PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Well, welcome back everyone to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Today I have on a guest that I’ve been really looking forward to having. We have Mike Crow himself. Mike, how are you?

Mike Crow
I am doing amazing, my friend. I am spending a day at Disney. What can you say?

Ian Robertson
Okay, but the Florida Disney, right?

Mike Crow
Absolutely. Disney World.

Ian Robertson
Yep. So which park are you going to, or you going to all of them?

Mike Crow
We go to all of them usually, plus Universal as well. I’m here with a good friend of mine and his family and some friends. And so we’re just having a kind of a mastermind and having some fun.

Ian Robertson
Awesome. Well, I’ve been really excited about having you on the show. And I’m really appreciative that you took time out of your busy schedule. Because, well, maybe I’ll let you tell the audience about yourself. What do you do? And why should, really all of us know who you are?

Mike Crow
Well, you know, I’m an overnight success. What can I tell you? It only took 38 years.

Ian Robertson
Exactly.

Mike Crow
You know, I started back in the business in ’85, grew a home inspection business, I was the first company to sell a home inspection business for over a million dollars. Then I helped that national firm grow several million dollar areas. They did some good stuff. And then I realized that it wasn’t really a good fit for me with them as much as anything else. And, uh, but I had a non compete, so, I backed off, I resigned, and I started coaching home inspectors, as long as they weren’t within 50 miles of the original, you know, home inspection company that I sold, I was good. And during the coaching program, people said, “My god, I don’t know if you realize this, but you’re in year 2000 now, and that was ’80 something when you built your business. So, what you’re teaching doesn’t really work today.” And that kind of ticked me off a little bit. So, I went and bought another company and made a guy an offer he just couldn’t refuse, one of my old competitors. And we took his business. He used to be a million dollar company, but he was just sliding backwards so bad. He was at about 300,000. So we took that company from 300,000 to 600,000 to a million to 1.4 million and then to 2 million. And we’ve been doing over 2 million for the last, I don’t know, 10 years or so. We did 2.7 million last year. And, so, it’s been an exciting journey.

Ian Robertson
Oh, fantastic. So, obviously your methods do work.

Mike Crow
Yeah, they do work, and they consistently work. And it’s about creating the right lifestyle with that process. So not only does it work, but I only work about four hours a week in my inspection business.

Ian Robertson
Oh, wow. Okay, I’d love to hear how you manage doing that. That’s fantastic.

Mike Crow
We can definitely talk about that some, and my original business that I sold, one of the reasons they liked it so much, and one of the reasons they were willing to pay so much for it, was that I didn’t have to be there either. And if you don’t have to be there every single day, your business is worth a lot more. Because now they’re not buying you, they’re buying your systems and everything that you bring into play.

Ian Robertson
That’s a fantastic point. That’s the dream of a lot of home inspectors. And a lot of us tend to say, “Well, I have to work really hard and a lot. I had to put in 100 hours a week to get to that point.” And your method obviously works quite a bit differently than that. So that’s fantastic.

Mike Crow
Well, and they do, and I will tell you, one of the things that I tell people is, if you’re willing to do now, what other people are not willing to do, you’ll get to spend the rest of your life like people dream they could, you know, could live.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. Well, this is a fantastic episode then to have on in the series that we’ve been doing. We’ve been talking a lot about marketing and the changing market of what’s happening. And you said something interesting before we started the podcast. You said, a lot of inspectors don’t know the difference between a good market and a bad market.

Mike Crow
Yes. Isn’t that amazing?

Ian Robertson
But yeah, but interesting, though, the title of this podcast is Market Through It.

Mike Crow
Right.

Ian Robertson
And that was your idea. So, maybe you could talk to that point a little bit. First of all, I’d like to hear what you think is a good market versus a bad market and help educate us on that. But then also, I’d like to hear why you came up with that title of Market Through It.

Mike Crow
All right. We’ll definitely hit the Market Through It here in just a second. Here’s the thing is, I’ve been at this for 38 years since 1985. Okay, so, how many recessions do you think I’ve seen? How many presidential elections do you think I’ve seen? How many pandemics have you? How many surges in the market where people are crying, “Oh, you know, it’s a, it’s a seller’s market, and sellers don’t want inspections.” And, you know, I’ve been through all of that. And in fact, I’ve been through probably three recessions. All right, I came into this in the 80s. And you’re probably too young to remember the 80s the way I do at least, you know, but there were long gasoline lines and interest rates were 18%, I mean, that’s what I came into in the business. Okay. And one of the most famous presidents ever. I didn’t say bashed, I just said most famous, okay. But you know, it was it was an interesting thing. And one of the things that I have to give my dad a lot of credit because he always said, “Well, you know, we just have to market ourselves.” And I do have a marketing degree, by the way, and by the way, so does my son, so does my daughter…but the bottom line is that you have to learn how to make the phone ring, you have to learn how to make people want to use you. And then, so the biggest secret, and by the way, this is where a lot of inspectors will probably turn us off today. So I apologize up front, but you have to learn how to get people to refer you over and over and over again. Okay, so a lot of inspectors, they want to go out and get a job, they want to go get an inspection. No, no, no, I mean, I do that, I do that, and we do it kind of well. But I want to go get somebody that’s going to refer me five times a year, I want to get somebody that’s going to refer me every year they’re in business, okay, I want to get somebody that’s going to refer me to every job, every home they sell maybe, or every home sell they’re part of, that they’ll refer me. I call those people mavens, by the way. So what I teach is kind of like maven, maven driven marketing. And the whole idea is to find somebody that is already working with homebuyers. And there are about 15 of those people. And I don’t think most people realize that. But you’ve got, of course, you’ve got the low hanging fruit, which most people don’t even use as much as they should. But you’ve got the..you’ve got the real estate agents, and there’s the buyer’s agent, and then there’s the seller’s agent, you’ve got mortgage companies, you’ve got title companies, you’ve got real estate attorneys who got moving companies, you got insurance companies, and the list just goes on and on, who new homeowners or homebuyers are working with. And what you want to do is get those people to know who you are, and get those people to refer you just over and over again. And so when I tell people to market through it, they think, I get a lot of times, “hey, let’s go get more homebuyers.” No, let’s get more people that can refer us. In fact, I created a KPI or Key..wow, KPI, a Key Performance Indicator, excuse me, you know, some days, I have forgotten more than I know, what can I tell you? You’ve probably forgotten more than I know. But it’s a key performance indicator, that your business is on track, that your business is doing the right thing. And when I came into the industry, the key performance indicators were, how much business do we do this month? What a terrible, terrible key performance indicator. That is like looking in the rearview mirror, right, and seeing what you did. I like looking out the windshield and seeing where I’m going. So one of the key performance indicators that I created was how many new mavens used us this month or this week. So this year alone, we have 500 plus new mavens that have used our home inspection business. By the way, most home inspection companies, while single man operations, won’t even do 500 inspections. And every one of those have used us at least once. And probably 60% of them have used us a second, third, fourth, fifth time. Okay. And so it’s, that’s, that’s the big thing. And, you know, the funny thing is, I actually teach you know, when a recession hits or, or I also call it winter marketing, most of my competition will like, go okay, when you turn the volume down on the marketing, because there isn’t as much business. Actually, it’s exactly the opposite, right? We have to turn the volume up. So during wintertime, if we’re visiting 20 real estate offices, we need to turn that into 30 or 40 real estate offices. If we’re doing a presentation once a week, we need to do two presentations a week. Now, I’m going to be very honest, those are low numbers, okay, for me, but for the average guy listening to this saying like, “Okay, I could do that.” And you have to market your way through that. During a normal business, if you’re already up and running, and you’re doing okay, then visiting 10 real estate offices a week, per inspector, is perfectly fine. So you got the recessions out there where the business has fallen through the floor, and everybody’s going, “Oh, nobody’s buying houses.” By the way, when we had more foreclosures than we could shake a stick at, I was doing 100 to 200 foreclosure inspections a month. Okay. Because I was working for banks and different things like that. And then during this last big, brouhaha, you know, where people were going, “Oh, it’s a seller’s market.” And agents are saying, well, if you put an inspection in there, then I’m not going to, I’m not even going to look at that offer. We had our best year ever, our best year ever. And now we’re headed into another recession, but in between that boom and that recession that we all think is coming, okay, and this is actually a normal market. And that I don’t think that’s what people understand. This right now, okay, is a normal market. But the problem is people have gotten so used to it being a boomer market or being a recession market, that they’re kind of concerned, they think this is a down market. It’s not, this is normal.

Ian Robertson
You know, it’s funny that you mentioned that. We did our Q4 Market Outlook podcast a couple weeks ago. And we said that, we’re like, you know, okay, so interest rates are, what are they 7% or something like that, or whatever. Whatever they are now. And I’m like, yeah, but like, 15 years ago, people were bragging about 11% interest rate. They’re like, hey, look how well it looks.

Mike Crow
Yeah, whatever they are. Well, yeah. Because it was just coming down. Right? Yeah.

Ian Robertson
So it’s like, okay, it’s, I don’t think it’s as bad as people say, we are transitioning. The transition period is a little bit difficult. But to something you said earlier, I got to roll back to it and say, preach it. Because that was spot on. People turn down their marketing, when things get hard, and they turn it up when things get easy. That’s like only watering your lawn in the rain. And then when it gets dry, you turn the hose off. It does not make any sense. People who in this market, market more, will end up coming out the other end with less competition, and a better business.

Mike Crow
Right. Now, I will tell you, I say something every time I hear somebody say something like that, and it goes something like this. I love my competition. You know, oh, you don’t want to market right now. You know, I completely understand that. If I were you, I wouldn’t either. Thank God, I’m not them. Okay.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it, it is kind of a funny mentality, “Oh, well, things are gonna get lean, I have to save money.” You’re going to lose that money by trying to save it. Like, how much does it cost to go visit a real estate office, as you mentioned.

Mike Crow
It’ll cost you, you know, about $10. Every visit, if you do it right, it’ll cost you at least $10 to $20 for every office visit. So if you’re visiting 10 offices a week, it’s going to cost you $100 to $200 a week. And those people go, “Oh, my God, that’s, that’s way too much.” You know.

Ian Robertson
It’s like, I had this inspector one time, was like, “I didn’t want to spend $500 to do a real estate presentation in front of, you know, 200 real estate agents.” And I’m like, what, why wouldn’t you? I’d do it all day long and then go buy them, you know, happy hour afterwards, when, yeah, that’s lost money. But I want to hear, I want to hear how this looks on on paper, so to speak. So say I am running a home inspection company. You know, during the boom, I did single inspector and I did two to 300. Let’s say just for instance. Now I noticed my numbers going down.

Mike Crow
Yep.

Ian Robertson
What, what do I do today? As I just made up, I’m going to be Joe, the home inspector. What should Joe the home inspector do to plow through this winter market, as you called it?

Mike Crow
So here’s, here’s a big secret. And again, I know, sometimes people go, “Man, you must, how old are you?” But I’ve been at this for 38 years, right? There are a couple of people out there that are going, “Well, you know, you don’t do this, or well, the market has changed this way, the market has changed that way.” What’s one of the biggest lies that is being told to home inspectors right now? Oh, the real estate agents aren’t in the offices anymore.

Ian Robertson
I hear that a lot, yeah.

Mike Crow
Yeah. Well, guess what? I used to walk in and out of office in the 80s and the 90s. And guess what? There were no agents in the office then either. Okay. They don’t make money sitting in the office. Okay. They come by the office, they pick stuff up, and and they..do more agents work from home now? Yeah, probably. But guess what, they still come to the office, you know, once a week, once a month, pick stuff up, see what the news is, talk to people there. And, so, but it’s one of the biggest lies, and I get it, and I appreciate it. And of course I go, man, I love my competition, you know, when I hear crazy stuff like that, you know. So the office visits are still the number one way to position yourself so that you can grow your business. Now, I teach people what I call Big Bang Marketing. So, we take a glass bowl with chocolates, and it’s an eight week program, and for every week for eight weeks, you need to go in, you need to say hi to them. By the third week, they’re going “oh, wow, you really are coming back every week, right?” I mean, the average inspector does what, he visits once a month, maybe. All right.

Ian Robertson
I just find a lot of guys visited once, and then they’re like, well, that didn’t work.

Mike Crow
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yes. You know that, that’s like filling your car up with gas once, and it, oh, it worked for a little while, but it doesn’t work now. Exactly. Yeah. Goodness gracious. So yeah, visit them once a week so they get to know you, they get to like you, they get to trust you, and they start referring you, and then you build on it from there. And the Big Bang Marketing really is designed so that you’re, you’re getting to know them, like them, and they get to trust you as well. And then you ask to do a live presentation at one of their office meetings. And people go, “Well, they don’t have office meetings anymore.” Well, there you go. There’s another lie in the industry. The good offices, they have, they have office meetings, sometimes every single week, even the slower offices, you know, or other offices, they have it like once a month. And by the way, some offices never had office meetings, never had office meetings. And so what you do is, you set it up so that they want to have an office meeting when you come in and do the right thing. Hey, I’ll bring breakfast in. And I have this little presentation on nine marketing secrets, you know, of top producing agents, and they’re going, “When do we put that on the calendar?” You know, and every broker wants their agents to hear that sort of stuff. So that’s kind of a cool thing. You’re like my new favorite person, you’re speaking my language man. We did a podcast just a few weeks ago on how to properly visit a real estate office. Ah, bet that was a good one.

Ian Robertson
I’d love to hear…I loved it, because it’s always been very effective for me, because this is a people business. You can go directly to buyers, like you said, and just go after the work. Or you can go after the work generator, right. So tell me what you say, when you first walk into a real estate office? What do you, what are you wearing? What are you carrying? What are you saying?

Mike Crow
Alright, so two things. If I’m a home inspector, I’m wearing my uniform. And there we go. We probably lost another 20% of inspectors going, “I’m not going to wear a uniform.”

Ian Robertson
No, no. Right on, we preach that on the show.

Mike Crow
You know, because the big thing about uniforms, of course, is that when you get a second guy, you want to dress him just like you so everybody goes, “Oh, okay, it’s another, you know, Ian, it’s another Mike. It’s another George, it’s another…” whatever, okay. And so that’s kind of a cool thing. But if I’m walking into an office the very first time, I usually have my uniform on. Now, if I’m marketing, and that’s what I’m doing all day, I wear a tie, you know, or I wear a jacket, but no tie, but I spiff it up just a little bit, depending on what neighborhood I’m in and what I’m doing. But for the most part, I just wear my, my blue oxford cloth shirt, you know, buttoned down, with our name engraved on it and everything. And I walk in. And I say one simple thing. This is the sentence that started the whole Big Bang Marketing. “Hi, (glass bowl in hand, miniature Hershey bars in the other hand,) Hi, I’d like to see if I can set up a chocolate bowl for your office. Yeah? Okay, great. Where would you like to put it?” And 50% of the time they go “Right here, okay.” And the other 50% of the time they go, “Oh, well, you can put it anywhere, put it in the kitchen, put it next to the mailboxes, put it in the one of the conference rooms.” My favorite spot, by the way, is next to the mailboxes. Okay. Now, if they have a place where they have all the brochures, that’s a good spot too, but I can put brochures there. And I can put chocolates over here. And now I’ve got two spots in the office. Okay. It’s like having different flavors of Oreos. I get more shelf space, you know. So those, that’s that’s the start of it. And then I ask some questions. “So, wow, how long has your office been here?” Like, I don’t know anything. Right? ‘Oh, gosh, we’ve been here. 28 years.” “Wow, that must make you guys one of the most prominent real estate offices in the area.” So I compliment them. Okay. “How many agents do you have in the office?” “Oh, we have 35.” “That’s impressive. I don’t know a lot of offices that have 35 plus agents.” Maybe that’s true or not true. Okay. “And so, do you guys get together on a regular basis for educational training?” Now I’m asking something I want to know so that I can, you know, plan. And, and a lot of times, that’s my first visit. “Well, I’ll tell you what, please don’t, please don’t let the candy bowl go away. I know it’s gonna get empty, but don’t let it go away. I’m gonna come in every week and fill this up for you. And just so we can kind of get to know each other, you know, we’re expanding the, the marketplace and everything, we’ve been in business for, you know, since ’85. And I’ll see you again next week.” And I leave. And the next week I come in, there’s no candy bowl. There’s no brochures, there’s no nothing, and they go, “You meant it when you said you were coming back.” Yeah. And they start hunting the whole office for the candy bowl. And I go, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I got another candy bowl out here.” And I get another glass bowl. I put them in. By the way, the glass bowls cost me a buck at Family Dollar and, and places like that. So I put another glass bowl in, I put more chocolates in, and I put more brochures, and I put more business cards in it and everything. I said, “Now don’t let that candy bowl go away. I’m gonna be back next week.” You know, and I ask a couple more questions. And the third week I come in, they go “You, you, you, you really did mean you were coming back.” And they reach under and they pull the candy bowl out and they go, “Here’s your candy bowl.” You know. And by the way, here’s a little secret. Put something in it besides just candy so it won’t walk off as easily. Okay, so like pens, writing pens, or emery boards. Agents love emery boards and something, and so it, we find that the bowls don’t disappear quite as quickly when there’s other stuff like that in it, besides just the brochures and the business cards. And then the fourth week we come in and they go, “Mike, so nice to see you again.” And the bowl’s sitting there, okay. And I fill it up. And now I start asking, you know, a little bit more about their meetings, I ask them a little bit more about who’s in charge of the meetings. By now I have a three ring binder that has a list of all my educational presentations in them, I have about 20 of them. And I go, “You know, who’s in charge of the presentations? And who schedules those? “Oh, so and so.” “You know, I’m just curious if they’d be willing to take a look at this list and see if there’s any of these educational presentations that they would find useful.” “Oh, yeah. Let me say, Oh, yeah. Henry’s in his office right now.” And they call Henry up, and I explain..”Oh, you’re the guy that’s been bringing the chocolates in.” I’ve already made points, and he doesn’t even know who I am. “Yeah. And I said, we have these educational presentations, you know, 10 ways to get 10 more referrals per month, guaranteed. Nine marketing secrets of top producing agents, Facebook Live..” And we go through..”Which one of these do you think your agents would benefit from the most?” “Oh, man, I love that one right there.” “Great. When would be a good time for us to schedule that for a meeting then?” Notice, I didn’t ask for a presentation. You know, I just asked when. And they schedule us and we come in. Now sometimes they’ll go, “Well, I can only give you a five minute presentation.” But when you, when they see this kind of presentation, they’re not worried about the five minutes. But if you don’t do the notebook right, and everything, “Oh, yeah, come in. And we’ll give you five minutes to speak.” And then I created what I call the perfect five minute presentation. Okay. And then that presentation can take three minutes to teach them something. And you mention your other presentations. And then you give a minute or two on who you are, what you are, what makes you different and everything. And before I leave, I’m scheduling my next presentation. I have literally gone into an office and left with six presentations for that office every week for the next six weeks. Okay. And by the end of that six weeks, that office, that office knows me, and it started to use us even. And so, that’s my perfect office entry. How’s that work?

Ian Robertson
I could listen to you all day. That’s perfect. So, if you’re listening to this show, rewind, and write down that whole process. Because you notice at step four, the fourth visit, we’ve talked about that on the show before, four touches. That’s, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s four touches, and then that person starts to trust you. They become a referral. You own that office. And it’s interesting. If you listen to Mike, Mike, a lot of the common complaints that I hear from home inspectors is “I can’t get past the admin.” By the sounds of it. Most of your conversation happened with the admin at the desk, right?

Mike Crow
Yeah. And I’m going to tell you a big secret, and I’m so glad you don’t call her the gatekeeper. Thank you for that. That’s impressive, okay. Most people want to call her the gatekeeper, right? We call her the greeter. Okay? We’re teaching our marketing people that that person is there to greet you, to say hi to you, to help you, you know, and you’re right, like 60% of, or 70% of our conversation is with the greeter when we come in, and we’re making them our friend, we find out what kind of chocolate they like..”Oh, you like Reese’s Pieces, not a problem”..and bring a small little bag of Reese’s Pieces in or something. And of course, you, you might walk into one office, and I had one office that I walked into, and the lady literally got up. I’m like four steps in the door. She literally got up, came right at us, she goes, “Stop right there. You cannot come in here.” And I went, “Oh, okay.” I said, “Did we do something wrong? One of my inspectors say something? Or did we miss something? I mean, what did I do?” You know, she goes, “You’re bringing chocolates into our office, and we have eight ladies in here on Weight Watchers. And you’re killing us, you’re killing us” And I looked at her and I went “Um, my wife is on Weight Watchers. I understand. How about if I brought fresh fruit in like apples and oranges?” And she looked at me. She said, “You’d do that for us?” I went “Yeah, absolutely.” So I went to the grocery store, got some apples and oranges and bananas and grapes. And you’ll notice I didn’t mention those a while ago, because don’t do grapes. And if you do bananas, make em really green, okay? Because they attract flying insects. Alright. But apples and oranges are the best. And it cost me less than chocolates. It cost me less than chocolates, right? And they don’t disappear as quick as chocolates do. But you know what? That lady never, never questioned me again. And every time I stopped and brought in fresh fruit for that office, and we had a great relationship. So you’re absolutely correct. Build that relationship with that admin person or as we like to call him, the greeter. And if you can do something nice for that person, man, they make your whole life, they make your whole life better.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, that’s spot on. All of your advice for all of that is fantastic. I like all your, you mentioned at least two of your presentations that you do when you actually get into the office and do the presentation for the meetings, they still have those or they’ll call them together when there’s something to talk about.

Mike Crow
Yep.

Ian Robertson
And then, you had the nine secrets of successful agents.

Mike Crow
Nine marketing secrets of top producing agents, I wrote that presentation myself. And then 10 ways to get 10 more referrals per month, I wrote that presentation myself. Facebook Live, my oldest son, Jonathan, wrote that presentation. And so we taught agents. Think about this, during the pandemic, right, what was one of the most important things that agents couldn’t do, and they still wanted to be able to communicate. And so we took this, and by the way, we had built this two, three years prior, and we used to teach it. But when the pandemic hit, we were teaching agents how to do Facebook Live all the time. And, and by the way, we took the whole Big Bang Marketing that I taught you just right here, which I shared with you just here, and we took it to online during the pandemic. And people, people were going, “Oh, I don’t, I can’t market anymore. I can’t walk in and out of real estate offices.” And they were trying to do Facebook stuff. But we took it three or four notches above that. So, most real estate groups have a Facebook group, and you have to join the group, you have to get approved to be part of the group, you can’t go in there and openly market. But if you’re going out there and giving useful information that will help them, that was great. We actually did more presentations during the pandemic year than we did during any other time. And we were doing sometimes as many as two or three a day at our office. Agents would literally come to our office, and we would set them up in our studio. And we would do a presentation where we’d make them look great to their audience. And, or, we do a zoom by zoom, kind of side by side, you know, and with them, and so they could put that on there. And so we were teaching agents how to do that, you know, turned up the market.

Ian Robertson
You know that..Yeah, exactly. Turn it up. And that’s genius, because I’ve actually been thinking of new ideas for how to do presentations at offices to keep it fresh, and teaching them something technical that they may not know, because some agents are young, but have not used tools like Facebook Live or TikTok and used it in a way, or professional way. And ones that are a bit older, may not know how to use any of that. You go into an art presentation. Here’s how to grow your business with TikTok. Here’s how to use Facebook Live. Here’s how to use this aspect of things. That’s a, that’s a glorious, I’m stealing that Mike. So..

Mike Crow
Oh, that’s okay. We have about, we have about, I know we have at least 10, maybe as many as 20 different presentations that we can use, okay. 13 marketing secrets to websites, 13 marketing secrets to business cards and your, and your website or, or things like that. Email marketing. So, the problem with most home inspectors is they go in and they teach, they don’t teach, you know, they, they talk about themselves. Okay? So imagine you’re going on a date, and see, most inspectors are really good at this because we’re guys, okay, we go on a date. And we want to talk about how we’ve done this and how we’ve done this and how we’ve done this and how we’ve done this and, and the lady across the way is just sitting there going, give me a break, you know, and keep in mind that over 70% of real estate agents are ladies. Okay? So ask them what they want. Ask them or give them something they want. You know, don’t show up empty handed, show up with flowers, show up with perfume, show up with you know, candy, candy. Oh, candy. Okay. Yeah.

Ian Robertson
You know, I love that analogy as a cueing it as a date. Because I’ve often said that the last thing you should do is talk about yourself at those office presentations. But that’s a perfect analogy. What are you thinking about? What’s your background? What are your concerns? And now they’re engaged with us. That’s, that’s awesome. And I want to just interrupt real quick, though. If people want to do your coaching, work with you, learn more from you. I just want to make sure I have this on the transcript for everybody early on, but they go to Mikecrow.com?

Mike Crow
Mikecrowreturns.com is the latest, greatest opportunity. You know, I do mastermind meetings, right?

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Mike Crow
Yeah. And so our next mastermind meeting will be early November. And people if they want to, they can pay a small fee, and they can come in and sit in a room for two days with some of the most successful home inspectors they’ll probably ever meet. And just sit there like a fly on the wall and learn and be able to have lunch with us and and be able to talk and go to dinner with us and that sort of stuff. Now, honestly, almost everybody that comes to that ends up joining us because they’ve never experienced, you know, the electricity of sitting in a room with 10, 15 highly successful home inspectors. And then they’ve never heard what we teach. They, they’ve never heard, like the marketing we just taught you are the basics. And honestly, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s like the wrapping on the present what I just told you, okay? Now let’s open the box and get serious about this thing. And so Mikecrowreturns.com is the easiest way to snag one of those spots. They’re limited, I don’t know how many are left, I have been truly blessed. I put a new gentleman in charge of my coaching program, his name is Davy Tyburski. And he is what we call America’s profit coach. Okay, he teaches companies how to be profitable. So he actually works with me during the mastermind. And then we also have a real estate agent, coach, and International just has coached hundreds and hundreds and probably 1000s, of real estate agents. And so he’s at that meeting, and sits in on that meeting as well. And we just, we just share with them and everything. And in you can see more about that at Mikecrowreturns.com. And thank you for asking.

Ian Robertson
Well, no, I wanted to ask because you get a lot of plugs on the Facebook forums with the home inspectors, and they’re from real successful home inspectors. Because when you’re looking at the forums and the Facebook groups with home inspectors, everybody’s willing to give you advice. But the ones who are actually successful, though, I’ll see your name pop up quite a bit. So it’s, it’s the real deal, well worth it.

Mike Crow
I appreciate that. Yeah, I had a goal when I first started coaching, to help 100 people create million dollar companies. And we surpassed that a number of years ago. So over 100, I had somebody come up to me recently and say, “Hey, I just want to let you know, we hit a million dollars last year.” And you know who I’m talking about, actually, but I’m not going to name him. And now what I’m really looking for, and one of the reasons I came on this podcast, because you’re, you’re actually one of these people, I’m looking for 100 people that are willing to help 100 other people now, okay. And that’s my big goal at this point. And I’ve been very blessed. And by the way, I’ve also had the the joy of helping coach a bunch of single man operations that started earning, you know, $200, $300, $400,000 a year as a single inspector operation, okay. And so the cool thing is, this works if you want to grow really big business. This works if you want to grow a really successful one man operation.

Ian Robertson
Well, the proof is in the pudding. And ever since I’ve been in the home inspection industry, which is just under just about 20 years now, your name has always been a staple in it. So if it didn’t work, you wouldn’t have a great reputation. And the fact that you even shared, that information that you’ve shared so far is, just shows who you are. man after my own heart, I love to help. I like I like it when guys, we just had a guy on our show that said, thank you, for our help and told us about his experience. You have a litany of just a long list of guys that you’ve helped.

Mike Crow
Yeah, I have some of the scars to prove it.

Ian Robertson
So I wanted to roll back to the one of the questions because guys are talking about, “oh, this is a bad market.” Other guys are like, “Hey, this is the best market I’ve ever had.” I want to go back to that. When you said most inspectors don’t know the difference between a good market or a bad market. What did you mean by that?

Mike Crow
No they don’t. Yeah. So again, you know, we talked about recessions, we talked about when it’s a seller’s market, and people are literally going, “Oh, I I can’t put an inspection in my agreement.” By the way, the good agents know better than that. Okay. The good agents work it differently. And so in a good market, how far out are inspectors booked a lot of times?

Ian Robertson
Typically a few days, our company is usually about two weeks, which is at the maximum of most contract contingencies.

Mike Crow
Exactly. However, during a seller’s market, they need you, same day. Okay. So I built my company, and it’s one of the reasons we did 2.7 million last year, I built my company so we could be available same day, and probably 80% of the days last year, we literally booked an inspection that day, and sometimes we booked as many as four on that day. Okay. Even Monday of this week. I think we we scheduled three on Monday for Monday. So the challenges with most home inspectors is when they’re, they’re building their business, they want to market, but you can market. So let’s, let’s imagine there’s this amazing store over here. Okay, let’s call it Frederick’s. I don’t know, right now that’s probably not a good name right? Frederick’s of Hollywood.

Ian Robertson
Different, different name.

Mike Crow
Let’s call it..

Ian Robertson
Gary.

Mike Crow
Harry, is that what you said?

Ian Robertson
Harry works.

Mike Crow
Yeah. Greg’s, Harry’s now we’re getting off.

Ian Robertson
Oh man. Okay. We’re getting spun on this one.

Mike Crow
Let’s call it Jerry’s. Okay, so there’s Jerry’s store over here, right? And you love Jerry’s store. And it’s a great store, the people are friendly. And you walk in there and you need a gallon of milk, right? And you walk back there and there’s no milk. So you have to go somewhere else to get the milk, right. So the next day, you’re going, “oh, I love Jerry Jerry’s is my favorite place.” And you go in there again, and now they don’t have any bread. And maybe they have milk. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. How many times will you go into Jerry’s before you go, “You know, I love Jerry’s, I think Jerry’s is one of the best. However, I don’t have time to waste to find out if they actually got it or don’t have it.” And you just stop going to Jerry’s, right? So when you have the availability, so you can have great marketing, you can have great service. And yeah, you may be booked out two weeks and think, man, that is great. And I apologize if I’m picking on you, because I’m not trying to. But if you’re booked out two weeks, you know, first off, there’s two major things you need to do. One is you probably need to hire more people. But even more importantly, you need to charge more. Okay, so we teach a simple formula, for instance, on raising prices, if you’re booked out that far in that kind of a market, we call it 3x90x2. So if you’re booked out three days or more for two weeks, at any given time, and because you’re not always there, probably, then you should raise your prices anywhere from $3 to $8 to $7, $8, $13, or $20. Notice that there’s a lot of odd numbers in there. Okay. That’s on purpose. And when I start coaching people, I had one gentleman out of California, of all places, and doing a great job and his business has literally grown exponentially. I love him so much. And he raised his prices four times in one year. You see, the average guys will raise their price once and think, okay, I did that. Okay, but when you have a formula, right? If you have a gauge on your car that says, oh, put more fuel in, okay, well, you put more fuel in, right. And so that’s, that’s what we did. And he is now over $100 more per average per inspector. And he’s just kicking it. And by the way, he’s now hired his first inspector and, and growing that business and doing some cool stuff with it. So, again, there’s so many little key factors here that people don’t understand. And when the market gets weird, the bottom line is they have to market more. So now we’re looking at, we’re almost looking at a trifecta, which people don’t understand right now. Right? Most of the time a presidential election, it really kind of messes up our, our cycle a little bit. But this election, because it is so important, because of some of the turmoil out there, that’s messing up the cycle a little bit now as well. Okay. And then, and now we’re getting ready to go into winter, right? I mean, we’re in late October, but we’re getting ready to go into November, December, January, February, the four, slowest months for 90% of all home inspectors. Okay. And, and, and we may be going into a recession, so people were pulling back, agents are selling less homes. And people understand that, you know, because of all three of those things hitting kind of at the same time, that if you don’t adjust your marketing, you will literally just go up and down with the market. Okay. And the market goes up and down all the time. So if you’re then visiting 10 offices per inspector per week, now it needs to become 15 or 20 offices per inspector all the time. You ever watched The Lion King? You got kids?

Ian Robertson
No, no. Oh, yeah. Well, I watched The Lion King as an adult, why not? Mufasa? That gets me every time when he dies.

Mike Crow
Yeah, yeah. So remember, what did the young lion cub do when the food dried up in her area?

Ian Robertson
Oh, you see, now I have to remember that part of the movie.

Mike Crow
She went further out looking for more food, looking for other areas that still had food. Alright, so the number one easiest way to get more business is geographically expand. The second way is just to make sure that you turn your marketing up as much as you can. So if you’ve been visiting 10 offices now we visit 20 offices per week per inspector. Okay. And it just, it just, it just works. It’s like, it’s like putting the right kind of fuel in the car.

Ian Robertson
And that’s exactly why I wanted to roll back to that point. Because that’s really the heart of our discussion today. There’s a lot of different ways we can market. But turning it up and doing it more now is more critical. We were talking about it before. There’s going to be a lot of guys going out of business because they turn their marketing down, then they just kind of fizzle off. So when we come out of this and to a more normalized market, I say more normalized because as you said, it’s it’s a fairly, it’s not bad at the moment, it was actually worse, a little worse before, might be heading into a recession, but whatever. But once we come out of it, half our competition is gone. And our marketing’s going like gangbusters. And it’s not that expensive. We’re not saying, hey, turn up Google ads, and spend three grand a month on it. We’re saying go buy chocolate. Yeah, you know, visit some offices. Worst case scenario, you can’t afford the chocolate, and you just afford the gas to drive to the office, at least you’re visiting them.

Mike Crow
Yeah, don’t walk in empty handed though, make sure you bring in a flyer, brochures, business cards. And man, if you can bring something in for that gatekeepers or something that people enjoy, that will work. And so there, I have a lot of friends, I created a number of fliers years ago, I created something called the Smile File. And then we created something called Just For Fun. And all it is is we put some like cartoons and sayings on it. And then on the back we put who we are and what we are and, and all that. So walk in with something that people want. Here’s the other thing is, in a marketplace, is that you’re very familiar with time blocking, okay, but the average inspector, they only think they block off time for inspections, right? Well, they’ve got to learn to block off time for marketing. And when that, when that block hits, just like they have to go do an inspection, they have to go do their marketing. So the time blocking is incredibly important with that. And they should have a list and they should, you know, just go run that route. It’s like a paper route, okay, just go run that route. Go say hi to everybody, go make sure that they remember who you are, and everything and do that again, every single week. And once you get past 200 inspections a year, okay, then you hire somebody to run that route for you. And that’s where most people mess up, is they try to keep doing the route themselves when they get to 200, 300, 400 inspections a year, and nobody consistently does it right, if they’re, if they’ve got that many inspections on their books.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, that’s fantastic advice, and I actually appreciate the advice that you gave me on my companies, you know, maybe I am booked out too far. I’m always, I’ve always been a big advocate of raising your prices to decrease demand. So I’d rather work a little less than make a bunch more by raising our prices, and knocking down our schedule a little bit. But maybe it’s time for me to do that. See, I learned something from you, Mike.

Mike Crow
You know, that’s really the power of mastermind, right? I mean, you are really knowledgeable in this business. And you have done a lot of good for people and you continue to do a lot of good for people. And you interviewed a lot of people and you learn a lot of things. And yet even in what a 30 minute discussion, you know, you picked up one thing that will probably make you an extra 20,000 next year. I don’t know. I’ve never really been big on the whole, I do tiered pricing. So I’ll do it every 1000 square foot. But I’d love to hear sometime about why and the reasoning behind, behind that maybe on a separate podcast of why you structure your pricing the way you do.

Ian Robertson
If not more.

Mike Crow
Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I find, there’s a number of things I find that go wrong on pricing, is people make too big a jumps because they’re on square footage. And so I was talking with an inspector the other day, and I said, “well, what’s your starting square footage?” He said, “2500”. And I went, okay. And I said, “What’s the next square footage that you’ve changed your price?.” “3500.” Say what? Ya know. But I actually, our prices change at 130 square feet now. Okay. And I know some inspectors, by the way, that get this really right. And it’s cents per square foot. And I have to tell you, those guys have my heart, because they’re getting paid for every square foot, you know. We could, we could do a whole podcast just on how to price your inspection and how to make more money per inspection.

Ian Robertson
Oh, it’s a date.

Mike Crow
Absolutely. We’ll set that up. And, you know, because most inspectors out there are doing like one a day, maybe two a day. You know, I used to do three and four today when it was just me. But most of our inspectors now do two a day and we still have some that are easily able to do three a day. But how do you make more money per inspection? How do you schedule? How do you price your inspections and all that..we could definitely have a date on that.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I would love it. I know that our audience would. But I want to reiterate to everybody listening, Mikecrowreturns.com. Those who know me know I own a couple of different inspection companies, have been doing this a long time. I learned something from Mike, all of us could definitely benefit from his mastermind group there. Mike, thank you so much. You have been awesome.

Mike Crow
You bet. And I look forward to us getting to know each other better and for us being able to help another 100 people.

Ian Robertson
That sounds fantastic. Looking forward to it.

Mike Crow
You know, one of the big secrets that I tell people is, be successful and be around those that are successful. And you know, because the more money we make, the more people we can help

Ian Robertson
Yup. Exactly. So if you want to be helped by Mike, a very successful home inspector, I really do recommend his program.

Mike Crow
Thank you so much.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, we’ll look forward to having you on again, Mike. Thank you.

Mike Crow
All right, thank you my friend.

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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