About Farough Darakhshan

I'm Farough (Frank) Darakhshan. I work in water-damage restoration in Northern Virginia with two companies: Flood Doctor, which has held its Virginia Class A contractor license since 2014, and Restoration Doctor, the trade name of VA Water Damage LLC.

My main job is the part of a water loss most people never see. After the crew has dried a house, someone has to write the final invoice, send it to the insurance carrier and the homeowner, answer the adjuster when the carrier cuts it, and follow it until it is paid. I do that work, for 500 to 600 open claims at a time.

I write invoices so they can be checked. Each line uses the exact Xactimate code, name and description, so when an adjuster sends back a comparative estimate, the two can be matched line by line and every cut answered on its own terms. Prices come from the rate schedule in the signed contract, Attachment A, and from my own market rates, not from an unadjusted price list. The dry log has one job: to show why the drying took as many days as it did, using equipment math first and then the real conditions on site.

Doing that alone, at that volume, is why I build software. ClaimForge turns an approved scope sheet into an invoice and a review package. Aries is an assistant built on Claude Code that runs scheduled jobs on a dedicated Mac mini and sends me a briefing every morning. The claim graph answers questions about clients, adjusters and carriers from exact records, rebuilt every hour, with no AI guessing at the relationships. Three AMD Strix Halo machines run local AI models for the bulk reading work.

How I work

The way I put it on 09/30/2026: "my main job is to write final invoices and then defend those invoices when insurance adjusters try to cut them down."

Defending an invoice is mostly matching. A carrier's comparative estimate arrives as a PDF. My tools read it into line items (113 of the first 116 parsed cleanly), match each line to mine, and sort the differences into lines that were removed and lines that were reduced. Each kind of cut maps to a written response I have used before, about 78 of them so far. I review and send.

The rules behind the invoice are simple and written down. Supervisory hours come from the photo record: the first and last photo on site each day, plus 30 minutes of drive time, rounded up to the next half hour. Drying days come from equipment math first, then the conditions that explain the rest: outdoor temperature and humidity, whether the house was occupied, what the materials were, how the layout restricted airflow. No reading is chosen to reach a number.

When I check my own prices against the published list, about a quarter of the lines differ, almost all of them my own rates. That is why the source of every price is recorded.

More on each of these in my working notes and on the projects page.