Thank you for purchasing the inspection growth planner!
A Word from The Author
Hello and thank you again for purchasing the Inspection Growth Planner. It is my sincere hope that you will use this planner as one of several tools to advance your home inspection business to the next level. As a home inspector for the last 23 years, I started my business when we were still using hand-written reports and had "beepers". Needless to say, we've come a long way!
Starting like most home inspectors do, part-time, I've had to learn things on a shoestring budget like marketing, bookkeeping, and SEO. Over the years, I have read hundreds of books, attended dozens of seminars, and watched probably a thousand videos about best business practices like business modeling, goal setting, marketing, web design, bookkeeping, and more. I've done my best to pour the best planning practices specifically for a home inspection business into this planner in hopes that it will help you as it has helped me. In the last three years, I've managed to grow my business by 300%!
Please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions, or ideas on how to improve the planner. I'm always open to learning something new. Best wishes to you and yours.
With gratitude,
Tony Escamilla
President, InspectorGrowth.com
PLANNER SECTIONS
Start Here
Why Write Down Your Goals and Plans?
You may ask, why is this a printed planner instead of a digital version or app on my phone? Well, there's a reason. In planning this planner and using it myself before actually publishing it, I conducted lots of research as to what's more beneficial and effective.
While it may feel strange at first to actually handwrite your goals and plans, I urge you to stick with them every day. It gets easier and you will soon see the benefits as I did.
Here's what I found.
Dr. Gayle Matthews Study
A study by the Dominican University of California took a group of 149 participants and divided them into five groups.
- The first group had to think about their goals, but not write them down. This group achieved a 43 percent overall success rate in attaining their goals.
- The second group did the same, but this group wrote the goals down. This group achieved a 60 percent overall success rate in attaining their goals.
- The third group did the same as the second but also wrote their action commitments down. This group achieved a 50 percent overall success rate in attaining their goals.
- The fourth group did all of that, and also shared their action commitments with a friend. This group achieved a 64 percent overall success rate in attaining their goals.
- The final group did everything the others did, but also sent their friends updates. This group had the highest success rate, at 76 percent!
What Writing Does For Your Brain
There are two basic levels that writing occurs on: encoding and external storage. External storage is the actual piece of paper that reminds you of the goal you’ve written. You’ll put up your list of goals somewhere so you’ll see them every day to be reminded of them daily.
Encoding is where things get a lot more interesting. Encoding is what happens in the brain when we see something, and the information gets transferred to the hippocampus for analysis. This part of the brain is where the brain decides what is important to store in the long-term memory and what can it can discard.
In the decision-making process, the brain will have to sift through a lot of information.
How does it know if something is important to you? Well, if your mind sees that it is something that you have written down, it will assign greater importance to it. As a result, it is more likely to sink in and be remembered. Neuropsychologists call this the “generation effect” and have found that people have better recall for information that they’ve created themselves than for something that they’ve read.
Symbols & Index
The purpose of the symbols and index is to help you organize your planner and make things easier to find. Much like the index at the rear of most textbook. Here‘s how to use it:
On the index, write a date of an event or information you want to remember and refer back to in the future . Add a short note of the information you want to remember.
The symbols are meant to be used on the monthly, weekly, and daily planner pages to help you organize notes and tasks.
SMART Goal Planner
SMART goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. Defining these parameters as they pertain to your inspection growth goals helps ensure that your goals are attainable within a certain time frame. This approach eliminates generalities and guesswork, sets a clear timeline, and makes it easier to track progress and identify missed milestones.
Let's say that on your way to your vision (destination) of growing your inspection business, your midrange goal is to hire two full-time inspectors. On the Goals planner page, write down two or three major goals that are SMART, and will lead you to the eventual destination. Each goal has to have a date by which you will reach the goal. Then write down two to three midrange goals that will take you from one major goal to the next.
Just like a road map. Don't be too concerned with breaking down the major and midrange goals in detail yet. That comes later in the monthly, weekly, and daily planners.
Numbers You Should Know
These base numbers will give you the ability to gauge your progress as you implement your plan. You should refer back to these numbers periodically to see how your plan is going. For example, if your plan is to increase your average inspection fee and three months down the road the number has not changed, your plan needs to be modified. The action items you are planning and implementing are not working. So moving forward what are you going to do differently? Keeping up with these numbers regularly is like checking the speedometer in your car, as you travel to your destination. Trying to go too fast can get you in trouble, and going too slow will never get you there.
Albert Einstein famously said that “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity?” Solving any particular problem requires a different mentality than the one that got you there, to begin with.
Competition Research
How well do you know your competitors? Are they working on anything new? Do they offer services you don't? How much are they charging for these services compared to you? If you don’t know these things then maybe you should. Conducting a competitor analysis is vital for not only matching your competitors, but giving you an edge over them.
The purpose of a competitor analysis is to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own and to find a gap in the market. A competitor analysis is important because:
- It will help you recognise how you can enhance your own business offerings to match or exceed your competition.
- It will tell you how you can out-do your competitors in these areas to not only keep your existing customers, but gain new business away from your competition.
To stay ahead you will need to continue to understand your customer requirements while keeping up with what your local competition is doing differently. All things alike between yourself and your competition (you both offer exactly the same thing), customer will buy on price. That's not what you want! You want to be different, better.
We recommend conducting a competitor analysis anytime from once a quarter to once a year. This gives you time to react to your discoveries and maintain a competitive edge.
Weekly Social Media Planner
Plain and simple. If your company doesn't have a social media footprint, you can't keep up with the competition. Whether you're a fan of social media or not, the fact is that in today's market, it's a necessity to doing business. The good news, is that for the most part, it's also FREE!
In the planner, choose your Target Market for the week. For example, do you want to target first-time homebuyers? Or realtors? or multifamily investors?
Next, research what hashtags the big fish (your competitors) are using on Instagram. Check their posts. What are they posting? Who are the targeting and how?
Tag, tag, tag!!! Tag your realtor partners in your posts. You'd be amazed how many of them will share your posts on their feeds. Also, share their posts on your feed. That shows them you are there to help them succeed (relationship building).
Join Facebook community groups. Almost every neighborhood has a Facebook group. Join and be active. Most will allow you to post a business ad at least once a week. Create a schedule on the planner of which groups to post to on what days. It's FREE!
Like anything else, what gets measured gets done. If you're paying for Facebook and Google ads, TRACK their performance. If the ad did well, make it better and repeat. If the ad did not, drop it and don't lose money.
Monthly Growth Planner
This planner page is where you start breaking down the goals you have set earlier in the planner. If you long-term goal is to hire two inspectors for example, and your mid-range goal is to hire one, then maybe this month you need to focus on increasing revenue (one top goal). The other goal for the month might be to start planning the onboarding of a new inspector. How will you pay them? What tools with they need? Training? Insurance? You get the picture.
Once your monthly goals are set, you can break them down further.
The other section in this page is to ask yourself "what did I do well last month?" I know this sounds like an easy question, but it's not. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. Did you ride the day-to-day wave? Or did you purposely do things to move you forward? This will get easier once you start using the planner regularly and taking action steps every day.
What I can improve this month? Do you need to work on your presentation skills? Your communication skills? Do you need more downtime with the family for work-life balance? You get the idea.
Lastly, Top Habits. The purpose of this planner is to build the habit of planning, looking forward, and looking back. Being strategic. But you only get better at that by doing it every day. A habit. What other habits can you build that will be helpful? Write them down in this section and then add a check mark, or a star, etc. to the monthly calendar for every day you practice that habit. The visual representation of the calendar at the end of the month will show you exactly how you're doing.
Weekly Growth Planner
As you can see, the Weekly Planner is similar to the Monthly Planner. This is where you break things down into actual action items.
The top 3 goals and action items are self-explanatory. Where you start separating yourself from your competition is on the other sections of this page. Top agents this week are your MUST calls for the week. Reach out to them personally to thank them for their business. Mail them a handwritten card or email them an article you think they may enjoy. Relationship building is key here.
What are your biggest problems for the week? Keeping an eye on your rearview mirror is a good way to prevent being blindsided by a problem and having to then deal with it as an emergency. For example, do you have an unhappy client that may become a real problem soon? Or does one of your team have a problem that may keep them from showing up to work?
In the realm of this week's problems, knowing your SWOT for the week is crucial. The concept is fairly self-explanatory, but the act of thinking about it and writing it down will show you more clearly what your strengths are, and more importantly your weaknesses and threats.
Daily Inspection Growth Planner
This is by far the MOST important part of your planner. Using this planner daily will not only engrain your planning habit, as discussed above but will take you closer to the mid-range goals you set before.
Try very hard to check off EVERY item you write in these sections, by the end of each day.
A final bit of advice. You cannot function and thrive if you are dragging physically and emotionally. Take care of your body. Eat well, sleep and hydrate. Try it and you will see just how much better you can focus during the day and how much energy you will have.
Related Reading: Better Sleep for Home Inspectors