Who counts as an exterior operator: the runs_exterior_division gate

What this gate decides

Every figure on the Exterior & Roofing page, and every reference to "locations running an exterior division" anywhere in HQ, depends on one underlying question about each franchisee: does this location actually run an exterior or roofing division, or did it simply bill a roof once? Verinode answers that question with a single flag on each franchisee's own account, called the exterior division gate (runs_exterior_division). This article explains how that gate is set, what it takes to flip it, and why HQ trusts it instead of just taking a franchisee's word for it.

This is not a setting HQ configures. It is computed automatically, nightly, from each franchisee's own job history inside their Verinode IQ account, using the same logic on both sides of the product: the operator sees it in their own IQ Benchmarks page, and HQ sees the rolled-up result in the network's Exterior & Roofing page. Franchisees own their data; HQ never touches the underlying jobs that feed this gate, only the gate's outcome and the aggregate metrics built on top of it.

Where you see the gate's effect in HQ

The gate itself is not a page you open. It shows up as the deciding factor behind several things you already see:

• The hero headline on the Exterior & Roofing page (hq.verinode.ai/exterior) counts exactly how many locations currently have this gate set to true. See Reading the network exterior hero for the full anatomy of that panel.
• The tile label on the first row of that page, Exterior Book by Franchisee, reads "Exterior division" for a franchisee whose gate is true, and "Some exterior" for a franchisee that has logged exterior jobs but hasn't cleared the gate. See Exterior Book by Franchisee for that row in full.
• The "Exterior & Roofing" category inside Benchmarks only appears on an individual operator's own Benchmarks Cards view once their own gate reads true. A location that hasn't cleared the gate never sees an exterior benchmark category cluttering its list. See Network benchmarks: how the section works.

In other words, this one gate is doing double duty: it decides who gets counted in HQ's network-wide "how many locations run exterior" read, and it decides whose own IQ account gets to see exterior peer benchmarks at all.

Why a gate exists at all

Exterior and roofing is a genuinely different business from interior water and fire mitigation: storm-driven, retail-plus-insurance, supplement-heavy. A meaningful peer comparison for that business only works if the peer set is made up of locations that actually run it. Without a gate, one mitigation shop that happened to patch a single roof after a windstorm would sit in the same cohort as a location whose exterior division is a real, ongoing part of its business, and every median on the Exterior & Roofing page (insurance mix, supplement capture, margin) would be diluted by locations that don't really belong there.

The gate exists to keep that cohort honest. It is the reason the numbers on this page are trustworthy on the tenth time you look at them, not just the first.

The three thresholds

The gate looks at two counts for each franchisee: how many of their jobs have been classified into a service line at all (a job with no classified line of work yet does not count either way), and how many of those classified jobs are exterior work. From those two counts, three conditions determine the outcome:

1. A job-history floor. A franchisee needs a real body of classified job history before the gate is willing to form an opinion at all. Below that floor, the gate abstains entirely: it does not set the flag to true or false, it simply leaves whatever value is already on the account untouched.
2. An absolute exterior-job floor. Once a franchisee clears the job-history floor, the gate checks whether they have logged at least a handful of actual exterior jobs, not just one. A single roof in an otherwise all-mitigation book never trips the gate on its own, no matter how large that one job was.
3. A share floor. Exterior work also has to represent a real slice of the franchisee's book, not a rounding error. The gate requires exterior jobs to make up at least roughly a fifth of all classified jobs before it will call that franchisee an exterior operator.

Once a franchisee clears the job-history floor, both the absolute-job floor and the share floor have to hold together for the gate to read true. Clearing only one of the two is not enough: a franchisee with a large book and just a few exterior jobs fails the share test even if the raw exterior count feels non-trivial, and a very small book that is nearly all exterior still fails the absolute-count test until it has logged enough exterior jobs to matter.

Below the floor: the gate abstains, it does not clear

This is the detail worth remembering: a franchisee with too little job history does not get set to false. The gate simply leaves the account's existing value alone and waits for more history to accumulate.

For a newly onboarded franchisee, that existing value is usually whatever they told Verinode when they set up their account, a self-reported answer to "does your business run an exterior or roofing division?" That self-report is what powers the gate's read until the franchisee has logged enough classified jobs for the gate to form its own opinion. The gate never erases a stored answer for lack of data; it only ever replaces it once it has enough to be confident.

Derived beats self-report

Once a franchisee clears the job-history floor, the picture flips: the gate always writes a confident answer, true or false, based on the actual job mix, and that derived answer overrides whatever the franchisee originally self-reported at onboarding.

This matters in both directions. A franchisee who said "yes, we run an exterior division" at signup, but whose actual book never develops a real exterior slice, eventually gets recategorized as not running one, once there is enough history to say so with confidence. Just as often, a franchisee who didn't think to mention a growing roofing side of the business gets picked up correctly once their job history shows it. Either way, the gate's read is grounded in what the franchisee's own jobs actually show, not in what someone typed into a form once, months or years earlier.

The gate recomputes every night as part of a routine network-wide refresh, so a franchisee's status catches up automatically as their job history grows, without anyone needing to go back and update a setting.

Why the gate keeps the cohort trustworthy

Every median, every peer comparison, and every headline count on the Exterior & Roofing page exists only because this gate is doing its job upstream. A few consequences worth understanding:

• The peer set stays real. Every location counted in the hero's "locations running an exterior division" figure has actually cleared a real threshold on its own job history, not a self-declared label that could be optimistic, outdated, or simply wrong.
• A thin book still shows up, just labeled honestly. A location with some exterior jobs but not yet a real division shows up in the Exterior Book by Franchisee row labeled "Some exterior," rather than being hidden or miscounted as a full division. The gate changes the label, not whether the location's activity is visible at all.
• The gate is not something HQ leadership can override per franchisee. Because it is derived automatically from each franchisee's own data, there is no toggle in HQ to manually mark a location as running an exterior division. If a label looks wrong for a location you know well, the most likely explanation is that the location's job history genuinely hasn't crossed the threshold yet, not that the gate made a mistake.
• It is the same gate an operator sees on their own IQ account. A franchisee that has cleared the gate sees the Exterior & Roofing benchmark category appear on their own Benchmarks page; that is the same true/false value HQ is counting at the network level. There is one gate, read from two different vantage points.

1. 1Read the hero headline as "locations that have proven, through real job history, that exterior is a genuine part of their business," not as a count of who says they do roofing.
2. 2Cross-check a location tagged "Some exterior" in the Exterior Book by Franchisee row: it has exterior activity worth watching, but hasn't yet built the volume for the gate to call it a full division.
3. 3If a location's exterior business is growing, expect its status to catch up on its own as more exterior jobs get logged and classified, there is nothing to configure or request on HQ's side.

Related help

• Exterior & Roofing: your network's storm book at a glance: the full page this gate sits behind.
• Reading the network exterior hero: the headline count and medians this gate feeds.
• Exterior Book by Franchisee: where the "Exterior division" and "Some exterior" labels appear tile by tile.
• Coverage labels and the anonymity floor: the separate, cohort-size protection that governs when an outside industry comparison is safe to show.