Quality of Life Raise.
This post could have started writting many years ago, 2014 to be exact. I started my home inspection business, SLS Home Inspections in 2007. I started with a 13 page pile of paper with components of what to inspect. It matched the primitive report software I was using. It wasn't very expensive to use the report writing software but it did the job for 11 years. I was at a home inspection conferance and met Erin Brockovich, yes the Erin Brockovich. I was standing in line to get a picture with her and the inspector behind me in line and I were chatting about business and inspector stuff. He said he was doing about 300 inspections a year. I was only doing about 200-225 and was having trouble keeping up with the signatures and payments and sending reports. I asked how was he able to keep it all running smoothly and he gave me TECH TIP #1. Inspection Support Network, or ISN. I told him it was too expensive for my small business. He nearly laughed in my face. "You can't afford $4 an inspection to automatically have agreements sent and signed, credit card payments completed online, schedule appointments from your phone, allow agents to schedule from their phone and so on and so on.?" $4??? How did I not know this? I immediately set up ISN and never looked back. It changed my business professionalism 180 degrees.
TECH TIP #2 Sentrilock. This one is familiar to realtors all over. Supralock, sentrilock, whatever is used in your market was another change in our professionalism that also helped us speed up the inspection time in the field. It also saved the agents spending some of their time since they did not need to send us a one day code.
TECH TIP#3 Home Inspector Pro (HIP)
This program was really the last part of creating a business instead of just a guy doing inspections. Until October of 2018, we were still using the old 2007 report writing software. I had hired an inspector (Luke) and he was doing his first solo inspections the first week of October. I was at another conferance in Las Vegas. Luke called at 9:00 PST to say the software had crashed and all our dropdown comments were erased. While I was on the phone with the software developer, Luke was able to find a work around and do the reports. Meanwhile, the developer was telling me he wasn't sure when it could be fixed because they didn't want to put any more money into the program. Huh??? I walked into the conferance the next moring right over to the HIP table and signed up. It was a life changing moment. Instead of 45 minutes to an hour to write a single report, we were now able to build the report 95% complete on site and with less than a 15 minute tweek on our desktop at home, send the report to the buyer and agent. We could literally finish the morning report before we even left for the next inspection. When I told Luke I signed up for HIP, his exact words were "That's a major quality of life raise."
We went live with HIP on December 1, 2018 after spending about 45 days populating the phone app we would be using on site with all our familiar and regular comments.
Fast forward to September 20, 2024, and Luke Anglea is now the new owner of SLS Home Inspections. I will still be working part time as the marketing director and also helping with mold inspections. Did I ever think it would end up like this? No, but once I started implementing business tools, it became a business that had value and could actually be worth something.
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