The Golden Age of Commercial Inspections

Lance Coffman returns to Inspector Toolbelt Talk to deliver a masterclass on the current state of commercial property inspections and why it remains an exceptional opportunity for inspectors looking to diversify their business.

While residential markets have struggled over the past two years, commercial inspections continue to thrive. Unlike residential inspections that depend almost entirely on real estate transactions, commercial inspectors serve a diverse clientele including current building owners, maintenance teams, portfolio managers, REITs, and attorneys. This diversity creates stability regardless of market conditions, as commercial property owners consistently need expertise to either make money or avoid losing it.

One of the most critical success factors Lance emphasizes is creating a dedicated commercial inspection identity. "Commercial leads go to your home inspection website, get shot in the face, dragged into the woods, and buried in a 10-foot deep hole," he explains colorfully. Commercial clients want specialists, not generalists, and perceive tremendous value in a dedicated commercial inspection service. This perception justifies the substantially higher fees - often thousands or tens of thousands of dollars compared to residential's typical $500 range.

The commercial landscape continues evolving with several hot trends. Data centers are booming due to AI expansion, while former office buildings are being repurposed into multifamily housing as remote work changes demand patterns. Churches, schools, government buildings, and small business properties remain consistently strong sectors. Lance recommends setting up Google Alerts to monitor commercial real estate movements in your region and identify emerging opportunities.

Rather than attempting to master every commercial property type, successful inspectors find their niche. This specialization allows them to build deep expertise and confidence when consulting with business leaders - a critical skill since commercial inspection is fundamentally consultative rather than merely technical. The fourth quarter presents unique opportunities when businesses plan their annual budgets, making it prime time to demonstrate how preventative inspections save money.

For those interested in making the transition to commercial work, resources like CCPIA provide vital education, coaching, and community. Lance hosts the "Staying Smart in CRE" podcast and weekly coaching calls to help inspectors navigate this lucrative but different world. The commercial inspection market remains what Lance calls "the golden age" - comparable to residential inspections in the early 2000s when competition was low and opportunity abundant.

Ready to elevate your inspection business? The commercial market awaits those willing to position themselves as true building consultants rather than just inspectors.

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.

Chapters

• 0:18 Episode Introduction
• 1:36 Lance's Role at CCPIA
• 3:33 State of Commercial Inspection Market
• 9:33 Online Presence for Commercial Success
• 16:57 Commercial Market Trends and Opportunities
• 27:15 Finding Your Commercial Lane
• 35:24 Overcoming Business Owner Intimidation
• 41:56 Episode Wrap-up

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. So today we have back on a repeat guest, Lance Coffman, how are you, Lance? 

Lance Coffman  
I'm well, how are you today, Ian? 

Ian Robertson  
I'm doing fantastic, and I feel like your mic is out-micing me today. You got that sultry sound going.

Lance Coffman  
I always like to say when I do live classes, I just wish somebody would hop on and just say, Ian, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller today. You know what I mean?

Ian Robertson  
You sound like Frasier Crane. Hi, this is Lance Coffman, and I'm listening.

Lance Coffman  
Yes, I'm either going to talk about medicine or we're going to dive into something really important. Either way, it's going to be great, stick around.

Ian Robertson  
It's going to be awesome either way. Well, Lance, I want to reintroduce you to everybody. You are our de facto commercial inspection guy here, and we're going to be talking about the state of the commercial inspection market. We haven't touched on this in many, many months. And commercial inspections is something that's very important to my heart, and if you're just looking at the metrics important to us as an industry. But Lance, since the last time we had you on, I think, I mean, it's probably been close to a year, maybe, but since then, you've become the Director of Training and Development over at CCPIA, right? 

Lance Coffman  
That's right, yes. 

Ian Robertson  
So what do you do with that? I like the fact that you're a director. It feels more important than you know, other titles.

Lance Coffman  
I guess it does. Titles are just titles. You know, what I am mostly working on right now with CCPIA, and a lot of my responsibility is I am taking the other aspects that weren't necessarily being honed in on. So, for example, Rob is really magnificent, if you will, at teaching in person and teaching individuals about the actual inspection process and the buildings and things of that nature. And of course, he wrote a lot of our curriculum alongside our Executive Director Maggie. As I've come in, I have worked more on the kind of business development side and the training of that. So we do weekly coaching calls. So if anyone's interested, you can always hop on as a member and do a coaching call with Rob or I. A lot of what we're doing is we're discussing your business acumen, where you are in the process, because as we'll discuss, a lot of maybe home inspectors or other individuals coming over into commercial, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of misunderstanding, and we try to work through those. And so I get to do that a lot, and I get to write a lot of curriculum and host a lot of online classes, which is really fun.

Ian Robertson  
Well, and I also hear your round tables are pretty fantastic. So there's a friend of mine who does commercial inspections, and I see him a couple times a week. He's always talking about your round tables and your webinars and all that stuff. So anybody listening, I've always been and I don't get paid for this, nobody tells me to do this, I just think, CCPIA...boy, that's a tongue twister when you say too many times, right? 

Lance Coffman  
It is.

Ian Robertson  
I just believe they do a fantastic job. I've seen a lot of inspectors be very successful with it, and I know that it's been really great for Inspector Toolbelt users and Full View Marketing, our website clients. It's just a great program. And Lance, Rob and all them, just do a fantastic job, and Maggie as well, obviously. But Lance so now that we were reminded that you're an expert and a director, let's dig into this, because the home inspection market has been not fantastic for the past two years, and we were talking about this beforehand. It has to happen. The market needs to slow down before it can become reasonable and then great again. It's going to take a bit of time. It's on the upward swing. But since then, though, commercial has been pretty great. Is a commercial market still really great for people getting into the commercial inspection field? How do things look? Give us an overall view.

Lance Coffman  
Yeah, absolutely. I do think things are really great. And the reason being is you really get to choose your own specific lane, if you will, within CRE because a very small percentage, and this was true for my own personal company, and as I came over here, I find it to be true for a lot of our inspectors that are more seasoned in commercial, is that a small percentage of your company actually relies on people buying and selling property, which we would call like a due diligence period. So in a home inspection world that dominates your calendar, right, as somebody buying a building or a home rather, and reaching out to you to do the inspection. In commercial that happens a very small percentage. We work with a lot of current building owners and maintenance teams and project management groups and portfolio owners and REITs and attorneys and whatever. I'm almost losing my breath saying all the different client types. There really is a litany of ways that you can come in and be successful once you really understand what it is you're you're being able to provide. And so I think commercial is like anything else. It ebbs and flows with our economy and how things go so. But what I have learned is individuals want to use commercial to either make money or not lose money, right? That's the whole point of it. It's a financial opportunity. And so while a home might just sit there and lose money or the market might go stale, in commercial, for example, what we're seeing, and I talk about this on one of my recent podcasts, is you have all these big business buildings with all these different offices in it that aren't being used anymore. They're now flipping those and turning them into multifamily and turning them into, you know, restaurants and all these different things. So people are going to adapt and grow and so as long as you understand what that looks like in your area, especially, I think people are going to be successful, or at least cover what they were losing for residential initially, for sure.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah. So there's a couple things that I picked up from what you said there. Like residential, if the market's not doing so great, people just sit in their house and wait it out. 

Lance Coffman  
Right.

Ian Robertson  
With commercial, you can't do that. The property needs to move one way or the other. So personally, I find that while it does eb and flow, not nearly as much as a residential market. I have two questions for you. First of all, when you say CRE throughout this podcast, you're referring to commercial real estate, correct? 

Lance Coffman  
That's correct, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Ian Robertson  
We just want to make sure that the terms we're using, everybody understands them. And also, you said you had a podcast. So before we get into any other points here, can you tell us a little bit about your podcast?

Lance Coffman  
Yeah. So my podcast, essentially, what I'm doing is, every month you are going to get, like, a 15 to 30 minute deep dive into something very specific within commercial real estate. So the last few that we've done, you know, we talked about private equity in commercial real estate. We talked about environmental in commercial real estate. One of them I just finished up, as I mentioned, about those buildings being turned into multifamily, you know, repurposing of properties. And so my hope is that in those types of conversations I have, eventually, I'll bring on other industry professionals. We'll do interviews, which will be awesome. But I just want to give one big kind of nugget of this is what's happening. This is how you can pay attention to it, and this is how you can possibly utilize it, because I realize everyone's in a different region, a different area, like when I was doing commercial inspections, my company was in four different states, so we're traveling all over and we're really seeing different client types. You might just be in, say, New York, right? And so you're going to have a very specific building type, compared to someone down in Missouri. So my hope is that everyone can understand where they are in particular and how they're going to kind of see what's happening on the horizon and what's happening around them. Because unless you're really in commercial and understanding, you know, commercial buildings and things of that nature, there's things moving and shaking all around you that you're just not aware of because you never put your mind into it. So once you step over that threshold, then it just opens up a whole new world. And that's what we're trying to work on inside that podcast. 

Ian Robertson  
Nice. And so what's it called?

Lance Coffman  
So I'm going to find it, and then I'm going to tell you here in a minute, because I had it right here. And I was like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to launch it. And then I started talking. I was like, ah, well, we'll get to that in a minute. So I'll tell you where it is. It's on Spotify and all the channels as well.

Ian Robertson  
Okay, great. So when you find it, let us know, but..

Lance Coffman  
I will.

Ian Robertson  
I do see a trend. So we go off of metrics over pretty much every state in the US, every province in Canada, South Africa, parts of Europe and Australia for residential and commercial inspections. We have our own data, and we also watch things like Google Trends and, you know, all this other stuff, and also what we can access, which is limited with AI right now.

Lance Coffman  
Right.

Ian Robertson  
I do see a good steady funnel of people getting clients online from commercial real estate inspections, and it's kind of a funny thing. So, like, if I have a home inspection client. They're like, hey, Ian, I only had four people call me for home inspections from the website last month. It's like, oh, okay. And, you know, we'll start talking about strategies, keywords. We'll look if there's any dips, and if there was only four searches in their entire region, and you got all four, it's like, oh, fantastic. I never get those complaints from commercial real estate because of the lead value.

Ian Robertson  
You know, if I get a home inspection, it's like, okay, 500 bucks, whatever. I mean, one of my clients recently, he calls me. He's like, hey, Ian, I'm paying off my SEO for the next 10 years. He was joking, because he got a $30,000 job from a guy that just found him. He's like, oh yeah, I found you. It looks like you service my area. You have all the right credentials, and he hired him right there. He actually overbid it. He actually asked me how to bid it, and I told him a little bit lower. He's like, oh man, I accidentally wrote the wrong number, and he got the 30, I know, it was awesome.

Lance Coffman  
Right.

Lance Coffman  
Kudos to him.

Ian Robertson  
Kudos to him and no kudos to me, because I told him the wrong number. But I mean, $30,000 lead. It's like, you don't need as many eggs in your basket to make the same omelet when you're in commercial. And I've always loved that aspect of it.

Lance Coffman  
No, you don't. And the thing is, you are predominantly going to be successful in two different ways. You're either going to have a really strong sales game where. Where you are going actively after particular client types, like for example, I got really good at inspecting churches and educational facilities like colleges and schools and government buildings like that. So it's easy for me to reach out to those individuals and offer them my service and do kind of a cold sales, if you will, an icebreaker. But you are not going to be successful in commercial inspections right now, unless you have an online presence and you are able to clearly articulate your value to your client. Having a standard like the ComSOP from CCPIA, being able to say, I build my inspections on that basis, because we truly have created a framework and a baseline that people can follow, unlike other industries, once you clearly give that expectation of what you can do, and you put yourself out there and you truly delineate yourself from home inspection. And that's something we always tell individuals is, you know, I understand you may have a stellar home inspection website and you may have a page on there about commercial but we truly believe separate yourself and be a true commercial property inspector or consultant, and that will help you, because if you can be found online, you've already put yourself in the top 10% of individuals who can offer that service. I mean, my SEO is done by my business partner, and she's been fantastic in creating our website, our SEO, we'll get found in other states that we don't work in because someone just found us online because we wrote an article once and did it correctly, and there you go. So if you're not online, you've got to get online. You have to have a presence and working with individuals like your companies or others who get the idea of how to put together a website, how to do proper SEO, how to put together, maybe proper Google ads. All that's going to be important initially. And then the referrals will come. Then the word of mouth will come, because that is true. I still get a lot of word of mouth. You get a lot of repeat customers in commercial as well.

Ian Robertson  
And I tell people it's a golden age for commercial building inspections online, because competition is so low, it's like what home inspections were back in the early 2000s. I could throw up a website and that guy would just be getting leads and phone calls in a week. Commercial, kind of something similar. I had a guy, we didn't even start his SEO. We just put up a website, just put up a meta description that he served all of Georgia, and he started getting calls from North Georgia, and he's in South Georgia. And he's like, Ian, can you limit it? I'm like, or just charge more and go to North Georgia, dude.

Lance Coffman  
Correct, right. 

Ian Robertson  
I'm like, why would you turn that down? So I actually had him telling me dial it back a little bit. All we did was add a meta description, which, if anybody knows SEO, that is literally just the very basics of anything that you can do. It takes 10 seconds.

Lance Coffman  
That's right, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, that's the starting baseline. If we ever do a coaching call and someone says, where do I start? You need to be online, be present immediately. I just don't think social media works as well. LinkedIn is great, just because there's a lot of business professionals on there, but you get to understand who the movers and the shakers are there, but you're not going to do a lot of sales through LinkedIn as much as you're going to data collect. But, yeah, have a great website, and have good SEO, and get found, and you'll be surprised what comes in just off that. I always tell that story when I started, you know, back in 2018 when my wife was down the street, business partner building our website, nobody had a website that was talking about commercial. And just like you said, the basics of it, we put it live, and we were getting calls the next week, and it's just been like that ever since. So the people will be surprised that even if there are an abundance of CCPIA members in one congregated area, maybe only a small percentage of them are actually standalone commercial inspectors. It's just home inspectors who join CCPIA to get the education and get started, but really separate yourself and find a lane, and you will, you'll get found and get successful fairly quickly.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, and I do want to emphasize something that you said, and I believe we actually even touched on a little bit the last time you were on the show about having a separate entity for your commercial business. I gotta back that up, because guys keep calling me, inspectors keep calling me. One guy, actually, just last week, he goes, can you build a commercial page on our website? He goes, we get such low volume for it. I don't think it's worth building a website. And I'm like, that's backwards thinking. You have low volume because it's just a page on your website. They go, and it's home inspections this and home inspection that. And all of a sudden you just see a blurb about commercial inspections. I can tell you. I can watch your leads go to your home inspection website. Commercial leads go to your home inspection website, get shot in the face, dragged into the woods, and buried in a 10 foot deep hole never to be found again. That's the best way to just lose leads. Home buyers, they don't care if you do commercial, they're not bothered by it. Commercial buyers, if they see the word home inspection, they're done, they're gone. 

Lance Coffman  
They can be, yeah. 

Ian Robertson  
Yep. I mean, for the vast majority, there's some that don't. But the ones you really want, if you want that $30,000 mall, they're gonna want a dedicated website. You know.

Lance Coffman  
It's all about perceived value, Ian, to be honest, because when you look at that and you see that you're moonlighting as other things, they don't think you have the true knowledge on the particular building type or whatever. Because as a commercial inspector, I've said this, and I shot it from the rooftops, you are really, truly a consultant. You're not just an inspector who's commoditized, because you come alongside these individuals, and you help them really understand their building needs and what they're going to utilize it for. To back what I said, you're trying to make money, right? You're using it for financial gain. So they might be a really great dentist or, you know, daycare owner, but they don't know anything about their building. You do. So you have to be able to provide the value, and that's in your pricing. That's in your website. That's how you conduct yourself. All that's learned through CCPIA, but that's where people are missing the mark when they just want to put a page on their website. Can it be done? Yes, I know people who have done that and they're successful, but that's today. Jump two years into the future, they're not gonna be able to get away with that very long. I don't think.

Ian Robertson
Oh no, I totally agree. You can barely get away with it now, but when in business, I never want to tell everybody, I barely got away with doing the minimum guys. So don't mean to brag, but you know. I'd like to say, I did what was best for my business. And it's really not that much work. For me, okay, if I'm going to start a commercial inspection company today and a home inspection company, most states, I'm going to create a DBA from my LLC. And then I'm going to increase my insurance policy to include light commercial and industrial or large commercial, depending on what I'm doing. So that way, I'm covered for everything. My same LLC covers all the payroll, all my marketing, and I have a completely separate entity where I can have a website, and I can have ABC home inspections, and then I can have, you know, True Sun Commercial Inspections. I just made that one up. If anybody wants to use it, it's not very good, but you're welcome to it. 

Lance Coffman  
Someone's gonna take it. 

Ian Robertson  
Someone's gonna take it. 

Lance Coffman  
That's right. 

Ian Robertson  
So Lance, you know way more about the commercial market than I do. Is there anything moving or shaking in the commercial market right now and trending over the next couple of years, in your opinion, that we should really focus in on?

Lance Coffman  
If it's a building being bought and sold, the small business buildings are still very hot. Whereas, like I said, it goes back to those small dentists and daycares and those type of things, or small office buildings, or there might be a little, you know, five or six office suites, or, you know, strip malls, shopping centers like that. Those things are always going to be being purchased and moved. It's just because there's a way to make consistent, either you own the building, or if it's multiple uses in one, there's a litany of lease opportunities. So someone's always going to be able to turn a profit, because even if business gets slow, people still have businesses, right? They're still going to try to push forward. Someone's still going to be cutting hair, someone's still watching your children, right? Someone's still washing dogs. That stuff's always going to happen. Those are service providers. So those type of buildings. Be on the lookout, like I said, for multi-use buildings being turned into multi family apartments, things of that nature. I would always recommend people build a lot of relationships with engineering and commercial construction contracting groups, because a lot of them may utilize you to come out and do kind of the initial inspection, and then they take your data, and then they build off of it. We get that all the time. And then, honestly, anything that's kind of like a warehouse that can be used for data or technology is going to get real hot, real quick, especially on the coasts. If you live in the Midwest, in the middle of the states, like me, it may not be as big a deal, but if you're on the coast somewhere, those data centers are going to get real big, and they're going to get, I think, to a point where you're going to see a lot of people purchasing those because our IT capabilities and AI and things that are happening are growing. You know, data is going to be huge. IT centers are going to be big, and that's going to bring in a lot of things. What people don't realize with commercial is it's a chain reaction. So let's say, for example, somebody moved into California, for example, and they are going to host a massive it facility for an up-and-coming AI product, and it's going to bring in 100 different individuals. What is that going to do? It's not only going to help housing, but it's going to create more profitability for apartment complexes, for small business storefronts, because someone's wife has a business. They're moving from Oklahoma to California now, they're going to be looking for a place. There's going to be, you know, so many different things that have a chain reaction to commercial and so I think people need to pay attention to that. Open up your eyes, look around you in the area that you're in, and see what's really changing. You drive to work every day, right? Like you drop your kids off, you go to church on Sundays, you're paying attention to what you're driving through. See what's coming up, or what's changed, or, oh, every time I drive through this neighborhood, these businesses are always closed, right? Well, then in your area that may be a dead duck, don't worry about it. Put information into it. But things like churches, schools, government. That's going to be really, really popular for the years to come. If you get into anything, pay attention to the small government and privately funded type buildings, they're always going to have a need for commercial inspections and understanding of building health. So that's going to be massive for most people coming in. That's going to be a lane that I think they can immediately jump in.

Ian Robertson  
Okay, so that that gives us some real, actionable information to work with, and I appreciate that, especially the warehouses. I don't think people, I mean, we all know about AI, but AI is like this thing that we kind of picture up in a cloud and we find it on our device. But there's really a big building, or multiple big buildings, where all of that stuff is housed and processed and then gets sent back to our phone. And there's small scale AI projects happening all the time. There's a guy, he's probably 15 minutes from me. I was chatting with him, and he is starting a small scale and I'm on the East Coast, he's starting a small scale AI project. And he doesn't need a very large data center, but he needs servers. He needs a data center to run those things on. So you could find something where it's a small project the size of a house or a relatively large one with acres of of warehouse space.

Lance Coffman  
That's right, yep, absolutely.

Ian Robertson  
So how do you, when you say, keep an eye out for those, when you see it, how do you take advantage of it, like, what do you do?

Lance Coffman  
Well, there's a few different ways to, if you will, keep an eye out for it. Everybody should have access to Google or something like that, right? So you need to be putting alerts on Google for certain buzz words that are happening in your areas. So like in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, where we've originally worked with our commercial company, right? We are constantly having buzzwords that pop up if someone is buying or selling big properties, or is there any state legislation that took place? Like years ago, I started commercial at the same time that marijuana became legal and really started getting hot in Oklahoma. Well, a few keyword changes here and there, and some key partnerships out of state, people called us to do inspections on buildings so they were going to grow marijuana and house their offices in, right? I knew that because I was paying attention to the market. But also I would say, look in your immediate areas. And when I say immediate area, I think inspectors should be looking up to five hours around them to be honest. 

Ian Robertson  
Oh yeah.

Lance Coffman  
That's like a baseline to be looking possibly, but looking in those immediate areas. You know, again, because I'm in Tulsa proper, I'm within three and a half, four hours of all of the major places in the state surrounding me. So I can put up keywords that say, what's going on over in Northwest Arkansas, right? What's happening up in Kansas City, what's going on down in North Texas. And then as I visit those areas, or if you're in those areas, drive around the major cities, or the major city metropolitan blocks. Are there buildings for sale? If there's buildings for sale, who has the sale sign on it, right? Are they project management groups? Be looking for those types of things, and then latch on to those individuals. The hard thing about residential was, these are, I don't know if it's really a harsh word to say, but it felt like, as a residential inspector, because I was one for a decade, we were kind of bottom feeders, right? Nobody really wanted to pay a lot of attention to us or build a lot of relationship, because we were so expendable, if you will, right? You sneeze in the wrong direction of the real estate agent, they go find somebody else. 

Ian Robertson  
There's a lot of us.

Lance Coffman  
Yeah, that's a lot of that. But when it comes to commercial you really can build really good relationships with people. So finding the brokers and the lenders and the attorneys and the bankers and all these individuals, see where their signs are at. If you always drive, because I always drive particular roads coming home, and I'm like, oh, that big building just got sold. So that lets me know, in this area, someone's looking for building types like that. So I need to go figure that out, and then use that information. And as you work through, you know, I always say finding a lane you want to go in for commercial, because there's no such thing as, I think, a master commercial inspector that can do it all, right? A home's a home, right? I became a certified master inspector through InterNACHI, any homes kind of a home, but in commercial, I may do 100 churches, but never step foot in a warehouse. I can't be an all around commercial, you know, a master inspector. So you're really going to find what you're good at, and then you start paying attention to those things in particular.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, and just to talk to that point, I agree. I remember one time I did a, it wasn't a big warehouse, relatively big, and they had radiant floor heating, very specifically for horses. So it had to be a certain temperature, certain spacing. And I'll be honest with you, I probably spent more time researching that radiant flooring than I did doing the entire whole inspection. 

Lance Coffman  
I bet you did. 

Ian Robertson  
I should have just hired somebody to come in and do it for me because I never ran into it again, and it wasn't that interesting, 


Lance Coffman  
Right, right. Yeah. 

Ian Robertson  
So nobody needs to know the optimal hoof temperature of a horse.

Lance Coffman  
Unless they are going to say that I am THE inspector who does stables and stuff like that, and you'll be surprised if you put yourself out as that person. People will pay you to come to wherever they are to do those inspections. And that's like any industry, right? I mean, I know, for example, people who are animal chiropractors, and they're so good, they get hired to go all across the United States to people's show horses, to do these jobs. This same thing could be done for commercial. If you put yourself out as that expert and that thought leader, you'll get business just based on that. It may not be where you are immediately, but like you said, drive up to North Dakota, go to the next state. People will pay for it if it's a good enough value, they really will.

Ian Robertson  
See you just turned my horse story and gave me some business coaching. I love it. That's perfect.

Lance Coffman  
That's what I like doing for commercial. Because people are, I say people, let me bring this in, home inspectors coming over from residential because that's a lot of our audience today. They kind of have this lowly thinking process of like, how am I going to do this and be successful, right? I've been pounding the dirt in home inspections for years, and we all live and die by the Sunday calendar and home inspections, right? You look on Sunday, you're like, what do we have set up for the next week? Cool. We get to buy groceries on Friday. In commercial, you get to build out quarterly, right? You really get to build out your business. And what people are missing is they have to first understand what it means to be a building business owner. That's like your first step. Once you put yourself in that mindset, then you can have better conversations with people. Then you feel more confident, because and it goes back to the things I said, if I call a school board and they put me down in front of 50 people on a school board, I'll be able to have fluent conversations with them, because I've studied it, I've been around them. I feel confident in it. Everyone can do that. They can find a lane or a thing, or even if it's in their area. And so that's why I said about the horse stalls. It's like, what's in your area? Like, oh, there's nothing here. But, you know, horse stalls and dollar generals. And I'm like, then you need to be the master horse stall and Dollar General inspector. And when you put that out there to the world, people will need you, and then maybe you just created this massive United States company. Who knows?

Ian Robertson  
You know, the only problem with inspecting Dollar Generals is you're always going to have to write up all the obstructions, because you can't get down any of the aisles in any Dollar General I've ever been in.

Lance Coffman  
That's right, life safety is a joke.

Ian Robertson  
Like, yeah, you're just gonna die in here.

Lance Coffman  
Yeah, probably so, absolutely.

Ian Robertson  
But I liked your thought about Google Alerts. If anybody doesn't know how to do this, set up a Google Alert. Ask ChatGPT ironically, or ask Gemini on Google. How do I set up a Google alert and set up all these different things for commercial buildings in your area, and get to see what's happening, and then write good content, you know. And everybody likes to think..so I have a client, and he's just like, Ian, I don't want to have SEO out in these other areas. There's nothing out there. I want to do it only in these major cities, because that's where all the commercial buildings are. And I basically told him, no, you got to know this guy. I told him, no. I'm like, just watch. Like, six months later, he was getting calls for commercial inspections in these small little towns that we were marketing to. I'm like, every little town is going to have a grocery store that gets sold, is going to have a horse barn, or going to have something where they need a commercial specialist to come in. Maybe not, I got horses on the brain, maybe not a horse barn. These little commercial buildings, and nobody else is marketing in those areas. We call it in our industry, fractional marketing. But for commercial, it's golden. There's not a town of 2000 people that don't have something. In my town it's 175 people. In walking distance, I have three commercial buildings and also a couple of fire department and, you know, what do you call it, emergency medical place, and all this other stuff right there. A lot of them need to get their regular commercial inspections. 

Lance Coffman  
That's right.

Ian Robertson  
You know.

Lance Coffman  
That's right. That's just good conversation and good sales tactics to do that. We have to think too with commercial a lot of people who own it say, for example, in your town, you have fast food restaurant, like an Arby's or, say, Dollar General, a lot of times, those aren't single owner businesses. These are, these are investors who may have 20 Arby's. They just saw that that one was being sold, so they picked another one up for their portfolio. So it's always important to go, well, there's an Arby's or a restaurant in my town. That's kind of one I see in every city. Then go figure out who the owner is, right? And just ask, do you own other restaurants? And then, like, yeah, I own four Arby's, and then I actually own that over there, and this and this. And you're like, great. Now you're in for a good conversation to talk about annual inspections, and maintenance, and things of that nature. That's all possible. It's just, how confident are you and how much can you, you know, how much can you dig, how much sleuthing can you do, if that's the type of commercial lane you want to go down.

Ian Robertson  
And I remember one time I was working with a guy, and we were in a Moe's or something like that, and I jokingly said, I'm like, oh man, they're charging extra for the guacamole, gotta pay those fees. And he goes, how much do you actually think they pay in their in their fees to own the name and own this business and all that? And I got curious. I'm like, well, let me look it up. He was making fun of me, like, I didn't know, and I didn't. So I looked it up. The money that they drop on things. And we like, we're talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars, and millions of dollars here or there, and they're just throwing money around every day. And what we're worried about, is our $1,200 estimate to do a walk through too much? We're only going to be there for the morning. They don't care. That $1,200 for the morning walk through with no report is nothing to them. Nope, not a thing. Drop in the bucket.

Lance Coffman  
Usually it isn't. And when you have conversation, this comes back in that consultant mindset. This is why people should be busy in the fourth quarter. Because what do businesses do in the fourth quarter?

Ian Robertson  
You talk about actually start making profit after Black Friday, like retail?

Lance Coffman  
When you think of the entire fourth quarter, what is something that they have to do in that fourth quarter for the next year? 

Ian Robertson  
Oh, they have to plan. 

Lance Coffman  
They have to plan. They have business planning. You should be a part of the business planning, right? That's a great time to start inserting yourself in those conversations. And like you said, or in January when you called them, they're like, we don't really have any issues or needs. We're not really worried about it. But as you keep tripping on them and you keep calling them, or you keep being around them or sending them great SEO or an article or whatever you wrote, and they remember it. Their roof goes out in October, and now they're like, oh crap, we didn't expect to spend an extra 30 grand this year. That really killed our budget. And then you find that out, right? Or just through conversation, then you have that business building and that planning conversation with them of having me come in for $1,500 and providing this value could have saved you 25 to $30,000 last year. Yeah, right. So is that something you want to do now next year, and then you'll be surprised, and that's a great conversation. I love having that conversation, but again, that's a confidence thing. You have to get yourself ready to have that conversation. You have to understand what business planning and all that is. Again, there's a lot of learning to do with it. I don't think commercial is just as easy as hopping over and, you know, having a fantastic website, because once you do that, again, that's perceived value, then you have to know what actual value do I provide? That's why a lot of people always had trouble with pricing. Because they're like, oh, I'm going to charge 20 grand for that building all day long. I'm like, you can, but are you giving 20 grand worth of value. Because if it's 10 grand of actual value, then offer them 10 grand, and then do that five times this week, right? Instead of trying really hard to just throw as much out as you can. So that's a lot of what I, you know, if you want to know what I do with CCPIA, that's it, like it's helping people understand that mindset. Because once you get that mindset, and once you understand how to use the resources we have, then people start sprinting. And I see people's commercial success grow quicker than mine ever did when I first started, because the resources and tools are present to them, or just conversations like this, where they didn't realize, oh, that was a thing, I didn't know, and then they start running for it.

Ian Robertson  
Well, I wish when I had started commercial inspections almost 20 years ago, CCPIA, you, podcast like this was around, because I just fumbled around. And to be honest with you, the intimidation and the imposter syndrome really kicks in pretty hard when you're first starting out. But fortunately, if you have people to guide you through, I'd say, okay, listen, don't charge 20 grand for that inspection. You can only give them 10 grand of value. But then you can also tell them, this isn't a home inspection. You need to charge more than $500. This is real world. They're gonna expect more. And being able to stand up and give people confident prices and talk to them confidently about their building. Because, let's be honest, you've talked to business people, Lance. A guy who's working out of a $380 million a year cell phone business who owns 15 buildings, they can be pretty intimidating to talk to, and as a business person, they size you up pretty quickly. It's what they do typically. So how did you get over the intimidation factor?

Lance Coffman  
Honestly, I just asked a lot of questions, and I think there was a lot of opportunities, especially at the beginning of my career, where I could have given better value, and I just didn't, because I didn't know better. But I was always curious to ask questions. And when I started my business, I built relationships with other business professionals. So I would reach out to the roofers and the electricians and the plumbers and the fire safety people and the life safety and, you know, the attorneys and all this. And I would have conversations trying to get an understanding of what do you actually do in this process. And then through that, I would reach out to, okay, who's in my network of people I know already, or, like, for example, in Oklahoma, we're in the Bible Belt, there's a lot of church buildings here. Well, I know people who go to churches or who maybe are a pastor who works on a board. Just take them to coffee or dinner and sit down and say, I want to pick your brain on how this idea works. And that's what I did. And so I just kept doing that, and then I learned from trial and error. Someone would call and say, hey, we have a small school we need inspected. Here's what we need. I know I can offer that service, but there's a lot of learning along the way. So I just ask questions as if I already have an answer, but I want to get something out of them to, you know, expand the reporting. But all the while I know nothing. So if I'm sitting in front of a board meeting, it's like, okay, well, let's talk about your pain points with your building, and you start writing things down. I know about buildings, right? I already have that expertise. But as you just talk about pain points, people are willing to talk about their pain points. They're willing to talk about what they need to do and how to be successful with their business ownership, if you just have the confidence to ask them, it's not like a hidden agenda. You know, if you're cold calling people and you're having a hard time getting through to them, then you're either gonna have to drip campaign them or leave them alone. But there's times when people actually reach out to you. Use those moments when someone reaches out to you to be a learning experience, so that then you can turn around and go after people of the same type of business or value, or, you know, set up and you can be successful that way. So I just learned to fail. But I also like talking to people. I think you have to be a decent communicator. I think you have to carry yourself well. I really want an organization of members, especially in CCPIA, of people who, you know, comb their hair and brush their teeth and use good language, and they seem mature and put together because, like you said, you sit down with a guy running a $500 million multi-building, multi-state business. You can't sit down and act like a just kind of a goober good old boy in front of them and hope you get successful. You have to be able to have a vernacular and a type of conversation with them. And at first your voice will tremble, but you'll get better at it. But as long as you have the confidence to do it and know that I need to know what they know, then you can go into that conversation with confidence. And like we said, we have ChatGPT and things. So it's like, hey, next Tuesday, I meet with a guy who owns 12 Taco Bells, what should I know going into that conversation as a business owner? Just use the simple tools that are already there. It may give you good stuff, at least some questions to launch on.

Ian Robertson  
And you know, it's a different kind of relationship too. So commercial real estate agents are a different breed than regular home agents, residential agents. But a lot of this relationship building, less of it comes from agents, in my experience, than it does in the residential field. So you build relationships more directly with your clients, and they have a very different angle. The average home buyer. They don't care about us, except for the two week inspection contingency, and if they're mad at us after they move in and we missed a drippy faucet. With commercial buyers, you can miss 100 drippy faucets, and they're not even going to know or care. Typically, you shouldn't be missing them. But I'm just saying it's a completely different thing. They're going to look at your high level. What have they done for us? At the end of the day, they missed 100 drippy faucets over the past five years, this dude, though, has saved us $30 million in repairs. They're going to look at it completely different.

Lance Coffman  
And that all happens with those conversations with your clients up front, what they have an expectation of, what your output is going to be in your reporting, because the actual inspection itself is so small in comparison to the final reporting and your deliverables, that is really what matters, right? I mean, I could be on a site. Here's a great example. A couple years ago, I was asked to go inspect an Amazon warehouse. Amazon doesn't own their own buildings. They lease their buildings. So this was a million square foot building, and I didn't walk through the middle, because it's all pallets and racks and people working. I stuck to the outside, walked on the roof, did my stuff. I was there two hours, and it took me another two hours to write the report. Got paid great for it, but it didn't take long, but it was the report, and what I put in it, and how I put it together was the value. That was the value that I offered. That's what they paid for. They didn't care how long I was there. They wanted to make sure I got everything I needed. You know, if you're there with the little daycare owner, it may feel more like a home inspection, because they're really like, hey, a $200 something this month could kill my bottom line. Amazon doesn't give a, like you said, a crud, about a drippy faucet in that bathroom. They have 20 guys that work there to fix drippy faucets in bathrooms. That's not what they cared about. They want to know that they had 100 RTUs on the roof that were 15 years old, and they need to be projecting out the replacement of those the next eight years. And that was $485,000. That's what they cared about. They didn't care about the drippy faucet. The daycare owner might have. It's all in the conversation and understanding their needs.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, the smaller the business, the more it feels like the residential side. I agree with that. The larger the business, the less it does. But um, man, Lance, we could talk all day about this stuff, but it sounds like the commercial market is still, in my opinion, a place to be. It does require us to elevate ourselves, and that is hard to do. Let's be frank. I mean, look how you're dressed for the podcast. You have your logo on your shirt, the hat. Looks like a uniform with CCPIA logo, and this looks like something you could show up on site with. That's the kind of level, use that as an imagery for what we need to present to our potential clients. But well worth it. It's a fun field. It's a great field. And like you said, it's something that you can, you know, schedule out your next quarter or two quarters. You get annual recurring revenue. We should do a whole podcast on the sellability and value of having a business that has both MRR and ARR and how to calculate that. I mean, that's valuable within itself.

Lance Coffman  
But you're getting into a different level of thought process now. But now you're separating the, I just do inspections, and I own a business that helps other businesses. That's the next level that we're not going to be able to get everybody to, but the ones who can get up there, are going to have a lot of fun doing it.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, exactly. Those are fantastic words to leave us on, Lance. Thank you for that, and thank you everybody. Thank everybody there at CCPIA for letting you come on and always supporting us, and we support you guys. And next time you want to come on, talk about anything, we'd love to have you back.

Lance Coffman  
I will. I have to tell you, though the podcast name. I have it.

Ian Robertson  
Please do. Please do.

Lance Coffman  
Gotta at least fix that, because I did screw that up. So my podcast is called Staying Smart in CRE. And then Rob also has his member spotlight and our round tables and building your business, all of that's on Spotify, and all that information is on our website, ccpia.org. So go check that stuff out. It's good digestion.

Ian Robertson  
Say that name one more time for us.

Lance Coffman  
It is ccpia.org. You will find our podcast, Staying Smart in CRE.

Ian Robertson  
Perfect. 

Lance Coffman  
Yes, if you look that up, or just look up the CCPIA page on like Spotify, Apple Music, those things, you'll see all of them there.

Ian Robertson  
Awesome. Adding it to my list. 

Lance Coffman  
Good deal, man. 

Ian Robertson  
Talk soon Lance.

Lance Coffman  
Talk to you later. I appreciate it. 

Ian Robertson  
Me too.

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.

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