Building Your Business Ep. 31: InspectorPrime, Using AI and Commercial-Specific Reporting Features

CCPIA (00:00)
Hi, John. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for taking some time today and being with us on building your business.

I want to talk about and introduce you guys because it’s so exciting to talk about Inspector Prime And I guess every good hero story and ⁓ every good thing you’ve ever seen on TV always starts with an origin. So let’s start with your origins a little bit. I’m going to let you guys introduce yourselves. I want to know what your background is and how you guys got hooked up.

Jeff Womelsdorf (00:35)
Absolutely. Yeah, I can kick us off here, John, if that sounds good. But ⁓ it’s great being here. Thanks for having us. We’re really looking forward to kind of showcasing what we’ve put together with Inspector Prime. ⁓ A little bit of background on ourselves. So ⁓ John and I actually, we met in the Marine Corps. We were both reservists in the Marine Corps and essentially we were paired together for an exercise that happened over in Hawaii. And over the course of that, I know, right? Yeah, rough life.

CCPIA (01:02)
poor you.

Jon Ajinga (01:04)
the rough

Jeff Womelsdorf (01:05)
going

Jon Ajinga (01:05)
one.

Jeff Womelsdorf (01:05)
sitting in Oahu. But yeah, nonetheless, so we got to talk and really got to get to know each other and basically just started throwing around ideas for how we could work together because we’re both always interested in, we just discovered through talking that we’re both interested in kind of just pursuing interesting things and having fun. It’s a lot more rewarding when you’re having fun for a living than just kind of doing the…

the nine to five desk grind type thing. So we were just kind of tossing around different ideas of how we can make a little extra money, start a business together, and we settled on the inspection business. ⁓ And that was two and a half years ago at this point. So we kind of started off as inspectors. got our inspection business launched. And really quickly, we realized that we weren’t super satisfied with a lot of the…

the software solutions out there for the inspection business. ⁓ And we kind of took it upon ourselves like, we’ve got the flexibility, let’s put something together that works for our business. And kind of after that first iteration, we came upon version one of Inspector Prime. And we really liked using it. So we’re like, hey, I know we’re a little biased because we built it, but nonetheless, we realized, hey, I think we have something here. So let’s dedicate some time. we took…

about a year and a half now at this point to really put together Inspector Prime, the Inspector Prime suite of tools. ⁓ Like kind of one of the reasons for doing it is cost effectiveness, kind of what it boils down to. Cost effectiveness and capability obviously. And what we’ve put together is not only incredibly capable, a capable system, but it’s also very cost effective when you’re looking long term for your

your business’s needs. ⁓ yeah, we’re super excited to share this with you. And I know I just talked a lot, but John, if you wanted to introduce yourself over to you,

Jon Ajinga (03:08)
No, that’s perfect. Yeah, let’s kick this thing off. Yeah, that’s great.

CCPIA (03:11)
I

guess I gotta know. You’re sitting in Hawaii, you either you’re on the island or you’re on the, you know, over at Ford Island enjoying some fun time, or you’re sitting at Duke’s on a Sunday having a libation listening to Henry Capono, and what would take, what would,

Jeff Womelsdorf (03:29)
We did go to Duke’s, yep. ⁓

CCPIA (03:39)
What would the conversation be like to have two Marines, you were officers, correct? Go, I know. Let’s go into the inspection business. I mean, I want to know that.

Jeff Womelsdorf (03:54)
Yeah.

Jon Ajinga (03:54)
Yeah.

It was all about, ⁓ you you spent 20 some years in the Marine Corps or the government. You’re like, know what? I want to do this shit myself. I want to do something for myself. I want to own it. I want to control the process. you’re told, you know, step in line and get in line. And we wanted to create. We wanted to create stuff, right? And it just kind of spiraled from there and said, hey, let’s start with this. We ended up living a mile from each other. We didn’t know that, you know? And so we’re right down the road from each

other. ⁓ Both have, I’ve got four daughters, Jess got two daughters and you know the whole nine yards. So it just kind of worked out. I was like, hey, what can we do to be flexible, get in the community and start building something that’s ours, right? And we’ve got many more ⁓ things other than the home inspection business and inspector prime that we’re kind of just working on having fun with. ⁓ But I had some database experience in the Marine Corps, building some databases for headquarters Marine Corps. And I said, hey, you we can we can do this as well. ⁓

And yeah, that’s kind what it was. was just, we wanted our own thing.

CCPIA (05:00)
I’ve sat enough bars

with enough friends and I don’t believe our conversation has ever been, hey, let’s go start an inspection business together.

Jeff Womelsdorf (05:08)
you

Well, so one thing about the Marine Corps, yeah, they keep you busy, but there’s also a lot of downtime and you would be shocked at where the conversations go on both ends of the spectrum. But yeah, how we ended up on home inspection businesses in general, think that we had just gotten down kind of a road of conversations like, hey, yeah, I’ve thought about doing this in the past. Hey, I’ve thought about this too. Let’s give it a try because yeah, we wanted something flexible that we would enjoy doing. I mean, that’s what it all boils

down to so we ran with it.

CCPIA (05:39)
I guess I have to say

I one time sat at the bar in Norfolk with the senior chief and I guess about two o’clock in the morning we both thought about you know starting a business together when he was getting out so I guess it can happen.

Jeff Womelsdorf (05:56)
Yep, yep.

Jon Ajinga (05:56)
Yeah.

CCPIA (05:58)
⁓

So was working in the commercial world always you guys’ plan or did you guys find commercial to be accidental?

Jon Ajinga (06:12)
Yeah, that was accidental. mean, we started off…

home inspections, right? Doing home inspections, Colorado Springs area. And then we built Inspector Prime and, you know, obviously InterNACHI has ties with CCPIA. And we start looking at you guys and it said, Hey, there’s nothing out there specific to commercial inspectors. It’s all home, you know, home residential inspection software that’s you guys are having to put a different, you know, flavor to, and it just doesn’t work a lot of times. And so from the ground up, we built Inspector Prime commercial or commercial system and

said hey this is going to be specifically for commercial inspectors whether you adhere to the CCPIA com stop or the ASTN or if you do phase 1 ESA reports our system can do it and you’re not having to leave it you know ⁓ so it does the whole thing it’s not it’s not a residential system with a commercial slapped on as an afterthought it’s from the ground up for this community so

CCPIA (07:09)
What was your biggest challenge you had early on when you were kind of gristing through this?

Jon Ajinga (07:17)
⁓ So we tore apart the CCPIA concept, right? ⁓ And so that takes some time to do. And we tore apart the ASTM and we obviously went out there and we looked at everybody’s reports they currently have, what the shortfalls were in terms of, you know, they can’t do cost to cure capital reserves. I got to make a spreadsheet or I got to put it in Word and duplicating time. So it was a matter of creating a system that was flexible enough to capture all the different answers

ancillary

services this community can provide without having to leave our system, right? That’s the whole point of having software that’s gonna cost you that amount of money is like, hey, better be able to do everything. So that was the hardest part was just kind of piecing it together and structuring the database so that it was flexible enough to do all that. But where if the client didn’t order that, they can just, hey, go ahead and hide it. They don’t need to see it. But if they do order it, it’s a click of a button and great, now you’ve got an ancillary service you can provide and, you

charge your hourly rate for and it’s right there. It doesn’t cost you any more time really. So that was the toughest part. was just breaking down all the regulations, all the structure, the base structure and keeping it flexible because from one inspector to another, they’re not the same, right? ⁓

CCPIA (08:34)
Did you guys ever

use the term, Simper Gumby?

Jon Ajinga (08:37)
Yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (08:39)
Absolutely. That’s another challenge that we ran into. I we spent a lot of time exploring a wide range of tools that we could leverage for building this. I mean, eventually we settled on the platform called Airtable, which we can get into if you’d like to, but we also don’t necessarily.

CCPIA (08:40)
You

Yeah, we’ll do that in

a half a minute, yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (08:59)
Yeah, yeah, mean, so it was challenging to kind of sift through the world of software solutions, but I think what we found in the end after exploring a lot and testing a lot of different things is what we think is the most flexible platform out there for commercial inspectors.

CCPIA (09:20)
I mean, that

was always when I was in the field. mean, I’m old, retired and fat. When I was in the field doing this on a daily basis, it was, as you said, John, I’m in and out. I’m going between this sheet and that sheet. And I use this format. I’m going to take and do my data entry on here. And then I got to go back and I’m going to, because commercial buildings are not residential.

And you have to understand that. They have a different purpose. They’re a revenue asset for a company. And there’s not one water heater. And there’s not one HVAC unit. And there’s not one electric panel. There’s dozens of each. And you can’t really, when I talk to inspectors, and I think you can echo this,

You know, they’ll write a report and they can do a room by room report on residential. Here’s the living room, here’s the dining room, here’s the kitchen, here’s the bedroom, here’s the bedroom, here’s the bedroom, here’s the bedroom, you know, type of thing. And there’s only one of and unique, because there’s one HVAC that’s controlling all of them, or there’s two or three max until you get to the big house. But when you’re dealing with…

a commercial property, I might have 35,000 square foot of uninterrupted one room.

Jon Ajinga (10:54)
Yep.

Jeff Womelsdorf (10:55)
Yeah.

CCPIA (10:56)
And so, so I appreciate that that was your challenge. that you saw that. And instead of coming at it from, you know, the super highway going eastbound, you said, no, no, let’s meet it going westbound. And I’m, we’re going to design something from the get go. And I like that. Did you have any, did you have any issues with,

inefficiencies and things that you are trying to solve in your design of Inspector Prime

where you saw this, let me say it a different way. You saw this need and you said, if Inspector Prime does this, I’m gonna solve this. And I think John, you might’ve hit that with your tables, but how about your data entry?

Jon Ajinga (11:55)
Yeah, yeah, actually, so.

I get your point, I your question. It was all about that workflow. Obviously, again, you’re in the field or you’re back at the desktop afterwards, if you just take photos on site. ⁓ We had to plan for a number of clicks how an inspector or his team put the data in there. And obviously that workflow was top of mind. yeah, think we solved all of that. Quite frankly, whatever you think of ⁓ entering a defect or a narrative or a finding, you want to call that, basically, ⁓

We’ve simplified the workflow because now if you want to do cost to cure capital reserves for any of those, it’s just a separate profile in that same finding or defect. don’t have to go anywhere else for it. You just say, yeah, I don’t want to do cost to cure for this. Check a box, put in your numbers that you estimate it is for the cost, and you’re done. And your sheets and your dashboards are automatically built for you. So it’s all very streamlined. as you mentioned, equipment, you’ve got 50 electrical panels in one component.

commercial building a property, and guess what? You don’t need to go outside of our system. You have an equipment schedule. It looks like you’re building a form, and it builds the client’s sheet and dashboard form, and you can easily provide them with a link to say, hey, give this to your property manager, or give this to your contractors that need to get in here. Here’s your 50 electrical panels and what you need to do for them. So very streamlined, and not only that because you can inventory all your equipment, but you can tie defects to the equipment as well to make that connection. So you’re not repeating your

You’re not saying, well now I’m gonna I gotta add the defect over here. Now I gotta add the defect to the equipment over here that no, no, it’s it’s all connected so you don’t have to do that twice. So that’s that’s one of the main efficiency we’ve made.

CCPIA (13:40)
That’s exciting. I think we should probably take a look at it and then we’ll have some conversation. So if there’s an opportunity that you can kind of show our audience, I know for those that are just listening, I would recommend that you watch this at some point, but maybe Jeff, you can show us a little bit about what Inspector Prime looks like.

Jon Ajinga (14:05)
I’ll go ahead and share the screen. This is what the client would see. We could talk about what the inspector would see, but it’s pretty much the same thing. You just have a workflow. ⁓

Jeff Womelsdorf (14:06)
Absolutely.

CCPIA (14:09)
OK, John, thank you.

Jeff Womelsdorf (14:23)
Yeah, do we want to kind of run through our client portal concept, John, real quick?

Jon Ajinga (14:25)
Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.

Let’s do that.

Jeff Womelsdorf (14:29)
is I think

that’s one thing that I love about the system is, yes, you can generate PDFs, obviously, but something that John and I, think probably what sparked our conversation back in Hawaii was we were talking about our, because we had both recently purchased a house. Hey, I just got this 100 page inspection report. I didn’t read through any of that stuff. And that was kind of the genesis for this, but why I mentioned that. we’ve come up with something called the Client Portal, which we’ve been getting a lot of good reception.

CCPIA (14:47)
Bye.

And the client portal is

what, so you would, it’s, you’re basically sending them an HTML link.

so to speak.

Jeff Womelsdorf (15:07)
Yeah, yep, we are sharing a link with a client that gives them access to an incredibly interactive platform where they can go in and check out their inspection. Sorry to hijack that, John. Go ahead and, yeah, back over to you, man.

CCPIA (15:18)
Okay.

Jon Ajinga (15:20)
no, that’s exactly what it is. The

key thing to know is…

When somebody purchases Inspector Prime, it’s theirs for life. It’s a company lifetime license and no Inspector Prime system ⁓ stays the same because once we deliver it, we’re hands off. We can’t see your data, we don’t access your system. It is quite literally yours in your own Airtable account. That’s what makes it powerful. what it also does is for every inspection, for every client, you can actually customize everything in here. If you see our name up here, this is going

white labeled to your company or the inspector’s company. But you don’t have to have all this, right? You can actually build additional features onto your system that matches your company’s services. But we provide essentially a baseline for you. And that includes making a proposal for your clients. So you get that, get that intake form from our office system, and you can go in here, make an inspection form, and you can send this to them instead of a PDF. You can say, hey, go ahead, I already made you a client portal. Check us out. Here’s your proposal inside of it.

CCPIA (16:11)
Thanks.

Jon Ajinga (16:24)
and they can do everything they need to do in terms of signing the agreement and making their first payment if they like to do that. But they also get to learn about ⁓ your team, your process. You can put a bunch of different things inside of this ⁓ so you can kind of introduce yourself right away as a professional outfit that’s not just fly by the seat of the pants. Here’s an email quote. No, you’re giving them a client portal right away. And then when you start delivering the report, they get everything in

in terms of the walkthrough survey report or the PCR, whatever you want to call it, ⁓ as well as any ancillary services they order. ⁓ So this is a ASTM kind of formatted ⁓

template that we provide, it also meets, again, the CCPIA ComSop in terms of the systems and everything they can report on. ⁓ The most important part of this is, again, you’re entering your information in, you’re making your template, and it automatically grabs your cost of cure, your capital reserves, ⁓ your equipment schedules, and again, it’s interactive. This is not just a go ahead and scroll through and take a look at your report, open some pictures. This is interactive in terms of they can actually filter

through and say, my equipment, where’s my electrical at? They can see just their electrical panels. can group, search. They can do a lot of things. And you can customize that to show them what you want to show them. ⁓

CCPIA (17:49)
So

are you showing right now the client side or are you showing the I’m the inspector, this is what I’m giving the client side?

Jon Ajinga (18:00)
I’m showing the client side, what the client would see when they log in and get their report.

CCPIA (18:04)
Awesome, awesome.

So once I send it to them, will it all be frozen where they can’t go in there and change anything?

Jon Ajinga (18:15)
They can never edit anything, but what they can do, yeah what they can do for example in the findings table they can say all right well ⁓ what are my finding types let me just look at my defects and Okay, they can just see their defects. They can even go well. What system is it in? Where’s my leg?

CCPIA (18:17)
Awesome.

⁓

that’s great.

Jon Ajinga (18:32)
They can filter it very, very cleanly. And so it’s digestible. You’re not going to get a 100 page website or report. It is very, very digestible. If they want to learn more, they simply click into each and they can scroll down. You can have a lot of different information for the profiles and go from there. They can even comment on the photos and things that you put in there. So we’ve got a few comments in here. ⁓ Open that up. But they can comment. ⁓

with you if you want to enable that feature.

CCPIA (19:05)
so that

will send me a notification as the inspector that they made a comment?

Jon Ajinga (19:08)
Yeah.

Yes, exactly. ⁓

Jeff Womelsdorf (19:10)
Absolutely, absolutely.

CCPIA (19:12)
Because we know in a commercial transaction, let’s just say it’s a transactional. I’m not doing a maintenance inspection. I’m doing a transaction inspection, a retail type inspection, that I’ve got two readers. I’ve got the CEO reader and I’ve got the working person reader. The CEO is making decisions and they’ll hand the report to the worker and say, here, go fix.

Jon Ajinga (19:38)
Yeah.

Exactly and to your point let me show you so this is the the report and they can print this out in PDF It’s like 25 pages, but we give we give anything more than that So if you go to just findings here now, you’ve got what’s a what we call a Kanban view right a card type view where if you just send this to Your worker types right and like I cool. I know exactly what I need to do for my electrical It’s all right here in this column for cooling for exterior, you know for roof and they can they can say what was the recommendation? What do need to repair?

There we go. There’s my repairs. ⁓ What do need to upgrade? Any upgrades? Yep. What do need to ⁓ maintain? know, and so they can, again, it’s interactive. It’s filterable.

⁓ They can do a lot. And this is how we created a system where we focus not on the PDF. Yes, you can give that whenever you want, but you can actually give them a system they want to come back to and say, great. Now, inspector, can you provide that yearly maintenance inspection for me? Sure, no problem. Just open the same inspection and you can do it right here for them.

And if they’ve got a 50 unit apartment complex, guess what? You don’t have to worry about creating 50 different kind of profiles or or marking them as you go. You simply mark them as unit one, unit two, unit three. So you’re not saying new narrative for unit one. OK, I got the same narrative, but now I need to duplicate it for narrative to know you just go into the narrative and you say it applies to unit one, unit two and so on. And that’s that’s how you save time as well. You do not have to make, you know, 100 different templates based on

the type of property it is. Our system adapts by using these special tags we’ve got to do that for you.

CCPIA (21:24)
So John, if I had the unit, let’s take the scenario of a 50 unit apartment building. I mean, units, all the odd units of 50, so that’s 25 of them all have loose toilets. Does your summary go back and say 25 loose toilets, or does it just say loose toilets and 13579? I’m not gonna…

Jon Ajinga (21:30)
Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s okay. Actually, all they would do is they would see one narrative, right? And when they open that narrative, they would see in here that it applies to those specific units. And then not only that, they’re like, okay, well, shoot, show me just room 212. All the inspector or the client has to do is go to their unit filter and say, well, what applies to room 212? There you go.

CCPIA (21:54)
embarrassed myself by counting. I’m a public school kid.

⁓ yeah.

Jon Ajinga (22:23)
And it would show a lot more obviously if there was a lot more, but that’s all they have to do. That’s all they have.

CCPIA (22:28)
I can

tell that some of this Genesis came from your backgrounds of the systematic approach of making this as clear as possible because I’m dealing with multiple different types of reading audiences.

Jon Ajinga (22:44)
Yep, exactly. ⁓ Yeah. There’s no way anybody ⁓ wants to read through a full report all at once, right? You don’t have to see.

Jeff Womelsdorf (22:45)
Absolutely.

Jon Ajinga (22:55)
or show them all the photos all at once. We don’t do that in our walkthrough survey report. They don’t need to see that. They just need to see, all right, what did I just pay this guy three or four or $5,000 to do? Good. Here’s my findings. Here’s my overall evaluation in like 15, 20 pages max, right? And here’s the numbers more importantly. Great. I had about 21,000 in immediate repairs and I’ve got about over 20 year period, a hundred K in capital reserves estimates. Great. That’s what I paid this guy

for,

I’ve got the information, let me send this link to my worker bees and you know, my contractors and get it fixed, or give me some more, more up to date local estimates for what they are going to charge me, you know, that kind of thing. That’s all they need. They don’t need, you see, we don’t have photos here, but they can obviously click in and get all the photos. They don’t need all that like, because an inspector takes, you know, 3040 photos that’s printing in the full report usually, not with our system, you can you can just print out the findings individually.

CCPIA (23:43)
Yeah.

Jon Ajinga (23:54)
as a profile for him, can make packets for individual electrical contractors and ⁓ HVAC technicians, et cetera. You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to handle.

CCPIA (24:05)
The boardroom doesn’t want that.

The boardroom wants that other sheet that had the numbers on it.

Jon Ajinga (24:13)
Yep.

Jeff Womelsdorf (24:13)
They want the hard numbers, yep, so they

can make an informed decision.

CCPIA (24:15)
They’re worried about EBITDA and they’re not worried about really anything else.

Jon Ajinga (24:19)
Right. Give them something like this. You could actually screen this or screen share this to the boardroom projector and say, all right, here’s what we’ve done for you. You’re looking at this all right, here’s what we’ve done for you. You’re looking at this cost to cure. You’re looking at this for capital reserves. And by the way, you’ve got equipment schedules. This is the gallery. Let’s go to our grid. All right. Here’s your electrical equipment. We’ve got one just in fair condition. You can do the whole thing right there and actually want to present it and not have to do any other work.

You don’t have to make a PowerPoint, you don’t have to do anything else. Just put your portal up there for them and they’ve got everything they need. And if they want to drill down and say, hey, show me that electrical panel, OK, or that heat pump, show me that heat pump. There you go. That’s what we got for it. And you can present that very cleanly with no extra preparation or time on your end.

CCPIA (25:11)
Yeah,

that’s really attractive.

So,

Let’s take a look a little bit at some, if you can, of some of the efforts it takes to put this in. Now that we see what the output looks like, let’s look a little bit about the input. Can we do that?

Jon Ajinga (25:36)
Yeah, definitely, definitely. ⁓ Jeff, you want to kind of explain while I get the inspector portal, you want to explain how we do field notes and different kinds of entry?

Jeff Womelsdorf (25:43)
Absolutely.

CCPIA (25:43)
Yeah,

please.

Jeff Womelsdorf (25:44)
Yeah, so there’s multiple ways that you can…

get your data into the report. If you’re working on a large team, so we have a few clients that are doing this, you can leverage Field Notes system that we built. So basically what Field Notes is, is it’s a form that your guys on scene, guys or gals on scene can fill out real time and submit those forms that then populate in the inspector portal. So like if you’re a supervisor back at the office and you have a team out conducting an inspection, they’re doing all their findings through the Field Notes, which is

free by the way, I want to emphasize that. So like if you don’t want to spend extra money on a extra air table business account, you can utilize these field notes so that your team can just go out, they do their findings, it populates in the field notes section here that’s up on the screen right now. And then you as the boss or the manager, or even when the team comes back, can log back in. But then you take these field notes and you apply them within your narratives and your findings. And it’s super easy

to actually apply these narratives to the report. So when we deliver the Inspector Prime commercial database to you, it comes with 300 something built in pre-built narratives essentially. And those all exist.

all the time within the inspector portal. However, they do not appear in the client portal until you tie the property to them. And that’s a one click move that you have to do. When you have a finding, you search through your narrative library, find it, hit the dropdown.

right here on screen, tied to the property, and now it is part of the report that applies to the client portal. So it’s really seamless to not only, you’re building out your narrative library, but then also to create new narratives, it’s form-based. So you just click on that button in the top right of the screen to create a new narrative, and you follow the fields in here. again, getting back to the customization abilities of this platform.

whatever you want to capture in that form, you can tailor it to whatever you’re trying to represent in your findings. So yeah, it’s really intuitive once you get the workflow down. Yes, it’s a little different than what’s out there currently, but… ⁓

it’s incredibly robust and you’re not having to search through a whole list of narratives and tailor each narrative like, no, you hop into the narratives library, you snap a photo, real time, it populates right in there for that specific property, tie it to the property and it’s in the report.

CCPIA (28:29)
So what you’re saying, Jeff, is I don’t necessarily… So if I had five inspectors working for me, I buy my Inspector Prime license. Do I have to buy five licenses or one?

Jeff Womelsdorf (28:44)
You buy one per business. Yep.

CCPIA (28:47)
So I

buy my inspector prime license. And if I want each inspector to be able to produce individual reports simultaneously, I’d have five air table accounts. But if I wanted to have them all come back to a central location, and that would be good for quality assurance too, QA-ing everything.

Jeff Womelsdorf (29:05)
not even necessary.

Yes.

CCPIA (29:17)
then they would just be in the field doing your field note pages. And then it comes back to the office and either they’re all logging into the OneAir table account or I myself or somebody I’ve trained is writing reports.

Jeff Womelsdorf (29:17)
Yep.

Exactly.

Yep, spot on.

Jon Ajinga (29:41)
And you can see the, again, we mentioned cost effectiveness at the beginning. It’s one Inspector Prime license for the lifetime of your company. It becomes your company’s software for life. And then you do not have to have ⁓ more than one Airtable account. Again, use the FieldNote system and like you said, do the QAQ quality control on the backend and write your report as in there in the field. Because it’s a real time scene. You’re going to see every letter they enter ⁓ into the system.

CCPIA (29:41)
Brilliant.

Well,

yeah, mean, QA, QC is so critical. mean, I’m going back to the eighties in my career when I did a field note system in the field. And all we did was hand field notes every afternoon into the office and the office wrote every report. I mean, there was no such thing as photos. Yeah, we got a Polaroid. ⁓

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there is no digital cameras. Everything was either Kodak film or Polaroid if you wanted to have a photo of something. And so this is almost taking the best of all worlds. if I’m, correct me, please, if I’m a manager of an inspection company, I’m going to use the word manager, whatever, right? And, and, and

Most of us, our personalities are such that nobody’s as good as us. We are the best. And the reason why I won’t hire is nobody does an inspection as well as I do, right? I mean, this is just our mindset. But this now assuages some of my fears, correct? That I can have somebody out there field noting, photographing. ⁓

checking narratives in the field that they believe are 90 X percent accurate. And then I’m finalizing every inspection from

Jeff Womelsdorf (31:49)
Yeah, you’re

serving as the approval authority essentially. So when it gets flagged for review, yep.

CCPIA (31:53)
I’m sitting at Duke’s. I’m sitting at

Duke’s with a Mai Tai.

Jon Ajinga (31:56)
That’s exactly right. The other benefit, and I pulled this field notes form up, is because this is what they see. This is all they have to deal with. There is no logging in. There is no, hey, let’s learn this system. You don’t have to train anybody to fill a form out like this. You send them a link, and they just …

Jeff Womelsdorf (31:57)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jon Ajinga (32:20)
put the information in, they hit submit and you see it come into your inspection on the back end as the owner operator, right? This is all, there is no training. We’ve got guys out there already using this in this manner where their employees do not have to log in, learn a new UI or UX or system. They just open the form, hit submit. And when the form is submitted, it says, hey, you wanna do it again? They say, yep, create a new form. And they keep going like that. So it reduces any training ⁓

you have to give to your guys, your third party contractors. And it just, you know, again, there’s no logging in. can’t, they can’t screw this up. It’s just a link, right? And they open the form and they do it again and again. So.

CCPIA (33:00)
And this can

be done in every section, every line, every, there’s no, there are no grayed out areas that’s gonna leave me high and dry.

Jon Ajinga (33:17)
Right, right, so you can use the field notes or you can go to the narratives and send them the narratives form. They can do the narratives from there or they can do the equipment schedules, right? They can say, right, what’s the equipment? Hey, log all equipment in the equipment form. Boom, there you go. And they can add.

CCPIA (33:31)
And in the

equipment form, I can add defects.

Jon Ajinga (33:37)
So they’ll fill this out and then what you want to do is you want to the defects they find in their field notes and you want to link them. That make sense?

CCPIA (33:46)
Okay,

so really to create a substantial codified report, I’m linking three different documents together.

Jon Ajinga (33:59)
So you got, yeah.

CCPIA (33:59)
I’m

linking my field notes with my narratives with my equipment schedule.

Jon Ajinga (34:09)
Yes, only when a defect applies to that equipment.

CCPIA (34:13)
Yeah, yeah, or I or yeah, or,

even if I just want to make a comment that it was painted blue, that might not be a defect. I got to that in my field notes.

Jon Ajinga (34:20)
Right.

You could just put that in the ⁓ comments section here in the equipment profile. Yeah. you get a number of ways to skin that cat. If you don’t want to have to link those to narratives, you don’t have to. You can just put them right here. Like, hey, yeah, painted, ⁓ painted blue. ⁓ Doesn’t work. I can’t do any more typing than that and talking, but but you get the point. So. Yeah.

CCPIA (34:27)
⁓ okay. All right.

Yeah, I get that. Plus you don’t want to embarrass yourself with misspelling.

Jon Ajinga (34:46)
Exactly. ⁓ But yeah, you’ve got a number of different ways of doing that. If you want to add narratives and connect it that way, you can. But our system allows you to focus on, hey, let’s get the inventory done for the equipment. And then I can say, great, what are the defects for the particular equipment as you go? And then again, the narratives when you want to add those. So yep, that’s it.

CCPIA (34:48)
Trust me.

How fluid is it in the field of, how much jumbling does it take me if I’m looking at a piece of equipment to fill in the equipment and then fill in the narrative? Is it pretty seamless?

Jon Ajinga (35:10)
Sorry.

yeah, pretty much just looks like this, a little smaller on the big screen, ⁓ the little screen on your phone. But you just do this, you hit add narrative and you either grab one from your current library, right? Or you make a new one, right? And that is literally it. It’s like filling out a form. It’s doing a simple search, filling out a form, hit and submit. Yep.

CCPIA (35:46)
Awesome.

Awesome.

Jeff Womelsdorf (35:50)
I’d

be remiss too just before we move on with with narrative specifically. So we’ve showed some examples of photos that you can drop in. But because Airtable is a database, since we built this on a database, there’s no more need to like if you’re doing sewer scopes or any other video based findings, there’s no longer a need to go to YouTube, upload a video, create a YouTube link, drop it in your report.

CCPIA (35:53)
Yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (36:16)
Airtable can handle the direct upload of video files. So you can just drop it right in here. And once it’s in there, it’s not going anywhere. you don’t, once your report’s done, it is a database. It’s a repository for data. So that’s where it lives. It’s not like, in a year, I’m not gonna be able to access this anymore. It’s like, nope, the raw file lives in the report.

CCPIA (36:38)
Is there a max size?

Jon Ajinga (36:42)
Yep. every narrative, every attachment field here can have 50 files or five gigabytes. The every inspection can have a hundred gigabytes total of media. So. A ton, a ton. don’t know anybody. Yeah.

CCPIA (36:53)
Okay, a hundred, a hundred gigabit. How much would that?

Jeff Womelsdorf (36:58)
It’s a lot. Yeah.

CCPIA (37:00)
Yeah,

well, I’m just standing back because now you think of meta, right? And the meta glasses that are out there. I think we’re going to start seeing more and more inspectors. mean, there is inspectors who wear body cameras for crying out loud. ⁓ But I think we’re going to get more and more inspectors starting to use the meta glasses to either capture photos so that it makes things faster. And so you might get

Jon Ajinga (37:06)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

CCPIA (37:28)
You might get an inspection report that might have a hundred, a hundred individual videos plus a sewer scope. So I don’t think I, yeah, you’re probably right. It’s probably not even going to be close.

Jon Ajinga (37:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yep, would be messed. That’s thousands of thousands of ⁓ photos and probably a hundred or so videos you’re talking about, you know, so yeah.

CCPIA (37:53)
Yeah,

because I think think that will allow you to capture three minutes of video.

Jon Ajinga (37:58)
That’s correct. Yep, have pair myself. They’re pretty fun to use. Those are really good.

Jeff Womelsdorf (37:58)
Okay. Yep.

CCPIA (38:02)
Yeah,

had a Navy chief working for me ⁓ and his goal was to have a series of big screens sitting in his command center like a talk. And he wanted to have inspectors in the field all wearing wearing ocular devices and him coaching what they’re looking at. And I’m like, you know, we might get there, but

Jon Ajinga (38:17)
Yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (38:26)
Yeah.

There

we might, yep.

CCPIA (38:32)
I sure as heck hope not in my career.

Jon Ajinga (38:35)
Yeah, that sounds a little more complicated than it needs to be, but you can do it. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

CCPIA (38:38)
It’s an inspection for crying out loud. We’re not curing cancer. ⁓

Jeff Womelsdorf (38:42)
Yeah.

CCPIA (38:44)
But he, again, this would have been a product that would have been very good for him, especially in the QAQC mode, because he was very micromanaging on the outputs. And he would have

Jon Ajinga (39:05)
Yeah.

CCPIA (39:08)
a primary inspector and at least one subordinate inspector on every inspection. And this allowed that conveyance of knowledge to always stream back to him because it was his name on the door.

Jon Ajinga (39:24)
Yep. Yep.

CCPIA (39:26)
And that’s one of the things that I like. Are there any particular report types or property types or scenarios that this software or solution, I’m not even going say software, this solution absolutely shines at?

Jon Ajinga (39:48)
I would say if an inspector …

You know, we can easily handle the one off, I just take, you know, retail store. Great. That’s pretty simple. But if you’re looking for something that handles multiple units, without extra work, without having to say crap, how do I present this to a client? Am I just going to list that, you know, units one through a hundred applies to this thing or no use our system. I mean, this, this has all the different filters and tags you need to build a multi-unit, a multi-property report.

you know, without extra work on your end. I mean, you’re in the field, you just market unit three. And if it applies to unit five, you go back to that same narrative and tag it real quick as unit five. You don’t have to do anything else but that. ⁓ And again, if you’re looking for something you can actually present to a client ⁓ or a boardroom,

This is it. mean, you should be proud to be able to present something that says, all right, here’s my equipment dashboard bus. This is your inventory. This is your overall status. All right, great. Let’s move on to cost to cure You’re looking at approximately 21, you know, so on and so forth, right? In terms of you can absolutely screen share this without having to go outside and create a PowerPoint or something, you know? ⁓ It does it for you based on the information you put in. all you have to do is get the information right and the system takes care of the presentation for you.

You know, ⁓ and again, it’s once an inspector has it, it’s theirs. So you can customize everything you see in it. I mean, the color, the layout, the different types of grass, you know, you can customize it to fit your company’s SOP. It doesn’t have to stay the same. know, Jeff and I didn’t didn’t have to build this to keep our users in a in a box, right? Because this is not this is not a proprietary system we keep hold of. We can’t even see our clients system information after they buy it. It is it is theirs. It is theirs for life. ⁓

that’s the model we wanted to start with and end with in terms of how we present Inspector Prine in the community.

CCPIA (41:48)
One

of the juicy things you showed, John, was your cost to remedy, your cost to cure dashboard here. The numbers that you’re inputting, because this is going to be a question that’s going to come up. I’ve already seen the YouTube comments that are going to come in. Are your numbers from a particular source, or are these numbers that I’m just inputting into a table?

Jon Ajinga (41:58)
Yep.

Jeff Womelsdorf (42:17)
It was really important for us that yes, we wanted to leverage the capabilities of AI. AI is not going away. It’s super useful when you employ it correctly. But what we wanted to make sure was that the AI that we’re leveraging in here isn’t taking over the role of the inspector because that’s not correct. You still need the human element in the loop when you’re doing these reports. So the native AI capability within Airtable is incredibly.

Jon Ajinga (42:18)
cool.

Jeff Womelsdorf (42:43)
robust. You can pick from a whole different suite of different models that it can pull info in. for instance, when we were, yes you have to input the numbers yourself as the inspector, but what we trained the AI to do was pull from the local market here in Colorado Springs to give us a starting point that we can work from to actually come up with the numbers that we want to submit for the actual report. So yeah.

CCPIA (43:10)
This looks great. think what kind of feedback have you been getting from those that have purchased your software?

Jeff Womelsdorf (43:21)
We’ve been getting great feedback. mean, so just a quick story about one of our clients. I won’t use his name because obviously I didn’t clear it before, but he had an idea to, he wants to corner the Spanish speaking market in the area that he’s operating out of. So he was like, okay, yeah, I’ve got my guy going through and translating stuff to Spanish. Like, whoa, time out.

CCPIA (43:34)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Womelsdorf (43:42)
leverage the AI. So we hopped on a call with him. We showed him how quick you can, obviously you go back through and proofread it, because AI is never perfect. But really quickly, he was able to generate an instance of the platform for his Spanish speaking customers, all using the AI and using the translation functions and all that. And ⁓ we have, like John said before, no instance of Inspector Prime is the same once we deliver it. So our clients are

are literally able to go in and rework all of these interfaces to suit their business’s needs specifically. And that’s the number one bit of feedback that we’ve gotten, is the flexibility, the customizability. No, no worries.

CCPIA (44:23)
Is there something, sorry, Jeff, is there something

John, you’d like to, ⁓ that you haven’t shown that you want to show a little sizzle to or have you shown us what you need?

Jon Ajinga (44:35)
Yeah,

I would have probably two more things is that if the inspector is able to write their own Phase 1 ESA reports, ⁓ we’ve got that built in. ⁓ So they can absolutely customize their ESA reports as well. And it’s got all the tables built in that it’s connected to. And again, it shows it right there for the client. ⁓ It’s text heavy because that’s what Phase 1 ESA reports are. ⁓

CCPIA (44:37)
Excellent.

Jon Ajinga (44:59)
What you’re seeing here is a system that allows you to do that and you can customize it to your particular SOP. And the other thing is, is again, we tore apart that CCPIA ComStop and you know.

Within the same system, inspectors can do accessibility reports, observe green features, fire door inspections, know, fireplaces. So they can do all that. They can also send questionnaires out to their clients. you know, whenever somebody responds, which I know is pretty rare, they can actually just get the responses in their system and they don’t have to touch it, right? They just review it.

CCPIA (45:21)
Excellent.

Jon Ajinga (45:38)
the client gets it in a client portal automatically, and that’s it. So now inspectors can really take the system ⁓ and add ancillary reports and inspections and not have to go outside. So here’s an accessibility report. This is based on the ComSop. We added some sections just to enhance the media that’s involved, but this is what you get. So you don’t have to go out and do another form or another Word document or anything, or try to build it in. ⁓

This

goes to the expandability. Again, this system becomes the companies. If they come to us afterwards and say, hey, I want to add this, and we’re going to train them up and show them how to add features to it to meet their company’s needs. So it doesn’t stay static. Again, we didn’t have to put our users in a box where, hey, it can only do this, it’ll only follow these clicks. No, you can actually expand the system to meet your company’s needs. So this is one way of doing it.

CCPIA (46:35)
How, looking at this made me think, how difficult is it for me as an Inspector Prime owner to develop my own form or my own, I guess are they called templates?

Jon Ajinga (46:53)
Yeah, templates, features, whatever you want to call them.

CCPIA (46:55)
Yep.

So let’s say I wanted to invent one for sewer scoping.

Jon Ajinga (47:01)
Sure, yeah, a very specific sewerscope report, yeah.

CCPIA (47:05)
And

I could design or swimming pool inspections or if I had a specific ⁓ other ancillary service I might do, does Inspector Prime give me that opportunity to design my own unique template or form set?

Jon Ajinga (47:29)
Yeah, that’s.

Jeff Womelsdorf (47:29)
Sure does. Yep,

it sure does.

it has its own form building feature right within Airtable. And again, I know we haven’t talked too much about Airtable, but why we chose Airtable was just all of the background abilities that you’re able to do. like when you’re buying our template, our database, essentially, you’re getting that obviously, by using it on Airtable, you’re getting their background support. And Airtable is a multi-billion dollar a year company, like they support Fortune 500 companies. So you don’t have to necessarily

worry about Airtable being down like some of these other proprietary softwares that they’re the ones that own the code. Airtable is incredibly stable, it’s incredibly customizable, and yeah even if let’s say you don’t want to reach out to John or I for whatever reason to do a feature, you have the Airtable help desk available to you. You have the Airtable experts that build and develop the platform that you can reach out to as well.

you don’t want to reach out to John or I. So lots of flexibility with this system.

Jon Ajinga (48:36)
Yeah, and we offer.

CCPIA (48:37)
I guess is I think about, I mean, I’ve had so many different softwares through my career, even some that I’ve had written myself. I didn’t write them, but we’ve hired software engineers and writers to write our own code that since they were all third party, if Microsoft updated.

then that would knock us out of the box. Or if iOS updated, that would knock us out of the box. I guess what you’re saying, since you’re working on those robustness of the backing of Airtable, you’ll probably never be knocked out of the box on any type of updating or I’ve moved, I’m on iOS. And so I’ve moved from Tahoe to Sequoia or something bizarre.

you know, because this is what they’re asking me to do or I won’t have any incompatibility issues then. I’m a surface person or if I’m an iPad person, there’s no compatibility issues.

Jeff Womelsdorf (49:52)
Yeah, I mean, we use iPads when we’re doing our inspections and yeah, it looks incredibly similar to this and yeah, just very little, if any downtime has ever been experienced on this platform in the year plus that we’ve been using it. So very stable. Again, that was what ultimately sold us on going with.

that because again, we’re inspectors that wanted to build a solution. We’re not developers that wanted to build an inspection solution. yeah, stability was a big selling point for us when we were choosing a platform.

Jon Ajinga (50:28)
Yep.

CCPIA (50:30)
Thanks, John. You can go ahead and stop sharing your screen if you’d like, unless there’s something else you wanted to show.

Jon Ajinga (50:33)
Alrighty, yeah.

No, I think that’s pretty good for now. I could talk for hours on this obviously, but.

CCPIA (50:39)
So I

Jeff Womelsdorf (50:39)
Yeah.

CCPIA (50:42)
gotta ask, ⁓ what has been in the last year and a half or two years that you’ve been out ⁓ screaming about Inspector Prime to the public, what has been your favorite, wow, this has made my life easier moment?

Jeff Womelsdorf (51:06)
happy to go first, John. ⁓ So with me specifically, I know our pricing structure is a little bit different. It’s a little unconventional, but when you take the time to crunch the numbers and what it does for your business in terms of cost savings, especially for commercial, you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars over a couple of years by leveraging this. Yeah, it’s a one-time cost to us and then you maintain your air table account, but

That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to save people money. There’s so many other software tools out there that really nickel and dime you at every opportunity that they can, but we were very passionate about making sure we weren’t doing that. So that for me is, that’s a big win on my part. Yeah, we were saving people money.

That makes me feel good because I mean as inspection business owners ourselves, yeah, you want to keep costs as low as possible, but still get good products out of it. So that’s mine personally. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And we do think we have something superior.

CCPIA (52:13)
if not good, superior. At the end

of the day, that’s what we’re selling. We like to think we’re selling behind our eyes and between our ears, but at the end of the day, we’re selling a piece of paper that has findings on it.

Jeff Womelsdorf (52:27)
Yep. ⁓

Jon Ajinga (52:34)
Yep. I would just add to that that the key thing is that you own this system for life. I mean, this is your company’s system. It is not controlled by Jeff and I once we deliver it. So for one time price, get to have a system you don’t rent anymore, And you get to control completely from your end. And that’s huge. And we offer weekly training. if people want to ⁓

Jeff Womelsdorf (52:35)
Yep.

Jon Ajinga (53:03)
use advanced features or add on reports like you were saying, they can get an hour of training with us and they’re going to be off to the races, you know, and that’s it’s pretty much that that’s simple to add additional features once they understand the structure of our system, how it works.

CCPIA (53:19)
Outstanding. So where do you envision your software evolving to over the next couple of years?

Jon Ajinga (53:25)
I know we need to do phase two ESA functions on there. ⁓

commercial inspector right now that does phase one ESAs and he’s going to give us this on a phase two so we can work together on getting something that meets the needs of that community. But other than that, we count on feature requests. And the other great thing is we actually can put something out within one to two weeks depending on what the feature is that they’re looking for. We are quick. We again do not have proprietary code we have to deal with and keep people in a box. We can say, hey, great, you want this? Let’s do it.

It

doesn’t affect all my other clients and users because it’s for your system. If we adopt that for the future Inspector Prime version, then we can do that and deliver it. But we will not interrupt people by making changes willy-nilly here and there. We actually get to iterate a lot faster than any other inspection software company out there. yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (54:06)
Exactly.

CCPIA (54:26)
⁓ That is great. ⁓ I don’t have any other questions. Is there anything that we’ve missed that we need to talk about during this session?

Jon Ajinga (54:42)
think that covers all the top elements for me, but yeah.

Jeff Womelsdorf (54:44)
I think so, yeah. And if people are interested in learning more, if there was something that we didn’t answer, please reach out directly to us. We love setting up time to talk with folks that are interested and kind of show them the capabilities and how it could fit into their business needs.

CCPIA (54:59)
And again, for CCPA members know that you can go to our website, do the click throughs on member benefits. Inspector Prime is an affiliate with us. There is an opportunity for you to get a little bit of a discount and communication. Plus, John and Jeff’s contacts are located right there on our website.

Thanks guys for taking the time and being with us. This is exactly what building your business with the CCPA is all about. It’s giving information to our members ⁓ and letting them have those tools, those resources, that knowledge base to make intelligent decisions and grow their business. And I think you guys are doing it. You guys are kicking it.

Jeff Womelsdorf (55:53)
Thanks, yeah, we really appreciate you giving us the time to do this. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Jon Ajinga (55:53)
Thank you.

CCPIA (55:58)
Yeah, I’m

looking forward to seeing how this is progressing. And good news, we’re only going to be changing the ComStop soon anyway. And so this will give you, it’s that planned obsolescence that John and I were talking about earlier. This is that opportunity to have you play a little bit in your forms and keep it fresh.

Jon Ajinga (56:10)
great.

Jeff Womelsdorf (56:11)
Hey, no problem.

Jon Ajinga (56:24)
There you go, her toes. ⁓ Awesome.

Jeff Womelsdorf (56:24)
Absolutely.

CCPIA (56:28)
You

guys, you again and thank you for taking your time today to be with us.

Jon Ajinga (56:34)
Yeah, thank you very much.

Jeff Womelsdorf (56:34)
Thank you. Yep.