PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R: Welcome back to the Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Today we have a very special guest, and I’m really excited about having him, Ben Gromicko. How are you, Ben?

Ben Gromicko: I’m doing well. Thank you for inviting me. This is gonna be fun.

Ian R: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve always respected you, you’ve contributed so much to the inspection industry, you and your whole family, you know.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, it is a family affair.

Ian R: It is. You’ve given really good information on many different levels. I’ve watched a lot of your webinars and every bit of information that I could get from you anything from how to market your inspection company, how to format a website, and also things like hydrostatic pressure, and what’s the proper way to bear this beam and truss uplift. You know, you cover a wide range of subjects.

Ben Gromicko: Well, that’s one of the keys to our success at InterNACHI. It has been about a couple of decades of producing content. Hopefully, the content is interesting. Some of it isn’t, you know, married to an Italian woman, and she cooks like crazy. In an Italian family, you know, when you’re cooking the pasta, one way to figure out if it’s good enough to consume, to eat, is you throw the noodle on the cabinet door, and if it sticks, then it’s good, it’s time to get the noodles out of the water. That’s kind of like InterNACHI. So we kind of throw a bunch of stuff on the kitchen door, and if it sticks, then it must be valuable to our members. We kind of promote that. Some of it, you don’t want to touch and you want to just throw that right into the garbage. We do that too, it’s been a lot of fun creating content. That’s the key.

Ian R: The content you don’t want is a little too Al dente.

Ben Gromicko: That’s right.

Ian R: You know, it was funny I was looking up some stuff about you. I mean, I’ve known about you and interacted with you on an electronic level to one degree or another for many years here. I was looking at some stuff about you. Man, your list of home inspection qualifications is insane. Yeah. I even came across a post that Nick had posted one time, and he said, “Look at my look at my brother’s home inspection qualifications. Like it wouldn’t fit on a website”, it was just this ridiculously long list of qualifications, you know, your stuff?

Ben Gromicko: Nah, actually, there are InterNACHI members in there, a lot of them are on a forum and they are just so knowledgeable. So I was never really a great Inspector, I don’t know everything. I don’t know how to apply at all but what I do is help and support those who need a little knowledge, a little help, a little guidance, a little advice, some tips, and things. I can find that information and bring it to them. For the experienced veterans, you know, they probably enjoy going back and refreshing their minds a little bit. So I don’t know, I’ve got a long list of credentials, but it’s basically because it’s required by the states and the provinces and the countries that we operate in. We have home inspectors all over the world. So someone has to be the local, accredited, or state-approved, certified instructor. So that’s what I do. Like, I’m a Florida home inspector, I’ve never performed a home inspection in Florida, right. I’m a home inspector in other areas and I’ve never performed a Home Inspection. I haven’t performed an inspection in about 10 years for our clients are so many more 15. The only home inspections I do now really are in front of our camera. So our videographer will film me doing an inspection or something like that. So there are a lot of really experienced, knowledgeable, master inspectors, I wouldn’t consider myself as one, I just support them. That’s my role.

Ian R: Well, that’s very modest of you. I do agree that some of the guys on the forums know their stuff, man. The stuff they pull off the top of their head. They’re like home inspection, Google, they just know it.

Ben Gromicko: I love going toe to toe with some of them, you know, it’s a lot of fun. Because we’ll post something and they’ll they’re so good at critiquing. They’ll question everything, even down to the detail of like a sketch that I’ll do. If it’s wrong, man, you know, we change our minds at InterNACHI. We flip it and we fix it real quick because it’s one of the other keys to our success. InterNACHI is we kind of listen to our members because they’re smarter than us. They’re out there doing all the hard work and we’re there to support them. So if we do something wrong, we apologize and fix it. But we’re trying to do everything right all the time for our members. It’s a lot of fun to get that feedback on the forum. In the forums, it’s like the Wild West. You gotta have thick skin. There’s a lot of stuff going on out there but there are some really good folks who are really knowledgeable, and I’m proud of them.

Ian R: It’s always been one of my favorite spots to be in talk with guys. But I think the point that I’d like to make is that you’re one of us. You’re a home inspector, you know the industry, you don’t kind of know it, you know it. So I respect that a lot because, you know, there’s always going to be somebody outside the industry who brings in value, but you’re inside the industry, you know. So you started out as a home inspector many, many years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about your home inspection career?

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, I was a home inspector for about a dozen years in southeastern pa suburbs of Philly, about 200 competitors within a one-hour radius, I would say. We’re really competitive, and we had great success. Actually before that, though, I was in high school, and I was building radon test kits. Back then it was charcoal. If you get 40 grams of activated charcoal with thrown into tuna can put a screen on it. Then universities were doing research on radon because it was kind of new back then. I hired my friends and my dad’s garage, and we built hundreds of 1000s of radon kits. Then I started doing radon tests for real estate agents during transactions. Nick started a RADON Mitigation System. So we found radon, and then we fixed it. Then we went right into building homes. That didn’t do too much but my brother Nick the founder of InterNACHI. We did all the work. So we built only three homes. We can only do it in 10 months. So we did all the work. So I was a home builder, radon tester, and a home builder. When we built homes, this guy, this old guy on a Harley would drive up to the houses that we were building and he would critique us. We couldn’t get any draws from the bank until he passed us. So he’d have his checklist and he’d come in and 15 minutes, maybe and then he leave. Well, one day, we talked to him, and he’s like, What are you doing? Well, I’m a home inspector, you know, and I also do these loan draw inspections for folks who are building homes. We’re like, well, how much money do you make, you know, and I’m like, oh, that’s what we want to do. So we started a home inspection company. That was the best thing in my whole life. It’s so much fun, being a home inspector. I enjoyed every minute of it and learned everything we could about it. We grew our inspection company from just my brother and me to a multi inspection company. That was a lot of fun.

Ian R: Yeah, I can tell in your voice that you look back on that a lot. Yeah, and it’s kind of funny that your life changed with a guy on a Harley? Was he really driving around on a Harley?

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, I’m coming too. Today’s the day, the bank guy is coming in. Pull up in a drive, I can still see him. It’s just what a great life he was living. I was thinking. What a great life to be an inspector, you know? That’s what we did. It was a great life to be a home inspector. It really is a lot of fun.

Ian R: Oh, it totally is. I’ve always related it to being like Han Solo. Like you’re just flying around in your spaceship doing cool things. Now we should do a podcast on Home Inspection vehicles and talk about Harley’s I think that’d be a great one. You know you got your saddle on the side that you can put your tools in, you know, strap your ladder to the back. That’s right. That’s right. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a great story. So that brought you here to InterNACHI and what is your position? What do you do at InterNACHI?

Ben Gromicko: At InterNACHI, I’m the Chief Operating Officer. Basically, I’m responsible for the day-to-day operations. Anything that’s going on, I’m responsible for it. Taking direction from our founder and CEO. Also, I’m the director of education or the dean of the InterNACHI school. It’s funny that I’m doing this podcast today because I like to say that we just got reaccredited as a home inspector college by the US Department of Education. So it’s Friday, April 29. We go through re-accreditation processes, just like every school, accredited college, and university. Today, we just got reapproved. They extended our accreditation. So we are a home inspector college as well. So there’s a home inspector College, inside InterNACHI. So InterNACHI is a huge organization, I’m the CEO of it. Inside it is a home inspector college. So if you’re a member of this big group called InterNACHI, you have access to free access to an actual college, you can download your college ID card if you wanted to. You could apply for movie tickets at a student college student discount if you wanted to. We just got reaccredited today, so we’re celebrating today.

Ian Robertson: Oh man, that’s insane. That’s a big deal and I guess that’s a good lead-in to what we’re actually talking about today. Is InterNACHI worth it? It’s a question that we see a lot of guys ask and I think you just kind of gave at least one of the big answers to that question, but I see guys on Facebook forums and Nachi forums and they’ll say, hey, guys just getting started, is internationally worth it. It’s interesting. We were chatting beforehand. I’m like, man, to me, that’s, that’s a kind of a crazy question. Like, to me, it’s like, yeah, of course, it’s worth it. I started all three of my inspection companies relying heavily, very heavily on InterNACHI, you have a different take? Man, that’s a great question. Do you want to dig into that subject? I think it’s good for us to talk about it and I think this will be good. First of all, if you’re a new guy listening and saying, Oh, that makes sense. Some of us may have been in InterNACHI for many years, and not realize some of the benefits that we could derive from it. Or maybe we’re not using it to the full. Like, I didn’t know I could get discount coffee as a college student now.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, so just starting off, like, I would say, don’t take my word for it, because you know what my answer is going to be. So what can you do? You can go on the international forum, as a guest, you don’t have to pay anything, it’s free, you can just ask to pose the question there, see what happens. You can go on Facebook, Facebook is live and active with a ton of people, you can just ask that question as you mentioned, and you can also experience it for yourself. So if you’re not a member, and you’d like to see what InterNACHI is worth to you, just email me, I’m on the contact page. I’ll give you a free trial membership. You can zoom around just like any full member that has access to anything you want and give it a try. My answer would be, in anything, especially in business, you have to figure out the value, your return on investment, right? So what are you getting in relation to the cost? So in business, I’m always teaching about this fraction I have like the top of the fraction. The numerator is divided by the bottom of the fraction denominator. So the numerator would be like, value divided by the cost. If the value is incredibly overwhelming, in relation to the cost, then it’s a good decision. So I was an Ashi member, I was a member of Ashi, I was a certified inspector of Ashi member for a few years, and other organizations, a member of many other organizations in every organization that you join as a home inspector. Well, you got to watch the cost, because it can really start adding up. So especially like a franchise, everything about a franchise as well. So you have to look at what you’re actually getting. And you should be overwhelmed by those things in relation to the cost. And so that works also for your potential clients. So if you’re a home inspector, and you’re running a business, you have to think of this fraction as well, because your potential clients are thinking about that. They want to be overwhelmed by value in relation to the cost. So if you charge a lot of money, like, let’s say $500, right, for a home inspection, which actually should be like the minimum, but that’s a $500 for a home inspection. Then you need to show the overwhelming and credible value that you’re going to provide to that potential client so that they can make a smart decision. If they can’t, if they look at your website, and they can’t figure out the value to cost ratio is kind of iffy, you have a serious problem. Right? So you want to think about that. You want to always think about providing overwhelming value to the cost. If you’re overwhelmed by that value, man you’ll you can demand higher prices as a home inspector, if you provide incredible overwhelming value. So that’s what I would say, don’t take my word for it. Just think about those concepts and ask other people.

Ian R: Yeah, and that’s a beautiful way to express it. We want to overwhelm people with the value that comes from us as inspectors. We’ve talked about that a lot on this podcast. Home inspection fees are too low. Actually, James Gante talked about that a few weeks ago. He said Be better, make yourself appear better, and charge more. Don’t worry about competition, you know, he says don’t compete. Why do you need to compete if you have that overwhelming value? I think the first thing that comes to mind with InterNACHI is certifications. When I first started, you know, I kind of had this mentality I know about a house. I’ve worked on them my entire life it was part of my family. It’s what we did. Why do I need a certification to tell people that?

Ben Gromicko: Yep. When you’re beginning when you’re starting off? No one trusts you. No one knows about you. So what you want to do when you’re beginning is you want to borrow trust. You want to borrow someone’s trust, you want to borrow someone’s validation of you. So you could do that in a couple of ways. Find people to do something nice for them like a free inspection and ask for a referral. Right? Hiring somebody new is risky. So you want to reduce that risk or eliminate it when you get a referral. So you want other people to talk well of you. InterNACHI can do that, right, we can train and certify you. We’re an accredited college that certifies inspectors, there’s no better certification mark or designation you can get, than InterNACHI’s, you can be certified by a for-profit school somewhere, you can be certified by Bob or Mary. That really doesn’t have that kind of trust level. So InterNACHI is this huge, big accredited organization all over the world. If we say, you’re certified, check out his or her logo to prove that they’re certified, you’re doing great that you’re borrowing trust, you’re getting a referral from InterNACHI, right? So you want to think about that, you want to think about using InterNACHI to your advantage. If it’s a certification logo that helps, go for it, right? In business, you want to always think about leveraging systems that do work for you. That you can’t do yourself. So you can’t just yell out, please trust me. So you want to leverage InterNACHI. In order to borrow that trust, that certification mark that says, I’m highly qualified. I’m one of the highest qualified inspectors in my area, actually, click this verification button and InterNACHI will tell you that. So when in business, you want to put systems in place that do work for you. So you’re not doing all the work, because no one really trusts you in the beginning. So this is one of the ways where you can put a system in place for a low monthly fee if you’re a member, and take full advantage of international huge, big size. That’s probably a good idea to use that logo. The certification logo, the CPI logo in particular, oh, by the way, don’t put the InterNACHI used logo on your website or your marketing. That’s one of the dumbest things you could do. Don’t help promote the organization, we’re doing just fine. What you need to do is concentrate on yourself. So the CPI logo, or any of the other 60, other inspector certification logos, you need to use that to identify the value that you’re bringing to your clients. So use the CPI logo, the CPI certified professional inspector is a federally registered certification mark that says you’re highly qualified. I think the certification logos are valuable, not only to beginning inspectors, highly valuable to beginning inspectors but also valuable to continue your credibility throughout every stage of your career.

Ian Robertson: Yeah, and I love that expression that you used borrowing trust, you have this huge organization, and you’re just borrowing trust and presenting that to the client. I think I kind of related sometimes to go to the doctor. So I go to the doctor, I had a young doctor one time and I’m like, oh, man, this guy’s kinda young, fresh out of college, but I tell you what, he had every certification hanging up on the wall. I didn’t read them. I didn’t look at what they all were. They had a bunch of seals on him. It made me feel warm and fuzzy. He borrowed trust from whatever accreditations these were. I think he kind of knew he looked too young. So I think he got a few went out and got a few extra. When I started out, I looked like I was 12 until I was about 35. I’d go to an inspection and people would say, you know, is your dad going to show up? Like, no, no, I might bring one of my kids here.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, exactly. I was young 20s When I was doing home inspections. Yeah, I was doing all the work. I was doing everything it was great. No one wanted to listen to me. So if you got a bad young look. People now, you know, buy whiskers, they figured Oh, for men, like oh, the great, I’ve got some if you’re watching the video, I got someone on my beard here. Oh, you know, you’re highly qualified. It’s silly. People judge the book by the cover. Sometimes you have to take that into consideration when you’re doing your marketing plan.

Ian R: Remember the commercial back in the 80s, or 90s, called a little bit of gray had this old guy sitting on a couch with a young guy. They’re like, he’s too old and he’s too young. So they merge them together. So you’re right that little bit of gray it sells. You know, it’s funny if we don’t have that, or even if we do, we can still give people that warm, fuzzy feeling by saying, you know, here are my qualifications. Like the CMI qualification certified master inspector. Man when I got that, that was a hammer. Oh, well, we’re thinking about going to this other guy. Is he a certified master inspector? Oh, I don’t know. I am.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, yeah, that’s um, that just shows that you are the best of the best. I want to little disclaimer, that’s a totally separate organization of InterNACHI or a cooperative relationship. CMI is really good that CMI logo, like when you call up a plumber, you want the master plumber to show up when you call up an electrician, you want the master electrician to come up. So when you become a CMI, you have to go through a lot of education or years and or years and so InterNACHI can help you with that to qualify to become a CMI. You should take a look at becoming a certified master inspector if you’re not.

Ian R: Yeah. You can look in the transcript, we’ll put links to all of this in the transcript for you. The same thing with the CPI thing, you know, hey, I’m a certified professional inspector, here are 60 qualifications that I have, let me know if the next guy that you go to has those 60 qualifications.

Ben Gromicko: Yep, they’re true. 60 different inspector certifications. So don’t just become a home inspector and certified. Man, you got to diversify your services, especially in this market, you got to do, if you listened to your podcast, you know, previous podcasts, I listened to them. You know, everybody was talking about doing other things. Like, I think James was talking about doing water well, inspections. Yeah. Same thing. With my home inspection company. You can get everything all one, what does it call it all one-stop-shop or something like that, you know, you’re wanting to go from lead hazard risk assessments to home inspections, to mold inspections, and you want to diversify your services. So InterNACHI has those opportunities for you if you want to do additional types of inspections and show me even more qualifications. I guess that’s one of the things the internet does. Well, we do two things well at InterNACHI. We have everything you need. Additional certifications, training, education, all that stuff, and marketing and business stuff and services and products and things like that. We have everything you need, all in one place and it’s a little cost, right? It’s that fraction again. So we help our members save money, I mean, you should keep your money in your pocket. So we go as low as possible, we got a $49 a month fee, and you get everything that any fully certified accredited home inspector or member has, right. So that fraction again. You know, your overwhelming value, low cost or low investment, huge return on investment, always thinking about that, I’m always teaching about that to inspectors. You know, as someone, David, I won’t mention his last name, he wants me to review a website for him. I do this often, for our members, just giving them tips. I’m going to look at it. He’s got five seconds to show me overwhelming value. I’m going to click that price tab on the website, you design websites, you know, you’re looking for, what’s the cost, you know, the potential clients looking for the cost and the value there, they’re doing that. Maybe they don’t know that they’re doing that but mentally they’re doing that. They want to know what they’re going to get for the inspection fee. So that’s the other thing InterNACHI does. We have everything you need, and we try to use our size to get benefits, free benefits, and exclusive discounts for our members. So you can keep your money. We don’t want it.

Ian R: Yeah, that’s great. I’m glad you brought that up, because $49 a month. So all this stuff that we’re talking about, and there’s a long list more, $49 a month. I mean, that’s a nice lunch for two people, maybe. So that’s not a huge fee, in my opinion. You were talking about a little bit about clients looking for a one-stop-shop. I think that’s something that InterNACHI has helped me in my companies out with, because years ago, you know, home inspection, all right, I just want to get that home inspection, want to get that home inspection. I’m like, You know what? Wood Destroying Insect is a market that I’m missing out on? Then I did that. I use primarily the InterNACHI course. Interestingly, I might not have thought about it. If it were not for InterNACHI, saying, Oh, hey, here’s a certification. Here’s a nice course. Have you taken this yet? Would you like to take it? Like you know what I would like to take that. So it’s the nudges and the certification. It was good training. We kept adding services and services until our average inspection fee, sometimes for a morning inspection is $1,200 because we do septic and well and all sorts of things. I burned off my overhead for that inspection and added a whole bunch of stuff on. I mean, that’s a nice morning.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, that’s right. If you really want to, there’s only a few ways you can make more money in the home inspection business and one of them is key, is ancillary Inspection Services. I mean, bundling up a home inspection package for folks who don’t know what the bundle is. Most people don’t know what they need. Someone famous that said that? I think Steve Jobs at Apple or something so that, you know a lot of people don’t know what they love or would want. So you actually have to start that conversation. If you got an office manager or if you’re going on the phone or if your emailing or texting is tweaked just right. You can prompt people to think about other services and the InterNACHI has these promo videos that help our members who are not very good at selling. They’re not very good at upselling. The home inspector just sometimes gonna like that talk, which is like kind of odd about ourselves about other services about selling people, you know more services. We help those who need like, so we have these videos and you put them on your mobile device, maybe an extra iPad, you can bring and you just hit play and it goes through these promo videos that help you sell ancillary additional inspections while you’re there. So the title was 10 of every videos while I’m here, you know, while I’m here, you know, maybe you have a radon problem, we don’t know until we test. So you can get that increased gross revenue, without adding your time. That’s a fraction again, the top part is gross revenue divided by your time, you don’t want to increase your time for sure. You want to be efficient with your time but you do want to increase gross revenue.

Ian R: Yeah, so let’s go back to that fraction. So $50 a month or 49? Technically. So one inspection one morning, I made an extra $800 on an inspection. I’m pretty sure that fraction is practically toppling over at that point. So the value is not only immediate, but it’s cumulative. Over the years, it’s just made me a better business person, and able to give my clients better value, while at the same time increasing the bottom line.

Ben Gromicko: That’s right. That’s right. And you also want to show that to your potential clients. So get a good website designer, get a good marketing team, get oh, the marketing team. So one of the benefits of being a member of InterNACHI is you have a marketing team, there are a half a dozen professional consultants, illustrators designers that are available to you, for free to design stuff for you like a logo, all you have to do is place an order, like a business card order, that’s like 100 bucks, but you get seven people working for you for as long as you want. For your membership fee. Imagine starting off as a home inspection company, right? Hiring seven people to work on your marketing is just impossible. You can’t do it. So it’s the same thing with the education team, there are a half dozen people in the education team, all waiting for you to ask a question about training, what to do next? What course should I take? Is it state-approved? Can I get CE? How do I get a license, they’re all working for you, they’re sitting and waiting. You know, this is an incredible resource. We have 30 people at InterNACHI and full-time salaried people at InterNACHI. We’re really blessed. They all work for each member. So that’s a huge resource that you should consider when thinking about joining an organization or buying a franchise or something. How many people are actually working for you full-time?

Ian R: Yeah, and you know, and I’m not just making this up to make everything sound flowery and awesome, but I really do love it. Yeah, I really go ahead just lay it on me. I really do love the logos and the brochures and business cards that you guys design our company actually refers people to InterNACHI because we don’t want a house with a magnifying glass on it. That’s not going to brand you. If I see one more house with a magnifying glass, my eyes are gonna burn out of my head.

Ben Gromicko: I can’t remember the last time I saw a magnifying glass. Do they still do that in school and the kids still do the ants and the sun thing.

Ian R: I don’t know but I don’t want to see it on the logo ever again,

Ben Gromicko: That whole Sherlock Holmes thing, you know, Detective, looking closely at things. I think you can express that you are thorough and complete within your inspections. Without using a magnifying glass in your logo. Yeah, that’s not the kind of brand you want to communicate.

Ian R: Yeah, have something that brands you and your company without being cliche about it. You know, it’s funny, you talked about websites too and stuff like that there’s a huge SEO benefit for being an InterNACHI member to a lot of guys call me or a brand I know. Either they know about SEO or they don’t. They’ll say something like, Hey, All I know is I just need SEO. Somebody said, What can I be doing? I actually pointed them to InterNACHI because I did a little experiment, which was kind of funny because they were just adding on to some stuff that we had done for him. I did a little experiment, I created a profile on my InterNACHI account for several different cities because I hear a guy say, Oh, I never get a lead from InterNACHI nobody ever finds me there. My phone blew up. So about 20% of them were people trying to sell me some, you know, insurance on my car or extended warranty or something like that but 80% of them were live leads, hey, I need an inspection in the city. I would even go outside my service area a little bit. I’m like, oh, I’m sorry to hear. Let me give you the name of another inspector. Oh, thank you. Here’s the other InterNACHI member. Oh yeah, they’re on the list. Thank you. Yeah, and I just did it as an experiment? I’m like, those, those are good hot leads, have we actually gone into our account and optimized it added all our information, created our profile to make it look nice. Actually taking advantage of some of the benefits that InterNACHI has on the back end of things that are just coming from an old SEO guy like me.

Ben Gromicko: Yep, you make a good point, we’re not very good at that. I mean, we see our members, and they’re not filling out, like their profile. That’s one of the things that they are, they’re not adding zip codes to their listing. The InterNACHI’s big on the internet. So we’ll we’re finding people searching Google searching for a particular inspector in a zip code, right, and they’re gonna pass up our InterNACHI members because their profile isn’t updated, you got to add listings, you got to tell like our system, you’re telling the internet, where you work as a home inspector, so enter your city, and state and zip code and things like that, and you make a list. Then if you’ve got a website, great, if you don’t, you gotta get one fast, you gotta get online, and you put that website URL, right in your InterNACHI profile. then InterNACHI has a search engine in there are people hitting it all the time. I don’t know what the stats are but it’s a lot of people looking for an inspector. We direct people to that InterNACHI Certified inspector, who has a profile that’s all filled out correctly as you said, and in this upcoming year, that is the rest of the year, that is my goal, I’m going to try to get every home inspector to update their business profile. Also like, you go into your website, and there’s a lot of stuff you can do on your own website to make sure you’re saying things right. Maybe even like, when you do a selfie on Instagram or something, you need to end it with, you know, hire Big Ben inspections from Boulder, Colorado, maybe throw in a phone number too. You have to tell people your name and your location, and maybe your phone number. It’s that, you know, they used to call it NAP, name, address, phone number. You know, it’s still important to update your profile, because that’s one of the things InterNACHI does. We send people leads for free. I was teaching a five-day class at the House of Horrors. We have three houses of Horror. A whole house with 1000 defects was built under our roof. You can take a live hands-on training class, and all the instructors are certified, master inspectors. I was teaching, I open up the five-day class and I was telling people exactly this like you’re new. So I want you to go into your profile and update it like right now. One person by the end of the five days got a ping, somebody called. So he was surprised because he wasn’t even certified in the first four days. Then the fifth day, he got the certification, had his profile updated and it actually worked. I do it all the time on a webinar like I’ll show you how this works and I proved that it works. I can show you that we have stats on how people hit your website. Now, it’s up to you to convert. So what you want to do is get people aware that you’re certified, you get trained and certified by InterNACHI. You take advantage of all the resources the InterNACHI has like the logos and surveys. Then it’s really up to you to tell people, you have to get people awareness, I call it. You have to send out emails or talk to people or your neighbors or find a real estate agent or network or hire a real estate agent who’s not busy as part of your growth team and get people aware of you. Okay, now get ready, they’re gonna come back, where are they going? Probably your website, they’re not going to show up at your front door. So you got to have a website, and you got to be able to convert them. This means you have to talk to somebody about your brand. On the internet, he has a team of marketing people to talk to you talk with you about what makes you different from all the rest and how can we provide overwhelming value to the people hitting your website, so that they see that the cost is, oh, that’s a really good decision, and they’re gonna hire you. A lot of members complain that I’m not getting any leads, the profile isn’t filled out, or I don’t get any phone calls or any scheduling while I go to the website. They don’t have online scheduling. Right? You gotta have online scheduling.

Ian R: Yeah, it’s the era of DoorDash and you know, remote banking, and people are just gonna hire you online.

Ben Gromicko: Yeah, so we’re trying to help our members through these steps. There are basic steps that every home inspector has to do in order to get that phone a ring or that online scheduler to ping you that you’ve got a job. We can take you from zero to 60. Probably in three weeks if you’re totally brand new, but that’s really concentrated. If you’re a full-time worker or somewhere that job, maybe a weekend kind of stuff. So it’s gonna take you longer, but you want to get from zero to 60 as fast as possible, by taking advantage of all the resources, and steps that we provide to our members in order to start making money. Then when you start making money, it’s the greatest feeling in the whole world to make 350 bucks on a Saturday afternoon, and you help people out with their dream home, and it’s just us, and they’re your neighbors now, right? It’s just so much fun to be a home inspector.

Ian R: It really is. I think you really well described what people call a marketing funnel. Like, we always hear that it’s a buzzword, but basically, you just described, you get people to know about you, and you funnel them down to where they hire you, which nowadays is your website. Most of us aren’t going to have an office where people come and say, Hey, I’d like to hire you as a home inspector. They’re gonna go to the website, get your phone number, whatever it happens to be. If at any point, our funnel is leaky, like, we don’t have our profile filled out, okay, well, you lost a bunch there. Your website doesn’t have your phone number at the top. Okay, well, you’re lost a bunch there. You don’t have online scheduling. See if we have holes in our funnel. We can’t say, Well, I didn’t get a lead. I’ve never gotten a phone call. Okay, fine. Find the holes in your funnel because, again, I go back to that experiment. It worked for me. Yeah, it worked for that guy in your class. That’s right. You know, and just talking to I was thinking about, if you go to www.nachi.org/benefits, the list of benefits is amazing there. Just for that fraction, even if you just want to break even with InterNACHI, let’s just say you’re crazy like then you just want to break even. I saved like $200 on renting a car through my InterNACHI deal. That bought me four months of InterNACHI. Then I say,

Ben Gromicko: I do that, I use the InterNACHI discount. I fly around the country, conventions and home inspector events, and stuff. I use the discount. It actually works. Yep.

Ian R: Yeah. The Ford one too. There are a lot of guys that buy. You just renewed your thing with Ford, didn’t you? Yeah,

Ben Gromicko: Yeah. Yep. Vehicles, computers, tools. So like inspector outlet is a good place to get a tool at a discount. Software, we asked those vendors to give our members discounts. That’s one of the things that you would expect an organization to do for you. If we’re not doing that, that’s of no value to you. So we work really hard at that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Ian R: Well, I think it’s pretty clear to see, we could talk for hours and days if InterNACHI is worth it. It really, really is, in my opinion. You’ve really given us a lot to think about too, Ben, and I loved your fraction illustration. and helping us to understand a marketing funnel in simple turn too. Listen, if you want to get a hold of Ben, he’s already offered to have you get in touch with him. Do you want us to put your contact information in the transcript there, Ben?

Ben Gromicko: That’d be great. I’m on the contact page nachi.org/contact. Just before I leave, can I promote a new thing that I’m doing in relation to coffee and webinars? I would love that because I love both. So I’m starting a new webinar. I do a lot of webinars, a lot of them are just like technical training webinars, you know, according to the standards of practice, or we’ll have a vendor selling something. I just wanted to try a new kind of webinar for inspectors. It’s called Coffee with Ben, I’m Ben. We have an informal chat time. I don’t have an agenda. I have no schedule. It could be five minutes, and no one might show up or 100 people might show up when we’re just going to talk about business, just as if you’re meeting me for coffee, and other inspectors show up too. So that’s the kind of format I want to try. If you’re interested, we’re going to promote it in the next InterNACHI newsletter. So go to HomeInspectornewsletter.com. Subscribe, and you’ll get to have some coffee with Ben if you’d like.

Ian R: I might show up too. So you might get to meet me as well. I will definitely have coffee either way, though. Ben, I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. You’re awesome and thank you for all that you do for inspectors out there. We’ll hopefully have you on the show again soon.

Ben Gromicko: Thank you very much. It’s been an honor and a lot of fun. Let’s do it again.

Ian R: Sounds great. Thanks.

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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