How to hire a restoration general manager: requirements, pay to offer, where to find them and how to screen

Hire a general manager when the company needs one person accountable for production and profit while you stay on sales, ownership or the next location. The hire is defined less by the title and more by the authority you actually hand over. Before you write the posting, decide what the role carries in your operation:

• P&L responsibility. Revenue, gross profit, job costing and collections for the production side, reviewed on a set cadence. A GM who cannot see the numbers cannot run them, so decide which reports they own from day one.
• Multiple departments. Mitigation, rebuild and contents each run on different crews, equipment and billing logic. The GM is the person who sequences them so a mitigation job hands off to reconstruction without a dropped file.
• The office. Estimators, project managers and job-file coordinators can report to the GM or to you — decide the line before the job is posted. Whoever holds it becomes the escalation point that keeps estimates, supplements and file documentation moving.
• Hiring authority. Part of the point of the role is that you stop being the bottleneck on crew decisions. Write down what the GM can approve — headcount, offers, terminations — and what still comes to you.
• Carrier and TPA relationships. Someone has to keep program work flowing: scorecards, file reviews, adjuster escalations. Decide whether that sits with the GM or stays with you, and say so in the offer.
• Fleet and facility. Equipment, vehicles and the warehouse are production assets. Assign their readiness, maintenance and loss-and-damage tracking to the GM.

Be honest about the seam between this role and the ones under it, and write the boundary into the posting. If what you need is someone to run crews and schedules, that is the production manager hire; if it is someone to run individual jobs, that is the project manager hire. The general manager is the one who runs all of it and answers for the numbers — if what you need is scheduling help, you may not need a GM yet.

The worker-side view of the job — the day-to-day, the route into it, the skills — is the career guide to what a restoration general manager does. This page stays on the employer side of the hire. And if you are still shaping the org chart underneath it, the broader guides on hiring for your restoration company cover the recruiting and screening steps that sit below this role.

Start by separating two things employers blur: certifications, which are credentials your company requires, and licenses, which are state law attached to the specific work your crews perform. The credential question for a GM is really the credential question for your company.

Credentials you require. The IICRC is a certifying body, not a school: it owns no schools and has no instructors on staff, and it approves independent schools and instructors that apply to and meet the criteria set forth by its board of directors. For a GM, IICRC certifications matter less for their own hands-on hours and more for whether they can credibly supervise drying, mold and fire work and defend the file an adjuster sees. If your crews take mold or sewage work, the Applied Microbial Remediation Technician (AMRT) certification is the one that matches the supervision: it covers mold and sewage remediation and is structured on top of the Water Restoration Technician (WRT) certification. The credential detail is in the IICRC certification guide.

Estimating fluency. The GM reviews estimates and supplements even if they never write one, so set the software bar in the posting: able to read an Xactimate estimate and interrogate a line item. The certification detail is the estimator cluster's to explain — see the Xactimate certification guide.

What state law attaches to the work. Licenses attach to the work, not the title, and they change what a GM can actually run. Mold work is licensed in specific states — among them:

• Texas — mold assessment and remediation licensing moved from the Department of State Health Services to the Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) on November 1, 2017.
• Florida — the Department of Business and Professional Regulation licenses mold assessors and mold remediators, and the license covers mold growth greater than 10 square feet.
• New York — mold assessment and remediation are licensed under Labor Law Article 32 through the Department of Labor.
• Louisiana — the State Licensing Board for Contractors requires a Mold Remediation license for projects valued at $7,500 or more. It is a contractor (business) license with a qualifying party, not an individual technician license.
• Washington, D.C. — residential indoor mold assessment and remediation require certification and a license under rules issued by the Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE).

The state-by-state detail lives in the state mold licensing series. Where the license sits with a qualifying party or a designated license holder, the GM hire touches it directly: name who holds the license or certification in your state, and keep that current when production leadership changes. Asbestos accreditation is a separate track: EPA's Model Accreditation Plan sets the accredited disciplines (worker, contractor/supervisor, inspector, management planner and project designer). What you verify varies by state. Wyoming, for example, has no state registration or licensure program for asbestos companies or individuals, though its Department of Environmental Quality still enforces state asbestos regulations for abatement projects. The asbestos abatement licensing series keeps the state detail.

Rules change. License and accreditation requirements are state law, and they move. Confirm the current requirements with the agency named for your state before you hand a GM authority over mold, sewage or asbestos-heavy production.

Start with the honest part: this page's research holds no wage benchmark for a restoration general manager. The nearest occupation BLS tracks, general and operations managers (SOC 11-1021), spans every industry — it is an all-industry proxy, not a restoration figure — so we will not pass its wage off as GM pay for your market. The number you can defend comes from your own books and from the offers you are competing against, not from a chart.

Build the range as a method rather than a figure:

• Price the work you are handing over. Estimate the production, office and administrative hours you personally cover today, and what it costs to replace or drop each. That is the baseline case for the salary.
• Read your own trailing numbers. A year of revenue, gross profit by department and your current overhead tell you what the P&L can carry. A GM offer the current numbers cannot support is a layoff on a delay.
• Set the bonus on metrics from those same books. Gross profit, collection rate, cycle time — whatever you choose, define the formula in writing before the offer, and size it to what the P&L can fund.
• Structure changes the math. If you treat the role as exempt under one of the FLSA's white-collar exemptions, the federal salary level those exemptions carry reads $684 per week — $35,568 a year equivalent — under 29 CFR 541.600. Salary alone does not make the role exempt: whether your GM actually meets an exemption is a duties-and-salary question to settle with the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division or counsel, not a default, and it is worth confirming your state's rule too.
• Budget the non-exempt case too. A non-exempt manager earns overtime at not less than 1.5 times the regular rate for every hour over 40 in a workweek — and a promised performance, attendance or retention bonus is not discretionary: it must be included in the regular rate for overtime. A bonus plan written for an exempt manager does not survive a non-exempt one unchanged.

One structural note: pay for authority, not for truck time. The moment the GM is your best mitigation tech instead of your best operator of people and numbers, you have re-hired a lead tech at a manager's cost. Hold the offer to the scope you wrote down in the first section.

Don't lead with a generic posting. Work the pools where production leadership already sits:

• Your own bench. A senior project manager or production manager who already runs crews, reads job costing and holds the crews' respect is the shortest path to a GM — and the one you can verify fastest, because the track record is in-house. Name the gap you would need to close (P&L exposure, program relationships) and close it deliberately.
• Other restoration companies. Branch, division and operations managers at larger restorers are worth recruiting on scope, not title — a production manager at a national firm may carry a GM's load. Ask what departments, numbers and hiring authority they actually held.
• Adjacent construction management. Commercial superintendents and managers are worth a look for the neighboring skills — scheduling, subcontractor and budget control. The restoration-specific gap is insurance documentation and drying science, which you can train on the job; the habits you cannot train are why you hire.
• Franchise-trained operators. Managers out of franchise systems have worked inside one company's documented process — weigh what they can run — departments, numbers, hiring — against what the brand ran for them.

Post the role where restoration managers already look — a restoration-focused board keeps it next to the work. You can see how the role reads to candidates on the operations manager jobs page, and the board-by-board breakdown is in where to post the job.

In the states covered below, the posting itself carries legal content requirements. Among the rules this page's research verified: California employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in any job posting. New York requires businesses with four or more employees to list a compensation range in advertised jobs, promotions and transfers, and to say if the job is commission-based. Washington employers with 15 or more employees must disclose the wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits. Illinois employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale and benefits, which a hyperlink can satisfy. Colorado requires compensation, benefits and how to apply in all job postings. That is where this page's research verified a rule, not an exhaustive list — check your own state labor agency before you post.

Then check the wording. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) bars help-wanted ads that show a preference for or discourage applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 and up), disability or genetic information. Its own example is an ad seeking 'females' or 'recent college graduates', which may discourage men and people over 40 from applying. For a manager search the trap is coded language: 'young, hungry leader' or 'recent-grad energy' shows the same preference the EEOC example warns about, and it screens out the exact experience profile the role needs.

A GM interview is easy to talk your way through, so make candidates demonstrate the job instead of describing it:

1. P&L exercise. Hand over a sanitized profit-and-loss or job-cost roll-up from your own books and ask them to find the margin leaks, name the two numbers they would watch weekly, and explain what they would change first. You are testing whether they have run numbers before, not whether they can talk about running them.
2. File review. Put a complete job packet in front of them — estimate, photos, moisture logs, notes, final invoice — and ask what is missing and what an adjuster or program reviewer would push back on. This is the documentation standard your whole company runs on.
3. Field walk. Walk an active job together. Watch whether crews answer to them naturally, whether they catch the moisture reading nobody logged, and whether they can explain the drying setup to you in plain words.
4. Scenario probes. A large-loss call-out on a Friday night, a crew lead quitting mid-job, a program file stuck in review — ask what they do first, what they escalate to you, and what they write down.
5. References. Talk to the owner or manager they reported to, not only peers. Ask what authority they held, what they decided without asking, and what broke when they left.

The interview has legal edges. Under the ADA, as the EEOC reads it, an employer may not ask medical or disability questions or require a medical exam before a job offer — but may ask whether and how a candidate can perform the job. For a GM, phrase it as functions: the role visits active jobs, climbs ladders and wears the respirators your jobs require. Whether they can meet that is answerable now; medical questions wait until after a job offer — and after an offer they are allowed only if you require them of every new employee in the same job.

Criminal history is another edge. The EEOC says employers can consider criminal records in hiring but may not treat applicants differently by race or national origin when doing so, and its guidance notes that some states restrict when criminal history may be asked during the hiring process. Check your state's rule before the question goes on the application.

Background and driving records are consumer reports when you buy them from a screening company — and for a manager with vehicle and financial authority, you likely will. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires, before you order one, a written disclosure that stands alone — it cannot live inside the application — and the applicant's written permission. Before rejecting an applicant based on the report, the FTC requires a pre-adverse-action notice with a copy of the report and a summary of the applicant's rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Pay history is the last edge. California generally bars employers from seeking an applicant's salary history but allows questions about salary expectations. Illinois bars asking about or screening applicants on wage or salary history and also allows expectation questions. Colorado bars asking about or relying on an applicant's pay history. Ask what the candidate is looking for rather than what they made, and check your own state before the interview script is final.

Order matters. Disclosure and consent before the report; the report and the rights summary before any rejection. Run the sequence past counsel or your state labor agency once — it is the same sequence for every senior hire after this one.

The early weeks decide whether the GM hire works, and the first part is paperwork and authority:

Paperwork first. Form I-9, Section 2 is due within 3 business days of the employee's first day — hire on a Monday and it is due by Thursday; for a job lasting fewer than 3 business days, it is due on the first day.

Hand over the compliance calendar in writing. A new GM inherits OSHA programs that already run:

• Injury and illness recordkeeping. The 300A annual summary is posted by February 1 and kept up through April 30, a work-related fatality is reported to OSHA within 8 hours, and an in-patient hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye within 24 hours. Companies with 10 or fewer employees at all times in the prior calendar year are partially exempt from keeping the records — but must still report the severe injuries.
• The respiratory protection program. Where respirators are required, OSHA calls for a written program run by a suitably trained program administrator, and fit testing happens before first use, when the facepiece changes, and at least annually after that. Decide whether the administrator role stays with you or becomes part of the GM's remit, and confirm they are trained for it.
• Bloodborne pathogens, if crews handle sewage or trauma scenes. Where assignments involve occupational exposure, the standard requires a written exposure control plan reviewed and updated at least annually, and the hepatitis B vaccine made available within 10 working days of initial assignment, after training.

Write the decision rights down before day one. What the GM approves alone — hiring, scheduling, equipment purchases under a set amount, program escalations — what comes to you, and who talks to the carrier and TPA contacts. Don't hire a GM for authority and then overrule them on the first hard call; that failure is yours to prevent, not theirs.

Set the first stretch as a handover, not a trial by fire. Ride the departments with them: mitigation first, then contents and rebuild. Transfer the program contacts, the adjuster relationships and the scorecard logins. Put the weekly cadence on the calendar — production numbers, job costing, open files — and let them run the meeting from the start.

Keep them with the job you advertised. If you hired a GM to run departments, don't let the role collapse into a dispatch desk. Protect the decision rights you wrote down, review pay on a schedule, and let the scorecard you built together be the conversation. The broader retention playbook lives in how to keep restoration technicians — written for crews, but the calendar, cadence and exit-interview habits apply to a manager too.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, insurance, health or tax advice. Confirm requirements with the state agency named for your work, and with OSHA, the Department of Labor, an insurance professional or counsel where the question is theirs.