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
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.
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.
The key point to remember here is that there's a difference between vision and goals. Think of your vision as the location you want to reach, and your goals as the road map to get there. If you've ever been on a road trip, you probably knew well before you hit the road exactly where you were going to gas up along the way, rest stops, and where you'd be spending the night on your way to the eventual location. Planning your business is no different. You can’t set your goals (rest stops) until you have a vision of where you want to go (destination).
To start, write down your vision as best you can imagine five years from now. Be as detailed as possible. Do you have an office/warehouse space? Do you have 3 vans? Do you own 3 sewer scopes? 3 drones, etc. Do you have 3 inspectors? An office person? Whatever YOUR vision may be. Having a written vision will give you something to come back to periodically to assess how you're doing. Talk with your significant other. Get their opinions, ideas, and most importantly buy-in. Don't kid yourself, actively growing your business is hard work. And it may require long hours at first. But once you reach your destination, it will give you the breathing room you deserve. Your home inspection business should be a joy, not a job. Not an anchor.
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.
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.
One of the most common mistakes that new inspection businesses make is not planning for growth. Whether your vision is to be a one-man show or a million-dollar multi-inspector business, planning will help you have the right people in place, at the right time, doing the right things.
Even if you're wearing all the hats right now, challenge yourself to write a description of what you would like key players to be doing as you grow. For example, if you hire an assistant (highly recommended) even part-time, you should have a clear picture of what you want him/her to help you with. What things can this person take off your plate so you can focus on the more important things, like continuing to grow the business?
Once you have the descriptions and positions in mind it's time to set a SMART goal as to when and how you will take that next step.
One of the best ways to grow your business, and your life is to ask yourself "Who are the top five people I hang out with?" If these top five people are not challenging you or making you want to be a better person and a better business person, you should seriously reconsider who's on that list and maybe join (or create) a mastermind group of your fellow home inspection business owners.
Coupled with an accountability partner, as mentioned in Dr. Gayle Matthew's study above, and the goals which you've now set, a mastermind group of your co-inspector business owners can help keep you on track and develop those ideas that can really launch your business forward.
Related Reading: What is a Mastermind Group
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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