jseffrin
(Jim Seffrin, Director of Infrared Training)
21
Dear Arnold:
Congratulations on completing your training and welcome to the world of thermography!
Prior to determining pricing, you must determine how you will use thermal imaging in your business. Will you use it as an adjunctive tool for home inspections or will you offer it as an inspection service for commercial businesses? Of these two choices, the latter can provide significant annual revenue. Properly marketed, a single thermograher is capable of generating an annual gross revenue of over $200,000!
I hope his is helpful and wish you the best of luck with your future thermographic endeavors. Feel free to give us a call if we may be of further assistance.
To reiterate the “cheaper” part; this doesn’t mean it’s cheap. It means that the process is cheaper than tearing things apart to find the problem, correcting it and putting back all the areas that you didn’t need to tear apart in the first place if you use thermal imaging.
Cheaper means that it is less costly to have a preventative maintenance program that “sees” problems before they become catastrophic. What is your clients daily or hourly loss from an unplanned shutdown?
And something you cannot put a price on; someone’s life!
When people call you up to do an energy audit with your thermal imaging camera because they “can’t afford to pay their electric bill” they also cannot afford hundred $135/hour find out what they’re going to have to pay a thousand dollars to fix.
When you select the services you intend to perform, you not only have to take into consideration how much it takes to do the job on-site, off-site and travel, you have to determine if there’s a cost benefit to the client. Some jobs just can’t be done economically. Some people just have to go ahead and pay their electric bill…
I am new to the board, so, please be gentle.
I am about to enter the commercial side of home inspection as well as thermal imaging field. I have no idea about the tools and the price what type of tools I should purchase for my business.
What if the inspection is only for thermal imaging? What is used as a base for pricing.
I am from the Canada.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Oh, no… I don’t mind paying. I’ll even fly him in First Class. He said he was going to come. I’ll email him now. I’m trying to get Jim Krumm there too. He does a ton of commercial inspections. He once bid a commercial job so high my face turned red. He got the job.
It’s not really the taping that kills us, it’s the editing. Nothing has changed since I launched www.NACHI.TV There is still about an hour of editing for every minute of the final production. I think this event is 6 hours long, so that’s 360 minutes. That means editing would take 360 hours or 9 weeks of editing and about $18K.
That’s a lot of time and money (on top of the cost of the event and the advertising of the event) to put out one episode that apparently isn’t a very popular subject matter. You might think it’s popular, I might think it’s popular, but the inspection, code enforcement, and contractor industries disagree.
We had a one-week commercial course being taught by Dale and Bill scheduled. We emailed all our members about it, promoted it in What’s New, promoted it in our monthly e-newsletter, promoted it on our Events list, promoted it on this message board, and even put it on our home page. I also let all my code official friends know about the event. We also mailed out (USPS) more than ten thousand snail mail invitations to more than ten thousand local contractors to promote it. That mailing cost us over $15K. I rented several local commercial buildings to inspect for the day and bought an insurance policy to cover that hands-on portion of the course. We rented the nicest venue in the city of Boulder at the Marriott. That cost us over $7K and is non-refundable. I’m sure Dale and Bill promoted it too. After all that… we got a whopping 2 registrations. 2, as in Two, as in one more than one, as in less than 3! And even worse, I’m convinced that the two registrations came from Dale’s efforts, not mine.
So now I’m financially once bitten, twice shy so to speak. Despite there being a ton of money to be made in commercial inspections… home inspectors, code officials, and contractors just don’t seem to want to get into it.
I just spoke with Kevin O’Malley who runs the annual Vegas convention. Every year he tacks on an additional 3-day commercial inspection course to the end of the event. This year he cancelled it.
James Krumm has agreed to be one of the speakers at the upcoming Commercial Inspection Business Seminar. He has been doing commercial inspections for 10 years. The event is free for InterNACHI members:
Its not like 10-15 years ago. There is a butt load of inspectors out here that don’t think education oughta cost anything. When I was still pushing local seminars for NACHI, ASHI and NAHI in the KC area, we had inspectors within 20 miles that had NEVER gone to any seminar put on by ANY group UNLESS it was free.
I remember about 4 of us wanting to be better educated and know more about wood shake / shingle roofs 15 years ago and driving to Dallas to sit thru Haag Engineering’s 3 day Roofing course that most Insurance Adjustors attended; OR 3 of us flying to Philly to take the 4.5 day EDI stucco / EIFS course; OR when 3 of us were interested in IR and drove to Boulder for the 2 day IR class put on by Will Decker, etc. We spent the $$$$$$ cause we wanted to learn.
It embarrasses me when I hear guys that want to do or get into home inspection and tell the rest of us how they can’t take off 2-3 days to learn a skill OR unless its offered FREE on the internet. Truthfully I think they ought to get into another line of work.
We had Six who paid, Troy P, Arnold G, Will M, David H, and two others I would need to look at PayPal to remember now, but it was Six, I forwarded you and Chris the folks who did pay, I refunded their money back as you know because there wasn’t enough people to pay for the conference hall and food, let alone have the course.
Its sad really, like Dan B pointed out, but its doesn’t make any difference to me, I stay swamped with work because of this very reason, not many want to know anything about commercial and less what to pay to be at an actual course for five days, its really hard to put all the information together in a five day course and do onsite inspections too boot.
When we have the course I will personally make sure the Six who did pay will only be paying about a third, they had their hearts set on this and it just couldn’t happen at this time. I will personally pay any difference to make it happen for them.
Bill and I have a different venue now, it will be in a less expensive location, currently there are about 14 people who will pay to take a course, when we have 20-25 I’ll be emailing all the folks who were-are truly interested. At least there will be 20-25 people making 500K working 10 months a year and not giving a damn about home inspections.
I’m looking forward to your course whenever it is scheduled. I was disappointed when the Denver event was canceled but I completely understand why. I have been exploring the NACBI site and will spend more time there and gaining the education that is needed to move on to the next level!
Hey how you doing brother. I saw you were offering the gentleman help. I was wondering if that offer can be extended to me aswell it would be much appreciated. My father started his construction business in NYC in ‘88 and it’s the family business. I’m trying to expand our array of services and wanted to add thermal imaging from a construction/energy standpoint. I have already looked at some cameras. I was wondering if I could get some advice on whether the camera i have in mind is best for what I’m going for. If you can help please let me know it would be very much appreciated. God Bless.
