Last year I was a (insert your profession here) who needed to learn more about what I do for a living. This year, same question. Same answer.

There are many definitions for the word “tone.” The one most important here comes from the Cambridge Dictionary: “a quality in the voice that expresses the speaker’s feelings or thoughts, often toward the person being spoken to…” The tone of our work, our product, our marketing, the clothes we wear, the vehicle we drive, the way we interact with our …

Change is scary; there’s no doubt about it. We’re often afraid of changing the way we do things, especially in our business. We think that we’ll cause an uproar; that everyone will be enraged and that we’ll cause a big stink. The reality is that it’s quite likely that most people won’t even notice. Most of us are so involved …

Being in business can often prove frustrating. The people we’re working with often don’t know what we know (if they did, what would they need us for), and to make things even worse, even though they don’t know what we know, many of them don’t even care what we know. We could try to educate them, but really, what good …

It’s hard to be different. When everyone else is doing the minimum, and you’re shooting for the stars, it’s easy to feel like a fool. People are going to call you out. Your competitors are going to laugh. Many potential clients are going to pass you by. Everyone will let you know that you’re not doing it like everyone else. …

It’s easy to keep things on repeat; to keep doing the same thing we’ve always done. Doing it again is easy. Doing something different is hard. But, that’s life in a nutshell, isn’t it? Do we take the easy way out again and again, never going any further that we’ve gone before, or do we take a chance and do …

Talking about AI is all the rage right now, but it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll ever have an AI home inspector. There’s simply too much to do, too many places to crawl into, too much stuff to handle, and too many personalities to juggle to ever imagine someone figuring out how to turn that much computer programming into a profitable …

Many people recoil from choice. They would much rather have things decided for them than to have to choose themselves. Many of our potential customers fall into this category, allowing someone else to decide for them who they’ll end up working with. Unless we make ourselves impossible to ignore, we’ll often find ourselves ignored.

When running our businesses, we can often fall into the trap of wanting to do too much. We’ve got grandiose ideas of being everything to everyone, and we end up so distracted and overwhelmed that we find ourselves being nothing to nobody. Better to pick one thing and do it to the best of our abilities. And then, maybe we …

“So, what is it that you do?” It’s a question that we get asked. A lot. And not just when we meet someone new. It’s a question that potential clients ask all the time. They may not use those exact words, or any words for that matter, but it’s the number one question in their mind. And the better we …