Guidelines. They exist to help us know what to do in public, in our relationships, as well as in our business. If you’re a professional home inspector, like me, those guidelines will typically include your standards of practice. They may be directives coming down from your state or local government or may be established by the home inspection organization that …
Thanks (Giving)
As we bring Thanksgiving week to a close, and I’m finally finishing off (most of) our leftovers, it seems like the perfect time to reflect on some of the things that I’m most thankful for in my home inspection career. All too often, in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, trying our best to keep our businesses on …
Are You a Slacker?
The English language is considered by many cultures as one of the most difficult for an outsider to learn, as words and phrases often have many different meanings. The topic of today’s post, the word “slack”, is one of those words that can have a few different meanings. Most of us immediately imagine something negative when we hear the word …
Swimming Upstream
Starting out in the world of small business is difficult. When we’re just beginning our home inspection journey, it seems like the list of things to do is overwhelming. New business owners, especially ones that are trying to run a business for the first time, are faced with a seemingly endless number of options. Quite often, there are so many …
Dotting the “I’s”
There are many great things about working as a home inspector. We get to be in a different place every day, never stuck inside the same cubicle day after day. We get to see many different kinds of houses and all different types of people. For the most part, everyone we deal with is in a happy place, either moving …
To Re-inspect or Not to Re-inspect
Being a home inspector is usually pretty straightforward. Someone calls us, we do their home inspection, and get paid. One, two, three; nothing much unusual in that process. But, sometimes, we’re asked to do things that are outside our normal routine. It’s in situations like these, when we’re asked to step outside our comfort zone, where we’ve got to be …
Peddle Power
Being a home inspector is a fairly unique job. We’re not like typical businesspeople. We don’t have a retail store where our clients meet us. We don’t have things on the shelf that we’ve got to store and manage. We don’t have vendors where we buy our inventory. Most of us don’t really have a lot of products for our …
Growing Pains
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem: deciding when (and if) we should grow our business. Hopefully it’s an issue that each of us will have to confront sometime in our future. Having to face this question means that we’ve been successful in our industry, but that doesn’t make the choice any easier. It’s still something …
It Was Just a Mistake
Mistakes are inevitable. We’re all human. None of us are perfect, and that means that, sometimes, we’re going to make mistakes. In our jobs, in our business, in our personal lives. Mistakes are going to happen. Making mistakes is part of life. We learn our most important lessons from the errors that we’ve make along the way. There is no …
Old Habits Die Hard
Some things seem to stick around forever. “That’s how it’s always been done” is the comment we hear all the time. We make strides in many areas of our lives, constantly adapting to changes and advancing our methods and procedures to remain competitive in an ever-changing world. But somehow there are those certain things that we can’t seem to part …