248. Why Home Inspection is the Next Boring Business Gold Mine

0:00Let me take you back to COVID because Brent Fletcher just bought his first house. He doesn't even know what a home inspector does. Then the guy walks the property and finds thousands of dollars in problems Brent never would have caught on his own.

0:13Brent Fletcher:That same day, Brent deposits his paycheck and signs up for home inspection classes. A hundred days later, sober and laser focused with zero industry connections, he does his first paid inspection. Fast forward to today, five inspectors, 500 inspections a year, and a following over 250 ,000 people who watch him online just to see what he finds next. This is how he built it, starting with nothing but a bad checklist and one good idea. I'm Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to the Uplook Podcast, where we interview entrepreneurs to hear their advice on how you can start a business too. So excited to welcome Brent to the podcast today to talk about all things home inspection.

0:50This is a newer topic for the Uplook, so super excited to have you on here, Brent. Thank you so much for being here.

0:54Brent Fletcher:Thanks for having me. How are you doing today? I am doing great. I'm excited for this podcast. So I want to dive in. Let's lay the foundation for the audience. What does home inspection mean? What exactly does Brent Fletcher do? So home inspection is a visual representation of the condition of a property at its current state and what's going on with it. So essentially what we're going to be doing is going into a home, looking at it from top to bottom and saying everything we see about it and any defects we may find and give it to a potential buyer so they can use it to make an educated decision about if they want to move forward with the property.

1:26Brent Fletcher:Now, it doesn't have to be just buyers. We can also do 11-month warranties and all down the line. But that's the general majority of what it is. How did you get into this as well? I know alluded into the opener, but I'm curious the founding story of how you got into this. So yeah, you're correct. It was COVID. I was trying to buy a house. I didn't even know what home inspection was. Now, keep an eye on, I did have a lot of construction background and all that. But this guy came in, showed up with his tool belt and ladder, did the whole inspection, did a great job, and found, you know, thousands of dollars worth of defects, as you mentioned.

1:55Brent Fletcher:And then because of what he found, I ended up getting all my closing costs covered and a check written to me for concessions, which was like$8 ,000 on top of all my closing costs because of what this guy found. So I took that$8 ,000. I'm like, I'm going to do what he just did. And I have that$8 ,000 into taking classes, schooling, buying my name for the business, getting my domain, getting my website. and I usually just use that to get the first branch up and running. Yeah. So wait, wait. So was that like what you did from day one? This was like, I see what just happened. Write me$8 ,000. And like, it was kind of like, I'm going all in.

2:32It just clicked immediately.

2:33Brent Fletcher:I knew this is what I wanted to do. I already had the knowledge in it. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was looking for the type of business that spoke to me and literally just came out of nowhere. And then as you also mentioned, I did a hundred day sober challenge. Once I decided I wanted to do it. Yeah. Just put all my focus into how to grow this business, how to get it started. And it was day 97, I got my first inspection. No way. That is such a cool testament right there. You want to know how the heck do I get a customer? So let's go to day 97. How did Brent land his first customer? So I actually went to a networking event.

3:05Brent Fletcher:It was my first networking event that I've ever been to. And it was like a tabletop, kind of like a speed dating networking where a bunch of different entrepreneurs can get to know each other. This guy was not a real estate agent. I forget even what he did i think he owned a store but he was wanting to list his property so he wanted to get it looked at and i happened to be at the table talking he's like hey come out to my house let's get it going and you can check it all out so that was my first inspection was a pre-listing oh my gosh so how did you know going into that obviously you like took classes but going back to day 97 how do you like know to look forward you bring like a checklist i really want to like zoom in on this area i mean i'm not gonna lie i stayed up all night the night before watching YouTube and like, oh, do like a whole evaluation of everything.

3:46Brent Fletcher:But I mean, there's, uh, I mentioned this before in some of my videos that there's confidence and competence. Now confidence, you're going to have to build to buy rep, rep, being repetitive, but confidence. I had confidence because I took the training. I knew, I knew what I was talking about. I knew, I knew what to put in there, uh, or the competence, but the confidence had to come later. So I relied heavily on my competence. So I knew exactly what I was doing during that inspection. And then save up all night just going over that report over and over and over make sure I did not miss anything going over my pictures over and over and uh just going back to my training what did you find and like how much did that pay you because I'm going to paint the picture for the audience I'm like how much money could you make this like early on so what'd you get paid that day that day I believe that inspection was 450 it took me about three hours to do the inspection and because it was my first one I probably spent another eight hours looking at the report to make sure it was good to go before it went but yeah i mean now we're doing it our average price point is about 550 in inspection and we can get done three hours wow we have all reports done on site yeah that's a pretty good like timing right there you make a lot of money in a day with a 550 ticket so once you get all the add-ons on there are i think we're averaging about 900 per inspection with add-ons wow that is a pretty good business to uh get into then so let's keep talking about growing the customer base then so day 97 get our first customer what happens after that building the customer base like what levers did you pull to get customer two three that'll hands down be the biggest challenge that i faced in this was trying to figure out how to get customers because people don't call home inspectors every single day most people only buy a house once or twice in their life so therefore it's a once in a while type of thing so what i've learned is order to have people call you, you got to be the last person they solve because I'll be the first person they call.

5:34So therefore, I made sure I put my face on social media every day.

5:39Brent Fletcher:It started with posts. I didn't do videos for the first year. I had metal things. I had the more, you know, Mondays where I tried to explain some things. What went wrong Wednesdays? Meet our friends Fridays. And one of the biggest things I can say to new people that are trying to start their own business and get seen, join your local chamber. Chambers are great. Get involved with your community. Get to know other entrepreneurs. And that's where I did the meet our friends Friday where I met local entrepreneurs and I do a post saying, I met this person, you should check out their business. So my right from the get go, I was promoting other entrepreneurs, businesses, and that came back tenfold where they would always recommend me out because I recommended.

6:16That is awesome. So was this like how you got like your second and third customers, like the local chamber slash like social media then?

6:23Brent Fletcher:Yeah, exactly. And then anybody that lives anywhere has, you know, a friend that's a real estate agent somewhere. So just having some friends that want to use me that helped out a lot too. And just word of mouth and a little side. This was my little mix is I was also a bartender and a lot of people knew me as a bartender. So therefore, if I heard people were talking about a house like me, if you're ready to home inspector. Right there, let me. I have a guy for you. It was definitely a slow start, though. I think my first year I did 40 inspections. Okay, so 40 inspections at like 450, let's call it whatever that turns out to be.

6:56That's obviously not full time money, maybe for some people, but were you doing it full time? Was it on the side?

7:02Brent Fletcher:Honestly, the first two and a half, three years, I was still a full-time manager at a restaurant and bartending. I was doing that at night. So I do inspections from 8 to 4, get to the restaurant by 5, work 5 to 12, 5 to 1. And then it's every day of the week because I didn't, I had to make it work. You know, there's opportunity and then there is security. Now, I had a family. I had kids. I had to have security. I had to have a consistent paycheck. I couldn't go all in. But the opportunity was there. So I had to double down and keep the securing opportunity, which ended up being 16-hour days, five, six days a week.

7:36So how long did you do the restaurant gig? How long did it take you essentially to go full-time?

7:42Brent Fletcher:It was about year three. Wow. Yeah. Luckily, the owner of the restaurant was totally supportive of me, helped me every way he could. So I was cutting back and slowly going back. The third year, I probably could have cut back the restaurant quicker, but I still just wanted to make sure that safety net was there. but on a year three is what it really took off to where I saw that I could completely support myself and my family and put Jesse inspections. Are you ready to launch, grow, and scale a business? Inside the Upflip Academy, you'll get a complete roadmap to shortcut your success with 25 plus step-by-step programs taught by active business owners, not gurus who share their step-by-step blueprints, plus ongoing live workshops, skills training, a business idea database and community to share resources and celebrate your wins.

8:31Click the link in the description below to join the Elphaba Academy today and start surrounding yourself with the people and tools that can change everything for your business. So I want to keep talking about customers because obviously there's only, there comes a point in time where like maybe you can't go to the local chamber events because you know, you just are scaling. What is the best way that you get customers now that someone should start with? Obviously, go to the local chamber, social media, maybe. What is the best way now?

8:56Brent Fletcher:You know, I really think it is, I mean, getting to know local entrepreneurs. You can go try to talk. Real estate agents are what everyone sees as the big one because real estate agents are the ones that work with your direct clientele. So, again, a referral through them. But I can tell you most real estate agents are already going to have their handful of inspectors. It's going to be really hard to get in with them. So, your best bet there is to be available. I mean, it's a seasonal job. We're very busy in the summer. So, what happens in the summer, what's happening to me is I'm two, three weeks booked out.

9:22Brent Fletcher:So we have a lot of people that call that, hey, we have a short turnaround time. Can you get us in the next four or five days? Sorry, I can't. Here are some other people you can call that might be able to get you. And that's where I was when I started. I was the leftover guy, you know, the one that just get in. So I say if you're trying to get into home inspections, get to know all the other home inspectors in your areas, make fun with them. So you're the referral that they're going to refer out. And then now you get to meet more agents through being the referral from another home inspector. And then hopefully that will help build your business moving forward.

9:51That's good. and then what does social media play how does that play into i want to talk about because social media is a big part of like your world and how you've scaled so let's talk about your social media piece sounds like you're doing a year one but kind of take me through the evolution of social media

10:03Brent Fletcher:what you've been doing and posting first year like i said was a lot of just instagram photos i was just doing photos things i found you know this is the inspection i'd done and i slowly started getting the videos and i really just loved editing it was just i don't know it's just one thing that i really liked getting into that's crazy i started doing that And I remember when I hit my first thousand on TikTok, I got a thousand followers. It was like so exciting. I hit 10 ,000. Now I can go live. And then all of a sudden one day I randomly said, don't do that in a video. And I got so many comments like, don't do that.

10:37Brent Fletcher:On today's episode, don't do that home inspections. Don't do that. And then boom, comments blew up. So I started doing that a little more probably about year three. And then that really started to take off on TikTok. or I think it was going into winter of year four I was like you know what I think I'm leaving revenue source on the table here I'm only focusing on TikTok really and some photos on Instagram so I made this shift to make the photos or the videos post two videos a day every day to every platform and I did that starting December it was Christmas day or Christmas of 2024 I started doing that.

11:14Brent Fletcher:And it took about six months. And I went from 4000 followers on Facebook to a quarter of a million followers. Wow, that's explosive growth. Yeah. And then that just kind of went and then I jumped on to YouTube. And I went from I think I had I don't even know, maybe 1000. And now I am at 95 ,95903. Okay, so I want to make that actionable for people. So obviously, they're hearing that like explosive growth. Talk to us more about that. If someone's listening right now, how can they replicate that? It's just posting more. What is that? Everyone always asks me, and I know there's a little bit of luck of the draw and making quality content, but more so than not post every day.

11:56Brent Fletcher:And I tell everyone that and no one will do it. No one wants to post every day. You got to post and pick two time slots. I get up every day at 4 a.m. 4 a.m. Take a shower. And by 4.30, I'm at my desk from 430 to 530. I'm editing and I post a video by 530 and I have the second one ready to go by noon. Wait, that's right. So you're still doing it all yourself. Why don't you like delegate this and what's kind of the reason why I'm not done? I enjoy editing. It's even back like let's go way back to high school. All I ever wanted to do in high school is I wanted to be a video director because I loved MTV and I loved VH1 and all those old music videos.

12:31Brent Fletcher:I always wanted direct music videos now this is a music videos but i'm still directing what's in it i'm editing it i'm cutting awesome together so it's something i've always wanted to do okay i like it so then what's your system for actually creating content because it's one thing to wake up at four o 'clock in the morning but like you like really need to know what you want to create so what's your advice for people like developing that content strategy from like day one across like any industry here so i mean like i said it's going to be different for everyone what i found is a short clip for the hooks to bring people in.

13:02Brent Fletcher:That's why I don't do that. So usually about 10 to 15 seconds long. And it's just a quick laughable thing. Like, all right, we'll follow this guy, see what else he has. And then if anyone that's on, if you're trying to get monetized or anything that you have to hit minute long videos or you don't get monetized. So therefore I always try to make one minute long educational video where those are kind of my 11 month warranty videos where I'm going in. I'm talking about all the different things I see during the 11 month warranty to be a little bit more educational and not so funny. And I try to post one of each each day.

13:32Nice. Okay. Now I like that strategy. And what's your attribution on this? Do you do attribution reporting on how many customers actually come through social media?

13:39Brent Fletcher:We know we do get quite a bit. And here's what we've been seeing. So yes, it does play a big factor. It's one of three key pieces that I've seen to why we've had so much business. Social media, yes. Two, we have a really good real estate agent base that we had before social media ever even took off. So I was already booked out as a solo inspector before I grew. So that helped. And what we've seen is, like I said, every real estate agent has their three home inspectors. So they don't ever refer me out if they're down in Denver. But what happens is a client will see me down in Denver from social media.

14:08Brent Fletcher:And they're like, hey, we want to use the social media guy, whatever, his company. So we go down there. The agents see the quality of service that we provide. And they're like, we've never seen anybody from the customer service, from the phone calls to how fast we get reports out on site. And they're like, you are now in our top three. So we grew a lot of agents because of social media and now we're getting a lot of referrals from them due to one video on social media. But now they're using us for people that have never heard of us. And then the next one will be the Google reviews. We're closing on 600 five star with a five star rating.

14:40Brent Fletcher:So people obviously have our service. You can't just be a pretty face online. You actually have to provide a service that can back what you're talking about. I believe we do that quite well. For the Google reviews, how do you do that? So my stepdad owns a foreign business and, you know, small business, boring business, like hard business. He struggles with getting like customer reviews. Is there like some sort of system you are using? Are you just simply asking people? Do you have like a workflow? What does that look like? Because it's so important. So we do. We can just send out the reports through the software we have.

15:12Brent Fletcher:But what we do is we always send a personal email with a link to the report. So we can just say, hey, we're right here. If you won't have any questions, we're directly talking to you. And then we have a little thing at the bottom. If you enjoyed our service, please, you know, leave us a Google review. There's also a lot of different, when this goes for any industry, they're all called something different. There will be like review, I don't want to call it softwares. So basically like, yeah, after the job is done, you click the job is done. It sends out a text message to the client. Hey, if you enjoyed your service, would you mind leaving a review?

15:44Brent Fletcher:So between the email and that, we hit them twice. but I would never ask someone at the job site, hey, did you like me? Like, will you give me a tip? No, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna provide you a good service, tell you to have a good day, call me if you have any questions and then they get hit a couple of times with, hey, if you enjoyed us, leave us a review. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm trying to set that up for him as well. So I was curious what software is out there. I wanna go back to what else you said and a big part of that was just like real estate agents like love working with you. Like, well, we've never seen something like this before.

16:15Or what are like the three pillars that you've set up to like come across that way to like get had people be so happy to work with you?

16:22Brent Fletcher:Honestly, being available. So especially I think it's true with any business, even like, you know, if agents are going to call you, they might have a couple different home inspectors are going to call. If they call and you don't answer, they're calling the next person. And then you call them back. They're already on the line with somebody else. Oh, yeah. Happens so many times. So always being available, even if you have, you know, your old lady neighbor answer phones for you and then forward them. Like it doesn't matter who it is. Just make sure you answer that phone every time it rains. Don't take time off.

16:51Brent Fletcher:That's the very true of the beginning. So I think that's a huge one is always being available. It is great for agents because agents are all over the place. They're working from 6 a.m. till midnight with their clients. Clients are calling them at 11 o 'clock at night with questions. And if you can reply right away, that will help a lot. Quick reports, quick turnarounds. I think that'd be another great pillar. They're not waiting on anything. They're not having to ask you. If an agent is asking you for something, you failed. Yep. I agree with that. You need to make sure everything gets to them before any questions even come in.

17:20Brent Fletcher:What a lot of agents have liked that we've done is we set aside a half an hour at the end of the inspection. We get our laser pointer, we get on our iPad, and we make it a presentation for the client when they get there to let's do a walk around. Here's where this is. There's that. Here's what we found. Maybe this is what could be causing it. At the end, we're going to show them how to read the report, answer any questions they have about it. So when we leave that job site, all questions have been answered. And it's reduced our phone calls that come in and reduced people to have questions at the end.

17:46Brent Fletcher:So I say if you're new to home inspections, factor that into the time that you're going to be on job site. Make a presentation, get your spiels down, how you're going to address things. People really do appreciate it. So what goes into that presentation, like the reports? I just want to be detailed as possible because I really like that advice. What I do is first, when everyone gets there, I introduce myself and then I asked you know before we even get started do you have any questions for me and they may or they might usually the answer is we will once we see what you have yeah of course oh and then we go from there ha ha ha we can laugh a little bit all right uh the next one be like all right so here's what we're going to do we're going to walk around the house we're going to talk about everything that we found here what the different defects mean then once we're done we're going to pull out the ipad and we're going to go through everything one by one answer any questions that you may have and therefore then we start doing a walk around the house laser pointer you know kind of doing all that because you mean i'd be like oh that thing up there like nobody knows what you're talking about now you're you're insinuating confusion before you even get started but you put a laser point boom right there it is that thing right there here's why it's an issue do a little circle around it you know all that good stuff so the presentation is huge you know to be successful home inspector yes you have to be able to perform a good inspection but if you want to be successful as a business owner you have to be able to sell the inspection.

19:05Brent Fletcher:Now, if you can't sell the inspection, no one's going to call you back. So basically, you provide the best service with every inspection you have. Now you're getting referred to the experts. Hey, that guy did a great job. We should give him another try, this and that. And before you know that you are. That's a great take. I actually encourage listeners to go back and rewind that bit right there because it's one thing to provide it, but it's also like the whole time you are selling yourself for future projects, it feels like. And when you originally said presentation, I actually thought you meant like a Google Slider, like Canva deck.