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How to Keep Growing During Busy Season
by Paul Zak, President of ACC
Your inspection business is booming, and you are finding yourself stuck between a rock and hard place—you want to grow, but there is not enough time in the day to do anything but work your business and maybe get some sleep.
What is consuming all of your time? Typically, all aspects of the inspection lifecycle, as you are focused on delighting your customers during every step of the process.
• It is critical to answer the phone, might be a future client!
• It is critical to book the inspection, spending the time to make sure you get everything you need while educating and upselling your services.
• It is critical to travel to and perform the inspection.
• It is critical so spend the time to review the findings with the client.
• It is critical to produce a high-quality inspection report.
• Again, all the while trying to keep the agent and client happy.
[For a refresher on a customer-centric focus, check out our blog (How Customer-Centric is Your Home Inspection Business?—America’s Call Center]. So how do you find time to do something different when you are already spending 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week working your business? The first thing you need to do is make a conscious decision to do something different. Invest your time and money in the short term to get the benefits long term.
You have decided to make an investment to grow. Great! So, where do you find the time?
You could try working even more hours, but that is difficult to sustain, especially if you are doing 2-3 inspections a day. Instead, block off time on your schedule (typically an existing inspection slot) to specifically work “on” your business instead of “in” your business. Yes, you will be losing that inspection revenue, but the return on investment will make it worth it in the long run!
You blocked off some time, now what? Start by thinking about how you are going to repeatedly find the time to do something different. To oversimplify, the options generally come down to:
1) Work harder
2) Work more efficiently (saving time)
3) Offload / delegate some of your current responsibilities (buying back your time)
All while keeping in mind your priorities…
1) You must keep the business running,
2) While always providing your agents and clients the best possible service,
3) As you are trying to grow your business.
If you are doing things in your business that do not fall within those priorities, stop doing them!
Work Harder
This might be an option for some, and this can take on a couple of different forms. The simplest is to add some extra hours to your workday not slotted for inspections. Just keep in mind that family and sleep are general viewed as important :) Or spend some time on your day off to spend some of that time working “on” your business, identifying ways to eventually buy that time back.
Work Smarter
This encompasses looking at ways to become more efficient and effective in running your business, which is essentially saving or buying time.
Have you optimized your inspection process and maximized the capabilities of your report writing software? There are many extraordinarily successful inspection businesses that provide high-quality, on-site or next day reports. Even if on-site is not a part of your business model, if you can have most of your report done on-site you could save hours or more a day. Have you optimized your comment libraries or are you writing custom novels for each report? (And sorry to say, very few people are willing to sit through a 120-page report—it is hard enough to get agents to read the summary!) Are you using the native capabilities of your device for photos, etc. so you are not having to waste time simply moving data around? If you do not know how to optimize your report writing software, you should take advantage of the software’s support team and the various community forums that are available.
Are you taking advantage of your business management software? Have you automated all your agent and customer notifications? Have you automated your invoicing and integrated with a payment processor? Do you have secure, automated report delivery? Are you taking advantage of online scheduling? Are you using your business management software to help drive your marketing activities? There can be a good amount of effort required to initially set up your business management software, but once up and running that can save you even more time during the day, as you are not having to spend your precious time on details that can be automatically handled. Taking the time to learn and utilize the tools you have available now will reap many benefits down the road.
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One subtle time killer, that many inspectors do not consider, is an overcomplicated pricing structure. How does this impact your time? If you have 5 different water quality options, 4 different air quality options, different prices for add-on services based on base inspection types, etc. that builds in unnecessary complications in having to understand or explain the differences. In most cases the client or agent does not care, they just want what they need. While there are some areas that are highly price sensitive, most consumers are willing to pay a little more for simplicity. Offer packages, keep your non-mainstream services off your online scheduler and have commonality across add-on service pricing. These are all ways to simplify, saving you time and possibly even increasing your average inspection fee.
Now look at where you are spending your time. If you are making $100-$150+ per hour per inspection, doesn’t it make sense to hire out some of the job functions that are important but probably would not cost you $100 per hour?
But “nobody can do it as good as me!” Ah, yes. That argument. Prepare for your balloon to be deflated because, guess what—that just is not true. While another person might not do it exactly the same way you do, there’s plenty of proof out there that others can do just as good a job as you and sometimes better. There are countless inspection companies in our industry that are extraordinarily successful who do NOT do it all themselves. If you are an “only I can do it” person, you will always be your biggest limiting factor. And unless you get past that, you will be greatly limiting your growth.
Hiring People and Partnering
You recognize that there are resources out there to grow your business. So where do you start? The easiest “go-to” is to hire another inspector to increase your capacity. You will have to make sure you have enough volume to keep them busy, have a plan for a training and a compensation program, and a good general rule of thumb is that if you are repeatedly at 80% capacity or more, you should start hiring now. And as the new inspector ramps up and starts working on their own, you should have more time to further work on your business. Though recognize this also comes with some overhead—as you must find the right person, train them and actively manage them. While in principle it sounds easy and is very necessary, be aware it can consume quite a bit of your time at the start. Talk to your peers who have been successful at this and borrow as many of their processes as you can that make sense for you.
The biggest return you will get is trading your time to find and engage the right partners. For example: Do you have somebody helping you with your taxes? Do you have somebody helping you with your insurance? If you are running your own business, the answers should be
“Yes!” which means you already have a couple of business partners.
You have already made the decision to not spend your precious ($100+/hour) time on those activities, now think of where you are spending time in your business that does not absolutely require you to do the work. What might be helpful is to put it into context.
• Would you pay someone $100 per hour to handle your marketing on a regular basis?
• Would you pay someone $100 per hour to handle your website, social media, etc.?
• Would you pay someone $100 per hour to answer your phones, handle your emails?
• Would you pay someone $100 per hour to book your inspections, handle access, etc.?
• Where else are you spending your valuable time on activities not generating $100+ per hour?
There might be some items that you are not willing to give up (like marketing), which in some cases could be okay, but be cautious. Remember, it is about the ROI. Far too many people fancy themselves marketing “experts;” when in reality, someone can do just as much harm as good by engaging in the wrong marketing activities and spending limited advertising dollars on tactics that simply don’t pay off.
The best-case result from this is simply wasted time and money. While the worst-case result could be damage to the brand and your bottom line.
As the president of ACC, I can say without hesitation, that in my 20-plus years of experience in the home inspection industry, one of the other most difficult things for inspectors to give up is answering their own phones and managing incoming leads. Again, the most common argument is “nobody can do it as good as me!” And that very well may be the case; but how can an inspection business grow if the owner never relinquishes that part of the home inspection process lifecycle? Bottom line—they can’t.
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However, after two decades of refining our process at ACC for home inspectors, I’ll comfortably put any of our talented customer service agents on the front lines for our inspector clients and their businesses. Because our customer service agents know this industry and they utilize our proven customer-centric growth approach. In fact, our customers see an increase of 15%-30% in revenue after starting services with us while only paying an average of $2-$5 an hour for those services. Sure, I’m clearly biased, but that’s a huge value for the dollar.
ACC isn’t the only solid ROI partner out there for which inspectors should seek to engage if they want to grow. There are plenty. Just make sure you spend the time to find the “right” partner.
Start by asking yourself a few key questions:
• Do I have reasonable expectations of my partners?
• Am I willing to invest in making the partnership successful?
• Am I looking at a “quick fix” or a long-term partnership that can grow as I grow?
• Am I willing to adjust my business to get the benefits of bringing in a partner?
Too often new business owners (and even some experienced owners) bring a “only my way is the right way” mentality when developing a new partnership—which is unfortunate. They do not look at it from a perspective of “this potential partner has been doing their specialty for 5, 10 or even 20+ years; I might be able to learn something from them.” Not viewing the potential arrangement as a partnership puts the partnership in a death spiral from the start, as more than likely the partnership will be deemed a failure with the first potential mistake, probably based on an unreasonable expectation.
If you approach it from a perspective of “I want to find a strong, experienced partner who will work with me to grow” and “I need to figure out how I can take the best advantage of the partnership, even if it means change” you will find an abundant return on your investment. It does not mean that there will not be hiccups along the way, but when they are encountered, how you and your partner work through them will set the foundation for a solid, long-term partnership that will more than pay for itself over time.
Lastly, once you have developed a partnership, make sure to give it enough time to draw the right conclusions. It probably took longer than a month or two to dial in your business processes and to get your phone ringing off the hook. So, make sure you give any partners you decide to work with the same grace you gave yourself. If there are obvious signs that this new partnership simply is not a fit, then by all means call it quits quickly; but otherwise, realize the partnership is an investment on both sides. Consider reviewing your partnerships on a six-month basis, evaluating if you are saving time, saving money, and/or even making money with them. If so, great! If not, are there things that you or your partner can be doing differently to turn that around?
So, What’s Next?
Your time is your most precious commodity, so you need to use it wisely. Make sure you are focusing on the bigger picture (remember, return on investment) and are intentional about your business goals. Then make the decision to find the time to work more “on”, and less “in”, your business. Once you have made that decision, are you going to work harder or smarter? Going down the smarter path means you will be bringing on people or partners or both. While they have different sets of challenges, the partnering path (outside of actual inspections) can help bring you positive returns more quickly than hiring, as you are gaining the advantage of having an experienced team you do not have to directly manage.
As a business owner, asking for help is a sign of strength, as it shows you want to see your business be successful. If you are content with your state of your business, you probably would not have made it this far in the blog, which is also an indication you are ready to invest in your growth. And with opportunity abounding in the world of home inspections, now is the time to do it!
About the Author
A respected industry leader, national speaker, and true innovator for the home inspection industry, Paul Zak currently serves as the President of America’s Call Center (ACC). Paul holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from University of Rochester as well as a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from University of Colorado Denver. He is an avid runner and health fitness advocate. He’s also a devoted husband to wife Carissa and a loving father to his two daughters Amanda and Madison.
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