Being a professional home inspector is an interesting job. We get paid to go into a stranger’s home, walk around testing stuff, opening things, and generally checking to make sure that all the different items in a house are functioning like they should. We do our investigating, we report our findings, and we’re on our way, out the door, heading …
Guidelines
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 …
What the Hell
When I was young, if you’d asked me if I wanted to grow up to be a home inspector, my first reply would’ve probably been “What the hell is a home inspector?” Then I would’ve probably given you a standard young boy’s response about wanting to be a doctor, astronaut or professional football player. Working as a home inspector had …
What’s Going On Here?
Face it, we’re an unknown. The dreaded home inspector. The deal killer. (And yes, one of my agents actually calls me that…) The agents think we’re there to cause trouble; to create hurdles to them closing the deal. But the buyers, they really have no idea what we’re there for. They know that their agent told them they had to …
6 Tactics to Increase Success – Part 3
Note: This article is part 3 of a 3 part series. Click here to read part 1. Every hour of every day, someone new decides they would like to be a professional home inspector. The lure of working for yourself, running your own business, controlling your schedule and being your own boss can be hard to resist. While different people …
6 Tactics to Increase Success – Part 2
Note: This article is part 2 of a 3 part series. Click here to read part 1. We each come to the home inspection business from different backgrounds, different thoughts and different ideals, but we all share one common goal: becoming a successful small business owner. It’s hard to start a successful small business in today’s dog-eat-dog environment. It seems …
6 Tactics to Increase Success
While we all come into the inspection business with different goals (making more money, becoming our own boss, having more control over our schedule, etc.), the overriding goal of everyone is to be successful. Success in the home inspection industry is dependent on many factors. Some of these elements, like the quality of the homes in our area, are (for …
Can You Tell Me a Story?
We know a lot of stuff. If you stop to think about it, no matter what industry we’re in, we all went through a lot of training to get where we are today. It may have been in a classroom, behind a computer screen, face to face with a trainer, or some combination of all three. But, odds are we’ve …
The Rules
It can be difficult to run a small business. It often seems like every waking moment (and some sleeping moments) are dedicated to doing something related to our business. Even when we’re not really “doing the work,” that part of the job where we’re directly earning income, there’s always something else to do. There’s always some other part of the …