Why Vacations are Hard - And How to Change That

Vacations are supposed to feel like freedom, but for a solo home inspector they can feel like a financial penalty plus a week of anxiety. We talk through why time off hits inspection company owners so hard: the phone still rings, agents still need answers fast, and the business momentum you worked months to build can slow down the moment you disappear. If you’ve ever tried to relax while mentally calculating lost inspections and missed leads, you’ll recognize yourself here.

We also put real numbers and real consequences on the table. The cost is not only the trip itself, it’s the lost daily revenue, the referrals that move to another inspector, and the long tail of follow-up work waiting when you get home. We connect that to marketing reality too: stressed-out owners do not come across as calm or likable, and that can hurt client experience, communication, and even your ability to grow a strong referral network.

Then we get practical. We share ways to protect your schedule and your lead conversion while you’re away, including using an answering service, setting up reciprocal call coverage with another trusted inspector, and planning specific work windows so your family knows what to expect. We also talk about managing expectations, keeping trips shorter until you find a rhythm, and recognizing when hiring even part-time support is the difference between surviving and actually recharging.

If vacations have become something you dread, hit play and take one idea you can implement before your next trip. Subscribe for more tools to run a stronger home inspection business, share this with another inspector who needs a break, and leave a review with the one boundary that helps you truly unplug.

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

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

Transcript

Ian Robertson 
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. Today I want to talk on a subject that I think a lot of us feel. If you're listening in and you're an employee of a home inspection company, you might not feel this as much, but for those of us who are solo inspectors, I think you're going to relate to this. It's about vacations. How many of us, since becoming a home inspection company owner, has all of a sudden started to hate vacationing?

My team here at Inspector Toolbelt kind of makes fun of me about it. My wife makes fun of me about it, but I can't stand vacations. To me, the most stressful thing is to have work happening around me, and invariably everything blows up while I'm away, right? Isn't that just the way the universe goes? And then me not being able to do anything about it. Maybe I'm out in the middle of the ocean kayaking, and somebody says, hey, there's this big emergency. I'm like, okay, nothing I can do for the next seven hours until I get back to shore, find some internet, and dig into things, in a different time zone sometimes. Vacations have always been very stressful for me. So if you're feeling the same, play this podcast for your significant other, for someone in your family who doesn't understand, if they make fun of us that we're the guy that can't relax, or a guy or woman that can't relax, play this for them because it's important for them to know.

You're probably like me, and especially when I was a solo inspector, every vacation didn't cost me the vacation. What I mean by that is, if I was going on a week-long vacation, it would cost me three weeks of work, and here's the math that I would do in my head. I number one, have to pay for that week, so you know if it's a, I don't know, $3,000-4000 vacation, then that's what it's going to cost me for the week. But then I'm going to count at the time $1,000 a day that I'm losing in work. So I lost $5,000 that week in not being able to inspect because I'm a solo inspector. That in of itself was like, now this is a $9,000 vacation. Just maybe a little trip to Maine or something like that, which for us here in New York is a quick trip.

Then, the lost revenue in missed phone calls. So agents are like, we need you now, and you're not available. And they just move on to another inspector. Maybe you lose an agent entirely. They're like, you didn't answer your phone all week. So I went with Joe, and now Joe gets all of their inspections. Stuff like that legitimately happens. So typically, if I was off for a week, I'd lose that week of inspections, and then I'd lose almost another full week of inspections. Let's call it four grand. So you take a $3,000 little one trip, you know, one week trip to Maine, and it costs you what's that now, $13,000? It only makes sense to us sometimes, right? It only makes sense to us because our family's like, just enjoy it. You live for vacation. This is what we do. This is what we work for. But in our heads, we're still a business owner.

So for everybody who has ever criticized the business owner about not being able to stop and have fun, think about that for a little bit, and think about the fact that our businesses never stop. So, if we're away for a week, the business still goes ahead full speed. It doesn't really slow down for us, and if there's an emergency, we have to take care of it. You know, I'm not out in the field inspecting anymore. I don't know if everybody knew that, but I still have things to do. So I was on a vacation recently, and I'm working at the table, and it's around dinner time. One of the people we were with, they're like, what are you doing? Why are you working? This is vacation. And I'm like, this is as vacationed as I get. I'm just going to work in the evenings or get up early, make sure I take an hour at lunch and really catch up on things. So that way, when I get back, I don't have two weeks worth of work in a one-week period, which is just not achievable.

So now that that's been said, that's what makes it hard. And there's a lot of other factors that make it hard, especially the sunk cost. Like you try to build up so much momentum, getting referrals, working on our online presence, getting AI to recommend us, and then we effectively disappear for a week or two. And then when we get back, the momentum is measurably slower a lot of the time. So it's going to take us weeks to pick that back up again. It's hard. I have guys message me about it all the time. Actually, some former guests of the show have even messaged me about it, and I don't know why, but it's like the phone could not ring for a month, and then the minute you go on vacation, that's when you're going to get all your phone calls. It hurts. So how can we alleviate some of the pain and start enjoying vacation again? I have to learn this. I'm not saying this as like, hey, this is what I did. I'm saying this as this is what I'm doing to try to enjoy life a little bit. Life can't be all just work, and we have a very stressful job. If we want to be at the top of our game for our clients, for our business, for everything, then we really need to have a break once in a while.

There's a client of ours, nice guy, but incredibly high strung, telling us he has 30 some odd phone calls a day, this many appointments, clients angry at him because he needs to get reports out, this and that, and whenever we have to work with him, and I say that we have to work with them, it's hard. It's difficult, and we need to like bring him down to an energy that, okay, so let's talk. Those are the things that are bothering you. Let's talk about what we can do. If we're riding at that high of a level, and he's a super nice guy, but if we're riding at that high of a level, we're burning ourselves out. We're burning other people out, and we're not working efficiently. And we're also not marketing really well. People like likable people, and when we're stressed out and messed up, we're not likable people, and our marketing's gonna fail a little bit.

So here's some things that I do to make sure that I can take a break once in a while. Number one, we've said this 1000 times on the podcast. It's not a matter of how do you answer your phone all the time, but who. Get an answering service. If you're on vacation, even use AI. And I hate saying that because AI answering services, no matter how good they are, still statistically, lower conversion rates, but it's way better than just missing all your phone calls. Have it on just for vacations, maybe. Get another home inspector that you trust, and this goes back to other podcasts of build relationships in the market. If you have other people you trust, hey, can you take my phone calls for the next week? Yeah, sure, I got you, buddy. And then you take theirs when they're on vacation. It's a reciprocal relationship. I've done it for years, and it really does work out. Hire an answering service year-round. Call centers are not that great, but it allows you to get a break once in a while. So when I was running solo, I had an answering service. We still actually use them to this day for all my companies. But they would they would answer, and I'd say, listen, I'm on vacation. Only contact me for something big. And they would hold all my messages, they would schedule stuff, and then for the most part, like 70% of people wouldn't even know I'm gone, except that my schedule is full this week. That's it, and it really, really reduces a lot of stuff.

The second thing that I've learned is instead of just working on vacation, plan it in. My family is wonderful, but at the beginning they would get upset because Daddy's working on vacation. You know, this should be fun time. So before vacation, I learned that I need to sit down with them and let them know, hey, these are going to be the times that I work. I'll answer my phone at fun times when I'm not scheduled to work, only when I need to. And eventually, as we talked about it and did it a couple of times, they said, okay, cool. You're way less stressed on vacation. This makes it enjoyable for you because now you can get some things out of the way. But I personally need to schedule time to get work done. Now, for home inspections, it's hard because it can happen at all hours of the day and night. But I would typically look over my emails early morning and middle of the day, and I would answer any phone calls right at the middle of the day. So listen, dinner, you get me 100%. Lunch, I'm gonna be walking around with a sandwich while you guys are sightseeing in a cool place, and just answering phone calls. Cool. Everybody kind of gets used to that kind of schedule. Schedule things around our work, not the other way around. And that sounds kind of lame, but it actually makes it more enjoyable for me. I know that I have to do these three things today, and if I wait till the end of the night, which I heard a lot of guys do, I've seen guys do that. Oh, I just hold it all till the end of the day, and then I scramble to get it done. Now we're just stressed about it, thinking about it, waiting for us at the end of the day. My thing is work it in, schedule everything around it. I have a 3 p.m. meeting. Cool, we're gonna have 6 p.m. dinner. You know stuff like that. Plan around it.

The third thing is manage our own expectations. A lot of people go on vacation and talk about it, and they're like, oh, it was amazing, and this and that. We may go on vacation and say it was amazing, but we're gonna miss out on a couple things. There's gonna be some things that we are going to miss out on. For me, I tell myself that makes me enjoy my vacation a little bit more because now I can get through some work. And this sounds like a sad podcast, but it's really not. I've actually learned to enjoy vacationing because it's valuable time with our family. You know, picture kind of stuff that you put on your mantle and remember for the rest of your life. So it's not a lame, sad situation. That's the reality of it. Business runs. So just kind of manage our own expectations. There might be a couple things that we have to miss out on. Prioritize. Make sure the things that we miss out on are the things that we're kind of like I wasn't really interested in that anyways. It also means planning our vacation a little bit more.

The next thing, keep vacations short. You know, if we have a three-week vacation, we're gonna feel that at the end. Personally, one to two weeks. Work in some weekend vacations, kind of get the groove going, and then build your way up.

The last thing is, consider hiring. It's a reality. If we're really that stressed and we're that busy, it might be time for an employee, someone who can run things while we're gone. When I was on vacation recently, the ITB team here, man, they killed it. This is a time for me to thank them publicly because they're amazing. They ran it all. I barely had to check because they were on top of things, and there was a couple situations that I had to get into and some phone calls. But man, when you have people around you that are doing an amazing job, it makes life easier. So, if we're thinking about being a solo inspector, we really need to apply those first points. If that's where we want to stay, cool. Solo inspector is a lot of fun, but consider those first few points. If we're not, then think about hiring and when we can bring someone on, even part-time, and even somebody working part-time. Okay, they're working for us two, three days a week, but we're going away for a week. Hey, this one week, can you work five or six days? Most good employees are going to be like, yeah, sure, I got your back.

So, is vacationing hard for you? You're not alone. Trust me, more of us inspectors feel it than you might realize. It is a constant topic of conversation. There's ways to make it happen, but make sure that our work is at its best when we're at our best, and that includes taking a break once in a while. So thank you for listening in, 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.

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*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.