PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. So every so often I’ll do a podcast based on basically volume of questions. So guys contact me, they’ll message me, they’ll call me. And a common theme lately is getting past what we call the stall. So I’m going to use a smoking meat analogy here. So anybody who has ever smoked meat knows about the stall. So the science behind it as basically evaporative cooling. So as meat is cooking, enough moisture is coming out of it, that it is cooling itself to the point where the temperature won’t go up. So if you need your, you know, roast at 195 degrees in the center, for hours sometimes if you’ve ever done a brisket, it’ll get stuck at like 140 degrees or 170 degrees, and it’ll stay there for hours because it’s cooling at the same rate that is heating up. So it just gets stuck. So if that analogy doesn’t mean anything to you, I’m sorry. But basically, we’re gonna be talking about when we get the stall in our business, when we get the stall as an inspector.

This has happened to me many times, and I remember the first time it happened. And for us, it’s, you know, maybe it’s different, maybe we get the stall at 20 inspections a year, like we did 20 inspections last year, and we’re only going to be on course to do 20 this year, or, you know, you can’t get past doing three or four inspections a week, or maybe the most common stall that I hear is when you hit about around 400 to 500 inspections a year, maybe a little less, maybe a little bit more. And you can’t seem to get far enough ahead to hire an inspector. So we stall. And so sometimes it’s months, sometimes it’s years where we’re stuck at this one spot in our business. And we’re not moving backwards, but we’re not moving forward. It’s the stall.

So anyways, I digress. First time it happened for me, I remember being really stressed because I’m like, maybe I’ve just hit the pinnacle of what I can do. And I wasn’t doing a lot of inspections at the time, it was like year one of my business, so I was probably just overthinking it. But those thoughts kind of go through our mind, maybe this is all I can do, maybe, maybe I need to do this or that kind of go forward. Or maybe we started go back a little bit and we really, really start to worry about. So what can we do to get past the stall?

So here’s a couple of things that I’ve been sharing with inspectors as they contact me and things that helped me. So a couple of them are going to sound rote because they are because they’re true. So a couple of things that we can do. Let’s say we’ve hit 400 inspections a year, and we want to hire an inspector. But we can’t afford another inspector. That’s the most common stall that I hear of, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, charge more and add ancillaries. It’s the way to go. So if we’re at 400 inspections, and we can’t afford another inspector, we’re not charging enough. So we may say, well, I’m already at, you know, 450, which is, you know, $45 above national average, or whatever it is right at the moment, kind of goes up and down lately a lot. Okay, that’s great. But if we want to hire another inspector, we’re going to need to make more money. And the two primary ways we do that is by charging more or adding ancillaries.

The first one is an easy mathematical equation, when it gets a little bit busier in the spring, raise our prices, maybe $25 per service. As we get to the summer months, maybe another $25, maybe more, whatever it is, raising our prices. So now if we do 400 inspections, we’re making a lot more. And it’s easier to charge that much if you do it in small increments. But it’s also easier to hire an inspector when we’re making more per inspection. Adding ancillaries is the hard part. And I say that because we always get nervous when we go out of our comfort zone, which we’re actually going to mention that later on about being uncomfortable. But it’s really important that we consider other ancillaries that we’ve never considered before. And this comes up a lot. And I’m going to repeat a phone call that I have probably once or twice a week with guys. Ian, I’m stuck. How do I grow my business? I tell them, add ancillaries, and they say, I’m already doing them all. I’m like, oh, okay. So you do septic inspections? No, no, I don’t do those. In my state, people don’t want that, they want a septic company to come and do this and that. Okay. Do you do chimney inspections? No, there’s too much liability in that. Okay, do you do sewer scopes? I’m too worried about breaking the cap on the hub. And I go through a whole list of ancillaries, and they have reasons why they can’t do it. Instead of thinking you know what, maybe I could do this. 90% of the time we’re not doing all the ancillaries that we could be doing, we’re just not going out of what we’re comfortable doing. Every ancillary that I’ve ever added on to my service, I’ve always been stressed, I’ve always been a little anxious about it, and it is almost invariably ended up being awesome.

So there’s two benefits to the stall, to overcoming the stall to adding ancillaries. Number one, it’s going to increase our per inspection fee. So you add a 400, 500, $600 septic inspection on to a $500 home inspection. I mean, you just made another, you just doubled your inspection fee.

And the second benefit is you end up getting more work out of that too. The mentality of consumers of getting everything in one stop is important now, to them anyways, so if they can get the septic inspection and the home inspection all in one, awesome. Can they get the sewer scope and the home inspection all in one? Great. Wood destroying insect and you name it, if they can get it all in one, we’re going to win more work that way. So either one of those things will help get us past the stall.

The third benefit is actually a completely separate point to help us get past the stall. Oftentimes, again, the stall happens when we reached the point where we want to hire somebody, we’re at the max of what we can do, but we can’t get past it. The more ancillaries we have, the easier it is to hire. One of my favorite ways to hire is not hire a full inspector. Now I have to train him to do a home inspection, a septic inspection, a pool inspection, wood destroying insect, I have to train and do all of this. But if I have enough pool inspections coming in, and I realize this may be a bad analogy for you guys down south, up north here, we get anywhere from two to $500 for a pool inspection. You guys don’t always get that. But just saying, I can keep a part time guy after hours busy all day long. So this guy might be a pool guy or work somewhere, whatever. And I can just have him three to five times a week do pool inspections after work. He’s a thrilled happy camper making an extra grand or two a week. And I’m thrilled because I can go do our regular inspections, and then he’s just doing that after hours. And nobody’s upset about it. Because typically the pools are going to be outside, and it’s just an extra service. Same thing with septics. Can we hire a guy? You know, maybe we’re doing 500 inspections a year, but 75 of them come with septics. Can we hire a part time guy that only does septic inspections? It’s a lot easier to hire when we have tasks like that. My favorite has always been, you know, radon and pools to be able to get somebody to do with that particular service. And I’ve mentioned this on a previous podcast probably a couple years ago now. But one of my favorite things to do, too, is hire not just for tasks, but to support what we already do. So that’ll be our next way to get past the stall.

So stay, we’re stuck at 350 inspections a year. And we don’t want to hire another inspector, we just don’t want the trouble. But we want to get some more inspections in during the busy season. So we don’t lose some agents that trust us and don’t have to turn down so much work. Hire a guy to drive us around. It really does work out better than you’d expect. You don’t need to pay someone a ton of money. It can be a college kid off in the summertime in our busy season, and say hey, dude, do you want to, you want to drive me around all day, I’ll give you $18 an hour or $20 an hour 15, I don’t know what is normal in your area. But they’re gonna make more than Uber. And you’re gonna have a guy that just drives you. So what that does is a couple of things. He’s not going to just drive you know, he’ll do things like maybe clean up after you when you hop into the attic. Or maybe we’re doing a septic inspection, you could fill in the hole, get our ladder out, whatever it happens to be, bring us a bottle of water, we’d be surprised how much time that saves. So if we’re at an inspection for three hours, all of a sudden, two hours and 10 minutes in, we’re done. And he’s put our ladder away. And we’re hopping in the car. And on the way to the next inspection, we kind of button up our report, send it out. And instead of doing two inspections a day, we could do three and be home by five.

One of my competitors who did very well for himself in his business, that was one of the ways that he actually grew to multi-inspector. He didn’t hire inspectors, and that’s what I did, I didn’t really hire full inspectors at first, is hire people to do things like that for you hire someone in the summer to drive us around. Do we have a nephew or a niece that can do that? Awesome. Bring them along, and have them drive while we write reports. Is our wife or somebody else answering the phone for us, or I guess I should say, is our wife or maybe we’re a female home inspector and our husband is answering the phone for us, whatever the arrangement is, can they answer the phones while we drive? I mean, if they’re driving, if they’re sitting around waiting for the phone to ring anyways, can they drive us to the next inspection and call those people back? Not ideal, but just brainstorming. Anything to get the drive time away from us so that we can use that time to answer client questions and finish our report and call real estate agents. Great way to get past the stall.

So, so far, charge more, easy one, I say it all the time. If we’re doing that many inspections, and we’re trying to get past the stall, charge more. Add more ancillaries, always a big deal. Again, really review in our heads, am I actually doing every ancillary that I could, or I’m actually holding back because I’m, I just don’t want to do that ancillary? You know what, nobody likes looking at a big hole full of poop. But the people really pay us a lot of money to look at a hole with poop in it. Talking about septic inspections, I don’t know what else is in that job description. This one, I hesitate to say though, expand our territory, and I say that temporarily, should only do that temporarily, in my opinion. I realize it’s an easier way to get work. So if we have a one hour radius, now we have a two hour radius. I find logistically, it’s a business killer in the long run. And here’s why. I’m going to tell you the bad part first. But the good part second. Bad part is if you have a two hour driving radius, if you’re on one side of your territory, and you have an emergency in the other, that’s a two to four hour drive, that’s a lot of territory to cover. More miles on the car. If we’re not hiring somebody to drive us, that’s a lot of time behind the wheel, that we don’t get to write reports, build our business, and do other things. A lot of gas, a lot of overhead. And if you’ve ever done anything like radon testing or something, and we have to go back to a house, it’s a big headache. And logistically, I’ve always found that we make less per hour with a larger territory. A lot of people argue with me on that, and that’s fine. The goal is to have a smaller territory, or his own territory for multi inspector. But if we’re single guy, a smaller territory, so it’s manageable, and we make our blows counts so that we make the most per hour. But if we’re stuck in the stalls, say we’re stuck at 200 inspections a year, and we need to get to 300. That’s our business goal. I want to get to 300 inspections a year, temporarily, can we expand our territory by, maybe it’s an hour and we now go an hour and a half. Okay, that opens up some more turf. If we have to, could we go two hours? And I say temporarily, because what will happen is as we expand, we’ll still be building up our agent referral base, our client base, everything, eventually we’ll want to shrink it again, which is always the hardest part is shrinking a territory because there’s an agent, you know, two and a half hours away that we really love to work with, sends us 10 inspections a year, they’re really great. Sometimes we need to cut them off and maybe refer them out to somebody else, or a totally different podcast, maybe start another business in that area, or expand later on when we have more inspectors. But either way, to get past the stall, sometimes we have to make our territory temporarily bigger.

The next point is hire part time first. So if we’re not too keen on having guys do ancillaries for us like that, like I mentioned before, try not to find a home inspector full time. The ebbs and flows of a fledgling home inspection business can be pretty rough, and trying to keep a guy full time employed can be a little bit hard at first. So if we are in the stall and trying to get into multi inspector, maybe start with hiring a guy that’s a retired HVAC contractor. I don’t know why they make great inspectors, but retired police officers, retired military, ex-HVAC guys, and ex-plumbers really do make easy transitions into the home inspection field. I think the first two because they’re used to walking into a room and commanding a situation and dealing with people. The second two, I think they’re just trades that are used to having to communicate and understanding enough about other trades and dealing with people to get their job done. I don’t know. And again, I’m going off on a tangent here. But find a guy that’s like you know what, I don’t want to work full time. I’m going to work Thursdays and Fridays. All right, cool. Or a guy’s like hey, you know what? I could use a Saturday. I’m off all week. I could, I could do your Saturdays for you. Perfect. Try hiring part time first. And it may not seem like we’re making much headway, so maybe the guy does one or two inspections a week, and he ends up doing, you know, 47 inspections all year. It’s like, okay, that didn’t really push me much past where I’m at at the stall. But it did get us past it, didn’t it? Now maybe that guy wants two days a week, or maybe he has a buddy that would make a really great inspector. That’s how we build, it’s like the image of a ladder with the rungs that are too far apart, we’d love to take those big steps, but they’re not practical. Sometimes the smaller steps on a ladder are easier to do, and eventually get us to where we’re going.

The last part of this is going to be a little bit more of a TED talk. And I hate, always hate that, I hate TED talks. But it comes down to getting uncomfortable or embracing the stall. So let’s talk about the first part of that. We can, to get past a stall, we have to get uncomfortable. If we’re at 300 inspections, and we want to get to 500, any one of these things sounds good listening to it over a podcast but turning it into something in practicality is work, thought, and getting uncomfortable. Changing and training your agents and clients to expect something different from us. Oh, we’re going to be an extra half hour because we have this added service that they paid for. Might have a couple agents get a little tiffy at us, okay. Will it help us get past the stall? Can we get uncomfortable? If we’re very comfortable with what we do, but it’s not working, it’s the silliest thing. I had recently, not long ago, a home inspector, contact me. And he said, Ian, none of this works, talking about a specific thing, I don’t want to give too much detail, he goes this doesn’t work. And I said okay, well, what did you do? And he listed the things, I’m like, that’s nothing like what I told you to do. He goes, yeah, but the other stuff I’m just not comfortable doing. That’s not how I roll. That’s not how I do things. And I’m like, okay, so you’d rather do something you’re comfortable with that doesn’t work, rather than something you’re uncomfortable with that does work. And I was very blunt with him. Because I’m not blunt guy, I’m like, don’t tell me it doesn’t work unless you actually did the thing.

So, if we are comfortable with doing an inspection, just a home inspection and maybe a radon test, or whatever it is. But we don’t want to expand out of that. Or we don’t want to expand into, we work alone, we don’t want anything else. Whatever it happens to be. It sounds like maybe we’re doing what we’re comfortable with, instead of what actually works. If you ever get a chance watch that show my 600 pound life. I watch that, like some sort of junkie, I have no idea why it enthralls me so much. But it’s funny how each episode goes basically. I started in season four in case you actually go and watch this. But starting in season four people come in, they’re like, I do the best I can, but it’s not working. He’s like you can, you’re not doing, the doctor’s like you’re not doing the best you can, you weigh 712 pounds. So then they go, they try to lose weight, they come back and they say we did everything that you said, but I still gained weight, and he goes you didn’t do everything I said, otherwise you would have lost 70 pounds. And it takes a long time for them to get it out of their head that they need to be uncomfortable. And you’ll often hear them say, that’s not how I do things. I need to do things on my time. And those are the ones that never lose the weight. So we need to get uncomfortable to get past the stall. Now everybody’s gonna go watch my 600 pound life. I tell you what, it’s a great show. And I don’t know why, I’m mesmerized by it.

So, if we don’t want to get uncomfortable, the next thing we can do is the other thing that I mentioned was embrace the stall. Now, what does that mean embracing the stall? Well, think about it this way. Maybe it’s not the stall. Maybe it’s just a good spot to be. Maybe the meat that we’re smoking has reached its temperature. And it’s delicious and delightful. We may have hit a spot in our business where maybe we’re not stalled. But maybe it’s the sweetspot. So step back. We do podcasts on how to be successful as a solo inspector or a multi inspector firm. Do we really want to go any bigger? Maybe we have two guys. Awesome two guys for inspecting. And we want to get bigger, but we can’t seem to. Step back and say, well, you know, maybe it’s manageable with me and two inspectors. You know what? They’re well paid. They’re happy. We increase our prices a little bit every year. I’m making a killing. What is expanding past what I consider the stall going to really do for my business. Or maybe we’re a single inspector, and we hit 300 inspections a year, and we charge, you know, $700 an inspection. You know what, you’re making money hand over fist. Is 300 inspections a year bad? No, you’re basically working a part time job making a killing. So sometimes it’s not the stall, sometimes it’s a great spot to be in. And sometimes there’s gonna be ebb and flows, maybe we’ll do 280 inspections, and then the next year we’ll do 320. But whatever, as long as we’re not going backwards unless we want to go backwards. So either get uncomfortable, is what I would say, or embrace the, the stall, so to speak, maybe we’re at temp, and that’s, and that’s really where we want to be.

But I get talked to a lot about this by inspectors, Ian, I’m stuck. If I were to sum up this whole podcast, if you’re stuck, either like where you’re at, or get uncomfortable, and try everything that we’ve been avoiding for a time, and try something new. But anyways, that is this episode. Thank you very much for listening in. We’re gonna have some great guests coming up, by the way, we have some awesome stuff in the works for guests. So listen in, and we’ll talk soon.

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.