PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Hey, there IT crowd. Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Today, we’re going to be talking about something that I really wanted to talk to everybody about at a very specific time of year, and because we’re entering into the winter months here, for most of the US and Canadian market, we’re going into a slower season. And even for, you know, the southern markets, it’s going to get a little bit slower because we have holidays, you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and things tend to not move as much around this time of year. So what invariably happens this time of year, now, remember, here at Inspector Toolbelt and Full View Home Inspector Marketing, we have clients all over the US and Canada and other parts of the world, actually, too. When this slow season happens, something strange also happens. To save money, home inspectors start cutting back on things that actually make them money, thinking it’s going to save them money. I’m going to go through a list of these things, and why, why we want to focus on that, and why sometimes we have that mentality.

But I don’t know, maybe 6, 7, 8 months ago, I mentioned a restaurant down the road from me. So they actually ended up closing. I drove by them the other day, and they were closed. But this is what they did. So they opened their restaurant, had all this marketing, had all this stuff set up, and they were bringing in customers, but then to save money, when the customers started to dry up a little bit, they started cutting back on the things that brought them customers. So for instance, they went with smaller, cheaper meat patties for their burgers. So instead of a nice burger made by hand, it was, you know, frozen patties put on a bun, so people weren’t getting what they wanted. They cut back on marketing. So they said, well, you know, for spending $800 a month in marketing, which isn’t a big budget, I’m just guessing, you know, let’s cut that back down to $200 and then we’ll save $600. They thought very linear about what brought them money, and they were just thinking about the numbers without the meaning behind the numbers. So it got to the point where if anybody even found the place, they got a junkie burger and nothing else, and it ruined their business. They literally went out of business.

We as home inspectors sometimes do the same thing. I have seen and worked with 1000s of home inspection companies over the past 10, 15 years, and I have almost invariably seen a pattern when somebody starts to go out of business. Now this is, when I say a pattern. It’s not guaranteed, and I’m sure there’s gonna be comments like, oh, I don’t do this or I do that, and it works out fine. I’m just talking about a general pattern. So what ends up happening is somebody will start cutting off this or that, and then they’re like, oh, it’s getting slow. I have to do this. I had to do that. And it’s weird how much of a pattern it becomes that multiple inspectors do it, and I can almost call it. I’m like, they have a maybe a year or two left. So what are those things that people start cutting out and that ruins their burger and keeps people from coming to their restaurant, so to speak.

Well, this happened recently with a couple of guys. Actually, they turned off their InterNACHI membership. So what will happen is I’ll get an email and it’ll say, hey, Ian, can you and your team take off any mention of InterNACHI off of my entire website or all of my marketing because we don’t belong to them anymore. I want to save money. That is one of the first and biggest signs that things are going downhill. Here’s why. So we may say, well, it’s InterNACHI. I can do an home inspection without it. I don’t need it. Yeah, and that’s true, and there are businesses out there that don’t have it, but couple of things. First of all, let’s take it just from an internet standpoint. So we’re not going to get heavy into this, but we have what are called citations. So Google, Bing, for all I know, ChatGPT, at this point, they look at something called citations. So citations are mentions of your company on related websites that have your link to your website, have your name, address and phone number called your NAP, and those are called citations, not just backlinks, but actual citations. What InterNACHI does for us is create 1000s and 1000s of citations, and they’re not only just citations, like you can go on fiverr.com and get citations that are worthless. These are relevant citations. So just that aspect turning off your InterNACHI membership, that loses you tons of internet advantage. And I say advantage, the vast majority of home inspectors belong to InterNACHI, I mean, I think it’s a little over 30,000, there’s only a couple of 1000 that don’t actually belong to it, from what I understand from what Nick has said on previous podcast, and the numbers jive with the numbers that we have.

So think about that. That means 99%, 98% whatever it is, of home inspectors out there, will automatically have an advantage to us online. That’s insane. So how much is InterNACHI membership? Somebody can contact me and correct me, but I believe it’s like $50 a month, or something like that, or $500 a year, something along those lines. That’s one inspection, basically. And if that’s not one inspection. We should raise our prices, but for the cost of one inspection, we could potentially lose dozens, hundreds, depending on the size of our company, more.

Think of the other things it does for us. It gives us visual content for conversion rates. Now we have done AB testing for over a decade. Websites that have the InterNACHI seal on it consistently convert better, and I’ll use that same illustration, it’s like walking into the doctor’s office. I don’t care what those certifications he has on the wall says. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. Conversions go down measurably when we remove the InterNACHI seal or don’t have it on there at all. So trying to save money, like that restaurant, we turn off our advertising and give them a cheap patty when we do that.

Second thing is turning off our marketing. This is counterintuitive. When things are slow, we should turn our marketing up. We should have been saving all year for when things were busy to turn our marketing up. But instead, the vast majority of businesses in any industry, let alone just ours, in home inspection industry, tend to turn marketing up when things are busy, oh, cool. I have more money. I’ll turn marketing up. And then they’re like, oh, I have too much work to hang work to handle. And then when things get slow, they’re like, oh, I’m gonna turn that down. But that’s so counterintuitive. Why are we trying to get more work when we’re already busy and then less work when we’re not. That really doesn’t make sense. We should, we should say, well, I’m not, and there comes in the issue of measuring ROI improperly. We’re like, well, we’re getting less work. Right at the moment, yes, but turning off our marketing will ensure that we don’t get work later on. We’re not building it up. And if we’re only getting, let’s say we’re getting five inspections a month, and we’re like, oh my goodness, my business is falling apart, like we tend to feel every year, but we turn our marketing off and now we’re getting two, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re like, well, see, I only have two inspections. I’m glad I took turn my marketing off. Really? Or are we only getting two inspections because we did turn our marketing off? We should plan to turn our marketing up when it’s slow and maybe not turn it down. But hypothetically, if that’s what you want to do, turn it down when it’s busy. It’s counterintuitive, when we get into the slow season, to turn off our marketing.

The third thing I see, and because we work with websites for home inspectors is we’ll have guys come in and say, I want to turn off my SEO just for the winter. So SEO is kind of like bodybuilding. So imagine for a moment a guy walks into a gym to a trainer, and he says, hey, I want to be a bodybuilder. He says, cool. You’re going to need to eat three to 4000 calories a day. Work out like an animal. In a year to two years, you’re gonna get jacked. So we get almost jacked, and then we’re like, you know what? It’s donut season and pumpkin lattes. I’m gonna turn off my gym membership, and I’ll turn it back on in the spring. That year to two years of gains that we made in muscle will likely be gone, or mostly gone, in the six months we stop exercising. Then when we come back, is it a switch? Like you turn it on and you’re like, oh, man, I get all my muscle back. No, it’s gonna take us that long to get it back again. SEO works a lot like that. Seo was built up like muscle over time, time and effort. And when we, quote, unquote, turn it off when it’s slow, we lose it faster than we gained it. And then when we go to, quote, unquote, turn it back on. It takes actually longer in a lot of cases, because you build up domain stigma and all that other stuff, which we’re not going to get into today. So turning off SEO is not only shooting yourself in the foot the short term, but hurting ourselves in the long run. It’s not something that we turn off or on. Same thing with websites. I’ll have guys say, hey, Ian, I love the website you guys built for us. But I’m gonna go back to a free GoDaddy site or a free Google site. And, you know, just, just because things are slow, that is almost exactly like, you know, the restaurant I talked about. It’s just like, oh, well, we could attract more customers by having a nice, nicer restaurant. But you know what, let’s, let’s not clean the carpets or wipe down the tables. And, you know, as long as we just have, you know, junky chairs that we get at a flea market and a table in here, people just want to eat at it. That’s all they need. They just need the table to eat at. Is that really what people go to a restaurant for? Is that how they choose a restaurant? If I walk into a restaurant that has a junky table in the middle of the room with a couple of chairs from a flea market, I’m gonna be like, yeah, do I really want to eat here? I haven’t tried their food. They could be the best chef in the world. Our website’s kind of like walking into that restaurant. It was quote, unquote, just needs to be there. We’re losing more clients than we think, than we’ll ever know by them showing up, and our website is basically a table and a couple of junky chairs in the middle of an empty room.

The other thing that I see home inspectors do is they lower their fees in the slow season. If we’ve ever, if we’ve ever, like, negotiated something, once we’ve gone down, really hard to go back up. So imagine for a moment we’re at a garage sale. We’re running the garage sale. Somebody’s like, hey, I want to buy that spoon. Like, okay, 50 cents and they’re like, oh, wow, that sounds like a great deal. Okay, cool. $1 then. No one’s got to pay us $1 after that, even if it’s worth $10 like, this is weird, dude, once we go down in prices, really hard to go back up. And what we’re also doing is just selling ourselves short. So how do we know that, let’s say we’re getting 10 inspections this month. How do we know that we would get five inspections if we kept our prices the same. How do we know we got 10 inspections because we kept it cheap.

So let’s say we are at $500 in inspection, and we go down to 350. Oh, I just need to get through the winter. Okay, 10 inspections. That’s $1,500 we lost because we lowered our prices. Couldn’t we have just done three less inspections and kept our prices high. Now, when the spring comes around, now we have to re-go through the process of raising our prices again. Lowering prices doesn’t really do much for us in the slow season. Remember, the slow season just happens. It doesn’t mean we’re a bad inspector. It doesn’t mean anything. It just means less houses are moving. People are eating turkey and buying presents and running out of money. January is a terrible month. People have no money. They’re just closing deals that they did in November and December and just, you know what they’re gonna look for a cheap price sometimes, in that month. February, things aren’t moving as much because people are just starting to look at houses again. It happens. It happens every year. It’s like, it’s like thinking the sun’s not gonna come up because it’s still dark outside. It’ll get better. The less we freak out about it, the better.

Another thing is, I see home inspectors stop doing events and providing a lunch. And I say providing a lunch because a lot of these real estate events where they introduce you to buyers and you meet agents and all that stuff, they want you to bring lunch. Like, oh my goodness, that $150 to feed these agents. And then invariably, afterwards, you’re like, I didn’t get one job out of that. It’s not about getting jobs. It’s about building relationships. Those relationships pay off over time. Measuring ROI, return on our investment, doesn’t happen that way. So stopping doing event events, stopping providing a lunch, to be frank, looking like a cheapskate because things are tight, really, really, isn’t the way to go about it.

Now, listen, if we’re just starting out and we’re like, Ian, you don’t get it. I trust me, I get it more than most. My first year of inspecting was not, not as glorious as a lot of other people. I wasn’t one of those guys that said, oh, I did my first year inspecting, and I did 1000 inspections. Yeah, not me. It’ll get better, but we have to put the time and the money into it, and in this case, the money.

Here’s something that I see a lot of, and it’s two, two aspects, writing our reports in Microsoft Word, or switching between free trials of software. This one cracks me up, because on the software side, obviously we have Inspector Toolbelt, and we see it. We know you guys. We know who was doing it. They go and they use five free inspections with us, and they use five free inspections with somebody else, and they use the 30 days free with somebody else. You know what the problem with that is, we did not hand out a consistent product. So if we go to a restaurant and we’re like, oh, we like the burger they gave us this time. Then we go back and the burgers different. We’re like, this is a weird burger. And then we go back and the burger is completely different the third time, maybe it’s a chicken sandwich. And we’re like, what the heck is going on? People want consistency. Agents aren’t going to refer us. All we’re doing is burning our agents. They’re like, why is your report different? Do you not have a consistent software? I tell you what, you want to skip between softwares. You can do that all day long. Learn a new software. Spend hours doing it instead of hours going out and marketing your company. Spend hours learning five different softwares so you can get all this free trial time. Go for it, but it’s really going to hurt our business. Giving, number one, inconsistent reports to agents, and now they have to figure it out each time. We’re going to lose agent referrals, our report writing skills are going to go down, because there’s going to be nuances of each software that we’re not going to really understand. So it’s going to come out a little weird and a little different. You know, it’s the first time baking a cake. It’s going to be a little bit lumpy and maybe not as great. Instead of getting really proficient at it and writing a great report, it’s going to be a little bit not great each time. So the clients aren’t going to be really happy. And then we’re going to spend lots of extra time trying to figure all of that stuff out in each particular app. So try to stick consistently with the app that you’re going to use, something that you’re happy with, and listen, writing reports on Microsoft Word. I see it pretty regularly on the forums. Hey, I’m trying to save money. I’m going to start off with Microsoft Word. I mean, if you need to, go for it, but I’m going to be honest with you, it’s going to take you a long time to write that report. People are going to tell you wrote it in Microsoft Word, and it’s not going to represent your business well. That’s the end product. That’s the one thing that they remember about us. And if our reports are like, wow, thank you, then it’s not going to do anything for our business. So if you have to, do what you feel you have to do, but I’m telling you, from my own experience, really not going to help our business, and let’s be honest. So Inspector Toolbelt, if you sign up for our app, you get five free inspections, using just, just as an example, if you’ve done five full inspections and you’ve gotten paid for them, you have hypothetically, five times 500 is $2,500. Can we put that back into the next year of of the app, or whatever app we happen to use, think about it logistically instead of trying to get it the cheapest way possible.

The other thing is reducing follow up communications by switching or not using software for it. This is important, so we just mentioned the importance of a good report. But imagine for a moment we’re not following up with emails and agents and text messages and so most, most of us software providers offer things like follow up text messages and emails and reminders. People love that. Our agents love it. They’re like, oh, thank you. You sent me two reminders before the inspection. You messaged me afterwards to thank me. A month later, we’re touching base. Oh yeah, I forgot about you guys. You know what? I do have an inspection for you. That stuff is gold. If we’re switching around, it’s not really going to be helping us. We’re not going to have that same follow-up that we do. So we’re just cutting ourselves short.

So in conclusion, when the market gets slow, we have to step back and get out of our own minds. I have to do this myself. All of us kind of freak out a little bit. But instead of cutting back everything and offering a cheaper frozen burger, no atmosphere, and no marketing to our restaurant, keep the things that work going, spend time in the busy season saving up the funds to be able to keep those things going in the slow season. Then when the busy season comes back around, we’ll be even busier than before. But I hope this information helps. Thank you for listening in, and we’ll see you next time at Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

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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*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.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

As the colder months roll in, many home inspection businesses face a common dilemma: Should they cut back on marketing and professional expenses to save money? The latest episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk dives into this critical issue, offering insights and strategies to ensure your business remains robust even during slower seasons. The podcast draws valuable lessons from a local restaurant that faced decline due to similar cost-cutting measures, emphasizing the hidden costs of reducing marketing efforts.

A key theme in the episode is the importance of maintaining professional memberships, such as those with Internashi. These memberships are more than just a line item in your budget; they offer substantial online advantages through citations that enhance your business’s visibility and conversion rates. By staying active in professional organizations, home inspectors can build trust with potential clients, a crucial factor for maintaining a competitive edge. Cutting these memberships can lead to a significant loss in business opportunities, as seen with the restaurant analogy shared in the podcast.

Another critical aspect discussed is the role of a strong online presence. In today’s digital age, your website is often the first impression potential clients have of your business. A subpar website can be as damaging as a poorly maintained restaurant, driving away customers regardless of the quality of service offered. The episode highlights the pitfalls of using free or low-quality website platforms, urging home inspectors to invest in professional web development to attract and retain clients effectively.

Pricing strategies during slow seasons also play a pivotal role in the success of a home inspection business. The podcast advises against lowering inspection fees to attract more clients, as this can create long-term challenges in raising prices again. Instead, maintaining consistent pricing ensures that your services are valued appropriately, preventing the perception of your business as a bargain option. The episode stresses that the slow season is a natural occurrence and not a reflection of the quality of services provided.

Building and nurturing relationships with clients and real estate agents are emphasized as well. The episode suggests participating in events and offering consistent experiences through reliable inspection report software. These efforts help establish trust and foster lasting connections, ultimately leading to sustained business growth. Consistency in communication and service delivery can significantly enhance client satisfaction and referrals, making it a cornerstone strategy for thriving in the home inspection industry.

The podcast wraps up with a focus on innovative tools and solutions that can support home inspectors in their journey. By utilizing comprehensive apps that streamline scheduling and report writing, businesses can improve efficiency and client interactions. The episode encourages listeners to remain engaged with Inspector Toolbelt Talk for more valuable industry insights and to leverage these resources for continued success.

In conclusion, the episode provides a comprehensive look at the critical elements necessary for maintaining a successful home inspection business during slow seasons. From preserving marketing budgets and professional memberships to enhancing online presence and fostering client relationships, the strategies discussed are essential for navigating seasonal challenges. By adopting these practices, home inspectors can ensure their businesses remain competitive and prosperous throughout the year.