It’s often said that in order for someone to have success in their business, they must know two important things. They must know who their target audience is (who their work is for) and what it is they’re providing to their target audience (what their work is doing for their clients). Equally important, but often overlooked, is figuring out if …
Imitation and Mediocrity
It’s kind of funny, if we stop and think about it, but most people are surprised when they find out how hard it is to break into the world of small business. Common sense should tell us that. I guess that it’s the blinders that we all come into the business with that do it, but we would think that …
Riding the Elevator
The elevator pitch. It’s a phrase that we often hear in the business world, and it’s (unfortunately) something that we do quite often in our own business. But is it the right thing to do? Is it working for us? And what the hell does it really mean, anyway? Wikipedia describes an elevator pitch as a short description of an …
Getting Better Home Inspection Clients
Get better clients. If we stop to think about it, this simple three-word sentence should be the ultimate goal for anyone running a small business. Better clients offer many different benefits for the small business owner. Better clients are easier to deal with in our business. Better clients force us to produce a better product. But, arguably the most important …
The Value of Providing Value
While I’m certainly not an attorney, it’s fairly easy for the average person to learn almost everything they need to know about the law from a small amount of quality internet research. While doing a bit of investigation to see if there were any ways that I could improve my current home inspection contract, I came across a site where …
Action, Not Just (Paying For) Words
One of the biggest hurdles a small business owner faces is figuring out how to get clients through the door. Whether your company has an actual front door in a building, or you operate a service-based business without a physical location for customers to visit, the goal is still the same: to get customers to call on you so that …
Am I Doing My Job or Am I Working?
It can be said that what we do for a living can be described in two different ways: what our job is and the work that we do. While those two words can, and often are, used interchangeably, that doesn’t mean they represent the exact same thing. Being a home inspector may be our job, we identify deficiencies and potential …
Networking 101
Networking is a term that’s often thrown around in today’s interconnected business world. According to investopedia.com, networking is the exchange of information and ideas among people with a common profession or special interest, usually in an informal social setting, and often begins with a single point of common ground. We can easily reason that networking is something that we participate in, …
Nine Ways to Sunday
One of the most exciting things about being a home inspector is the range of personalities that we come across in our business. While most people we meet are fairly even keeled and down-to-earth, we occasionally cross paths with someone who really makes us appreciate all those “normal” people we encounter in our business. I recently had a client who …
That’s Just How It Works
Humans are wired for comfort. Almost everyone enjoys it when things in their life are predictable, when what’s going on around us follows a well-worn path. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy the occasional surprise, but we’re quite content when our lives play out exactly like we expect. There’s comfort in familiarity. We know what’s going to happen …