Million Dollar Success - With Ian Mayer

A million-dollar home inspection company is not built by grinding harder in crawl spaces, it is built by designing a business that stops depending on you for every booking, every call, and every dollar. We sit down with Ian Mayer of I Am Home Inspections to unpack the real turning points behind his growth in Los Angeles, from leaving a brutal music path behind to discovering a love for real estate and problem solving, then hitting the wall that so many solo inspectors quietly face: a packed schedule and nothing left over for real life.

We talk candidly about the “best year ever” moment that still comes with a near-empty bank account, why solo success often has a ceiling, and what changed when Ian finally made the leap toward a multi-inspector firm. The biggest surprise is how fast things improved once he stopped answering his own phone. We break down why responsiveness and customer service win inspections, how a part-time scheduler can raise close rates, and how pricing becomes easier when the owner is not negotiating mid-drive with a sandwich in hand.

From there, we dig into hiring home inspectors the smart way: prioritizing mindset, communication, and long-term goals over a perfect resume, then training the technical skills. We also cover the unsexy growth work that compounds, including SEO for home inspectors, consistent social media, and the thousand small actions that keep the website ranked and the calendar full. If you want more freedom, better margins, and a home inspection business that can run without you, this conversation is a roadmap. Subscribe, share this with an inspector who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest scaling question.

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

Transcript

Ian Robertson 
Ian Mayer from IM Home Inspections. How you doing?

Ian Mayer 
I'm doing great. So great to finally talk to you after all these years.

Ian Robertson 
I know. I was just excited to have another Ian on the show, because now it's just a show about Ian. No matter how you look at it.

Ian Mayer 
It's funny when I email you, I always feel like I'm emailing myself. Why am I talking about myself in the third person?

Ian Robertson 
Well, you know, if your name is John or Gary, that happens more often. Ian, that's not, I mean, it's relatively common, but not enough. So, sometimes I don't know if you do what I do, sometimes I'll email myself a reminder when I'm doing something real quick. I'm pretty sure at least once or twice I've sent you a weird email, like pick up bread.

Ian Mayer 
You probably have at some point over the years, but yeah, no. When I first got online, there was only one other Ian in the world, and he was an IT guy in England, so I couldn't buy Ianmayer.com because this guy existed. And then when I had the first, you know, Myspace and whatever, the early internet stuff, I would get so many DMs for him, but now I go online and there's like a bazillion Ians and bazillion Ian Mayers, and it's crazy.

Ian Robertson 
Well, the reason we have you on today is not because of your ultimately cool name. You just had an article written about you, or an episode, I forget what it was, but either way, you've been doing a fantastic business, and you've hit the million dollar mark, which is the magic number that home inspection businesses use for, I mean, it's just the top of the top for a home inspection company. That's like hitting your first billion, that's like, you know, Elon Musk finally becoming a trillionaire. So, before we get into the million dollar question, tell us a little bit about yourself, Ian.

Ian Mayer 
Well, how far back do you want to go?

Ian Robertson 
The day you were born. No, I'm just kidding. How did you get into the home inspection industry? You know, what made you get to the level of success that you're at now? You know, where's your business located, things like that.

Ian Mayer 
Okay, so I'm in Los Angeles, California. I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco because I wanted to be a rock star. I was gonna be a drummer in a rock band, and I was gonna make it the music business or die trying, and then one day I woke up, and I went, I don't want to die that badly. The music business is absolutely brutal. It's almost impossible to make any money, and I definitely didn't have as much talent as some of the other guys in the scene who have gone on to do a lot better things. And then I met my wife, and I was also very.. I wanted to get married and have kids, that was, you know, I wanted music to pay for that, but you start to realize, like, going on tour for no money doesn't really jive with having a wife, so I needed something else to do. And I didn't know what else to do for a long time, and I had a job that I really hated, and one day, I was like, you know what, I'm not gonna go to work today. I'm gonna take a mental health day, because I'm just so lost. I walked through a bookstore, and I saw out of the corner of my eye copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I'm like, well, I've never met my dad, I've never had a poor dad or rich dad. Let's kill two birds with one stone, let's buy this book. And that kind of made me realize, okay, there's a world out there bigger than me, so it just started to get me thinking about something bigger. And then I ran into someone at a party, my wife's best friend was having a party, and they're having a lady there, and she's like, what do you do? And I was like, well, I've got a degree in finance, I'm not really using it. When I moved to LA, the deal with my mother at the time was I would go to college, and I was like, I will only go to college if we're in LA, because I thought, and I'll be rock star before I graduate, and I ended up having to graduate because eventually I ran out of classes to take. So, I got this degree in finance I'm not using, but she's going well, my company is looking for people like that. I'm like, okay. So, six months went by, eventually got an interview, and the guy who interviewed me was also a frustrated musician, he was a frustrated guitar player, so I see the guitar in your background there. So we talked about music and football for like an hour, and then he's like, alright, well it's been over an hour, and I'm like, we didn't even talk about the job. But they hired me, and so it was a wholesale mortgage company. So that was my first introduction to real estate, and I just instantly was like, whoa, I really love real estate. This is really cool. My passion was always music, but all of a sudden, I'm like, I'm almost as passionate about real estate, and I didn't even know that about myself. And I always had an eye for problems. Like, I can always walk into a situation, go, well, the problem with this is, and you know, most companies, that gets you in trouble because they're a problem person. This company was kind of after a while working there, they're like, you know what, you kinda got this cool skill, come back here. And they take me to the back of the office, and they had all these loans that they had made, they were getting kicked back by Wall Street, because you're getting the whole thing. When you go to get a mortgage, your broker gets a loan, and you're going through the bank, and then the bank sells it to Wall Street, and it gets traded around like, you know, stocks and bonds, whatever. And so the loans that were getting hit by Wall Street were like, okay, these are our problems, find the problem and fix it. So to me it was like, oh, okay, I'll go through it, this one's got a paperwork error, that's easy. This one, like, the underwriter screwed up, all right. Who made a mistake? Was it a mistake a person made? Was it a mistake a system made? And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I kind of like this. I'm getting paid to just be negative all day, point out people's problems. And so that finally made enough money that my wife and I are like, we want to buy a house, but we couldn't really afford anything nice. But we bought a fixer upper, complete. I mean, it had four walls, it had a foundation, the roof was shot, the plumbing was shot, the floors were shot. But we bought it, and yeah, I would work on it at night and on the weekends, while sitting in an office, spending all my day looking at pictures of houses, and eventually I was like, this is a lot cooler. Like, we had a home inspection, and I thought that job was pretty cool. And then I thought about it like, being a home inspector would be a really cool idea, but then within a short period of time, my mom passed away, the economy collapsed, and my wife got pregnant with her first child. So I was like, I cannot become a home inspector. What am I talking about? I can't go to start up a new business right now. I mean, the real estate is a mess, and all the stuff going on in my life, and I talked to myself about it, which was the dumbest thing I've ever done. So I went and did some bunch of other things, and then one day I was working in an office for a company that had nothing to do with anything that I had any interest in, but it was a job, because you know, at that point was, you know, it was after the 2008 crisis, right? So you couldn't get a job anywhere, and somehow I got a job, and then one day I walked in that office, and they're like, yeah, the owners relocating the entire company to another state, we're all getting laid off, and I'm like, what do I do now? And I just remember going for a walk, and I'm like, what do I do now? I mean, if I work for somewhere else, I'm just gonna get laid off again, I'm too old to be laid off again. And then there's like, I still have this home inspector idea in the back of my head, and I wanted to get back into real estate, and it just occurred to me, like, you know, if I become a home inspector, no one can lay me off. No one's gonna say you have a job today. Oh, you don't have a job tomorrow. Like, I'll control my own, have some control of my own destiny. And so I looked online, and it just happened to be back then ASHI school used to have a traveling school. They would go around the country and set up little trainings in a hotel, and there just happened to be one in a couple weeks, and I was like, bingo, we're on that. And there was also one for the Flir, not Flir, but whatever the infrared station was also having a training in a couple weeks, and they were only a couple weeks apart. So I'm like, boom. So I just signed up for all those classes, and I took all the classes, and started my own company. The original objection was just to pay the mortgage, put food on the table for my wife and kids, that's all I really wanted to do at the beginning, which was, you know, a struggle, as we all been through that first year, you don't make any money, thankfully, my wife somehow strung together a series of jobs, you know, so we can keep the mortgage paid, or at least paid enough.

Ian Robertson 
You know, just to pause there for a second, I think that's an important thing that you said, especially for new inspectors. A lot of us like to think about it being a meteoric rise, like we'll hear stories about this home inspector, he's like, oh, I did 600 inspections my first year. Those are outliers. The average inspection company owner that I know has a similar story about their first year. You know how many I did in my first year, Ian? Like one, and then, like, my second year was like 20, and then third year I'm just like gangbusters. It takes time and it takes effort, and there's a little bit of drudgery.

Ian Mayer 
Yeah, my first full year was 77 inspections.

Ian Robertson 
You did way better than me, first full year.

Ian Mayer 
And you know, to be fair, I was doing a lot of the parenting while my wife worked, because she got on a roll for a while, and there was a little bit of, like, well, maybe she should be the primary, but I really wanted to do this, and the third year, you know, it became, I mean, I still remember the first time I paid the mortgage in full, purely with home inspection money. That was like the greatest day of my life, at the time I thought. So this went on for five years of just me, you know, being an inspector, getting up, working, and then one day I was in a crawl space, and it was December, and my oldest kid's birthday is at the end of December, and you know, we had bought whatever we could for Christmas, but his birthday was coming up, and we're like, what do you want to do, because we were always very cautious, like, keep his birthday present, Christmas present separate, don't do that combination thing, because it's not his fault he was born right after Christmas. And his birthday is coming up, and I just remember coming out of crawl space, and just right before coming out, I just stopped. I pulled up my phone, and my ISN just said I had the best year ever as a solo inspector, and my bank account had zeros in it, and it's my kid's birthday coming up, and I just felt horrible. I'm like, what am I doing? I'm working so hard, five, six days a week, you know, two inspections a day, and I'm not really getting ahead, and probably a little controversial point, but when I started really noticing all the solo inspectors that I know that do well either don't have kids or their kids are long grown, and this is their second career. Like, you don't meet too many people who are supporting a wife and kids as a solo home inspector. I know like one guy that does it, but very, very few. You know, most of the guys that are on the NACHI board, or wherever you meet, that are really successful solo home inspectors, like, they don't have a lot of bills, and you know, I had a few kids, and it really occurred to me, my youngest kid has never been more than two hours from where he was born, because, you know, Dad had to work. If I wasn't working, money wasn't coming in, and even when we go on vacation, I'm on my phone the entire time trying to book clients or letting stuff go to a voicemail, and then calling them back, you know. You have to go to the bathroom and go to the corner and like call someone back trying to book the job, and I'm like, we're not even having real vacations, and I'm like, this is not the life I wanted for my kids, you know, I wanted them to have, you know, something better than I had, and that's not happening just being a one-man shop. So that's when I started going, I need to do something different here, and that's kind of where the multi-inspector thing came from.

Ian Robertson 
So I think there's something very real in what you said there about the vacation, that's something that we don't talk about enough as an industry. How many of us listening to this episode have had a real vacation recently, where we didn't have to answer a phone call, we didn't have to deal with a problem or an issue or an agent, or you know. I laugh and I chuckle, that's what you have to do, because that's part of not only being a business owner, but just being in our industry. But I guess, here's the million dollar question: we've all had those moments coming out of a crawl space, and for some of us, solo inspector, that's the way to be. My favorite time in life, one of my favorite times in life, I should say, is being a solo inspector, flying around in my spaceship like Han Solo, looking at cool stuff, eating at cool places. It was a blast, but it does wear on you. The most time I ever had with my family is when I started allocating things, and that was my favorite time in life with my family, when especially my daughter was young, and we have great memories, so there's advantages to both. But how did you go from that, man, I'm not getting ahead moment coming out of the crawl space to where you are now? Because even most multi-inspector firms don't hit the million dollar mark.

Ian Mayer 
Well, it was a long transition. I mean, it was not overnight by any means. It was another, probably five years.

Ian Robertson 
That's a short period of time, though.

Ian Mayer 
Maybe even six. I mean, the first thing, I remember it was January, because my son's birthday was in December. So now it's January, and you know, January is kind of the slow time of the year, anyway. So I just remember coming home, and I would do my inspection, write my reports, still writing reports at home, and then I would just sort of trudge the internet, and going, what do I do next, and you know, I came across a video for IEB, and I was like, all right, and you know, membership was I think, 349 or 347 a month, and I had exactly $500 in my bank account, and I was just like, you know, to put in football terms, this is the Hail Mary, this is Joe Montana throwing the ball into the end zone and hoping Dwight Clark catches it—a big moment from my childhood—and it works.

Ian Robertson 
Big shout out to IEB, though. We want to make sure that people hear that shout out, so that's cool.

Ian Mayer 
And couple months into it, and at first I was like, I don't know, these people are weird, they come together and do things and that's in Houston, and I don't really like to fly. I don't really like to be away from my family. And then one day, this email came across, like, how to hire people, and I was just like, okay, I don't know anything about hiring people. I've never been a manager, well I've been a manager somewhere, but I was never in charge of hiring anybody. I never really had staff under me. And I just remember going to my wife, I'm like, she's gonna think I'm crazy, but I'm like, I need to shut down the company for like three days and fly to Houston and take this class, and I expected her to say no way, you can't shut the company down, what are we gonna do for money. And she said to me, she says, if that's what you think you need to do, you should do it.

Ian Robertson 
That's a good wife you got there.

Ian Mayer 
I bought a plane ticket to Houston, hadn't been on an airplane in like 11 years at that point. Went to Houston, took the class on how to hire people, and that was just, I mean, it was game changing. Big shout out to Dirk, who you know, who is no longer with IEB, but he really sort of changed my head around, particularly when he just said, you know, everybody's been through something in their childhood. I'm like, wait, I thought it was just me. I thought I was the only one with a traumatic childhood, and then you find out, like, you know, we're all screwed up, we all had traumatic childhoods, and that was just the big change, as far as, like, mindset change, so I started to keep an eye out for things. And then my wife and I love to go camping, but you know, we go camping, we don't have cell phone reception, so it used to be we would go camping for a night or two, and then when we came back off the mountain, as I started to get cell phone reception, I would check all my voicemails and furiously call everybody back, see if I could salvage whatever jobs were ready. And this time we went and my phone had been ringing busy, and my neighbor had just been laid off, and I was like, I'll tell you what, I will pay you $100 to babysit my phone. I literally handed her my phone. I just drew a little on paper, Monday, 9-, Tuesday, 9-, the slots. I usually just write the names, the address, you know, I didn't even teach her how to put it into ISN, to just fill up the sheet with whoever calls. So we go camping, we're gone for two, three days, we come back, she hands me the sheet, every slot is filled, and I was just like, I've never had every slot filled, so I was like, didn't you just say you got laid off? And she's like, yeah, I did, yeah, and she has a child with special needs, so she had very limited time. She needed a job, but she could only work so many hours because she had to take care of a kid, and I was just like, you're hired. Because it occurred to me, and this is one of the things they teach in IEB that I didn't really understand until I experienced myself. When you stop answering your own phone and let somebody else answer it for you, you get so many more jobs, because when you're trying to answer the phone, and if you're on site, you know it's awkward, you're in an attic or you're in someone's bathroom trying to do your inspection and trying to talk on the phone, you're trying to rush the conversation, or you're letting it go to voicemail, and you're calling them while you're driving to your second inspection with a sandwich hanging in your mouth. You don't get to give a lot of customer service. You have someone who has nowhere to be and has nothing to do other than be on that phone, she can sit there and answer all the questions, and next thing you know, people were telling her about their dogs and their kids, and they were having this great connection, and well, of course, we're gonna book with you, and all of a sudden the bookings just went way up because I wasn't answering my phone, and she only worked for me part-time. That's the other key. Like, you don't have to hire someone full-time. She works 9-2. And then I went back to answering my own phone at 2:00.

Ian Robertson 
You know, it's funny that you mentioned that. We've talked about that on the show, because people, like we as home inspectors, will be like, I need to answer my phone call, I need to qualify everybody that calls, I need to answer all the questions. They won't answer the phone like me. It's all a numbers game. If you can find somebody that can do 80% or even less than what we can do on the phone of answering questions and responsiveness and all that stuff, they will still beat us out in closed phone calls into jobs just because of the sheer availability to answer that phone. Like you said, driving down the road, trying to answer calls, sometimes it's just a matter of the first one to answer and have even just a little connection with that person is the one who gets the inspection. So hiring somebody, whether it be call center, hiring somebody, or whatever, getting off your phone, was the first step for me, too. So as soon as you said that, I'm like, oh man. And there's no greater feeling than not having to answer your phone. I don't know about you, but how did you feel not answering your phone? To me it was like having chocolate on a mountain, drinking whiskey, it was amazing.

Ian Mayer 
No, it was fantastic, because every day at 2 o'clock when she got off, I'd start crying a little bit, not literally cry, but I gotta go answer my own phone now. And then eventually, you know, we got busy enough, we hired someone to do the afternoon shift. There were still slots, my wife then would take the other slots, but there were still times where it'd be like, okay, no one's available, you have to answer your own phone. I'm like, oh man. And another problem became is, when I answered on my own phone, I would double book myself at like half price, because I wanted every job. Of course, you need Saturday too. All right, I have a Saturday too. And, oh, you know, you get so involved in trying to get every job, and of course, when they start asking you for a discount, your initial reaction is no, but they're like, come on, man. All right, fine. You know, when the person who's been hired to answer the phone, they ask for a discount, you're like, no, I'm not allowed to give you a discount, take it or leave it, you know, and they keep me organized. And so, you know, I was suddenly making more money, with someone else answering the phone, because, they beat up on them on the price, they're just like, sorry, I just work here, you know. Whereas me, as the owner, I got to do whatever I can to make sure they book.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, more money, less stress, whoever is answering their own phone calls, that's what Ian's basically saying, but Ian, we're kind of, it sounds like we're leading to the point that the only way to really make that million dollar mark is to have employees, to one extent or another. Like the most that I've seen a single inspector make and burn themselves out completely is about 300k a year, and those guys are going hard, you know, five six days a week, burning themselves out, no vacation, answering their own phone calls, like you just described, and that sounds like a great living, but you don't have a life.

Ian Mayer 
Yeah, that's probably where I was, the one man shop, but you know, you don't keep anywhere near that 3k.

Ian Robertson 
No, you don't, no.

Ian Mayer 
You know, between all your marketing expenses and your gas and fuel and tools and memberships, and this and that, you're only keeping a very small percentage of it, and that's the other thing I learned as a multi-inspector firm is, your costs kind of go down. I mean, yeah, you've got payroll and employee taxes, and now I've got health insurance, and that costs a lot, but like the money I pay you for my website, I have to pay you that, whether I'm a one man shop or I've got 10 people.

Ian Robertson 
Exactly.

Ian Mayer 
My website doesn't really make a difference, and you know, your insurance doesn't double when you buy two people, it goes up a small amount.

Ian Robertson 
Exactly.

Ian Mayer 
And certain other things, like, you know, I gotta buy myself business cards. The business card doesn't care if I have one person or 10, business cards are business cards. A lot of your expenses stay the same as you grow, and certain things go up, obviously. But that was another big realization, like, oh yeah, scaling getting bigger is not quite as scary as it sounds. Definitely scary at first, but once you get into it, you're like, okay.

Ian Robertson 
Well, let me ask you then, because for me, hiring my first employee was probably the scariest, like, I have no problem starting a business, running, and making things happen, but I still remember hiring my first employee. I think I nervously vomited for his first week. I think that's normal. I didn't literally vomit. But how do you hire inspectors? For me, that's always been difficult, because either you get 50 guys that are just like, man, I wouldn't let you inspect my house after it was already inspected, and it didn't matter. I don't want you near my property or my kids or anything. Like, why would I hire you? You have to kiss a lot of frogs. So, how did you find your princes, so to speak?

Ian Mayer 
Oh, man, I made some mistakes. My first inspector was great, and we're still friends. He's no longer with me, but he became a real estate agent, and we're still friends. But I definitely, looking back, like I underpaid him, I underworked him, I definitely didn't do as much as I should have, because you know, you have these fears, like, can I afford payroll, what happens if he makes a mistake, what happens if I don't have the money? So I made a few mistakes there, but you know, one of the things that I learned was don't really focus too much on can they do the job, really focus on like, what do they want to do in life. My first question to everybody I interview is, what in the world makes you want to be a home inspector? You really want to crawl through a crawl space full of spider webs and mouse droppings and going into attics that are hot, and once they get the advent, I'm like, really focused on, like, where are they trying to go with their life. What are their long-term goals? I think a lot of business owners get focused too much on, can you do the job? Do you know what an electrical panel is? Do you know what a GFCI is? I'm like, I don't really care about that stuff, I can teach you that. What I care about is like, where do you want to be in five years? Are you looking, because if they, you know, if they say, well, you know, this is just my temporary job until my real estate career takes off. No. I mean, I get a lot of those people to apply. Or I just want to, you know, work here for a couple years until I can have enough knowledge to get my own company going. Well then, we're not a match, you know. And they say, hey, I love hiking and camping, and, hope to get married one day, and I just need a really stable career. Okay, now we're talking something, now we're on board. So I mean, I really got to credit that to Dirk from IEB. He really got that into me, like I don't really care too much about your resume. I want to know where you're going, where you're trying to be, what do you want to accomplish? Occasionally it still bites me in the butt. I've still made a few bad hires here and there, but I really want to get down to personality. What makes you tick, or what things do you like, dislike about, you know, your life, what you want to do, is there something I can help you with long term. That's much more interesting to me, and I think I've heard Gary V say that too, your resume is where you've been, question is where are you going.

Ian Robertson 
That's interesting, because that's probably a mistake that I've made. I'm gonna actually really think about what you just said there, not worrying about the person's skill set necessarily, but you learn a lot about a person by what they express when you ask that question. Where do you see yourself in five years? Why do you want this job? If their answer is, well, I really like eating, and I need this to eat. It's like, okay, well, you're probably going to be here for six months and just go to the next best thing. You know, how they articulate it too also probably tells you about their communication skills, where they are at in life, and honesty. And that's an interesting question to ask. I'm going to remember that one, Ian. So your best employees, how did you find them? If you don't mind me asking, did you put out ads or did you happen upon them? I'll tell you, for me, I live by the mantra, when you find the right person, you create the position for them instead of looking for the right person when you have the position that you need filled. If I find somebody that I'm like, you're just great, I'm going to be like, how can I make you happen in my company? Whereas if I'm looking for somebody for a position that I already need, that's when, like, Michael Scott will say, you know, the most urgent need creates the quickest solution. It's not going to help.

Ian Mayer 
Most people have come to me. One of the greatest pieces of advice I got from a lady, Michelle Hopkins, who runs an inspection company out in Washington, D.C. So, on my website, I have a picture of the employees, and the very last one is a silhouette, you know, blank silhouette, and says Your Face Here. So, a lot of people call me because they're like, you know, I took the InterNACHI courses, I got my CPI, now what? Or I took my CPI, I got some business cards, I went out, knocked on a couple realtor doors, and went, oh my god, I can't market. But my best employee did come to me through an ad, I did run an ad, and he responded. And then my second best employee, was this friend from elementary school. As soon as I hired him, he's like, you gotta talk to my friend someday. And then another friend of his from high school I hired, so they all knew each other from high school. So there's been a lot of friends of people who already work for me, and there's been a few ads, and then a few people who just, you know, they found me, they just called or emailed one day randomly, like, hey, you know, I got my certification, do you happen to be hiring? Though, the guy I just hired, funny, we were at a concert, and I met a guy at a previous concert, and then we kept in touch, and then I said, hey, you're going to this other concert? He's like, I'll be there, and then we're talking, he's like, oh, this is my roommate, blah blah blah, and I started talking to him, and he said he was talking about his career challenges, and then he was kind of in between careers, and I just said, you ever thought about becoming a home inspector? He just looked at me, he's like, that sounds like a really cool job. I'm like, well, here's my card, and you know, he kept in touch, and we talked about it for a while, and interviewed him a couple times, and so now he's my newest trainee. So you kind of always got to be recruiting, always be hiring, always kind of keeping the ear out for people who may come along.

Ian Robertson 
So, with the employee side of things, that's obviously always a growing pain, but you keep mentioning marketing. How did you grow your business to the point where you could sustain a number of employees? I think that's everybody's worry, like, oh, I'm doing 400 inspections a year, burning myself out, but if I hire an employee, he'll do 200 and I'll do 200. How does that work? You need to grow your business as you grow your business. So, how did you get the work?

Ian Mayer 
You know, having been in bands, I'm used to marketing, you know, I mean, that's not quite the same, because it used to be back in the old days, you'd print up a bunch of flyers, then you'd go out to the clubs and hand out flyers. Hey, come see my band on Friday, or whatever. And then, you know, this thing called social media came along that just made it so much easier, because now you can just hand out flyers from home, post. To me it was a lot of Instagram and Facebook were the biggest things, just every day posting a picture about something with my logo on it, and then starting to post pictures of the houses we inspected, and I would put the logo, used to put them on the garage, do it a little differently now. My wife is really great at social media, so she taught me a lot of stuff, and then I've been doing SEO since, you know, for the band days, because I used to do websites for bands, so you had to help me make it mobile, because I couldn't figure that part out. But once I got that part out, I just started doing my own SEO. I've always done my own SEO.

Ian Robertson 
And you're good at it.

Ian Mayer 
And social media, and it just sort of grew organically, you know, and then as we hire more people, we have more capacity, so we're turning less people down. I mean, there's always a struggle with, do I have enough people, and I mean, some days that we wake up on Monday and, like, we literally do not have enough people for all the inspections we have booked on Monday and Tuesday, and then Thursday, you're going, I have too many people on staff, dang it, so there's always a balancing act. But a lot of it has just been social media and keeping the website, you know, top ranked.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, you know, it's funny that you mentioned that. I asked you the question that people ask me, how do I get more work?

Ian Mayer 
I don't really think there's really any secret to it. I'm always surprised when people post, I can't grow my business. What do I do? Like, try using that thing you're posting your complaint on, instead of posting how you don't have any business. How about posting about the business you do have? Not that hard.

Ian Robertson 
I liked how you answered my question, because a lot of guys will ask me the question, how do I get more work? There's no one thing, that's what everybody wants. Give me the one or two things that I should do. It's not one or two things, it's 1000 little things, it's 8000 posts and 15 social media profiles, and 500 evenings, you know, making those posts, and it's 1000 little things. It's every micro interaction with a real estate agent or a potential buyer. Even your hiring process is 1000 little things. You put out an ad, meet a guy at a concert, always be looking, always be recruiting. Any good business is built on 1000 little things, and for you, you have a million little things in your business, which has worked out really well for you. So, if you were to go back in time to the beginning, because a lot of your big success, which in the past five or six years, and that's a short period of time to have that level of success. I know companies have been trying to do that in the past 10 or 20 years, and haven't gotten to it yet. What would you change if you could go back in time, 13 years ago, or so, when you started your business, and you'd smack your younger self and say, Ian, do this.

Ian Mayer 
Market it harder to begin with, because at the beginning I was like, as long as I post a couple times a week, I'll probably be okay, you know. I remember I set aside some money to live on and some money to market. I kind of wish I'd reverse those and spend more on marketing. Even things like pens, they're stupid. I mean, you know, I've got a pen, I've got my logo on it. I've never gotten an inspection from having a pen to give to an agent, but when you give a pen to an agent, they take you way more seriously, because now they know that you have an actual marketing budget. You're not just some guy who got his certification last week. So I think I would have done more of that, and I think I would have definitely hired sooner, like we talked about when I got to the point of like, I realized I needed to hire, I realized my youngest son at the time had never been more than two hours from home. Since then, we've had numerous epic vacations formed on a week, two weeks, and we've gone to Yellowstone, where there's no cell phone reception for two weeks of time. We went to Alaska, where we had no cell phone reception for two weeks, and came home, and nobody missed me. Like, I'm back, I'm ready, and everybody's like, oh, you're back, okay.

Ian Robertson 
That's important. We want to be unimportant to our business. That's the sign of a good business, is when we are not the critical piece in our company.

Ian Mayer 
It's timeless, so you know, if I could do anything, I'd go back, I would have built it better to have more time with my kids when they were younger. Now they're teenagers, and they're like, who cares, Dad. Like, you're home? Do you have to be home?

Ian Robertson 
Teenage years are fun. I'm in the middle of that too, so two Ians with teenagers. Listen, Ian, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. You obviously run a larger inspection company, a lot of volume, and to share your wisdom on the show. And I do want to point out you have a podcast that you're co-hosting, and you also have a book coming out. So, before we end the episode, can you just give us the 30 second pitch on those?

Ian Mayer 
Yeah, the podcast I'm a co-host on is called Real Estate Red Flags. Buddy of mine, Josh, in San Diego, who's an arborist and tree inspector, runs it, and he just asked me to be the co-host. I'm like, cool, I like doing these things. And then, yeah, my book is called Build a Real Estate Career That Fits You, primarily about real estate agents, although other home inspectors would get a lot out of it, and it's not a "do these 10 steps and you'll be successful." It is more about finding your inner voice, finding things that work for you. I just remember I've worked in sales organizations in the past where they have, this is the way we do things, and you either, get with the program or get out of here, and that doesn't work for everybody, and there's a million ways to build a real estate business, but there's a couple key things that you do need to do to stay focused, you know, to find your territory, which drives me nuts when I see a home inspector, "I'll go anywhere," oh great, you'll spend more time in traffic than you will inspecting. I don't go anywhere. I go to a very specific area, and that's it. And we do volume that way, so you know, I recommend that for agents. So it is a pre-order on Amazon right now, and it should be out in about a week. So when this airs, it should be out. Build a Real Estate Career That Fits You.

Ian Robertson 
That's awesome. Well, we're always looking for a good book on this show, so I'm looking forward to that one coming out. But Ian, thank you so much for being on, sharing your story and your wisdom, and I got some, I personally got a couple of action points from this episode, so I appreciate it a ton.

Ian Mayer 
All right, sounds good.

Ian Robertson 
All right, well, thank you much, and everybody listen in on our next episode of 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.