Most of us feel like we’re swamped, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things on our plate: work, family, commuting, finances, personal and professional commitments. The list goes on. It seems like we’re all scheduled out and there’s no spare time left in our calendar. If we’re being real honest with ourselves, we already know, deep down inside, that it’s …
Zoom Class Update
First let me say thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever taken a class with me. I consider it an honor that anyone trusts me with something as valuable as their own education, and I take seriously the responsibility that comes with that trust. I’m happy to be able to share with you the things that I’ve learned …
Hiring the Best
In the home inspection industry, the vast majority of inspectors are beholden to real estate agents. After all, the agents know exactly where our future clients are, so it only follows that agents (especially the successful ones) would be the object of an inspector’s eye. The question then becomes “As professional home inspectors, how should we be treating our agents?” …
Your Son’s House
I, like some of the people reading this, am a professional home inspector. If we do this job long enough (and well enough), we’ll eventually be faced with backlash. Someone somewhere will be upset. With us. The home inspector. Wow. Imagine that. Just by doing our job well, we’re going to piss someone off. Sounds like a great career. Where …
On the Level
As is often the case for small business owners, during those occasional moments of calm when nothing is happening and no one is blowing up my phone, I sometimes find myself pondering the trajectory of my home inspection career. I think about where I’ve ended up and how I got here and often wonder how this all happened. Quite often, …
Decision Time
We’re all very busy people. Quite frankly, we could call what we do a juggling act. We’ve all got plenty of personal and professional commitments that we need to deal with. Plenty of balls in the air, every day, at all hours of the day. Life is busy enough; throw in the small business-owner thing and we very quickly reach …
Work for Somebody or Run the Show
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 …
Remember the Goalpost
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 …
Looking for the Patterns
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 …
Becoming Mediocre
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 …