Remembering Your Why

What keeps you going when home inspection gets tough? When you're rubbing your temples between appointments or crawling through another challenging crawlspace, what drives you forward?

In this candid conversation, Jay returns to the podcast for another installment of "Drinking with Jay" to explore the concept of remembering your professional "why" – that core purpose that separates sustainable success from eventual burnout. Over glasses of Glendonock 12-year scotch and Ironweed Empire Rye, we dive into how your fundamental purpose affects everything from client relationships to business decisions.

Jay shares insights about "trauma-driven success" – how childhood wounds and the need to prove critics wrong can fuel achievement but ultimately lead to emptiness. We contrast this with the sustainable motivation that comes from genuinely caring about clients and recognizing the profound responsibility of safeguarding what is likely their largest lifetime investment.

The conversation takes a revealing turn as we discuss how houses are deteriorating across markets while buyers simultaneously have less money, fewer skills, and greater pressure to purchase quickly. This creates a perfect storm where vulnerable buyers need trustworthy inspectors more than ever. "Intentions have a smell," as we discuss – clients can sense when you genuinely care versus when you're simply chasing a paycheck.

Perhaps most powerfully, Jay opens up about his personal "why" – reclaiming evenings and weekends with his family – and how this purpose has shaped his business decisions, from pricing strategy to work boundaries. His vulnerability highlights how aligning business with personal values creates not just professional success but meaningful fulfillment.

Whether you're an established inspector feeling burnout or just starting your career, this conversation offers a compelling reminder that understanding your deeper purpose creates resilience, authenticity, and direction in a challenging industry. Subscribe now and join us for more thought-provoking discussions about the business and philosophy of home inspection.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Drinking With Jay Returns
• 2:15 Understanding Your Professional Why
• 9:35 Trauma-Driven Success in Business
• 15:10 Genuine Care vs. Sales Techniques
• 21:40 Modern Housing Market Challenges
• 29:00 Personal Whys and Family Balance
• 45:45 Episode Wrap-Up

Transcript

Ian Robertson 
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, Jay, good to have you back on.

Jay Wynn 
It's good to be back, Ian. I know it's been quite a while since we sat down and chatted.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and this is still one of my favorite segments. Drinking With Jay. I gotta say it like that. We gotta have some like, light piano music in the background, like Drinking With Jay. Start talking because Jay's listening.

Jay Wynn 
Oh boy, I need another drink.

Ian Robertson 
You need another drink.

Jay Wynn 
It's hasn't started yet. But okay.

Ian Robertson 
The podcast subject we're going to be talking about today is pretty existential when it comes to home inspections. Remember Your Why, and we're gonna get into what that means in a little bit. And this was your idea. And I love the idea. But before we get into that, in the tradition of Drinking With Jay, what are you drinking?

Jay Wynn 
An old standby, I went and I got another bottle of scotch of that one that I found in Scotland, the Glendronach 12 year old. But I got it in my Treetop Brewery glass. So Treetop Breweries, they opened one in Saratoga, and we went, there's this great little whiskey drinking glass. So I picked one up, and so we're doing my 12 year old Scotch in my special glass. So I'm all happy about all that.

Ian Robertson 
So I think Drinking With Jay would be a Glendronach commercial if it could be, because I think this a second or third time you've had it on, right?

Jay Wynn 
Yeah, probably I love it, and if I got to go for something that just checks all the boxes, that's it. So I really love it. It's got a little bit of the bourbon overtone with some of the sweetness, and it's got some of the Scotch flavors that I like, with a little bit of the peat and light smoke. But it's not too heavy on anyone, and it's just a nice sipping scotch.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and, I mean, you even brought that when we roasted a pig like manly men in the woods.

Jay Wynn 
Yes. And everybody agreed it's a good scotch.

Ian Robertson 
Tonight I'm drinking Ironweed Empire Rye Whiskey.

Jay Wynn 
Ooh.

Ian Robertson 
So it's a special edition that's from the Albany Distilling Company. So it's a local distillery that sells nationally. And I've had their stuff before on the show, and I saw them at a farmer's market, and I didn't know they had a rye. And I found out that you can only buy this rye at farmer markets, which I don't really go to. I know it seems like it should be part of my heritage to go to farmer markets, but nah, it's just, it's not my thing. But, um, I tried it. I liked it. I bought a bottle. I will say, for the tiny bottle I got, it's pretty expensive as ryes go. Might as well be a high end scotch, but it's good. I like it. It's got a little bit of an edge to it, and it's got a strong rye flavor. Because my one big beef with ryes is that they don't taste enough like rye, like I want it to taste like rye toast with alcohol in it. I want it to be punched in your face. This gives me about 70% of that, and it's kind of got, like a bourbon feel to it otherwise, but I like it.

Jay Wynn 
Nice. I agree with you on the rye. If you're gonna sit down and drink a rye whiskey, it's gotta have that, like you said, like the rye bread, but the really good rye bread, like the marble, the white and the black rye bread, that's, that's really, oh, that's, if you're going to do it, you got to go enough to make it worth it. I do think that's where a lot of them miss out. So, Ironweed, huh?

Ian Robertson 
Iron weed, I like it, and I do agree that's where a lot of them miss the mark is when I drink a rye, I should be able to say, oh, this is a rye without looking at the bottle. Otherwise, they just try to make it taste like every other light bourbon out there, so that people can't tell and call it a rye. Yeah. So Jay, this, um, Remember the Why, we're not talking about the YMCA, right? What are we talking about here?

Jay Wynn 
So there's a book that I read many years ago called Start With Why. And I forget the author of it. I read it about once a year. I could look it up. But he basically profiles some of the most successful individuals and some of the most successful businesses. And he says the number one thing they start with is they have a very clear definition of why they're in business, very, very clear, and they don't lose it, and the ones that do lose it ultimately fall apart and no longer hold their competitive edge, hold people together. They lose it. They lose that magic touch. And he goes into some of them, like when Lee Iacocca took over Chrysler, wasn't it? Lee Iacocca took over Chrysler, he had a very clear vision of where the car company needed to go. He understood why they were there and what they needed to do. They mentioned whether you like them or not Apple when they first came out. They had a very clear vision of what they were going to do. They were going to put the best personal computers into everybody's home. They had a very sharp focus on that, and as long as they maintain that, they did, they did phenomenally well as businesses. When they start losing that, why are they in business? Then they start to go the way of the dodo, and they start falling apart. But it also applies to like, if you're meeting somebody for the first time, and you can explain, we're a service based industry, and we've talked about it, and I really like it because you've mentioned in the podcast before that we're actually professional consultants. And I really like that mind shift, because it takes us from just a home inspector to what we really are, and that is a high end, very specialized, very educated, professional consulting company. But the question is, Why do we exist? Why are we doing what we do? Why hire us? And if we can answer those questions, or we understand the very clear why, our business is going to present much better than 90% of the competition around us. So from a business sense, I think it's very important to understand the why. But even then, I also think it's personally important to understand why we're doing this, both for our families and to make our finances work. And even bigger, like you said, it's a little bit existential, but I think understanding why we do this ultimately gives us also that work balance with family life that we need, and it helps us to deal with when life throws us the curves that it does. So it is a little bit existential, but I think it's an important question that everybody gets to wrestle with. Because some guys, in my mind, the guys that understand this, even if they can't articulate it, but they understand it, they do well, and the guys that don't understand this seem to flounder.

Ian Robertson 
You know, there's some deep stuff in there, because it is existential. And listen, it's not necessarily a straight up, here's a business strategy, but it's something that we should stop and reflect on. Because listen, if you're a highly paid athlete, have you ever seen the coaches? They'll spend a lot of time on why, why are you in, you'll even see them yell, why are you in this game? What are you doing? Who you doing this for? And they'll even see them say, picture who you're doing this for, you know, there was a comedian talking about, you'll never see a player be more successful than one who grew up with a single mom trying to make her proud, you know, or something. You know, people who understand their why, those are the ones that can push through some pretty crazy stuff. And we get through some pretty crazy stuff in our industry, and things get hard, you mentioned that. And when things get hard, if we remember our why, it helps us through it.

Jay Wynn 
Yeah. So I mean that professionally, I think in the last few years, a lot of us are feeling because it's like, why keep it up? Why do we do this? Why do we keep marketing and understanding the why? But I also think personally, it's important to gage, because I think everybody would agree, since Covid 2019 and things shut down, a lot of people have had a lot of things happen, just emotionally, family life, personally, and I just think that's taken a toll that nobody's really talking about, where people stop talking about too. And so that's also where it helps to have a very clear why. Why do we do this? Why are we getting up every morning? Why are we going out there? I think it helps us to deal with all that too. You know, I haven't broadcast this to a lot of people. But one of the reasons we had to kind of step back a little bit, is we had a death in the family. My father-in-law came down with terminal cancer, and he lived with us, and we ended up caretaking for him till, until he passed away. And so that was a situation where life presented us a very difficult, difficult set of circumstances. Understanding the why we were dealing with things helped us to get through that, then helped us to rebuild from that, too. So it's things like that, and that was one of the things that, you know, my wife and I, even with our son, we talked a lot about, is that, why do we have to deal with this? Why do we make these choices, and why do we keep going forward so it helps or it can help. You know, it's not the be all, end all, but it's certainly something that I think will help a lot of guys just refine and define their problems and help find a solution to it too. Why are you doing this? But I think the easiest one to start with is, rather than taking it personal is just go professionally. So like, why are we, why do we exist as an industry, and why are we in the home inspection business? And what is our personal why?

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and I think there's, our why kind of takes the wheel of our business too. So our why can be a lot of things. Our why can just be straight up money, like I know guys that are just like, a guy earlier today, he was talking about a business associate of him, and he goes, that guy loves money, and that is his why. He loves money. Here's my personal problem with that, though, is if our why can be perceived as vapid, not necessarily that getting money, you know, we work because we want to have money to support our families and stuff like that, but maybe our why is pride. Or maybe our why is, you know, people told me that I would amount to nothing. My father never helped me through things, and I'm just going to prove everybody wrong. Those kind of why's can lead us to some pretty serious burnout, because the more we work, the more money we get. So we work more until there's nothing left to our life but money sometimes. Tale as old as time, and I've seen people do it. If our why is just to prove everybody wrong, that we're not the loser that they said we were, then we're just going to burn ourselves out. Because, you know what? Unfortunately, nobody's really watching us that closely anyways, and when we do succeed, they're just going to find another thing to not like about us. So we need to get over that. But then there's other why's that drive us in a good direction in my opinion, this is not necessarily that the other things were bad. I mean, we could talk all night about trauma driven success. Everybody remember that term, trauma driven success, we'll have a podcast on that.

Jay Wynn 
Well, I think that's a big deal in our industry, though. No, I really do. I think that's an issue that a lot of guys don't talk about, but being pushed by other motives in our industry seems to be a very common theme, if you really drill down with some guys about why they're doing it.

Ian Robertson 
Well, hey, let's open up a little bit about it. You know, I'll talk about my why and what I think your why is, and you can tell us, but trauma driven success is one of the worst things that we can get into. So there was a study that I was reading about recently, and I wasn't planning on talking about this on this podcast, but 70 to 80% of what people consider successful people, they did surveys and checked with them, and blah, blah, blah, and about 70, 80% of them had what they call trauma driven success. They were neglected as a child. They were abandoned as a child. Their dad or their mother was just a complete turd to them, and they felt worthless, and then you end up working yourself to death, because you know what gives you visible success that you can show people, not the inward virtues that you build, the inward who you are, because then those same people that said you're a loser and an idiot, they'll just watch you sit and squalor, but still call your loser an idiot, even though you could be the kindest person in the world. So outwardly, on the exterior, I get a job, and I work more, then I drive a better car, then I have a better house, then I, you know, I give my kids the best things, and it becomes trauma driven success. I'll admit it, I have a wee bit of it myself. You know, there's always a measure of, you know, looking back on your life and saying, okay, yeah, maybe, maybe I have a bit of trauma driven success. And I know other successful home inspection company owners. It's a conversation that we have at a, I don't want to call it a higher level, but you get a room of home inspectors, the multi-inspector firms, the quote, unquote, big guys together. It's a whole different conversation a lot of times when you bring up that subject. So it's a dangerous why to have.

Jay Wynn 
It is, but here's where I run into it is most guys that I've talked to and other home inspectors, especially ones that want to be hyper successful will put on the front in front of other people. But when you get them alone and you start talking, and you actually make a human connection with them, and they feel comfortable, a lot of guys will open up real fast. And I say guys, because I don't, you know, sit and have intimate conversations with ladies typically. It's just, we tend to keep it peer to peer. I know there's ladies out there in the inspection industry, and they're killing it, and so kudos to them. I just happen to talk to the guys that's all, but a lot of guys, when they feel comfortable, they start opening up, and you find out there's a lot of those issues that are driving them. And the problem with that is it's like a fire. It's like you can keep throwing wood on a fire and it will consume everything and never be satisfied. So I think that's part of maybe what you're, you're talking about, too, is that it is such a vicious driver that is never satisfied with it, with whatever you achieve. There's always that something more that you have to do, or there's always that something more pulling you or something more pulling you down is more accurate. So I don't think, I mean, I don't think that's a good why to have, but if you can identify that, maybe you can start entangling that too. But the other reason I think your why is important, I think if your why is shallow and self-serving is that translates through into your business too, and it translates through into your interactions. And I think maybe that's the one that I see more, let's just keep it with inspectors, because that's in our profession. But I see that more with guys. It's the guys that really care about their people, the people that they're inspecting for, that understand the importance of why we're out there doing this, of why we're charging what we're charging, and actually care that we're being entrusted with the most valuable purchase that a person can make, probably in their lifetime. They want us to go through and put our stamp of approval on it, if you will, really look at it for them, because they're about to invest years of their life into it. And you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars of their monies due. I mean, if you understand that's a super important responsibility to carry, and you care about that, then that also translates through too. And I think people pick up on that real quick. I think we have to sell ourselves very, very fast. I mean, most people are making an impression within one to two minutes about us, but I think they really, they cue in on why we do what we do. I know one of the markers that I've had, and one of the reasons I think we've been successful as a company, is at the end of the inspection, people go, wow. We felt cared for. We felt like he was really watching out for us. He obviously loves what he does. He's knowledgeable. But we felt like he is on our side, and that's really what I'm shooting for all the time, is that, why are we doing this? Because you're trusting me with one of the biggest decisions you're ever going to make, and I've got to get this right, and I understand that.

Ian Robertson 
You know, you said something very important there, because some of the best advice I've ever heard about being a good salesman is, I forget how it happened. I think this guy was like teaching everybody all these sales things, and he goes, you know what the best trick is? Stop being a salesman. We as humans, are good at picking up genuineness for the most part. We can be fooled, but being fooled is short lived, and a smaller pool of people. In reality, we're drawn to genuineness. And the guy's point that he was trying to make was, and I really wish I remember who this was, but he said, listen, if you're like you just mentioned, Jay, you actually care about people. You want to help them. They're going to pick up on that, and that is going to be the best sales. So stop with all the tricks and things like that. Matter of fact, my insurance carrier recently, my insurance was up and the rate went up just because our business income was up, and so he called, and there was no mixed signals or anything. He goes, this is gonna be a little bit of work, but I think it's worth it if we look and get you a better deal to either get a comparable or a better insurance quote, and he bent over backwards, got it done, and I genuinely felt cared for. I've had this guy for 18, 19, years as my insurance carrier. I'll never leave him, because you know what? He actually, genuinely cares. He has two daughters. You know, we're quote, unquote, Facebook friends, so to speak. You know, we follow each other on social media. He cares about people. There was a mistake that happened years ago, and he corrected it quickly, apologized, owned up to it. You can't fake that. And especially if you're an intelligent person, you can pick up on that fake garbage pretty quickly. His why has always been his family, he goes. I need to go and face my wife and my daughters at the end of the day and have them know that I'm not a sleazeball. I need to be able to see any of my clients and feel good about that. I can meet any of my clients out in the street, and I feel good about meeting them. How many of us as home inspectors can go and meet all of our clients and just run into them in the store and not hide in the other aisle waiting for them to go?

Jay Wynn 
And that's the goal, isn't it, to give them such a good experience. And this is the thing is, you don't necessarily need to be right with everything, or you don't need to necessarily have found everything, but you need to have made the best effort possible. And they need to know that you did that. And I think that's the thing, is that even a few years after I've run into clients and they said, yeah, we love the house, there were a few things... And you know, you find out that stuff that got moved or it wasn't necessarily your fault, but after the inspection, you find out that there were things that they didn't know about moving in, but because you went through so much effort for them, and they picked right up on that, they were still on your side, and that's a good place to be. And you know what I mean about that? You were talking a little bit about, I think, with Preston Kincaid in one of your recent podcasts. I think it was with him about the personal experience, or, I forget how you guys worded it, but it had to do with AI and the AI generation. And people still love that human interaction. So if you can give them a human interaction with a very sincere why that you understand and you believe, then that puts us, I still say, in the top 10% if not in the top 2% because understanding that very clearly, it translates, I think people I heard an expression that says, intentions have a smell. If somebody's trying to take advantage of you, typically, you can come through and you pick up on it relatively quickly. But if someone's genuine, then that comes through too.

Ian Robertson 
I think we should name this podcast episode that instead, intentions have a smell. I think more people would click on the link and they'd be like, wait a second, what? I don't want to smell your intentions, Jay.

Jay Wynn 
Once you say it, you're like, oh, yeah, that actually makes sense.

Ian Robertson 
It does. So it's like, when you when you see a person walking towards you, I remember you always said this inspecting, when you feel weird about something, it's your subconscious picking up on something. Stop for a minute. Make the rest of the brain catch up. You can smell people's intentions when somebody's walking down the road, their gait, the way they look, the way their shoulders are perched one way or the other, and it's like, okay, I can smell their intention. Something's not right here. But it happens, and genuine has a good smell. When we're genuine, it has a good smell to it. One of the best keyword sets for convergence, interestingly, is anything that has to do with a family business. Because, and I never tell people to, you have to actually have a family business to advertise as a family business. So some people are like, oh, make sure you say it's a family business. It's like, okay, where's your family? He's like, oh, I got a brother in Arkansas. Like, that doesn't count, man. But people love that because it feels genuine. When you can't meet the person to see them face to face, it gives them a feel of genuineness. So I'll tell you what my why always was. And let's just be real about a home inspection. There's days where you're hitting your second inspection, and you pull over on the side of the road, and you just kind of sit there and rub your forehead for a while in between. I've hit it many times, or it's just like, I'm cooked after your second inspection today, or whatever, you're just like, you just go and you pull off somewhere. I always kept a picture of my wife and my daughter up in the visor, and I'd always keep a current photo, change it out every once in a while. And while sitting there, rubbing my forehead, I'd look up and say, sometimes even audibly, that's why I'm doing it, and I'd move along. I always liked it if I could bring my daughter with me to pick up a radon test or, you know, something, because it reminded me, this is why I'm doing it. And unintentionally, my clients would pick up on that. They'll be like, oh, you should meet Ian's daughter. She came in, she's so cute, and this and that, and it would immediately make the room reek of genuineness. We're going to talk about the smelly intention thing the whole rest of the podcast.

Jay Wynn 
It's fine. I think it works, but it does.

Ian Robertson 
For me it elevated me out of trauma driven success, you know, having a vapid reason for doing business, to having a real, genuine love as my reason. And that gave me better intentions, not that I had bad intentions. I always wanted to be the best at what I did, but now I wanted to be the best at what I did, because that's a family like mine. So that drove me to say, okay, I know I'm losing this agent, but I'm going back in that crawl space. It's gonna take me another half hour and the agents just gonna have to sit it out. You know, it made me a better human and a better inspector when I had a good why.

Jay Wynn 
And I agree with that. I heard it really well explained, is that, how did they word it? We're a good faith industry in large, you know? And I thought that was a great way of putting it, I mean, when we show up, then we're promising that we are going to do the very best of our abilities within all good intentions and all good faith to find the legitimate problems in a home, so that people can have intelligent conversations about it and protect their interests by making decisions that work for their family. And I think about that, is that we're not showing up to pad our pockets. We're not showing up to be the number one guy per the numbers in the area. We're showing up just for that reason because in good faith, they need a highly qualified professional to do his due diligence and look at everything that can be seen in that house and put it all together for them so that then they can make the best decision for their families. And that can be a lot to carry, and again, if you're doing it just to bang your numbers up, or to pad your pocket that's pretty shallow, but it also means that if you have that in mind, and you're looking at the...I just have an experience that just kind of translates into this, but you're looking at protecting their interests. And I just looked at one, the house was as is, it was in a more depressed area that I inspect in. Got there, and I knew the house had major problems, because obviously I just know the area. My client showed up, and it was a single mother about maybe 25 to 28 something like that. She had her young kid there. She was working on rebuilding her life, and she was looking at this house because she couldn't stand basically living at home anymore. There was the fire in her apartment, so she got burned out of her apartment. She was back living with her mother. That situation wasn't working, and she needed to get out. So she found this building because it was in her price range, and we were looking at it, but the building had major, major, major structural problems. Now I could have blasted through and just yeah, well, it's as is, and you understand what you're getting into, you're gonna have to fix this, this and this, but I took the time to really explain to her what was going to be involved for her to get into that property, and it wasn't going to work for her. And I felt like in this transaction, neither agent bothered to show up, and no one had ever taken the time to walk her through and actually look at the building and show this stuff to her. I felt like I was the only one looking out for this young lady, you know, and that's why we do it, too. So we didn't even go in the house, but we were probably outside of that building for almost an hour. There was so much damage to the foundation. There was so much damage and rot in the walls. We were just talking about things, and we spent that time with her, partly so she knew what she was getting out of, but partly so when she was looking at houses, she could also know different things to look for. So she could wrap her head around so like I walked her through signs of water damage, how things are moving against the house, signs of the foundation shifting. So then now she looks at a house again, she's also better educated to find something that will work for her.

Ian Robertson 
And that's a beautiful why, because the best gift that you can give, the greatest way you can help someone is to help someone who cannot give something back. She wasn't an investor it sounds like, she wasn't some agent that can give you 10, 20 inspections a year. In fact, very likely you might not get anything later on, because she might just rent an apartment or anything. You did something for another human being that made her life better for the sake of making her life better with nothing in return. That's a beautiful thing, you know, and that's a beautiful why, and that's why, that's why you get reviews and people like, we're in the same service area, the things that people say about you are beautiful. Love you or hate you, even the people that are like that guy, he killed my deal, yeah, but he's, you know, he knows what he's doing, and he takes care of people or whatever, you know, they they have to admit that, and that's a beautiful why to have. So we were talking about the AI disruption. And it's funny how many people think that we're talking about ChatGPT giving us comments for our reports. That is so outside the scope of what we're talking about. Matter of fact, just today, somebody emailed me about home inspector just being able to take photos and the AI going through and just writing the report for them. And I'm just like, you obviously don't listen to the podcast. That's what's going to elevate guys like you out of that mess that's going to be happening at some point where AI just has people take a bunch of pictures, looks at the pictures, and writes a report. People are going to go, okay, that's great that you have an AI report from this company that does them for 150 bucks with a 19 year old college student just walking through. But why don't you have Jay come through in afterwards, he's going to actually take care of you.

Jay Wynn 
So you know what my plan is for the next few years. My plan is to adopt all of the AI tools that work for our industry but still provide an awesome service. So my goal is to give them the absolute best of both. I'm going to give them the best of the, you know, the common knowledge that's out there, because I'm not opposed to using it, but then I'm also going to do the best that I can to walk them through so that they understand their house. I'm sorry there's no AI program that can do that. There probably won't be for a very, very long, long time. There's no AI program that's going to handle the father in law coming in and who's wound up tighter than a pine knot and pointing all these things out. But you know full well, he's going to have probably more input on this decision than anybody else, and how he's treated and how his questions are answered. It may be the most important person to talk with, even though, like you said, he might be the reason that you're by the side of the road holding your temples between inspections. But AI is not going to handle that. AI is not going to look at their kids and go, Yeah, your kids have special needs. Well, then you need to think about this and this and this. So these are things that you may think about with this property, and I've had that too, where we find out that, you know, and it only comes from talking with people too. I'm looking at a property, and it usually starts out very, very formal. This is what we're here to do. But after about an hour on the property, I typically know their kids names, if they have them, their dogs, their pets, how they're going to be using the property, a rough idea what they do for a career, what they're looking to do for goals in their life. So all this is factoring into as I'm inspecting, I'm pointing things out to them. So for instance, if somebody's talking to me and they're saying, This is my forever home. I want to be here till I die, then it changes from somebody that goes well, I change jobs every two years, so just show me what I need to fix in the next couple of years. You can really dial that in, because that's part of why we're there. We're there to get them information that lets them use the home, or lets them make decisions about the home the way they think they're going to use it. AI is not going to take that away. There's no way that AI is going to come up with that. And I think if it ever does, we've crossed a line where most of our industries have been removed and replaced, and I think we're going to have bigger issues as a society. So I'm not too worried about that, because my goal with that is to do both, is to provide them with the best experience possible and use the latest tools possible too.

Ian Robertson 
And that's very well said, and I guess that's kind of the point. And the point I brought out in that podcast was it's going to come in thirds in my opinion. The bottom third of the industry is going to be gone because there's going to be, listen, if we're doing, you know, $200 inspections, they're going to get a 19 year old kid to give a $200 inspection with AI assisting it. You know, it's going to take pictures and say, okay, now push this wall. Is it soft? Okay, if it's soft, then here's the three likely reasons, and it's just going to follow prompts. The middle third, they're going to struggle. It's going to be those of us that adopted some AI tools, but not all. Maybe have some good customer service, but not really. We were the middle ground. The high end guys, the top third. I'm not talking large companies necessarily, just guys like you aren't gonna have to worry about it. In fact, it's gonna be better be like, cool I have, I have all the AI tools that those cheap, $200 inspectors have. Here's my $1,000 inspection. Because we do XYZ, we do the things that you can't get the 19 year old college student on a summer vacation with a tablet to do and when they're trying to figure out, oh, well, how about adding an addition on here? Well, you could, but you have gray water going out of the back of the house, so you're going to have to move that before you put an addition. You might want to think about putting it on the east corner. Oh, well, we never would have thought about that. Again AI is not going to be able to replace that, at least probably not in our lifetime. So what I'm trying to warn people out of is get out of that bottom third. There's too many of us down there. If we can at least get to the middle or the top third by doing things like knowing your why, having a good why, and being good with people that way, being genuine.

Jay Wynn 
Yeah. So I mean, and that's part of that, that's part of how you break through, is by understanding why we do this. Lately, and I don't know about other guys, but lately, at least in the last six months, it feels like, on a number of these inspections I'm going on, I feel like I'm the only person looking out for the buyer.

Ian Robertson 
Unfortunately.

Jay Wynn 
No, I've had several inspections where their agent never bothered to show up. The listing agent showed up and tried ram-routing houses with major problems through in just about every case, it's young couples trying to get out of an apartment, typically, because they have kids and they've outgrown the apartment. I think in every case, it's been that situation. So they're desperate to get out, and buildings with just critical defects that were overpriced, that they can't afford to repair, and nobody's telling them about it, and everybody's pushing them into this place. And when we stop and take the time and walk them through and point this stuff out to them, they realize that not only are they not avoiding a problem, they're avoiding a money pit that is going to bankrupt them. And it feels like sometimes I'm the only one that's looking out for that. It shouldn't be that way, but it feels like it is, and it feels like it's getting more and more that way in certain areas, I am fortunate that I work with a lot of really great real estate professionals, but there are certain areas where I'm inspecting in where it's like buyer beware of everybody involved, including the agent they hired to represent them. So why are we there to protect our people, and we're there to watch out for them and and I think the older I get and the more I see this, the stronger I feel that.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, well, and that comes off to people that smell of your intentions, comes off to people, they know that you want to protect them. And tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems like, over the past five, six years, houses seem to be getting worse.

Jay Wynn 
They're worse, absolutely

Ian Robertson 
Okay, so it's not just me. Maybe it's just because so much of the bottom of the barrel is being sold now, and people are overpaying for bottom of the barrel, like, oh yeah, $500,000 house, and it's like, oh geez. You know, before the pandemic, there's nobody would have bought this. But now there's like, eight offers.

Jay Wynn 
And I'm going to tell you how I know that is because the reports that I'm writing now are longer with more majors, with more issues, and we're talking more major issues. We're talking major water damage, termite infestation, foundation issues, in particular, bad roofs. You know how many buildings I look at where we've got a bad roof that should have been replaced a few years ago, and it's still on. Everybody's trying to push it off. No, no, I think houses have gotten, I think the quality of the house on the market has gone downhill. It used to be a long report if I had three majors prior to 2018 seriously, that was about what I was looking at two or three majors. Usually they were in the realm of addressable. I'm writing some reports now where I'm coming out with with 10 major items all through the house, anything ranging from foundation to framing, plumbing issues, water issues, I think houses are in rougher shape now because there's been such a demand that the stuff that would never have gone on the market before is now on the market over asking and being pushed to people that are in desperate situations trying to get out of their current living environment.

Ian Robertson 
I also think too, I definitely think exactly what you just said, but also too, people have less money with inflation and all that stuff that's happened over the past five years that you know what, your taxes have likely gone up. Here in New York, we have awful taxes. You know, there's some areas around here where you have a 1500 square foot house, and you know you're paying seven, $8,000 in taxes. It's nuts. So now that's money that comes away from home maintenance, because you know you're going to prioritize your overpriced groceries. You know, for a family of three paying $200 for the bare necessities, or I should ask my wife, how much groceries are. I shouldn't guess at that. How much are groceries for three people, Jay?

Jay Wynn 
Oh, I don't know. We cheat the system. So we buy a whole cow, and we do all sorts of other things to get out of a lot of the..

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, we do too. Yeah, buy a whole pig or something. But either way.

Jay Wynn 
It's not cheap.

Ian Robertson 
No, it's not cheap. And so these people are forced to, you know, skimp on maintenance. You know, if you have a $15,000 roof, you just kind of let it ride and hope for the best. You know?

Jay Wynn 
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, where I saw, I've always seen that pattern, was what I call them, age in place, where you've got the people that have settled into a home, they've been in there since the 60s. They're just living right through as they're aging. Don't get me wrong, these people are clean, some of these houses are beautifully cleaned. They're fastidious, but nothing has been updated since the 80s, because that's when they stopped having the money to put into it. And so you see things that are dated and aged and worn, because they basically hit the point where they had to choose between, like you said, putting out a new floor in the kitchen or buying your medications. And so when your priorities start to shift, the house does get neglected. So I see that, but I'm seeing that pattern more and more and more with people too that don't fit that what I consider age-in-place bracket. So you're seeing it with a lot of other houses too, and it's just like people gotta make that choice. They're on a tighter budget, and I don't think anybody's money is going as far as it did five years ago. I don't think we talk about it in real world terms, other than wow, things are expensive. But I think you're right. I think people have less disposable income. The income they have is more and more taxed, and not just by the government tax as far as demands placed upon it. And I think everything is incrementally getting a little more expensive. You know, I know one thing, I don't know about you or the other guys listening to this, but people paying with a credit card now, we're not absorbing the service charge fee. We're passing that along, and I find a lot of businesses are doing that. We sat down and looked at our numbers, and that was taking a huge chunk out of every inspection when people were paying with credit cards. So for the last almost year and a half, in our contracts, we say, if you opt to pay with a credit card, there will be the service charge fee added. And most people are good with that, because every other industry is doing it. But I don't know what it is for you, 2.5 or 3.5%, depending on who you're using, or something like that. But that adds up. You know, you start looking at the numbers over the year, and that's a lot of money that can come out of your business, or that gets passed on, and somebody's paying it, either you or they are. But if you do that to somebody 70 times in the course of a month, you know, it may only be a percent or two here and there, but you do that, like I said, 70, 80 times to a family, and that's a lot out of their pocket.

Ian Robertson 
Don't get me started on tipping culture, too. If I have to tip one more person that I've never had to tip in the past, you know. Anyways, that's probably not going to equate into our home maintenance.

Jay Wynn 
No, but that's where we're going. And the other thing too is people have less skill. Nobody wants to admit that, but 20 years ago, a lot of people could fix basic items in a house. Now people really don't have a clue. And part of that, you know, is because people had a simple toolbox. They don't have a hammer, they don't have a drill, they have a putty knife, they don't have a caulk gun, they don't have paint brushes. The basic things that, like we grew up with, were basic home maintenance items. They didn't even have them because they've never done it. So you're talking about people with less money, more demands on their income, fewer skills, and fewer people to call on the form of family that can help them purchasing homes that are at the top end of their budget, that they're sinking just about every cent into to get into, and are going to be working like crazy to afford the mortgage. Yeah, you know what? We better do our job. We better do it well, because they're putting a lot of faith in us, and that's what's riding on our shoulders. So that's why I think it's important to understand why we're doing this and why it's so important we do it well.

Ian Robertson 
So let me ask you, because I think this is an important part of the podcast, we're getting close to the end, and I think it's important for the audience to hear from you, what is your why, Jay?

Jay Wynn 
I've been doing this almost 12 years professionally now, and my why was very clear. We had a son. You know, Jordan was born, and he was about two years old. And I was going to work. I was waking up at five, six in the morning. I was going to work for 8, 10, hours a day, coming home, sleeping for an hour or two, and then basically waking up to put him to bed. And we hit the point where my wife and I looked at each other, and she says, I want you as part of his life. And right now this is not being part of his life. So we looked at home inspections with some prompting, like I said, you were very instrumental in saying, hey, this would be a good idea for you to do, get into inspections. And she said very simply when I proposed this to her, she says, I will help you do anything. I'll back you up anything, but I want one thing from you. She says, I want your nights and weekends back. She says, I know we're gonna have to build this, and I know we're gonna do this, but I want your nights and weekends back so you could be more present in his life and in our family. And so that was why, that was why we made the shift. That's why I started doing inspections. It was so that I could have that time with them, to be able to do more and to engage more with them. And so it was a work/family life balance thing. And I gotta say, since we've built it up, because there was a growing period where, yes, I was working some nights, I was working some weekends. That's just paying your dues. Once we got to the point where the business was self-sustaining, though, we started drawing some hard lines. And now I don't work nights and I do not work weekends, and I've pretty much trained all my agents to understand that I don't work nights and weekends, because that's time that I've promised my family. And so there's a big why there, that's one of the reasons we draw those hard lines, and I'm glad to say that we still do it. So my family was the reason I started inspections, and that's also, frankly, the reason we started charging more too is so that I wouldn't have to work 12 inspections and come home and write reports. So that I could do my inspections, do a more limited number of inspections a week, get paid more so that I could free up my time specifically to put it towards my family. So that's my big driving why.

Ian Robertson 
That's a beautiful thing, having our why aligned with our actions. A lot of us like to say our why is our family? But is our business taking away from our family? And, you know, we have to provide and you have to pay your dues, as you mentioned, but our why drives where our business goes. It will really learn what our why is by with the direction that our business is headed in. So your why is shown by, you know, charging more, having more time with your family, controlling your business and living out your real why.

Jay Wynn 
And there's another part to this too, in keeping consistent with that why, that also means that, in the later years, learning how to manage the stress so that I don't bring the stress home to them. It's not just I'm spending hours with my family. I'm spending, it's I can shut the business down, run it when it needs to be run, but after business hours, shut it down, or run it minimally, so that I'm not carrying the stress to them too. So it's actually helped me with a lot of different things, and that's one of them, stress management, time management, learning how to keep things in their proper place, which I think is a balance that a lot of us fight. I think it's one of those things where initially we go, well, I've got it all figured out, but if we really stop and do some self-reflection, we find that there's areas that we all can improve on, because it's not a definite point, it's very fluid. You know, when you're really, really busy and there's a lot of work and you've got to do it because it's your busy season, yeah, then you put more time into the business, but you work on not letting the stress carry over. And then, if you're smart, you're putting a little money aside for when things lighten up so that you can enjoy your family, and you're not freaking out about, oh my god, I'm going to lose everything because I don't have work coming in. Well, that's the trade off, too. So it's something I think we all could work on a little bit. You know, you said this was going to get a little existential, and it does. This is not the nuts and bolts of things. This is a little more on the ethereal, if you will. But these are the reasons that motivate me, and these are things that I think a lot of guys wrestle with. And I say that because people will talk with you if you're willing to listen. And I deal with a lot of other inspectors, which I love. I love working with the guys in our area, and we talk about stuff like this, and it seems to be a consistent theme, figuring out these balances and figuring things out. But I think your why is important to figuring out a lot of it.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, that's beautiful, Jay. Thank you for sharing that with us and those are very personal reasons. But listen, thank you for sharing the subject, for sharing your personal why, and also for helping us understand, you know, we should probably stop and look at our own why and why we do this.

Jay Wynn 
Yeah, I hope it helps guys just sort through some of the stuff and keep going, because ultimately, I'd love for guys to be successful and just do well.

Ian Robertson 
And your intentions smell good.

Jay Wynn 
Your intentions smell good.

Ian Robertson 
I know I'm gonna get like so many messages after this podcast. What do your intentions smell like? Backup creepoid.

Jay Wynn 
Tobacco and leather.

Ian Robertson 
Tobacco and leather. Listen, it's been too long since we've had a Drinking With Jay episode, so we'll have to have you on again here soon, because this is, you know, campfire, sitting around, drinking, talking home inspections. So thanks. Appreciate it, Jay.

Jay Wynn 
Always enjoy it, Ian.

Ian Robertson 
You have a good one. Bye.

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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*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.