Mastering Growth and Profit in Home Inspection: A Talk with Nick Gromicko

Unlock the secrets to scaling your home inspection business with self-made magnate Nick Gromicko as he sheds light on the path from solo entrepreneur to the leader of 14 thriving enterprises. Despite forgoing formal business education, Nick's hands-on, practical growth strategies highlight the importance of balancing profit with personal fulfillment, providing a blueprint for breaking through the industry's growth ceiling. Join us for an eye-opening conversation that will redefine your view on success and guide you toward a future where your business flourishes without compromising your values.

It's not the size of the company, but the health of the balance sheet that defines success in Nick's book. Our discussion cuts through the noise of vanity metrics, offering a sobering look at the dangers of overconfidence and debt in a world of rapid expansion. We take a deep dive into the mind of a seasoned entrepreneur who champions profit over size, humility over ego, and the wisdom of organic growth.

As we venture into the evolving terrain of the home inspection industry, Nick dissects the necessity of standing out in an increasingly commoditized market. We explore the power of diversification, from mining stocks to real estate, and share strategies for inspectors to make their mark with unique selling propositions. Discover the latest tools of the trade, like our Inspector Toolbelt app, and embrace the strategies that ensure the longevity and prosperity of your business in a competitive space. Tune in to this masterclass in fiscal discipline, strategic growth, and the art of making a mark in the home inspection world.

Check out our home inspection app at www.inspectortoolbelt.com
Need a home inspection website? See samples of our website at www.inspectortoolbelt.com/home-inspection-websites

*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. Today we have on a special guest, a repeat guest, Nick Gromicko himself. How are you, Nick?

Nick Gromicko  

I'm doing well.

Ian R  

So Nick just showed me around his amazing garage with all his cars and carts and wagons and some of the biggest wrenches I've ever seen, and walls and walls of them.

Nick Gromicko  

You want big wrenches, hold on, I'll give you big wrenches. I make up for the wrench where I lack in other areas.

Ian R  

There you go, you got some wrenches that'll, that'll take any bolt off.

Nick Gromicko  

I'll find some more for you metric guys.

Ian R  

There you go. Well, today we're having Nick on not to talk about wrenches, although that would be a great podcast, but we're going to talk about being profitable, building wealth, wealth management, and things that Nick knows about. And Nick, if I could, this is gonna sound like a weird question, but I'm gonna, I'm just trying to set you up for why you're qualified to talk to us about this kind of stuff. What makes you qualified to talk to us as home inspectors about building wealth, wealth management, profitable businesses, and things like that?

Nick Gromicko  

Wow, that's a good question. I used to ask this question of myself, true low self esteem. And that probably helped me because I always, didn't think I was doing well. But after a while, you know, like, right now I run 14 companies that I started myself. And all of them are profitable, some are not very profitable, but they're all profitable. So, I mean, certainly there are better financial guys out there in the world than me and people have, you know, I'm not Jeff Bezos, but I did okay for a guy who dropped out of high school. So I think that because, you know, I didn't learn to read until late, I was born poor, inherited nothing and dropped out of high school. I probably have a viewpoint on business that may be different than someone else who, you know, graduated with an, with an MBA, like my wife. 

Ian R  

Yeah.

Nick Gromicko  

My wife has four business degrees and an MBA. So we look at things very differently. And maybe what I can shed some light on is from a different angle than most people, I would say.

Ian R  

Yeah. And I would agree with that. I remember we've bonded over the fact that both of us are high school dropouts. I think you made it a half a year longer than I did. I was about halfway through ninth grade. So..

Nick Gromicko  

Oh, I beat you. I made it to 12th grade. 

Ian R  

Oh, you did? Okay. You got me way beat. Yeah. 

Nick Gromicko  

And then I dropped out. I should have dropped out in 10th. Yeah, I'd have been two...

Ian R  

Yeah, exactly. Right. So I do think that you bring something to the table that so like, my brother has a, has a master's degree, and he understands business very well. But when he speaks to me about it, it's like we're talking two different languages. I own multiple successful businesses. And he and he owns a successful business, but it's like, it's like he's speaking Chinese. I'm speaking Portuguese. It's just two different languages. But I think the language that you speak is more understandable to us as home inspectors because we're down in the nitty gritty and okay, this is what business is from our perspective, and not necessarily not, not that it's good or bad, but from a, from a college education, maybe Jeff Bezosy kind of Elon Musk view of how things work. A lot more Bootstrap, I guess, would be the good expression for bootstrap business mentality.

Nick Gromicko  

I mean, I don't have a lot of three syllable words in my speech. So, you know, I wasn't very good in high school when I was dropping out. So probably, you're probably talking to someone with an eighth grade education.

Ian R  

And that's okay.

Nick Gromicko  

If you can't understand me maybe you're too smart. 

Ian R  

Well, and you do break it down well, for us, you put it into the every man's terms, so that I think I'm gonna, I could only guess that how much money you have with 14 successful businesses. You have InterNACHI, you helped pioneer the inspection industry. So I think you're very well qualified to tell us on how to become profitable, how to build wealth and wealth management. 

Nick Gromicko  

I mean, you know, my money was made in profitable businesses. I hit the lottery. I didn't, I didn't win big on Bitcoin or anything. But to this day, you know, it's mostly profitable businesses that are generating everything for me. 

Ian R  

Yeah.

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah, that's parabolic. In business, if you keep them running, you know, you get more and more each year out of them. So the longer you can keep working, the better, you have to live long to make a lot of money.

Ian R  

Yeah. So I do want to caveat our conversation here. Sometimes we equate money with success, and that's not always necessarily going to coincide. You said something interesting about a mutual friend that he has all that money and he gets lonely. So, we want to, we want to make sure that we build success. And when, when we make our businesses profitable, we kind of keep all of that in perspective. But you said something interesting about home inspectors, the home inspection industry rather, a week or two ago, maybe longer than when we were talking one time, that it's very hard to become very profitable as a home inspector without growing your business. In other words, you hit a ceiling,

Nick Gromicko  

There's only so much you can make with your own two hands, unless you have some crazy weird skill like Tiger Woods, right? Tiger Woods can make a lot of money with only his, his own two hands.

Ian R  

What does he do? He builds walls or something? 

Nick Gromicko  

So what do all rich people have in common who make a lot of money, they have employees, you know, I have 112 employees, that's about where I should be, I'd like to be around 100. So I can at least know everybody's name, know a little bit about them. If you get, you know, I'm not a person that can run 1000 employee company, but regardless of where you are, you know, one employee or 1000, there's generally some correlation between the number of employees you have, and how much you make, you know, you're not gonna make, like I said, a lot of money with your own two hands, you might make a good living, but it's difficult to get rich doing that, unless you're Tiger Woods, or, you know, some musician or something. You're going to need people.

Ian R  

So I remember you saying that in an even a previous podcast. And we actually open this up to inspectors to ask questions, and we got a lot of questions. So some of them were very similar. And that was actually one of the questions. I think Juan De La Cruz, him and a couple of others ask that I'm at the point of scaling up. In other words, I've grown past where I am doing things on my own, and I want to hire employees and grow a business. So his basic question was, how do I go about that? How would you recommend a home inspector scale up?

Nick Gromicko  

Well, you probably have to start thinking about delegating. When you scale up, and so I wrote a book called Scale Up, believe it or not, you can download it for free.

Ian R  

I have it on my shelf. 

Nick Gromicko  

Okay, so it's, um, I think it's a CertifiedMasterinspector.org/scale, you can just download it for free, and it gives you like, over 100 things you need to do to scale up your business. But mostly, you have to be willing to delegate and accept B plus work. If you're a single operator, you're probably used to doing A plus work on everything, and you're doing the best you can, every day, every hour, you're gonna have to forget about doing that anymore. You're gonna have to be satisfied with B and B plus work from your employees, they're never going to be you. And you're going to have to get over that mental hump, I would say is your biggest problem.

Ian R  

I think that's a beautiful point. Because I think that's what prevents most home inspectors from hiring and growing their business. Like, this call center doesn't answer the phone like me, this inspector doesn't inspect the roof, like you're not going to get you. So eventually, not lowering your standards, but accepting acceptable work that's not going to be as perfect as yours, is the way I think I look at it. Matter of fact, Mike Ortiz, he asked a question, he's hiring his third guy. So he's able to do that. And he actually mentioned that, you know, accepting that nope, nobody's like you on one of our previous podcasts. And he's heading into his fourth employee this year. He's done really well. But he's about two years in, two and a half years in. I was fourth employee. He says, what's the best way to move forward and prepare my company for that transition? In other words, going from little owner run to how do I grow bigger as I go into my fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh employee, like you're at 100 and some odd, how did that work when you, when you started to grow?

Nick Gromicko  

So for me, I have ADD so it worked out really well, because I just kept going into other into other businesses that I found interesting. I would say, as you grow, you know, you have to have infrastructure behind it. It's just like a city, a city can't just start slapping on buildings and bringing in people. It has to have bridges to get in and out and road systems and water systems and all that. So you have to give some focus to not just counting how many heads the employees but what those heads do. So you're gonna need someone in the office to start helping, you're gonna have to have managers underneath you. You know, if you take a look at the the operations that you're familiar with, with me CCPIA for instance, it's run by Maggie. You know, without her there's no way I could run that, I don't run it at all in fact, she runs it. So, you know, CMI, IC2, the insurance companies, the Cozy Coats for Kids, you know, InterNACHI, the House of Horrors, all these things. They operate with someone in charge, as well. So if you're getting the three and four, I think you're gonna have to put someone in charge, can't be you and four Indians, it's going to have to be you, someone right underneath you and three Indians, if that makes any sense.

Ian R  

No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And I see a lot of companies, when they get to that number of employees, that that's what they do, they have like a lead inspector, and he runs the inspection team, and then you have an office person and then yourself. I've always said, every time you hire an employee and inspection company, I plan on losing three quarters of a day per employee. So you know, checking reports working extra to get inspections, managing people. So by the time you get to five, six employees, you should really only be doing an inspection once in a while when there's an emergency, and just keeping an eye on things, running your business. So that makes a lot of sense. 

Nick Gromicko  

You gotta pick a mini you too, you know, you gotta pick somebody underneath you. Yeah. And have them checking your stuff. Because if you have to manage a bunch of people and still do your stuff, yeah, that's not delegating.

Ian R  

Yeah. And, and it is, it does seem hard to do sometimes, like maybe it's like, we're digging a ditch, and we stopped to go rent an excavator? Did we lose time to go rent that excavator? Yes. But when we come back with it, it works a lot better. So we may lose time and money hiring a mini me, so to speak, to run the company. But eventually, now we can have six employees with that guy running them. And we're free to grow the company, that makes a lot of sense. 

Nick Gromicko  

And also, you know, I think that's one of the reasons I think, I'm financially successful, more wealth than I ever dreamed I'd have is because of I have low self esteem. So despite my personality at InterNACHI, you know, I'm always thinking that I'm probably not right, about what I'm thinking about. And so that gave me a big advantage when I hired managers, because when they wanted to do it their way, I didn't say no, no, no, we're gonna do it my way. I was I thought, instantly, they knew better than me. And that's, that's a big advantage that most most businessmen who have been successful on their own don't have, they think that they know the best way to do things. And you're probably wrong about that, not only delegate stuff down, but also delegate your authority and, and keep your mouth shut and see what they do. Even if it looks kind of strange to you, their experiences in life are much different than yours, and they might have a different way of doing it. And it turns out, it's a much profitable way, much more profitable way to do things. And that was that was really hard for most people. And it turned out, it's very easy for me, because whenever I see someone attaining our goals in from a different angle, the first thing I think of is that I've been doing it wrong. Most people think they're doing it wrong. And you can only you can only have this big advantage that I have through low self esteem. If you believe you're an idiot. You truly believe in what you get, like I did for many years. You have a, you have an advantage over someone who truly believes they're a genius.

Ian R  

So..

Nick Gromicko  

Original quote there, by the way, I'm gonna put that one in the book.

Ian R  

Yeah, everybody, business success, wrap up this whole podcast, think you're an idiot, and you'll succeed. But basically, it comes down to, have you ever heard the Dunning Kruger principle, Nick?

Nick Gromicko  

I have not. I don't, I don't read books so I do not.

Ian R  

So I don't read books either, actually. But the Dunning Kruger effect is these two guys Dunning and Kruger did an experiment. They found that nobody actually knows how intelligent they are. So people either way overestimate their skills or way under estimate their skills. And ironically, people that are terrible at something because they have no benchmark for how terrible they are think they're awesome. And then people who are actually awesome, understand so much about it that they think they're stupid, because how could they actually know what everybody else does about that subject. 

Nick Gromicko  

Well, it's even worse, in my case, because I got rich early, and I got rich a couple of times, right? And so just like everybody else in my neighborhood, who thinks I'm smart, because I have money, you could actually believe it yourself. You can, you can start to think that I must be smart because I have money. There's some joke about some guy playing the lottery, and then he wins. And then he's, you know, he wants to tell everybody, you know, advice on how to win the lottery and how smart, if you stick to it and buy a lottery ticket every day you too can win you know and all this nonsense, right? So you have to be careful, you don't get, you don't become full of yourself as you get rich, because then you're not humble anymore. And you start to think that you know best when certainly you don't, it's very unlikely you know the best way to anything.

Ian R  

No, I think that's actually a deep thought from our discussion that there is a lot of humility that goes into it. Other people know what we don't know. And the more we can step back, and not necessarily have low self esteem, but be humble and say, maybe they can do it better, let's see how this plays out. Or maybe just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong. Interesting. So let's say we are working and we're scaling up, another question that was that was added here. Are you opposed to debt? And I think a lot of home inspectors are thinking, well, if I want to keep up with this big company, maybe take on some business debt, so that I can grow faster. And it's like venture capital, a lot of big businesses do that kind of thing. Or do you think it should be more bootstrap?

Nick Gromicko  

I prefer to be more bootstrap. But, you know, I'm not opposed to debt, that makes a lot of sense. In an inflationary environment, where there's a lot of inflation. I mean, anybody you know, we all know this. Now, we all know Dave Ramsey was wrong, right? We all know people, we all know, people with 2.75% mortgages, right, sitting on them when inflation is at, well they say it's, it's four, it's really like eight. Yeah, we're sitting on a real inflation rate of about 8%. So we know, we all know he was wrong, dead wrong, made a mistake. So I'm not opposed to debt. It's, but there's some satisfaction in, you know, paying for everything, I suppose, without borrowing. It might be a spiritual reason, also, not to borrow. I think the only you know, I'm not religious. But I know the only time like Jesus kind of got violent with everybody, and kicked some butt was with moneylenders. There also might be a psychological reason not to have a lot of other people's cash on hand. Because you feel flush, when in fact, you are not. So you're, it's an, it was an advantage to me to always have low self esteem, and always feel like I'm struggling. I always felt up till very recently that I was struggling to make it and borrowing money tricks some people into thinking that they're not struggling, you have to be, you have to be very wary of your own brain. Your own brain can be a real enemy. And so you don't want to trick it into thinking in a way that could hurt you. And so that would be my opposition to debt for some people. But on paper, absolutely not, financially, debt makes so much sense in many situations. So before we get into too much on whether someone should borrow to grow and expand their home inspection business, you know, you have to start thinking about that first. You also don't want to borrow money for no reason just to grow big, you know, size doesn't matter. Bottom line does in business. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're, again, trying to raise money, which is a form of borrowing, a form of debt, right? Don't worry about how big you are, worry about how profitable you are, I have some very small businesses, that have no employees that are outrageously profitable. So we see that the human brain wants to be big. We see this when they design their own brochures and their own websites, you go to a lot of home inspection companies where their wife and the husband design their own website and design their own brochure, the name of their company is taking up all the precious real estate, they're revealing the problem with their own brain, that they want their name so big on the, above the fold of the website, the company name, they want it real big on their inspection vehicle, even though it doesn't say home inspection on it. So you don't even know what the, what the darn company does, unless you have glasses to see, you know, underneath the word home inspection. So they you know, the trade all their precious real estate for ego to satisfy their ego being big. Instead, they should be using that precious real estate to sell their services and explain to people what they do and why people should hire them. That's a perfect, and I see that so many times that it reveals to me that most people or most home inspectors, certainly, you know, focus on being big instead of profitable. You know, that's, that's another deep thing that you just said there. I remember this one home inspector was bragging about how many inspections he did in a year and how many employees he had.  They stand on stage sometimes and do it.

Ian R  

Yeah. Well, my question to him was share your net profit. Yeah, he shared his gross numbers, I'm like, how much of that is net? And not that he was gonna do it in a public forum, but I knew him personally. He goes, Ian, it's not going so well, I didn't want to share that number, I'm like, then why are you bragging about all the number of inspections if you're not.

Nick Gromicko  

Exactly.

Ian R  

You can have a third of the size of the company and be more profitable.

Nick Gromicko  

If you ever go to one of these events where there's stools, they're not chairs, they're stools, they're about three foot tall, there's guys sitting on stools, five of them in a row on a stage, and they're telling me how much they gross, this is usually a bunch of crap. You know, I want to, I want to see the profit margins. And I want to see your bottom line, let me see, let me see your bank accounts, don't show me, tell me how many inspections you did. Because if you did a bunch of inspections, you know a lot, enough to be onstage bragging about it. And people *clapping* like this, right, and people in the audience sitting next to their wives with pen and paper. If you're in one of those situations, and you haven't made any money, you're not really making any big money, you've harmed our industry, you're, you're my enemy. Because all you did was turn and suck inspections out of the system through the skills you had to acquire inspections, but not to acquire, acquire profit, you're the most, the biggest enemy in my industry, I would love to just crush you out, because you're stealing jobs and wasting them for someone to do 1000s of inspections and not end up rich. That person didn't go out on to an enormous cornfield and pick and pick enough corn for himself and his family. He burned large swaths of the cornfield down so that nobody can eat. He took those jobs and wasted them, stole them from other inspectors who could have made a profit out of them and did it 1000s and 1000s of times over and over for years, and at the end had nothing to show for it. And all he did was harm us all, that's my biggest enemy in this industry. It's within. It's not without, it's not NAR, it's that idiot sitting on that bench on stage, telling us how many inspections he did without revealing, without showing me his house, show me your paid off house. And then we'll talk, I'm gonna see that first, let me look at your house. Let me see that it's, how much you owe on it, then go up on stage and tell us how you did it. Otherwise, I suspect a lot of these guys are just stealing work from everybody. When you do a job and you don't make any money off of it, you're a thief, you're a thief to my industry. 

Ian R  

Unfortunately, I think most of our listeners would agree that it's not just one or a group of five guys doing 10,000 inspections each. It's a lot of us that are single inspectors or, you know, smaller companies not making a profit. I talked with guys all the time. And they're like, oh, I have to compete at 350. So then they wonder why they can't make their bills. But they did 600 and 700 inspections by themselves. 

Nick Gromicko  

They worked their a** off. 

Ian R  

Yeah, they worked for nothing. I did the math with this one guy. At the end of the year, of how many hours he spent attaining the inspections, getting ready for the inspections, driving to them, doing them. He was doing three a day. He ended up making just above minimum wage at the end of the year. He's working, you know, 100 hours a week, seven days a week. He didn't even have a vacation that year, he said, and I'm like go to McDonald's. I'm like, that's a lot easier job for minimum wage.

Nick Gromicko  

Less stress, less liability. Anyway. 

Ian R  

Yeah. So I think we get I think what you're saying is very true, because we get in our own way. So but let's say now that we're one of the inspectors where we do well and we make profit. One of the things that I struggle with is I've always been very good at making money, and then it's sits on my desk, proverbially speaking as a paperweight. I'm like, oh, hey, look, and then I move on to the next thing that interests me and I want to go do this. What does a home inspector do with money after he has it? What would you tell him to do?

Nick Gromicko  

So you know, what of my, I think of things in like in terms of battles, right, so one of the one of the enemies in finance is cash, because the United States has so much debt, that debt has to be serviced. I think they're running up a debt of what a trillion dollars every 100 days or something. No one's buying our notes. So they have to print this money, all this printing of money, and it's worldwide, every currency stealing it right around the world's. 

Ian R  

Fiat currency. 

Nick Gromicko  

Fiat's going to zero as it always does. It's just going globally. It's all going to zero. So with inflation, you know, you have to, if your profit margin is 15%, and there's 8% inflation, you're only making 7% Because you're fighting upstream against inflation. So without getting into too deep into it, and I wrote, I wrote an article on it, it's at nachi.org/wealth, how inspectors can store wealth. But basically you have to buy things that you can touch. In general, if you can't touch it, you know, it's not there, really. And so I think there's a whole list of things you can buy, and some is with just $100, you know, like, maybe should go buy groceries now, and store them because they're going up, you know, groceries went up 40% in four years, and it goes all the way up to, you know, something, we can spend a lot of money to try to hedge inflation, but you have to get rid of your cash. I'm sitting on some cash, and I would love to, I'd love to deploy it. And I can't find opportunity. I mean, the, the real estate market is high where I'm at, the stock market is, you know, all time high, ratios are crazy, right? Gold broke out of, you know, four or five all time highs in a row last in the past two weeks. So I don't know where to deploy cash, really. And I don't think I'm alone, I think probably, probably other people with cash have the same problem. And that's why, that's why the market is as high as it is. And things are as high as they are. I mean, we're having a commodity bubble right now. I mean, planet Earth has two things that it's sort of swimming in, it's swimming in oil, more oil now than when they told me in third grade that we're reaching peak oil from now on, we're gonna never find anymore. So we have more oil reserves now than ever before. That's, it's a planet of oil. And it's a planet of cash. We're swimming in it. There's cash all over the place, and no place to go. And I'm not sure what to do about that completely. But you have to get to a variety of things that you can touch. I would say, you know, right now, if I, if someone forced me to deploy money, I would say I would buy mining stocks, I think, miners at least pull something real out of the ground that's going to be needed. You know, whether it's lithium or copper or silver right now. Or gold, those stocks are basically selling for the same thing they sold five years ago, it's the only thing that didn't go up, it's the only commodities, precious metals, only commodities, that didn't go up. It just started to go up recently. And the mining stocks behind them haven't really budged much, they got a long way to go. So if you're asking me today, I would say go buy some Newmont Barrick. Or, or some, if you want to get a junior mining stock, and try to you know, get a 10 banger out of it. If you're willing to take a little risk do that, those are very undervalued, and silver is still very undervalued, you know, not even close to its all time high of $50 or something. It's only coming up on 30. Right, despite every other commodity going through the roof.

Ian R  

You know, it's ironic, you're the second person to tell me that recently, mining stocks, I might have to, I might have to listen to that and go get some. But I do find that question comes up a lot with business owners in general, not just us as home inspectors of where to put our money. And we're always told things like, you know, do mutual funds, like a lot of people do like places like Betterment and all that stuff or high yield savings accounts, you should have at least six months they say or a year of your life expenses in like a high yield savings account, like Goldman Sachs or something like that.

Nick Gromicko  

You can get pretty good interest rates now, you can get 4.8% to a bank. 

Ian R  

But that's just keeping up with inflation, really, just barely. Probably losing.

Nick Gromicko  

But you have to ask yourself other questions. Am I going to need cash in the future or in the near future? If the answer's no, then you got a problem because you got to figure out what to do with this money. Right? 

Ian R  

Yeah. So you've always been a proponent of gold, but like physical gold, like the old Ron Swanson adage of burying gold in a box in the backyard next to the oak tree where nobody can find it.

Nick Gromicko  

Well, I mean, you just said why, you just explain one of my reasons I like gold is because now you know, someone once said well can't they find, can't the government find your gold and I said I don't think so because I can't find some of it. I forgot where I put it. But you know, it's the only, it's the only financial instrument that has no third party counter risk to it. There's nobody can take it away from me. Nobody can lose it. You know, you mentioned other things like 401k's and stuff like that. I'm not interested in that, I have money in the stock market, but I don't like, I don't want too much of it in there. I'm a trader. I'm only trading in and out you know, constantly, you see me on InterNACHI's message board. Awesome things I buy and then you see me dump it like in two days, as soon as it goes up and up. And I'm a trader in and out but you know, because that's not wealth. You know, wealth is something that you, that you have to, that should, you should be able to touch, I think. And, you know, maybe real estate's for you, if you're less worried about the government, I mean, the government knows where your real estate is. And they know you can't move it. So it's kind of on the frontline if you're, if you're sort of a, you know, anti government conspiracy theorists, like me, I have a lot of real estate, I have 55 properties. So I'm against real estate. But it's the stuff that's most out front, right. You can't pull it away on wheels, can't hide it, and they can tax the crap out of it. And there's nothing you can do about it.  And probably on the other side of that, in between, everything in between would be gold. So it's small, it's indestructible. If your house catches on fire, and it melts, it melts into gold. I mean, it's just, it's, you know, monetary instrument, it's used in everything. Silver is really going to be the the big one, silver and copper. I think, you know, if they really get this, you know, electric, electrification of the world going, you're gonna need a lot of silver.

Ian R  

Yeah.  Yeah. Well, Europe is, Europe is already mostly there, UK a lot, a lot of them are already there with the electrification. So okay, so I do like the physical asset thing. I have a hard time with real estate sometimes just because of the tax thing. I live in New York, and we're highly taxed. 

Nick Gromicko  

Oh, yeah. 

Ian R  

So. And really, when it comes down to it, with few exceptions, like over the past few years, real estate as a whole just keeps up with inflation. So if you sell, if you buy a house.

Nick Gromicko  

It pays rent. 

Ian R  

Well, if you're renting, yeah.

Nick Gromicko  

Well, it does, it does three things at once, right. So real estate is a special kind of thing, because it does three things at once. First of all, it pays a dividend every month. I mean, you know, last week was the end of the month for me. So I got a stack of checks, right? I mean, all the rentals, pay income, and that rent goes up with inflation, just like anything else, right? So it's a hedge against inflation, right? It's a tax deduction, because you can do, you can say, like Donald Trump does, right? You can say that your real estate is going down in value on paper, despite it going up in value in reality, that and whoever wrote that? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about legislative history. But whoever came up with that idea. I mean, to be able to say that this property is going down in value, while in fact, it's going up in value. That's a big, that's a big tax saving. So that's number two, right? Dividend, you get a dividend every month, you get a tax write off. And then the third thing, the thing itself appreciates. So it's a double hedge against inflation, right? Because the rents are going up, but then the thing is going up with inflation. So I mean, there's a reason most people who got really rich on our own did it with real estate. And it's because of those three things. You combine those three things, there's nothing that touches it. Gold doesn't pay a dividend, right? Yeah. And I can't, I can't depreciate gold. So it only is one of the three things. Some things have two of the three things, this has all three. Real estate is amazing. So I have a lot of it. 

Ian R  

So yeah, no, I mean, that's a good point. And I'm not exactly a real estate guru. I just never had a stomach for renting properties. But it is a little bit hard right now. Because real estate's so high. A house down the street from me sold double what it was, what it was purchased for just five years ago. I'm like, what in the world? Double. 

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah, I mean, so four years ago, the average median average seller is like $59,000, to buy the average house of America. And today is an average salary of 103,000. 

Ian R  

Exactly. 

Nick Gromicko  

So some, you know, it really went past inflation, didn't it?

Ian R  

It flew. Well, and there's a housing shortage whenever that's that's economics 101, you don't have enough of something so it becomes more valuable. 

Nick Gromicko  

And I think that's the, I think that's the government's secret weapon, what they're really doing, right, they have this big debt. And there's only three ways of getting rid of this big debt. We can pay it. Well, we can't. I mean, if you took all the tax receipts that came in, tax receipts dropped 5% this year, by the way, already. So you know, compared to last year, so if we gave them all the money we earned, we still can barely service this darn thing. It's growing so big, right? So we can't pay the debt. The second way is to default on it. Just tell attorneys too bad, you know, and everybody else, Social Security recipients, sorry. You know, we just can't, tell the military, you just, I'm sorry, you just can't attack the wrong countries anymore. You know, when the Saudis hit us on 911 you can't go attack Afghanistan and Iraq and spend 20 years over there, can't do it, cost us 9 trillion to do that. No more doing that anymore. You're gonna have to call Nick Gromicko, and he'll send you a 95 cent map of the Middle East so you can actually go retaliate for 911 the way you should have with surgical strikes, and got out. You can't spend $9 trillion, that's defaulting, right. Tell them, okay, no, you're cut off. Social security recipients, you're cut off, Medicaid, Medicare, the Chinese, everybody has our notes, you're all done. We're defaulting, we've defaulted before. So it's not a big deal. But they're not going to do that. There's no way, no politician is going to do that. So the only third way to get rid all this debt, and the one they're doing is to inflate it away. Basically add zeros to everything. And then the debt becomes worth the debt becomes only 1/10 of the size. It's just a bit basic math if you did that, right. So how do you cause inflation? Well, one is to print a lot of money, which they're doing right? Then we're gonna, they act like they're trying to get the 2%, they're never gonna get to 2%, they have no intention to, they want inflation. And what's the other way to cause inflation? Increased demand. So let millions of illegal immigrants in, everyone who has immigrants has to eat and needs a roof over their head. You put that pressure on it, inflation, inflation goes up, they want, despite everything they say, whenever the government's saying something over and over. And you got that, you know, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve on 60 minutes, what's he doing on a TV show, you know, a couple of times a month, you know, we should, we shouldn't even know his name, you should be insignificant to us. But whenever they're on, they're saying they're trying to get rid of inflation, it's because they're trying to create it. And it's, they have a clear motive too, they ran up the debt, they have to deflate it, inflate it away. Inflation is a tax on everybody. And it's a sneaky tax, because everybody votes for it. Not knowing that they're paying it. Like corporate tax, you say, oh, we gotta get these corporations to pay more tax. No, that's a tax on you, corporations, I have a lot of them. I have a lot of corporations. They're just three pieces I can show you them. They're just three pieces of paper in a file cabinet, they can't pay tax, corporation can't pay tax, it can only collect in the form of higher prices and pass it on to bureaucrats. It's a sneaky way of taxing you. It's just the same ways when I hire an employee, and he says, well, a lot of taxes came out of my paycheck, well you should see what I had to pay to hire you. Just sneaky, that money could have been yours. It's a sneaky way of taxing you. Corporations don't pay tax, people pay tax. If you raise a corporate tax, or you're taxing us in the form of higher prices, if you vote for certain people, you're taxing yourself with higher inflation. Because it allows the government to print money, and do they give it to you? No, they spend it on themselves. And you pay it in the form of groceries.

Ian R  

And there's a lot of complex parts to that issue. But inflation is definitely something that affects our decisions of what we do with what money we have. And to go back to the debt thing I do, I do tend to think that some debt is good. Like I think if you're going to buy a house, even with a higher interest rate, buy it and refinance when the interest rates go down. Because then you end up paying back if you buy something for $500,000, in 10 years, that money's worthless, so now you're paying back money that's worthless to to pay off that debt. So that dollar is now worth 80 cents, so...

Nick Gromicko  

Debt is a hedge against inflation. 

Ian R  

Yeah. 

Nick Gromicko  

So again, as inflation goes up, Dave Ramsey gets more and more wrong. That is who benefits inflation. In fact, inflation is basically a transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers.

Ian R  

Yeah, pretty much.

Nick Gromicko  

So if you're saving money, you're losing it. You're not losing the money, nominal, you're losing it in purchasing power. And the borrower is paying back the debt that, he got a lot of purchasing power to buy a house, and he's paying it back with dollars that are more and more worthless. Yep. So he's the winner, the saver's the loser, it's a transfer of wealth. Inflation is a transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers.

Ian R  

Yeah, no, I agree with that. Yeah. If I could to get back down maybe to a couple of the questions. I know you didn't want to talk about the NAR thing, and we don't have to talk about that. But it does bring up a question from one of our inspectors here, who wanted to know, basically, if it's not that, what's the biggest threat to home inspectors to the industry? What are your thoughts on that?

Nick Gromicko  

Well, you mentioned a big, big one is inflation. You know, if you go to the, you know, Inspection Museum in Boulder, Colorado, which you know, we started, in there are inspection reports and some of those reports have the invoices from when they did them in the 70s and 80s. Right? Those invoices don't look terribly different from today's invoices, that's crazy. You know, we haven't really given ourselves a raise, and we're doing a much better job. I mean, we do you know, photographs inside, color photographs inside our report. You know, we do all sorts of ancillary inspections, we do, you know, we email the reports, we have insurance, we have the buyback program, we have warranties, all to protect our clients. We have all a variety of tools that we never had back then, infrared cameras and moisture meters, we're a much better industry than we were in 1980, providing a much better service than we were in 1980. Yet, our prices, which should be six times what it was in 1980 are one and a half times. 

Ian R  

If that. 

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah. So you asked me, what is your threat to the inspection industry? We already talked about it. Inflation.

Ian R  

What do you think about, like the commoditization of the industry? Because I think that does, I think there's a little bit more of that than there used to be.

Nick Gromicko  

You mean, like big multi inspector firms?

Ian R  

Not necessarily, it's more of a mentality of like, you know, used to years ago, look for a home inspector, and I remember having to compete really hard on skill levels, where now it's the mentality of buyers have, you just need to get through the inspection, kind of like you do with appraisers, you'll meet your appraiser, you don't ask them about a skill level, you don't ask to see sample reports. You just get whoever met the price line, they go do the appraisal and you move on. I see. Do you see the same thing happening to the home inspection industry?

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah, but you know, I always look at that in you know, because I'm looking at it through other industries. I mean, a variety of other industries have nothing to do with home inspections. And I always look at that as an advantage. So I'm hoping the industry around me commoditizes in that, in that sense.

Ian R  

Really? Okay.

Nick Gromicko  

Becomes homogenized and similar and lower in price and sort of just grumbles along without getting any real power or distinctiveness, because that's what I'm gonna get. I'll be the, I'm happy to be the odd man out and even odder the more you guys all become the same. So I'm going to stand out from you. You know, my CEO is a pretty smart kid. He always says, we wish we had 10 ASHIs that are all bumbling around doing nothing like the regular ASHI. Because we would stick out really well in NACHI. Don't put them out of business, he was always begging me to, please don't put them out of business. We need 10 more. So if you adopted his thinking to inspectors, it doesn't really harm me that there's a bunch of bozos out there, doing the same thing over and over looking similar. Because this just enhances, and I'm a marketing guy, so maybe you know, I'm not talking, I'm not talking to everybody, everybody says, well, it's easy for you. I'm a marketing guy, I'll do a little bit more better marketing than them. And I'll take the gravy. And you can have all the rest. You can have all the potatoes that you want. I can't do it all anyway. So I prefer the 90% that I can't do to be done by those who are similar and weak. It keeps them at bay. That's a way of looking at it.

Ian R  

I actually really like that perspective, Nick, because I was wondering where you were going with that. And that makes a lot of sense. So if everybody else is McDonald's, and you're the gourmet burger shop. 

Nick Gromicko  

I'm happy. 

Ian R  

Yeah. So that's actually, because just yesterday, I was just like, oh, this industry is going down. Everything is commoditizing. And I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah, but no, that's a great perspective of it gives us opportunity to stand out as different. 

Nick Gromicko  

It's a great opportunity for single man operators. So I wrote an article nachi.org/get-rich. Now there's four ways that home inspectors can get rich. And one of them is the single man operator just, just kills it. He just become so amazing. You know, he's Tiger Woods. And that's one of the ways to do it, you know, and I'm sure Tiger Woods would think the same. He would love to play against his whole career against a pile of mediocre golfers that never took $1 from any of the money that he was going after. He'd get all the, he'd win all the tournaments and all the endorsements, and no one else could compete. Well, in business that would be, that would be a dream. And so the closer they become, they come to doing that, the sweeter my dream.

Ian R  

Which makes a lot of sense because actually Peter Giannino you know, sorry, Peter, if I pronounced your name wrong, but he asked how does the home inspector survive in an area where there are two or three multi inspector firms getting all the work? And I guess that's the answer to the question. It's not a matter of how do I compete with them, it's perfect, the more they homogenized and kind of do everything the same. What can I do to be even better than that and come out as Tiger Woods.

Nick Gromicko  

You have to start with everything, right? You have to clean up your whole marketing and everything to attack, to pull away from that, right? I mean, maybe if your just you and your wife and your son doing inspections, you could say, you know, not a franchise. Family owned and operated. That tagline would cause a consumer to say, well, I don't want these franchises. I want the family owned and operated guy, right? You know, or, you know, if you're just a single man, right? Or you're just a single woman just doing out there competing with multi inspector firms and franchises. Maybe your tagline would be, you know, picture of yourself, you know, saying you actually get me at the inspection, not sending one of my underling employees, or anything like that, right? 

Ian R  

That's gold. 

Nick Gromicko  

People wondering, who's coming to the house? Who are they actually hiring? Anyway, when the world all gets the same, it becomes easier and easier from your marketing to distinguish. And marketing is basically a tool to distinguish yourself from others, right? That's what it is. So you can, that accelerates the more they become homogenized. So I look at it as a good thing. I mean, now if you're just at home, I just want to do my little inspections and get in there make a couple of money. Maybe you're, you should jump into, jump in with the rest of you know, but that would not be anything I would do. Your software is not that, is it? Are you trying to be? Are you trying to be Home Inspector Pro and Home Gauge and everybody else and ISN and everything? 

Ian R  

No, matter of fact, we get, we get flack sometimes because we're different. We want to be different. We want to stand out. 

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah, well let's see, you know, when you're, if you're not getting flak, you know...

Ian R  

You're gonna get flak when you're doing something right. 

Nick Gromicko  

You're not over the target, you know, flak is what hits the plane. So..

Ian R  

Yeah, exactly. 

Nick Gromicko  

It's okay to be different, you know?

Ian R  

Yeah. And, and I do like that. And even with our software.

Nick Gromicko  

I have no reason to, to have a pricing, to have pricing that is, all my pricing in every one of my businesses are considered high. I can't argue that I should charge you more if there's nothing behind my argument, it would be like an attorney going into a trial and say, Your Honor, I moved to that you blah, blah, blah, this, and then he sits down. The judge be like, well, you know, you've known, are you supporting your, your contention in any way before I rule against you? So you want to have, you want to have reasons to charge more. I know, there's I mean, this is the game. I mean, we're in here to make to make money. And I'm tired of these inspectors saying, well, I make a good living, well, then go get a good job. The only reason to be in business and take on all this risk and do all the things home inspectors have to do is to make a really, really great living. If you're just putting along and you know, and putting food on the table. Oh, my God, please get out of my industry. Go away. Get a job. I don't need, I don't need an inspector who puts food on his table. If that's his goal. I wish he would go away. 

Ian R  

I mean, there's a, there's a lot to say about that, a lot to unbox, because there's a lot that goes into a business that we don't think about, the late nights, the worry, the work, the advertising, the marketing, we think boy, I made $500 in two hours. No, you didn't, it took eight hours to get to that two hours.

Nick Gromicko  

Why do all that for nothing? Yeah. You'd be better off working.

Ian R  

Yep, exactly. But that, that's why we have you on the show is because you're gonna say the real stuff that we need to hear. And I think we got through the bulk. We had a lot, we had a lot of people submit questions, and I'm trying to combine some of them. But um, is there anything that you'd like to add for inspectors, Nick?

Nick Gromicko  

What was the theme of this, of this interview? 

Ian R  

Basically the theme is how to gain wealth and profit as a home inspector. And I think that's kind of what we're targeting here. 

Nick Gromicko  

If we're wrapping up, we didn't get into any details, we should probably do a detailed one. But, you know, generally there's a three part system to getting rich, which is to increase your income, which usually means increasing new sources of income, managing your expenses, you don't want to buy boats and yachts. I mean, you can have an occasional luxury in life. But you don't want it all. You don't want a big house. I wanted a big house. That was my luxury, but I don't have a yacht or boats or anything. You can have an occasional luxury. I'm not saying don't enjoy life, but you don't want a lot of them. You don't want to keep spending to keep up with your income. So increase your income, manage your expenses, and invest the rest. It's kind of like a simple three part system. A lot of people do two of three, you know, a lot of older people did the first two actually.

Ian R  

Fiscal discipline is extremely important. I do, you know not to quote Dave Ramsey's too much because I know how your, your feelings on him, but he talked about, he's like if you make $100,000 a year and you buy an $80,000 car, he says you're stupid. He goes, if you're, if you're making $300,000 a year, and you own a boat, two $80,000 cars and the big house, you're stupid. He's saying, he says some of the same things that you're saying, of fiscal discipline.

Nick Gromicko  

Well it's the same thing we talked about earlier about the guy on stage, right? We want to look at his margin, right. So in personal financial margin is your income versus your expenses. We want to, we want to see that, we want to see a healthy margin there in the same way we want to see that guy on stage talking about how many, how many home inspections he did last year, we want to see his margins, is what we really want to see. Same thing with personal finance, we want to see a margin, and then what's he do with it? Don't keep it in cash, as we discussed on the show earlier too, not in this environment. You want to put it somewhere where it grows and it and it and it helps with the first step, which is income. You know, I like stocks I love, you know, rents, things. It's been off a little bit.

Ian R  

Yeah. And I do like the fact that you went back to that point, because again, it is one of my biggest pet peeves when inspectors tell me how many inspections they do, you don't need to tell me how much money you make. But don't brag about oh, me and my helper we did 1000 inspections this year. I'm like big stinking whoop. How much did you make at the end of the year? What was your profit margin? Because I know guys out there that charge a premium, do a couple 100 inspections a year and make more than some multi inspector firms. 

Nick Gromicko  

Absolutely. 

Ian R  

Yeah.

Nick Gromicko  

I mean, look at me, my gross revenues are not that much in all my accompanies. But I know how to get that margin, or I don't do it. If I can't figure it out, I don't do it. You know, so you should focus on that.

Ian R  

So I will say getting into some of the detail. Let me know if you agree or disagree with this. If I, if I were starting my own business today, and let's say I was doing 50 inspections a year, just starting out. 

Nick Gromicko  

How many? 

Ian R  

50, just guessing, you know, if I was just starting, I was doing 50. Personally, I would invest in commercial inspections, because it's bigger money, and basically the same job. And I think it's a lot better, and then you can get reciprocal income. And then we've talked about this a lot on the show, you can do yearly inspections, maintenance inspections, and a lot of those commercial inspections turn into regular income. Home inspections tend to be a dead stop. And home inspections, we shouldn't stop doing it. But I think we should have a couple avenues of money. I think we should grow bootstrap personally. Everything, I've never taken on any debt for any business. It's not my thing.  It doesn't, yeah. So take it from people that have built businesses. Yes, that has its place with parts of life. But when it comes to business, it does change your brain. It really does. When you're doing things bootstrap, there's a different mentality in that business. And it tends to grow organically. But would you agree with those couple of statements I said or would you disagree?

Nick Gromicko  

Me either. I do, I think it goes back to the one of the three things I said you have to get your income up, I would have a second stream of income, which is a commercial inspection company completely separate from my home inspection company.

Ian R  

Always.

Nick Gromicko  

Completely separate, separate websites, separate entities, separate altogether. And you'll find that that management business because it's not a home inspection business at all, it's on inspection business at all, you don't need knee pads to crawl around anywhere, you're gonna hire everybody, almost, the way I do them is, I'm a commercial inspector. You want to manage it, especially as you're getting older, like I'm 62, I don't know how old you are, but at your age and up, you want to start going towards commercial, because you need a management business late in life. Home inspections is a physical business, you gotta be in great shape for it, and it'll beat you up over time. Whereas the commercial inspections, it's all about management business, it's a scalable business. And it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful desk business, which I like, I always say if you can, if you can try to build your commercial inspection business as if you were blinded in you know, accidentally blinded so or just put a blindfold on. And if you can run it from your desk with just your phone you're doing, you know, unable to see very far, maybe you can just see enough to type your, to type up your invoice, you're doing right. I don't even retype the reports from the experts I hire for each project anymore. I used to, I used to put it all, I thought consistency mattered in our report. I just now staple that report to mine, to my cover letters and what I did on the inspection, and I haven't had a single commercial client complain about it and in fact they like it. It appears even better because it looks like different people with different expertise worked on their inspection, which, in fact, is what actually happened. So I can charge a lot more. Why would I want to homogenize it and make it like, I'll retype it all into one report. I'm not, I'm not in a report writing contest. I'm in a money making business. 

Ian R  

Yeah. And then it's recurring income, which is, which is important for any business. 

Nick Gromicko  

It's B2B, I like.

Ian R  

Yeah, B2B is good. Yep. That's, that's extremely important, a lot less drama. I also find that other ancillary businesses help a lot of very successful home inspection companies, start pest control companies. And again, that's recurring income, you're out at that house once every six months, every, every year. And you can run that from your desk, you have the inspection, you finish it, send it off to your pest company, and you move on to the next inspection, water treatment. Almost part of, almost no SOP in most states in the US. So water treatment systems, radon installation companies, I was talking with a home inspector yesterday, started an environmental company. And he doesn't, he doesn't crossover with his home inspections in that but you know what, somebody needs a RADON Mitigation System, guess who they call?

Nick Gromicko  

One of the Ukrainian refugees that I took into my house to get them out of the war and out onto the street started his own filter business. But you can imagine how many filters are in a house. I mean, between the water filters and your furnace filters and everything, he goes around and changes all the filters. He has actually most of them on his truck, the rest of him in his warehouse. And it's a heck of a service. It's repeat business, you know, he only needs like 150 clients to get actually, I forgot to actually what, he doesn't have that quite yet. But to get really, really wealthy the way he's doing it. Because they just give him repeat business. He comes back every few months. Yep. And he changes all those filters. And he knows what filters they have, like, do you really know when you get ice out of your freezer, you know, do you know what size filter that is? Or even where it is?

Ian R  

I do, but I'm weird.

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah okay.

Ian R  

I'm not most people. 

Nick Gromicko  

Fridge filter sizes or the last time they changed it, right? So it's a really great business, it's attractive to people with, who are more affluent. 

Ian R  

And that's and that's why I guess I'm pointing out too, it's not overcomplicated things but we have access to the client first, and we can we can build off of that. So like the water treatment company, I remember water treatment company charged me $90 to come tap their finger on the top of the timer and say, oh yeah, that's still working, dump two bags of salt in, and then were gone in five minutes. I'm like, that's a glorious business 

Nick Gromicko  

Glorious.

Ian R  

Glorious, I mean, the initial setup and everything, you might need your best guy to go do that. But then after that, have your 18 year old nephew just start now working in the summers dropping salt into people's water softeners for $90 a pop all summer, I gladly pay because I'm like, listen, I'm not gonna go drive to Home Depot, get 20 bags of salt, drive back, dump all this salt in, spend three hours doing it. I'm like, it's worth it to me to just have somebody do it, you know. So anytime we can do that, I always find multiple streams of recurring income is always going to be the best. And that's an unfortunate part of home inspections. No recurring income. People have tried it.

Nick Gromicko  

Steady clients is a great, any business that has regular clients is a great business. You know, you can sell them, you can upsell them a lot of stuff. They trust you over time, you trust them over time.

Ian R  

You have a relationship.

Nick Gromicko  

I don't want the crazy clients. So I want to make good clients, and a book of business is why insurance companies get rich. It's not because they sell insurance. It's because they resell insurance.

Ian R  

Well, have you ever watched The Office, Nick? There was one episode where...

Nick Gromicko  

I never watch TV. I don't have a TV.

Ian R  

All right, I love TV. It's kind of like TV raised me. So. But there's one episode where this guy is in business school. And he asked a question on the show. Is it more profitable to keep an existing client or to get a new one? And he was just quizzing him. And the answer was it was, it's always better to keep an existing client than acquire new one. Home inspections, we have a great business. It really is like the coolest life ever driving around. 

Nick Gromicko  

Right.

Ian R  

Seeing cool things, meeting cool people, but we have high acquisition costs. And then we never see that client again until they sell their house in five to 10 years.

Nick Gromicko  

Yeah, or worse. We acquire, we acquire an agent who gives us work but because there's 2 million of them chasing 5.1 million deals, you know the average real estate agent can only give us two or three a year.

Ian R  

Well, and a lot of them are going out of business. Some are freaking out about the NAR thing going out of business. So now what if 10 of our 20 agents that refer us go out of business? We lost half our work.

Nick Gromicko  

I'll say this. They never had a business.

Ian R  

Well, yeah, exactly. 

Nick Gromicko  

Your average real estate agent makes $30,000 a year gross before expenses and taxes. Yeah, it was it was it was never business. Now, again, it's one of these things where they're just sucking money out of the system and not making any profit with it. Not there's a few exceptions. Of course, in any industry, there are a few exceptions, there are realtors that do really well for themselves. But the great vast majority of them, don't feed themselves on that, you know, they're probably married to a spouse who's really carrying the load, if they really broke it down and looked at where the money is coming in, coming out, you know, looked at the wear and tear on their car, their marketing costs, and everything to go get those three deals done a year on average, oh, my God, they never had a business. We at least have a business, and we don't charge enough for it, they don't even have a business. They're not even doing enough volume. You can't, there's only 2 million, there's only 5 million deals.

Ian R  

Out of a real estate transaction, I would say the home inspector makes the most money on average, per hour, because you know, the attorney works. Attorneys in my area charge 500 to $1,000. But they're working lots of hours and employees and stuff like that. Agent's not making much money, the appraiser's not making much money. 

Nick Gromicko  

Yup. And the agent definitely makes the least. 

Ian R  

Oh yeah. After their office fees and splitting the commission eight ways.

Nick Gromicko  

They look like the biggest check, but it's actually a really bad business. You know what I mean.

Ian R  

No, I agree. So if you're a home inspector listening to this, you made the right choice. And to sum up Nick's expression earlier. We need to think we're all idiots, and we'll all succeed. I'm just kidding. 

Nick Gromicko  

It worked for me. And my thought process may have been accurate. Who knows.

Ian R  

No, you've done really well, Nick, and Nick, as always, great podcast. And I know we didn't, we could go on forever talking about this. But I think this gives home inspectors a good idea of where to go from here, so to speak, of how to start maybe tweaking our thinking is really what it comes down to, what I'm gathering from you. Not necessarily what we do mechanically. Okay, if I do XYZ, this will work. A lot of it comes down to our thinking. 

Nick Gromicko  

We should get into the mechanics on another podcast. 

Ian R  

Let's do it. I'm down with that. 

Nick Gromicko  

As you can see, get the wrenches out. 

Ian R  

Yeah, we'll get the wrenches out and get on the nuts and bolts. 

Nick Gromicko  

That's what I'd rather do. 

Ian R  

Okay, let's do it. Thanks, Nick. 

Nick Gromicko  

Thanks.