Crafting a Compelling Marketing Message

Just imagine if you could steer your client's focus from price to value in your home inspection business. What if there was a clear strategy for crafting a marketing message that shows what sets you apart? Join us in a chat with Ian Robertson and co-host David Nyman and explore this and more. We delve into the concept of a 'marketing fraction,' to shift your perspective from a pricing war to delivering distinctive value to clients. Remember, it's not always about adding more things, but rather articulating what's already there in a compelling manner. 

Are you tired of the one-size-fits-all marketing strategies? Well, it's time for a change. Today, we dissect effective tailor-made marketing strategies for home inspectors. Discover the fine art of tapping into your target market, speaking to client intent, and personalizing your services. We emphasize clarity and consistency in your marketing message across all platforms, be it social media, emails, or phone calls. Community involvement could be an untapped goldmine in setting your business apart. 

Ever wondered how to package your marketing message into a catchy one-liner? We've got you covered. Understand the magic behind a strong and memorable slogan, and the captivating power of humor. We encourage you to turn each reason to hire your business into a social media post, and consistently use animations or logos for branding. We're thrilled to wrap up the season and we're grateful for your continued listenership. Season four is just around the corner and we have some exciting stuff lined up. Get set to learn, grow, and make a difference in the home inspection industry with us!

Check out our home inspection app at www.inspectortoolbelt.com
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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Transcript

Ian R
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. And we have on with us again, the Swede himself, David Nyman. How are you, David?

David Nyman
Doing well, Ian. How you doing?

Ian R
Hey, not bad. You know, this is our last episode of season three. I know, lots of sad faces out there. But we actually had our 100th episode recently.

David Nyman
With lots of fanfare.

Ian R
With lots of fanfare, no fanfare actually. We just work hard at trying to deliver value and, and good things. And, you know, I didn’t want to do an episode of oh, remember this episode or that, because that’s just patting yourself on the back. I wanted to, you know, just continue to work hard to bring everybody something they can chew on.

David Nyman
Yeah. I gotta say for myself, like, every time you watch a TV show, they don’t do that this much, that much these days. But they used to have like a collection of what happened during the season. And it’s clip after clip that you’ve seen and I’m like, yeah..

Ian R
Yeah, nobody wants to see that.

David Nyman
Yeah, all the actors got the day off and the editors worked the whole day.

Ian R
We should do it as like a memory montage of the past three seasons. But a, three seasons, that’s, man three seasons of ITB talk.

David Nyman
Doesn’t feel like it.

Ian R
Yeah, season four, season four, starting sometime in January. But you know, usually towards the end of the year, we’ll, we’ll stop the production and then pick it back up. We’re usually around mid January, let everybody gets through their time with their family and stuff like that, you know, unless you want to, you know, listen to us instead of your family, you can do that.

David Nyman
I can see why.

Ian R
But for this episode, David, I wanted to talk about communicating value to our clients, because I was watching a Facebook post, and actually commenting on it. And as some of these ideas for our podcast come from, and the person asked, I’m losing to guys who are charging less, how do I not race to the bottom on price? And the answer overwhelmingly from others and myself was stop competing on price, compete on value. And it was hard. Some guys don’t always like get that right away the whole value thing. And they’re like, well, they asked about price. That’s what they care about. People care about value. So just going back to a previous episode, I encourage everyone to listen to us, one we did with Ben Gromicko. And I can’t remember if it was this season or last. But he talked about a marketing fraction, which is a staple in marketing. So if you take a piece of paper out while you’re listening to this, or do it in your head, draw a horizontal line and your ideal inspection fee underneath it. So say your base home inspection fee right now is 350. And you want it to be 500. Write $500 underneath that. Now on top of that fraction, start adding up the things that make us stand out which add value to our service, we’re a licensed home inspector, that adds a one, we offer thermal, offer thermal imaging add three points for that, start adding points on for everything that we can add value to. What we’re trying to do is just a visual way of say right now we can think of 47 points worth, when maybe we have a drone, or we’re FAA certified, add 10 points on for that, or 15, whatever we think. But we’re at 47 over 500. That’s not going to work, we need to make that top number larger than the bottom number. In other words, we need to add more value than we’re charging. And we need to be able to communicate that to our clients. So it’s a two part thing, add value, and then communicate it. And I think the latter part is the hardest, don’t you?

David Nyman
Yeah. I actually use an illustration when I talk about this with, when it comes to value, getting people to understand the value of what we offer. If you came to the door with someone and you gave them like $100 bill, they appreciate okay, that’s $100, I’d take it, doesn’t matter what you do to that $100 bill, you can scrounge it all up, have a little ball. But as long as they know, that’s $100 bill, they’ll take it. They’ll be like, that’s amazing. I’d love those hundred dollars. For us, you know, we need to actually, you know, flatten that thing out and make it really visible. This is $100 because if they don’t realize the value of it, they’re not going to want it.

Ian R
Yeah. And that’s the thing, communicating value. So I know one of the things that we need to talk about real quick, we’re gonna go over six very quick points. But one thing that we really need to take into account is adding value does not necessarily mean adding stuff. So you know, you go and you buy something at the store. They’re like, well, here’s this coupon and here’s that coupon and if you get this credit card, you get this off and it’s just piling stuff and then we can’t clearly see what the value is. Instead, my wife bought me a new coffeemaker. And there was a picture of the coffeemaker. And that one picture, clearly stated, its value, it looked good, it was functional, listed the features on the side, that’s exactly what I wanted. So when she bought it for me, I looked, I’m like, oh, yeah, this is a good piece of equipment, this is gonna make good coffee. So we don’t want to just, we’re not just talking about throwing stuff out there. And I say that, because it’s hard to clearly state our value, when there’s just so much stuff, I see so many inspection websites, and it’s just full of, we have three different warranties plus this guarantee, and then that guarantee. And we offer three levels of thermal imaging. And, you know, if you do this, then you get that. Those are gimmicks, there’s a fine line between gimmicks and value. And we’re talking about actual value, the other thing we need to realize is that if we can communicate our value, we will actually beat out guys that actually have more value, maybe than we do. So I’ll give, for instance, there’s a guy that markets in our area, who owns an auto shop, or auto dealer, rather. And you probably remember him, used to live in the same area, Billy Fusillo was his name. I think he’s since passed. But he would always say “it’s huuuuge”. It was his expression, he would talk about his lots, they were huuuuge, they’d have savings, they were huge. And you know what’s funny, his lot wasn’t any bigger than anybody else’s, for the most part, his deals were the same as the other dealer with the same car type, you know, down the road. But he was able to communicate what he was bringing to the table really well, to be frank, I mean, he did really well in business by having the same or even less value than one of his competitors. So those two points, we’re not talking about gimmicks, we’re talking about actual value. And more important than the value itself, unfortunately, for marketing purposes, and people will hate me for saying that, more important for marketing purposes, is being able to communicate the value, having that fraction be 47 over 500. But being able to communicate it well, will get us more work than having 972 over 500 but not being able to communicate and tell people why we’re valuable. Yeah, no, exactly. It’s like diamonds buried in the ground, if you don’t know that they’re there. They’re not worth anything to you. Yeah. And we’re not, you know, most home inspectors that contact us are like, I’m not good at talking about myself. It’s a skill you’re, we’re gonna have to develop, we’re gonna have to get it going. Let’s talk about those six points here, David. So, first of all, the first point is get to know our clients. Sounds weird at first, doesn’t it? But what do we mean by that?

David Nyman
Yeah, well, I mean, value can have a very different meaning to different people. So knowing what our clients are looking for is gonna be the first step in being able to present them with that value, like you mentioned, you know, some gimmicks that people put on their websites. If that is not what people are looking for, they’re just gonna see a bunch of empty words, if your clients live in a market that doesn’t benefit from the inspections you do, like a large part of the country doesn’t have basements. If you have a big banner on your website, you know, we do professional basement inspections. All of a sudden, you have you know, all that ad space reserved for something that no one wants.

Ian R
Yeah. And that’s, that’s really the point, we need to understand our market. One of the worst things that we can do is show our website and our marketing material, brochures and all that to other home inspectors. We are not marketing home inspections to home inspectors. What we look for, is going to be completely different than what the average consumer does. I’ve actually had clients, I remember this one client early on in my career, and he was a professional web site builder, ironically. And he stopped me and he said, hey, nice website, can I give you some pointers? And I took em, I’m like, oh, man, those are fantastic. So I made it a point to ask people. How did you find us? What made you call us? Is there anything on our website that maybe didn’t appeal to you? And actually, I had one lady tear my brochure apart. She’s like, your brochure is awful. And she went through it. And she was right on every dot, and I wrote it down. And I went out and got new brochures. We need to sometimes even sacrifice a client, which is more valuable, sacrifice a client to get the information we need to say, what are we missing? So asking consumers, not just our family, asking agents even, asking clients, asking people that may be a client but not and say what drew you to us? Oh, well, it was this guarantee. Cool. Let’s move that up on the list. Oh, your experience listed out like that was beautiful. Cool. I’m gonna move that up. You know, I almost didn’t call you because you didn’t have XYZ. Now we know. We need to get to know what customers want, if we don’t know, we don’t know. And that kinda also brings us back to remember that episode with Juan Jimenez where he talked about variable USPs? You know, I was thinking after that episode, Nick Gromicko, I went to a presentation of his probably 15 years ago, he would have a different business card for each one of the types of homes in his area. So in my area, you know, it’s not uncommon to have a home built in the 17/1800s. So have a business card just for old homes or section on our website, just for old homes. A brochure just for old homes. If we do, you know, work on new construction a lot, have a separate set just for those. We don’t have to go big but have a variable USP, we’re talking to an agent, I only work with historic homes, cool. We whip out our historic homes business card, it’s a variable USP, but variable USP is just talking with the person, see what matters to them first. And then presenting the USP, the unique selling proposition to that person. Kind of goes with your point of don’t sell them something they don’t want.

David Nyman
Yeah, no, I think you said UPC for a bit.

Ian R
UPC, USP.

David Nyman
I was confused.

Ian R
I’ve confused all our listeners. I said USP so much, it’s like when you say a word over and over again, it doesn’t sound like a word anymore. United Postal Carrier.

David Nyman
Exactly, or barcode. But yeah, you know, spending that time to find out exactly what your clients are, like you said, you know, there might be different parts of town that you want to pay attention to, you know, one town, one part of town is really well developed, expensive homes, you know, on our business card, we might have a picture of a home, could be good to, you know, have a different picture, depending on what area you’re in. Because this doesn’t look like my home. Just something simple like that could have an impact.

Ian R
Or if we don’t even want to go that far. That’s what Nick Gromicko did, we could just do what Juan said in the podcast we did with him was..See I said we wouldn’t do a memory montage of our podcasts. And here we are doing one. But Juan said in there, I will talk to the client and find out what they want first. Because things like, you know, most home inspectors now I find offer thermal imaging, and I keep using that as an example. Because a lot of home inspectors are like, oh, make sure you put thermal imaging at the top, I want to make sure that, I want them to make sure that they should choose me because I do thermal imaging. I’m like all your competitors do it. I mean, it’s expected in the market, Why sell them on something that the expected market, have it on there, but is there something else that sets you apart?

David Nyman
It’s like you’re selling milk, and you got a big label on it, “Our milk is white”.

Ian R
Yeah, our milk is white, yeah, I expected that already. That’s exactly what it is. So I’m a home inspector that uses thermal imaging, that’s what they expect. But now going with Juan’s expression of variable USPs, just even on the phone call being able to express because we need to express it in our marketing and with our client on the phone, when we’re client trying to seal the deal. On the phone, we need to talk with people more. We can’t just say, hey, you know, I do this, this and this and this, and we offer this, this and this and this and start listing stuff. But maybe all they care about is we specialize in historic homes, their father in law, or somebody said, make sure you get someone that specializes in that. Okay, you wouldn’t find that out unless we talked to the person. Oh my father in law says we, we want someone to specialize in historic homes. Who? Well, we do. Matter of fact, three of our eight inspections this week, were pre-1850s homes. I love looking at this and that and, you know, now we’ve sold them, we’ve maybe even have a small fraction of the fraction we were talking about. We may have a 47 over 500, not toppling over that fraction. But boy, we sold that 47. And we really got that client hooked. Which leads us into our second point, which is what, David.

David Nyman
To make sure that we address the customer’s need. So yeah, very good segue into that. We don’t want to sell them something they don’t need. But also, you know, after that conversation, we’re like, okay, you mentioned that you need this, you need that, you need this. We have all that covered through these services.

Ian R
Yep. So we can be a one stop shop. We have lots of services. And I’ve always said ancillaries are where we make our money, but also where we add value to our clients primarily, the more value we add, they can make one phone call and get 80% or even 100% of all the inspection services that they need. But also speak to client intent. Why did they call us, and it’s very likely for home inspection. So I say that because, and it seems simple. But I see so many guys tried to sell things up front. I had this client not long ago and he has all the, I’m not bashing warranties, warranties have their place. But he has all these warranties and guarantees. And some of the warranties had variables to it, if this, then that. And everybody that would call, he would just be like, that’s my, that’s my USP man. And he would just hammer them with it. And he was calling me because his conversion rate was low. I’m like, you didn’t speak to client intent. They called you for a home inspection, talk about the home, talk about their needs, talk about their worries, find out what they’re looking for, do they want security, for their purchase? Cool, then mention the warranties. But we have to address our customer’s needs. And we have to do that on our website and our marketing material too. If the first thing they pull up on our website is exactly just that, bunch of warranties and they can’t even tell you’re a home inspector. There’s so many home inspection websites, I’m like, I don’t know what this guy does, is he a home inspector? We didn’t address their need. 90% of most of our work is going to be primarily somebody looking for a home inspection. Address that first on all of our marketing material. I say address it, like just at least mention it. You know, just say, we are the premier home inspectors in the area, boof, just something.

David Nyman
Yeah, I mean, I do give counsel to all our trainees. It’s good for a home inspector to have a lot of irons in the fire, I guess you could say. But it is also important that you focus on the one thing that actually makes you a home inspector, inspecting homes. I think, I think like you said too, like I’ve seen those websites, too, where you go on the site, and you’re like, I don’t know, is he a home inspector? And that could actually make you lose people right away because they Google home inspectors in Winnipeg. So if you do a search for home inspectors in Winnipeg, and you get to the website, you’re like, oh, something must have gone wrong in my search algorithm. I got to a website that just sells warranties.

Ian R
Yeah, exactly.

David Nyman
And now you go to the next website on the list.

Ian R
And that’s exactly it. That actually just happened recently, a guy said go to my website and check it out. And I check it out. I’m like, am I at the right website. And then it took me a minute. And I’m like, okay, if I were the average consumer, I would have thought that I landed somewhere wrong, because your website doesn’t speak to user intent. And then, on top of that, we also want to, so ancillary services are kind of like the toppings on the ice cream, home inspection is the ice cream, ancillaries are the toppings that are on that. I remember somebody telling me that their favorite topping on ice cream is ice cream. And they said it jokingly. I’m like that’s the weirdest thing to say. But now imagine that they come to us, after talking to three other home inspectors that do offer thermal imaging, sewer scope, septic inspection, air sampling, and they come to us and we only offer a home inspection. That is just ice cream and ice cream. So we do need to add ancillaries, we will lose work if we don’t have that value added. If I go to my mechanic, and he’s like, I’m sorry, I don’t, I only do engines, I can’t get you new tires. I’m just gonna find a new mechanic, because I’m like, I feel like that goes together.

David Nyman
I’m not sure actually it does.

Ian R
I’m pretty sure it does. It’s part of my car, we don’t have to do everything. But we should always be adding on ancillaries…Stop arguing with my point, David.

David Nyman
Oh sorry.

Ian R
I’m just kidding. We always get in trouble when we’re on together. But that’s what it comes down to, put some toppings on there. We need to make our ice cream more appealing. Even if they don’t hire us. It lends credibility to us. If we say, I’m also a certified sewer scope specialist, I’m a licensed septic inspector, I am a certified thermographer, whatever it happens to be, it does lend credibility. So what’s the third point that we’ll talk about, David?

David Nyman
So the third point is interesting. Make it memorable. So people that, you know we have logos, we have mottos, all those things, you know, as part of our marketing, but like you mentioned, it’s huge. That guy, you know, he’s been, not been on the air for a long time. But as soon as you say that term, someone in upstate New York will be like, oh, car commercial. So so just, you know, a simple thing like that can help you to get a lot of recognition, I guess you could call it in the near area around you whether you do it on your website, if you have ads out there, someone sees an ad flashed by in their browser. They’re like, oh, I recognize that. That’s my home inspector. That can make a big impact.

Ian R
And we’re not talking about just a slogan, but it kind of comes down to a slogan. The reason it comes down to a slogan is we should be able to put our entire message in one sentence. Even if it’s a semi long sentence, it should fit into one sentence. I’ve quoted Einstein before. When I said this, if you can’t explain it simply, you simply don’t understand. If we can’t condense our message into one sentence, why they should hire us, we don’t understand our own message. Now we can say, oh, it’s all complex. And this and that. Cool. I’m not talking about every intricacy. That’s why you have entire websites and brochures and long conversations with clients. But let’s take just a website, for example, we need this state. So okay, the value proposition is, we should be able to communicate the problem you will solve along with the results your customers should enjoy. So we need to be able to tell them that plus who we are, or how to get a hold of us, where we’re located, and a bunch of other stuff before they ever scroll down. So if we can’t, if we can’t condense it into one short sentence, it’s just not going to happen. We have less than three seconds to convert somebody. It’s the same thing with being on a phone, on the phone with somebody. Geico, “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your car insurance”. They’ve had that one sentence for decades. But look at what it does. It tells us what our problem is. We’re paying too much for car insurance. What’s the solution? Give us 15 minutes. You could save that 15% or more. Now is insurance complicated? Yeah. But they communicated their whole shtick in one sentence. Yeah, there was another one, Saddleback Leather Company, it was, “they’ll fight over it when you’re dead”. It kind of has an interesting message, to it, right? In other words, our product is going to last so long that people are going to want this from your dead corpse. Because it’s such good quality. Yeah, and it’s that good, too. It’s that good. NACHI had a great one, “inspected once inspected right”. That was great. But we can’t use that. Because literally everybody has it all over the place on their website. Can we condense our message? Maybe we’re a very tech savvy home inspector, a better inspection thru technology. That’s not a great one. But..

David Nyman
Don’t put that on your website.

Ian R
Don’t put that on your website. That one actually kind of stinks. But you see what I’m getting getting at? It conveys a message. And if we can, you don’t think it’s clear? I was giving an example, David, think of a better one.

David Nyman
Yeah, no, no, it’s it’s funny. I’m gonna lose a lot of the audience here too. [says something in German] That was, was it Audi, I think, or Volkswagen. It means, advantage through technology. So I’m like, that’s the motto you just said.

Ian R
Oh was it? I did not know. Sorry, Audi. I didn’t realize that was your slogan already. But there’s reasons why large companies spend hundreds of 1000s, sometimes millions of dollars, coming up with one sentence. Sit down..

David Nyman
Just do it.

Ian R
Just do it. Yeah. You know, and how you do it is with those sneakers, Nike, just do it. Get out there. So think about our message. What are, what is our message? Is it serving our community one home at a time.

David Nyman
That one’s better.

Ian R
That one’s better. You know, I’m making these up on the spot, Doing the job right, once for you and your family. I don’t know. Anyway.

David Nyman
I don’t know about that one.

Ian R
Now I’m trailing.

David Nyman
Don’t put that on your website, either.

Ian R
No, don’t put that on your website. But everybody kind of gets the idea. It shouldn’t come off the tongue quickly. Think about what makes me and my company different. What’s our core belief. And if we can’t put it into one sentence, we don’t know what our core belief is. Step back from our company for a minute, and put it into one sentence, that should be at the top of all of our brochures, website, marketing material, in our reports, it should be on our phone calls with people. That’s our mantra. What’s the, well actually, I just kind of pulled into the fourth point there, making it consistent. Once we figured out what our value proposition is, and we’ve condensed it into a sentence, we want to make it consistent. So condense it into a sentence, but then also list it out at the same time, I do like it when I’m on a, on a website, and I see up at the top, we are the best. Here’s a quick reason why, if you want to read the long reason why, look below, and then it just goes through this ridiculous list of all their qualifications. And I’m like, That’s the perfect sales pitch. I don’t get all the way through the list. And some guys leave and do something funny, like partway through the list. If you’re done reading this, click here to schedule but if not, here’s even more. You know, it’s just a funny way of saying, I’m your man. But we can’t just lead with that. Because otherwise it’s just taking a whole pot of spaghetti and throwing it at the wall. We need to lead with our clear message that we’ve been consistent with, you know, what was that good one that I came up with, it doesn’t matter. Our slogan, our clear message, maybe a small blurb, we call a small paragraph a blurb, and then say, all right, if this didn’t convince you, here’s everything else, too. Good way to be consistent. Do that in our brochures. I always did that on our phone calls and again on our website as a script that you can use to to close phone calls. And that’s what I would do. I kind of figure out okay, what are they looking for? I talked with them for a bit. And then I would start listing stuff out. Okay, and here’s what we are. Here’s who I am. I get about halfway through and I could hear them getting quiet. I’m like, do you want me to keep going? No, no, no man, don’t worry, you got me. Okay, cool. When can we schedule you? Take that same premise, and work it into a phone call or brochure or website. That’s how we get our value proposition.

David Nyman
Basically you condense everything into a sentence, and then you expand that sentence back again, throughout all your media.

Ian R
Exactly. And it’s a it’s a marketing trope, how many of us have looked up a recipe online, we noticed that they show us that, yeah, I’ve been looking up these fancy cocktails to make my wife. And they always show you the drink first. And then a short blurb about why this drink is awesome. This is great for your next cocktail party with your friends, a nice light, refreshing drink made in three minutes. They have me hooked, the picture looks great. And then just one, maybe two sentences for them. They have me hooked, and then they give me the recipe. They didn’t start out with a long list of stuff. Now I’m going through the stuff I’m like, ooh, I’ve never had oregano in a drink before, this or that. And, you know, I know that people are putting oregano in drinks. I don’t know what’s going on out there. But that’s a marketing trope. If we follow that pattern, give them the quick hook, then give them a list of ingredients of why your special sauce is the best, works every time. There’s a reason why everybody’s done it forever. What’s our fifth one there, David?

David Nyman
Well, market it hard. So once we have that message condensed, we want to make sure that it’s out there. So we have so many options, social media, we got emails, just adding it into a signature, I’ve seen a lot of home inspectors, you know, because I communicate a lot with them. Some of them have, you know, just their name at the bottom. Some of them have like a logo and the message altogether with a bunch of ways to contact them. Putting on a website, even answering service, you know, if we have voicemail box, including it there too, putting it everywhere. That way, you know, your message will not be lost.

Ian R
Excellent. And that’s exactly what we want to do. Once we have our clear message, we spent all this time and effort, we want to make sure that it’s conveyed everywhere. Don’t wait for somebody to ask us, you know, what’s your, what’s your mission statement? Or what’s your slogan, just express what it is. So maybe it’s building excellence through inspections. I don’t know. Let’s just make pretend that it’s that. Put that, like you said at the bottom of all our emails, when the person answers our phone, or we answer a phone, hey, this is Ian, from such and such inspection company building excellence one home at a time, how can I help you? Or even working it in somewhere where it sounds natural. Having that consistent branding is important. Because what if, what if we have that branding and that USP on our website, but they talk to us and they get a different message. That’s going to create inconsistency in our message which people do not like. They see on our website that we are a thorough home inspector with tons of experience and all this stuff. And that’s why they called us but then we pop on and we talk about, you know, we provide thermal imaging, and here’s our warranties. That’s not why they called us. So that goes back to point number two, speak to our customers needs. And we do that by having consistent branding, why they called us is why we should continue with that branding, when they called us. Have it out on social media too. So if we took the time to come up with a with a great USP in one sentence, push that out everywhere, put that on all our social media as possible. Then, at the same time, now that we’ve listed out all those reasons they should hire us, going back to that fraction, maybe we have 972 items of why they should hire us. Cool, turn each one of those into a social media post over the next three to six years. Schedule that out. Reason 372 to hire us, we keep your house clean by changing our shoes. I don’t care how small that item is. That adds value, put it out, put it out there. Everybody should know about every one of our USPs.

David Nyman
And a way to make it consistent too, you know, if you have a little bit of digital ability, I don’t know what you call it, you can make that mission statement or the USP like a little animation and then add that clip at the end of every single post you make. You know, you watch a video of your inspectors climbing a ladder, looking at a roof. At the end of it that logo pops up with your message, and that can make it all consistent.

Ian R
Yeah, I just thought of a good one if you’re a local home inspector. Not just a home inspector, we’re your neighbor. Maybe we’re involved in the community. Yeah, that one’s decent.

David Nyman
And I’m watching you.

Ian R
And I’m watching you. I’ve seen you walk your dog.

David Nyman
You turned that from a great slogan to a creepy message.

Ian R
You should really get that thing on the back of your neck checked. No, but you see, maybe that’s our USP, we’re part of the community, we coach Little League, we, we sponsor, Girl Scouts, whatever it happens to be if community is our big thing.

David Nyman
We run the local ice cream shop.

Ian R
Yeah, put that in there. You know if it were family owned, have it be family owned community oriented. And they don’t need to be as short as I’m saying. I’m just kind of coming up with stuff on the spot. But just condense our message. If we can’t condense our message, we don’t know what it is.

David Nyman
You can have like a video of your mom at the end of your social media posts. Like my mom says, I’m a great inspector.

Ian R
Okay, well, that took a different direction. And this, you realize this is our last episode of the year, David, right?

David Nyman
What’d you say, it’s my last episode?

Ian R
Exactly. I wasn’t going to tell you till the end. Alright, so our last point, though, is what we’ve said throughout the entire episode, but we want to emphasize it, actually know our USP, most guys do not. One of the first thing I ask them, when they, when guys call me, what sets you apart. And then I usually get a long list. And it’s three to 10 minutes long, depending on who I’m talking to of, I grew up in construction. I’m in construction, and you know this and that. And I’m like, okay, you just described all of us. Like 90%.

David Nyman
I don’t think you heard my question.

Ian R
Yeah, what sets you apart? Now, there’s very few things that actually set us apart. Let’s be honest with you. Let’s be honest with each other here. What we think sets us apart oftentimes isn’t because it’s what everybody else has. So that goes back to my point, being able to communicate our selling points, let’s take the you off the, of a USP and just selling propositions because there’s not a lot of uniqueness in the market anymore. A lot of us are ex-contractors, some may have engineering experience, a lot of us offer the same services. It really comes down to having at least what the market expects of us for selling propositions, SPs, but being able to present it like it is a USP. I’ve bought products before, and I’m like, wow, this company is awesome. And then I buy the product and everyone’s like, you know, you could have got that from there. But I’m like, yeah, but they didn’t tell me that they had all this stuff. We can’t expect people to know, the person who can communicate what they do better, is the one that will close the deal more often than not.

David Nyman
And sometimes, I mean, part of that can be just knowing your competition. What other home inspectors are out, look at their websites, okay, what is a blatant hole in what all these home inspectors are offering?

Ian R
Perfect.

David Nyman
That’s my niche.

Ian R
Oh, man, that’s a beautiful statement, David. And we talked about that in a lot of ways here. But that’s, look for a hole in the market that we can say, okay, there’s a need. And that goes back to communicate the problem. The problem is, let’s say hypothetically, you have to call two people to get a septic inspection and home inspection. Call me, and I’ll do both. My company does both. Nobody else in the market offers it or very few. So good point. Well, David, this has been a great podcast, I think for our last episode. Thank you for being on, and season four of Inspector Toolbelt Talk coming up January 2024.

David Nyman
Yeah, do we have any, any amazing plans to tell them?

Ian R
Well, so everybody keep an eye out. If you’re, if you’re talking about our app, listen out for, we have Teams 2.0 coming out. And then we’re coming out with a whole bunch of feature sets that come with it. December, January, February and March are going to be big release months. Multi-inspector firms are gonna be very happy, single inspector firms are gonna be very happy. A lot of things that guys have been asking for.

David Nyman
I think we’ve seen a few improvements too with speed on the up over these past few months.

Ian R
Yeah, speed improvements, lots of new features. We’ve had almost two new, actually more like three new features a month for the past six months. We’ve had a lot of new features big and small. So, very cool. All right, everybody, IT crowd, thank you for listening in, and we will see you at the beginning of season four of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Thanks David.

David Nyman
Thanks Ian.

Beon DeNood
On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team. Thank you for listening to this episode. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you can catch our future episodes as well. And if you have any feedback, please send us an email at info@inspectortoolbelt.com Also, don’t forget to check out our brand new app for home inspectors, scheduling and report writing, all in one easy to use app. Check it out now at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

Ian R
The views and opinions of this podcast and its guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.