Marketing our business can be a rough proposition. Throw in the fact that home inspectors are generally marketing to two different audiences, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Well, maybe not disaster, but at least a big headache. Or maybe a pain in the backside. We’re trying to get the attention of the gatekeeper (the real estate agent) while …

As a business owner, and as a human, we fear rejection. We worry all the time about not sealing the deal. We hate being rejected. We’re often crushed when it happens, believing that someone else doesn’t think that we’re good enough for them. Rejection can have a long-lasting, detrimental effect on us. It’s only natural for us to assume that …

Personalization: the process of making something suitable for the needs of a particular person.(Cambridge dictionary). The word personalization used to be taboo in the world of business. A company produced one thing, and that was that. You got what you got, and you liked it. Thank you sir, may I have another? Kevin Bacon, Animal House, 1978 Today’s world is …

No one likes getting pitched. Cold-calls during dinner. Marketing emails delivered right to our desktop. Ads jumping right into our social media feed. Junk mail landing in our mail box. It’s all around us, and we hate it. Until, that is, it solves a problem. Whenever there’s something we like, want, or need, and someone’s pitch scratches that specific itch, …

Learning new skills is a part of life, and an important part of starting a new business. We all move through Broadwell’s “Four Stages of Competence” at our own speed, paced solely by our desire to get better at our newly acquired skill: the more we want it, the more we work at it. Being stuck in “conscious incompetence” really …

Every day of our lives, we’re faced with challenges. They seem to come at us from all sides; a non-stop, constant, unrelenting number of items to add to our to-do list. We’re left running around like crazy, trying to come up with workable solutions to “problems” that really don’t matter that much. The challenge is not figuring out how to …

At one point or another, we all get frustrated. Frustrated by the effort. Frustrated by our apparent lack of success. Frustrated by the seemingly endless walls we need to scale. Frustrated by all of it. We may think we’re alone, but it’s not just us; it happens to everyone. Even the most successful people in the world feel frustration. So, …

It’s human nature for us to avoid responsibility. Our ancestors realized that if they were never on the hook for anything, then they were never going to be held responsible for failure. Failing your tribesmen could mean getting kicked out the village, so avoiding responsibility is a behavior that’s been reinforced throughout our history. The problem with this avoidant behavior …

Every one of us is afraid. Fear is a universal emotion. Our ancestors survived because they were afraid of being eaten by beasts in the jungles. We no longer have to fear being devoured by a tiger, yet our fears remain. We fear failure. We fear losing. We fear looking foolish. We fear trying something new. Often, we even fear …

One of the perils of becoming good at what we do is that some of us develop a feeling of entitlement. We start to feel, as defined in Merriam-Webster, a “belief that (we are) deserving of or entitled to certain privileges.” I worked hard to get here. I paid my dues. I suffered through all those hard times. I put …