Buying vs. Building a Home Inspection Business - Tom George

what's up guys kevin wagstaff here with spector spotlight we got tom george on today and this is a great conversation because new inspectors and first couple year inspectors typically think the only way is go work for a multi or build your own thing up over time and tom shows there is another route buying into an existing business taking it over so very refreshing to hear another route and he talks through a lot of specifics so fun to just hear whether you're thinking about doing this or not or didn't know it was a possibility at all i think tom goes in depth and then speaks pretty eloquently about this so hope you enjoy it and uh we'll see everyone soon thanks again for listening to the podcast you guys the support the notes i'm getting are amazing so please keep them coming keep guest recommendations coming and share the podcast that's what helps me um keep doing this and putting time and energy and effort into it is more people listening to it so share it with your community with other inspectors i appreciate it greatly so thanks everybody thanks for being willing to do this too i know lorna was reaching out to a ton of people and when you popped up i was like oh we've been meaning to do this for years but obviously you've been busy buying running growing a business but how's this past year been how has this past year treated you um because you're down in colorado springs what uh i'm always curious what how people reacted march april when when kind of hit the fan so april we had a very rough month uh i'm looking at our numbers over here but after that i mean we had record you know breaking months for three or four months in a row so um we were up a lot so april was rough but the following months made up for it and then some so was that what you expected or was it kind of like hey none of us know what the hell is going on oh uh i had no idea what to expect or what to plan for we just had to you know pray and hope for the best and it luckily all worked out but um you know i was an ieb at the time and i was really relying on them to kind of tell me what to do and that was great to have them to give guidance and things like that but i don't think anybody knew so no we were all just making it up as we went and we were the same way here we were just like we froze up for a couple weeks and then we were like all looking around and thinking okay i think we all might be okay right um well let's jump right into your background man because uh it's super fascinating it's it's the most fascinating i think part of your journey uh because you've kind of done it all you started your own thing you went and worked for a company and then you bought into a company and so i think this is going to be hugely helpful for for all walk from inspectors from all walks of life um so if you don't mind just doing the whole stepping through kind of the journey from the beginning about five years ago does that sound right four or five years ago yep it's been about four and a half years roughly so since we met up at internachi i think we did yeah yeah so i got started um i guess going way back i was just always in construction and things like that and when i i eventually joined the army and when i got out of the army i kept applying uh to various jobs i was in the infantry which doesn't exactly set you up for anything so i got totally random jobs and i kept having people who were interviewing me they would like look at my resume and they would be like you should be a home inspector no kidding yeah it happened uh it happened three times and on the third time i was like man i should look into this so that's how i found internachi as i started researching it and i realized that um basically the biggest you know home inspector association in the world was two hours away from me so i definitely took that from a you know from god as a sign and that's where i met you i went up and did the five-day training and uh i met you on the fifth day and i originally started my own company i was originally cheyenne home inspections named after my five-year-old daughter now but uh i did that for about a couple months and i remember you had recommended that i reach out to another inspector here in town who was doing really well doing a multi-inspector um so i did that and i worked for them for not very long maybe three months and uh decided to go back out on my own and then i did it for about a year and i was starting to get some good traction and things were going well and then i met a another local inspector named lance who was the previous owner of my company and he asked me to come work for him and he gave me a little bit of what his plan was he basically told me that he was interested in getting out of it but it was like years later he was like you know what five years i might want to get out of it and then i would probably sell my business but i would like to bring on an employee and kind of groom them for that so i was super intrigued by that because i had always known of him um i think everybody in colorado springs you know knows of him so uh i went and sat down with him and next thing i know i shut down china home inspections and uh was an employee of his and we slowly got a plan together for me to buy the business and it was a super wild ride because it was supposed to be like i think our original plan was two years we he was going to groom me and we had this plan that would ultimately take about two years and i think i actually owned this company like nine months after meeting him our plan didn't go according to plan at all yeah once we started talking to you know a lawyer and a lender and things like that they kind of told us that our plan didn't make any sense so they put us on the right track and uh it just got uh they got it it sped up a lot but so yeah that's kind of how i came to to own this lance ended up working for me um as just an inspector for about a year and then about a year ago he he retired fully so wow when did this is great i have so many questions and and for anything that you don't feel like diving into don't don't feel like you need to only speak about what you're comfortable speaking about um on specifics but i think it's super interesting and most inspectors don't know anything about this world and this side of the business um when did you meet lance or how did you meet him so i met lance um internet she called me one day and asked if i was going to the local chapter meeting and i didn't know what they were talking about um i was like i didn't know it wasn't so i looked into it and i went to the chapter meeting that night and i sat next to lance and we barely talked at all um i i don't even think we said like two words to each other just because there's so many people and then you've got a sticker but he called me like the next day and he basically told me that he facebook stalked me and that he loved my online you know social media presence he loved uh the he said like go get her attitude and uh that was the stuff that he struggled with you know kind of a generational thing like yeah i was a little better with some of that stuff than he was and that was the side that he wanted to get better at so he saw kind of my strengths i guess in my social media and uh that's why he reached out to me and then you know after knowing him for a while he told me that he was always looking he would meet people at the international meetings and he would check him out and but he never actually reached out to anybody so pretty wow so he kind of found you that's amazing first of all and who would have thought an internachi chapter meeting um you know i've been meaning to just check one out because it's the one up here it's like out of perkins or something that never ended up going to it but the networking uh that's pretty amazing so he found you kind of kind of targeted you in a sense um for kind of the savvy you know business growth mindset that you had so then from there was it just like hey come work for me would love to have someone like this on the team or did it start right away with hey i'm eventually looking for a successor so even in the very first phone call i remember it like it was yesterday um i remember my wife was like who are you on the phone with and i was like he's like lanceland and i was like yeah because i told her i met him last night and uh um she saw like the because like i said i've always known of him and um so but yeah in that very first phone call he had told me like i'm interested in you know passing this along to somebody else so when we were doing i think the way that we first started was uh i just did ride alongs with him you know because i was my first year so i was relatively slow i was probably doing like five inspections a week um so i would just spend my off time with him and yeah even in those first couple ride-alongs we were i remember i had a notepad and i was asking them like okay what are your expenses like what you know how many questions do you do i was like running the numbers to see like if buying this was a yeah a possibility someday so yeah that was the plan like from the very start it's just the plan on how to make it happen was completely um changed but it it went from two years to like i said well much less than a year and um i always see people talk about how you can't buy a business how especially this business how this is a relationship business your you know the home inspector is the business and etc and i agree with that in most situations but it can be done you can do it right um so we from the get go for that first year where i was basically just an employee i was just an inspector we uh we had a plan in the first year this is what we're gonna do which of course that got shortened but uh lance told everybody every realtor that we were doing inspections for lance came to all my inspections and he would basically just sit there and talk to him and he told him you know the plan like tom's taking over the business and it was kind of strange because i could always hear everything he was saying up and telling people how great i was and telling them about my construction background and everything that i was implementing into the business because we didn't originally use spectora i use spector you didn't so when it was kind of funny because when we first started i was using spectora for our clients but when he perfections he would use his old [Laughter] and he would attach it publish an attachment but i eventually when we had some slow time i got him trained up and everything but so he would always be in the kitchen you know talking to the agent and telling him about how i helped him implement this and i made this better and etc so it was always awkward because i could hear that yeah that was one of the big ways that he made it work was that i had a long time to meet agents and to get in front of them and for them to become comfortable with me and for him to basically talk me up and to tell them the plans that they weren't blindsided so when people talk about how you can't buy a home inspection business well that's that's probably assuming that just one day like the hard cut over yeah exactly yeah that would that would never work no and so this is that's that's amazing to hear first of all and like that's just the absolute right way to do it um so he was kind of teeing you up and then during those inspections i'm guessing you would come over shake hands they'd kind of you know each agent would get a feel for you and who you are right to kind of say okay he's an extension of you lance basically because if that's what they bought into was lance right probably want to feel like okay is this tom is telling me he's a good guy you know is he going to do the similar job and and i'm guessing that's what happened right absolutely and you know we started slow where um he would kind of do the whole review with the clients at the end and i would just answer questions if it was specific to what i had inspected or whatever but eventually a full review and um there was even times where he was coming for the first like half hour of my morning appointment and he would introduce me and tell him they were in good hands and etc etc and then i would finish the whole inspection and i would go to my afternoon one and he would come at the end after and he would do one in the middle of the day so but he was always there so it made people comfortable because that like they know that lance is at least kind of calm yeah that's obviously an inconvenience like that that kind of stinks to have to you know always make an appearance at your um inspectors inspection but that's how we made it work um i definitely didn't retain every agent there are a ton of agents i'm sure that we're like oh lance doesn't own it anymore but we definitely retained most of them um the business as far as the number of inspections and the amount of revenue and everything has uh definitely proven that it can be done it just has to be done carefully yes and so for anyone that's listening that is on the maybe the sell side of this or later in their career i i think if people have naive visions of yeah one day you just ring the register and then you turn over a list of emails and like no this is the hard this is the reason why someone would pay whatever multiple you paid or whatever you know whatever formula multiplier of revenue or number of inspections no one's going to pay if it's just a hard cut here's a bunch of emails you reach out cold like it's got to be this smooth transition so i love that you kind of explained that because i think it could happen more in the industry if people are if they'll if the sellers are willing to kind of slowly hand the baby over as opposed to just thinking the entitlement i think that's what bothers me sometimes is that you hear the entitlement of i've worked 30 years at this of 20 years of this i should just get a million dollars and not have to do anything it's like this is the sense i get from some um owners and it couldn't be further from the truth it's like no one's gonna pay you that um without setting them up for success right um talk me through that fear though of oh man like this is a relationship service business what if it doesn't work out or what if people you know what if what if it doesn't like at what point were you fully like pot committed and saying like okay this has to work out i have to get these people to like me the way they like lance um and was there any fear of like man what if they do just drop off and i just paid a bunch of money for yeah absolutely it was a very nerve-wrecking experience going through the loan process and uh you know i had a closing date just like when you buy a home and leading closing date was pretty terrifying and i actually kind of remember wanting to not that i would have but i remember having like definitely second thoughts at the very bright closing um my wife kind of convinced me like it's gonna be fine you know um yeah it was a terrifying process i remember thinking like what if all the agents just leave and i don't any of them and i basically bought a business for no reason um but honestly the biggest fear that i had was what if i'm buying a business that i could have just built um with a little bit more time you know because the amount of inspections that we were doing i probably could have gotten to that point at some you know and then i wouldn't have had a big uh loan payment but one of the ways i kind of justified it was i asked a lot of inspectors like how they did their marketing and um what those um approaches cost and of course a lot of people would use like google adwords and things like that well i was i kind of calmed myself down and talked myself into um you know stay in the course by i realized that what most people were spending on marketing was much much more than what my loan payment was going to be um so that that made me feel a lot better that there's out there that are spending thousands of dollars on google adwords or you know even like the candy bowls and just buying lunches and all that stuff to where the numbers made sense and then it also was a lot better because i had to get a business appraisal so it really is like very similar to buying a house i professional take all of our tax documents from um like six years before then and they appraised the business and it appraised for more than twice what i paid for it so that obviously made me feel a lot better amazing yeah and i love comparing it to this because i've seen over the years inspectors take mostly that route of build it myself and it's a long slow grind um you know for most and i think if you know the numbers and you're saying wow i'm just going to shortcut this by transferring that um i guess credibility you know it's like coming out of his body into yours and i just see this business as being so about word of mouth and momentum and these accumulative rewards of three agents in an office that use you the fourth one is more likely to use you because they talk to the other three and that takes years to build up and so i love this um i completely love the fact that you oh and seo value that's what i wanted to say um lance had done a great job over the years and i i knew his name personally and i'm actually googling it right now home inspector colorado springs because you you're kicking ass down there um you've helped him you've helped him solidify that and keep those rankings because i think he was in danger of losing them to be honest if an older operator gets to rank first off the credibility and the domain that's been around for 20 years they don't do anything they can drop whereas like you hammered home on the reviews and content and seo but that's a great reason right i'm sure that factored in to say gosh when you google home inspector colorado springs you see that's nice you see it at the top and that's how i always knew of him when i when i sat down to him you know at that internachi meeting i knew exactly who he was because i've always seen his website just by doing my own research and i don't know if you remember this but you helped me with my google adwords years and years ago and when we were doing all that um yeah he was kind of my the one i was competing with so yeah the seo presence the phone number i mean we had an employee that worked for lance years before i even was around and we still get phone calls you know for him we get phone calls for you know that lance inspected their house in 2007 and things like that so phone number um it's kind of shocking that people would not just google because i would just google home inspector yeah you know even i would just assume that maybe those people weren't around anymore or whatever but uh yeah like save the number under like home inspector lance or something so then they just type in their phone at some point and well i think they probably have a pdf printed right oh you're so right um so what were some of those things that sped up the transaction i'm curious kind of like what what um you know whether it's the loan officers or the business folks um like to what you're willing to share like what what made it be like okay guys you got to make this happen faster um well the biggest thing was that he thought that he would be comfortable selling it because lance was all about he wanted to set me up for success he had zero interest in selling it if he didn't think that it would work great by the way like he you know i met him up in the internet just seemed like stand-up guy and the fact the way he's handled this what i've heard from you makes me like that's the way to to have a legacy and actually kind of fade right off into the sunset with grace so absolutely yeah he wanted uh to be able to have enough time to where he felt comfortable handing it over um and we thought that time was gonna you know be a lot longer but it wasn't um like six months later and he was feeling pretty comfortable but the biggest thing was that our original plan was for me to just pay him directly every month and uh when we talked to a lawyer they basically said that that would never work because like if we had a plan where like say it was going to take uh 12 years to pay it off well every year you would own 1 12 of the business so i wouldn't have control of anything right i wouldn't i would have to run everything past him and we both were like well i don't want that so that was when we were like okay well so we have to get an actual loan i have to get an actual small business loan and uh we started going that route and it was really tricky because we we write about so many programs especially especially with me being a veteran like there's supposedly so many uh programs and advantages and benefits and everything we tried uh they didn't really exist yeah it was always like oh yeah that was last year like that that's disappointing yeah so um the loan process was kind of a pain in the butt but it all in all that's how we ended up doing it was i just got a small business loan we had a contract written up by a lawyer i got a business appraisal what else it that was about it was really those three things but and then lance got we went to um the bank on closing day and he got a check for the entire sum and um it's pretty smooth and you know you hear about you know for anyone that even who sees headlines of like money being cheap right now and like there there is a lot of money to be lent and borrowed um especially sba you know in the tech world lots of people are just literally getting sba loans to acquire businesses and going that route because buying is easier than building when money is cheaper to borrow and so um i imagine the the rate is pretty reasonable given where overall interest rates are right now um and so for for some of those new guys that are thinking about it it doesn't always have to be your money in the bank you know a large loan at a reasonable interest rate isn't much different than another mortgage but then you have this asset that's producing cash every day and every week and so it's kind of a finance it's like a financial engineering game in a sense is the way i think of it if you had to do this or like would you have done this from the beginning or would you have gone through what you went through because of what you learned in terms of starting your own thing and then working for another company like that insights you've gained or would you been like man this would have been way easier if i just if i just acquired this business from the beginning i would probably do it the same way i i think that there's a lot of people out there who want to be inspectors and they always go straight to [Music] that they have to start their own business um because that most people have gotten home inspections probably had one guy with a pickup and um but i think it's important to consider the other options and i not everybody is meant to you know be a inspection company owner and not everybody's meant to just be a home inspector to where um i learned those things through trial and error when i was just uh doing my own thing i loved it but i was aggressive i i was uh hungry and it was it was building traction but slowly to where i liked buying a company that you know we were doing like in our first year we did like a thousand inspections um that was more the pace that i wanted yeah but with me going to work for another multi-company here in town i quickly learned that that just wasn't for me but i do think it's important to consider options and to try different options um yeah i would definitely do it again i would do it the same way we have grown quite a bit because when i bought the company i was the only employee but it's on our closing day our closing day was april 1st and on april 1st we had our first employee start nice yeah you came in hot you were like all right i got plans we're going to scale we're going to grow you want to have quality of life too you know all the great things we never offered sewer scopes um it was something that lance was just not interested in doing and so he subbed everything out to a third-party contractor while like six months before you know closing day i had uh our third-party sewer scope contractors best employee telling me that he wanted to get into home inspections and so yeah on closing day we were offering sewer scopes and we had our first employees start and he's now a team leader here he's been here for two years and uh we've had several other inspectors we've had a you know radon tech and an office manager and things have definitely been good so wow and i this is such an important point to me and it it makes it's cr became crystal clear when you just said this of the different skill sets it takes to grow a business so it's like you're talking like sales social media hunger you know pounding the pavement getting in offices shaking hands that's like one side of the brain and kind of one part of the body and then you have the owner operator side where operations and efficiency and maximizing value and adding services and coordinating people and logistics completely different part of the brain that i think a lot of home inspectors are kick-ass at i think a lot of them are are more skewed towards that side of the brain in my opinion um which lends itself totally to saying hey can i get into something that i can just make better and i don't have to go shake a million hands and do a song and dance and make google slide decks and all these things that inspectors are like oh kevin can you guys just make that for me i'm like no you've got to grow the business and so it it just makes so much sense to me as i'm hearing this where i'm like well if you're an operator go put yourself in a position to be a great operator right oh and not that you can't do both but if you had to pick one um but i think p i think debt scares people um when in reality people should like failure should scare people like not not growing fast enough should scare people um i think inspectors that kind of bounce along the bottom that's that's tough right well yeah and i think people just need to if you want to get into doing home inspections you just have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself like do you want to be a technician like are you maybe the type of person who's just fascinated with houses and then maybe be a home inspector and work for a multi-company but if you truly want to do all the other stuff like the business side of it the marketing side of it that's that's honestly my favorite part about this job is that i i'm not naturally good at those things the the amount of things that i've had to learn since starting doing this um it's it's pretty amazing too around so much man it's insane like every time we talk i'm like dude i'm like thomas he's just learning so much and it's amazing yeah um but that's my favorite part is that you're kind of forced to get outside your comfort zone and do things that you might not want to do or be comfortable um my big leap in 2021 is to do more like agent presentations and things like that and that's the last thing that i want to do but yeah i do like that it forces me to do it and it it almost makes me start to like it maybe not love it but start to like it but uh yeah i'm i was just thinking the other day i was like you know we have a youtube channel that i started and uh i got i've gotten pretty good at editing videos on um you know adobe premiere and i recently started using canva and like doing all of our own marketing stuff now and like that's the stuff that i was like two years ago like i don't know how to do that i have to hire somebody for that but it's uh that's that's my favorite part is getting to learn um obviously it's great as a technician getting to learn more and more every day on houses and things like that but learning about how to hire and how to motivate your team and things like that just constant growth like personal growth um this that's the best thing in the world to me and you've gotten to like fast forward you know you like jumped ahead a couple years by doing it the way you did and to me it's it's i agree with you that like all the things as a you know business owner myself when i'm out of the comfort zone i gain you gain a little confidence doing it and then you start to like it and all the assets and marketing you're doing they're seen by so many more people so it's more motivating whereas if you you know if you're a single inspector have 100 agents or so like each thing you create gets seen only by a small handful of people because you're not a big you know big company and have a big footprint but like i can see where that's way more fun because you're literally doing it for a business that's been around for what fifteen twenty years ah two seven okay yeah so that's pretty amazing um do you believe that in every city or town that there's a lance out there i do um because i absolutely think so i bet you i could google every single decent-sized city comparable to colorado springs find a lance that probably thinks like lance looking for you know their tom i would certainly think so and i think most of them if they don't learn that this is a possibility or if an inspector doesn't approach them and present this as a possibility they're probably just gonna change the number yeah change their phone number and turn their website off so um there's just there's a lot more options than what people think so but it's just so funny because i always hear it that it's a relationship business you can't sell a home inspection company um i know that if i was to build something from scratch or if for anybody out there listening who is going to build something from scratch just always keep in mind selling it um you know get people in positions get systems in place i have a really good friend who is a local contractor and i we always talk shop because his business is very relatable to mine but it is different but i'm always like man you're the only employee like you you got to get people in these positions and you've got to get systems so that you can take time off then etc and then years from now you could sell it but right the way it sits right now like if you didn't come in tomorrow you know and i think i might have even heard this on a spector spotlight podcast but you're not a uh business owner you're an income producer so when i first started thinking about that it definitely started to change how i was building the business and what kind of positions we have and things like that but yeah you have to think of those things from the absolute start there's too many people out there who are you know iub always talks about this like there's so many people who are like well nobody can do it better than me etc but that's the mindset that you you have to deal with at some point and it's probably better to do it sooner than later in our industry is so bad with it um because it's so hands-on and because you have you know a lot of guys with pride and you know the craftsmanship pride and um yeah this is i was so excited for this conversation purely because i read on forums and chats and talked to inspectors i think every day who don't have a plan who aren't thinking what's my exit strategy someday um and it terrifies me you know because you think of the different professions that maybe have a pension or people that put away in their 401ks automatically i don't know how you have to be disciplined as an inspector and as a sole proprietor or however the business is set up with your retirement accounts and that's like getting into personal finance and stuff but i just fear that a lot of these older inspectors they kind of have just been living day to day week to week month to month and not thinking okay could i get a couple hundred thousand bucks someday to kind of help with my retirement or whatever the price is um i think it's way more i think it's happening barely at all but i think i don't know what percent it is whether 5 10 15 of businesses should be transferred in this way because think of it from the agent perspective when you're just kind of like one guy just disappears you're kind of wanting them to bring you a successor you know from the agent standpoint i would just be like uh okay i guess i'll just google it and you know and just go find the next guy it's nice to have a warm intro so i think the fears are overblown of how difficult it can be yeah for sure let's switch gears to some fun stuff for you like how how big do you want this to get how big do you want to be i know anyone that you know touches ieb you know obviously starts thinking they want to take over the world which is a great thing in most ways but yeah what's your vision well i don't have as aggressive as a growth plan as what most people would probably assume it's totally okay i think i think it's sometimes when i hear some people saying like oh yeah we want to be in multiple countries and universes and galaxies i'm just like okay slow down uh you got it like you have to grow at a reasonable rate or obviously the quality goes down and things like that we have only hired um we've basically tried to hire like one person every like nine months anything left like that's just too fast i you know you're going to lose control of that quality um but i do have my inspector has been with me the longest one who started on our closing day he lives in littleton and he drives to colorado springs every single day so yeah we've recently talked about like maybe we should just expand a little then you know let's go to the south denver metro area so that he can uh stop commuting so much but i know that that will take off really quickly and then we'll have to hire another person that lives up there and then eventually you know a team leader of those people and so where we're uh leaning towards is kind of expanding um north and you know maybe south but we just opened a it's kind of in the process right now what we're calling like a home maintenance division so we're going to start offering home maintenance plans for homeowners so that's our 2021 uh big push so i love that so what would that look like hey if your furnace goes out or you know you need dishwasher repair within the first year or second year or how's it how do you see it so we're actually only going to be doing like routine home maintenance um you know of course there's a lot of home inspectors that are like oh you can't do repairs well i do agree that it's a huge conflict of interest for a home inspector to go into a home and inspect it and then to offer to do repairs um because of that we're gonna steer clear of that you know there's a lot of opportunity where somebody could be shady and they could create a leak and then offer to fix it so we'll be doing things like cleaning dryer vents cleaning gutters we just over the years we have so many people ask us if that's something because we we always do a mechanical room tour it's like one of our big um steps in our home inspection processes we take them down there and we educate them on this is how you change this this is how often you should do it and we just always get people that are like do you guys do this that kind of comes that's what i would ask yeah exactly so um we're gonna go into people's homes and offer a routine uh like a routine home maintenance plan consultation and we would go around and look at everything in the house it requires um a lot of people's refrigerators um have water filters but they don't know that yeah or their clothes washer has a filter and they don't know that so we'll go around the house and look at all those things and basically put together a um a report if you will and we design a plan where we come back quarterly and on this trip we're going to winterize your sprinkler system um clean your air conditioner and do you know these things and then in three months we're gonna come back into these things and etc so i love this so so much like i can't tell you how much opportunity i think is here for this um one from being an agent from being a home buyer uh homeowner and then just over the years hearing all this feedback that the market is saying they want this and need this and no it's not a conflict of interest for those of you just tensing up and getting scared like you're gonna get no like it's not it's just flat out and not because these are things every homeowner needs exactly if they're not anything that you don't know if i say that in the spring your ac needs to be clean like yeah exactly and millennials now like we have to like adapt as an industry and i get so pumped in it i'm already like okay how can we help you enable this with like subscription payments and kind of have that recurring billing um through spectora because this is these are no brainers to me i don't change my own furnace filter when i should you know and it's just like i would pay for this in heartbeat so funny because people are always like i bet you keep really you know good maintenance on your house and i was like i've lived in this house for three years i think i've changed my furnace filter one time so yeah i almost messed up this year blown out the sprinkler you know it's like there's all these things where i'm like to me easily pay whatever the number is like uh whether it's 100 a month 150 a month or something that smooths it out over time about those four five six events a year so let's talk more about this i think you're absolutely on to something i think this could be huge um and this stops people from having to either google it every time or go to a home advisor and find kind of someone they don't know or trust that was the big thing so i started talking to people because i've been planning on this for about a year now doing research and kind of putting the system together but i talked to a lot of people and there were people that it's so hard to hire a contractor here i'm sure it isn't but it is insane yes um they don't return phone calls they don't show up or they're just not a trustworthy you know professional so um i think the last person that i talked to that was i finally was like okay we're doing this we need to set a date um they were like well yeah it's so annoying like i have to find somebody to do my sprinkler system and then i have to find somebody to do my dryer vent and that it'd be so nice to have one person and i was like yeah and we know home so well that that's another thing is some of the contractors that we just as every home inspector listening to this either has dealt with this or they will but they'll write something up on a home inspection report and that contractor will say that they're wrong and that they're 100 right it's just contractors they like some let's say a contractor that does water heaters well they know how to put part a to part b and etc but they don't think about the big picture and sometimes they're not aware when you point out a problem um maybe something like building science related to where that's where i was just like with our level of knowledge we could just provide an amazing service to people and skip a lot of headaches yeah because don't you think all those tasks we just mentioned those are things most home inspectors probably know how to do i would venture to guess to where it's not like you have to go find maybe a specialized uh you know sprinkler contractor to do one thing you know i think like if you talk handyman home inspector most of those tasks are trainable and scalable that's what's so exciting to me about it because you're not talking about doing hvac or you're not talking about doing in-depth you know water heater installations you're just talking about the basics that people hate to do and always forget to do right well yeah that's the big thing is it's not that people you know are just neglecting their houses people get busy you know people have good intentions the next thing you know months have gone by and the gutters are overflowing and etc so um my wife we have two kids my wife's a realtor she is super busy and yeah we don't even change our own furnace filters the hard part with this probably is is hiring so if i'm in the mind of a of a home inspector who's like oh yeah it's a great idea i should do that it's like okay do you hire someone w-2 to just do this and then make a bet kind of on yourself that you can market it and get people to sign up or do you kind of contract it out to start until you get validation and then you bring someone in-house um i'm trying to think of all the ways this could work so one of the ways that we are making it work and one of the ways that we decided to pursue this because i'm an open book um all of my employees are salary so in the winter you know we obviously we're in a season we're in colorado so we drop down significantly in the winter so um this is a way to help me keep people i've never had to lay anybody off but that's not to say that it could never happen so this is just another way to help bring in additional revenue during those slow months so but yes if you had to hire somebody just to do this it's going to be very tricky to bring on somebody until there's enough traction so there's always that challenge but that's how i was able to justify it is that all my employees are salary yeah and i think home inspection profits can subsidize it so if someone was willing to take a bet and say okay i'm gonna forego five percent of profits every month to put into this in depth to this uh venture to see if this can i can prove this out i think that's a great bet to make cause it's not like you're trying to create something out of thin air um yeah i like this a lot let's talk let's talk offline even more about you know could you talk about scheduling you know when you sign people up for these kinds of things like i think it's stuff that a lot can be automated to help um in terms of getting people scheduled to take the hassle out of it because that's the whole goals like can we add enough value to where homeowners are like oh cool yeah like tom's got us covered like we're scheduled it's on my calendar it just happens like that's how i wa that's how i would want it to work sure yeah yeah i thought the same thing awesome man um what else yeah what else is interesting to you in the world um you know in the world of home inspections kind of what you're observing or seeing or um you said you're an ieb for a bit i was yeah i recently stopped i'm i'm not good with the time commitment um so i think ib is amazing i i learned a lot but i did recently um decide to let it go but um i don't know i mean the home inspection industry has came so far and i i always hear people talk about porch and home depot and i don't follow that stuff too closely i know that uh it's kind of crazy because my inspector sean and i were just talking yesterday about how i always think about like how photographers are going to be a thing of the past because the iphone is getting so ridiculous it takes amazing photos and like me i had i had planned on hiring a marketing person this year but then i discovered canva and now i'm like well this is pretty easy i can do this yeah so i'm uh always wondering like when is the thing going to happen that's going to be like i don't need home inspection so uh it's a scary thing but i think we're safe i mean i think i listen to the podcast episode with you and mike on there talking about how um data i forget i forgot how it was worded but could basically you send a drone or something through a house and could it do the home inspection for you and not in my lifetime i don't think i have to worry about it is it possible sure but uh i think we're safe for now i i agree um and like like trends with millennials are are in the industry's favor it's not like people are getting more savvy with handyman you know with being a handyman in their home and um i think if people are going the other direction where they're like hey let technology take care of it or like i don't want to deal with this stuff the problem is there's just such a shortage of i don't know if there's still a shortage of home inspectors it's hard to tell i don't know how crowded the market feels to you do you are you seeing tons of competition pop up i do and i know a lot of people listening to this are probably people who have contacted me because i have people contact me every other day asking if they can um shadow me and i always say yes but there are always people who are like oh you know i'm thinking about starting a home inspection company uh to where it's i just think it looks like it looks like such a fun job and a lot of people are people who are following me on social media and i think that they see how much fun i have because i do i love my job to death i have so much fun doing it and a lot of people see that and they're like i should do that um but it's hard it is really hard to get into this so um there's there's a ton of people that are trying to get into it but i just don't think most of them are gonna stick around um it would depend we're obviously we're in a huge military area we have four very bases near us and there's a lot of people who were like i was when i got out who have a medical retirement or uh uh yeah they have more wiggle room like like me i could i could not have pursued home inspection if i didn't have a retirement from the army um so i think maybe in this area it's just more so because we yeah we just have so many people that have that cushion to fall back on so they can pursue this but that's an interesting point i i guess i've never i've i've known that's a dynamic but i didn't put it in the context of that kind of uh you know almost saturates the market with those part-timers that sometimes can drag prices down which is not good for you know which is not fun um but they don't hang around as long because the ramp up as you know is brutal like to get to 100 inspections is like the holy grail sometimes it's like not many get there yeah um i it took me a year to do a hundred um and it felt like a huge accomplishment and now when i think of that i'm like dude i might do that in a week or something [Laughter] but i do i hear that all the time i hear people say like i don't need to do a lot of inspections because i have a retirement or i have a disability or whatever the case may be so i do think that we're super saturated here but i just don't know how it is everywhere else dude all these guys should go be a plumber an electrician or whatever because you can't you can't get any other type of contractor to do a job for you within a month or two there's huge shortages on that side in the trades obviously it takes more schooling and more um expertise but gosh the breadth of knowledge that a home inspector takes um i think people sleep on they just think oh yeah i built a house once and uh you know pretty handy yeah you know it's when we're talking about the industry and where things are going i always think of how much technology is involved in home inspecting nowadays and um it it's really funny for me because we do have so many agents that used lance before me um or clients who used lance before me and now we do we have drones and we have thermal cameras and you know continuous radon monitors and all this fancy stuff to where um it's crazy first of all that we still charge the same price as we did 10 years ago ridiculous ridiculous so aggravating uh i could talk about that all day how much that bothers me but um yeah the technology is so crazy and you know spectora the the reminders feature that you guys released that has helped us so much to where we inspect so much more stuff because we have a little button that i just click and now i have all the stuff that i can refer to to where before i feel like a lot of inspectors were like well i can't be expected to you know because it's true you can't remember everything about everything um the amount of stuff that we're required to know and the amount of stuff that we could know is just insane but the level of home inspections is going up and up and up with technology and the reason i brought up the reminders things because yeah we are inspecting things that because we have it at our fingertip to be able to refresh us or refer to or whatever it's just crazy the level of home inspections is going to get better and better and it's funny because a lot of um agents have kind of acted like we're um almost have like an unfair approach like a listing agent will be like well that's not fair you guys had a thermal camera to wear it's only going to get worse as technology goes on like i don't know if you know what a zip level is but that's a new thing i keep seeing home inspectors using where they're catching you know significant settlement and foundations with this fancy tool that nobody would have ever known about if they didn't have that fancy tool so this is all great for the consumer agents might hate it but like it's ridiculous it's gotta the level has to go up and i think prior i want to see prices double you know i don't know if they will but i'm trying to i'm always trying to think of what needs to happen for people to accept kind of that you get what you pay for and that this is an area you know i write articles you know every quarter so to put out there and try and circulate but it's the education just isn't there for most homeowners like it's an area people still want to skimp in and uh yeah i don't know should it be like paid through different means or stretched out or subsidized somehow i'm trying to think of ways that people need to comfort up to say like yeah this probably is worth 500 bucks guarantee it's worth 500 bucks or 600 or whatever um i don't know how we solve that that's education i think every inspector out there needs to be blogging about this stuff needs to be on youtube talking about this stuff that's how we do it collectively it might be yeah when it's funny some a home inspector might lose a inspection uh lose a job to another inspector who was 25 dollars cheaper but you know one defect a single defect that could be found that the more expensive inspector found that the cheaper one didn't find i mean we're talking about like big ticket things we're talking about like a leak or whatever that could cost tens of thousands of dollars so it's to me it's just so silly to not just go with the most reputable person the most credible person etc but people do it every day they do um and i don't know where we sit in kind of the world that's shifting around um like data being a product and people accept you know the whole facebook kind of exercise of it's a free thing but you give them all your data and most people willingly know that now and so like i just i wonder you know it's like you said the porch thing going on like is that is that something that's happening in our industry do we need to be aware of it what should we be thinking about you know these are the things that keep me up at night sometimes of like are prices going down but then what's gonna compensate you guys for if prices drop say five percent on average a year or whatever or if they rise five by five percent like what what factors into that that's just fascinating to me sure i agree because if people are like hey uh who's going to help me maintain this house afterwards it's like could you give a slight discount on the home inspection because they're doing a home maintenance plan then you're kind of you know making sure you're growing and getting what you want but then it feels better to the homeowner because it smooths out maybe the upfront payment or something i don't know right absolutely just just brainstorming here it's just i love that though that's like what i'm most pumped about i'm gonna be thinking about that all day um we got a couple minutes left what else what else is on your mind what else uh what else has been going well going poorly um um dude the marketing stuff props for that that's that's exciting um i'll have to scan through your social media accounts and i'll link to them in the description too so everyone can check them out and follow yeah thanks i uh i really um we started making youtube videos to [Music] for training purposes mainly um in order to streamline get getting an inspector through training we were making videos on how to inspect a garage and how to inspect a kitchen and things like that that's kind of where it started but then we started making videos on how to you know best use our spectora template and how to uh just everything how to maintain the it's funny because we always hear like really common misconceptions so then i was like and it drives me nuts um so we i was like we made a list of all the misconceptions that we hear every day that are not true but we hear them by realtors like for instance realtors tell clients all the time and then the clients call us and they're like well my realtor said i don't need a radon test because this house doesn't have a basement and i'm always like oh i want to crush that so bad so yeah we made a video to address that and of course not everybody's going to see it but it it'll help a little bit and that's worth it to me can you send me that list i'll i'll put out an article i'll reword it so we're not writing the same article but um i just want to keep putting out these educational pieces for agents and homebuyers because honestly if we can make all of our lives easier get in front of people like that's what it's all about so i'd love to hear that list i asked a question on the user group the other day of like what are three things you wish homeowners knew because i want to start putting this content out there and getting in front of people yeah for sure it's uh it's frustrating to me because you know we'll not do as many radon tests because agents are giving out bad information but i'm also always like what if that client decides to get a radon test afterwards say somebody a home inspector somebody talks them into getting one after closing and it comes back high i would think your that agent's probably liable for that and should probably be buying them a uh radar mitigation system so um you know we're we're trying to make everybody more knowledgeable to help everybody the home buyer the agent etc so um that's where our youtube channel kind of came in but uh it's really fun it's something i really enjoy so i love it it's another means of communication and i think the more we you guys communicate with agents the more comfortable they feel and trusting you guys and not not being the stereotypical you know kind of bad agent that wants to hide things or tell people not to get a test because it could make the deal fall through you know that's a whole another topic is their incentive structure and the way they're incented to want to sandbag the home inspection honestly because it's a it's a place where the deal could fall through right and they have to like it's to me there's just so many ethics involved in that in being an agent um yeah we could probably rant on that for an hour for sure um well cool man i gotta jump um this is outstanding thank you so much for telling the story um i think this is gonna be a hit for sure but i'll uh i'll send you all the links and all the good stuff and we can share with everybody and uh go from there yeah thanks for having me on all right brother have a good day man and uh have a good rest of your week all right you too all right later

Channel: Spectora Home Inspection Software

Views: 382

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: QaGaZMi3FLE

Length: 59min 29sec (3569 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021