Holly Murry on Turning Empathy Into a Repeatable Restoration System

Featuring Holly Murry, Director of Franchise Development at FRSTeam.

Most home-service brands sell a service. FRSTeam sells the memory attached to it. Holly Murry spent three decades proving something simple. The soft part of the job, the empathy a homeowner needs on their worst day, can be written into a script, trained every morning, and run the same way across a franchise network. The catch is that you have to balance that empathy with the discipline to hold your own team accountable.

I sat down with Holly Murry, who ran FRSTeam as brand president for just over six years and now leads franchise development there. FRSTeam is a restoration franchise inside the Empower Brands portfolio, and it works a corner of the industry most people never see. When a fire or a flood hits a house, other companies dry out the structure. FRSTeam restores the contents: the clothing, the electronics, the child's stuffed animal, the military flag passed down through generations. I wanted Holly on the show because she started as a technician answering a job ad almost 30 years ago and held nearly every role on the way up. That path taught her something I care about at NaiL. You can make an emotional, human service consistent without stripping the humanity out of it.

Treat the contents as someone's memories

Most operators describe their work by the task. Holly describes hers by the moment.

"I fell in love with this industry when I realized that we get to help people literally every day."

She showed up to homes where a family thought everything was lost and handed back the things that held their history. That framing changes the job. Walk into a fire-damaged home and the homeowner is sizing you up in the first minute, deciding whether to trust you with what they cannot replace.

"We train a lot to the empathy that has to go in on that front end. You're talking to them about their belongings, their prized possessions, and really just working with them on what's the most important thing in your home."

The lesson for any service business is the same. Figure out what your customer is actually buying. For FRSTeam, the customer is buying the relief of getting their life back.

Turn empathy into a script your whole network can run

This is the hard part, and the one I pushed Holly on. How do you systematize an emotional moment without making it feel like a pipeline? A homeowner can tell when the person at the door is reading from a card.

FRSTeam's answer is a trained sequence they call the first 15. It covers the first fifteen minutes on a loss site, taught through an online platform every owner can access.

"We really want the homeowner to feel that we care about them, and they really get to drive where we go. Hey, we're here to help you. We're here to document the claim. Walk me through your home. Show me what you've got."

Holly treats empathy as a skill you build and drill, the same way you would train anything else on the job.

"Empathy can be a process. You can make sure that you're asking the right questions and you're communicating, you're saying hello, you're shaking a hand. And I think some people forget the importance of all of those steps."

The reps matter as much as the script. In her own office, the team runs a five-minute training every morning and role-plays the first 15 on each other.

"The average person takes seven times to learn something."

That number is why the training never stops. People who have done the work for years are the ones most likely to forget the empathy, because the motions get automatic. Holly also keeps the playbook alive by pulling ideas straight from the field. One franchisee suggested a follow-up call at the end of an assignment. Another asked for a leave-behind form explaining which perishable items could not be saved. Those came from owners doing the work, the people closest to the homeowner. If you want a sense of how seriously the best operators take field input, it mirrors what I heard in our conversation with Zach Peyton .

Hire for how people handle what they can't control

Holly's vetting process for a franchise candidate is a meal. She gets to know who they are, and she runs a test most people never notice. She asks the restaurant staff to let something go wrong on purpose.

"I'm looking for them to speak up if something went wrong. I don't love it if they stay silent. And then how they choose to communicate with everyone that they interact with."

She is watching two things: whether the person advocates for themselves, and how they treat someone they might consider beneath them.

"I don't care if you're talking to somebody who you believe is beneath you. We all put our pants on the same way. We all are trying to find success in our own life."

The deeper test is adversity. When you own a business, something goes wrong every single day. A missed schedule. An irate homeowner. Two employees calling in sick on your busiest morning. Holly wants to see how a candidate reacts before she ever hands them a territory.

This connects to a framework I got from Drew Raymond, a multi-location owner at Superior Fence & Rail. He only worries about what sits within his arm's reach, what he calls his circle of influence. His crew once showed up to a job and the house was on fire. The team panicked and called him. He walked them through the three things to do, told them to call back after, and kept his own voice steady on purpose.

The point Drew makes and Holly tests for is the same. If the leader starts to panic, the team learns to panic. Hire the person who stays inside their circle of influence.

Balance empathy with accountability, or you'll fire too slowly

Holly was direct about the trap. You cannot run a company on empathy alone.

"If you sway too heavy on empathy, you tend to fire slowly. I have had plenty of times that I fired very slowly, and then after the fact you're like, why didn't I do that?"

The empathy belongs to the customer, every time, without exception. The accountability belongs to the team. She thinks about it like the coach she had growing up.

"I love and care about you enough that I will support you in your success, but you also have to be invested in that support for your success. You gotta come with me on that journey."

When a teammate checks out and stops fitting the culture, the job of the owner is to make the change for the good of the team, no matter how much you like the person. The operators who get this right sit in the middle. They never let a homeowner feel the cost of accountability, and they never let a struggling hire quietly drain the rest of the crew.

Make it a place people actually want to work

Holly leads from a line FRSTeam's founder Harry gave her in the late 1980s.

"Make it a place that you want to come to work to every day."

She means it literally. When a single mom on her national sales team got sick, Holly drove to her house on a Tuesday afternoon with Gatorade and saltine crackers. The reasoning is simple and it scales.

"People will never remember what you know, they'll just always remember how you make them feel. If they feel cared for, then it's easy for them to care for the people's belongings that you're handling."

That care shows up in how she handles conflict, too. When a franchisee or an employee comes in hot, she pauses before she defends anything.

"You don't seem like yourself today. Is everything okay?"

She carries a story behind that habit. A close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 18, a freshman at Stanford. Leaving the hospital, his father got cut off in traffic and nearly came apart. Nobody on the road knew what that family had just been told. Holly's takeaway is one every manager should hold onto. You never know what someone walked in carrying. In an emotional business, that awareness is the difference between escalating a moment and defusing it.

Know when to get out of the way

At Empower's Ignite 2026, Holly gave her final president's address and handed the brand to Jeff Waters, a man she worked with for over a decade. He spent ten years as a franchisee, then joined the franchise business consultant team.

"A strong leader also knows when it's time to get out of the way."

She set goals when she stepped into the president role: expanding into contents and hitting a threshold of new owners. She hit them. Handing off still stung.

"It's like watching your kid go off to college. I've raised you, I think I've done as good of a job as I can, but it's time for you to go figure it out on your own. And as a parent, you're still a little sad."

She is honest about the FOMO of no longer being in every loop. The reframe is that picking your own replacement, and trusting them, is itself the last job of the role.

Let automation handle what doesn't need a human

Holly is a self-described technology junkie, and she is clear-eyed about where it fits. The empathy stays human. The repetitive coordination gets automated.

"I'm really excited to see how technology can take away some of the day-to-day pieces of our business that really don't need a human's touch. Even just follow-ups with homeowners. Being able to automate that, I think it will actually increase customer service levels."

This is exactly the problem we work on at NaiL, and it is why I asked Jeff Waters in a separate conversation how you automate something this emotional without making the customer feel processed. The answer both Jeff and Holly land on is to automate the check-in cadence and the status updates, and free your people to spend their attention where it actually moves someone.

What home-service franchisors should take from Holly's playbook

Three lessons worth stealing if you run or are building a franchise in an emotional service category:

• Write the empathy into a trainable sequence. Holly's first 15 turns the most human fifteen minutes of the job into something every owner in the network can run the same way. Then drill it daily, because people forget the soft skills first.
• Hire for how people handle what they can't control. The restaurant test and the circle-of-influence mindset both screen for one thing: composure under adversity. That trait predicts a good operator better than a résumé does.
• Keep customer empathy and team accountability in separate buckets. The homeowner always gets the empathetic side. Your team gets standards. Sway too far toward empathy with your own people and you will fire too slowly, and the rest of the crew pays for it.

Hear the full conversation

Watch the full episode with Holly Murry for the stories behind the framework, including the meal test and the Ignite 2026 handoff. If you want to see how NaiL helps service teams automate the follow-ups and status updates that do not need a human touch, so your people can spend their time on the moments that do, book a NaiL demo .

Article by George Paladichuk, founder of NaiL AI. Featuring Holly Murry, Director of Franchise Development at FRSTeam.