Home Spotlight Foundations of Trust: Family, Resilience, and Commitment to Professional Integrity

Foundations of Trust: Family, Resilience, and Commitment to Professional Integrity

by Contributing Writer
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My father and grandfather both were career police officers. My father retired as deputy chief of police. My mother, in all her 4-foot 10-inch, 110 lb. frame, was a firebrand who didn’t like school, wasn’t a reader, but knew how to make ends meet. In the end, she passed away from breast cancer at age 63 after seven years of fighting an aggressive, rare variant.

When my mother and stepfather moved us from California to Tennessee in middle school, it was hard to find work. He was an electrician…and mom made ends meet. Eventually, they somehow wrangled a concession stand on the strip in Pigeon Forge. We worked that stand into the ground. There were a few larger locations after that—a now disappeared amusement park restaurant at the start of Gatlinburg; a pizza and sub shop across from the entrance to Ober, again in Gatlinburg. Those were very hard years for my mom and my stepfather (and me…I was free labor).

Greg Johns

When we first moved to Tennessee, we had little money. On weekends and after school, we’d walk along the sides of the twisty, curvy Allensville Rd., complete with very fast southern drivers and steep shoulders. Throw in some electric fences, ticks, and random dead animals. When you, as a middle schooler, are picking up sour beer cans while fellow students drive by with their parents, you have no choice but to steel yourself. In hindsight, my mom was brave, and I can’t imagine what it must have felt like somewhere in that stubborn heart to see herself and 12-year-old son picking alongside road weeds and grass to try and scrape enough money together to make ends meet. She was good at that. My mother’s bravery and determination in those times were truly inspiring, teaching me the value of hard work and perseverance.

Later, I tried several times to leave Tennessee. I thought after my master’s in English composition out in Boston, MA, that I’d never return. Life had other plans.

I started as an inspector as a favor to my then boss, as well as a favor from my then boss. I was adjunct teaching at a local university in Tennessee and inspecting. I had no experience in homes. I didn’t know a trap in a drain from a trap door from a pest trap. I studied and apprenticed alongside him, took the national standardized exam, passed the first time, and thought, “Well, that can’t be good. Everyone said that test was hard.” Turns out, being a good test taker is not the same thing as having solid comprehension of an industry, an artform in and of itself.

My first-year inspecting, I missed a failed tiled shower pan. $1500 later (keep in mind, this was 13 years ago), I learned I needed to tell my clients they could no longer follow me around while I inspect. That was a critical lesson—clients hire us expecting us to be professional and part of being professional is getting comfortable telling clients what you need from them. I haven’t had an issue since then…but, that experience has never left me. I felt so ashamed crawling back out of the crawlspace and looking the client in the eye and saying, “Yes, that definitely has been an on-going issue for a while prior to your home inspection. I’m very sorry.”

If we fast forward to year seven, I bought the business from the owner who was retiring. Partially, I bought it out of fear—what the hell was I going to do if I just let the business close? In hindsight, it wasn’t the right move for me. I went into debt to own a franchised business that was known more by the former owner than the brand, and good will did not readily transfer even though most agents knew me well. I also wasn’t a good fit for a franchise. More on that in a future editorial.

I hit the ground running as a young business owner (I was 36 years old) and hired an inspector, bought a second vehicle, paid his way through franchise requirements for training, had him apprentice with me for six months, then got him up and on his own. And then COVID-19 shook all sorts of crap loose. I lost him to an engineering firm after we took a dip in work volume. When he came to hand me a typed resignation (he was a good kid, well beyond his age’s maturity level), my heart sank. But I told him the truth—I’d never be able to give him the benefits the engineering firm that poached him could provide AND I would have jumped at that opportunity had it come across my path at his very young age; it was my lot to work as a journalist for a small paper while also working third shift as a night auditor.

COVID-19, for many of us, wasn’t all that bad. I made good money throughout that fevered fervor. Tennessee also was one of the several states that didn’t believe in enforced quarantine. During that period, I made the executive decision to stop marketing to brokerages and agents. For years, our business was known for annual award sponsorships, free food, holiday gifts and kitsch, etc. I wasn’t keen on this business model as agents appeared to be fickle when a transaction didn’t make it past the buyer’s due diligence period. No matter how many times I would say, “It isn’t the home inspection report. It isn’t even the home. It’s the price. Any home will sell for the right price,” it never translated that way for agents.

Not marketing to brokerages and agents was also when I concreted my position that our industry was improperly motivated and had evolved questionably related to working for clients vs. for agents. I have been kindly nudged not to focus on this subject matter for this feature piece. So, I’ll just say that if you read my other editorials, you can catch up with where I fall on placating agents’ whims just to be awarded more business.

At any rate, all of this allowed me to shift my business model toward consumer protection. As part of this business model, I also developed a penchant for high-level learning related to what a home is and all that can and does go wrong with many of our structures. The last many years, I have been my region’s building science home inspector. What does this mean?

Building science is really built on very basic principles of physics, materials science, and chemistry. Also thrown in there is some amount of social psychology of sorts due to the fact that homes must be acted upon by humans that live in and around them as much as by the weather they are intended to keep out. For me, building science was what I had been after for years. I didn’t want to just generate reports that met minimum standards and listed deficiencies—I wanted my reporting to be a source of more diverse information for my clients related to the structure and all associated components. I also wanted to give them information pertaining to the health of the home as it relates to affecting the health of the occupants.

 

Now, before you throw me a ticker-tape parade I’d like to mention two things: Transitioning to this more comprehensive reporting did not make me the bees knees to some builders and agents in our market (strangely enough, I do have many agent fans from markets adjacent…it’s a bit weird, but appreciated nonetheless). And two, there are plenty of other inspectors across our glorious states that are as good, if not better, as me related to using building science to inspect, report, and explain. To all those out there, doing what I do and swimming up current by doing it, I doff my hat to you.

So, what does this model look like? Well, it places clients front-and-center. It ignores pressures from agents or builders related to potential future work. It inspects with an eye toward consumer protection. It gathers all discovered deficiencies and tries to draft a wholistic report that shows the deficiencies as both singular and as directly correlating to other deficiencies and/or other issues the client(s) will inevitably experience in that given structure over time due to how the home was built and systems therein configured. A house as a whole. A house as a system. Inspecting this way requires training to get beyond deficiency citation. Not all inspectors are willing to do this, comfortable doing this, or cut out to do this. My clients—they love me, and this generates nearly all my business. Word of mouth and past client referrals. Plus, I charge more.

We all know this is not the ideal business model put before us in most industry presentations and conferences. We’re supposed to grow bigger, hire more employees, report only the minimally required, sell more ancillary services, and cash out when someone wants to buy us. But, I write these words offering an alternative perspective. An alternative approach. It’s not for everyone, but it worked well for a boy from humble roots. It keeps a roof over my family and food in our bellies. I’ll never get rich. But this isn’t meant to be a get-rich model. This is a small town, American small-business model. This is a community member wanting to provide a different consumer protection service to clients than check lists or stock statements with no follow-through. You do more, but you charge more, so you get to do fewer inspections.

I’ll let my wife make us rich. I’ll work to enrich my community one trusting client at a time. It’s a cool gig. If you have been on the fence, I encourage you to jump off and go for it. Consumers now, more than ever, need competent professionals willing to provide a service that adds value to their investment beyond a due diligence period. Our industry needs a lot (again, read my editorials), but there is great opportunity out there if you are willing to learn deeper, care fiercer, and protect unquestionably.

My mom was, as they say in the South, a firebrand. I wish she was still around. I wish we had had more money for her to get better treatments. Thirteen years in our industry and over 4,000 inspections have shown me that her fire is carried forth. It has given me the strength to make counterintuitive choices within our industry and stand firm as a business owner in doing what I believe is right. Money is nice, yes. But, getting paid more than just in money is even better.

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