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 we often hear in the business world, and unfortunately it’s something that we all do in our own businesses. Is giving the elevator pitch always the right thing to for us to do? How’s that working for us? And what the hell does it really mean, anyway? Wikipedia says an elevator pitch is a …
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 …
The 7 Pitfalls of Small Business (conclusion)
This article is the second part of a two-part series. Click here to read part one. Running a small business can be a wonderful experience, bringing with it a sense of excitement and fulfillment when things go right. At the same time, things don’t always go the way we’ve planned. When things do go wrong, those feelings of happiness can …
Lessons Learned
We all know that exercise is good for us. It helps to keep our bodies (and our minds) healthy as we age. Unfortunately, for many of us, making a conscious decision to exercise is difficult. It’s easy to reason that, instead of exercising, we could be working and making money, or relaxing from all the work we’ve already done (and …
Don’t Be Scared
We’ve all experienced it. We’ve all gone through it. That customer or vendor that’s causing us all that grief. That person that we would do anything to have never met. It’s an inevitable part of being in business; it’s something that cannot be avoided. Or can it? Not all customers are created equal. Tim Ferriss It seems like all of …
The Tip of the Iceberg
No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter how successful your business is, there’s one thing that we all have in common: we all feel a bit of stress when it comes time to tip at a restaurant. Tipping is such an arbitrary thing; it often ends up being a nerve-wracking experience. Why does it have …
No One Can Do It for Us
I know, I know; it’s hard. When you run your own business, finding time to do all the things you’d like to do seems impossible. I was in the same place as everyone else, thinking “I’d love to find the time to upgrade my inspection report.” But, the simple task of running my own business was overwhelming. With scheduling, marketing, …