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 …

Even though it’s not something we usually talk about, at least not in reference to our own lives, we live in a transient world. Everything has an expected lifespan: we humans, our pets, the things we build, the birds, the trees, and even the Earth itself. Everything is finite and will eventually end. Memento mori, or “remember death,” is an …

Being a professional home inspector can be a stress-inducing job. It seems like things in our industry are forever changing. As soon as we think we’ve learned everything that we need to do a good job, there’s some new gadget, some new technique, or some new wrinkle in the code that we need to figure out. The amount of knowledge …

People who start a small business should be congratulated (or maybe placed in long-term therapy), as it’s quite often a difficult undertaking. The hours can be long (especially in the beginning) and the rewards may seem elusive. Lots of new business owners fall by the wayside before they’re ever able to get any traction. And with this failure comes lots …

When it comes to running a home inspection business, most of us are working with limited information. We likely have a vague understanding of where we want to be and the goals that we’d like to shoot for, but have spent little time or energy hashing out the details. Dreaming about the big picture is easy to do and can …

Running a professional home inspection business can be a lot of fun, but it can also be the source of a lot of personal grief. All too often, we find ourselves stuck in a rut, dealing with (seemingly) the same problems over and over again. Too many times, we’re replaying the same day in our minds, following the same well-worn …

Much like everything else for sale in our commoditized world, the home inspection industry has its own system that perpetuates a cycle of low costs, mediocre products, and hidden costs -often to the detriment of both the inspector and the homeowner. The companies offering cheap home inspections aren’t necessarily aiming to deliver subpar services, but rather they are making choices …

If we take a step back and examine our lives, we’ll probably realize that we spend an inordinate amount of time doing things that, all in all, are net negatives. Which on the surface, seems like a crazy thing for us to do. Considering that we could be using the same time and energy to do something that’s a net …

Think about your favorite pastime. Golf, fishing, running, cooking, whatever it is that you love. If you’ve been doing it a while, then you’re probably pretty good at it. Whether you can drive straight off the tee box, drop a lure into a 5-gallon bucket from 50 feet, push a 7-minute mile, or make a kick ass jambalaya without even …

There is nothing in this life, from which we derive some benefit, that does not come at a cost. Even the most innocuous event, like sitting on a sandy beach watching the sunset, comes with a built-in opportunity cost. When we do something that we would otherwise consider to be happening for free, like looking at the sky or sitting …