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 …
The Cost of (Not) Changing
If we stop to think about it, the home inspection business has both changed dramatically over the past 20 years, and it hasn’t really changed that much at all. Yes, I know that I’m saying two opposite things in the same sentence, and no, Hurricane Ida burnout hasn’t totally fried my brain (well, maybe a little), but hear me out. …
The End Game
In business, as in life, there’s usually a goal (or there should be a goal) behind everything we do. In the back of our minds, we should always be cognizant of the effect that our current actions could have on our ultimate objectives. If we don’t keep our eyes on the prize, those goals are going to be difficult to …
Afraid of Change
Change. It’s all around us. It forces its way into our lives. And, it seems, it’s happening more quickly now than at any time we can remember. Every day seems to bring some new gadget, device, app, technology, software, or way to do things. Often, it can seem overwhelming. But as the old saying goes, progress waits for no one. …
The Right Choice
As the end of summer nears, many of us are getting our children ready to return to school. Back to school brings many challenges for home inspectors (as well as our kids). Quite often, the real estate market slows down in response to the start of the fall semester, as families hunker down for the new school year and are …
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 …