think we all we need to start thinking about class because building assemblies push our our drying plans. And the reason why a lot of our drying plans fail is because we didn’t pay attention to building assemblies. And the other thing to remember when we’re calling out equipment in our initial walk through, just remember, you’re not usually doing the math that’s necessary as you’re doing that initial walk through. You wanna at least have a more deliberate process. We’ve all got tools that can help us do that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying be really, really careful about just deciding on equipment without doing the math and without figuring out what you actually need in total. Because if you go too far into it, you’re in a mess. Let’s go let’s go on and let’s talk about floor plans. Now when you have when you have floor plans, I I just want you to I just want you to remember this. Okay? This is this is super this is super simple, but most people get it wrong. Where are we normally working in a structure? We’re normally working somewhere that, what, that is close to water. So that’s gonna be toilets, dishwashers, cabinets, vanities, tubs, showers, all of this stuff. Everywhere there’s water in this building, we need to be actually putting in the cabinets, putting in the toilets, and putting the details in our in our sketches, not just simply drawing out the rooms and being done with it. It takes almost no time to do it, but it has to be coherent. And you can get somebody else to do your sketch and and pull it straight in. Encircle’s got some cool things they’re doing in that too. But as long as it’s got but as long as it’s got the as long as it’s got the full details of where that water is, I think that’s that’s where you win the biggest. And I think it all and and I and I look at like, I’m I was looking at these ones today before I got on this thing, and most people don’t put that in their estimates. They just don’t. And I would I would put them in a different color, and I would light them up so that people can see what it is. And and it’s a good time if you if you can do it is to go and annotate your sketch to put the appropriate colors for the for the great award that you have. And I think I I think we we we don’t recognize that essentially everybody looks at our file. We all went to the same grammar school. We all went to the same high school, and we all understand color coding. And we all understand pictures that have everything in place, and we all understand – And I just think we need to to to play that game. Let’s go on to the next one because I wanna talk about the common floor plan mistakes. You’re gonna see adjuster pushback very consistently. When you you scanned after demo, I need to see what’s actually been removed before I can approve the scope. Missed adjacent rooms. Why why are you billing for x square feet of equipment when the affected room is y? No containment show shown. I don’t see justification for the containment line. No material labels. What kind of flooring was was there? I need to I need to know before I can approve approve to the replacement. No equipment on the plan. Five air movers in a small room seems excessive. In fact, I had a guy last week. He he told us that he told us that our that our equipment allocations were massive. We asked him what we asked him what what the calculation for massive was. He wasn’t impressed. The furniture block furniture block, the scan. Your dimensions don’t match the original plans, so let’s reconcile. The basically, remember, if we talked about it before, if you want to win, if you take the same pictures in 3D, for example, at each stage of your job before, after demo, and after repair, you’re gonna you’re it’s it’s hard it’s hard for you to lose, but you’re always gonna get a pushback. If somebody’s pushing back on you about about floor plan or pictures, that’s because you haven’t done your job. It’s usually not because it’s it’s usually not because they’re not doing their job. I know that there are crazy people that we have to deal with in this industry. I had a guy call me one time, and he had, he said, I need you to work out a problem I have. And I said, what’s that? He said, my my my one of my managers got on a FaceTime with certain third party reviewer and referred to her in a term that no rational human would ever use for a female, and, I need to know how to fix that. And I I I said, you you you have to fire him, like, now and apologize. But I there’s always gonna be somebody pushing back on you in a way that’s gonna drive you crazy. I know that. But we gotta figure out ways not to let them do that as often. Can we go on to the next one? Okay. When you are looking at any tool, you need to look at the speed in the field, the turnaround turnaround time, the accuracy, the learning curve, the total cost, and does it does it wind up in your in your workflow? Does it wind up in Xactimate? Does it wind up to your estimator? And I think you can use this this this is a this is a metric that we use in my own shop for anything we do, for any kind of tool that we’re using, is where did how how does it how does it fit within the within these? And, you know, more and more, we’re gonna see that we have apps out there that will do all of these things at the same time. And I think that’s the I think that’s that’s the way to fit it. But because we can always run you know, you can always go, with the brand newest version of AI and go down the rabbit hole and build your own code for some crazy ass, expensive CRM that you make to do all of this. But you’re gonna spend all your time doing that and burning up your credits instead of actually doing the job that that you need to do. And the you know, I know that all of us get eaten up by, by subscriptions, but the only people getting eaten up by subscriptions are the people who aren’t job costing those out in their in their jobs to begin with. Every job you do should have every one of your subscriptions that touches that affecting that job in some way to to to address the price. We could spend hours on pricing, and I’m a price specialist. I do a lot of that, but but that’s something you definitely need to deal with. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. So let’s just talk about AI documentation in a way that makes this super simple. If all I did in the world tomorrow is go take these pictures and walk the loss and record it on Otter, on note on on some kind of notetaker, Encircle, on Dropbox, on whatever CRM you’re using. If I did nothing but that, I would still wind up with a better scope and a better narrative than we have ever been able to create. I want you to also remember this. This bugs the crap out of some restorers, and I’m sorry if it does. But you have some very skilled people that are very good at going out and walking losses and writing up scopes and getting everything ready to go. I want you to remember that with the advent of AI and being able to capture everything, what we’re actually able to do is you’re actually able to put somebody out there that’s not as certified that has better bedside manners to deal with the insured to go do that initial assessment to pull all this basic data in. And that takes that takes a that that that takes an entirely different price point when you’re going out to do the initial assessment, and it also lets you slightly change who you’re sending to do that work initially. And I I hate to say it this way, but, I mean, they’re usually gonna be cheaper because they’re not highly technical people. I’ll I’ll give you a great example. I had a guy that worked for me for years. He still works for me. That when he went to work for me, he didn’t understand building stuff very, very well. And it was not uncommon that he would turn his video or his audio on to something and say, I know this is damaged. I just don’t know what the doom of flachi is, but it’s attached to this and this and this and this and this, and it’s attached to this damage. And just by doing that, we could turn that into a scope. And now we can turn it into a scope without having to even slow down. We can get it into a scope and out the door and out to into estimation like that. We can get a we get something that comes from the field into estimation usually in minutes rather than days, and that’s that that’s that’s changing everything. Can you go to the list after that? You want a photo if you’re gonna if you’re gonna be pulling a photo if you’re gonna be pulling photos, you wanna be able to give give them classification. If you’re pulling your equipment, you wanna be able to see everything about that so that it can be cataloged as well. I cannot tell you you’ve heard me say this over and over today. I cannot tell you how important it is for you to record your audio. There’s nothing more important that you can do than that right there besides probably getting the measurements in the building. If you get that recording, it will change the scale at which you operate. I could promise you this. If you will do what I just said and you will take that audio transcript and you will turn it into us turn it into something your people that write the scopes could do and you turn it into the narrative that you turn into the carrier, I will bet you that most of your jobs will go better. We we have this problem. I spent about 28 years of my career begging people around me to give me a brief. A brief. Just tell me the high points of this. And I think in all the hundreds of people I’ve employed, I’ve had three that could do it really well. And I think at the end of the day, what the AI has done is given us the ability to do the brief in a way that is that is better than we ever could. Just a a by the by, guys, if you’re using AI tools and you’re using AI tools that are off the shelf, I need you to remember that if you run the same thing through those twice and you don’t get the exact same result, then that tool is not reliable. You should get the exact same result over and over again with the same data. And you should test any system you’re using so that it’s giving you the same data over and over again. Because if it doesn’t, it’s gonna be a problem. The other the other thing I’d tell you more than anything about your communication, tell it not to do em dashes, please, and tell it to write it like you, not like the AI. And it will figure it out before long. If you need me to help you with that at some point, contact me. I’ll I’ll tell you how to do that more more clear more clearly. If you can imagine I’m just gonna tell you in my shop, and I’m gonna talk about this from my appraisal expert witness in on power work. If you can imagine, because we use AI tools just like I’ve been telling you, when we send a communication, it’s instantly in our management system. When we change the status on a project, whenever it gets pictures to catalog, it it changes the status on status on it. If it needs to go somewhere else, if it needs to tell somebody to bill something, if it needs to create billing, if it’s need to create a narrative, if it needs to send something to the insured and say we did the following things, it does all those things. It does about 45 different things automatically that we don’t touch. And so what happens is I have a in that end of my business, I have a business of 10 people that would normally be about 15. And those 10 people will get stronger and stronger and stronger, and I have the most cohesive team because I’m not having to grow new talent all the time. And that’s where this really changes everything. And I think that’s what you should be doing, and you should you should embrace this technology on that level. Because at the end of the day, when you get that audio, when you add a little video to it, when you get the pictures in the proper form so they can be annotated, when you get everything in where you can send it to scopes and you can put it out in in drafts to go to go to go to your principal and interested parties, you win. You win because all of you, I bet you there aren’t three people three people in our game that are really good at communicating and being really efficient with all the other things you do. And I’m I’m the same way. I’m terrible. I I I need to write 10 emails right now that I haven’t written. But you you get my point. So are we about ready to do some Q&A? Yeah. There was a couple of more slides, but I also realized everyone here is super, super busy. So I will send the slide deck out to everyone as well so we can review it. One of the things that you will be receiving is AI vendor evaluation checklist or rubric if you’re a millennial like I am. Alright. Told her that I told her that was the the proof. She was a she was a millennial because she used the word rubric. Alright. Annie McCabe doesn’t know what a rubric rubric is unless it was his kids who did it. And I saw Andy, I I do like my em dashes. Alright. So when you all filled out your registration form there, there were a few people who left some questions. So, David, there’s a couple that I want to go through if that’s okay. Please. The first one is Kelly from AJA Development Group. So what key documents should be in each file? What is your thought on master service agreements for clients and addendums for the type of service provided? So I guess that’s two questions. But okay. Well, first of all, I love I love master service agreements. I think master service agreements are wonderful because they get they get you out of the contracting business. And it makes it it there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do that. The the the second thing is that on on every single file you do, no matter what no matter what no matter what, you’re gonna take the pictures like we talked about, and you’re gonna take audio to basically tell the story of the loss. Those two things are always gonna be there because those are gonna get you the rest of the things you need on the loss. You’ve gotta collect that in the field, and then you can do everything back at the desk that will that will change the outcome. It to to large part, what we’ve done is made something more it’s it’s it’s easier in the field. And, like, one thing we’ve gotta do gotta do, and this is something that that Encircle’s been working on, I’ve really liked talking to them about this, is we need to get out of this zone of sending an estimate two weeks after we did the work and calling it, an invoice when we could send an estimate right away and then have an invoice to follow, like like normal companies do. Excellent. Okay. There’s this question that has come in a couple of different times, but the one I have in front of me is Mitch from disaster response. He says, I have technicians that do not follow through on all the tasks that can be done. How do you encourage them to do that? And another one’s added and stay consistent with that routine. I I I have a I have a rule of thumb. If it’s not automatic, if it’s not just second nature to them, they will never do it. And so if they’re not doing it, it’s because you have the wrong people or you haven’t made it second nature. And, you know, if you went to any any if you worked at any of the places where they have any, like, Bath and Body Works and Victoria’s Secret, all those places, if you went to work there, you’re gonna be met by a manager when you walk in the door. And the manager’s gonna say, okay. You remember we have to do this and this and this and this, and these are the new things you have to do today in addition to these things. And it’s gonna get said to you every single time, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve been there 600 days. It’s still gonna get said to you. And what we notice most of the time is we allow people not to do their jobs, and we do not continue put put to put them on it. What I do with my people, just so you know, is I call them up and say, tell me what your job is today. And if they can’t tell me all the bellwethers they’re supposed to do, then I know that we’ve have some training to do. And we are piss poor in our industry at doing training. We say we’re not because we go get people IICRC trained, but I’m talking about people in our workflow. We need to look look this more like we’re football teams and less like like we’re companies. Everybody’s gotta be on the same page no matter what. The smart people and the dumb people have to understand the same thing. Good way of putting it. Okay. I have a couple questions left here. So we we have a bunch in the Q&A. We may not have time to get to everybody, but I can, if David is okay with it, share his contact information. You guys can ask him directly. Sure. So let me there’s a couple of really interesting ones that I want to dive into more. One of them you kind of touched on when you were speaking. So Jacob says, are short videos by room better than a whole house, or would a video by floor be a reasonable middle ground? And what time limit do you use usually better? By floor would be fine. If you’ve taken all the pictures and you’ve gotten all this annotation anyway, then really what you’re doing is you’re giving more context to the video. So wherever the context with the video is good. The problem my only problem with video is sometimes I know this sounds terrible, but a lot of times when we do video, we don’t do as much voice on the video as we would if we were just doing audio. So as long as you’re producing that information, that context so that what comes after it will do that. I sometimes will do just a one by floor or one by by room of damage depending on the level of damage. Just depends on it. But I’m just saying there’s no problem with you every time you open a video saying where you are and producing it for the next thing. Works every time. So any anything that your workflow allows. My workflow just hates long videos, personally. Fair enough. Okay. I have one question from our friend, Mark. Mark, I did see you. I know you really like our webinars, so I was so glad to see you as always on board. So Mark asks, from the examiner side, what are the two to three most common documentation gaps that give desk reviewers cover to cut a file even when the work was done correctly? K. I want you to remember that if your if if your hydro reports, if your data reports aren’t consistent, It’s the first thing they’re gonna do because they think you’re a liar to begin with. Because remember, they think you’re trying to push equipment. So if you have this data and it’s right as rain and and it’s very easy for you to to to justify, then it’s then it’s good. Look. I’m gonna tell you if you if you want them to pay your claim, I’m gonna tell you something to do that will that makes them pay your claim. If you will, every single day, starting with the first day you’re there, issue the adjuster a burn report that says we showed up today on the Smith’s loss, reported it this day. On this time, we showed up. We found this. We did these things. We deployed this equipment. We deployed these materials, these people, and this labor. And our burn rate today was blank. Our burn rate should fall over the next four days. We will be back here at 8:00 AM in the morning. My phone number is this. My email is this. Please contact me if you have questions or would like to meet with me. I will be available to you. If you will do that, when that lands on the examiner’s desks and there’s four days of of burn reports that says, hey. You’re spending money, and you also ultimately have all your telemetry, all your all your data, pictures of your job, and everything, and you start turning that in like that even before you’ve turned in an estimate, a a piece of paper in Xactimate. If you will say that, it has a they have a hard time not paying it because you gave them notice they they were spending money. And keep in mind, most of the problem that all of us have is when we send the $13,000 bill, and they didn’t know it was coming. But if I knew I spent $3,000 today and I was gonna spend probably $2,000 more and $1,700 the next and probably $1,400 the next and $800 the next, that’s a different that’s a different arrangement altogether. That’s never going to a lawsuit. It’s never going to appraisal. It’s gonna get paid. The what we normally do is we don’t do that communication, and we don’t provide all the all the data on on what we did what we did, and the data meaning something that they can understand. Because keep in mind, if the examiner only looks at your file for ten minutes, if you can write them a narrative that explains what you did, you win. Nobody talks to anybody in the industry like they’re humans. If you will treat them like humans, they produce different results for you. And I talk to examiners all the time that tell me that when it can be put into a brief for them and they have the data backed up for it, they always win. And most most folks don’t do that. Excellent. There is one question. I know we won’t be able to answer it today, but I just thought it was funny. How to deal with adjusters? So I think that might be something we can talk about at a later date. I think that is sometimes generally a frustration, but chatting with you before we hopped on today and and really talking about that human element and, you know, speaking to adjusters like they’re humans is maybe you don’t wanna believe it, but they are humans. Yeah. Find something in common with them no matter what you do. Yeah. Something in common, and don’t ever get mad ever. And, alrighty, everyone have a fabulous day, and thank you so much, David, for joining us today. Thank you. Take care.