The Mit List | Episode 3: David on Scoping as a Story
David Herring has been in the restoration industry for a long time. He’s watched the industry get better at writing estimates and worse at scoping losses—and he’s convinced the two are connected.
In this episode—a cut from our Rethinking Scoping and Estimating fireside chat—he sits down with our CPO Jeff McDowell to talk about what actually happens when you walk into a structure, and what most crews have quietly stopped doing. The conversation starts with estimating tools and ends somewhere much more interesting: the idea that every loss is a story, and the field tech walking it is the only person who can write it.
TL;DR: Scoping and estimating got smushed into one workflow by tools that were trying to save you time. They did—but at a cost. When you walk a loss thinking in line items, you miss the narrative. The narrative is what drives your estimate, your carrier conversation, and your communication with the insured. Document the story first. Everything else is downstream of that.
David Herring
Founder
RiseDocs, Writeloss
Jeff McDowell
Chief Product Officer
Encircle
Scoping and estimating aren’t the same job
The invention of estimating tools like Xactimate has saved the industry huge amounts of time. Before, building an estimate kind of sucked and took forever. Hand-keyed entries, lots of room for error, lots of repetition. Estimating tools collapsed that workflow and made things so much faster. But, in making it faster, it may have accidentally pulled scoping and estimating a little too close together. People stopped treating them as separate activities.
David’s point isn’t that the tools are bad or anything like that (big fan of Xactimate). It’s when scoping and estimating happen in the same breath, you end up rushing through the field observation to get to the line items. But the line items are only as good as the observation that fed them.
The diligence of collecting field data got a little blurry. Not because anyone was being careless or lazy, but because those tools made it easy to skip ahead.
You’re not hunting for line items, you’re telling a story
This is how David looks at it. When you walk into a structure, you’re creating a story of the loss. That story not only feeds the estimate, but every communication that follows with the insured, with the carrier, and anyone else who needs to understand what happened.
The different between thinking in line items and thinking about damage sounds like nitpicking until David describes it out loud. If you walk into a hallway and notice water damage four feet front the entry, two feet from the right wall, source unknown—that’s the start of your narrative and the line items come later. The narrative is what tells you whether you need containment, whether more demo is warranted, what the drying plan needs to account for, etc.
“If you and I were walking through a loss and we just talked about what we see and we never talked about 64 square feet of drywall—the net result of that would be substantially greater than if we had walked and talked line items.”
David Herring
Founder, RiseDoc and WriteLoss
The scope sheet was always the wrong answer
Hot take: there’s no such thing as a perfect scope sheet.
When you hire a fancy consultant to build the perfect scope sheet and every customer looks at it and says “can you change this part,” that’s not them being difficult but exposing the root issue. Losses are far too varied to be contained in one form.
The tech standing in that room knows. They can smell it. They can feel the squish underfoot. They hear the water behind the drywall. That judgment doesn’t get replaced by software.
“What AI is doing for us is taking the burden of the bad scope sheet and removing it. And I think that’s the most awesome thing in the world,” said David. Instead of trying to anticipate every variable in advance, you just talk. Walk the loss, describe what you see, and let the AI extract the structure from the narrative. The scope sheet was always a workaround for not having a better tool. Now there are better tools.
The person who walks the loss and the person who writes the estimate aren’t the same person
David’s company figured this out 25 years ago. The talent required to walk into a new structure every day—dealing with a stressed homeowner, reading a space quickly, moving through damage and describing what you see—is genuinely different from the talent that prefers sitting at a desk for 50 hours a week thinking in line items. Neither is better, they’re just different and forcing one person to do both usually produces a mediocre version of each.
The separation matters because the person with great social skills in front of a homeowner is exactly who you want gathering the narrative. They’ll learn about the HOA restrictions, the parking situation, the insured’s schedule. The estimator doesn’t need to be there—they need everything the field tech captured.
Narrate a loss like you’re talking to a 12-year-old
When you’re walking a loss and recording your observations, be deliberate. Be specific. “I’m walking into the master bedroom. On the west wall, I see this.” Not “something up there.” Not vague gestures that make sense in the room and mean nothing in a recording.
The 12-year-old analogy holds because AI is similar: it can do almost anything you direct it toward, but it doesn’t come up with things on its own (and if it does, it’s a poorly engineered tool). Feed it vague input and you get vague output. Feed it a deliberate, descriptive narrative—even an imperfect, conversational one—and something genuinely useful comes out the other side.
David mentions: you can swear, it’s okay. The AI filters it out. Standing in ankle-deep water in a basement at 3am would make anyone want to drop an f-bomb or two.
The logistics narrative is part of the scope and missing it means less money
Here’s where the line-items mentality really costs money. An estimator sitting at a desk thinking about square footage and SKUs is unlikely to think about whether the HOA won’t let work start until 9 AM, or that there’s nowhere for a dumpster except the street, or that there’s no side yard, and every piece of debris has to be carried through the building.
Those details affect the cost of the loss. Carriers understand that—when you explain it to them. But if it doesn’t make it into the narrative, it doesn’t make it into the estimate, and it doesn’t make it into the conversation with the adjuster. It just disappears as margin left on the table.
The field narrative is how that context gets captured. When you’re walking the loss and narrating what you see and what it means, the constraints of the job come out naturally. They become part of the story. And when you pull all of that into a scope, the estimate reflects what the job actually costs to do right—not just the square footage.
“You’ve got video and audio. You’ve pulled it into a good outline for an estimate, and you’ve created a narrative that helps you communicate with everybody. And all because you did one thing really right. One thing.”
David Herring
Founder, WriteLoss and RiseDocs
Frequently Asked Questions
Because the skills required for each are genuinely different—and conflating them tends to produce a rushed version of both. The field tech walking a loss is gathering a narrative: what happened, where, and what it means for the work ahead. The estimator at the desk is translating that narrative into a defensible, accurate scope. When one person does both under time pressure, the field observation gets shortchanged. That shortcut shows up in disputes, missed line items, and scopes that don’t hold up with the carrier.
Thinking in line items means you’re mentally building the estimate while you’re still standing in the structure—64 square feet of drywall, three air movers, x linear feet of baseboard. Thinking about damage means you’re describing what actually happened: where the water is, what it’s done to the building system, what the source might be, what it means for demo, drying, and containment. The line items are downstream of the damage assessment. When you skip ahead to the line items, you often miss the details that change the scope entirely.
Because every loss is different enough that no pre-built checklist can cover all of it. The variables—building construction, loss type, site access, occupant situation, HOA rules, moisture pathways—are too numerous and too specific to any given job. Every shop that has chased the perfect scope sheet has ended up with something that works pretty well on average losses and misses everything on the unusual ones. A narrative-first approach doesn’t have that ceiling.
AI removes the translation burden that used to sit between field observation and scope document. Previously, you either forced the field tech to also think like an estimator, or you had a dedicated “scopes” person who reviewed field data and wrote it up. Now, if the field tech captures a rich enough narrative—video, audio, photos, stream-of-consciousness description—AI can extract the structure and produce a scope that’s actually better than what the old workflow generated. The key is that the field data has to be rich. AI amplifies what you capture. It can’t invent what you didn’t collect.
Be deliberate and specific, like you’re directing someone who can’t make any assumptions. State the room, the wall, the location, the observation. “I’m walking into the master bedroom. On the west wall, about four feet from the corner, I’m seeing discoloration on the drywall—looks like moisture intrusion, source unknown.” Include anything that affects how the job gets done: HOA restrictions on hours, parking or dumpster constraints, access challenges, anything the homeowner told you. Don’t edit yourself for language—AI filters that out. The goal is to leave nothing in your head that should be in the file.
They affect cost directly, and they’re almost always missed when estimating happens without a field narrative. Things like restricted work hours, dumpster placement limitations, no side yard access requiring debris to be carried through the structure—these drive labor costs up in ways that a square-footage calculation will never capture. Carriers understand these constraints when they’re explained. The problem is that line-item estimators, working from a desk, rarely think to document them. When the field tech narrates the loss and includes what they see and hear from the homeowner, these details come out naturally and make it into the scope where they belong.