Building Your Business Ep. 30: Ian Robertson of Inspector Toolbelt and Full View Digital

CCPIA (00:02.155)
Hello Ian, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and being with us on building your business.

Ian Robertson (00:09.654)
Hey Rob, the pleasure’s all mine. It’s an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

CCPIA (00:13.762)
You know, it’s I’ve been on yours. And so I guess this is a little bit of a reciprocation. You know, it’s it’s it’s funny. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the last couple of years, both, you know, on on four formats like this on phone calls. And also when we get together and see each other at conventions. But, know, it’s dawned on me. I really don’t know anything about your background.

Tell me a little bit about what got you interested in the inspection industry.

Ian Robertson (00:47.118)
Well, you probably don’t know a lot about my background because it’s been sealed by the courts. Just kidding. I’m just joking. Well, so I have a little bit of an eclectic background. I guess at the core of it, it’s a lot like any other inspector. I did construction. Actually, me and Nick Gromicko joke about this because he’s a high school dropout. I’m a high school dropout.

CCPIA (00:51.24)
yeah, it’s… I get that.

Ian Robertson (01:13.434)
I didn’t make it past the ninth grade. I think, I think Nick dropped out a year before a year after me, but, we, joke about that, but I got into the construction industry. did surveying. it was a quasi family thing. my dad was, my dad did surveying to an extent and my uncle and all that other stuff. and that introduced me into the world of homes and I did construction and.

Remodeling I did a construction. I owned my own construction finishes company at 19 Went and did and industrial coatings and industrial coating inspections and You know just all this other stuff and then in my early 20s I got into home inspections Full, you know full bore when licensing came out in New York State. I went and got my license for that and then commercial inspections back

20 years ago were way different than they are now. There wasn’t an industry per se. In fact, when I first started, I don’t even know if Naschi had their comps up out or not. I think they were just working on it. I’d have to go back and look. But I remember when I came out and I got excited, I’m like, cool, now I have something to present to people. But it was very much engineer and technician run. So it was hard getting into it. But that’s

That’s how I got into things. own three inspection companies now. Still do, don’t do a whole lot with them personally. I own Fullview Home Inspector Marketing, for, what is it? Just about coming up on 13 years now, we’ve helped home and commercial inspectors all across the US and Canada, and sometimes Australia, you know, do their online marketing and stuff like that. And obviously we own Inspector Tool Belt.

one of the premier home inspection softwares in the industry. We’re very proud of that. And that’s me.

CCPIA (03:10.592)
It’s funny, I grew up with a surveying household as well. I have been beaten over the head, the difference between a cloth tape and a steel chain, the survey pens, in fact, you can’t see it on this screen, but up on my bookshelf, I’ve actually got a six foot wooden ruler.

Ian Robertson (03:15.768)
Did you really? Did you hold the dumb end of the stick?

Ian Robertson (03:25.329)
my gosh.

Ian Robertson (03:40.718)
man. Yeah.

CCPIA (03:41.27)
that I had to use for marking stakes for grading. I spent a lot, a lot, a lot of years of my life. I remember, know, this is, gosh, this is terrible. Nobody cares about this stuff, but geeks like us do. I remember 1989 getting my first, our first laser.

Ian Robertson (03:47.822)
The worst

Ian Robertson (04:02.606)
Hmm.

Ian Robertson (04:10.508)
yeah.

CCPIA (04:10.612)
and being able to shoot a half a mile in a morning. In a morning!

Ian Robertson (04:16.59)
The EDM system, yeah.

CCPIA (04:19.042)
And now they can do it instantly. But we used to have to set up the receiver and the transmitter for the laser, the prism, and it would take an entire morning to shoot back and forth to measure that half a mile. And for my father, that was amazing.

Ian Robertson (04:32.984)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (04:40.45)
Well, so it’s funny how things come full circle because your dad probably ran the ran the EDM and you probably ran the rod. So that’s, that’s what you do when you grew up surveying. And, but now I watch surveyors and the, there’s only one person because it’s all robotic. So now the surveyor is the rod man. He’s doing all the running around and said the rod man. But, I used to remember watching my uncle as I would walk a half mile, mile cut line.

you know, do offsets and all these things. And then I’d spend three hours, I’d finally get to the marker. He’d go, okay, good, come back. And then I’d walk all the way back and he’d just stand there. He’d sit there with a sandwich and read and…

CCPIA (05:21.718)
Yeah. And I started doing it because the sign said survey party. And I’m looking for the party.

Ian Robertson (05:29.742)
there’s no party. It’s party of two people in the woods for eight days straight.

CCPIA (05:31.714)
No, no. When they hand you, because you’re going to do a level circuit or even if you’re doing offsets and they hand you the rod and a machete and a cloth tape and say, okay, start walking this way. You’re you’re right. I want to be the guy with the book or the girl with the book or I want to be on the transit. I don’t want to be this guy walking the bush.

Ian Robertson (06:00.79)
Yeah, we could talk about childhood trauma with surveying all day long. Go out to this hundred acre lot and find three half inch wide pins. We’ll see you in a week.

CCPIA (06:01.1)
That’s funny.

CCPIA (06:10.87)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve got this metal detector that’s made this yellow stick that beeps. Now go find it and that rod could be buried two foot in the ground. Yep. Yeah, so.

Ian Robertson (06:17.634)
Yeah.

Ian Robertson (06:22.21)
Yep. Yeah. But that’s, it was actually really good. don’t know about you, but it was really good for, we used to do a lot of as-built before home inspections were a thing, but before anybody even knew what a home inspection was and it turned in structural inspections. And that was actually my first taste of home inspections. People would come in and they’re like, well, we want a structural inspection. My uncle would get all grumpy and be like, these are as-built and they’re like, okay, to us it’s the same thing. Did it move? Is it the exact size that we wanted it to be?

CCPIA (06:30.945)
Yes.

Ian Robertson (06:52.258)
you know, does your rod change from the top to the bottom, you know? And he would give them the information and let them figure it out. But I’m like, huh, these people want more than an as-built. And you know, it translated really well into commercial inspections. You know, we don’t do, although maybe that’s a good add-on service. Maybe we discovered something here,

CCPIA (07:12.162)
Well, it’s funny because I was on a previous podcast with another host and we started talking about my genesis. I started doing inspections in 1988 in Louisiana. one of our, and this tangents into what you’re saying, one of our key metrics, we used water levels that we made.

And we could do slab surveying of the offset of a slab of a 800 square foot house of up an inch, down an inch, up an inch, down an inch level or whatever, and actually show where the pilings have failed under the house. And we called that a structural slab survey charged an extra $300 for on top of a $200 inspection and we got a $500 ticket.

Ian Robertson (08:07.086)
Well, mean, Texas guys for home inspections will do slab surveys a lot of a lot of the time. So, I mean, for big commercial inspection, you add on two grand, you give all the disclaimers that it’s not a survey, you’re not a licensed surveyor and you do what we call a topo. So basically you have a big six foot ruler. set your, you set your scope at, you know, whatever you set it at five feet and you measure the differentials between each of the spots on the slab and you run a quick distance measurement. So you know exactly where each pin went.

In less than an hour, you charge two grand for something like that.

CCPIA (08:40.908)
Yeah, yeah. My father had a, as a civil, he had a contract to go find potholes and problems on the mainline tollway in Illinois. So they block off a lane and I would have to walk five miles of the tollway with a steel Johnson bar, dropping it.

Ian Robertson (09:05.548)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

CCPIA (09:07.586)
And if it bounced back up in my hand, the concrete was solid. And if it thudded, it was hollow. There’s our pothole. And I regressed. I changed that, you know. Okay, that was my misguided youth and that taught me discipline. Go walk five miles, bounce on a steel rod in the ground, you’re gonna learn things. I do that now as an extra survey. I call it an ultrasound of…

Ian Robertson (09:24.43)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (09:37.256)
slabs in commercial warehouses.

Ian Robertson (09:41.432)
They make equipment for that actually too. You can hook up the equipment right to the slab.

CCPIA (09:47.436)
But I’m cheap and frugal and but it’s an opportunity to create a product to fill a need for a client. I I found found slab issues that if they would have drove their forklift with a few thousand pounds of paper for a paper printing company, they would have gone through the concrete. And it’s worked and it’s a

Ian Robertson (10:00.718)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (10:16.628)
It’s a great viable solution. it’s funny. We have, I guess when you talk to enough inspectors, you find certain similarities. It’s, it’s, I might’ve been in the trades. That’s a similarity that so many people have. I might have, and in your case, you worked in some engineering factions. know, surveying is engineering. It’s, it’s, it’s really, and you might not be doing the calculations.

Ian Robertson (10:27.566)
Hmm.

Ian Robertson (10:40.373)
It is here.

CCPIA (10:45.814)
but you’re tactically, you know, feeling it as tactile. It’s you’re feeling the building or the project. And then you said you had some, you had a Finnish company. So I get that. And then at some point you realized you wanted to be inspector and then you probably realized the report writing solutions were not what you wanted. And so you created inspector tool belt.

Ian Robertson (11:11.256)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (11:14.616)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (11:15.362)
you probably realized at some point that you didn’t like the marketing that was out there. So you created your marketing. And I think that’s where I really want to focus today, And I don’t want to dismiss Inspector Tool Belt, because I think your product is awesome. You’re proud of it. I love looking at it.

Ian Robertson (11:22.274)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (11:43.894)
But I don’t think a lot of people know enough about your marketing background. And I think that’d be something fun to play with. How’s that sound?

Ian Robertson (11:53.475)
Yeah. And we, we kind of talked about that too. Actually, you guys asked me to, demo the software and stuff like that, but I’d rather give something practical to people listening because, especially for commercial inspections, as you know, it’s a different world of marketing. Just as an example, if we’re a home inspector, most commercial inspectors are home inspectors that become commercial inspectors. Let’s, let’s be honest. That’s how it is. And we tried to take the same marketing model and put it in commercial inspections and put a different spin on it.

And it doesn’t work that way. Even just think about our customer journey, we call it. Customer journey for a home inspection to a commercial inspection is completely different. So for instance, a home buyer might not have even ever thought about a home inspection. Matter fact, they might have thought that the building assessor or something was going to do it or something like that. So they get two weeks typically in most markets.

to get a home inspection done. That customer journey has to begin and end within less than that two week period, because then they need to schedule it. So sometimes people get less. So the customer journey happens faster for a home inspector client than almost any other industry. Within a day or two, they need to know who you are, why hire you. You need to be completely ubiquitous in your market, which is basically you have to be everywhere. So when they look, they find you.

When you convert them on the phone and things like that, it’s all very very relatively quick, but we get so used to it as home inspectors Our mentality is it happens like that everywhere now with a commercial inspection You picture this sometimes you’re gonna have small ones like a button like the owner of a company is like I’m buying aware this small warehouse and you’re gonna deal with them directly and Maybe he has a time crunch, but those are gonna be rare. A lot of times it’s going to be okay. Hey, a building owner. We’re doing this

We need all the exit signs on this commercial building inspected or all the fire extinguishers or we need a slab survey or we might need the whole building inspection or we need this or that. There’s going to be a myriad of different types of inspections and they’re going to be very unhurried. So it’s usually going be like, hey, here’s our budget of $12,000. I’m going to give this to my secretary and he or she is going to find somebody.

Ian Robertson (14:17.582)
They’re going to present me with two or three options. We’re going to look them over, sit down at a meeting, and then we’re going to go back and maybe ask some questions and figure it It could take days, weeks, or months to convert that job. So customer journey, way, way different. And that’s, and the difference in the success of our marketing as a home inspector versus a commercial inspector is going to be number one, understanding the customer journey. And number two,

finding all the spots in it that we need to be in. Because that’s what any good marketer does. What do they do to get from point A, which is start to thinking about buying a service or product, and point B, which is actually buying a service or product. For us, how do we get into all the spots where we are point B?

CCPIA (15:05.538)
Very valid. I I found

I have also found that the residential side provides the purchaser slash client a disservice in that time crunch. Because if Ian Robertson is the best inspector, I love the word ubiquitous, I can’t spell it, but I love the word, so you’re it.

Ian Robertson (15:20.432)
yeah, yeah.

Ian Robertson (15:35.48)
fun word.

CCPIA (15:38.722)
in your marketplace, put that box there, dag nab it. I would hope you’re booked out. I would hope being that person, you’re probably utilized at like an 80, 90%. So that if that client wants Ian Robertson and they’ve only got this small lineal time period, they can’t get you.

Ian Robertson (16:05.123)
window.

Ian Robertson (16:09.1)
Yep, happens all the time. And you see it all the time.

CCPIA (16:11.08)
And yeah, and now all of a sudden the client gets somebody else, even though they wanted you, because they don’t have, even though they could probably get an extension and do all this legal stuff, but if they want the best, they don’t get the best. And maybe that’s good for the marketplace because that allows other inspectors to infill up, but it doesn’t, it commoditizes.

Ian Robertson (16:18.594)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (16:29.826)
to get the most available.

Ian Robertson (16:40.396)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (16:41.622)
But on the commercial side, you so perfectly said or eloquently said there’s time, they don’t care about price. They just want Ian. He’s the best. And we’ll take our time to make sure we get you there.

Ian Robertson (16:49.421)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (16:57.858)
Well, and there’s the point. Most of these companies, yeah, so our availability and price a thing, totally, 100%. And we can talk about a couple of things that we can do to make sure that we give them the best value while we get the best price. But when it really comes down to it, even if you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation, you’re going to want the best for your $30 million warehouse.

You’re not going to go and hire, to be perfectly frank, the home inspector who has a page on their website that says we also do commercial inspections, which if, if I had a dime for every blog post I’ve written, every podcast I’ve published, and every time I’ve had to personally tell the home inspector that you need to have a separate, yes, everybody listening, you need to have at a bare minimum. This is a minimum level of, separate brand, separate website.

separate everything for commercial inspections. You’re going to miss more work than you realize. And guys will tell me, oh, I’ve never had a problem. get, I get commercial jobs all the time. I’m like, okay, how many did you do last year? It’ll be like 12. And I’m like, okay. And they were all like thousand dollar commercial inspections. I’m like, those are just, I mean, our home inspections are averaging a thousand and $75 right now. I’m like, be a home inspector for that. If you really want to be doing these $30,000 hotels, $15,000 warehouses, you need to have a whole

separate brand for that. Went off on a tangent because that just, I can see you shaking your head yes, because it just bothers the snot out of me. But they have higher expectations for the higher level of work. But that gives us an opportunity. We all have to say we’re the best home inspector, but sometimes mathematically speaking, we aren’t the best. We’re the most available. If our schedule is full, we have to ask ourselves, am I the best or am I just the most available?

CCPIA (18:48.684)
Exactly.

Ian Robertson (18:55.362)
With commercial inspections, it’s not, it’s going to be completely different. schedule is going to be full when we’re the best, because that’s what they’re looking for. And they’ll even fly you out places. I have commercial inspectors that I’ve worked with for years and they’re like, Ian, we need to turn the marketing down. They’re like, this guy’s flying me out to Wichita. This person is flying me out to, you know, Massachusetts and we’re doing this and I’m staying for three days out and you know, Buffalo and.

They’re gonna say, okay, we found the guy that we like. He’s gonna do the inspection. He’s gonna run our board meeting. He’s gonna do a whole presentation. This is what we have now. If you wanna be that, you have to be that.

CCPIA (19:38.85)
Yeah, and that’s a try. And I have had members call. We do coaching sessions and every member at the CCPA better have my phone number because I make it available to absolutely everybody. And I’ll get calls like that. And sometimes, now there are projects that require a Rob or an Ian because that’s what the client wants, boots on the ground.

Ian Robertson (20:06.414)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (20:07.222)
But there are other projects they want to rob or an E in oversight. And this is where you’ve got to get into the business owner’s mindset. You could find a very qualified, competent, local inspector that can do your field work. And you can be their eyes, their QA, their QC.

from wherever your home is and then go to the boardroom and present those findings as well and still be very, very profitable and not have to spend your time because there are some projects I have seen Ian that the only people that make money are the airlines, the hotels and the car rental because you don’t think about billing that other element into your fee because your client wanted you to go to

Ian Robertson (20:54.328)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

CCPIA (21:04.79)
from Chicago to Poughkeepsie.

Ian Robertson (21:07.246)
Yeah. Well, and then too, um, talking about the over serial thing, um, that’s where CCPIA works out really well. So a lot of my guys will do that. I say my guys, the inspectors that I work with with commercial and sometimes I’ll be like, okay, listen, there’s 30 HVAC units. I’m getting an HVAC guy, HVAC guy. Okay, cool. But for the most part, they’re going to be like, I need boots on the ground, but I’m here eight states away.

So they’re going to hire a CC PIA guy. But listen, if I’m, if I’m hiring internally, maybe, maybe we’re a commercial inspector say, Hey, no other commercial inspectors ever called me. Step back and look when they find you. I’m not hiring you for ABC home inspections. That also does commercial inspections. I want a guy that’s going to show up and say, Ian, know exactly what you need. by the way, this, this, risk assessment report, we usually have that here in this part of the state. They may not have mentioned it. geez. Thank you. Yeah.

You know, that kind of conversation, you’re only going to get hired by other good CCPIA guys if you are a good CCPIA guy. Like you, got to know your stuff and it’s easy to find out who knows and who doesn’t right away.

CCPIA (22:19.554)
It’s a, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a tough, it’s not a tough vet. Now you, you, you, talked about websites and we’ve done other podcasts with, with, digital designers and, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve screamed the same thing that, that you need to have a digital presence that’s commercial and not and, and, and, and, and I, and I get that.

Ian Robertson (22:43.714)
Yeah. Yeah.

CCPIA (22:49.578)
What other differences have you seen in the marketing strategy between residential and commercial that you think it’d be important to talk about?

Ian Robertson (23:01.176)
So one of the biggest differences is commercial inspections is way less referral based. So it is still referral based in a lot of aspects. You have commercial real estate agents. But for the most part, it’s a lot more digital than it is the home inspection field. And it’s also a lot of recurring revenue if you do it properly. So for a commercial, we’re going to focus a lot more

on not necessarily a different keyword. I mean, they’re going to be different keywordsets, but they’re going to be searching a lot more online. So picture yourself being in a company and they’re like, okay, we’re buying three warehouses in the Southwest. So they’re going to go online and start researching. And especially these young engineers and young businessmen and women that are coming on site.

Now for these companies, they’re using a lot of chat GPT, Gemini, and all these other AI models. They’re going to start asking questions back and forth. Can you do a background check on, you know, this company? You know, who are the top companies in this area? According to Reddit, are there any other businesses that have used XYZ or mentioned this company? And they’re going to go a lot deeper than the homeowner who looks at our Google reviews or home buyer looking at our Google reviews and

saying, okay, the agent recommended this person, they have 93 good Google reviews, I’m hiring them. It’s a lot different for commercial. And the customer journey for different companies is different. So are you gonna be targeting somebody buying a warehouse versus buying a hotel? The questions they ask are very different. Are we going to be going after somebody who’s looking for an annual maintenance routine?

or an insurance inspection for draft hoods. All of those are going to be very, very different marketing sets. So the content’s gonna be different on our websites. So we may wanna say we do commercial inspections, but we need to break it down a little bit. We need to do a question and answer type situation where it’s like, is a PCA? How do we go about it? What is a cost to cure? How do we go about it?

Ian Robertson (25:22.926)
And then mention our local market if we’re in Phoenix, Arizona, they’re like in Phoenix, Arizona what is a what is a special inspection versus what is a You know a fire inspection whatever these things are So that anytime that somebody asks us a question about a commercial inspection. We should have a piece of paper by us and write it down Then we take that question and we put it as content into our website. That’s basically what we do for our clients. We follow trends

And we were like, okay, what’s the trend? What are the questions that are people people are asking in their market, in other markets that they’re expanding into. And then we start creating content based on those questions. I don’t know all the reasons why, but most of our commercial clients get the bulk of their work online. But that’s basically one of the main reasons why, whereas home inspectors might be if you’re doing, if you have a good online campaign, 50 50.

CCPIA (26:13.751)
Yeah.

Ian Robertson (26:22.815)
Maybe 25 % of your work comes from online Whatever it happens to be but the bulk and commercial definitely from online

CCPIA (26:30.306)
I couldn’t agree more. I can go back to the statistics when I was still running a company. We were well in excess of 75-25, maybe even 85-15 of internet source versus direct referral because, you know, and I think it’s for a lot of reasons. I think some reasons might be this is such an emerging industry.

Ian Robertson (26:45.336)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (27:01.074)
that you still I mean we’re still calling dibs. We’re still educating the world on the value of a commercial inspection that it hasn’t become mainstream enough yet that that all the referring partners understand us. But once you find a referring partner they’re in they’re like holy cow give me some more of this. It’s like it’s like eating potato chips. But so I couldn’t I couldn’t agree more. Now you mentioned something

Ian Robertson (27:01.293)
It is.

CCPIA (27:29.282)
Earlier on in that context of your clients will hire you for more than just an inspection. What do you mean by that?

Ian Robertson (27:38.499)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (27:41.923)
Well, it comes up in a lot of different ways. and I won’t give his name here, but he’s a great commercial inspector, but he contacted me. He’s like, Ian, they want me to inspect all these exit signs on this ginormous building. and then change light bulbs. If there’s a light bulb that needs to be replaced or batteries, I’m sorry, batteries, not light bulb. I’m like, cool. He’s like, well, obviously I wouldn’t do the batteries, but all this, I’ll check out the signs. I’m like, why wouldn’t you do the batteries? I’m like, this isn’t a home inspection. If I’m hiring you and like,

If I’m hiring you to do those exit signs, I’m probably going to be doing it for insurance reasons or a tenant complaint or something like that. I’m probably going to want you to do it every year and I’m going to do that every year. I’m going to send them a contract. I’m going to push it. I’m going to send reminders the next year because what I want as a business owner is ARR, annual recurring revenue. That makes our business incredibly sellable. So let’s say you only make $300 to do a

one hour walk through and you know charge $40 to replace the batteries and the sign you know whatever it doesn’t matter you do 300 of those over your career and you start accruing them when you go to sell your business you sell that business for the amount that you have with three to eight x so if you’re making 100 grand a year in annual recurring revenue besides your you know 500 grand a year and other revenue

they’re going to take the other revenue into account, but they’re going to go buy your annual recurring revenue, stuff that you have contracts for. So that’s going to be $100,000 times five. $500,000 is what your business is worth. The more ARR and MRR, which is monthly recurring revenue you can get, the better. And let’s be honest, changing out batteries, Rob, man, I’ll do that all day long, you know, just to have the recurring revenue. And then every year,

CCPIA (29:32.758)
Yeah. I have to walk around with a ladder, really? Yeah. Go ahead.

Ian Robertson (29:39.02)
Yeah, well, no, it but it he goes, and he’s a smart guy. He’s like, that makes sense. We have to get out of the home inspector mentality of it all because.

CCPIA (29:49.728)
Yeah, it’s you really and I feel bad in I really do right down to my core. feel bad for our colleagues that have to do both residential and commercial in the same day.

Ian Robertson (30:07.201)
Mm-hmm.

I can’t do it in the same day. I won’t schedule for the same day. Messes my brain up and I won’t. None of my guys. Nobody will do it in the same day if we can help it because it’s just two different mentalities.

CCPIA (30:14.443)
Yeah.

CCPIA (30:18.518)
Yeah, exactly. And let alone residential commercial in the same day after concurrently day because it’s different vocabularies. It’s different clients, different reporting styles and different approaches. you know, like there’s a sweet spot out there in marketing. And again, we’re still playing with the marketing. These buildings.

that are maybe 15,000 to 50,000 square foot probably don’t have an on-site maintenance staff.

Ian Robertson (30:52.824)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (30:59.852)
They’re probably using the shop foreman or the shop mechanic or maybe even the owner is doing the filter changes and they’re doing the little bitty things. Where in homes, to get a homeowner to do a maintenance inspection doesn’t happen. We all know people that have been chasing that banner for decades.

Ian Robertson (31:22.402)
Narrow and muscle. Yeah, doesn’t happen.

CCPIA (31:29.634)
And the American homeowner population does not do maintenance inspections. If it breaks, we buy a new one or we have it fixed, but we don’t want to know anything preventative. But on commercial, that’s a huge, when you talk about annual revenue, doing an annual maintenance inspection, inspection on a commercial building is hands down some of the greatest residual opportunities you’ll ever have.

Ian Robertson (31:30.466)
Yeah, come on out.

Ian Robertson (32:00.782)
If I were starting a commercial inspection company today, I would in tandem have a maintenance crew that either I worked with a company and I made money off of their contracts, I would need full disclosure, what are your contracts and this and that, and I take a percentage off the top, or I would have my own guys and be like, okay, we’re going to do your annual inspection and we’ll make sure that the crew takes care of X, Y, and Z. And that way you don’t have to hire a full crew.

You have a maintenance staff that comes in once a month and handles these, particular tasks. Every third month you have a one hour inspection to see if there’s anything new and then we’ll give you a proposal automatically. Those you almost have to think like, like a project, like a, like a property manager, because that’s, that’s where it’s going. But even still those little niche projects are important, but talking about what you would mention before Rob.

CCPIA (32:47.756)
Yeah.

Ian Robertson (32:58.092)
This really is the golden age of home inspections for those things. Cause property managers have not figured this out. And I still don’t know for the life of me, why more property managers are like, why don’t we just become commercial inspectors? They just don’t. I don’t know why. and then most home inspectors, we are very good at inspecting homes, but the vast majority of us are not equipped for commercial inspections. So competition is still very low. We all like to think we are like, it’s just a big house.

Man, competition is so low in the commercial industry. had a guy. We just threw up a website, no SEO, no AEO, which is optimization for AI. No nothing. We just threw them up a website. He’s like, I don’t want it. I just want a website. See where it hits. He landed multiple commercial jobs just from the website being up. And then I looked, I’m like, there is no SEO on this website and he’s ranking in, in statewide keywords.

And then I looked because there was only like three competitors in his state that had any keyword sets. So he was coming up fourth on page one everywhere. When you did a question on AI, his website would come up as one of the references almost invariably. And it wasn’t because we did anything amazing or he did anything amazing. It’s because there was no competition and it still amazes me how little competition there is.

CCPIA (34:24.896)
And when you’re looking at dollars, then it’s a fairly cheap invest because it’s not a saturated market where there’s competition and the paper clicks or the keyword searches aren’t as expensive. You can grow a fairly big breath economically in a lot of different markets in this country or even across the world.

Ian Robertson (34:31.212)
It is.

Ian Robertson (34:49.134)
man. I could tell you markets right now where you could just jump in and start getting work in the Northeast. Man, go for it in the Northeast. I’ll have a guy put them up and he’ll start getting work. I mean, are you going to, are you going to be like rolling in it right away? No, there’s always still going to be a learning curve. And it’s not like there’s the surge volume is still pretty low compared to home inspections. So if you go to Google trends.

or you ask AI, trending keywords are never going to be how many commercial inspections, but the ones that are out there are high value and low competition.

CCPIA (35:28.45)
You gotta start somewhere. mean, I made a snowman the other day for my dog to jump through. You gotta start with a little ball and you roll it and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. that’s what we have to do on the commercial side is plant those seeds and get that going because that’s what’s gonna create that buzz. I I had a conversation with an industry leader four or five years ago and I’m not gonna say names, but this is.

Ian Robertson (35:33.019)
cool.

CCPIA (35:58.332)
one of the industry leaders that everybody in country and probably North America knows. And this individual goes to me, sure, Rob, I understand you’re successful because you’re in Chicago. There’s a lot of commercial. It’s easy. And I stand back and say, wait a minute, I can be anywhere in North America and go, there’s a commercial building. There’s a commercial building. You don’t have to do, in fact,

Ian Robertson (36:14.239)
Mmm, yeah.

Ian Robertson (36:23.522)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (36:28.008)
I rarely did million square foot warehouse spaces. Those don’t get inspected. I’m doing more donut shops, dentist offices, mechanic shops, and that 35 to 75,000 square foot warehouse industrial building that’s owned by Acme Widgets than I did any large portfolio work. That’s just not work that I looked for. And so

your to your point it’s out there and it’s very findable.

Ian Robertson (37:03.352)
I’m really glad you brought that up Rob, because that’s something that everybody, I say everybody. Well, I mean, almost everybody that I’ve ever talked to misses because for instance, if we live near Houston, we’re going to be like, I want to do commercial inspections in Houston. That’s where all the commercial work is. I like what we call there’s different. So if you look up this term, there’s different variations of it, but fractional marketing, I’d rather have you targeting.

50 small towns than Houston. Because those every small town you will not like my town is probably. The last time I checked it was like 173 people in my little town here. And I’m I’m thinking just down the road from me there’s one commercial building to commercial buildings three commercial buildings a big warehouse five commercial buildings. This giant gym with a pool inside sick so I’m like.

CCPIA (37:45.951)
I could grieve.

Ian Robertson (38:01.406)
Without even counting and there’s two schools So without even fully counting I’m gonna guess a dozen or two dozen Commercial buildings mechanic shops and some larger than others some you know 10 15,000 square foot warehouse of something Whatever that what’s ever in that warehouse so Nobody’s targeting my little town. So guess what I’m do for my client I’m gonna target that little town and be ubiquitous, which means everywhere

Anytime somebody is in that little town doing a search. Well, what about this? What about that? I want them to find my client. Go after those little towns. Stop going after the big cities because that’s where everybody’s going after and they have people to choose from. And I even tell that to my home inspection clients. like, I this one guy who wants to be on page one of this big city. And I’m like, listen, you put, you get on page one of this big city.

You’re not going to get as much work as if you’re on page one of these 15 little towns. And I showed him the numbers and he still didn’t want to listen. So eventually we got him on page one of the big city and he’s like, Ian, it didn’t increase my traffic. I’m like, I know that. And I referred back to the email. I’m like, here was my presentation, but it’s the same thing with commercial. Every little town, like you said, Rob has commercial in it and not every, not everything you can do a pizza place. You can do a $4,000 warehouse.

and make a couple grand in the day. Cool. You know, easy day, but go after those little towns and you’d be surprised in my little town. There’s also a, a munitions testing plant. So they actually need to interestingly get their stuff inspected because they test munitions. So those micro vibrations go through and loosen things like bolts and roofing material. and they have underground structures, so they need to get regular inspections, find out what inspections they need.

CCPIA (39:47.031)
Yeah.

Ian Robertson (39:55.029)
sure they’re not cheap to get and it’s a big big plant so there’s always some

CCPIA (39:59.778)
Yeah. Commercial, I get nervous every once in a while. Not nervous like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but nervous a little bit in… There’s 38 states plus two provinces in Canada that have licensure for home inspection. And there’s really no states…

and that have licensure for commercial, can talk about North and South Carolina, and I won’t go there, but people start talking about, need to license, we need to license. And I like this opportunity of being flexible and going state to state and having this. But what is really nice is because of the home inspection regulation, they very clearly defined what a home inspection is.

Ian Robertson (40:58.712)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (40:58.978)
New York has a definition. It’s any building with four or less dwellings. Great. And so if it’s five, it’s commercial. And so I’ve always told our members, I say, if you’re going to go into commercial, go loud. Be as bolsterous as possible. You’ve probably done home inspections for people that have jobs. You’ve probably done inspections for people that own businesses.

Ian Robertson (41:25.198)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (41:28.886)
You’ve probably done home inspections for people that know people that know businesses. You probably know people that know businesses. And I said, tell everybody in the world you do commercial because it’s just going to be ripples in the pond. But to your point about small businesses, we just did a field training of a bar and grill, a little 1200 square foot bar and grill in the inner city of Chicago.

And we have 30 inspectors show up from nine states because that is what’s in their neighborhood. This is what you’re inspecting. You can do that bar and grill at a very attractive, very fair and very compensated fee schedule that’s equal to your process, but it’s a whole lot better doing a home inspection.

Ian Robertson (42:28.61)
Yeah, it’s a and we do have to be adapt more adaptable in the in the commercial field. It takes a lot of more exploratory measures for our for our marketing because our marketing isn’t just okay. I put this out here. Somebody called me and I got the job. The marketing continues when we’re courting our client. We don’t quarter home inspection clients. They call the schedule. We court them on site when we do the inspection. Most commercial clients. I don’t know about you. I was just as you were talking. I was remembering a

big man, I don’t know, 30 story building I inspected here in the capital district of my state of New York and cool building. they had a, they had a brick veneer that was falling off, ended up falling off. I told them it was falling off. They didn’t fix it ended up falling off onto the street and they got sued for it because they’re like, and you got warned. I’m like, yeah. Anyways. now I forgot what I was saying. but our courting happens well after.

We provide the, we call them. We ask questions. We say, what do you need? Okay. Do you have the little bar and grill? All right. Cool. That’s an easy one. Here’s our price. We can be there next Thursday. is it a bigger, you know, outside mall? You know, then, okay, cool. Well, there’s going to be how many stores do you want a representative number? are we inspecting the whole thing? And then we call back and maybe ask more questions, follow up. And you know, maybe we do like a $30,000 hotel.

We’re probably going to be doing a zoom presentation. You know, what kind of marketing we’re going to do and think about that zoom presentation thing. If you have people buying like in Florida, like this three building resort and you want to do those, I’ll be honest with you. Those are easy and awesome. You’re going to be doing, okay, cool. You’re, you know, if you want to, if you want an estimate, it’s going to cost you X, Y, Z.

And then we’ll do a presentation for your board. We’re going to do a zoom presentation. Here’s what we look for. Here’s our, here’s our cost of cures. Here’s add ons. If you want to know how many, how many working TVs are in each hotel room. So you have an inventory. Here’s what we do in each bathroom. How, how everything work that all into our marketing plan. So how for each type of client have a marketing plan. So we have first tier, which is going to be.

Ian Robertson (44:57.25)
you know, the bar and grill or, you know, a rental or a lease inspection or something like that, things that take a day or less. Then another tier where we’re going to go, okay, I got this lead. How do I funnel them? Okay. The next tier is going to be like a three day warehouse. Okay, cool. here’s my next marketing plan and each marketing plan is usually going to add on steps to the point where when you get to $30,000 inspections and above, they’re all going to be basically the same in my opinion.

You’re going to do a presentation, not just a quick, you know, here’s an estimate. You’re going to do a presentation likely and maybe even a board presentation afterwards. So marketing doesn’t stop with getting the lead. We need to have systems in place to get that lead to where we want them to go. Some of the best things I find are you can do things like type forms. So the lead fills out the form and then you have the lead and you can keep track of it.

CCPIA (45:38.571)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Robertson (45:55.669)
use things like HubSpot, a little bit pricier, but HubSpot can say, okay, is this a first tier, second tier, or third tier lead? All right, then you just literally drop that lead into that funnel and it continually makes it happen. It’ll send you reminders. Hey, you’re supposed to have the estimate out to them today. Send yourself a reminder. cool. I’ll do that.

CCPIA (45:57.698)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (46:07.18)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (46:14.914)
A lot of people call some of that process, they’ll create a tech deck where we’re okay. So I can send this piece of collateral or I can do this in this step, but you’re right. I, some of the most successful commercial inspectors I’ve been lucky enough to meet and in my time here with the CCPIA have been those that understand that, that are doing the inspection on

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and presenting the findings or at least scheduling a call with the client on Friday to make sure they understood it. And they’re just not dropping the mic. And to your point, mean, I think it’s, I think you letting them know that in your, know, cause you’re probably for lack of a different term.

Ian Robertson (47:06.158)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (47:11.314)
every person that you support, you’re probably adopting them into your life and your family.

Ian Robertson (47:18.06)
Yeah.

Yeah, and you know, there’s also different variations of what we can do and I try to help out as many inspectors as I can and here’s a here’s a cheap way of doing it. So listen, we may not be tech savvy, but we may be a great commercial inspector. Trello T R E L L O. What you’re going to do is create a free account and you’re going to create a commercial lead board. Just call it that in your first column, you’re going to have your

your cards and each card is going to represent a different tier of lead. So get a lead, create a tier. Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to create a new card for every lead and pick the template that you created and it’s going to have a checklist in it. And you can set up your Trello so that each checklist item is going to send you a reminder. So you got lead,

send introductory email. Once you do that, check it off. you don’t send it, it’ll send you a reminder, hey, you didn’t send the introductory email for this lead. And the free version will do a lot of this or all of it for you, depending on how you set it up. So now you can follow the lead manually. Did you call them back? You checked off this box. Three days later, have you called them back? Oh, I got to call them back. Now push notifications on our phone are telling us what to do next. Super easy and super cheap to do if we’re just starting out.

But really, you should be doing things automated. I love automation. know, like Inspector Toolbelt, I want to be able to push that button and the lead just keeps getting the things that they need. And there are ways that you can take any CRM and do that and kind of manipulate a little bit.

CCPIA (49:10.466)
I will research that. think that’s, right. think all of us are on the hamster wheel. We’re all running and the demographics of most of the inspection industry is single owner operating businesses and not multi inspector businesses. so to your point, the more automated, the more, I don’t want to say AI generated, but

The more stuff that you have pre-prepared and ready to go, the higher the elevation, the professionalism, and I think your victories will be.

Because at the end of the day, we want victories because that’s where money goes in the goes in the bank and or or your mattress or wherever you store your money.

Ian Robertson (50:05.442)
Yep. Well, we could talk about money storage all day long because I think most of us as business owners do it the wrong way. And we’re leaving money on the table by how we run our business. So we could,

CCPIA (50:14.828)
Yeah, yeah, most of us undervalue. Most of us are afraid. I’ve had so many calls from members. What have…

CCPIA (50:28.994)
I don’t want a tangent, but I will. One of the things that destroys me, destroys me to the quick, is when I look on social media and somebody posts, here’s a building, what do I charge?

Ian Robertson (50:31.384)
Let’s tangent man, let’s make it happen.

Ian Robertson (50:47.79)
I know I hate that.

CCPIA (50:49.454)
And then you’re going to get 50 responses from 50 different people and half of them are snide and crass and without validity. And my response to those individuals is stop asking what.

Ian Robertson (50:59.022)
Mm-hmm.

CCPIA (51:13.41)
start asking how? Because what you’re going to charge in your area of New York is different than what somebody’s going to charge in their area in Florida or their area in Chicago or their area in Arizona. It’s tell me how you would come up with a price on this. What and maybe

what ancillary things I should consider, but don’t ever ask, don’t ask me what do I charge in dollars because it’s gonna be different.

Ian Robertson (51:53.081)
I’m glad you brought that up. That’s a good tangent because I’ve always thought that it was kind of like a doctor posting their patient online. Here’s a picture of my patient. What’s wrong with them? It’s just like, okay, we’re going to start asking like symptoms. Can we have some more information? It’s the same thing with a commercial building. Okay. What do they want? What are they going to use it for? How far away is it from you? Are you going, are you going to need specialists? And you start asking those questions and they don’t know the answers a lot of the time.

CCPIA (52:07.222)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Robertson (52:22.828)
So we should have a checklist of what questions do we ask them, and it really should be in something like a type form. And I keep mentioning type form or any other service that’s like that. It’ll take partially filled out form so that you can find out who is filling it out. It’ll ask multiple questions and it’ll do if this than that. They’re say, I don’t, I don’t know what I want. You say here’s three standard inspections that we offer. Would you like one of those? And then they click one, at least then we know where to go. And then when we do the, the

client acquisition call, we call them. say, hey, thanks for filling out that form. Have you, what are you using it for? you’re switching this warehouse to vehicle storage. If you’re going to do that, can I recommend that we do, you know, a slab inspection to make sure that it can handle the weight? Cause it might handle the, the, the small two door Kia, but what if you’re going to put a Hummer in there? We want to make sure that you’re not going to have any slab issues.

So first of all, you won that job already on authority. They’re like, we didn’t even think about that. He told us exactly what we needed, but we didn’t know we needed it. And then second of all, you just got an ancillary service. you, those questions, we really need to have those written out. What are you going to be using the building for? Do you know what ancillary inspections you want in this area? We have a lot of our clients order this, this, and this type of inspection. We’re selling ourselves short by not having a list. I know for me,

When I go to the dentist, I don’t want him to ask, what do you want? I’m like, I’m to say, what do I need? Do I need a filling? Do I need veneers? I don’t know what a veneer is. think that’s when they just put like a little coating on your teeth to make them white. don’t know. Anyways, I’m digressing. We don’t want to leave it the ball on their court. They put the ball in our court. Let’s deliver it back to them with something useful. Have a list of questions.

CCPIA (54:12.866)
I couldn’t agree more. I think we’d initially had a conversation about, okay, let’s talk about your superior and excellent software product. But then it’s like, well, no, there’s more to it. You have so much more to offer. But I want to go back and circle the wagon because this has been great and we could do another three more hours on this.

Nobody will listen, but we could do another three more hours on this. So let’s go back to Inspector Tool Belt towards the end of this. And what’s on the horizon for Inspector Tool Belt? Is there anything new and exciting coming out that people need to be aware of?

Ian Robertson (54:42.761)
Hahaha!

Ian Robertson (55:02.86)
Yeah, so whether you’re a home inspector or commercial inspector, we have lots of both. We’re going to be having more CRM options put into our app so that you can funnel those leads better, both for residential and commercial. One of our very next feature that we’re releasing is sub items. So it allows you to get as granular as you’d like with things. So, you know, if we’re walking around, we’re like, okay, crack in the slab, but now we’re doing a slab inspection, you can create sub items under the slab.

get even more granular with each particular comment, giving each comment its own rating and own attributes and things like that, and digging even deeper for more technical types of inspections. We’re digging deeper into AI without letting AI run the ship, but it’s definitely gonna be an AI companion that can help steer you in the right direction and take care of things on the side to allow you to inspect better.

CCPIA (55:50.38)
Okay.

Ian Robertson (55:58.479)
One of the worst things I think that’ll happen to even commercial inspections is eventually people are going to want AI and rely on that too much. It should be a companion because anybody who’s ever even asked AI for a recipe realizes how bad it is pretty quickly. Like it gave us a recipe and my daughter made it and I’m like, there’s something missing. We asked AI, Oh yeah, well, I didn’t tell you about these three ingredients. That was my mistake. Can you imagine that happening on a $30,000 hotel inspection?

or somebody’s $500,000 house, it should be an assistant, in our opinion, and that’s what we’re making it. A great assistant to say, hey, you might have missed this, or did you mean to word it that way? Or hey, how about we take care of this task for you while you’re writing this?

CCPIA (56:41.538)
Uh, my, our son is in a, in a, in in a master’s program right now for aeronautical engineering safety. And I asked him the other day, said, so tell me, cause he’s writing papers every week. And I go, so what do you use AI for? He says, nothing. What do mean nothing? I said, I said, don’t you have a check your grammar? says, I don’t even have a check my grammar because I’m afraid it’s going to change the meaning of something. And so.

Ian Robertson (57:08.846)
Yeah.

CCPIA (57:10.666)
So I don’t think, I think it’s coming. I don’t think it’s there. I don’t think, and Nick Gromicko says it very well. I don’t think virtual or AI is ever going to take the place of inspector boots on the ground and eyes on something.

Ian Robertson (57:31.139)
Well, and here’s why I agree with you and why we are developing it very carefully. We think that some States or I think some States are actually going to ban it because AI reg AI regulation is getting very wonky. the first time a doctor makes a mistake because well, AI said, here’s your three symptoms. So my dentist uses it. It scans me scans my teeth rather. And it gave me all this stuff.

CCPIA (57:41.89)
Okay, interesting.

Ian Robertson (57:58.015)
first time a dentist or a doctor or somebody makes a big mistake, then they’re going to start regulating it and then it’s going to pour into home inspection regulation and vicariously into any regulations that happen with commercial because it really shouldn’t take the lead. It should be an assistant.

CCPIA (58:14.966)
Well, look at the autonomous cars that have had the issues over the last week. Didn’t three converge on each other and basically had a standoff? They didn’t know which one was going to go which way. And then we had another one drive through a crime scene. Yeah, you know, that was just in the last week. We’ve had those autonomous cars, taxis do that. And so you’re right.

Ian Robertson (58:22.606)
I didn’t see that.

Ian Robertson (58:30.631)
I didn’t see that.

CCPIA (58:43.778)
Man, this has been fun. mean, unfortunately, we’re coming up on our time and I got to be respectful for you. You have so generously given up so much. I’m to put all your contact, but is there contact information? If somebody wants to get a hold of you, Ian, what’s the best way they can do that to get a hold of you?

Ian Robertson (59:06.862)
Yeah, so it depends on what you’re getting hold me for. If you want like website and SEO and things like that, and you’re contacting full view home inspector marketing, uh, it’s Ian IAN at full view digital.com. If you’re asking about inspector tool belt in the app and things like that, then it’s going to be info at inspector tool belt.com. That’s our inbox. You’ll have me or David or somebody else answering you out of that. Um, but yeah, reach out. Um, also if you’d like to call me directly, um, 5 1 8 8 7 8 4 8 4 5, but otherwise.

It’s been a great privilege to be on here, Rob. And believe me, the honor, the honor is mine. love sharing information.

CCPIA (59:41.43)
No, it’s mine. I look forward to our meetings and greetings and handshakes are few and fleeting, but it is always my pleasure. And thank you again for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat. I think both of us have a lot of passion and can chat about commercial inspections all day long.

Ian Robertson (01:00:07.298)
Yeah, agreed. Thank you again.

CCPIA (01:00:09.138)
My pleasure.