How Thomasville Restoration Scaled to 23 Project Managers Across Five States Without Scaling Their Support Team

They called it “the Bible.”

A binder. Five to six inches thick. Indexed, highlighted, zip-cut pictures of every process under the Project Concierge position at Thomasville Restoration. It was meticulous.  Comprehensive even. And at five or six people, it worked.

Then Thomasville started hiring. Five people became ten. Ten became twenty-three—spread across five states and the Greater Washington, D.C. area. Not everybody retained information by scrolling through a hundred pages and hunting down an index entry.

So they did the obvious thing and called William May.

May is Head of Production at Thomasville, responsible for all 23 Project Concierges—field-based project managers who handle the reconstruction side of restoration work. Most of the calls flooding his phone weren't about fieldwork. They were admin: How to code invoices in Concur. How to upload a signed change order so that collections would bill the right amount. How to properly document a job so that accounting had the correct numbers.

The answers existed in the binder. But the binder was at home, or in a backpack nobody wanted to haul into the field, or on a shelf while someone stood outside a homeowner's house needing an answer right now.

May's phone started ringing at 6:30 in the morning. It wouldn't stop until seven or eight o'clock at night. 

“I felt like I was chasing something I was never going to catch,” he says, “because I was stuck in the weeds every single day.”

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Why Talented People Were Leaving Before They Could Succeed

The phone calls were a symptom. The deeper problem was invisible: May had no way to know whether training was actually landing.

“You sit there, and you explain everything to them, but you really don't know if they're actually engaged or retaining the information.”

Thomasville would print updates. Put them in cubbies. Require confirmation emails. “A huge waste of time with no guarantee that the individual on the other side was actually going to take the time to acknowledge it and retain it.”

Thomasville's entire culture is built on not micromanaging people. Every Project Concierge is told: you're running your own business. But when someone can't verify they're doing things right, they need a manager to give them that affirmation. The culture designed to create autonomy was forcing the opposite.

“You could have the most talented individual working for you, but if he doesn't have a strict process and proper training and he doesn't know what he's actually supposed to be talented at, he will be split in a thousand different ways, and he won't be good at anything.” May pauses. “He will get frustrated, and he will not stay around.”

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From a 14-Hour Phone Queue to 30-Second Answers

Thomasville deliberated for roughly two years before committing to KnowHow. The CEO, Head of Operations, and May all had to believe in it first. “No one wants to give up where they feel comfortable,” May says. “But we had to overcome that before we could ask our team to overcome it.”

Once Thomasville committed to bringing their knowledge infrastructure into KnowHow, every process went in. Step-by-step scripts. Change order documentation. Invoice coding. How to request EMS services when a Project Concierge discovers suspected microbial growth behind cabinets and has never worked in restoration before.

A Project Concierge sitting outside a homeowner's house now opens the app, spends 30 seconds finding the answer, and keeps moving. No calling a manager stuck in a gazillion meetings. No driving back to the home office.

But the transformation May talks about most isn't speed. It's visibility. He can see who's opening workflows, who's taking quizzes, and who keeps looking up the same process. “I can go in and see that they're constantly looking up how to do change orders. So I need to touch base with this Project Concierge. Maybe he needs a little refresher.” He coaches on the front end instead of catching mistakes after the damage is done.

The training timeline didn't shrink because the role is too demanding for shortcuts. What changed is retention. People hired under KnowHow are in compliance every week, checking every box. And when processes change—a software update, a way of doing things—May has KnowHow updated, and the team is notified within 30 minutes. 

Before, that meant reprinting binders, laminating sheets, putting them in little sleeves, and distributing them across five states with no way to know if anyone read them.

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Scaling Culture to Locations That Don't Have a Leader Yet

Ask May what to put in KnowHow first, and he doesn't say admin workflows.

He says your identity.

At Thomasville, that means lanyards with photos and names. Under Armour gear,  uniforms in red, white, and black. Trucks graded on a scale—tire shine included. Business cards at every customer interaction. It's the first thing May covers in onboarding, before a single process gets taught.

“We can only expand our culture if our team that's out in the field is expanding with the same core values and expectations that we initially started with.”

Thomasville is hiring in Richmond, Virginia, right now—before they've set up a leadership team there. The person 150 miles from headquarters gets the same foundation as someone trained in the launchpad room in Baltimore, because the identity travels through KnowHow.

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Building Toward 50 States

May doesn't hedge about what happens without KnowHow. “We would be stuck in the weeds every day. We would have to downscale. Our growth pattern would break. It would stop.”

It hasn't stopped. Thomasville is building toward all 50 states, and May's time now goes where it belongs—supporting expansion, recognizing high performers, and giving back to his team instead of answering a thousand phone calls a day.

The phone still rings sometimes. May's answer is the same: check KnowHow. And if it's not there, he'll have it updated before the next job.

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