PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. So I wanted to introduce a special guest that I’ve really wanted to have on the show for a long time. His name is Richard Law. He is from SOFI, which is the Society of Field Inspectors. How are you Rich?

Richard Law
I’m doing fine. How about yourself?

Ian Robertson
I’m doing fantastic. I’m just happy to have you here. Couldn’t have been more timely. I don’t know if you keep an eye on what happens in the home inspection industry. But I gave you a little bit of an insight into it. Home inspection industry isn’t as booming as it used to be. And a lot of us as home inspectors are looking for things to help us get through, basically, a miniature home inspection recession of things, our businesses aren’t as busy as we might like them. And I remember way back when, that field inspections helped me and guys that I was working with, get through the Great Recession. And if done, right, it was actually really a great gig. So that’s why I’m super happy to have you on, on the show. But before I kind of yammer on here, like I usually do, Rich, tell us a little bit about yourself and SOFI.

Richard Law
Okay, I can do that. Of course, I’m here in Florida. I’m here in the, guess you can call it the land of paradise. And I started out in the Navy and spent 20 years in the Navy as a naval flight officer and flew, and 20 years, and traveled around the US, traveled around other countries. And actually, I spent about 10 years out of the country. And when you do that you realize what a great country we do live in here in the United States. So I think that’s important. Oh, I was in the service. I was stationed at the Pentagon. And I picked up a real estate broker’s license when I was there and worked with some investors, investment property. But then I, when I left the Navy, I went to work for computer sciences as a system engineer and worked on some defense department programs. After that, I went to a company called E-Systems, which was purchased by Raytheon and again, worked for other programs that were all defense related. And then when I left E-Systems, which was Raytheon then, I had my real estate license, my broker license, and I got more involved with that. So, so being a broker real estate I got very much involved with the home inspections, the home inspectors, and knew what they were doing and, and how they would help the buyers of real estate. I also got involved with doing some field inspections, and some property preservation. And I did both of those because they were kind of related to, you know, my real estate brokerage. And then I took in, while doing an inspection someone said, “Hey, Rich, you know a lot about it, why don’t you just create a membership or create a database and get going with that.” So I did that back in the late 90s. And just built it and built it and built it up. And today we’ve got about 8,500 members. And we probably get a little over 50 members now just about every week, memberships going up a little bit because the economy is slowing. People are just looking for ways to make some extra money. Notary signings are down, less people are going to church. So we get some pastors that do field inspectors. If you look at home inspections and different areas, in northern climates, it always slows down in the wintertime when it gets cold and snowy. So there’s a slowdown there. And I know a lot of home inspectors concentrate on field inspections during the cold winter months.

Ian Robertson
Maybe for listeners, some of us know what field inspections are, I obviously do, I’ve done them for many years, we’ll get into the bad connotation that they sometimes have. But just for the overall quick overview, what’s a field inspection when we talk about that?

Richard Law
Well, it varies over a very, very large area. I once started to write down descriptions of all the inspections that are out there and got up to about 250. And just this week, I learned something new and I do that pretty much every week. There’s also an inspection that’s done on the, you know, the food trucks, you know, the food trucks are out there and they do a lot of cooking in the food truck. So they have, you know, they have gas, they have electric, a lot of materials that come off the grill that are filtered out and go up into a filter usually. So there’s cleaning schedules that have to be done. They have to be noted that they have been done. There has to be, you know, manual pull offs and stuff like that for gas and a truck, you know, for propane if they’re using it. So even with home inspections or mobile, mobile inspections, the same criteria from home inspections or the same criteria from something you would use in an Olive Garden works with a food truck.

Ian Robertson
Interesting. I had never really done a restaurant or food truck in my time in field inspections. I did a lot of big commercial inspections, a lot of nursing homes and things like that. They used to, they used to pay me a couple hundred bucks to take outside photos of a nursing home or something like that. It would take, you know, half an hour on site. I usually do it in between inspections when I’m already out and things like that, and it worked out well. But I remember looking through the list and thinking there’s a lot more that I could be doing. And it sounds like there’s a lot more now than there was even just 10, 15, 20 years ago. You were talking to me the other day about some sort of inspection in lumber yards where those fire takeoffs, or what did you call them?

Richard Law
Well, when you’re going to a lumber yard, you create a lot of dust. And a lot people don’t really understand how flammable that dust can be. So one of the biggest problems there, is controlling sparks. And there you need special switches, special motors in the lumber yard so that you’re not sparking, that someone can’t throw on a light switch and and blow up the sawmill. So those are a little bit different. I’ve never done one of those myself, but I have talked to a few people that have, and that’s what I would call, probably a very unique inspection, probably your home inspectors may never run into one of those at all. In fields and services, there’s kind of, I like to classify three different areas, there’s commercial, there’s insurance, there’s mortgage. The best segment is probably commercial. Well, it’s not probably, it is commercial. The worst segment is mortgage. And insurance is kind of in the middle. When I say insurance, I mean residential insurance. So in the mortgage area, and this has not changed in decades, the fees are very low. Even today, field inspectors are out doing what they call mortgage drive-by inspections, where they’re knocking on doors and, and those are paying three, four, or five dollars.

Ian Robertson
Crazy.

Richard Law
It is, it’s very crazy. It’s very risky. You know, when you, when you knock on a door, you never know what’s on the other side of a door. And a lot of people today are losing their homes, losing their vehicles because of the downturn. Through no fault of their own, in many cases, and so knocking on the door, it’s just not a good idea. So we purposely really exclude the mortgage inspections. Our database is set up with the hiring firms, at least, so that we don’t get involved in that segment. And we can do that, for the simple reason is, membership in SOFI is free. It’s free to inspectors, it’s free to the companies. So when something is free, we can really control it. Whether someone is listed in our database depends upon us and them. If we know that they don’t pay a lot, if they know that segment’s got a really bad reputation, we can easily exclude them. If I started taking membership fees from companies and you know, that becomes tougher. If someone’s willing to pay me a big fee to become a member, you know, hiring company, it’s kind of hard to turn them down. But when membership is free, it’s very easy to turn down the companies that just don’t have a good record or just don’t pay a lot. And we get that through feedback from inspectors too. So that’s kind of mortgage, that’s the area you kind of want to stay away from. And you can go up to the Facebook groups and read story after story after story about low fees, people being chased, and trying to force them off the road. And just a lot of things going on there. You don’t want to get involved with.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I think, not to interrupt, but I think that’s why a lot of us as home inspectors, you know, we’re charging $300 to $2,000, anywhere in that range for an inspection, depending on what we’re doing. We’ll do big commercial inspections, you know, $10, $20, $30,000. So when we see things like, oh field inspectors make $3 for a visit, or $5 for a visit, automatically turns off our brain to the option of doing that. It’s almost like it hurts our pride. Like, I’m a skilled inspector, why would I do that? But I think before we get too, too far in, I think the point you made is important. Not every field inspection’s created equal. And I think that’s why I tended to like the commercial ones. They’re actually kind of fun. You know, I remember one building I was in, it was a, it was a big apartment building. And they had a big water incident. It was commercial/insurance. They paid me several hundred dollars, I took some pictures, wrote down what I saw. And it was just fun. I’m like, I’ve never not seen, you know, a defect like this and normally wouldn’t see it on that scale. I did one. It was a high profile case in a city near me where the side of the brick building veneer started to fall off. So I took pictures and they’re like, oh just write dow, you know, this or that and I wrote down, hey, this looks like it’s about to fall down. And not like 90 days later, it actually did fall down. And I’m just like, those are very interesting commercial experiences. And, you know, I wouldn’t make as much as a home inspection, you know, on average at the time $175 to $200 an hour is what we shoot for. So I made like, make $125 for an hour’s worth of work. But when I’m slow, and inspections are down, that was perfect. That was awesome. Not every inspection is going to be like that. Sometimes you’re going to be like, okay, well, I took this inspection, and I made $50. But it’s not the end of the world. But those three to five dollar inspections, that’s really what turns inspectors off.

Richard Law
Yeah, they would, but you know, sometimes you’re going to run into the situation where they say, well, we have lots of inspections for you, they pay between five dollars and $200. And then once you start talking to him, you find out that 99% of them pay $5 and 1% paid $200. So you gotta be careful you don’t get lured in so to speak. And the best way to do that is just avoid the mortgage stuff. Oh, let’s move to the top. If I were going to do it today, what would I do? Okay, knowing all the background for a couple of decades, I think, you know, the commercial stuff is good, that’s the best. It has a very large range, okay. There, there’s a lot of stuff that you can do without having the technical background that you and your associates have. But just going out and doing something like a business verification, maybe a residential draw inspection, or what they call a progress report, maybe a lease inspection, maybe a collateral inspection, there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of in the, I’d say probably the $40 to $60 range, and a lot of that stuff takes oh, maybe 10, 15 minutes on site, something like a business verification would be easy to do probably 10, 15 minutes, a draw inspections with, I think you’ve said you’ve done before, probably take 10 or 15 minutes on site, and not a lot of photos. I’ve done commercial drone inspections where I took no photos, made no reports, I just called a company asking it and gave them a verbal report, which took about five minutes. So those are kind of like, very common ones that pay pretty well for a short amount of time on site, a short amount of little paperwork involved. And then once you start doing those, and well, the other part too, is you can be going out tomorrow to do a home inspection. And if you could do a $50 inspection on a way there and it takes 10 minutes and one on the way back and takes 15 minutes, you just put another $100 in your pocket.

Ian Robertson
Yes, sir. Right? Exactly. It’s helping burning off overhead too, because maybe we’re out marketing, and we’re visiting real estate offices to try to get home inspections, you know, okay, go visit five offices, then go do one of these inspections, then do a couple more and then go do another inspection. And you kind of burned off your gas overhead for the day.

Richard Law
Yeah, so that doesn’t require any real additional training because the company is going to provide you with the inspection form, they’re going to provide you some instruction, you know, that may be on the telephone, maybe they’ll send you a video to watch, maybe they’ll invite you to a webinar. So those are good. Those are good for everyone because they don’t require any training or expertise, so to speak. With home inspectors you kind of have an advantage because you like to look at problems, well that’s your whole job really, is identifying problems.

Ian Robertson
Exactly.

Richard Law
So you’re looking at problems, okay. You know a little bit about electricity, electrical and plumbing and roofs and flammable materials, combustibles, mold, mildew, all that stuff. So when you get into a higher level of commercial, well, there’s two parts to it. I guess the part I’ve been most involved with is what they call commercial insurance loss control. And that’s where you go into a commercial facility. It could be a very small one, it could be a dollar store. It could be a very large one, it could be a large Hilton Hotel, and there you’re not, what you’re looking at is risk. You’re looking at fire sprinkler systems, you know they need to be on. They need to be, if they’re a wet system, they need to be pressurized. There are dry systems out there. I’ve never seen a dry fire sprinkler system, but there are dry ones. So you need to know a little bit about fire sprinkler systems. You need to know about ISO construction classes. What is the building ISO. Is it joisted masonary, is it fire resistant, because all that makes a big difference on fire damage. You know, an insurance company looks at joisted masonary as a bigger risk than fire resistant. Yeah, it’s just the way it is. So you’re looking at ISO construction classes. You’re looking at things like trip and fall hazards, you’re looking at commercial cooking equipment. If you’re going to a hotel or a restaurant that cooks, you need to know that. You gave me an idea, I did the Radisson Hotel a number of times over in Cape Canaveral, Florida, we did it as part of training. Of course we didn’t have access to that hotel because we didn’t ask, and we didn’t want to let them know we were inspecting it. But there again, you can, you can determine a lot of things from the fire sprinkler system, just by walking in rooms, you can determine how much of the area is covered by fire sprinkler systems, you can go out to the pool, which is an important thing to look at. And there you’re looking at self-locking, self-closing gates, the pool at the Marriott in Cape Canaveral was not fully fenced, you could walk into the pool area from the street. You know, they wanted to know about water depths, are they marked on the side of the pool? Are there instructions on pool usage, whenever I would go to a facility that had a pool, I asked them to provide me before I went there with a copy of a last county pool inspection. So I got an idea what the county thought of their pool. And you’re just looking at so many different things that are technical, you know, you’re looking at wiring that you can see, you’re not pulling the cover off a circuit breaker panel. And there’s other facilities you might go to, it could be a paint booth. And there you’ve got special requirements to look at, again, you got the anti-sparking switches and breathing materials and storage of flammables in any facility, or you’re looking at storage of flammables. Because you can only store so much gasoline in a metal can, after a certain amount of time, if you got too many metal cans, they have to go into a locker. If you go to a manufacturing facility, they need to look at data sheets. So the top level commercial stuff, require more training, but it’s training like you guys have, is this is what’s right. And this is what’s wrong. And once you know that, it’s easy to identify.

Ian Robertson
But I think that’s, that’s a good example of why, if we’re a home inspector, and we’re feeling the effects of the economy right now, we should really consider field inspections. Because, yeah, there’s going to be that $25 to $50 drive by this business and make sure they’re there, take a picture of this data plate, whatever. But it also opens up opportunity. Like I said, it opened up some great commercial opportunities that were just a ton of fun and gave me a lot of commercial experience. And at the time, I was pushing into the commercial inspection market, and it was just invaluable. So if we’re listening to this, I’d like to ask Rich this, because Rich, you’re the president of SOFI. First of all, I guess my question is twofold. First of all, how do we get started, we imagine we would start off by going to sofi.us. So that’s sofi.us. And then, where do we get our work from there? And then after that, how do we ensure that we’re getting that good work that’s really cool and interesting and pays well, and not just 8 million people spamming us asking us for $3 inspections. Okay, so that first one, how do we get started as a home inspector?

Richard Law
Well, there’s a couple of ways you can get to our website, you mentioned sofi.us. And the other way is just go to fieldinspector.com…fieldinspector.com. And up at the top of the page, you’ll see a button up there and it says Join SOFI, membership is free, just fill out the online form. There’s a lot of other information up there on our front page. We have a lot of YouTube videos, which will explain to you the different types of inspections that are out there, what they’re all about, you know, kind of walk you through some of the inspections so that you feel more comfortable knowing what they’re about. We have a lot of information up there on the best ways to do marketing, how to, you know, get connected with the better companies. There’s some podcasts up there, audios, they’re really not podcasts or audio training, which I’ll say, you know, if you call a company, you know who to ask for in the company, questions to ask, the order in which to ask questions. So there’s a lot of information up there just to kind of bring you up to speed on what field inspections is all about. You know, help you decide if that’s something you want to do. You know, it’s interesting, it does look very easy to set up. So home inspector, I go to fieldinspector.com or sofi.us, click on the big red button that I’m looking at, and it says Join Now. Fill out the form, but it sounds like that’s not it. I think I see people just thinking okay, I joined, now what? But you talked about marketing. Who are you marketing to, and how does that happen? Okay, you’re gonna be marketing to the best companies out there, at least the best ones that we know about, we have a database. Okay, like I say we got about 8,500 plus field inspectors in there. A lot of them are part time, we also list about 80, eight zero, companies that hire inspectors. And these companies are our national companies that cover the whole US, all 50 states, plus they cover Guam, the Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands. And so it’s about 80 of those. And they’re pretty much all commercial with some residential, and think there’s one mortgage in there. So it’s pretty much aim to the high side.

Ian Robertson
Nice.

Richard Law
And those are the companies that home inspectors are going to contact by email, or calling and introducing themselves. They can also go up to their website and look at, you know, more detailed information up there from the company on what they do and what they’re looking for. So, so that’s the list we have, so to speak. It’s, it’s in paper, it’s printed, we mail it out. It’s called the National Field Service Directory. And that’s up at the SOFI store. Everything that we offer, of course, has a, you know, satisfaction guarantee. So there’s, there’s no risk.

Ian Robertson
So that part you would pay for.

Richard Law
You would pay for that.

Ian Robertson
Okay, cool. So that, that makes sense. So I joined SOFI, I could pay for this directory. But just joining SOFI, those 80 companies, I imagine are looking through the directory. And I may be in an area that they’re like, oh, hey, we need a guy over there. Oh, it’s a home inspector. Perfect. They may have qualifications that we need. Is that is that basically what you’re saying?

Richard Law
Well, what we, what we do, is we have, of course, our database. And we can segment that into field reps that cover a metro area and field reps that cover a statewide area. Okay. So we have that information. And like, say it’s about 8,500. Many of the companies, not all of them, get that database from us, okay, they order it in a PDF download. And it’s a searchable download. And we give that same field rep database to everyone that buys a directory, you know, field reps, because the database is very important for networking. You know, I’ve talked to field inspectors. In fact, I’ve talked to a lot of them that have never talked to another field inspector. And that’s really a big loss for them. Same thing with home inspectors, you probably have some home inspectors out there that probably never talk to a home inspector, another on.

Ian Robertson
Gotcha. It happens.

Richard Law
And that’s a good idea. In some cases, you don’t want to be talking to people in your area that are home inspectors, well, you could talk to him, but you don’t want to share information on how you’re you’re getting your work, you know, you don’t want to give them the good ideas, so to speak.

Ian Robertson
Oh, I do all the time. But I’m a weirdo. This whole podcast is about telling everybody what I do.

Richard Law
But with that database that they get, of field inspectors with a directory. And that’s, I’m here in Florida, what I do, and what could do, and everyone could do, is I can contact a field inspector in San Diego, or a field inspector in Seattle or Dallas or Boston. And I would start the conversation on the phone, I would contact them by phone. And I would say “Hello, you know, my name is Richard Law. I’m a field inspector here in Central Florida. And I see that you’re in San Diego. And I thought maybe we could talk a little bit since we don’t compete with each other. And maybe I can share some of my good information with you. And you could share some of your good information with me.” And let’s say I’m a home inspector. Okay, well, I can search for those people that are doing field inspections far away. And I can also search on the keyword like “home inspector”, and there are some in there that do home inspections a long distance away. And again, if you got a home inspector or a field inspector in Seattle or Boston or Cleveland, you can share information because you don’t compete.

Ian Robertson
Right.

Richard Law
And it’s just so much more you learn doing that.

Ian Robertson
Well, the home inspection community is actually, I consider us pretty close-knit, for the most part. There are home inspectors that are kind of like a little standoffish, just like in any other industry. But for the most part, we actually communicate quite a bit, and I imagine that would probably be a benefit when it comes to field inspections. So maybe we work for a company, so maybe we put forth the effort, we joined SOFI. And we call a couple of companies, and we get some great commercial work out of it. But they have something that comes up in Ohio, and we’re out in Maine. Hey, I know a guy out in Ohio, you know, maybe he can join SOFI, and he can help you out with those inspections. I imagine stuff like that probably happens quite a bit.

Richard Law
You can do that. And what I’m also finding too is there was a, a good article up at ZeroHedge that talks about gig workers. And what, what they’re seeing now with the economy worsening is more and more people are looking for the backup to the backup to the backup to the backup. And, and when you’re, you know, I’ve been both employed as an employee, and I’ve also worked as an independent contractor. And when you’re an independent contractor, you need a backup to the backup to the backup to the backup. I mean, I know a guy down in Dallas, who has a chicken legs setup down there where he delivers fried chicken, not chicken legs, chicken wings, fried chicken wings, okay.

Ian Robertson
I wondered what was happening there.

Richard Law
He works half the day managing his restaurant there, and the other half the day out doing some inspections. So, what you, if you’re an independent contractor, the notary signing agents is another group. And the realtors is another group. They’ve all been slowed down because of rising interest rates. There’s less refinances going on, there’s less home buying going on. So we’re seeing more and more notary signing agents, and home inspectors, and realtors looking at field inspections. In fact, the National Notary Association, which is a large notary association, there are 10s of 1000s of members, they promote SOFI up there. Because they want to take and keep their members, they want to keep them busy. They can’t keep them as busy as they’d like to keep them so they find us to help keep them busier, okay, and keep them around. Okay, which is important. There’s a group out in Omaha called MPI, which is kind of like a mini training facility for home inspectors, as part of their training, they teach their inspectors about field inspections. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other, you know, training organizations, don’t start doing a little bit more training on field inspections to kind of bring the home inspectors into another area.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and like I said, it not only helps us get by in tight times, but it opens up opportunities. So I remember I was inspecting a hotel once. And then it got around that, hey, we have a commercial inspector that can do hotels and motels and all this stuff. And I ended up inspecting a lot of hotels and motels on my own. And also with these other companies. I like doing with the other companies because I’m like, alright, here’s a few hundred bucks for, you know, an hour or twos worth of work. I would do a hotel or motel by myself, and it be several thousand dollars and sometimes several days, you know, it just created opportunity, you know what I mean? So, I think it’s something that we should as a home inspection industry, get out of our mind, like, like you said, Rich, get those five dollar inspections, not even in the arena, go for the good stuff. And you never know, if it helps us get through these tough times, cool. If not, maybe next winter, maybe it’ll help us get through that tough time or maybe, you know, maybe we get injured, and we can’t climb up on roofs for a few months. Can we supplement that with some drive-by inspections from you know, SOFI and things like that?

Richard Law
Yeah, you can, and you can also move to higher levels too.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Richard Law
The companies you’re going to be working for that we are affiliated with are kind of middleman, they’re working for the big insurance companies you know, the Hartford’s and all of them, so you’re in the middle, so you get less money. But over a period of time, that may take a couple of years even, you can start breaking away from those middlemen and start working for the big, really highly protected properties and move to higher levels where you’re working directly for an underwriter. Now the person that I got all my training from was a fellow by the name of Jim Julian, and he worked at ISO, he taught at ISO, this guy really knows commercial insurance loss control, and he does the big, highly protected properties. You know the, the big properties in Manhattan, he’ll do light manufacturing facilities, he’s traveled for underwriting companies over to Europe and Asia. He’s really known for his experience. And he’s really highly needed. Because if you got a big property, you want to make sure you’re covering everything. And I was working with him, and I’ve got his training, by the way on video and, and manually printed on PDFs up at our SOFI store. But the thing was with him, he would share a lot of information with me on how much he was making, what he was doing to make more money. And he would show me some of his reports that he did. So I can remember one report, you know, and I said, how much did you get paid for this? He said, I got paid about $8000 for it. I says, wow, I said, that’s good money. He says, well, he says, that, you know, I was two days on site, doing the inspection. And I was three days writing up the report. So it was $8,000 over a week, it wasn’t a day.

Ian Robertson
Still, that’s a good week.

Richard Law
Still not bad money. Yeah. So that’s what the commercial insurance loss control is all about. And you could be doing a Motel 6, you could be doing an Olive Garden, you could be doing a Dollar General, you know, I’ve done some Hampton Inns, I’ve done some of the bigger hotels, and they start getting easier, too. The more you do them, the more you learn about them.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Richard Law
For me to go to a Hampton hotel, I would ask for information before I got there. You know, I would like to look at any other inspections that the county did, I would want to know their vacancy rates. I would also tell them say, hey, listen, I’m going to be there at such a time. I need you to have one year maintenance people there, that’s going to be with me the whole time I’m there if I need them and be available to answer questions. If you’ve got floor plans of your facilities, with the Hampton up in Fredericksburg, they had three big buildings, I need to know a little bit about your fire services up there, you know, where your nearest fire department is. So I would get them to feed a lot of information to me, okay. And then I would go up there and do the inspection. And I would use the maintenance people there to, you know, look at roofs, to look at laundry services, I would go in and look at a couple of rooms, maybe three rooms, I would always pick the room. I never let anyone else pick the room, because I didn’t want someone to show me their best. Okay. I’d look at the fire sprinkler systems. Oftentimes, I would sit in their coffee place there and, and at least do a part of my report in there in case I had questions when I was going through it and drink their coffee and ate their Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the Hampton Inn, which was nice. It’s nice to have a little sugar in your system when you’re writing a report. And so those are, you know, fairly easy once you get going. And you go through the same thing again and again and again. And you have all your boilerplate material on recommendations, the same thing like home inspections.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, definitely. Yep, exactly.

Richard Law
You do one, you’ve got all this stuff written up. You see it, you just copy that information and paste it. And I mean, the expertise comes in identifying it and solving the problem.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. So I think that’s a good illustration of why it’s a good feel for home inspectors, because that’s, that’s what we do. We call them canned comments. We identify issues.

Richard Law
Yeah, but with field inspections, when you start out you’re kind of learning on the job, you know, in a lot of different areas. But in some of the things like I said those $50, $60 inspections, and some of them are priced by the item, you could go to a John Deere dealership, and do a floorplan inspection. I used to go out to a dealer for commercial construction equipment. He had graters and loaders and backhoes, I would go out there to take and see what was on the floor, what he’d sold, what was out on demo, and everything had to be documented. And they wanted to have the hours on the machines. If something was out on demo they wanted, I wanted a record of who had it, and then you go back and forth, and you do that same inspection probably every couple of months. The first time I went out there and did it, the manager called me in the office, and he said hey, you know, he says, you’re, you’re eating up a lot of our time because you know, there are no more analog hour meters on this equipment, you have to turn the machine on. And here’s what we’re gonna do. He says, I’m gonna give you these three keys, you’re gonna be able to turn on every piece of equipment that we have here in a dealership, he says, you’re not going to be able to, he says, he says, he said you can start with these keys, but you’re not going to start them. He says, if you start one, he says, that’s gonna be the end of our relationship. He says you just turn on the ignition to get the hours, and turn it off. You know, he says, here’s, we’re going to do it this way, when you leave here, you take these three keys with you, when you come back, you bring the three keys with you. And he says, call me the day before you’re going to come back. So I know you’re coming. And when you arrive, walk in the dealership, and let us know you’re there. So that was great.

Ian Robertson
Nice.

Richard Law
Oh, that was so easy. Yeah. And I did that every month, or not every month, but every two months for, for years. And so they knew me, I knew them, paid pretty well.

Ian Robertson
So I think that’s a good illustration too, of your experience there, that it can be a great career, it can be a side gig, and it can be a great career. And it can lead to nice situations like that. Not everything is, you know, running out in the rain and snow and wind, and taking pictures of strange things. It’s, you know, cool commercial inspections, cool niche inspections, and things like that. But, Rich, I tell you what, this has been fantastic information. I really think the home inspection industry as a whole, we need to hear this right now. And hopefully you get some people that will be calling you. If you go to the Contact Us page on sofi.us, Rich’s phone number’s right there. You can sign up right there. And I can vouch for the program. I’ve been on it. It works great. Single inspector firms, multi-inspector firms. It’s a great way to get through this economy.

Richard Law
And we also do a lot of resumes for home inspectors that are involved with field inspections. See you, you got a copy of the resume we just did for that Tampa home inspector.

Ian Robertson
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, I saw that. It’s a very nice resume.

Richard Law
So you might want to share that with some of your associates there.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, so if you need a resume to send to these companies that you’re calling, he actually, Rich sent me a copy of one that they made for a home inspector recently. And it was beautiful. So you can order that right on sofi.us as well. So lots of resources. Spend, spend some time there. If you have time, this winter, rifle through that whole website, join, and give it some time. Don’t just knock it out at the beginning saying, nah, this isn’t gonna work for me. Thank you again, Rich.

Richard Law
Okay, well take care, and like I say, get out there, and start building up another side business. And things may slow down more in 2023. So, so just kind of be ready.

Ian Robertson
Thank you. Great advice.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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