Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. Buddha When I came across this quote, it got me thinking about sharing our skills. Some people are hesitant to share their knowledge with others, as they believe that by teaching others they’ll somehow …

Our customers have many choices, so it’s not always a given that they’re going to pick us. The more we know about their mindset (and the more we act on that knowledge) the better our chances. For home inspectors, our clients are often woefully uninformed. They’ve likely got more questions than that flip house has code violations! Knowing what they …

We think we know exactly who we’re doing things for, both in our business and personal lives: our target audience, we call it. It seems pretty straightforward. But like most things in life, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. There are always other forces at work, unknown variables that come into play, other people involved that can be …

Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, and it doesn’t help that everyone seems to have their own version of what’s right. How do we know if we’re on sound footing with our “right” or if we’re simply looking out for our own “rights”? If it’s something that feels good, that’s acceptable to everyone involved, that (from our own …

When things go wrong, what’s our default reply? It wasn’t me. Do we try to push it off on someone or something else? Do we instinctively attempt to pass the buck? Do we quickly move to the next thing, leaving the fallout for someone else to clean up? I’ve got this. We don’t hear (or speak) those words often enough. …

If our job is to provide our customers with information, we face a dilemma: transferring knowledge from our mind into the mind of someone else. It’s quite likely that our customer doesn’t have the same understanding of our industry that we do. If they did, they wouldn’t be paying us, now would they? It can be difficult to communicate important …

We see it everywhere, in every facet of our lives. Increasingly, more of our interactions are being dictated by price. Online, we can even sort by price. Show me which one is the cheapest and that’s the one I’ll get. It’s strikingly ironic that when all we’re measuring is the fee charged for something, we end up with very little …

Being cautious in our lives (and our businesses) is a noble goal. Steering clear of things that will cause us pain (physically, psychologically, and/or monetarily) is always a good plan. But, like everything else in our world, we can take it too far. Acting out of an abundance of caution it’s called, and it’s often defined as “precautions taken against …

We’ve all heard the expression “jack of all trades but master of none.” It’s meant to describe someone who can do many things, but doesn’t excel at any of them. It would be great if we could be a master of all trades, but there’s not enough time in the day to learn the skills needed for that feat. Knowing …

Our success will hinge, as it always has, on the leadership of our (most) junior Marine. Gen. Charles Krulak General Krulak was speaking about the Marine Corp specifically, and the armed forces in general, in this article, but just as easily he could have been talking about our business. The way our business comes across to our clients is contingent …