3 Simple Ways to Increase Revenue

Hi, this is Mike Crow, and I run home inspection business.

In fact, I've run a couple of home inspection businesses.

You know, true joy for me, though, has been helping literally

thousands of home inspectors build really solid home inspection business as well.

We can help a single man operation be able to do over three hundred

thousand dollars a year,

maybe all the way up

to 400 thousand dollars a year as a single inspector operation.

Even better for me is the 80 plus companies that we have helped

be able to build million dollar home inspection businesses.

I would like to help you be able to do the same thing.

At a recent conference, Mike shared some of his best secrets,

this short segment talks about three simple ways you can increase your revenue.

Here's one of the things that that Jeff learned as well, and all the members

learned it, is that there's a difference between clients and customers.

So most people think clients and customers are the same thing.

You're taught that clients and customers are the same thing. They're not.

I learned and I learned it from real estate agents,

and then I learned it from other sources as well, that clients are

the people that are paying you and that you're working for ,

and then customers are those people that can refer you.

And most people only market.

In fact, the ninety five percent only

market to the clients.

The home buyers in this case.

OK, and then what I try to teach people, especially those people that have grown

million dollar companies,

are now in the one percent of the home inspection industry. OK.

What I've tried to make sure that they do is that they market to the mavens

or the customers.

They're, in that words, interchangeable for me.

OK, so here's one of the ways this looks.

So you have clients and you have customers.

If you're a real estate agent, this is the way it looks.

The seller is your client because you make a listing,

you set a listing agreement in place.

You put a sign in the yard and then somebody calls you off.

That sign goes, oh, we'd like to make an offer on that home.

And you go, He's sure. I'd be glad to help you with that.

That buyer now becomes your customer for the real estate agent.

This is how it works. OK.

So when the home inspection world, though, we're slightly different.

That buyer most likely.

Ninety nine percent of the time becomes our client.

But here's where this is this gets fun.

The agent is your customer.

And I have inspectors all the time, although I don't work for the agent.

Well, of course you don't.

But if you don't take care of them in the process, you're an idiot, OK,

because you've got to make sure that they want to refer you.

Now, people keep telling me sometimes, oh, Mike, you're

you're just you're just making the agents happy.

No, I'm not just making the agents happy.

I give my buyer a good, solid, thorough home inspection.

That's why we do probably do five thousand inspections this year.

OK, maybe probably more than that. All right.

And and if we didn't do a good, solid inspection,

we'd already been out of business.

Somebody would have

sued us out of business or somebody would have come back after us.

And by the way, when you get bigger, it's one of the things you will learn

is that there's always that challenge of that as well.

But we make sure that the report is good enough

so that the agents can easily understand it.

The the listing agent, the selling agent, the title company, the

the mortgage company,

the whoever ends up seeing the report, we try to make it as clean as possible.

And it's one of the things that completely changes this thing.

So for you, you know, the person that pays you is probably your client.

In most cases, that's the buyer.

And then the person that refers you well, that's your customer

are your referral source. That's very important.

Very simple. All right.

Next piece here, there's three ways to increase your revenue.

Now, we've kind of talked about some of it already, but I want you to understand.

One is you could go get new clients.

So, yes, we have we have a website and we have

Google paid advertising, all that out there.

And then we have that and then we have marketing towards the the mavens as well.

So we're always trying to get new clients and new mavens into our business.

All right. And here's a secret.

Here's something that I started teaching years ago.

And I've heard one or two people teach it as well now.

But here's something I've never seen anybody do that hasn't learned it from me.

And that is that you need to count how many new maven's.

Have used your business every single month.

See, most people count how many inspections

and how many more inspections and how many dollars

and how many more dollars. I'm future banking.

I want to know how many agents have use me and how many new agents

have referred me this month or that I'm working with this month.

OK, so last year that number was over 500,

and I think it was five hundred forty three new agents

recommended our business last year, and that was just for one inspection.

And then many of them recommended us for a second, a third.

I think our top one ended up recommending us for 17 or 18.

I think the top two, 17 and 18 new inspections over the period of that year.

That's why a mavin is so important to us.

And now you want to try to make sure that you get as much money

from every inspection.

So when you do a sprinkler and a swimming pool

and a termite and a raid on and a mold and a sewer cam check, it's not unusual

for inspectors to make over a thousand dollars per inspection now.

And the other thing is, there's a simple formula for knowing how to raise prices.

And I can show that to you at some point.

But if you're. But let me just tell it to you this way.

If you're booked out more than three days,

you need to raise prices, not a barge. Ten dollars.

Thirteen dollars, eight dollars.

And by the way, any two week period that you're booked

out, three days or more, you should raise prices.

So when people start coaching with me, it's it's

normally what will happen is that they will raise prices.

Two weeks they'll raise prices, and then two weeks later,

they'll raise prices again and they'll raise prices,

sometimes as many as three, four, even five or six times in one year

until they get to a point where they're not booked out three days.

So, for instance, I keep our company set up so that we have inspectors available.

Almost same day.

Right now, we're booked out about a day and a half, which is perfect.

The average person, the ninety five percent would go, oh, my God,

I can't be I need to be booked out as far as I can.

No, not in the home inspection business, maybe in the carpet

cleaning business, maybe if you're a dentist.

You know, my wife went to go get an eye appointment the other day

and I said, sure,

we could schedule you July twenty fourth or some crazy thing like that.

And I told her, I said, well, that's a shame.

And I picked up the phone and made three phone calls and we were in.

That was a Tuesday. On Thursday, we were sitting in somebody's shop.

And that's the way it works.

In fact, I want you to hear this loud and clear.

The company that offers speed and accuracy,

speed and accuracy will win over every other competitor down the road.

OK, so you want to get them to spend as much money with you as possible.

You want to get new clients.

You want them to get as much money as you can,

and then you want to get those mavens to refer you more frequently.

And a lot of the stuff that we're teaching you gets the maven's to go,

oh, you want to use this company? Oh, you want to use this company?

Oh, you want to use this company, OK.

And we teach them how to say that in such a way that it works well.