PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. Today is a bit of an odd podcast for me. This has been requested many times, and over the past five or six years, I’ve kind of avoided this podcast, just because it’s not in my nature. But I get asked so often that I decided to do it, and it’s basically questions and answers. Some of them, oddly personal, some of them, you know, little bit broader, but we went through and had AI help us compile the main questions that people have asked via email, messages, and feedback from Spotify or anywhere like YouTube, and these are the main questions that we kept running into multiple times. So we’re going to go through them one at a time and whether or not they make sense, here we go.

So the first one is one that I personally get asked quite a bit, what is the one bit of advice for someone to get success? First of all, I want to say that success is very subjective. We often look at people and say, objectively, they’re successful. We look at the money they make, we look at their family, we look at their job, we look at places they go and things that they do. Success is very, very relative. Success for me, success for you, success for somebody else, is going to be very different. But if you are talking about strictly business success, I guess objectively speaking, you could say that I’m successful at that to an extent. I have successful businesses, ones that are profitable. And advice I’m going to give you is get yourself some childhood trauma. And I mean that with all sincerity. If you look at the statistics, there are estimates that up to 70% or more of successful business people have what they call trauma-driven success. Actually, I know a couple of guys that are, I don’t know if they call them psychiatrists or psycho analyzers, one works at a prison, one has a private practice, and I mentioned this to them just in conversation, and they both laugh because they know it’s a real thing. The one guy especially works with business people, because a healthy, mentally healthy, happy person does not keep reaching for more, doing more, bending over backwards until 3am to make something work. So get yourself some trauma. Insecurity will do a lot for you. I still remember talking to Nick Gromicko, and I don’t remember if it was an interview or some sort of forum, and he talked about that. He said he was too insecure to not be successful. And that stuck with me, because that is the truth of a lot of successful business people, is we get our validation from okay, this works. That’s why a lot of business people don’t even care about the money. Have you ever noticed that, like, there would be businesses now that are unprofitable, but the business owner is just all about making it successful in different ways. Get yourself some trauma. But listen, if you’re happy and your business is not, quote, unquote successful, you’re a success. Just be happy with whatever success that you have. So one bit of business advice for anyone to gain business success, lean into the drama. It won’t lead you to happiness, but it’ll get the job done. If you really want to be happy, make it less performative and find happiness within yourself. Boy, that got mushy quick, didn’t it? All right.

Well, anyways, this one was a funny one. Is that guitar in your background for decoration or for playing? So if you watch our podcast on YouTube, actually our biggest listenership is on Apple podcasts and Spotify. But if you watch on YouTube, you’ll notice I have a guitar in my background as of recently. So to answer that question, both. I’ve had that guitar since I was 16 years old, so going on 30 years now. That guitar has been with me all over through many stages of life, good, the bad, the ugly. It’s probably the one possession that I have kept through most of my entire life, and it has a lot of meaning to me. Its name is El Scorcho, in case you guys ever wanted to know. And if you want to know anything about me, if you know that song, we should jam sometime, because my guitar is named that for a very specific reason. And there’s a little easter egg if you want it. Also unasked question. The picture off to my left or your right on the opposite side of the guitar, however you’re looking at it, is a picture of the Ron Swanson pyramid of greatness, just in case you were wondering.

All right, third question, what would you do if you were just starting out today in the home inspection industry? So what I would do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or even five years ago, is very different than what I would do right now. What I did was appropriate for the time. What I would do now is multi-folded. So first of all, I would spend more time on my brand now than I did 20 years ago. 20 years ago, you pop out a logo and you look halfway professional, and you beat all your competition. The inspection industry is getting better in that way. More people have a tight brand, and even if they’re not always overly professional, the brand looks professional, and I would just get that tight. I would make sure I’d spend a little extra, get my logo and my business cards. And as much as I hate prints, I would still do brochures, and I would just pass those out like candy and get my brand known. Number two, what I would do is I would spend every morning and every evening, an hour each, on Reddit. I would make sure that I have my website. Let me back up a little bit. Make sure I have my website and my SEO looking fantastic, because that is overly important right now. Just a little side note, we have been watching the metrics over the past six months, and it is not only double what it typically is this time of year, it’s double what it is in the high season for search volume. And it is crazy for like 80% of our clients, 50 to 100% you know, so double almost. So I’d have that extra tight right now. I’d be just doing every bit of SEO and AEO that I could. And then I’d spend an hour every morning on Reddit and an hour every evening on Reddit. Reddit is what Google uses more often than not now, and AI is one of the biggest SEO and AEO indicators. Sorry. I mean, Facebook is still important, Google business page, posting on it is important, but I would spend time commenting on everything home inspection and real estate related without advertising. And just drop in sprinkles of it once in a while. You know, I’m a home inspector, and here’s what I would say, you know, if you have any questions, here’s my website, very, very discreetly. That’s how I would start things off. And then I would still go out and shake hands and kiss babies, so to speak. I don’t care if agents are at the office or not. We’ve talked about that before. I’d be visiting every office. I’d still drop off the old school candy and brochures, and I would work that for two, three hours a day. I’d take agents out to lunch and coffee, and I would just flood my market with me. We had that podcast at the end of last season called Ubiquity Is King. I would make it so that you would see me everywhere, every local real estate forum I would join, every local Reddit/subreddit I would join. I would make sure that I would show up for every search possible. I’d write a blog article and an FAQ about every possible question anybody in my area would have. I would letter up my vehicle, and I’d drive it around everywhere. I’d want everybody to see it. That’s how I’d start off. Is it a magical formula? Kind of actually. Yeah, it works. But I would do that for six months, and then I’d go back and evaluate which ones were working for my particular territory, and then I’d do it for another six months. I would not evaluate the effectiveness of it until a year, because you have an eight to nine month return rate on that. So that’s what I would do if I was starting out today, and that would be the basis of it.

This one, I don’t know how to take. Are you bald? Yeah, no, but I don’t see why that would matter if I was. This was a funny one, and there were follow up questions. No, I’m not bald. Okay, you sound bald. I mean, I have all my hair. I’m pretty happy about it, to be honest with you, genetically speaking, I’m pretty thrilled with that. So I guess there you go. That one was awesome.

All right, what kind of guest are you looking for these days for the podcast? I am looking for anyone with information to share. We have had so many amazing guests. All of our guests have just been amazing. Guys that have just beautiful information that they have spent their career earning, bleeding for, and they come on here and they share it, and so many people have benefited from it. We get so many emails and text messages, and even people who come on as guests on the show to talk about, hey, I followed everything in the show that you and your guests have talked about, and I did it, and now I’m successful. Awesome. That’s what we love. So, if you have a specific type of inspection that you do, if you have a specific marketing method or something that you do, or anything else, any kind of thought on the industry where it’s headed. Let me know. Throw out an idea, and we’d love to have you on. What we don’t like is advertising. You know, we have podcasts where people have a service, we talk about the service. If your service is good, it advertises itself. And we don’t want anything that’s overly generic, because we’ve all heard the podcasts that are 15 episodes of the same thing, of the best way to do an inspection, you know, make a niche.

I do want to go back. What would you do if you were just starting out today? There’s one thing that I have mentioned, and we had it on last season with Kari Cheek, and I mentioned it again this season, I would 100% start teaching continuing ed. I would do it for free. I would pay to do it, and I would just week after week, month after month, teach continuing ed. And I don’t care the subject, I would learn it. I’d be a master of it. Continuing education is, first of all, required for agents, and they’re always looking for new subjects. And second of all, holy cow, you have a captive audience. But if you’re even halfway of a decent speaker or even not, doesn’t matter, you’re going to get to interact with those agents on a level that you wouldn’t and for hours at a time.

This one made me feel weird inside. Do you like getting fun stuff in the mail? No. Do you like getting fun stuff in the mail? I don’t even know how to answer that. We’re just gonna let that one sit there and let you guys dwell on that for a little bit, and imagine what my inbox looks like.

Do you still inspect? I do not, personally anymore. Once in a while, I’ll pop on a commercial inspection. I’ll help a guy out. I do keep up on my inspection knowledge very deeply, because I’m a huge nerd. I review reports almost every day. I mean, today, probably three, four reports alone. So while I don’t inspect, I keep up on it. But no, I’m not in the field anymore. Stopped going out in the field a while ago. Do I miss it? Oh yeah, I love inspecting. I really, really, do. I do miss it. But, you know, maybe one day.

The next question, do you take on any businesses for coaching? Now, if you ask my team, probably get asked this several times a month or more, sometimes several times a week. And right now I don’t, and I’ve been asked this for years. You want some advice? I’m always giving free advice. Coaching? You know, we’ve had Mark Hummel on a couple of times, and he’ll be on an upcoming podcast, and we’ve talked to them about, you know, coaching and things like that. So you never know, maybe in the future, we’ll see what happens. But currently, I like to help guys. I like to help them. When I say guys, I do mean men and women, for all the women listening, I like to help people. So if you need advice, let us know. And everything is on this podcast that we try to put out there.

This one is something I oddly get asked a lot because I am not a financial advisor, but it says, what is some financial advice you would give? So I am not a financial advisor and I’m not going to give advice. And there’s my legal disclaimer. If I were going to give my old self advice, here is what I would tell me to do. Number one, start investing now. Now, when we talk about investing, we think of, you know, Wall Street movies and things like that, and that’s just not what investing is. Investing is slow and not sexy. It is slowly building up funds. And I would tell myself to do it no matter what financial level I was at. And I’ll just give you a couple of examples. So my favorite thing to do is to use one of these robo advisors. There’s a million of them. You can use Vanguard, you can use Betterment, you can use I don’t think Robinhood has Robo advising or large index funds, maybe they do. But there’s 1,000,001 of them out there, pick the one you like. And my favorite is to do a 90/10 split they call it. So 90% stocks, 10% bonds. This is high risk and high reward. It’ll give you an average over the lifespan of the entire stock market. It has an average of 9.5 to 10.5 compounding interest return. You’re going to have times where, you know, you’re up 28%, and then you’re going to have times where you’re down 28%. Don’t watch it. Don’t worry about it. Even if you had just before the Great Recession, invested at the very peak, just before it dropped and bottomed out, right now you would still be ahead of inflation. Money sitting in a bank account is just devaluing. Money just devalues over time. It’s fiat currency. It’s going to go to zero eventually, whether it’s in three generations or 10 generations, or whatever, our generation, who knows. But fiat currency just devalues. So instead of money devaluing, what I would tell myself is to do these two things. So first of all, that index fund with the 90/10 split, put it in there, and don’t think about it. So imagine if you started off with $5,000 in that account, and monthly you put in $100. So over the course of 10 years, that would turn into $34,000. What you put in was not $34,000, you would have $34,000 in 10 years by putting in just $100 a month. So let’s be honest, $100 a month is like taking you and your kids to Chili’s for dinner. Can we stay home one week and put that $100 a month in. Now over 20 years is going to be a much different amount. So let me just do the math. Rate of return, we’re going to say 10%, and over the course of 20 years you’re going to have $112,000. That’s pretty sweet. So no matter who we are, investing at any amount, even if it’s $10 a week, I mean, come on, we’ll find $10 in our pocket, washing our clothes. Invest a little bit. Put it in there and don’t watch it. Don’t touch it. I would put it in a taxable account if it was me, but I would tell myself, don’t watch it, don’t touch it. Just wait. Now, those numbers may not seem like “blow your mind,” but imagine if you start putting $1,000 in a month. Either way, it’s going to build up over time.

The second thing I would do is not keep money in a regular checking account. I did that for so many years and just wasted money. So I still have a checking account, obviously, and it’s transactional. It’s how I pay employees, it’s how I buy certain things and pay the credit card off, things like that. But I keep most of our transactional money in a high interest account. So most high interest accounts right now are going to get you about 3.75% which at least keeps up with inflation. So let’s say you have $30,000 a month of operational funds. You have, I don’t know, one or two employees, maybe I don’t know, keep what you need for the week in there, and keep the rest of it in a high interest account. Then it’s going to earn interest. At the end of the year, you’ll find that you’ll have a few thousand dollars of extra funds kicking around. Let’s say at the end of the year, you end up with $4,000. That’s like eight inspections. That’s like almost a full week for one of our employees that we just made from just interest on our account. So that’s the financial advice I would give myself. I’m not a financial advisor. Talk to a financial advisor. I wished I had done those things sooner. Now I have an investment portfolio. My brother’s a CPA. One of my best friends in the world is an accountant, too, and they helped me do those things, because otherwise I’d have all my money under a mattress. But I took their advice. Talk to a financial advisor, make small steps now, and allow them to grow over time.

But I thought that was an odd question to ask me, maybe because it’s like asking the financially dumb guy what to do with the money, because I at least have the most recent information, because I had to ask somebody about it. But again, this was an odd podcast for me. Hopefully this answered your questions, and if you have any more, send them in, maybe we’ll do one later on, in a year or two. But thank you for listening in to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

Success is a slippery word that often hides more than it reveals. We talk about why chasing external markers rarely brings contentment, and how many high performers run on trauma-fueled validation loops that push them to work longer, harder, and more obsessively than their peers. That drive can build profitable companies, but it rarely brings peace. If you’re building a business, define success in plain terms and separate achievement from self-worth. Money, growth, and status can be useful scorecards, yet real satisfaction comes from building systems, serving people, and learning when to stop optimizing. The paradox is simple: you can’t out-earn a lack of inner peace, but you can use ambition on purpose if you know what it costs.

When the talk turns practical, the modern home inspection playbook looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Brand matters first: a tight logo, clean visuals, clear copy, and consistent offline materials make you memorable in a crowded field. Next, stack your digital foundation with a fast website, on-page SEO, helpful local content, and an active Google Business Profile. Layer in AEO by writing crisp FAQs that answer the exact questions people and AI tools surface. Then commit to being seen everywhere your clients and agents already spend time. Reddit is a goldmine if you show up to help first and mention your services sparingly. Join local subs, answer every home and real estate thread with practical advice, and let authority build one useful comment at a time.

Ubiquity is the multiplier: flood your market with helpful presence. Visit brokerages even when offices feel quiet. Drop off brochures that actually teach something and don’t read like ads. Attend local meetups, answer questions in Facebook groups, and letter your vehicle so your brand circulates daily. Back it with content depth: write a blog post and an FAQ for every common defect, repair timeline, pre-listing prep, or seasonal maintenance issue in your area. The goal is simple—when someone searches, scrolls, or asks a friend, your name already feels familiar. Give this strategy a year before judging it. Lead cycles run eight to nine months, and the compounding effect shows up only after consistent effort.

One lever that outworks cold calls is continuing education for agents. Teach CE for free, often, and with humility. Choose specific topics: sewer scope basics for older neighborhoods, thermal imaging limits, or how to read a roof quote. Build a clear deck, practice delivery, and show up prepared. You’ll engage a captive audience for hours, earn trust, and become the default referral when clients need someone careful and clear. Follow up with a short recap email, a one-page guide agents can forward, and a standing invite for questions. Mastery plus generosity is hard to ignore, and over time it cements you as the local expert who solves problems, not just the vendor who sells.

We also dig into money habits that help small shops breathe easier. Investing early, even in tiny amounts, compounds quietly in the background. A simple 90–10 stock-to-bond index approach, automated monthly, beats cash that melts in a low-interest account. Use a high-yield savings vehicle for operational buffers so idle funds earn something while you work. Keep a lean checking balance for transactions and move excess to interest-bearing accounts. None of this is flashy, but it turns discipline into dollars without adding stress. Pair those habits with regular report reviews, skill refreshers, and honest metrics, and you build a business that lasts. Success then becomes less about chasing, more about choosing what matters and making space for it.