PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. Today we have a, we have, I’m gonna call you a friend, Randy Lima, from Integrity Home Inspections USA, down in Memphis, Tennessee. How are you, Randy?

Randy Lima
I’m good, Ian. And thank you for having me, and the feelings likewise. Yeah.

Ian R
Now, we were just talking before the show. I love working with you. We have a good working relationship there. And I think you’re a great home inspector, and you’re the perfect person to talk about our subject today. We’re going to talk about becoming a successful single man operation. Because a lot of times on the show we talk about how do you grow your business? How do you hire more inspectors? How do you do this and do that? Something that we don’t talk enough about are single man operations and how to grow that to the point without taking on other personnel. Before we get into though, into that, though, Randy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your inspection company, things like that?

Randy Lima
Sure, Ian. Well, I’m a 58 year old guy, kind of an old feller, just got into this about three years ago, I had spent about 28 years in the retail sector but as a fraud investigator, worked for the world’s largest retailer, hiding out in Arkansas, and then and then I went to work for a Dollar chain, well they’re putting one on every corner now, so but I’d had enough of the corporate life. So it was time to do something different. And when you think about it, home inspections are not unlike investigations, you’re researching, you’re investigating, and you’re documenting your findings, just like you would in an investigation.

Ian R
Yeah, I mean, that’s a fantastic background to have to get into home inspections. That’s exactly what we’re doing, great. So what made you choose home inspections, was it just the fact that it kind of related to basically an investigation?

Randy Lima
It was, it’s funny, it was actually my wife’s idea cuz we had had a home inspection on the house we bought just outside Memphis, little town called Collierville, Tennessee, and this was in 2015, I guess. And candidly, I just wasn’t super impressed. And it, the lack of technology really, mainly. And then there were some electrical things and you know, I thought these, these weren’t things hiding behind walls, you know what I’m saying? So, cost me some money. And I thought, you know what, I think I can do them better with the right training. And so I did, I get professionally trained, and but it was really my wife’s idea.

Ian R
Nice. The wives, they usually have the best ideas, don’t they? But yes, she’s sitting in the background. Yeah, it really is impressive, the strides you’ve taken in just a three year period. I remember, we started working with you right about the time that you started. We do your website and your SEO and online digital marketing stuff. And, but obviously, you’ve taken your business, and you’ve run with it. And you said something interesting to me the other day that kind of started this conversation on why we wanted to have you on, is you said, I’m not interested in doing X amount of inspections a week, I want to live life. And you raise prices, you raise the quality of your service. And you do all of these things. And you have no intention of ever growing past the single man operation. And I thought that was elegant and simple and beautiful. And because I remember I’ve always talked about I’ve gone from single inspector to small inspection company to, you know, multiple inspection companies. The most fun I had in the industry, by far was single man operation, driving around, eating at the best places, only worrying about myself, having fun, I felt like Han Solo, it was like it was the most fun that I’ve had in in the industry, and hour per hour, one of, there’s different ways to measure this, one of the most profitable because, you know, profitable per hour, I should say, depending on how you squish those numbers together. So there’s a lot to be said about the single man operation. What’s your motivation for staying a single operator? Number one, I want to control quality. I think no one, and don’t get me wrong. If I were 20 years younger, I’d probably be looking to scale. But I’m 50, I love what I do. I’m having a ball. I really don’t want to mess that up. I’m making a really good living and then we’re turning down work many weeks. So I’ve got what I want. I’ve got what I need, but I can control the quality. I think the other thing is I don’t have to worry when I leave the office so to speak, I’m off. I’m off, I’m not dealing with, with you know, employees and things like that. Employees are one of the greatest rewarding things you can ever have watching somebody grow but then it also comes with some responsibility and additional workload and expense too. Yeah, and that’s I guess why I mentioned the hour per hour being more profitable. And I like how you said when you’re off, you’re off. When you’re in a multi inspector company, you’re never really off. Because we’ve all had those times where it’s like, oh, man, two months ago, there was this guy who went crazy, because, you know, well popped a leak or a small tank, popped the leak, you know, two days after we were there, and you’re trying to calm him down. As a single man operation, maybe doing 200 to 400 inspections a year, depending on who you are, and how much you want to do. You know, that comes up once in a while, when you’re a multi inspector operation, every two months turns into every two weeks, the more inspectors you have, sometimes it’s once a week, and then you’re just dealing with a lot of problems. So I’m not downing one or the other. But I just think it’s, it’s a beautiful thing to talk about. Not just growing a big business, but being a successful single man operation. And I think you’re right on par with a lot of, a lot of other inspectors out there. There’s a very, very good friend of mine, he takes every Friday off. I mean, can you imagine just even being in a regular workforce saying, you know what, I’m going to work X amount of hours a day, and I’m going to be home, and then I’m going to take a three day weekend, every day for the rest of my working life. I mean, you can’t really beat that. That sounds like a good life.

Randy Lima
You know, it’s funny, you say that. So I, during the summer months, we have a place on the river, Tennessee River, during the summer months, I do not take afternoon inspections on Friday, we block that off. So you hit it on the head. That’s exactly where I’m at.

Ian R
I mean, that level of control in life, that, that’s awesome. You know, another thing too, is Ben Gromicko, was on the show one time. And interestingly enough, Nick and Ben talk about the first time they thought about home inspections, they were home builders, a guy pulls up on his Harley, as a home inspector, kind of does this inspection on one of their houses and then drives away on his Harley, and they both stood there, they’re like, this looks like the best life ever. And you know what? It really is. And sometimes, sometimes we get overwhelmed as home inspectors when we’re a single man operation. And I think a lot of pressure comes on ourself, comes from ourselves rather, like oh, man, I, I’m turning down work as you mentioned, I shouldn’t be doing that. So I need to work more to take on those jobs. Or I needed to take someone on now to help help me handle this work. It sounds like you’re of the mindset that you don’t let the work dictate what you actually do, you don’t let your business run you, you run your business. If you don’t mind me asking, how do you do that? How do you control that atmosphere?

Randy Lima
So a lot of it, you know, of course, we have an online scheduler and our online scheduler, there’s only nine slots available for me every week. That’s the most I’m going to take, the most I will do is two a day, Monday through Thursday, and then I’ll do one on Friday morning. Don’t work weekends anymore. When I first started, I did weekends. Now beggars can’t be choosers. You’re trying to stand a business up. But uh, so that’s the number one thing, but I will tell you, if I, my sweet spot for me, it’s like seven a week, honestly. You know, I use, I use a drone for roof. So you know, when I come home, I gotta unload the drone footage. You know, I spent about an hour, hour and 10 minutes on every report at home, model number. So you know, I kind of look at all that and then decide, you know what, I’m double booked Monday, I double booked Tuesday, I’m only gonna take one on Wednesday, I block a spot off, man, if I’m tired, I’ll block a spot off. As far as anyone’s concerned, I’m booked for that day. But if I don’t manage my calendar, someone else will. I learned that a long time ago. So it’s my time to manage. And I do that. And I don’t know, we had like eight this week. And a lot of them have gotten pushed into next week now because of the snowpocalypse here in Memphis, Memphis does not do well with snow, everything shut down, inspections are being pushed. So next week is going to be kind of brutal. But that’s the exception, Ian. I did about 290 inspections myself last year. And, Ian, I probably could have done another 60 to 80 easy that I turned down or referred to one of my competitors, who is also a friend that I trained.

Ian R
So there’s a lot to unpack in what you just said there, a couple of points about training other inspectors and having relationships built in there that we talked about before we started recording here. But just talking about managing your time and taking control of it. I find that well there’s two aspects I want to talk about. First of all, I want to talk about controlling what people expect out of you and your and your schedule and the whole fighting for work mentality. And then talk about pricing too, because that’s going to matter if we’re charging 250 an inspection. Seven inspections a week is not going to get us very far. But talking about that managing everybody else’s expectations. Do you find that there’s a lot of home inspectors out there that are like oh man, I can’t miss this job. I can’t miss this inspection. The agents gonna go somewhere else and they they almost put on an air of desperation. You know, they’re willing to do anything to get the job. Do you see that a lot in your market?

Randy Lima
Man, what, you just said it so eloquently. I mean, I see it a lot. So I will tell you, when we’re in a very competitive market here in Memphis, Tennessee, my average inspection is only $425. But I’m in the top quartile on pricing. So I’m not, I’m not that $250 guy. I think my mentality is there some work you just don’t need. I didn’t get into this to scrape by, I’m professionally trained, I invested money in top notch equipment, I give exemplary customer service. And, you know, I, I’m going to charge for that. I’m absolutely going to charge for that. And of course, everything we’ve done, we’ve painted some ancillary services too, that helps boost our inspections. You know, and I know you’re big on this, Ian, I’ve watched your podcasts all the time. We do mold, air quality testing, we do radon testing, I tell you something else, too, that’s been kind of interesting. It’s, I wouldn’t say it’s on fire. But it happens more than I would expect, is we do drone photography for all the roofs as part of the inspection. But we also offer drone photography, meaning shots from a distance and different angles to show how the house sits within the neighborhood and everything. It’s only an extra 100 bucks. And I give him you know, six photos, roughly. And it’s amazing how many people have just added that little $100, you know, ancillary service, that’s really not related to the inspection. But the drone’s already up in the air, we’re already doing it. So it’s just another way to make a few bucks, right, you know, and give them a great service. They love it. They’re excited, they got this new house, maybe it’s in a beautiful setting. We give that now, so but I do see that I see that, Ian, and we’re just, we just refuse to play in their game. No one wins a race to the bottom.

Ian R
Yeah, and let’s look at it too from a different angle. And I want to talk about the pricing because I’m all about the hard math. But I hired a guy to come and sand and refinish my floors recently. Interestingly, I tried to do, I started to do it myself. And then I’m like, I have to rent the equipment to go and dry them, I’m just like, because I’m a DIYer, I love to do things myself to bring back my old construction roots. But so I hired a guy to do it, and called a bunch of companies and some guys are like, I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t, don’t give it away. And they just seem so desperate. And I don’t know if they knew that they were coming off that way. And um, and to me, I’m just like, that’s not what I’m all about. And I was kind of picturing the people that would hire them. Maybe some slumlord be like, yeah, I need you here tomorrow. And they’re stiffing them on pay and their prices were low. And I’m like, this just feels weird. So I hired a guy who had the best equipment. He had a video showing his equipment, it was all dustless or quote unquote, dustless. They are able to catch about 95% of the dust and I can actually confirm that. And they did a fantastic job. And he came over, and he was confident and he goes, okay, yeah, you want this done, we can do it. But, you know, here’s the deposit, here’s a price. And that was it, he was confident, he was calm. He wasn’t worried about just getting the next job. And that made me want to hire him. So he got me as a client, which I’m not saying that I’m the best client in the world. But, you know, I paid up right away. I didn’t try to haggle. He came in, he did his job. I didn’t sit down and do the math and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, look how much money you made per day. I did afterwards. And holy cow, he actually made out like a bandit. But, I want to get into floor sanding now. But ultimately, the price we charge, and the way we project ourselves into the market affects how much we can charge and the clientele that we end up with. So the 250 guys in your market, 250 guys in my market, heck, there are guys in my market that are still doing $199. There’s an air of desperation there. And you can’t, you can’t make money. So you’re 425 an inspection, right?

Randy Lima
Yeah, that’s that’s our average inspection.

Ian R
Yeah. And that’s higher than the national average right now. The national average went down again, it’s down in like, I think it’s down like 375, 350. So you’re above even the national average. And I know for your area, you’re in the high end of the average.

Randy Lima
Yeah, and a lot of that. Thanks to you. We raised prices twice last year, $25 each time. And you know, 50 bucks is a lot when you do 25, 30, 35 inspections in a month.

Ian R
Oh yeah. So if you raised your price, here, I’ll just do the math. 50 times 300. That’s an extra $15,000 a year. I mean, that’s, that’s nothing to sneeze at. And that’s not doing anything, that’s not adding any overhead. That’s gravy.

Randy Lima
That’s right. And the interesting thing, you know what you just said about how you appear. You know, being in retail 20 years. One thing I learned is people, customers shopping in a Walmart or Target or whatever it might be. They will treat the store like the management team and the employees treat the store. If everybody puts everything back, and the store’s nice and clean and everything, shoppers will tend to do the same thing. But if your store looks like, you know, like it’s been through a typhoon, customers will treat the store the same way. I see that as the same way with inspections is, how I portray or how we portray our brand. You know, here’s another thing we started doing, Ian, was we, you know, if I show up to a house in and this, some people disagree, and I respect that, I show up to the house and I do the inspection, but the water wasn’t on, the electric wasn’t on, gas wasn’t on. If I gotta go back, I’m charging a return fee. And that’s not always positive, you know, and I understand it’s not the client’s fault, but I’m also not running a 501c3. And time is money when you take up inspection slots. And if you explain that on the front side, and I actually have one email goes out that tells them all this, you know, the confirmation, it’s in the agreement, which they have to initial, not just sign the agreement, they have to initial these points. And nobody pushes back now, because we’ve kind of established that as the norm. And I’m seeing even some competitors do it now as well.

Ian R
First of all I love your analogy of the people will treat the store like the management does. It’s the difference between going into Dollar General, and then a nice department store. I’ve made fun of Dollar General my whole life, it looks like it got robbed every time you walk into one, that would go back to your old job. But it really is important that you set your own standard. Like you just said, you set the standard and other people follow. I see too much of us as an industry worrying about, well, what if I lose that job? Okay. And? Or what if this agent doesn’t refer me, I’m like, if they’re demanding that you do a lower price at a quicker pace on the time that you don’t work. They do it now, they’re going to do it again. And now they’re running your business. So a lot of people think it’s a luxury. It’s really not, it’s a mindset. When I was a single inspector, I did a lot of the same things that you did. I didn’t work weekends. Matter of fact, we have not worked weekends in probably 18 years. And a lot of people were like, oh, you’re gonna go out of business. That’s when real estate happens. I’m like, no, we didn’t go out of business, we did really well. We have very few problems because the clientele that we get is usually people that are like, okay, you guys look like you know what you’re doing. We want the best, we’ll wait for you. We’ve had people extend a lot, extend their contract contingencies just to have us. And I’m sure you experienced the same thing. Because you’re Randy, like, okay, Randy doesn’t work Saturdays, he doesn’t work Friday afternoons, you need to get him that Friday morning, or you need to get him Tuesday afternoon. What do you do to, what do you do when you have an agent that kind of balks at that, though? How do you handle that?

Randy Lima
One benefit is that because we book at such a high percentage of to fill, you know, often filling, not always, but often. That’s leverage for me, because I can explain that to do that actually ends up costing me money. Because I’m going to end up turning down another inspection that would pay more. And, you know, again, so and I said this to you too, people asked me what I do for a living, and I tell them all the time, Ian, I am in the relationship business, I just happened to do home inspections. And what I mean by that is if you build the relationships with the agents, the clients, brokers, you know, bankers, whatever it is finance people, people are more forgiving and more understanding when they know you the person. And so to build our brand, I spent an unbelievable amount of time investing in relationships. So the truth is, I actually have agents who said, you know, told my client, you’re a little more expensive than some of the others, but you’re worth it. And that’s not me tapping myself on the shoulder. That’s just feedback that I’ve actually received from clients. And funny thing too, is talking about pricing is you’ll never believe what our average inspection you know, we break it down by referral sources, whether it’s agent referral, or if it’s Google, or if it’s word of mouth or some other method, our highest average inspection comes from Google. Now most people think everybody on Google is a price shopper. And the truth is, that’s not true. Some are, and you’re not going to get those, I’m not going to be able to compete with that. But no one can sell it better than I can sell my own service when somebody calls and so we get them hooked right on on the first call, Ian, I’m sending out an agreement. Next thing, you know, we’ve got a signed agreement and then all the monies paid. But uh, so it’s not always about the money. Sometimes it’s about the confidence that you show, and you alluded to that earlier. So I think it’s just not been that big a deal for us. We have lost some, and that’s okay.

Ian R
You know, that is a fantastic point. The last, very, everything was but the very last point you said, we’ve lost some, but that’s okay. We’re so worried as an industry about losing the inspection. I’ve always said that it’s great when you lose an inspection because that probably was one that you didn’t, didn’t want. And the relationships are extremely important. And when you talk to your clients on the phone, you’re building a relationship there as well. And then they’re going to be more understanding, they trust you, you know, I was going over the math with, with an inspector not long ago. And he wanted to go, multi inspector. And he’s like, oh, man, but he’s only charging $300 an inspection, he’s burning the candle at both ends, going nuts. And I’m like, you really can’t afford a new inspector at $300 an inspection, you have to split the commission with them. And then you have expenses and this and that, we did the math, he was going to end up making like $40 for every inspection that his inspector does, wasn’t really worth it. But now, as a single inspector, let’s say we charged, I just took it for a round number, $500 per inspection. And let’s say we did seven inspections a week, at 50 weeks a year, two full weeks off, and seven inspections, and three and a half days a week, we’d make $175,000 gross. That’s a good, that’s a good living. That’s more than, that’s more than an attorney makes. You know, most doctors don’t make that much money. And you do it part time. There’s some glorious stuff to being a single inspector three and a half days a week. Not a whole lot of liability to that. Take your time, live your life. That’s pretty awesome.

Randy Lima
You know, the other thing, Ian, too, is I take about five weeks of vacation every year, that’s the other thing about, yeah. And I line up one of my buddies, you know, Joe, you know, Joe, I lined him up and I just send everything his way. We don’t exchange referral fees or anything of that garbage. I mean, I think that’s unethical, I refer him because he’s good at what he does. So I still take care of my clients. And, you know, he’s not gonna steal em, I don’t steal his, we don’t do that. It’s a respect thing. But I take five weeks of vacation a year, I love it.

Ian R
You’re making every multi inspector company out there go, this sounds, this sounds good. And there’s nothing wrong with going multi inspector. That’s what I did. You know, there’s a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of profit in it. But it depends on what our goals are. There’s no shame in being highly successful, well paid and have tons of time off either being a single inspector firm. And you can accomplish the same thing with a multi inspector firm. But we’re just talking about this aspect. But you did bring up something interesting. You brought up your friend Joe, fantastic guy. I know him and his wife, great inspectors, they started not long ago, either. But why is it so important? If we’re going to be a single inspector firm, why is it so important to build relationships with at least one or two other inspectors in our market?

Randy Lima
Man, I feel strongly about this, too. I think there is so much snark in the inspection industry in some areas where competition is the enemy. And it doesn’t have to be that way. So Joe, his wife was an agent for a nationally recognized real estate brokerage firm. And we got to talking, and she said you know, my husband is interested, and the next thing, you know, Joe is tagging along with me. And he’s studying and he’s, you know, signed up for a course online and successfully completed the course. And of course, because he’s licensed now. And it’s awesome, because, number one, I have a lot of confidence in him. So that’s the first thing, I know what he does, and I have a lot of confidence, but what if I got sick? What if I was injured seriously, or something like that? You know what, Joe is a person that I would feel very comfortable jumping in and helping out. And likewise, I’d do the same for him. And I think good inspectors, if someone’s good, and what I mean by good is not just, A, you know, all the right things to call out and how to articulate it and all that, I’m talking about your customer service skills. I’m talking about the little things like showing up looking professional, being professional, engaging your clients, running a good operation, period, trustworthy, all those things. But more than any of them is that he cares. He cares about what he does, and he wants to be the best. I’m the same way, that doesn’t mean I am the best, but I strive to be the best. And I think that’s good for our industry to have competitors like that. I’ve got a couple other competitors I’m very comfortable referring to and I’ve gotten referrals from them as well. I think good competition elevates the market.

Ian R
It does. It does elevate the market. You’ve probably listened to the podcast, you’ve listened to Drinking With Jay, that segment. Jay Wynn, he’s always talking about that, both me and him have really good relationships with other home inspectors and I know a lot of other inspectors do to. Whether we’re single or multi inspector firms. It’s important to have good relationships with our competitors, but more importantly when we’re single inspectors, as you mentioned, you gave the example of, you know, what if you get hurt? What if something happens? I remember one time, I think I got very, very sick. And I called another home inspector that I trust. I had built a relationship with him. He goes, Ian, I got you covered. Went and covered it, did it. Never asked for anything back and the next time he needed a favor, he didn’t even ask, I offered, what do you need? I got you covered, the more we work like that, it not only brings a better service to our clients, but we create a network, we can’t be an island. We’re still only humans. You have something come up. Oh, man, I forgot that radon test and I’m on a road trip 500 miles away. You know, call Joe, call one of the people you built a relationship with, I got you covered, buddy, you got me last week with the water test or whatever it happens to be. If we’re going to be a single inspector firm, go out to coffee with these guys. Train some of them. Don’t worry about them muscling the market, they’re going to look to you as a leader in the market. I’ve always found that they’re like, oh, well, I was trained by Ian. Oh, yeah. We love Ian, that didn’t, that didn’t hurt my business, that helped elevate my reputation. I’m sure you find the same thing. How do you build relationships? Do you reach out to other home inspectors? And when you find them, do you take them out to coffee? How do you build those relationships?

Randy Lima
Yeah, so there’s a gentleman here that owns the local home team franchise. And I just reached out to him when it, well, let me back up, I guess I’d seen one of his reports that he’d done for a mutual friend. He’d done a report. And actually, I was very impressed with the quality of his report. I mean, this guy does a nice job. And so I reached out to him. And I said, introduced myself. And this was probably three months after I’d started. And just wanted to let him know, I appreciated, you know, because it happened to be it was while I was training to become an inspector where someone had called me. And I told them this, I’m not licensed yet. So they went ahead and hired him. And I just appreciated him for doing such a great job for this mutual, you know, this friend. And one thing led to another, now he and I will periodically, once a quarter, go get breakfast or something, and we’re competitors. But we’ll talk through the business. The other thing about having these friends in the industry is when you want to bounce something off of them. Hey, you know I’ve run into this, you know how it is man, you run into something, you think you’ve seen it all, and you run into some you’re like, oh my gosh, what in the world is this? How do I explain this? What, here’s my thought process, am I crazy? Having someone to bounce that off of is really helpful.

Ian R
Yeah, I didn’t even think about that aspect of things, too. Because sometimes we tend to be an island when it comes to that stuff. And that’s why we end up posting things on the home inspector Facebook groups, and everybody grills you. But in reality, we can’t, we can’t see everything right. I remember, there was this weird asbestos cylinder in an attic one time. And I just had no idea what it was. I had never seen anything like it, was from the house in the early 1800s. And I sent it around to the network of people I knew, nobody actually had seen it before except one guy. And he goes, oh, yeah, I forget what it is at this point that was 15 years ago. But he’s like, oh, yeah, this is what it is. And he sent us some information, all of us learned from it. I’m like, oh, that’s cool. It was unique to our area too, like, it wasn’t like something you’d find in, find in a lot of the U.S. So yeah, it creates a nice local network of, of home inspectors that you can rely on to bounce stuff off of, wow, that’s pretty nice. Do you find that as a single inspector firm, that you kind of have to redefine what you view as success compared to other inspectors?

Randy Lima
I do now. I mean excuse me, I did when I first started. Now, it’s kind of second nature. I know what I want. And of course, you know, I use QuickBooks, I manage my expenses and you know, success to me is making a good living. And having that work life balance, you know, leading up to COVID, we had lost several friends through whether it was cancer or suicide or accidents, things like that. And then COVID hit, and it really caused my wife and I look back and how we were doing things and what we were doing. And I’ll tell you this, I don’t share this a lot but we actually, Ian, we sold our, because we were becoming empty nesters. We sold our four bedroom house in Collierville, Tennessee, market was really good. We bought a 40 foot grand design RV and decided we were going to travel more, and we went full time in a 40 foot grand. Now this is not a normal RV, this thing’s got two full bedrooms, two full bathrooms, washer, dryer, residential fridge, fireplace, all that. But, and we’re still doing that by choice. By choice, less is more, we started realizing there’s more to life, and that time off and doing things and experiences is so important to us. That to me, is if we can afford to pay all our bills, have some money for retirement and get to experience things. That is success by our definition. I mean, I’ve played that game with corporate for 20 years, I don’t want to go back.

Ian R
You know, there’s, there’s something beautiful in what you said there. There’s a lot of hustle culture that happens. I by nature kind of hustle. But I also pay for it at times. There’s something to be said of stopping and breathing and smelling the roses, so to speak. There’s that proverb, better is a handful of rest than a double handful of hard work and striving after the wind. So basically saying, are we working to work more? Or we working to find what we view as successful. Now maybe for some of us, being successful is having a bigger business. And we can hire a manager, and they run things. And you know, we’re comfortable with that. And that’s, that’s our comfort zone. For some of us, maybe we love just crawling around crawl spaces and checking out attics. And to be honest with you, I kind of, that was always my favorite part, I actually kind of missed that, I’m like, I like being under the house and looking at all the spiders and it’s quiet.

Randy Lima
You’ll learn a lot.

Ian R
You’ll learn a lot, you end up poking yourself with something at some point. But redefining success is really important, we need to ask ourselves, what are we working for? Whether or not we’re going single inspector or multi inspector? The one thing, the one metric that I see people, most inspectors I say most, most inspectors I talk to, define their success in number of inspections. I did you know, X amount of inspections last year, I want to do 50 more this coming year. And I’m like, okay, but going back to what you just said, can you say, I’d like to make a better living next year? How can I do that without doing any more inspections, but maybe raising my quality, raising my prices. So 2023 was considered one of the worst markets for home inspectors that I’ve seen in 20 years. There, there’s home inspection companies going out of business, and you raise your prices twice last year, in a market where people typically charge quite a bit less than you do. So there’s something to be said about what you’re doing. And the living that you’re creating for your family. It’s not like you’re doing magic tricks. It’s not like you have a secret thing in your back pocket that only you know about. It’s just, I do respect how you portray yourself. And I think it goes back to that confidence that we talked about earlier, portraying that confidence, knowing what you’re good at, knowing your worth. And then presenting that to the clients. How do you, if you had to give a suggestion on how to present your worth to your clients? How do you do that? Like, is there specific things that you say? Do you use a script when you answer your phone?

Randy Lima
So I love this question. So, and initially, I used to have like a little outline, you know, now I’ve got it down. But you know, so when a client calls me one of the first things I’m going to ask them you know, of course I’m gonna ask them how they heard of us and so forth. But I’m gonna ask them, you know, is this your first home inspection? Have you had a home inspection before? That kind of lets me know what I’m dealing with. I love first time homebuyers, because they’re all starry eyed, you know, they’re excited. And that’s my favorite client. And so, either way, I’m going to lead into what I do. And I’ll just start just like the flow of my inspections, I’ll say look, we’re going to look at you know, the driveways, walkways, patios, porches, decks, stairs, stoops, and I’m visually in my mind going through, okay, and then we’re gonna look at, of course, at the foundation of the home, whether it’s a crawlspace, or slant, the siding materials, the doors, and of course, the roof. Now we use drone technology, the only time we don’t use drone, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. And so I actually go through my mind the flow of the inspection with them. And the goal here is to answer all their questions, even if they forget to ask them. If you do that, when you’re done at the end, and you ask them, do you have any questions? Usually, I get feedback like, no, you pretty much covered it, you know, because I’ve already given them a price based on the address. And because we do the base price plus square footage plus age of the home, and then the foundation type, you know, so it’s not truly dynamic pricing. But our inspections vary based on those factors. But what I find is if you sell them when you tell them everything we do, and explain the technology that we utilize, yeah, everybody’s using a thermal camera. But how many people actually tell the client, here’s what we use a thermal camera for, missing insulation or possible leaks, things like that, or the same thing with a drone and explain to them that you can see a nail head, you know, popping up on a roof with that drone because of the quality. When they start putting that together and understanding okay, you’re not just telling them we have the technology, we tell them how we use the technology. And the question is usually, how do I schedule it?

Ian R
So there’s a couple things that you’re doing there that are, I don’t wanna say marketing tricks because they’re not that, they’re marketing techniques of engendering confidence, go back to that floor sanding guy, he could easily have just said I sand the floors. Okay. You keep things clean, okay? But no, he went, I actually watched the video and he explained things, and it engendered confidence in him, in his services, you’re doing the same thing, you’re laying out every possible scenario for them. And you’re asking things with a positive answer to the question. Do you have any questions? Well very likely they don’t because you’ve been very thorough. And if they do, they’re like, wow, okay, let me let me add some on there. You’re directing the conversation, and you’re keeping everything focused on how thorough you are. And I like how you brought out that not everybody, everybody offers x, y, z. But they don’t always say it. It’s easy to offer it. But did you explain to them why it’s a value to them. And one last thing, I imagine I’m rolling this around in my head, my script would typically take five minutes, if the other person didn’t talk. By the time I was done with my average phone call it was usually seven to 10 minutes long. By then, if I could get them past the five minute mark, 99% of the time that deal was sealed, would you say your calls are about the same length or a little less or more?

Randy Lima
I think pretty, pretty close, Ian, it sounds like you did very similar approach. And it’s everything, they believe in you. If you tell them what you do, and how you do it, it does instill that confidence. And usually, the only questions again are like how do I, and I now have even led them to where they don’t even have to ask that, I’ll say so, do you have any questions? And if they say no, I say, well, you know, if you decide you want to reserve this, here’s how it works. And I tell them, you know, we’re gonna send you an electronic agreement, state of Tennessee requires, we also do Mississippi, requires a signed inspection agreement for every inspection. So that takes the pressure off of that too, because the state of Tennessee standards of practice require it, and you can pay for your inspection online, we even sell the way they can pay, we don’t pass on now this is just personal choice for us, I understand others and it’s not wrong for them to do, it’s just our choice is not to pass on credit card fees. I personally hate credit card fees, I’ll just build it into my pricing if I ever decide, you know, to change all up my prices. But you know, we don’t pass on credit card fees, there’s no taxes on the service. Again, I’m giving them all the reasons why they should book it right then and there.

Ian R
Yeah, and as vested interests, that’s, that’s what it comes down to. So if you keep them on the phone for five minutes, and you’ve given them that level of information, you’re sealing a lot of your deals. That’s why car salesmen and anybody who sells anything, they try to keep you there for a certain period of time. Because then in our mind, okay, I’m already vested in this guy. And then on top of that, if you give them real solid reasons to hire you, plus the vested interest time, you seal the deal. So what you’re doing is a very well proven technique, but you’re doing it out of genuineness, which is fantastic. And I like how you started out with a script and now you don’t need it. I’ve always said every home inspector should have a script if you’re going to answer your own phones, have an outline, say okay, if they say this, then this. And then after a while, you don’t need to do it anymore. But keep them on the phone for five minutes and give them great, great information like that you’re going to, you’re going to be able to charge whatever you want. So I love this information, Randy, I was excited about you coming on and and talking about this. If you had to, if you had to give any advice to a guy out there that was, had the goal of just staying single inspector, what advice would you give him?

Randy Lima
Relationships, trust, and accountability. Relationships matter, and that’s what’s gonna get you the business. Trust is doing what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, how you say you’re going to do it. And accountability is holding yourself accountable for those things, even when it’s not easy to do. I would say diversify. You don’t want to have, you don’t want to rely only on real estate professionals to give you your work. I think that’s certainly, and we know what’s going on with NAR and all that right now, certainly. But regardless, I’ve had that approach from the beginning. I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. I think it’s kind of like investing you don’t put everything in foreign funds or everything in blue chip, you diversify. And like I said, Google has been a huge part of it. And you’ve been a big, big part of our success with the SEO in Memphis and how much Google work we get. We get, I just tell you our budget for Google is like $225 a month, we get easily $2,500 a month in work from it. So, so certainly Google is, is a great way to get work. But also everybody you talk to, everybody you talk to, I’m a professional, and don’t say I’m a home inspector. I’m a professionally trained home inspector, and that goes back to that confidence too, oh he’s professionally trained. Well, the other guy might too, but he’s not telling anybody. He’s keeping it a secret. Yeah. So shake a lot of hands, we did things candidly, that didn’t work. I did the real estate thing. Here’s the thing, the dynamic of real estate offices has changed. So many of them are never in the office now. COVID exasperated that even more. I do a lot of real estate office meetings where I get invited. And something new, I think I shared with you yesterday I’m going to do, and this has cost you almost nothing, you don’t have to buy a fancy microphone or mix or anything like that. Offer a podcast in your area once a month to talk about an aspect of home inspection, and target real estate professionals. You could also do one that targeted home buyers, you just got to figure out how to get that in front of them. But that’s a big deal when you invest in real estate agents. I mean, you’d be surprised how many real estate agents don’t know the difference between a single hung window and a double hung window. They don’t understand. And now you’ve just made them a better agent. Because they can sell hey, these windows also come down from the top, you know, and, and so when you train them and invest in them, they almost feel like oh my gosh, this guy spent all this time and I do this during inspections with agents all the time, I bring them along with these new ones especially, and teach them and train them. That’s what I would do. Because that goes back to the relationship part. If you build relationships, you’re going to do well, because they’re going to tell everybody.

Ian R
That’s beautiful. I think that’s a great way to end the podcast. Relationships, trust, and accountability, that’s really the three hallmarks of a single inspector firm or any company really. Randy, thank you so much. Thank you for bringing up this subject to begin with. I think a lot of us might actually sit back and rethink maybe our goals with business a little bit after this one. It sounds like you’re living a pretty awesome life at the moment, working as a single inspector firm. And kudos to you, and thanks for sharing this information with us.

Randy Lima
Thanks for having me, Ian, always a pleasure, sir.

Ian R
You’re awesome, 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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*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.