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LEARN HOW TO GROW YOUR INSPECTION BUSINESS WITHOUT HAVING TO HIRE OTHER INSPECTORS

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Today, I wanted to talk about growing your inspection business, but not by hiring additional inspectors. It sounds counterintuitive because one of the first things that we think about when we want to grow our inspection business is hiring new inspectors. It’s kind of the hallmark maybe in our mind of what makes a great inspection company. But before we jump in and try to hire another full-on inspector, let’s consider some of the information. First of all, how many inspections are you actually doing per year? Let’s say you hit a milestone and you’re doing 400 inspections per year. That’s fantastic. You’re doing a great job but now, with hiring another inspector right now, make sense.

You might be thinking depending on what inspections you offer in addition to home inspections; I have to pick up radon tests. I have to make phone calls, I have to do this, a lot of administrative stuff, and there’s just not enough time for me to be able to take on more inspections. First of all, that’s how we feel. Listen to the other podcast that we did a couple of weeks back on, you aren’t charging enough. Try raising your prices first, working less and making more and growing that way. But after you’ve listened to that and you still want to grow, consider a couple of options besides hiring a full-on home inspector.

First, the disadvantage of hiring a full-on home inspector. We all worry about the classic case. We get a guy trained. We spend all this time and money with him and he leaves. He starts his own company. He knows all the tricks of the trade, what we do and how we go about it. They take some of our referring agents and client base with them and they start their own business. It’s a real worry and it’s real because it happens. Happened to me. One of my competitors in my market was an inspector that we trained from start to finish, showed him all the tricks of the trade. And then one day, he said, ‘I’m out’. He started his own business which is fine. He’s a friend of mine. I love the guy. He’s a great inspector but there’s that disadvantage of hiring a full-on home inspector.

Now, eventually, we’ll need to hire a full-on home inspector or several full-on home inspectors to be able to grow our business if that’s our goal. But consider some things to do first. Take the Ford Production Line Model to your home inspection company first. This is what I did and it worked out really well for me. So, for an instance, could we train a guy to do one specific job? An inspection type that comes up a lot, or have them do some other things that don’t take necessarily the full skill set of a fully-trained home inspector. I’ll give you an example of where I started.

In my area, radon tests happen on 80 90% of inspections. We never really like doing radon tests because a couple of reasons, it’s a lot of extra work to go back. If your inspection is an hour away, you have an hour there and an hour back again, 2 hours to just pick up a radon test. In addition to that, if you set the radon test on the inspection, you now had to go back and meet the sellers. It was never really a very comfortable situation sometimes especially if you found a lot of defects. So, what we did was when we got really busy, instead of hiring a whole other inspector to do as many inspections as I was doing and picking up radon test, I hired a guy to just up radon test. We pay him $50 per test that he picks up.

For us, it’s amazing. We’re charging more than that per hour for a home inspection service. So, it worked out great for us because we were saving money. He loved it because his typical radon test pickup, half an hour there, half an hour back and he’s done. He was making $50 an hour. He was thrilled. The same radon guy has worked for us for I can’t even remember how many years and its always things worked out well. So, that’s us thinking how else we could manage that how else we could make that happen. So, there are a lot of different services that we offer that we could actually tighten up, be able to do more home inspections, get more base fees and then give inspection work out to those who specialize in those particular fields.

So, for instance, that radon guy, he’s not going to leave us and start a competing home inspection company. He doesn’t know how to do a home inspection. He’s not going to go start a whole another competing business. He’s going to stick with us because we bring him work. So, by compartmentalizing our business model, we can actually grow without taking on another home inspector. A couple of other examples, we would hire a couple of different people to do water samples for us. Water samples take forever here in my area especially if you’re doing what’s called an FHA short form or heaven forbid, the FHA long-form, they can take weeks. So, we would hire a guy, he would go out, take the samples, bring it to the lab, and that was it.
By the time we would get to the home inspection, the samples were either there or there a couple days afterward and he wasn’t going to start a competing company with us. Same thing goes for other ancillary inspections. Do you have a guy that could do your pool inspections for you? So, he may go off and do his own pool inspection company but very likely, he’s going to want to stick with you if he knows pools. Hey, this guy feeds me pool inspection work. I’m going to stick with him. Perhaps, we offer septic inspections. If you don’t offer septic inspections, that’s fine, but I’ll tell you, it’s been one of the best ancillary services that we have ever added to our repertoire.

We make almost as much on those as we do a home inspection. They don’t take quite as long and to be frank, people kind of leave you alone by your big open hole of pool water. Nobody wants to hang out with you, so you get some alone time. You don’t have people following you. The reports aren’t that as much as a home inspection report, fantastic service. But when you do offer that one thing that we tried is having a guy just go and dig the hole. So, we’d show up to an inspection. The guy would go dig the hole, find a septic tank, rope it off so that nobody would fall in. And we’d go check it start the hydraulic load test and do a couple of other things that we’re going to do. Then go back in and he’d watch things.

It was beautiful. He didn’t need to be overly skilled or know how to even do a septic inspection. He was thrilled he was making good money for just digging a hole and we were thrilled because we’re making good money and not having to worry about him starting a competing business. Then he’d fill in the hole, put all the stuff away and that’s it while we were doing the home inspection. I took a play from the playbook of one of my competitors too. I saw on Facebook one day that he was sitting in a driver’s seat writing up reports. And some guy I’d never seen before was driving him around and I got to give credit where credits too. That was a genius idea.

So, say he could do 3 inspections a day and they each took him two and a half hours. He would do those three inspections, drive to each inspection, have to pull over somewhere, kind of fill in the rest of his report or bring reports home and write them up. But now he has this guy driving him around. The guy doesn’t need to be incredibly skilled. Well, maybe he needs to be skilled as a driver, so that he doesn’t crash into things. But ultimately, he’s driving him around while he’s writing his reports. He would be done with his reports, paperwork, admin stuff, phone calls, whatever needed to do by the time they got to the next inspection.

The guy would get out, unload his ladder, take out all the stuff, if he made a mess coming out of the attic, he would be there and clean it up pack everything away. So, now his inspections were shorter but just as thorough. So, now he could do more inspections per day be home at 5 o’clock, and be done with all of his reports and admin stuff. But he didn’t have to take on a full-on home inspector to do it and that guy is not going to go anywhere. If you pay him $20 an hour to drive around, let’s say you have a 10-hour day, that’s $200 you paid him. But if you could do a whole full other inspection at $600, you made $400, were home earlier and was done with all your extra stuff. Everybody’s happy with that situation.

Then, there’s the obvious one of support staff. None of us really probably want to stand around an inspection site in the crawl space be getting phone calls, missing inspections, answering questions and text messages, all while we’re trying to focus on inspecting a home. So, support becomes very important. But I never really went for hiring one person to be our support staff because the same thing, they get really good that you run your business on it and then they leave. There’s a broker in the area that I work very closely with for many, many years, great guy. And his business was basically built on this one admin. She ran the show and she was awesome until one day she left. Family matters, nothing she could control, she’s gone. It literally brought his brokerage to a screeching halt.
So, I learned from that situation and I went with a call center. Now, you can say what you want about call centers, but our revenue went up and our close rate went up. Because anytime that somebody called, someone answered. Someone left a message; they follow up 3 times to try to catch that lead. Way more than I do as a business owner. So, I could take on more inspection work and to be perfectly honest have a little bit of a quieter day with someone else answering our phones. A lot of them are going to charge a base fee, let’s say it’s 400 bucks a month, just a random number. And a lot of them will charge about 20, 25 bucks per inspection that they seal the deal on.

Okay great, I raised our prices $30 and that covered the expense. And that one $400 fee each month, they would win us quite a bit more work than that $400 fee and I had a quieter day. Now, if you’re brand new and just starting out, that’s not going to apply really well. But early on in the game, I went with a call center. Because by doing that, I could compartmentalize my business. That call center is not going to go and go work with one of my competitors and say, ‘Hey, here’s all of Ian’s secrets.’ They’re going to do their job. So, taking all of those different parts, sometimes we think that the very first thing that we need to do to grow our inspection business is to start hiring other full home inspectors.

Could we, first of all, increase our revenue. Then, increase the number of inspections that we can comfortably do by adding on other people in unskilled areas. A great example of this too is hiring a helper. Maybe we’re on inspections are taking us longer than we’d like. Maybe on the average 2,000 square foot house is taking us four hours. Could we cut that time in half by not having to do all the little things? Such as outlets, doors, things that are not really going to be hyper-critical typically. We could hire somebody to be unskilled labor. Could we get our inspections done in two hours, still give that same thorough home inspection to our client but have that guy test all the windows and doors and outlets for us. So, we can focus on the attic, crawl space, heating units, structural components, and things like that.

By growing our inspection business that way, we may be able to take on more, grow even better over time, and not just get bigger. And become more profitable is really the ultimate goal of it. So, consider growing your business without hiring other home inspectors first and see if you can become more profitable that way. It’s what we did and it worked out great. Hope you enjoy this information. We look forward to our next podcast.

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].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

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