PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R.: Let’s talk a moment about branding. Whether you’re a home inspector or running any business, branding is extremely important. It sets you apart from your competitors and helps people recognize you.

That’s why we hear keywords like brand recognition and things like that. It’s extremely important. It’s why when we go into the store, we reach for a bottle of Pepsi, if that’s our cola without even looking at what the other ones are, we know that brand. It’s recognizable, we grab it, and we go for it.

It’s why we choose FedEx instead of choosing a white van courier service. We know FedEx; it gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling. A lot of times, when home inspectors call me, one of the first things I ask them is, do you have a brand? The response is almost always the same, yes, I have a logo.

Okay, can I see it? Yes, hang on, I have to find it somewhere, or oh yes, I had a friend make it for me, or I got it from vista print, or whatever they happen to say. Whenever they say that I know for a fact that they don’t have a brand, because a brand is more than just your logo, your brand is based on your logo.

Kind of like as we mentioned before, Pepsi, Coke, FedEx, UPs these brands are built off of their logo; it’s a central thing. But it’s not the only thing that comes with your brand. Branding is more than just I have a logo.

The question is, are you excited about it? Do you love your logo? I often say that when we’re working with home inspectors on building their brand or maybe even building out a website with our website department.

Do you love your logo? Because if you don’t love your logo, you’re not going to be passionate about your brand. That’s extremely important for running a business. We need to see our logo and say, oh yes, I love my logo.

This is my logo, and just plaster it all over the place. But why is that so important? Going back to that brand recognition, that’s an obvious answer. But let’s go on what we in the marketing world call a customer journey, and I’ll tell you a story about a paving contractor that I heard recently. So I need to get my driveway paved, so I looked around for a contractor, and I did this without even thinking. I know the science behind it, but let’s just go with the I wasn’t really thinking; I was just looking for a paving contractor.

So there was about a dozen or so in my area, the first few didn’t even have a website, so I just blew right past them. Then there were a couple that had a website but looked like it didn’t get updated since the 90s. None of them besides a couple had any kind of social media presence or anything.

So I just ignored them; they didn’t even register on my radar because I didn’t get that warm, fuzzy feeling. I felt like I was going to get a guy that was just going to what we call a tailgate slammer. Just some guy showing up, and none of his guys are going to be clean, and they’re going to wreck my newly installed sidewalk, and I just worried about it, so I just blew right past them.

So it came down to three guys, three that were local. One of them didn’t have any social media presence, and not that that is going to be the end-all, but he had a website from the 90s, the phone number just went to his personal cell phone, and the voicemail was something like hey, this is John, leave a message.

The social media, he had posted something on his Facebook from 2005 or something like that, didn’t give me that warm fuzzy feeling. So I whittled it down to two guys. Now, the two guys both had a brand, but the other one had a better brand.

So the one that didn’t really have the better brand, he might have been the better contractor. But you know the one that had the better brand, he had a website, it had his logo all over it. I could see pictures of him and his guys, the work that they’ve done. I could see things that they posted on Facebook, with their logo on the pictures.

Thank you notes to clients who left a review. I could find him all over the internet with personal comments, and again, his brand. It was kind of like a red and yellow logo, and it matched what he did really well. Everything he did, he branded. He showed up to my house, and he had his polo shirt on with the brand on it.

He gave me an estimate with his logo all over it. Not just that it comes down to logo, but everything went with this theme. It was that red and yellow put together on his invoices, shook my hand, I loved him. Was he the cheapest? I don’t know. Was he the best? I have no idea. But he won me over in the customer journey; hands down, that’s what branding does.

Let’s say, for instance, you’re trying to win someone over with a cold internet lead. Are they going to hire you if you don’t give them that same warm and fuzzy feeling that contractor gave me? Probably not.

A home inspector one time told me you’re never going to know the leads that you lose; you’re never going to know those people that blow right past your website, blow right past your online profile because they don’t have that warm fuzzy feeling, it’s just going to be a blip on your radar.

But now, if we show up and we have our branded shirts, branded hats, kind of looking like a walking billboard sometimes, but it gives people that warm, fuzzy feeling. If we have a branding all over our reports, all over our emails, everywhere, we give people that I chose FedEx because it’s FedEx feeling.

Instead of the white van courier. I bring this up because I recently had a home inspector call me, and he said, Ian, I’m doing everything right; why am I not getting work? I hear that a lot. I’m doing everything right; why am I not getting any work? So instantly, I know they’re not doing everything right.

If you’re doing everything right, the work will come. So I asked him to break down what he was doing. He said, well, I bought a drone to set myself apart. Okay, what else are you doing? Well, I have a website. Okay, well, let’s start there. I took a look at his website; I couldn’t find him, couldn’t find him anywhere.

So I typed in his direct URL after he gave it to me, it turns out he had used his contracting website. He said, well, I was trying to keep expenses low, right there he lost me. Trying to save money on branding gets you nowhere.

On his website, I couldn’t see his logo, it was a weird blank website with just words about how awesome he thought he was, but it didn’t give me anything. When he would go to an inspection, I would ask him do you have a branded shirt? Do you have a branded hat? Do you have branded cards? When you walk up, you shouldn’t have to ask the agent will you refer me; they should want to refer you.

If I were an agent, and a home inspector walked up with his brand on his shirt, his hat, greets me, shakes my hand, hands me a business card, is polite to my client, then I get a branded report, and then I get branded, just polite soft-touch emails we call them, saying hey, it was great working with you.

If you ever need an inspection, let me know. I am not forgetting that home inspector; I’m going to refer them. That client is not going to forget that home inspector; he’s going to refer them. Everybody has that warm, fuzzy feeling, that environment that you create. So are we doing that? Let’s talk about just the logo for a minute, though.

Going back to yes, I have a logo. Who built your logo? It’s great to have a cousin or a niece or somebody put something together. But usually, we’re going to end up with a little figure of a house and a magnifying glass that looks like everybody else’s logo. Our brand is supposed to make us stand out from our competition, not look like the rest of them.

So have a professional create a professional logo, not clip art, but something that’s unique to you. So, for instance, if we’re in the northwest, and we’re in a really rural area, let’s say we’re in Montana. Let’s do something with mountains and trees and the outdoors; that’s what people love in that area.

That’s like my area up here in upstate New York. But we don’t want our logo to look like everybody else is in that area, make it unique. If we live down south, it’s great to have palm trees and stuff like that, but make it specific to your area, but not so specific that you look like every restaurant logo and five other home inspectors in your area.

Create a unique brand that also comes down to choosing the right business name. If you choose a superlative like premier home inspectors, or best home inspections, or platinum home inspections, there’s going to be dozens, if not more, home inspection companies with that same exact name. So what sets you apart? Choose a name that’s memorable and that can be used when people are talking.

So if you have a last name, that’s great. You want to be Jones home inspections, okay, easy to remember. But now, if you have a very complicated last name like Galifianakis, that’s going to be very difficult for people to say. So choose a name that’s easy for people to say, remember and use.

Now once we’ve had a professional logo built for a memorable home inspection company name, we need to push it. We can’t just say I have a logo. I have a hammer; does that make me a qualified contractor? So push your brand, have professionally made business cards. You notice I keep saying professionally made; we’re home inspectors.

We know a lot about hydrostatic pressure, architectural shingles, and all sorts of things of that nature when it comes to buildings, that does not make us a marketing specialist. A marketing specialist will know what to put in your marketing material, where to put it so that it doesn’t create clutter and detract from your brand.

My business cards were always our business logo, my name and phone number and license number and just a couple of other things; they were very clean and very basic people called it. But when you had my business card, you knew who I was. It stood out; it was memorable.

So don’t try to put everything that you’ve ever done, and try to fit an entire website’s worth of content onto your business card. Keep it clean, keep it simple and keep it to the point where people can remember you; that’s the point of branding. Then brand everything else. I remember a home inspector telling me I don’t want to be a walking billboard, and I said, why not? I want to be a walking billboard.

When people saw me pull up in my inspection vehicle, all branded down the side, all branded on my hat, my shirt, my cards, my tools, everything was branded. It wasn’t overdone, but it was apparent. Nobody could forget who I was out of that inspection.

Even the agents on the other side, the selling side, would oftentimes refer us even when we found big defects and maybe even their deal fell apart because they got that warm fuzzy FedEx, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coke feeling from having a branded inspector. It made them feel comfortable with me, that I wasn’t just a fly-by-night door slammer.

So how can we make sure that we have branded things properly? Let’s look over just a couple of basic rules, this gets very complicated, and everyone’s going to have an opinion on it. But here are some just very basic rules.

First, going back to our logo, because that’s what our brand is based off of, make sure that is spot on. Make sure we love our logo so much; we just want to show everybody because it’s just awesome. Now be careful; when we do develop a logo, what we have a tendency to do is to show that logo to people that care about us.

Our brother, our cousin or uncle, our father, some of them may even be marketing specialists. But the problem is they’ll often tell us what we want to hear. So they may say, oh, that’s awesome. Oh yes, that’s great. Oh, looks good. But that’s not what we want; we want an honest opinion, show it to people who will just tear it apart.

As much as it’s good to show it to other home inspectors, that’s not whose opinion you really want because you’re not marketing to other home inspectors; you’re marketing to the public.

Grab people that you know will give you an honest, hard opinion that don’t mind hurting your feelings because that’s what you need to hear. What do you like about this logo? But more importantly, what do you not like? What turns you off to this logo? They’ll tell you things oh, it looks too dated, it looks weird, or I don’t like the colors; those are the opinions we want to listen to.

So now, as we get our logo, make sure of a couple of things. Make sure it’s not a cheesy vista print; I keep bringing a vista print because a lot of times I’ll see these logos, and I’ll see that it’s Vista Print clipart. Or they got it off of Fiverr.com.

You can get some cool stuff off of Fiverr.com, but more than likely, you’re going to get clip art that everybody else has. Make sure it’s not cheesy, and just a picture of a tiny little inspector with a magnifying glass; everybody has that. Everybody knows that is a standard home inspection logo.

Make sure it’s unique; make sure it stands out. Then, focus on the colors. A lot of the times, we try to put too many colors into a logo. Let’s go back to FedEx; I’ve been talking about them a lot. FedEx has two colors in their logo; their branding is genius. UPS, two colors. You have Pepsi, two colors. Why do we need to have a lot of colors in our logo to be able to brand ourselves? We don’t.

Try to keep it to two colors and maybe a third slight accent color. Blue and green, blue and silver, green and gray, whatever it happens to be. Try to stick to two colors because the logo should be simple, and your brand should be straightforward and memorable.

As a side note, all colors mean something. So having a red and black logo, it means something completely different to the human eye than having a blue and silver logo. Also, remember, some colors are going to be a little bit more aggressive on the eye. So you want to kind of downplay them a little bit.

Try to stay away from certain colors like lime green. Lime green can be nice in certain situations, but more often than not, when it’s looked at on a mobile device compared to a computer, compared to a tablet, whatever device we’re using, it can come off a little bit aggressive and overly bright and can even make some of the text hard to see.

So try to tone down the lime green just a little bit. Green is great; I love green. Green is in one of my logos for one of my inspection companies, but just kind of tone it down a little bit. The bigger color to look out for, though, is brown because brown on the human eye actually denotes, for lack of a better term, loserdom.

For instance, they say you shouldn’t actually wear a brown suit to an interview because people who wear brown suits to interviews are oftentimes not looked on favorably by the person doing the interview. It’s simple human logic. I don’t know the real science behind it; all I know is, as a general marketing rule, you have to be very careful with brown.

But from strictly an internet standpoint, brown looks very easily like baby poop. You get a brown, and you print it on your card, your logo is brown, and you just love it, everybody loves it, and now for some reason, when you look at it on your niece’s phone, it looks like baby poop.

That’s because different devices and different screens are going to display colors differently. Color on the internet is not static. So you want to make sure that the brown doesn’t look like baby poop. So I personally avoid browns at all costs; it’s just too much of a risk for the poop factor. But there are certain circumstances where you can use brown.

So, for instance, let’s say you’re in Texas and your logo is going to be like leather, and then it’s going to look like you branded it with a branding iron. That kind of brown, as long as it has enough reds and blacks in it to make it look leathery, actually is a really awesome-looking logo style.

We’ve had a lot of guys use the leathery-looking logo, and it’s worked out really well depending on where you’re at.

But otherwise, brown is a very dangerous color to use. Do we really want to take the risk with our entire brand looking like baby poop online for certain consumers? Then, going back to making sure that your logo and your brand is memorable. Now, I’m a big fan of just having words in your logo.

A lot of guys will argue that with me, and to be honest with you, there’s good and bad to both arguments. It’s just my personal preference. So if you’re going to be Jones inspections, I would just have those as letters with different colors in them. But then, you can also keep it simple other ways.

There’s a home inspector down in Florida, and it’s Sandpiper inspections; man, I love that logo. It is just on point for his area. I don’t know where he got the Sandpiper idea from, but it’s just memorable, and it looks good.

It breaks the mental rule in my head of I don’t like to have cheesy pictures of stuff because when you look at the picture, it’s not cheesy, and it is memorable, and he can use that in many different circumstances.

Now everybody listening to this podcast is going to look up Sandpiper inspections; go for it; he’s a great inspector. But stuff like that works really well. Up in Maine, there’s an inspector who runs Blue Lobster inspections; what an amazing brand. It’s so amazing; he has a trademark, so don’t think about taking it.

But it’s beautiful, it fits his area perfectly, and it just works out. It’s easy to brand him. So don’t just say I have a logo, I have a brand, take your logo, take your theme, take your business and actually brand it, make it memorable. Make it something so that you don’t have to wonder are they going to refer me?

You walk away confident because they will refer you because you’ve given them that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from having a brand. An environment for your clients, the agents that refer you, and anybody who comes across your business.

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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