Being a home inspector is a difficult calling. We’re hired to provide important information to our home buying clients, while at the same time providing cover to our own backside, in an attempt to guard against misplaced anger and frivolous lawsuits. It’s almost like we’re two different people, each of whom have their own ideas and agenda. On the one …

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; …

One of the biggest problems facing the home inspection industry, same as most other industries, is that we put too much faith in the belief that our problems can be solved by intelligence alone. It may simply be a function of the smarter ones among us who are enamored with sitting around and thinking up ways for us to get …

Running your own business is not for the faint of heart. It seems like every day there’s some new thing to figure out, some irate person that needs calming, and some spontaneous fire that needs quelling. All too often, it seems like we’re going it alone, left to our own devices as it were; standing alone on the shore trying …

Electricity. It’s so commonplace that we often take it for granted. (Until there’s a power failure, that is!) It’s hard to imagine a time when someone couldn’t simply plug a cord into the wall and power up whatever device or appliance they needed. But there was a time, not so long ago, when even the most advanced parts of the …

As we head into 2024, let’s take a moment to look back on our successes and failures of the past year and learn what we can from 2023 before we put it to rest. Hopefully, we’ve all had some measure of success this past year, even though, from a real estate perspective, it wasn’t that great. It’s certain that we’ve …

Looking back is always an adventure. All too often, it’s an exercise that’s fraught with anxiety as we ruminate on the things we’ve done and foolishly stress out thinking about the things that we could’ve done better. Thinking about past mistakes and figuring out a better way forward can be a very rewarding mental exercise. Dwelling on those mistakes at …

Honest feedback. It’s the lifeblood of every business owner, but it’s so hard to get. We can ask our clients to let us know where they think we can improve, but most people are going to give us some throwaway answer like “You’re doing a great job” or “Don’t change anything.” But if we’re really serious about getting better, we’ve …

It seems like every time we do something unique in our business (try a different approach, discover a new method, invent a novel way of doing things), everyone else plays copycat and runs around imitating our idea. So what do we do? We get mad about it, scowling, huffing, and stamping our feet in rage. How dare they! That was …

Why does it seem like it’s so hard for us to change? All it takes is for us to do something different from what we’re doing now. That doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But, unfortunately, it usually is. All too often, we’re stuck, mired in normalcy, and destined to keep our life playing on repeat, with our normal, …