As we bring Thanksgiving week to a close, and I’m finally finishing off (most of) our leftovers, it seems like the perfect time to reflect on some of the things that I’m most thankful for in my home inspection career. All too often, in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, trying our best to keep our businesses on …
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 …
Peddle Power
Being a home inspector is a fairly unique job. We’re not like typical businesspeople. We don’t have a retail store where our clients meet us. We don’t have things on the shelf that we’ve got to store and manage. We don’t have vendors where we buy our inventory. Most of us don’t really have a lot of products for our …
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 …
What Do You Want?
It’s a fact of life: we’ve all got to work for a living. One way or another, we’ve got to do something to make money. It’s hard to live in today’s world without an income. If we like food, shelter, and the creature comforts available in our modern world, we’ve got to figure out a way to earn money to …
Figuring Out a Client’s Potential Problem Score
As small business owners, we all have a love/hate relationship with our clients. Obviously, we love when clients are paying money for our services, which (ultimately) pays for everything that we enjoy in life: food, shelter, transportation, vacations, and that new 85” 4K ultra-high-def TV. But we hate it when some of those same clients turn into vile-spewing demons, bent …
AAAA Letter to an Agent
While there are many different ways to get clients as a home inspector, I think we can agree that most successful home inspectors get the majority of their clients through referrals from real estate agents. As we’ve discussed in an earlier post, the agents already know who needs an inspection and when they’re going to need it. As a result, …
Is There a Market for Quality?
Give the people what they want. George Jessel It’s an often-quoted line, and it’s typically used as an excuse for doing inferior work. Many businesses fall back on this old axiom to justify providing a mediocre product. They say that they’re only doing second-rate work because that’s all they’re clients want; it’s all they’re willing to pay for; it’s what …
Action, Not Just (Paying For) Words
One of the biggest hurdles a small business owner faces is figuring out how to get clients through the door. Whether your company has an actual front door in a building, or you operate a service-based business without a physical location for customers to visit, the goal is still the same: to get customers to call on you so that …
Am I Doing My Job or Am I Working?
It can be said that what we do for a living can be described in two different ways: what our job is and the work that we do. While those two words can, and often are, used interchangeably, that doesn’t mean they represent the exact same thing. Being a home inspector may be our job, we identify deficiencies and potential …
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