We all go into business with certain expectations. We imagine that we’ll make a lot of money. We expect to work with the best people in our industry. We anticipate that we’ll have scores of frenzied clients, posting to social media, raving about how great we are. And we’re certain that the number of problems that we’ll encounter will be …
Streamlining Your Business
Customer acquisition. It’s a phrase that most of us had never even heard of, much less thought of, before we became business owners. Now, whether we call it that or not, it’s something that we can’t get out of our mind. Trying to figure out how to get more people to hire us ranks right up there with food and …
Peace of Mind
Small talk is a part of everyone’s’ 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 the most …
Guidelines
Guidelines. They exist to help us know what to do in public, in our relationships, as well as in our business. If you’re a professional home inspector, like me, those guidelines will typically include your standards of practice. They may be directives coming down from your state or local government or may be established by the home inspection organization that …
Are You a Slacker?
The English language is considered by many cultures as one of the most difficult for an outsider to learn, as words and phrases often have many different meanings. The topic of today’s post, the word “slack”, is one of those words that can have a few different meanings. Most of us immediately imagine something negative when we hear the word …
Swimming Upstream
Starting out in the world of small business is difficult. When we’re just beginning our home inspection journey, it seems like the list of things to do is overwhelming. New business owners, especially ones that are trying to run a business for the first time, are faced with a seemingly endless number of options. Quite often, there are so many …
Growing Pains
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem: deciding when (and if) we should grow our business. Hopefully it’s an issue that each of us will have to confront sometime in our future. Having to face this question means that we’ve been successful in our industry, but that doesn’t make the choice any easier. It’s still something …
How Far Do I Go?
We’ve all got a decision to make. We’re the business owner; the top dog; king of the hill. The buck stops here. However, we want to describe it, ultimately, we decide how we’re going to run our business. And while there’s no denying that we’re influenced by outside forces, we’re still the ones that must decide how far we go. …
Being Respected or Being Profitable
As business owners, we often find ourselves faced with important decisions that are going to affect the future success of our business. And all too often, those decisions involve choosing between something that we know is right or something that we know will be profitable. We’re either going to gain someone’s respect, or we’re going to make a bunch of …
Above and beyond
As professional business owners, we all have some standard that we operate by; some set of guidelines that we put out there so that our clients know what it is they’re actually getting when they hire us. Typically, these principles are provided to our clients in one form or another, either printed out in some sort of list or outlined …