If you’ve been inspecting for more than a couple of days, it is quite likely that you’ve already encountered a problem. Problems are a way of life for small business owners, and, let’s face it, problems suck. Problems usually mean that, one way or another, someone is extracting a pound of flesh from us. We’re likely going to end up …
The Right Messaging
I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole, as I am prone to do, learning about the human mind and all the different ways that our brain receives information. We could easily say that we go through every day of our lives, constantly receiving messages. We spend every waking moment (and some sleeping moments) getting sensory input, receiving useful information from …
The Decider
Being a professional home inspector means wearing a lot of different hats. Yes, we walk up to the house wearing our inspector hat, but we had to perform a lot of other jobs to get us to that front porch. Obviously, we’re a student, always learning about our profession, but we’re also a marketer, an accountant, a secretary, a tech …
A Multi-Pronged Defense
I was listening to a podcast this morning, the Tim Ferris show, and his guess was a military expert who was talking about the potential threat that China may pose to the US and the world. In part of the interview, he was speaking about China’s aggression toward and desire to annex Taiwan. He talked extensively about the way in which …
Closing the Deal
There are literally tens of thousands of home inspectors out there. Maybe not all of them reside in our own backyard (although, sometimes it feels like they do), but there’s enough competition milling about to make it hard for us to be seen. And the reality of this situation is that if we’re not being seen, we’re not being called; …
Peace of Mind
Small talk is a part of each of our lives. It’s defined by Wikipedia as ”polite conversation about unimportant things.” On most days, we all engage in some form of small talk, whether in public or in our jobs, and most of us have our go-to questions at the ready, just in case some small talk breaks out. One of …
Is There a Market for Quality?
Give the people what they want. George Jessel Obviously, as a small business owner, we must follow the advice of George Jessel, and give the people what they want. If we’re trying to sell something that no one wants, there’s an oversized chance that we we’ll quickly find ourselves out of business! Unfortunately, too many businesses point to this quote …
Plan Accordingly
It’s tough to grow a business. If we’re good at what we do, sooner or later, we’re going to be overwhelmed. We’ll be faced with more work than we can handle. Not only will we be doing the actual inspections, the thing we do for a living, but we’ll also be be dealing with all the other tasks that come …
Walking the Line
Being a professional home inspector is not an easy gig. We find ourselves in the unenviable position of trying to appease different parties (the buyers, sellers, listing and selling agents), each with their own different, and often conflicting, motivations. This information should be top of mind when we are performing inspections and writing reports. Our reports matter, and not just …
Handling Sticky Situations
An inspector reach out regarding an interaction that he had with a builder after inspecting a new construction home. The water heater was located in the attic, and it was a tankless unit. From what I understand, there was no overflow drain pan below the water heater and the builder was challenging the inspector for including this fact in his …