In my home inspection school, I often get the chance to talk with people who are considering making a career change. Most of them are excited for the opportunities that the inspection industry provides, but as with any life-changing decision, they’re often filled with apprehension. They typically come armed with a long list of questions about the industry. In addition …
What Did We Expect?
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 …
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 that we need 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 …
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 …
Fishing for Success
Good news! We’re currently in a booming real estate market! While this information will come as no surprise to those of us that have been working as a home inspector for more than a minute, and the bottom is certain to eventually drop out (so be prepared), being in the middle of a boom time does make for some increasingly …
Hell Yeah
We’d all like to be more decisive in our lives. While some of us are blessed with the certainty gene, most of us are pretty wishy washy when it comes to making decisions. We think about it. We debate. We hem and we haw. We say we’ll think about it. Then we think about it some more. Whether we end …