PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Welcome back everybody to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We have a great episode for you today. Today we have on Greg Brooks from Rocket Station. How are you, Greg?

Greg Brooks
Good, Ian. How are you doing?

Ian Robertson
Hey, not bad. Thanks. Hey, I’m really glad to have you on. We were talking a little bit before the show. I think you are more involved in the industry, the home inspection industry, than I expected. You’ve been around a bit, haven’t you?

Greg Brooks
Yeah, we have. We’ve got some great clients and some great partnerships. The company itself has always been in the real estate world. And then we made a big push into the home service, and specifically the home inspection industry, about three and a half, four years ago. And then like we were joking about before, as a kind of a typical salesperson who’s sold everything from band aids to sports supplements, I feel like I know more now about home inspections than I ever thought I would, you know, previous starting to work with, with some of the, some of the top companies in the industry.

Ian Robertson
Well, you know, it’s funny, because, you know, I get emails all the time saying, hey, would you like us to be on the podcast or this person, that person? Your name came up, and I heard you on a different home inspection podcast. You were at one of the IEB conferences, or you spoke there. And you actually work with, I think you told me, about 150 different home inspectors at the moment.

Greg Brooks
Yeah, yeah, we do all across the country. We have a couple in Canada as well. I mean, ranging from, you know, your typical guy in the truck, solo operator, all the way up to, I mean, one of our largest clients, they both have a commercial and residential business, and they employ close to 120 inspectors down in South Florida.

Ian Robertson
Oh, wow. Fantastic. So I really want to crack into that egg here and talk about it. But let’s hear a little bit about you first, Greg, how did you, what’s Rocket? Well, first of all, what’s Rocket Station? Where are you located? You know, any of that kind of information to help us go?

Greg Brooks
Yeah, definitely. So Rocket Station. So we’re based in Dallas, Texas. So that’s where I’m at. I’m actually working from home today, like most of us do now. I live on the Fort Worth side of the city. We, we’re the leading virtual staffing company within the real estate industry. So our business, we really focus on four core demographics and four clients. So we have a big property management business helping property managers across the country manage their their rental units, we have a real estate investor arm of our business as well, we have a retail, so both commercial and residential, traditional real estate, helping agents and brokers kind of build out back office teams. And then our discussion today, we have a home services division. So everything from general contractors to home inspectors to plumbers, our company employs close to 2,000 team members overseas in the Philippines. And what we do for our clients is help them find that back offices support that, you know, so many of us through COVID, and now the changing, you know, market conditions are trying to balance making money, being a profitable business, with being able to take over market share. I know that’s a topic you guys talk about a lot on the podcast, but we really help you find trained, talented, dedicated virtual assistants based halfway around the world and plug them into your business and help you really leverage their abilities. You know, whether that’s a scheduler, outbound salesperson to local offices, and agents, setting appointments, really, whatever capacity you find yourself strapped as a home inspector, we help you, you know, hire that support to be able to run a more efficient and effective business.

Ian Robertson
Nice, very cool. So it sounds like you guys have like a wide range of things that you do. But specifically talking about how it matters to a home inspector, I think there’s a stigma attached to anytime you hear the word, or the term, VA, virtual assistant, is, you know, the quintessential getting a call at seven o’clock at night, somebody with an accent on the other end trying to sell you car insurance, or the impression that somebody’s going to call your office or try to get help with something. And they’re going to get that impression. It’s just a weird feel. So if you don’t mind me asking, what are some ways that you think that home inspectors could use VAs?

Greg Brooks
Yeah, no, definitely. We definitely hear all those sentiments right? It’s kind of, it’s the industry’s fault that that VA term, right even the term virtual assistant, we don’t use it for any of our marketing, we don’t view our virtual team members, as you keep hearing me saying virtual team members, because they really are, they’re a dedicated team member who’s just as capable, talented, valuable as somebody in the office. You know, even this, the phrase virtual assistant, you think, you know, basic level work, admin work, really kind of dollar an hour type task, and that’s, that’s not what what our team members are. In terms of the home inspection space, really, the only thing that we can’t do, and I kind of joke with a lot of our clients, is we haven’t figured out virtual home inspections yet. So anything you’re doing in the truck, obviously you know, that’s reserved for your, for your trained team. But where we specialize is more of the back office function of running a home inspection company. So that can range anything from social media presence, right, having someone that can consistently post or manage our different social media channels, run our marketing, email marketing, drip sequences, run our CRM for us to manage our clients better. And then there’s also the sales and customer service standpoint of that as well. You know, especially in the industry, there’s a lot of people that they leverage call centers. You know, with mixed reviews, what we do is give you, you know, the benefits of a call center from call coverage or from the cost of using a call center, as opposed to having somebody in the office answer the phone, or you know, your own personal cell phone ringing at all hours of the day. But with the dedicated expertise, similar to having somebody in your office higher, so from scheduling inspections, to doing customer, customer satisfaction calls, post both to the property inspected, as well as to the agent that you’re working with. Another big way that home inspectors leverage our services is to help gain that market share. And to consistently have team members, whether it’s through email marketing, whether it’s through traditional cold calling, but reaching out to those top performing brokers and agents in your market, requesting their time, right, whether that’s an educational presentation, going to the office, or if it’s just meeting for a one on one coffee to create that rapport, and that, you know, that friendly relationship that a lot of this industry revolves around to get to being the preferred home inspector of that top performing agent, you know, that takes reaching out, making the connection, following up, sending little gifts or, you know, marketing material to their office. And all of those things can be automated through a virtual assistant, where they’re the ones that’s actually handling the relationship, all you have to do is show up to the presentation or go on the coffee to, you know, to actually meet the agent.

Ian Robertson
So I’m really glad you brought up all those points, because I think that’s why most home inspectors turned down their podcasts sometimes when they hear VA, because that’s the stigma. Well, they’re just going to, you know, send an email, I’m going to have to answer all these questions, I could have just done it faster myself, in reality with a little bit of, you know, hey, here’s what I expect of you. It’s actually a pretty fantastic deal. So we actually use VAs, and I was telling you this beforehand, we had a VA that we hired. And she’s fantastic. She’s, she’s a team member, she’s, it’s not like, oh, hey, we’re getting her through an agency kind of feeling. It’s, she’s part of the team. We were, I mean, we were just joking about the whole team with her, you know, what’s her favorite dessert, and, you know, laughing at cat videos, you know, just kind of, you know, a little joking session here. But she’s fantastic. She’s turned into way more than that. She does support. She does all sorts of tasks. She’s our best graphic designer, she does fantastic work, I think. I think she does, like 80, 90% of our graphic art now. One of our developers actually started off as quote, unquote, VA. He is a, he’s an amazing developer. So that may be a little bit of an unusual find, maybe both of those were unusual finds. But yeah, a VA is not a bad thing, in fact, they’re, they’re part of the Inspector Toolbelt family, they’re some of our favorite people. So it’s a very doable thing to have a VA work with you and accomplish all those tasks.

Greg Brooks
Yeah, and I think like what we’ve seen is, and home inspectors, they’ve always had a certain level of like, remote to their business, right? Because you’re in a truck, you’re at someone’s house, you’re at a commercial property. So I think like bridging that gap from like, the traditional brick and mortar, come into the office to this new virtual hybrid, work from home, whatever you want to call it world, plays right into how we feel and how our clients feel VAs really bring value to their business, is because it’s not a VA in the traditional sense of it’s like, hey, I’m gonna give you this list of five things. And you just do that, because I don’t want to do it. Right, all of our VAs that work for our clients, they look, act, and feel just like they’re sitting in Buffalo, New York, in Dallas, Texas, in Boise, Idaho, right, they just, their office is, a computer screen, so you’re able to really maximize, and candidly, just be able to leverage, like better talent than what you ever could before. Right? If you wanted to hire a social media manager in Boise, Idaho, there was a going market rate for that, or it was even more expensive in big markets like New York or LA, right. So for most home inspectors, they just either didn’t do anything about it, or they handled it themselves. Now with platforms like us, you can tap into the same caliber of talent, but because they happen to live halfway around the world, it’s more affordable. You can, you can leverage them more, and when done the right way, there’s no difference in feeling in terms of, they are your team member, right? It doesn’t, it’s not this person that kind of sits in the corner and oh, what do they do? It’s somebody that you can hop on a zoom with and, you know, talk about how was your weekend, how was your Christmas, share stories about your kids and also get the work done at a really high level that can help you scale and grow and run a more efficient business where you’re not having to be the person that does everything and turns every wrench and approves every piece of paperwork, you know, when done the right way. It’s just like hiring that employee that most home inspectors need right now to just handle whatever the function is in the back office.

Ian Robertson
And I think it actually works better that way, if you make them part of the team, like if you keep everybody at arm’s length, that’s, that’s never really going to get you the best results, you know, making them part of the team is better in general anyways. But you talk about a lot of these different tasks. So would you hire one, and I’ll just use the term VA, just because it’s the vernacular that people are familiar with. But you hire one VA to do your social media and other VA to do your outbound calling, or is it like, one VA kind of does it all? Or how does that work?

Greg Brooks
I think we break it down. And when we talk about, like, the talent management side of it, we break it down. Everyone’s got different skills and different specializations. You know what I mean? So for our clients, whenever we’re drawing up and working with them to take that deep dive and discover like, okay, what do you need? Like, do you need a salesperson? Do you need a just some scheduling support? Do you need someone with a customer service background? Do you need a CRM guru, right, that can manage all your email marketing and your automations? It’s really on a case by case basis. And it’s really, and I’m sure some of your listeners may have heard this before. The VA industry, the BPO industry, which is the Business Process Outsourcing industry, which is what VAs are a part of, they do a bad job of selling VAs, like a unicorn, or like a magic pill, where it’s like, oh, I need a salesperson, and I need someone to help with ledgering my, doing my accounting at the end of the month, and my payroll and oh, if they also knew how to use my CRM, that’d be great. And the VA industry says, perfect, here’s that person, you know, like those skill sets are very different. The experience that you would have to truly be a talent with any one of those four or five skill sets, you know, most people don’t have that. So what we do is we’re really real with our clients, and we really evaluate everything a client needs on a case by case basis. So we always encourage our clients, like, bring us your laundry list, right? Whether it’s your wife is the one at home or your husband is the one at home who’s doing all the payroll and, and paying vendors or is it a social media manager? Or are you looking to grow your business and you want to, you know, make 150 cold calls next month to top performing agents. Bring us everything. And then we help our clients parse out based on skill sets, based on experience, based on areas of expertise, exactly the type of person each role would need, from a personality profiling perspective, as well as from a workplace experience perspective. And we, I mean, we have clients, and we have VAs that have marketing backgrounds that also are great at sales, right? We have VAs that come with bookkeeping, you know, AP, AR experience, but I think what’s more important is realizing that, you know, it’s not a magic button. It’s not, hey, everything I don’t want to do or don’t have time to do, let’s just hand it over to this person and figure it out. You know, you need to evaluate it the same way you would if you were hiring somebody locally.

Ian Robertson
You know, it’s funny, you say that, too? Because I have a follow-up question. Because I think most of us are spinning our wheels in our head thinking, oh, that’d be nice to have somebody make 150 phone calls next month, or, oh, that’d be nice to have them do follow-up phone calls or do this or do that. But a lot of us as home inspectors don’t think about the little things that we do that we could outsource. What are the things that you find that most inspectors send you a laundry list, I need somebody to do this, this and this. What are the things that you call back and say, hey, there’s five things that aren’t on your list that I don’t think you’re thinking about right now. What are those? If you don’t mind me asking?

Greg Brooks
No, for sure. So I think it’s the relationship management with agents. I think home inspectors, for the most part, are really great home inspectors. Most of them are not really great salespeople or relationship managers. And what I mean by that is, A, maybe just having the time, but, B, like just being the type of person where you want to proactively be going into into two different brokerages every single week and making a presentation, you know what I mean? It’s like, if I’ve got 25 home inspections lined up for the week, like number one, I don’t have time to go make a sales presentation. Number two, I’m probably not following up with the agents in that office that are throwing me work or I’m forgetting to send them that thank you text. So we always look at it, just from like, what can add like top line revenue?And if we can bring someone in there that can act as your assistant or act as your office admin, and they can be the one that owns those relationships for you, I mean, that could result in five, ten extra inspections a month just because you’re top of mind, right, just because you sent that email and said hey, you know, Happy Thanksgiving from the team at, you know, Buffalo Home Inspections. And that might be like, oh, I need a home inspector. I’ve got two deals coming to market, perfect, boom. Right. So I always like to look at the, at the revenue side of it first, like what are the most impactful, A, what is the, what is the client doing for marketing? Do they even have any? What are they doing to manage those relationships because it is such a relationship-based industry, where so much of our businesses are determined by us having that local presence with those agents and brokerages in our local communities. And how can we improve that and really differentiate ourselves from, you know, the four or five, 20 different inspection companies that are also playing in our backyard.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And I think that’s the thing that comes to my mind is the personal touch. Because, you know, I’m the kind of guy thatm I’m relatively personable, I like to talk with people, but I’m also introverted. So it’s like, I’ll be sitting there, I’m like, I need to call Joe Realtor, but I don’t feel like it. I’d rather pay somebody to do that, so..

Greg Brooks
And I feel like it’s just in sales in general. But like, a lot of home inspectors like that’s, it’s, it’s somewhat kind of foreign to them, you know what I mean? Where they feel like it’s almost this like, manipulation game to man, it’s not, right. It’s the small things. That’s why virtual team members can really be leveraged in that relationship management piece, because it’s not so much about, you know, it’s oh, Ian called me today. It’s oh, no, someone from Ian’s office called me. And they sent me a little pack of cookies, like that was really nice. It’s all those little touch points, right. It’s all just kind of the top of mind, piece of it, that I feel like a lot of home inspectors, either A, just don’t have a background or don’t realize where they can improve those relationships. Or like you said, they just don’t have the time, they just do not have the time to say, hey, we currently are working with 45 active agents. And we’ve got another list of 35 agents that haven’t sent us an inspection in three months, well, ring ring, it’d be great to give them a call or shoot them an email, and then manage that relationship. Right. So it’s just those little, minor kind of process improvements, that really can, at the end of the year, result in like exponential revenue growth, that, all that can be managed by a VA sitting halfway around the world for you. It’s just about doing it and having somebody with the hours where they can solely dedicate their focus to that piece of it.

Ian Robertson
And you know, there’s also other things that are missed opportunities for inspectors, like even having a chat widget on your website, for sure. So I was talking to a home inspector not long ago, and he was just like, oh, yeah, I had one of those on, I only get one or two chats, you know, a week or sometimes a couple a month. And so I turned it off because I would be in a crawlspace, I wouldn’t be able to chat with him. I’m like, dude, that’s you’re missing inspection.

Greg Brooks
That’s a classic excuse right? Call came in, I was in the crawlspace. Chat came in, I was I was in the attic. Right? That’s every home inspector’s nightmare.

Ian Robertson
Yes. But okay, if you don’t, even if you have a call center, I don’t know any call center right now that’s answering your website chats. Watch, now they all listened. And they’re like, oh, let’s add that service. You better copyright that. Yeah, exactly. But a VA can handle those for you. So that initial phone call, somebody answering right away, is critical. Even if they just answer, is it going to be a perfect sales pitch? Maybe, maybe not? I don’t know. But at least they get, they get that phone call answered, that chat happens. They’re on top of it. And you know, those are going to be softer skills that can be learned over time. So you may not have somebody building you a great graphic and doing that at the same time. But can they be doing something else and maybe answer a chat? Oh, yeah, we’ll be right with you. Ian’s on an inspection, can you leave me your number, I’ll have them give you a call right away. Now they have real human interaction. And they can chat with you on your website. That’s big. I chat with everybody on their website. Again, weird introvert, I’d rather just chat with you on a website than actually talk to you on the phone.

Greg Brooks
No, for sure. And it’s about, I mean, in the world that we live in, right. It’s an Amazon world where we all want the best service, and we want it fast. And we want it now. It’s about meeting your customers where they’re at right, especially in our home service area of our business. And this is across home inspections, plumbers, general contractors. I mean, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, all of our businesses are one Google scroll away from our competitor getting the business that we could have had, right, we all pay a lot of money to all these platforms, whether it’s meta in the Facebook platform, Google, Yelp, whatever. And if we don’t have someone who can respond instantly to that phone call, or within a couple of minutes to that chat bot, most of the time, even if they are an agent that really likes us, or if they are you know, the homeowner themselves booking it or the potential buyer booking it, one scroll away, they go to the next option. And if that person answers, we just lost out on a 300, 500, $800 potential inspection, right, which when you start to multiply that out, can mean real lost revenue just because we’re not meeting the customer where the customer wants to be.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and it kind of comes down to, in our industry, timing. Like you said, they’re only one click away from our competitor. I’ve always told my competitors in my market. The only reason you got that inspection and I didn’t is they happened to call you first. Because if they, if they call me first, they’re not calling my competition. We had over a 90% close rate when I was answering the phones. This is, this is what you’re doing. You’re working with us That’s a high close rate for inbound calling. So if they were calling me first. That’s it. So I need to, I need to answer that phone first, I need to get people on there before they go on to the competition. And that’s, that’s one advantage of a VA. You know, you brought out in one of your messages that you sent me in preparation for this, process mapping your operations. How does that look? So forget anybody has any kind of semblance of process mapping. Because even I, you know, sometimes I’ll go through my process and somebody be like, dude, what does that even do? You know, can you just skirt around that a little bit? Oh, yeah, of course. So pretend we don’t have any process mapping stuff. How do we go about it? And how does that look?

Greg Brooks
For sure. So process mapping, the best example I love to give any of our home, our home inspection clients, is everything that either you or your your guys or girls are doing in that truck, in a house, in a commercial building, a warehouse, there is a step-by-step checklist as to the steps that they’re going to perform, the pictures, they’re going to collect, the reports that they’re going to write, to complete that inspection. What we found is over 92% of home inspectors don’t have that same level of checklists for how they run the back office. So whether that means how they do their social media, how they handle the scheduling call, how they conduct an upsell call, how they do their bookkeeping, or payroll, a lot of it, we have in the home inspection industry, we have a spouse that works, you know, on the weekends, or part-time or full-time in the business, and they quote, unquote, handle it. Or, you know, what is also very common is, we have an office manager, someone that usually been with us for a while, who quote unquote, knows what to do, right. So when you have that, yes, it’s good, it helps us. But if you’re trying to scale and grow, and you need to hire more people to support that individual, or if there comes a day and a time when, when your spouse doesn’t want to work in the business, or you guys want to go on vacation, the business stops. So what we look at is, all the clients we work with, we tell them, you guys have processes, right? You’re running a business, you’re collecting, you’re doing transactions, there’s processes there, it’s just for most business owners, how they operate their business, is between the six inches between their ears, right? So what we really help our clients do in order to make the transition to virtual easier, but also to give the business owner that clarity on what they want this VA to do, and more importantly, how do they want the VA doing it, is we work with them to document the steps along every job, every task, every phone call, and template that out so that the training of that future virtual assistant is a lot easier, right? It’s a lot less dependent on you having to take time off or sit side-by-side with someone or get on a zoom call to show them what you do. Instead, we say, forget all of that, work with our team of professional, and let’s go through, and let us kind of download that out of your brain, and then we’ll create pages and quite literal digital documents and checklists and training videos that walk through every single process no matter how simple or complex. So that that can be leveraged in your business to expedite the training but also act as that resource, right? If you get the, you know, everyone has those situations in their business that comes up once every six months, right? It’s the one thing that if it has to come to you to get the answer, well, let’s document that. Because then we have the reference material where we can create a better customer experience, because that’s been captured, it doesn’t live in your head, it’s something that’s a part of the business that can be can be quickly looked up and information provided to the, to the customer on the other side. So it’s just all about the documentation to really run an efficient, streamlined business, from front to back.

Ian Robertson
And that’s beautiful because process mapping is extremely important. And I I’ve let out little bits of it. So I own three inspection companies. And I’ve even let out my scripts like, this is what I say on a phone call. If they say this, then you say this, and it goes right through the whole process, and even how long to be on the phone call. And how many of us have actually done that, but I can, I can give that script to somebody, and they can be selling in just a couple of hours of practice. Same thing with my first home inspection business, I started to process map everything. And the key, I’ll tell you the key to that, what I found anyways, I think you talked to that point, but I was able to replicate that. So when I started my second company, I said, here’s what we’re going to do. And it created a mirror image and it worked perfect. So a replicable process, and one that makes your business even sellable later on if you ever want to retire. Here’s everything that I do line by line. But I think you said the key, we could do a whole podcast on process mapping, but I think the key you said, is getting a third party to look at it, to get it out of our heads, and it sounds like you guys help with that, right?

Greg Brooks
Yes. And I think, I think that part of it, and it sounds like, Ian, like you may have, be of process mind. You know what I mean? Where like, that’s kind of your area where you like to excel. What I find is, most business owners, they’re really good at the big picture. Right? They know they want to hire five more inspectors next year, they know that’s going to take X amount of inspections, they know they want to start a subsidiary, they want to start a pest control company. And, you know, they have those plans, the big picture plans, the hard part there is being able to slow down and actually map out, well, okay, in order to bring on five more inspectors, we’re going to need X amount more volume. Well, what does that look like from a marketing perspective, from a sales perspective, from a scheduling, you know, customer support perspective, and they don’t, they just don’t have that ability. Candidly, I don’t have that ability either, right, we have a whole team of process developers and system integrators, who are the very detail oriented people who can take the big picture and turn it into those replicable tasks that need to be done every day to to provide that consistent product and to have a company that can grow and scale. And I think this speaks to, regardless of really any home inspector’s aspirations, for some home inspectors like, just being able to take two weeks on vacation next month, next year or this year, and not have their whole business stopped. Like, if that’s your goal, you need process mapping, right? If you want to move into another market, or if you want to double the size of your business in the next 24 months, you need process mapping, or like you said, of what a lot of our clients are finding is, if they are interested in selling, alright, maybe they’ve been a home inspector for 30, 40 years, and their back’s shot, and they’re just trying to trying to get out of it. The company that has those processes is way more valuable than the company that is them. Right? That they are the process, that they’re that crux, because whoever buys you is going to have to reinvest so much money to figure that out. Whereas if you have that booklet and have that standard operating procedure, you become so much more appealing, and the audience that you can sell to becomes become so much bigger as well.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it becomes easier for hiring an assistant, like you said to VA, hiring employees, making your team run more efficiently. But having another set of eyes on it is important, because a lot of times we’re like, what, what process, you know, somebody calls me, I put it into my software, and then I send them an invoice through such and such a program. It’s like, okay, but what program? How do you log in? You know, do you charge this kind of fee? Or that kind of thing?

Greg Brooks
What does that script look like? How are we handling that call? Are there escalations? If there are escalations, who would that go to? Exactly, all those steps. And a lot of people where they really feel this, is like hiring talent is hard, tough, time consuming, no matter what industry, no matter if you’re hiring them in your backyard, or you’re hiring them halfway around the world. The biggest piece here is empowering that team member that you are bringing on with clarity in their role in terms of what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. And documenting those steps along the way is the key to be able to do that.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I remember one time I hired an employee, and he said, I didn’t understand why you got so granular with your processes. Because I get, I get overly, I use Trello, I love Trello. And I have process and boards and cards and checklists for everything. And he’s like, three months in he goes, you know, I didn’t really have a question. You know, if I ever felt lost or anything, I just look at the checklist and go, oh, there’s the next thing, click.

Greg Brooks
Exactly.

Ian Robertson
And off we go. If we can’t put our process in a checklist, then we don’t have a process. And then if we don’t have a process, we’re stuck in the mud.

Greg Brooks
Yep, you’re the, you’re the cog in the wheel, right, you’re the center of everything, unless you’ve got a process that can be replicated over and over, that can be documented, like you said, that can be put on a document and handed to a complete stranger. And they can at least understand 80, 90% of it just from reading by the step-by-step..until you have that, I mean, kind of the comparison we like to use is, until you have that, you’re not quite a business owner, yet you’re self employed, right? You’re the one that it’s got to come through. And it’s a breath of fresh air when you’re able to empower your team members to be able to actually own their jobs, own their responsibilities, and like as a business owner, to not have to micromanage, and I mean business is, especially in this day and age, is changing every single month, right, so to be able to like actually empower people to use their talent and do, do what it is that you hired them to do and give them clarity in that, right. I’ve never encountered a virtual team member or an in person team member who hasn’t found so much value and empowerment in having that clarity of the process that they can step in and really be able to leverage, you know, the talent that, that got them the job in the first place.

Ian Robertson
So, if anything from the entire process, I think the process mapping aspect of it is probably the most critical part because then if we hired a VA and we gave them our process, say if somebody calls, say this, this and this, here’s when I send invoices out, here’s the process for adding it to my calendar, mark it in blue and do this and whatever, is just doing that in of itself is freedom, and then we can replicate that with other people, then we can actually grow our business, because I think that’s, a lot of guys are out there, like they’ll call me, “I hired an inspector, got too hard. I didn’t know how to train them. How do I get him on his feet?” I’m like, do you have a checklist? When you show up to the inspection, do you have a script for your driveway speech, then you have your process laid out in your software, and then this is what you do after. And this is what you do in this circumstance. If you don’t have your business laid out, you don’t have a business, you have a person conducting business.

Greg Brooks
And that’s, and that’s not only, is that a lot of hours every week, every month, every year, but it’s a lot of stress, you know, just candidly, being, being self-employed, where everything goes through you, it’s tough to run a sustainable business for a long time like that.

Ian Robertson
Well, and if you’ve listened to our podcasts, we’ve talked about call centers, and just any, any way to offset that burden, because it becomes a burden, you become an inspector trying to run a business or a business owner trying to inspect, and neither of those situations work. We need to think smarter and not work harder. And a VA is one of the ways to do that.

Greg Brooks
Okay, definitely. And the thing that I see with a lot of home inspectors, it comes from a place of pride, right? A lot of time, it’s your name on the door, it’s your local rep, you know, local reputation. You know, that kind of always has the inspector doing the, well, I, no one can do it better than me. Right. So like, I think there’s, there’s one thing hopefully the listeners can take from this. It’s like, okay, let’s come to terms with your right, right, no one does it better than you. But wouldn’t it be really awesome, if you had like two or three people that could do it 80% as good as you. And in actuality, they’ll probably end up doing the job better than you. But just to get you over that hump, right? To have a virtual team member, an in-office employee, whoever, that can just handle one function of the 900 things you have to do as a home inspection company owner, and they could do at 85, 90%. Like, I feel like that’s hugely valuable, right, to any business. So I actually have to kind of disagree with your point there. Because, I’ll agree but disagree at the same time. Wasn’t it Einstein who said, If you can’t explain something simply, you simply don’t understand. For sure.

Ian Robertson
If you’re really that good, and if no one can do it as well as you, but you can’t write it down, you don’t actually know what you’re doing. You’re still just going off of feel.

Greg Brooks
And I think we’re saying the same thing. I think..

Ian Robertson
That’s why I said agree to disagree.

Greg Brooks
Yeah. I think what, what when, when you talk about being a business owner, right? Me being one of them, like you have this great pride, especially when it is your name and reputation. But in actuality, like, you’re gonna hire someone who actually has the skill set to do that thing, and they’re gonna do it 150 times better than you are, right? So it’s that, get over that pride, you know, nice way, get over yourself, right? Because it’s going to make your life, your business, everything just so much better, when you start to create these processes, explain things, and be able to get a lot of these functions onto other people’s plates.

Ian Robertson
Yep, I totally agree with you now.

Greg Brooks
But, I was trying to be nice, right? I know, like you said, there’s always egos in the room, you gotta, you gotta, I’m the new guy. And you got to always massage it. So I want to make sure we didn’t offend anybody. But just having that kind of, that realization, just tell yourself, you’re the best, but 80% will be good. And I guarantee you, your mind will be blown with like, you’ll kind of have that aha moment, right to be like, I should have done this five, ten, 20 years ago.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. I always thought that nobody else could do customer support, but me. And you should, you should see my team laugh when they see my customer support chats when we’re trying to help somebody with the app. And I’m like, hey, I’m gonna hop in on this, and show the team how it’s done. And they just sit back and they’re like, oh, boy.

Greg Brooks
Yes. No, I totally hear you. And we have a lot of people like, especially when you talk about the sales roles. They’re like, there’s no way, it’s regional. Like we’re, you know, we’re in Myrtle Beach. Like how would somebody, and the great example, I know a name that probably a lot of your listeners know, Wally Conway, just recently sold his business. So congrats to Wally. But Wally, we first started working with him, we were doing outbound calls to book him on coffee meetings in his office with some of the top performing agents and there’s no name, I feel like, bigger in the home inspection space than Wally. Right. So to be able to have somebody from halfway around the world who, you know, who’s working for Wally’s company, call on behalf of Wally, there’s a certain level of expectation there, like you’re working for Wally, and say, I mean, Wally will tell you, within six months, I mean, we had doubled what was on his calendar, in terms of inspections. And it’s, it really is that easy, right? Most of the time, it’s about, just jump in the pool, rather than just kind of stick your toe in. And I think kind of, that Wally story is a testament to that because Wally, my reputation, like people are going to expect me, and we created a process, created a way in which we could scale him 10x, and the outcome was the same, the outcome was, we want to grow the business and put more inspections on the, you know, on the calendar next next month.

Ian Robertson
So I’m not arguing with any of that. You obviously have a reputation with 100, over 150 inspection companies and some of the biggest in the country. So let me ask you how the process looks. Pretend I’m Joe Home Inspector and I, single inspector, you know, 20 inspections a week. Going nuts, can’t sleep. What do I do? What does the process look like? Do I shoot you an email? Or do I go on the website? How does that happen?

Greg Brooks
Yeah, definitely. So anyone who to any of this has kind of tickled them, and they’ve been looking at VAs, going to discovery.rocketstation.com is the best way to reach us. So that’s our calendar. We have a process development expert that will be on that call with you. And even if it’s, you don’t want to hire VA right now, but you just want to take that first step to developing processes, even if you just want to do it yourself, we would love to be a resource. And we’ve got tons of great material, whether it’s a scheduling role, whether it’s an outbound calling agent, we’ve got lots of great blueprints that could probably fast track a lot of your listeners in terms of taking that first step to developing those documented, documented processes. So discovery.rocketstation.com is the link, rocketstation.com is our website, we’ve got a home services page in there that’s got tons of resources as well. And like I said, for us, we always tell people, whether you’re looking to go virtual, and hire virtual assistants, or you’re just looking to make your next local hire, or just run a more efficient business, start with the process, spend the time, put the effort in, it’ll really help. And I mean, candidly, will save you a ton of time and a ton of money on the backside, making sure you get the right hire set up correctly to jump into the seat and the role that you need.

Ian Robertson
If anything, everyone listening should do that process, just like Greg said, just to know how your business runs, I think you’d be kind of blown away, even a single inspector, how much is involved in our business that other people wouldn’t know without laying out the process. So now we go through that process, Greg. I mean, let’s just break the question, how much is a virtual assistant? What’s that gonna cost us?

Greg Brooks
For sure. So our virtual team members, we have a, we have a full-time or part-time option. So part time, I’ll give you, kind of some qualifiers here, because it’s like, well, I don’t know if I need full-time or part-time. Part-time, if you are a one to two inspector company. And you’re looking to kind of bring in a hybrid virtual, you know virtual team member that handles multiple things, part-time is probably the right option for you. 20 hours a week minimum. A lot of our part-time clients utilize them for like, after hours, because they can do some outbound sales calls. Because agents are typically more responsive, you know, when they’re out, when they’re out with clients after hours, or they can do some weekend coverage. If you’ve got, you know, three plus inspectors, you probably are, and at least one person in the back office, you’re probably already ripe for at least a full-time, one full-time virtual assistant. So our pricing model is the same. So for end to end process mapping, meaning that we cover everything, we do all this documentation for you, we create job descriptions, we handle all the recruitment of the right type of talent, we do a one time account onboarding fee of 1,995. So it’s $2,000 to create all of these process docs we’ve talked about for you, as well as leverage our team who’s done this for 150 of some of the top performing home inspection companies out there. And then once you hire the VA, we bill hourly, just like an hourly employee, so full-time is $10 an hour, so it’s about $1,600 a month. And part-time is just a little bit more, it’s $12 per hour, so about $950 a month, and they work a set schedule. So there’s that accountability, that expectation if you need them, daytime, after hours, weekend coverage to offset your call center. We build all schedules custom based on the hours and the role that your business needs.

Ian Robertson
Great. And I like the transparency of it, because I never like saying, hey, you know, you’ll find out once you get your recruiter. Exactly. So I like the transparency of that. And I think that’s reasonable, especially, again, just the process mapping. That’s, that’s essential. So what happens? Do you interview the VAs? Do they get to choose? Like, I don’t like this person, but this person I really clicked with.

Greg Brooks
Yeah, no, definitely. So how we structure it. So for the client, where your journey begins, is really defining that role and jumping into the process documentation. So you’ll work with a dedicated team that specializes in the home inspection space, who you know, regardless of what software you’re using, phone lines you’re using, the role you want to plug them into, they’re going to be able to really, we call it the download. They’re going to be able to get that business out of your head. And our team is going to typically spend about 55 hours over the course of about three weeks, building your documentation, creating your training videos, your checklists, that you are then going to own. So we build it, we manage it for as long as we work together. If there’s updates, new roles, we’re your one-stop-shop to be that process driven piece that so many inspectors need. From there, once we get that outline, so you get started. We begin the process development, as we’re finalizing documents about two weeks later, we bring you a pool of candidates that we have already trained and evaluated over the course of six weeks. So we’re not a matchmaking service for those of your listeners that have used some other staffing agencies out there. It’s very common in the VA space where the placement of the VA, the VA company itself just acts as a placement agency where you know, they might have just interviewed and screened the person two days ago, and they’re putting them in front of you for your selection, we don’t do that. We’re very specialized. I like to say we’re about two inches wide in the industries that we service, but we’re 2,000 miles deep in terms of our level of knowledge in our clients’ businesses. So with that, we put every virtual team member candidate through six weeks of evaluation, to train and evaluate them to make sure they’re going to be the right fit for our clients. So at that point, that’s when we bring you a pool of three to four candidates per position that you get to interview, you get to meet them, you get on a zoom call, you know, ask them any questions that you typically would of any new hire, and then then our clients actually get to select the VA that they want to work with. And then from that point, it’s typically about three weeks all in for process mapping, interviews and hiring, and then they plug right into your business, just like somebody sitting there in the office right beside you. It’s completely dedicated. We’ve got a management team that’s there to help with system setup, logins, access, email, configuration, all that stuff that you don’t have time for, to make it really easy on you so we can get the person in and get them doing the job you’re paying them for as quickly as possible.

Ian Robertson
That’s awesome. And that’s sounds like a unique process. Actually, I’ve not heard of that exact process before. Cool. Well, I really appreciate you being on today, Greg. Hopefully, everybody listening, if you’ve not considered a VA before, and we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, some hard times here, this is the time to grab market share. Even just hiring a part time VA, making phone calls for us, checking with agents, grabbing that market share, you know, learn from Wally, you know, get some coffee date set up with some agents and sit down with them. A VA can help you with that. Is it for you? You know, contact Greg, go to, what was the address again, we’re gonna have it in the transcript here for everybody to have, like a clickable link.

Greg Brooks
Definitely, discovery.rocketstation.com is the quickest way to get to us.

Ian Robertson
Very good. So take a look. And if you have any comments, leave them in the comment section. But Greg, thank you so much. Appreciate you being on.

Greg Brooks
Thank you so much, man. We appreciate you having us.

Ian Robertson
Talk soon.

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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