How to get rich in the inspection business.

Good point.

You can charge $250 with termite on any size home and your phone will ring off the wall. REA’s here love these HI’s, who write short reports, not alarm the home buyer, and give-a-way lots of freebees to REAs.

Or, you can charge high fees, do a few inspections, serve the top 3% professionally, do fewer inspections, not make as much money monthly, but you will sleep well at night.

Do you want to be a Mike Crow, or a Dan Bowers? Big differences in the fees you charge, and the services you provide…

You forgot the 4th and most current option.

The brochures stay in the racks because people buying real estate never step foot in a real estate office anymore… and the best agents are only there to drop off escrow checks.

'Zactly!! You can’t really do much good at leaving cards there either.

You gotta get’em** in** the RE agents’ hands! :cool:

Again, this isn’t about real estate offices or brochures. It’s simply a controlled experiment. An experiment that revealed something much broader and more important: what causes consumers to take interest in an inspector, reject an inspector, or choose to hire one.

So, after years of observing my little experiment, it became clear that there were certain brochures that almost no one ever touched, and certain brochures that were looked at, but then returned to their holder. These brochures sat for months, even years, before we ran out. There were also brochures that every consumer would choose and take with them.

As a real estate agent, I recalled the Golden Rule: “Location, location, location.” So I wondered if it was true for brochure placement. I shuffled the brochure wall so that the most popular brochures were in the bottom corner, below some brochures that had nothing to do with inspections. And I relocated the least popular brochures to the center of the wall. Then, I watched. Consumers continued choosing (and not choosing) the same inspectors they always had. Location made no difference. I needed to find out what was going on and what made consumers behave as they did… and I figured out just how I’d do it. Stay tuned.

Excellent thread topic. Outstanding material. Are you willing to do the work to 10X your business?

NICK IN THE HOUSE! Bring it!

So, there I sat, watching consumers each day. Now, don’t get me wrong – sometimes the popular inspectors weren’t chosen and sometimes the unpopular inspectors were chosen. But most of the time, the winners won and the losers lost (seems like a law of the universe). And I wanted my home inspection company to win. I couldn’t correctly predict what any particular consumer would do for certain. The best I could do was predict the probability that a consumer would behave a certain way.

Déjà vu is the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past, and that’s the sensation I had.

Before I was a REALTOR, I was a research analyst for a nuclear physics laboratory–specifically a particle accelerator facility (an atom smasher). I recalled that in quantum mechanics, atoms behave unpredictably. The best one can do is accurately predict the probability that an atom would behave a certain way… just like I became able to predict the probability that a consumer would behave a certain way.

Could I use quantum physics to discover why consumers chose certain inspectors and not others? I was on to something!

Stay tuned.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful, which I assure you I’m not, we’re six days in on this thread and i’m getting impatient. Can we put some meat on this bone?

You don’t know Nick very well, do you?

Three little words, and/or letters. Stay tuned.:wink:

I’m just single minded, and laser focused. It’s kind of like being slow-played at poker, or being on a 70mph highway behind a line of cars doing 45.

Let me offer this… Do you remember the thread involving “Grape Inspections”? Hasn’t completed yet, has it? :-k

I remember that thread, i stopped reading after the grape guy reported business really hadn’t picked up any, or something to that effect, I’m paraphrasing.

Post #1 has a lot of meat. The rest is little details.

Okay Nick we want you to finish helping Grape Guy become successful because instead of just talk like here you began to implement. Did Grape Guy end up a Millionaire following your advice yet ? If so we were hoping to tag along for the ride and admire your skill with Pygmalion.

Right now you are doing the exact same thread without a experimental Rabbit to prove your theories .

Did you give up on the “Purple One” ?

Turn this simple Farm Boy { “The guy with the Vine Fruit Logo” } into a Mogul and you will win every Inspectors admiration.
Please finish it as we were all watching and fascinated.

Can this thread and go stomp Grapes into Wine. :slight_smile:

I remember him. I don’t know if he followed my advice or not. I developed his brand (he had none), which is the first step he needed to take to get on the right track.

Yes you took him to the first step.Waiting for the second step.
Admit the thread dragged on but that was because everyone was salivating for step 2.

The more I thought about it, the more similarities I found between sub-atomic particles and consumers about to hire a home inspector. I got so excited thinking about it one day… I ran all the way home, kind of like Woody Allen did in the movie “Hannah and Her Sisters” when he found out he didn’t have a brain tumor. Here’s the scene from that movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76-UbwX1i4A

But also like Woody Allen in that clip, it hit me while running down the street – the fact that I could now predict consumer behavior regarding home inspector choice is meaningless. What good is being able to predict how often consumers will choose my competitor over me if I don’t know why they are choosing my competitors over me?

The method I used to learn why was a simple one. And it didn’t rely on the similarities between sub-atomic particles and consumers about to hire a home inspector. It relied on one tiny difference.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been working on branding, trying to get website, social media, print materials, and clothes to all to include the righteous logo the design team spun me up. And I’ve been taking around the “now that you’ve had a home inspection books” with “office copy do not throw out” in black sharpie. I stopped at a dozen more offices today. Branding is expensive but I’m chipping away at it.