How Restoration 1 Elevated Franchise Support with KnowHow
Restoration 1, a leading provider of restoration and disaster services, is dedicated to providing exceptional support for its network of franchisees. As the company’s reach expanded, managing this network became increasingly complex, requiring a streamlined solution for training, onboarding, and ongoing support.
That’s when KnowHow—an intuitive mobile and desktop AI-powered application designed to centralize company knowledge and empower staff with training and support—came into play, transforming Restoration 1’s operations and franchise support.
“Supporting our franchisees is incredibly important for Restoration 1. They are our number one priority,” says Kyana Shamloo, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Stellar Service Brands. “Using KnowHow has made it easier and more efficient to support our franchisees,” she explains, emphasizing that KnowHow has “helped [our] franchisees deliver great onboarding and ongoing training to their team members.”
Before implementing KnowHow, Restoration 1 faced several key challenges in supporting franchisees effectively:
- Updating training: With a rapidly growing network of hundreds of franchises spread across the United States, ensuring consistent training for every team member, from the Southeast Coast to the Pacific Northwest, was an uphill task.
- Time-Consuming Support: Recurring inquiries from franchisees consumed valuable time and resources, as leadership teams had to constantly hunt down answers. As Kyana explained, “When you think about the time spent answering questions, especially if they're recurring, and you think about the people that have to answer them and hunt them down and the salaries tied to those people, it can quickly add up.”
- Disorganized Information: Franchisees struggled to locate the necessary information swiftly, leading to delays and frustration. Before KnowHow, Kyana explained that a lot of time was spent trying to “find all the information needed, get it to [franchisees] quickly, and making sure it's easily consumable.”
Given these obstacles to overcome, when an excited franchisee brought KnowHow to Restoration 1’s leadership team, it was an instant hit.
“KnowHow was brought to us by a franchisee who had seen it, had probably had some level of a demo with it, and was so impressed and excited by it,” says Kyana. “For them to have that excitement and for us to be able to dive in and to see how this could benefit us and our franchisees and their teams was a game changer.”
After receiving the recommendation, Kyana and the company's leadership team worked closely with their Tech Committee to evaluate KnowHow, gathering feedback from their franchisees. After seeing KnowHow's potential impact on increasing franchisee revenue, profitability, and satisfaction, Restoration 1 decided to go all in.
“KnowHow took the time to not only build a great product that's easy to use but also a great team that's easy to work and workshop with. They also have industry-specific content, which makes working with them a fantastic experience because you don't always get that,” Kyana adds.
How Restoration 1 Implemented KnowHow
Once committed to KnowHow, Restoration 1 employed several best practices to ensure a smooth transition:
- Clear Messaging: The leadership team clearly articulated the reasons for adopting KnowHow, ensuring everyone understood the benefits. Questions like “Why are we adopting this tool?” and “What impact will this have on training and developing my staff?” were addressed early to gain buy-in from team members.
- Phased Approach: They involved the franchise advisory and tech committees in gathering pre-launch feedback. After approval, they rolled out the platform in small, intimate groups to ensure adequate support and feedback during adoption.
What was the result of all these steps?
KnowHow as a Centralized “Single Source of Truth”
Before KnowHow, critical "how-to" information was scattered across people’s heads and random pieces of paper. Today, team members are encouraged to document processes in KnowHow, turning it into the “one centralized source of truth” for Restoration 1 and its franchisees.
Kyana shares, “We rely on KnowHow to be the one centralized source of truth and digital repository for our team and all of our franchisees to utilize.”
This ensures franchisees can access the latest procedures, guidelines, and resources quickly and efficiently without sifting through multiple documents or platforms.
“[KnowHow] has been a game changer for our existing franchisees and even more so for our new franchisees, making them feel incredibly knowledgeable and supported from day one. [After onboarding,] they start their business on a strong foot,” Kyana says.
[KnowHow] has been a game changer for our existing franchisees and even more so for our new franchisees, making them feel incredibly knowledgeable and supported from day one.
— Kyana Shamloo
Cost Savings and Resource Optimization—The KnowHow Advantage
By reducing the time spent answering repetitive questions, Restoration 1 minimized the operational costs associated with support. This freedom allows the leadership team to focus on higher-value activities, driving overall business growth.
Numbers can’t accurately quantify how much that saved time is worth to the business bottom line, but according to Kyana, words can:
“The time that we would have spent on having calls that could have been answered through a KnowHow or trying to track down version six of a specific SOP, now we can use that to have more one-on-one conversations with them or launch even more campaigns or whatever that looks like. [With KnowHow, the leadership team can focus] more on helping franchisees increase their revenue, profitability, and satisfaction.”
A Game Changer for Franchisee Onboarding
With KnowHow, Restoration 1 has significantly enhanced the efficiency of onboarding new franchisees and providing ongoing training support. By transforming how knowledge is shared across the team, KnowHow makes expert guidance easily accessible and significantly reduces repetitive inquiries to management. These days, when team members have a question, “[We] point to KnowHow and say, ‘Hey, have you looked at KnowHow yet?’” Kyana shares.
Additionally, Restoration 1’s franchisees have excelled in building out comprehensive onboarding workflows using KnowHow. Whether onboarding a project manager or a water technician, new team members have clear guidelines for the next steps, success criteria, and performance expectations. This structure ensures every new hire has the know-how to succeed from day one.
However, the true testament to KnowHow’s impact comes from the invaluable assurance it provides, or as Kyana puts it:
Once you get KnowHow set up, going, implemented, [there’s] this peace of mind knowing that the really important information lives in one place and is always updated. That peace of mind is priceless.
— Kyana Shamloo
Supercharging Knowledge and Documenting Valuable How-To
Every business encounters obstacles when it comes to capturing and sharing expertise.
“Everyone hits those walls, so the nice thing about KnowHow is that it almost levels the playing field, where as long as you know what you want to communicate, it makes it way easier to create content that people can consume and use,” explains Kyana. Whether team members are seasoned professionals who may not be tech-savvy or newer employees with a knack for organizing information, KnowHow simplifies the process. “So it does help get those gears moving so that you don't get stuck in that initial period of, okay, how do we even get started?”
This functionality ensures that knowledge isn't trapped in heads or scattered on paper, creating a more collaborative and efficient work environment.
The Benefits of Adopting KnowHow
Restoration 1’s adoption of KnowHow has transformed their business, enhancing operational efficiency, improving franchisee support, and eliminating onboarding bottlenecks. With KnowHow, Restoration 1 has:
- Centralized Knowledge Management: By consolidating all essential information into a single, accessible platform, KnowHow has eliminated the chaos of scattered documents and inconsistent or outdated processes, methods, and how-to.
- Improved Cost and Time Efficiency: Reducing the time spent answering repetitive questions has allowed Restoration 1’s leadership team to focus on more strategic initiatives, driving overall business growth. In addition, franchisees experience these time-saving benefits within their own businesses, equipping them with the tools needed to achieve the highly desirable position of “working on the business rather than working in the business.”
- Streamlined Onboarding and Training: KnowHow’s AI-powered tools make onboarding new franchisees more efficient, ensuring comprehensive training from day one. Franchisees, in turn, use KnowHow’s AI-powered features to onboard, train, and support their teams.
All these are the tangible benefits of adopting KnowHow. For the intangible, hard-to-measure benefits, we’ll let Kyana have the final word on the impact of KnowHow on their operations:
The KnowHow team are true listeners and doers. I’ve been impressed by their willingness to work with us, understand our problems, and engage in meaningful conversations. This process helps them better understand our business, our franchisees, and the importance of our requests. As a result, the solutions they provide are always exactly what we need, giving us peace of mind. Their support and product development teams have been sharp and collaborative, making a tremendous difference.
— Kyana Shamloo
About Restoration 1
Founded in 2008, Restoration 1 is an award-winning franchise that specializes in a wide array of emergency mitigations, restoration, and reconstruction services. An industry innovator, the Texas-based company uses advanced technologies and tools to perform restoration for both residential and commercial properties that have been damaged due to water, smoke, fire, mold, storms, and more. There have been 397 agreements awarded throughout the U.S. with plans to expand to more than 500 locations nationwide in the next couple of years. For more information about Restoration 1, visit www.Restoration1.com.
About Stellar Service Brands
Based in Dallas, Texas, Stellar Service Brands is a holding company that includes Restoration 1, an award-winning franchise that specializes in a wide array of emergency mitigations, restoration, and reconstructions services; bluefrog Plumbing + Drain, a trusted franchise in plumbing repair and installation; and Softroc, a provider of poured in place rubber surfacing. Together, they include more than 480 franchise locations awarded across the U.S. With the investment and support of MPK Equity Partners, Stellar plans to continue expanding by adding brands that share the company's goal of providing exceptional home and commercial services.
About KnowHow
KnowHow is an easy-to-use, mobile and desktop app that helps restoration leaders rapidly onboard new hires, train their workforce on new software, and boost productivity by putting expert guidance in everyone’s pocket. The app centralizes company how-to and best practices and with Howie, KnowHow’s AI-powered mentor by their side, workforces can skip searching through binders, calling supervisors, or panicking with unexpected on-the-job challenges. Workers are equipped with expert guidance in their preferred language, based on company best practices, to move forward confidently.
Learn more about how KnowHow makes it easy to build, maintain, translate, and share Standard Operating Procedures at tryknowhow.com.
