I enjoy sharing the things I’ve learned over my career, so I often find myself training people that are working to become home inspectors. While I get quite a variety of questions from inspection students, there are a handful of questions that everybody asks. One question that always seems to come up is whether it’s better to work for an established home inspection company or try to go it alone.
Obviously, no one can predict the future and there are many variables that impact an individual’s success, there is a certain personality trait that can provide some insight into whether someone should join an inspection team or fly solo. This trait is so important that every individual struggling to gain some traction in the competitive world of home inspections needs to know where they stand in relation to this important metric.
We have all heard the old axiom that customers generally do business with people that they like. This is an obvious fact and often demonstrated in our own business dealings. Many of us will drive a bit further to go to a favorite restaurant, passing countless other eateries on the way. Why would we do such a thing? Maybe the food really is over the top at our favorite spot, but it’s more likely the reason is the people working at our favorite restaurant simply treat us better than elsewhere.
Customers generally do business with people that they like.
On some level, we all know this to be true, but we don’t often think about this fact when we are attempting to market and grow our business. And what, you might ask, does this have to do with working for another home inspection company?
One word: Personality.
People with outgoing, happy-go-lucky personalities generally find more success running a service-based business (like home inspections.)
People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.
Anonymous Author
An upbeat personality is an important trait when running a business. There are lots of inspectors with a laundry list of qualifications (which they are all too happy to tell you about). Unfortunately, the one thing that they never bothered to get certified in, the one training class that they failed to register for, is interpersonal relations: how to effectively deal with people.
I know many of these inspectors personally, and they are constantly complaining about not being able to generate enough business to sustain themselves in the industry. They constantly shift the blame for their lack of business success onto other things: their competitors’ prices are too low; the Realtors are united against them or are being paid off by other inspectors for referrals. What they fail to realize is that most people really don’t care about qualifications, they simply want to be comfortable with the person that they hire to work for them.
While personality is important when doing inspections, it’s even more critical when trying to build a business.
Personality is an important trait in the business world. We all have personality; it’s just that some people seem to have more than others. If we could all take a test to determine our “personality score,” we’d find that personality is distributed throughout the population along a continuum. A small number of lucky people have really high scores, and could sell sunglasses to blind man, while a small number of unlucky saps are stuck with the personality of a wet dish rag. Fortunately, most of us fall somewhere closer to the middle, with a personality that’s relatively close to average.
Know thyself…
Socrates
It’s important that we’re honest with ourselves when it comes to this metric. Running a business by yourself takes a lot of (for lack of a better word) schmoozing. Business owners are constantly on the prowl, looking to gain exposure and increase their bottom line.
If you are outgoing, gregarious, and wonderful to be around, it’s likely that you’ll be able to find lots of success running your own company. If you lean more to the introverted end of the spectrum and would prefer to limit the number of uncomfortable social situations you place yourself in, it may benefit you to work for someone else, letting them handle all the networking that comes with growing a business.
Working in the inspection business, which is essentially an interpersonal communication business, is going to be more difficult for those of us (yes, I’m in that number too) who tend toward introversion. I’m not saying that introverts can’t run their own businesses (I’m living proof that they can), it just happens to be a much harder road. Working for a successful inspection company can allow an introvert to focus their energy on providing a quality inspection product for their clients; while greatly reducing the amount of marketing and interaction they must do away from their inspections.
We can never fully escape marketing, as it’s something that we’re always doing, even while inspecting. But being realistic about who we are and the areas where we excel is always a good plan. Knowing where we fall on the personality continuum is important and will likely dictate the type of success we’ll have as a business owner.
Choosing which road to travel as a professional home inspector is a difficult choice. Knowing where we fall on the personality scale can only help us make a better informed decision.
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Thanks, Joe
