Be skeptical, not cynical.

I’m currently reading a book that’s blowing my mind, offering guidance that’s undoubtedly going to make a difference in my business. And it was written in 1915! The book is The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie. If you’ve never read anything by Dale Carnegie, obviously some of the language and references can seem a bit dated (hell, it’s …

There’s an old saying that tells us to dress for the job we want, not the job we have. The same type of thing can be said about building our small business. We should operate like the business we want to become, not the business we currently are. Actions develop into habits, habits constitute character, and character determines destiny. Dale …

It’s easy to show up. It’s easy to do our job. It’s easy to check the boxes. It’s easy to take our clients’ money. It’s easy to be there in body but not in spirit. It’s easy to be just another person running a business. The hard part is actually trying to do something that matters. Going above and beyond …

As home inspectors, it’s important for us to remember that we are going to have an asymmetrical relationship with our customers. We meet new client and sees new houses every single day. The inspection that we do tomorrow morning is simply going to blend into the background with the other hundreds/thousands of inspections that we’ve already done. That client will …

It’s not something we often think about, but we are obviously products of our environment. Everything we do is geared toward optimizing for speed. We try to get everything on our to do list done as quickly as possible. So we can move on to the next thing… That’s not really a bad thing, as successful people get lots of …

It’s important to have standards in our business, knowing exactly what we will and won’t do for money. While we’re sometimes tempted to deviate from those standards (especially when large dollar amounts are involved), its important to hold our moral ground. If we make the choice to do something that we’ve already decided we’d be better off not doing, chances …

It doesnt matter how much we know about our jobs, how much we learn, or how many books we read, if we’re not also students of business. Knowing how to do a good home inspection is pointless if we don’t also know how to run our company. A small investment in developing our business skills can pay dividends long after …

Where are we today in our business? Where is it that we really want to be? Whatever the difference is between these two answers is the key to reaching our goals.

New concepts, ideas, and materials are developing at an amazing rate, and it can be nearly impossible for us to learn everything that we think we need to know to compete. A far greater challenge is for us to develop the capacity to comprehend exactly what all these new inventions have to do with our industry so that we can …