The very moment a home inspector makes the decision to start their own business, the life cycle for that inspection business has begun.
While there are variations in the business life cycle phases for smaller businesses vs. larger corporations, the concept is still the same. The business begins, it grows, it reaches a maturity, and then it experiences a rebirth/renewal or simply falls into decline.
As you might expect, or may have even experienced first-hand, the different phases of the home inspection business life cycle come with many varying and often difficult challenges. For a home inspection business owner to overcome those challenges and achieve maximum success over the lifetime of their business, they must know what phase of the business life cycle they are in at any given point, and they must know what kind of decisions to make and actions to take during those specific phases.
Think of the life cycle of any inspection business as a race – more of a marathon than a sprint. And because it’s a marathon, you want to approach each stage differently and strategically. You don’t have to be a marathon runner to understand that you wouldn’t want to start the marathon running flat out as fast as you could. If you did that, you’d be out of gas too early and incapable of finishing the race. The same thinking applies for an inspection business owner. In the startup phase of your business, you wouldn’t just hire a bunch of home inspectors to help out before you actually had the steady work to support the staff. That would be a recipe for disaster. You have to establish yourself and your business/brand, tweak your approach to securing inspections and/or add-on services based on early feedback and changes in your market, learn, listen and make smart adjustments.
Every inspection business will fall somewhere on the spectrum of the business life cycle. It’s up to the owner of that business to know how to successfully navigate each phase. And remember, understanding what phase your inspection business is in will make a tremendous difference in how you approach strategic planning and operations. Solutions that may have worked during the growth phase of your business most likely will not work for the maturity phase – and so on.
Take honest stock of which of these phases your business is currently in and be prepared to ask the tough questions. Are you doing the right things now to ensure your inspection business will have true staying power? If not, it’s time to make some adjustments.
