Strategic Goal-Setting for Home Inspection Success

We're like , okay , well , I'm already inspecting , why know my goals ? Or maybe we're not inspecting . We're like , okay , my goal is to inspect . But this is actually kind of important because I was doing some self-reflecting and thinking in my head .

My first company that I ever started and I didn't really have a goal , so it was a construction company like construction , painting sheetrock and things like that . I was young company like construction , painting sheetrock and things like that . I was young and I just wanted to get work . The problem with that is I kept hitting walls .

I could only work as much as I could work and that was the limit of my income . And then I realized later on it didn't fit my goals because I wanted to be able to have people work with me , do cooler jobs and do all this other stuff . But I kind of worked myself into a spot where it's hard for me to expand out of it .

So that brought to mind the fact that later on , when I started my other companies , that I had a goal . I said when I sat down and I said to myself okay , this is where I want this company to be . So oftentimes we'll hear about accidental success , and that's okay , that's cool . I've had accidental success too .

I started doing something and it just turns out awesome and people want you to do it and they pay you money and you grow great . But what we don't see or we don't talk about a lot is those who have the success that they planned for , and you do that by having a goal .

So , first of all , when I talked to home inspectors and what actually brought this up with the self-reflection and everything is somebody called me and one of the questions I ask is you know , what do you want to do with your company , as you're growing a home inspection company and like 80% of the time they're like my goal is just to inspect , you know .

And then sometimes people are like hey , I want to go multi-state , I want to start a franchise , whatever . But this one guy in particular , he goes , I don't know , and he just , he just really had no direction and you know what ? It didn't take him long a few months and then he was just gone .

He was on to the next thing , because he didn't have a goal , he didn't have an aspiration to work towards . So the first thing that we should all do , no matter where we're at in our business if we're in almost 20 years deep , like me , or we are just starting out ask ourselves what is our goal .

So maybe we're just starting a home inspection company and we're going over that . Can you answer ? That question is really what it comes down to . That's the first thing . So is our goal to start a multi-inspector company , to have us pull out of the field and just run our inspectors ? Okay , that's great , but we need to know that up front .

Accidental success is great , but planned success is usually faster and an easier transition and you don't have to tear down what you've built to build something new . You can just transition right into it because you built the foundation for it . Is our goal to be a single inspector that works three to four days a week and makes a great living ?

We had Randy Lima on recently again . You know that that's his goal to be a solo inspector and have time off with his family . Is it a retirement job , is it ? You know ? I say this is it to work seven days a week , 365 days a year , with no weekends off ? Because , I'll be honest with you , that's where most of us end up .

If we find some success in our business . We end up working way too much because we didn't have a goal , we didn't build the foundation . And now we find ourselves and this is a common phone call I get Ian , I'm working seven days a week , three inspections a day , and I'm exhausted . We didn't plan for growth , we didn't plan for what are we going to do .

And then we get into this weird habit of like okay , well , I really don't want to hire a guy , or I can't hire a guy because I'm too busy to hire a guy . That's accidental success and more often , it's accidental failure . We pay attention to the accidental successes .

What we don't see are the accidental failures , because they just go off into the sunset because they burned out or it just didn't work for them . So what is our goal ? So now , what if we know our goal ? We're like , okay , cool , I'm getting into this , I want to be a solo inspector .

Awesome , now we can build the foundation of where we're going to go and I want to go over just a couple of scenarios about why it's different . Because in the back of our heads we're thinking we just got to get out there and inspect . Whoa , okay , yeah , but not necessarily so .

For instance , if we want to be a single inspector and we need X amount of dollars to survive , that X amount of dollars is going to increase . It's just the nature of things . I remember a guy telling me Ian , I need exactly $50,000 a year . If I have that , I'll be fine . As soon as he hit $50,000 a year , he's like man , this isn't enough anymore .

Things get more expensive , inflation happens , whatever . Don't work towards the bottom line . Be like okay , this is where I can live comfortably . Here's a number that I'm looking at . Maybe it's . I'm not going to throw out any numbers because everybody's different but work towards a reasonable number .

Take our baseline what we need to live off of and then add 60 to 70% on that and make that our goal . How many inspections a week do we need to do that ?

If we account for the slow season around Christmas time and through January , and if we're in the South you South the summertime gets slow , especially in states like Georgia and Southern Texas and Florida , where it's a bajillion degrees , summer tends to be a little bit slower . We see a slowdown in those areas .

So plan for those and say , okay , now I need to work towards that . And we've talked about this a lot on the show and I don't mean to keep beating the same horse here . But it's about raising our prices . If we're going to be a single inspector , we need to have a life , not just a business .

We don't want to be working seven days a week , three inspections a day , four inspections a day .

Okay , now , that requires us to raise our prices , know our schedule and know what brings us not only the money we need to survive , but the life that we need to survive to keep our family intact and not have our wife wondering when's the next time they're going to see us , or the kids , you know , wondering why we missed our ball game .

And I'm not saying that all of us that work that hard do that . I'm just saying we need to have a life , not just a business is . And I'm not saying that all of us that work that hard do that . I'm just saying we need to have a life , not just a business . Is what I'm saying . Okay , so now maybe our goal is to become multi inspector .

I'm going to be frank , I'm going to talk about it . Raising our prices is going to be important for that , because now we need to plan . Okay , so once I hit X amount of inspections a year , once I hit 400 inspections a year , I want to take a guy on and we're going to plan for that .

Okay , so I'm going to hit 400 inspections a year for at least 1.5 years , bank all the money I can and then hire a guy and give him 200 of the inspections a year and then I'm going to work back up to 400 inspections a year for myself and we're going to need to raise our prices so that we can afford when we do a split with the guy .

Just go back and listen to our podcast with Tom Kubiak . We do want to have him be an actual employee , a W-2 , with a small split , rather than doing a 1099 split if we can , because nobody wants to be audited by the Department of Labor . That's never fun . They're a lot harder on people than IRS .

But listen to why Tom Kubiak said that's important for us to do back . I think two seasons ago , but you can look it up on our website . But now we can start planning Okay , those are the numbers that I want to hit and those are reasonable goals 400 inspections a year is not going to kill you .

But now maybe we say , okay , well , I want to hit , and those are reasonable goals , 400 inspections a year is not going to kill you . But now maybe we say , okay , well , I want that guy to do 300 inspections a year . So now we can say , okay , once I get to 500 inspections a year , I do that for at least 1.5 years .

Then I give that guy 300 inspections . He can make a good living .

I banked a bunch of money because now I'm back down to 200 inspections a year and then we work back up to 500 and then bring on the next guy so we could do that fairly quickly and grow our business fairly quickly over the course of just a few years and not have to take on any debt , not have to scrape by and give our guys a great living and give

ourselves a great living . We can do it faster than that . I'm just giving modest numbers . But now what if ? Um , you know a lot of people don't think about this . Uh , but I've had a couple of guys call me recently . They're like my goal is to start a franchise . Oh , that's cool .

We start our business and we direct our business in a direction very differently . If we're going to start a franchise , everything gets written down very differently . If we're going to start a franchise , everything gets written down . Everything gets written down .

Every process , every bit of software , every agreement , everything gets written down and documented , and so that it can be replicated easily .

We should be doing that with our business anyways , but it's even more so if we want to start a franchise so that by the time we're done with a two-year stint in our business , we can have everything documented so that we can hand our business model over to somebody in one packet and say just do this , and they can do the same thing in a shorter period of

time than we started it . So there's a lot of different goals that we might have . Our goal may be . I want to push into commercial inspections . I will say this commercial inspections I still say it it's the wave of the future , I love it , it's the best . But it's really hard to start out in the commercial industry .

I've met two guys over the past two years that started out in the commercial industry commercial inspection industry and then worked into home inspections because , as they put it , home inspections kind of keep them going in between large commercial inspections .

I don't know the logistics of their business exactly , but it makes sense to me to work from a home inspection business into commercial inspections rather than the other way around , if that makes sense .

So what I'm saying is , if our goal is to go into commercial inspections , we want to ideally in my mind anyways again , this is just my opinion have a good , solid home inspection business and then , as all of our guests have recommended in Rob Klaus and Dylan Winnikey and so many others who have talked about commercial inspections Nick Gromicko , they talked about

starting your own separate company for commercial inspections . So we can build that while we're building our own inspection company , because it's a lot of the same processes just adapted . Now we can build our commercial company while inspecting and that's supporting our commercial company . So is that where our direction is going ? Cool , start that now .

Start working on a logo , a company name , whether it be a DBA for your LLC or a separate LLC , however you want to do it . Start branching off now for your goals , maybe five years down the road , because one of the most dangerous things that we will do in business is to say my goal is just to get out there and start working .

We're going to find ourselves five years in and we're like man , I wish I had geared up for commercial inspections and trying to reverse engineer our business . It's a lot easier if we know our goals at the beginning . This is important . For those of us who have been in business for a long time , though , too .

It is never too late to stop and say what's my goal with this ? I did that halfway through my home inspection career and I'm like man , I'm busy , I have great inspections , great people to work with , everything's awesome . But I'm like where am I going with this ? You know , am I still going to ? What if I bust my knee and I can't get into addicts ?

You know what ? What backup plan do I have ?

So I started building goals of having a different business model , and I had to reverse engineer some stuff , but it wasn't that bad because it didn't get so far that I was 20 years into it , 15 years into it If we can stop at any time and say where am I going with this and then our goal could be stay single inspector , work , part-time , work crazy hours ,

be multi-inspector , go into commercial inspection , start a franchise All of these are fantastic goals . Or we may even say I want to build an inspection business to sell it . Home inspection businesses are getting more sellable by the day . They never used to be very sellable .

I've seen multi-inspector firms go for $5,000 for their website and a couple pieces of equipment because the guys own their own trucks . And home inspection companies were never very sellable . But they are becoming sellable and to do that we need recurring income .

So what things outside of our SOP can we offer people that are recurring income that can make our business more sellable ? So , for instance , commercial inspections very sellable business . Maybe our goal is to not only just do commercial inspections but have the annual inspection that commercial companies really need .

Or we can schedule all of their inspections that they need . So , like restaurants need their hood inspections for the grease and all that stuff , you know , fire suppression inspections we can schedule and handle all of that for them and give them documents . Now we have yearly recurring income , which makes our company valuable .

Hard to do for home inspections , but we've talked about it before . Most SOPs in most states we don't want to offer services that are against our standards of practice but , like in New York State , you can do all sorts of things like water treatment , pest and termite .

In most states that's not included under any SOP and that's a great way to have recurring income . Have a branch of our company that does extermination or whatever you want to call it , pest treatment , whatever it happens to be , work at it now if we want to have a sellable company .

So this is just a reminder never too late to sit back and say what are my goals and if we're just starting out , know where we want to be and be honest with ourselves . We don't want to sit there and say , well , I just want to do this , I just want to have low goals .

If we have lofty goals in the back of our head , pop those out , put it on paper and say can I reach this ? If not , okay , lower our goals . If we can cool , go for it . But either way , listen in next time and thank you for listening to my rant .

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