Avoid Slow Season Pitfalls

Quiet calendars don’t have to mean quiet growth. We break down the most common slow-season mistakes home inspectors make—and replace them with practical moves that compound into spring momentum. From why turning off your website or pausing SEO backfires to how steady AEO signals and consistent social content build authority, we show exactly where to invest attention when the market cools.

We dig into real-world tactics: refreshing your website with local service pages and helpful articles, optimizing your Google Business Profile with complete details, weekly posts, and fresh photos, and using YouTube and Facebook to boost topical relevance. On the relationship side, we lean into the realtor calendar—office visits, short trainings, and pre-listing inspection packages that put your brand on the sign and in the room when deals return. Pricing gets a strategic reset too: plan your spring increase now, refine packages and add-ons, and script your phone conversions so you protect margins without racing to the bottom.

Professional development and operations round out the playbook. Finish CE while the phones are calm, add certifications that open new revenue like sewer scope, infrared, mold, and radon, and service every tool and vehicle you depend on. Then let data guide your next leap: read your analytics, identify top referrers and churned agents, automate client follow-ups, and audit report clarity. Finally, build a true profit and loss so you know your cost per acquisition and cost per inspection—numbers that inform smart pricing and better marketing bets.

If you’re ready to turn winter into your advantage, this is your blueprint for marketing consistency, realtor partnerships, pricing strategy, CE momentum, equipment readiness, analytics literacy, and cleaner reports. Subscribe, share this with a fellow inspector who needs a boost, and leave a quick review to tell us your top slow-season priority.

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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 Entering The Slow Season
• 1:13 The Biggest Pitfall: Cutting Marketing
• 4:30 Keep SEO, AEO, And Social Alive
• 8:20 Refresh Website And Content Mix
• 11:30 Optimize Google Business Profile
• 13:23 Build Realtor Relationships Now
• 17:40 Pricing Strategy For Spring
• 20:35 Knock Out CE And Certifications

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. Today we're going to talk about a subject that I like to talk about this time of year. We're entering the slow season. No matter where we're located, even if we're in a warm climate, this time of year is going to get slow. We're coming up on Thanksgiving time and Christmas and New Year's and etc. People aren't buying as many homes. They aren't putting as many homes on the market. And even houses that were on the market come off the market this time of year and then get put back on in the spring, or, you know, after January, when their relatives and holiday seasons are all over. So this time of year, I often see, I want to say, not often, pretty much all the time, the same mistakes being made year after year as a whole in the industry, we can avoid some pitfalls by avoiding some of these things. And that's why the title of this podcast is avoiding slow season pitfalls and grow our business. And I'll tell you, once I stopped doing these things many, many years ago, when I started my first company, that company grew, then the next one, and then the next one. But it takes a little bit of overcoming our fear and changing our mentality a little bit. 

So the first one, and this is the biggest one, and I think I even brought this up last year and the year before, the biggest mistake is cutting back on marketing. Every single year, and I don't know why. Marketing, especially like SEO and AEO, as we call it, which is optimization for artificial intelligence, AI, all those things take time. Relationships take time. Having the four touch principle, if you go way back to season one. We're in season whatever, five or whatever right now. We talk about the four touch principle. All of that stuff takes time, and if you stop doing it, it doesn't just hold its place where it is. It actually reverts backwards. View it as like bodybuilding. So if we're marketing, it's like we're becoming a bodybuilder. So imagine we only start working out when there's a competition happening right now, like, okay, we're in competition season. I'm going to start working out. By the time you get through competition season, then you'll finally be ready for competition but then there's no competitions, so then you stop working out. All we do is recreate a cycle of being out of shape for competition season and then in shape for non-competition season. So do you see what I'm getting it? We build up marketing during the busy season, and we always talk about ROI. I see guys talking about that online. It's not something where it's like we do one thing and it starts working. We do that one thing. Marketing is cumulative. It's like bodybuilding. It's building muscle. And when we stop, it doesn't stay where it is. It reverts back. You made three points of contact with an agent but you stopped for four months during the slow season, now you have to go back to the beginning, to the first touch. If you built up SEO all during the busy season, you're doing good, but now you stop because, quote unquote, I'm not getting as many as leads because it's slow right now, all we did was revert our SEO back so that when we start it up in the spring, when things get busy, we're behind it. We're behind everybody else. 

Keep our marketing going during the slow season. I know it's tough, and I had to, especially with my first company, I had to say, okay, well, what else can I cut back on to make sure that I keep my marketing going? I see guys turn off their websites. Okay. So that hurts my literal heart, like I'm having heart palpitations when I hear guys say that, "I'll just turn it back on in the spring." Yeah, dear lord. I don't even know how to explain that to them. I'm like, okay, so all winter, someone's not going to find your website because you turned off your SEO, or you turned off your website, or you stopped posting on social media. All of that marketing needs to continue to happen. And in fact, it should get pushed up during the slow season, so that we are in the best shape, so to speak, when busy season starts, instead of trying to catch up, which eventually doesn't happen. So that's the first mistake. Don't turn off your SEO, don't turn off your AEO. Don't stop posting to social media. Don't stop trying. Slow season, that's when we push it up more. Think of it like a farmer. A farmer doesn't plant the seed in the ground, look at the ground, go "it hasn't produced anything after a day or a month." He waits. He plants in one time of the year and reaps in another. Slow season is when we plant, and we reap during the busy season. And because it's cumulative, one last thing before we move on to the next point, because this is the one I'm most passionate about, and our busy seasons will get less and less not busy, so in other words, if we're slow this season, but we keep marketing through it, our next slow season will likely be a little bit busier than this slow season and then cumulative. Matter of fact, there's an inspector I work with, as I was just about to mention, that complains because his slow seasons are not as slow as he would like. That's a good problem to have, but you only get that by marketing through the slow seasons. 

A couple other ones, not updating our website or online presence. So now we kept our website, we kept our SEO, we kept our AEO, all this stuff, but we don't do anything. That's kind of like doing the same bicep curls in the gym and thinking your biceps are going to get bigger. Eventually you need to throw in some different things, some different movements, you know, something a little bit different. Slow season is the time to do things a little bit differently. Maybe add a couple of articles. Maybe do some other citation building, like getting some local companies to put our website and things like that on their business. Even just little things like that will keep it going and give us a different angle to grow our web presence. There's a lot we can do on the side, and that includes social media. I have so many guys that just don't post on social media. They're like, oh, I only had 15 people view that video or this or that. Okay, forget the actual human beings that see it. That'd be nice if we have, you know, 200,000 or a million followers or something like that, but in reality, AI, especially ones like ChatGPT and Google and things like that, they all look at your social media, particularly Facebook, even though that's become an older person's platform, so to speak. But Facebook, a little bit of Instagram. The jury's still out on that, but even X and a couple of others, YouTube's a big one. Google owns YouTube, but ChatGPT often refers to YouTube. Make a whole bunch of videos, do something to continue to market your business during the slow season. 

The next one is ignoring our Google Business Profile. I would say better than half the clients that come to us say they're doing everything that they can, and then when they give us access to their Google Business Profile so that we can optimize it, not only do we not find the deep stuff that we typically do, but even the surface stuff most Google business accounts, you know your map listing where you get your reviews, when you log in, there will be a little circle in the upper right hand corner, and that circle will say, this profile is this percent complete. Better than half is not even 100% complete. That's the easy stuff. Go in, check your profile, post some updates, put some pictures in there, something. Keep that Google Business Profile going strong.

The next one, failing to build realtor relationships. You know who has a slow season when we have a slow season? Realtors. They have the same slow season we do, just a few weeks offset, sometimes maybe even a month offset from us. So when they're slow, guess who's more likely to be in the office. Office visits since covid have become slightly less effective. And I admit that it's still effective for us, we still do a lot of them, but in some markets, become slightly less effective, especially with certain agencies that now do things virtually. But even them, they will still have office spaces, because you still need to have a table to close at and all this other stuff. Either way, if you're going to find anybody in the office, this is the time of year to do it, a week or two before and after Thanksgiving. The same with Christmas, all that stuff. This is the time of year that they're going to be in the office. They're marketing hard. They're pushing through the slow season. Go there and say, hey, what can we do to work through this together? Can we work out a pre-listing inspection arrangement, and I can hang my sign at the bottom of yours, you know, this house was pre-inspected. Can we do an office presentation for you? Can we talk about this or talk about that? Go out to lunch with them. They're more apt to spend time with you and listen this time of year. But this time of year, when things get slow, we have that initial couple weeks excitement of, oh boy, yeah, I get some time off, and we would go out. We'll go fishing if it's warm enough or cold enough, if you like ice fishing. And then eventually it gets into a pattern of, well, now I'm home and I'm just waiting for the next inspection to come. Turn that busy season momentum into office visits, because this is when we're going to find them. 

The next thing is not completing recertifications or CE training. This one makes me scratch my head. So I have taught CE courses for 15 years of my 20 year career, maybe a little longer, and you'd be surprised how many home inspectors sit in my classes in the middle of summer saying, I had to turn down three inspections today to be here because my license expires next week. Why? That doesn't make any sense if you turn down three inspections, so you turn down almost $2,000 to take a $200, $400 course, I don't know how much they cost, I just teach them. That doesn't make any sense. So if our licensing or certifications or whatever we have expire next year, don't wait until the expiry date. Get our continuing education now. Find all the courses we can. This is the time of year to do that kind of stuff. Additional certifications, we just had Tony Escamilla on, and he talked about some important things for that. This is the time of year to do it. I don't know why we're taking courses sitting at a computer when we should be out inspecting in April, May and June. Do it now. November, December, January. Spend every day at the computer just getting as many certifications and getting all your continuing ed in this is the time to do it. Plan ahead. 

The next one, not reviewing and updating pricing and packages. So I've often said the best time to increase your prices is in the spring. So right when the busy season starts, nobody's going to blink, and then you set the new standard for the rest of the year. Psychologically speaking, it's the best. And I've seen this weird thing where inspectors want to reduce their pricing depending on the season. I don't know where that came from, but I have not seen good metrics from that. That can be a whole separate podcast. But this time of year, we should look at our pricing and say, okay, in the spring, what am I going to increase my prices too. If I'm at 550 for a home inspection, am I going to 575 or I'm going to push it to 595? Am I going to push it straight up over 600? Whatever it is, now is the time where we build our action plans, get a piece of paper and a pencil, have ChatGPT type it out for you. But just remember, ChatGPT doesn't really have good information, but you can have it turn things into an action plan for you. What would be a good price increase? What's normal, what's average in the market? And just get some ideas. Write that down. So when spring comes, okay, cool. You know, it's March, I'm going to increase my prices X amount. 

This one is a little bit more practical, and this is the one that I have always been guilty of. I mean guilty to the point that I could punch myself in the spring when I'm out. Neglecting equipment maintenance. You know, if I have a sewer camera that that I rely on during the spring season, and I don't maintain it in the winter, guess what's breaking in the spring. Sit down, take it apart, put it back together, get it all cleaned up, fixed. Little things like if we have a little laser measurement tool, get that cleaned up, get the cotton swabs and clean it out. Our infrared cameras, our vehicles. And I never did this because, you know what? It's cold outside. I didn't want to bring in all my tools, let them sit there and get warm overnight and then clean them up, etc. It was just kind of a pain. Make that our job. Thursday, Thursday night, we bring all our tools in. We spend all Friday cleaning them up, getting them ready, and putting them back in the vehicle and cleaning up our vehicle on the inside and the outside, vehicle maintenance. Again, the more of this stuff that we can do now, the better. 

The next thing is not reviewing our analytics or looking at where our market is headed. First of all, you should always listen to our market outlook podcast, but your market is going to be its own little bubble. Are we looking at our analytics from our website saying, how did we do last year? Did traffic increase? And if you're a client of Full View Home Inspector Marketing or Inspector Toolbelt, and you don't have analytics, we invite you, we send you emails asking you to use analytics, and we'll put it on your website. You can see real life traffic and just a simple view going, okay, I had, you know, altogether, 700 people visit my website last year, just a random number. This year, at the end of the year, I'm at 740. We've gone up, but not as much as I'd like. So where were they landing? You know, what could I do? Was there a marketing campaign that did really well, like maybe a lot of them came from a QR code? Oh, okay, cool, that QR code worked. Look over our analytics for the last year. Where did things come from? 

The other thing is look at our business analytics, not just our website analytics. Business analytics are okay, what are our top 10 referring agents? Did it change this year from last year? Do I need to make sure that I call every single one of them, and that's my favorite thing to do. Every year, call your top 10 to 20 agents, just chat, spend the whole day. Not calling to advertise, how are you doing? I really enjoyed working with you this year. And if you really did your business right, you should be able to ask him. How are the kids? Alyssa is probably about 13 now, right? Oh, George. Does he still play football? Hopefully they have him as running back. You know, he's a really quick kid. Those kind of calls solidify relationships. Are we doing that? And if we're maybe a multi-inspector firm owner? Do we have somebody in our company do that? We can have, you know, Joe or Sarah at the desk answering our calls, make those phone calls for us. If somebody fell off the list, like somebody referred us eight inspections last year, but this year it was one, and it was only at the beginning of the year, can we call our highest churn agents, in other words, who was referring us less than before, and say, hey, we hadn't seen a whole lot of you this year. Is everything okay? How are things? Oftentimes you'll find out, oh, yeah, you know, I was sick, this or that, or, you know what, I just forgot about you guys. I was using Harold, and, you know, I just forgot about you guys. So, yeah, I'll get you on the next one. This is the time of year to do it again. They're going to have time. 

The next one, not following up with past clients. Yeah, I struggle with this one. Personally, I don't keep in contact with past clients as much as maybe other inspection companies do, because the referral rate is a lot lower. They might have a cousin, an uncle and a friend. Okay, cool, but now I have to keep up with 1000s and 1000s of clients. But if we can, it is a good thing to do. Personally, I like to automate that. So for instance, if you use Inspector Toolbelt, you can set an automated email to go out in six months. So you did their inspection in the spring, and now they're getting an email saying, hey, we really enjoyed working with you. Hopefully the new home is working out great. If you have any friends or family that need an inspection, make sure to have them give us a call and use this QR code or whatever. But keeping in contact with old clients, that's very helpful as well. 

The next thing is not improving our reports. This one's easy. Go back this season, and we did an entire series on improving our reports, on how to write better, faster, clearer and giving a better experience to our clients. Go back and listen to every episode in that series. Spend your winter on it. There was a couple of new inspectors that contacted me, and again, I'm honored, but they said they spent just days listening and re-listening to the podcasts, we had guests on for some of them, and just saying, okay, can I improve this way or that way? There's also some ancillary ones talking about how to improve your agreements and how to properly write a narrative. Whole bunch of stuff in there. Go back, listen to all of them one episode at a time. Make our reports better. That is one of our best forms of advertising. 

Just a couple more here, but the next one, not planning financially for the next year. How many of us have ever reviewed our profit and loss? And I say how many of us? Because if we're a solopreneur, the vast majority of solopreneurs, if I ask them, what is your P and O, they won't know what that is. So I say, profit and loss, and they have to think about it. If you have to think about it, and you don't have it on a piece of paper or in your system, that means you really probably don't know it. Knowing our profit and loss will help us to know what is our acquisition cost per client? What is our cost per inspection? What should be our budget for next year? So we might say, okay, our profit and loss says X amount of dollars. So my cost for acquiring a client is $43. Maybe that's too high for us, and we're like, okay, how can I get that down? And we might find holes like, oh, well, my conversion rate is low. I'm only converting 73% of calls. How do I increase my conversion rate? And then through just the accumulation of clients, that's how we lower our acquisition cost. So separate things, what was our marketing cost? What was our cost for the person answering the phones for our website and all that stuff put together? And that'll give you a rough idea of what our acquisition costs are. So now you can say, all right, how much is it going to cost me to get clients next year? Profit and loss will also tell us how much each inspection costs us to do. That's an important number, and we've talked about that a lot on the show, how much does this inspection cost me to do? So take your customer acquisition cost and then add it with all of your other expenses, and then average that out through the number of inspections you did that year, if you did 400 inspections that year, so you're going to take the big number of all of your expenses and divide it by 400. That's how much it costs you to be on site. Cost you per inspection. So know what's coming next year, because there are several inspectors that I am actually working with right now, and if you're listening, you know who you are, where I keep telling them, raise their prices, because you're not making as much as you think. And then they get to the end of the year and they're like, oh, I did 500 inspections this year, but I only made 70 grand according to my tax accountant. I'm like, yeah, know your profit and loss. 

So really it comes down to—slow season is up to us. Do we stop or do we prepare? Right now is the time where we should be getting our business jacked. We should be hitting the business gym, so to speak, taking our business protein, and just building it up so that when the busy season comes, we're just tearing into the market. This is where we get market share. This is where we help our business. This is where we help ourselves grow, become a better inspector, taking courses and things like that. So avoid these slow season pitfalls. Work through the slow season. Enjoy a couple days off, though. You know, I'm not saying don't. You know, go spend some time with the family. If you have kids, especially, dude, go to the aquarium, go on a hike in the cold weather. Just do something. But then at the end of the day too, spend some time on our business. Thank you for listening in. If you have any questions or comments, as always, leave them. We love to hear them. And we'll see you next time on Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

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.