As business people, we are subject to scrutiny by our potential clients. They’re often probing and prodding, looking for insight into whether we’re an inspector they can rely on. Much of the time, the first thing they look for is experience. When did you start doing your job? Clients want to know how long we’ve been practicing our craft. When …
Fishing for Success
Good news! We’re currently in a booming real estate market! While this information will come as no surprise to those of us that have been working as a home inspector for more than a minute, and the bottom is certain to eventually drop out (so be prepared), being in the middle of a boom time does make for some increasingly …
Fake It ‘Til You Make It
Everyone had a first time. We’ve all suffered through our first day of school, that first dance, the first time we had a date, our first kiss, and eventually, our first home inspection. Some of us remember each of these experiences in vivid detail, while the rest of us try to block them from our memories. Whether they were good or …
Everything I Learned
There’s nothing like a relaxing vacation to get you back in the mood for returning to the daily grind. Unfortunately, my recent vacation was anything but relaxing, as my family talked me into traveling to the theme parks in Orlando Florida. After spending a “relaxing” week waiting in lines and paying exorbitant prices for mediocre food, I was more than …
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 …
Can We Live With Constant Change?
Unless you’re brand new at this small business thing (and if you are, good luck to you), we’ve all made it through the dreaded start-up phase. We’ve soldiered on, taken our lumps, run the gauntlet, learned our lessons and come out of the other end. We mourn for those who weren’t as lucky as us; the 75% of start-ups that …
Seeing Through the Disguise
Often, when starting out in a new small business, we run into problems. One of our biggest problems happens to be figuring out what type of clientele we want to deal with in our business. There are always two different type of potential clients available to sell our services to: professionals and amateurs. Unfortunately, because we’re just starting out in …
Is There a Shortcut to Success?
Practice makes perfect. We’ve all heard that old axiom. As a child, we probably heard it enough from our parents to make us sick. But, like most old sayings, it was grounded in truth. Think back to your childhood, to any skill that your parents forced you to learn. Would you have ever achieved any level of proficiency without the …
Diffusing Adversity
Adversity. It’s not a word that we often use in our everyday conversations. And yet, adversity, and how we deal with it, often plays an over-sized role in determining the level of success that we attain in our business (and personal) lives. Adversity can be defined as a state of adverse conditions, where someone or something is actively opposing or …
Becoming a Business Ninja
We will start today with a slight distortion of a quote from author Nick Hornby’s 2005 Novel A Long Way Down: ‘A business is hard to build yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.’ Hornby’s original line was about the difficulty of rebuilding yourself, but …
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