Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
12 Talk about growth with Reuben Saltzman
124 Plays2 years ago
This episode of Dial It In features Ruben of StructureTech, a home inspection business that receives between five and seven million hits to its website each year. Ruben is beloved by DIYers and homeowners alike for his expertise and helpful articles. The hosts discuss Ruben's success and the tricks he uses to grow his business.
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:24
Speaker
Dave, have you ever looked at the statistics for the websites that we host? All the time. Yes. It's funny because there's one sort of 800 pound gorilla elephant.
00:00:38
Speaker
that has just an unbelievable amount of traffic. I pulled a couple of statistics. This company has, generally speaking, between five and seven million hits to their website each year, which the math translates to, at any minute of any given day, this website has between 150 and 300 people on it.
00:01:04
Speaker
Perfect. Yes. Every single day, every single minute of every single day.
Guest Introduction: Reuben from Structure Tech
00:01:11
Speaker
And it's a company called Structure Tech. They are a home inspection business. And we're pleased that the owner of Structure Tech, Reuben, is our guest today. Hey, Reuben.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hey guys, thanks for having me on. I make this joke, but I want to start by telling that Reuben is one of the nicest men I've ever met. And there are times in which I absolutely hate him because I am a DIYer. And like with any DIY project, it involves at least three trips to Home Depot.
00:01:45
Speaker
And because my wife has such respect for Ruben and loves Ruben just as much as everybody does, usually after the first one, I'll start getting the, um, do you think you should call Ruben? No, I'm not calling Ruben. Or, or, uh, or to do, well, I Googled the problem you're having and I found this article that Ruben wrote for four years. No, I'm not calling Ruben. Oh, that's hilarious.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's a testament to just a Herculean amount of education that StructureTech works out and how you've really grown the business. And that's why I'm just super excited to talk to you today. So thanks for joining us. Thanks, man. Glad to do it.
History and Journey of Structure Tech
00:02:30
Speaker
Tell us about StructureTech.
00:02:32
Speaker
Well, we are a home inspection company. I am a second generation home inspector. I say home inspector. I haven't done a home inspection in many years now, but back in the day, I used to be a home inspector. The company was founded by a couple of guys back in 87. My dad got into home inspections in the early 90s and he found out that these guys were ready to sell their business and he bought the business in 97.
00:02:59
Speaker
So my dad bought structure tech in 97 and that's when I started. So I've been with the company for over 25 years now. And then over time, my dad and I became partners. And then I've since bought him out probably about five years ago or so now I bought my dad out, but he's still involved in the company today too. He still works in the company as well.
00:03:21
Speaker
So it's definitely a family-owned type of business. My sister works in the company. My brother-in-law works in the company. A lot of good people in this company. And we've grown. Back in the day when he first bought it, it was just me, my dad, and one other guy. And today, we've got a whole team of people out doing home inspections and running the company.
00:03:45
Speaker
For people who haven't bought a home yet or haven't had it in a while, explain just a little what exactly a home inspection is, why you need one.
The Role of Home Inspections
00:03:56
Speaker
Sure. Well, if you're going to buy any house, I mean, a lot of the time people get the idea that only if you buy a used house, but we're, we're big proponents of any house. If you're going to buy a house, you need to get a home inspection. And it's basically you're hiring a professional to come through that house with a fine tooth comb and let you know exactly what it is that you're buying. A lot of the time.
00:04:20
Speaker
People will use the home inspection report to negotiate down on the price of the house they may use it to negotiate repairs. Every once in a while they might get a home inspection and they might decide. I don't want this house anymore it's got all this stuff that i had no idea about.
00:04:40
Speaker
You know about that. Yeah. So I, uh, I went to put an offer on the house before the one where I live now and I hired Reuben to do the home inspection. This was probably one of his last home inspections. And I got there, I don't know, a half an hour into the home inspection and he was sitting on the stairs playing on this phone. I was like, Hey man, what's up? He goes, yeah, you're not buying this house.
00:05:08
Speaker
What? He goes, yeah, you're not buying this house. Like, um, can you unpack that a little? He goes, sure. He leads me to the basement and has me stand about eight feet away from a corner of the house. He goes, stand here. Don't move. We'll just wait.
00:05:23
Speaker
Then he leaves and it was a creepy basement and I was willing to overlook the creepy basement. But here I am kind of doing the Blair Witch thing. All of a sudden the side of the house comes off in about a three foot chunk and he pulls out this four foot chunk and he sticks his head and he's like, this is why you're not buying this house.
00:05:48
Speaker
I'll say for anybody listening, normally your home inspector is not going to do this. Trigby and I had known each other for quite a while. Yeah. So this was the kind of more the friend to friend. Yes. Trigby, normally we'd never tell people buy this house or don't buy this house. We're not there to give real estate purchasing advice.
00:06:09
Speaker
I have a friend i had no qualms don't you buy in the house we literally pulled off a corner of the house and i was like yeah no we're not doing it's not in my house the answer is no no when your dad neil took over structure tech how many employees did you have.
00:06:28
Speaker
Uh, well at that time it was, it was me, my dad, and one other guy who was Dwayne. So there was total, you know, my dad plus two employees. Was Dwayne really the guy? Oh wow. Dwayne is Dwayne. Dwayne is this guy who was 20 years ago, looked, looked, looked old and he just, he wears overalls all the time. He's just.
00:06:45
Speaker
Everybody knew him from the big overalls. He would always wear those overalls. That was insane. So in 20 years, how many people do you have now? Today, I think, you know, I haven't taken a count lately, but I think we got about 30 to 35 people on our team now. Amazing. Wow. Yeah. What do you attribute your growth to?
Growth Strategies and Time Freedom
00:07:06
Speaker
You know, I'd say being intentional. I still remember after my son was born back in, what was it, 2007, thinking to myself, and our business was the same size then. It was me and my dad and one other guy still in 2007. I remember thinking to myself, I want to grow this company. I want time freedom. I want to be able to spend time with my son.
00:07:30
Speaker
I want to be able to spend time with my kids. I want time freedom. The only way I'm going to have time freedom without compromising stuff is to grow the company. It was a conscious decision.
00:07:45
Speaker
to say, this company is going to grow. And of course, the next thing is, all right, well, what's going to make that happen? And one of the biggest things I had been hearing about, and I'd spend time on forums where home inspectors get on there and we argue about how roofs should be flashed and all these little details. But there was one guy on there who also did websites for home inspectors. And I remember I'm talking a lot about SEO.
Impact of SEO and Blogging
00:08:09
Speaker
Search engine optimization which you guys is bread and butter but this guy would give us a lot of advice and say hey your website should have these tags in the header and you should use keywords and you should mark up your images and your images shouldn't be just numbers it should be.
00:08:26
Speaker
mini inspection roof image, it should have all these important words that people are going to use. And I mean, this blew my mind. I had no understanding of any of this, but I took everything this guy said as gospel and I kept doing everything he said. And our website actually, I mean, we probably doubled our traffic based on that. So instead of getting like five visitors a day, we might get 10 visitors a day.
00:08:52
Speaker
Like you know not were tens of visitors so started following his advice but then something else he said was you know if you really want to turbo charge a website you gotta do a blog. I don't even know what a blog was but looked into it and i thought i have no idea how to do this.
00:09:09
Speaker
then eventually some real estate agent who I still blog for today, she said, Hey, Ruben, you want to help me blog on my website? I was like, yes, I do. I have no idea what this is, but, uh, I've heard it's a good thing. So let's do it. And I started blogging on her website, not realizing at the time, this doesn't do anything for me, but, but eventually started blogging on my own site and
00:09:36
Speaker
that really started increasing traffic and it started to make us an authority when it comes to home inspections. Of course, not in the first year or maybe even the second year, but after a number of years of doing this, we started to get authority in the market and people started to recognize our name. And eventually we said, all right, look, we need to hire another home inspector or now we need to get another one and another one. And every year,
00:10:05
Speaker
we kept adding on more inspectors. And it was never one year where it was like, all right, we're gonna add 10 on, but it was slow controlled growth up to where we are today.
00:10:18
Speaker
Amazing. When you talk about your blog, it's not inherently something where you might think, oh, this is going to be a sexy blog that's going to get millions of visitors every year. But when you start reviewing and you go to structuretech.com and go to the blog,
00:10:36
Speaker
There's some very interesting and kind of fun articles. I'm just I'm just looking at the homepage or at the blog page right now. Animal skeletons and creepy home and home inspection stuff, right? Or reviews of different tools and things. So you really take a broad approach and think about what's most interesting to people that are in your market. Tell us a couple of stories about some of those blogs and maybe some of the
00:11:01
Speaker
inspections that have stuck out for you over the past 25 years?
Creating Engaging Content
00:11:06
Speaker
Sure. Well, that is an open question, Dave. So you're letting me talk about anything I want, it sounds like. Absolutely. So one thing you said is that I write about stuff that's interesting to everybody, and we do definitely have those.
00:11:22
Speaker
animal skeletons and creepy stuff. I mean, you don't need to be passionate about houses to click this and get a good chuckle out of it or I've started making YouTube videos for most of my blog posts because I understand there's a huge portion of the population who actually prefers to watch a video over read. I don't understand that. I was opposed to doing it for forever because I thought
00:11:46
Speaker
I need to read and scam at my own pace who wants to watch a video instead but it turns out there's a lot of people who do so started making videos for everything but even my kids there eleven and fifteen go watch some of those videos no get a chuckle out of them so those are the ones that are meant for everybody but i'll tell you the ones that really get traffic it i mean.
00:12:07
Speaker
You guys are well aware of this. It's this thing called the long tail search. It's searches people make for something that is extremely specific. And I mean, today, one of the most popular blog posts I've ever written, and one of the most visited sites on our entire website, besides the homepage, is a blog post I wrote discussing dishwasher drain installation defects.
00:12:36
Speaker
I mean, how crazy specific is that? How boring is that? Who would ever go to a site to read about that? But if that's your problem, you're going to Google this problem. I'll tell you what, I own that search. And there are people all over the world who want to know about problems with their dishwasher drain installation, and I own it.
00:12:58
Speaker
So it's the long tail. So it's having a mix of things where anybody could click on it and find value in it and entertainment and other things where you're going to see a headline, you're going to skip right past it. But then once you have that question, once you have that problem and you Google it,
00:13:18
Speaker
then we own it. So it's trying to get both sides of that, both the stuff that people want to click and stuff that people want to search. I always tell people that you are sort of the standard bearer for how to do it right, because what you're talking about doing, like dishwasher defects, that's not a compelling reason to hire you. That's just straight up education.
00:13:42
Speaker
which then creates the expectation that you are the thought leader. So there's not a hard sell, like here's three reason things you should look at, therefore hire us. It's a long five to 700 words about dishwashers.
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah. And you know, Trig, you talk about not a hard sell. I did write a blog post and I know you saw it and this is probably the closest we have ever come to make it a hard sell for ourselves in one of our blog posts. And I've been blogging since I started doing this in I think 2008, 2009. This is the most salesy one I've ever written where
00:14:27
Speaker
We heard about a local competitor who was calling us out by name on these new construction inspections saying we do the same thing StructureTech does, but we do it for half the price. And so we did a secret shop. We secret shopped these guys. We did a home inspection on a new house. And then we had the homeowners hire the same company. And our inspector didn't know that this was going on. I didn't even know what was going on at the time.
00:14:53
Speaker
I didn't have the idea. That's fantastic. We did a home inspection. I thought, you know what? We should do a secret shop. What's a recent inspection we did? And so we had the homeowners hire this other company, and that other company did a home inspection. And the differences in our two reports was just night and day.
00:15:13
Speaker
I don't know, how do I say this delicately? Ours was done by a professional home inspector who knew what the heck he was talking about. Theirs could have been done by someone who took a two-day course on how to be a home inspector and how to fill out a report. That was how different our reports were. And so I talked a lot about it. I didn't call anybody out by name, but that's about as close as I've come to being salesy in one of our blog posted videos.
00:15:42
Speaker
So as a result of that, you have all these blogs out there and I actually have a rough count of the blogs, which I think will surprise you. Back in 2007, you said, okay, I'm going to dedicate myself to blogging. How often do you post a blog? Once a week, religiously, every Tuesday morning, 6am. For 16 years.
00:16:04
Speaker
It's approaching that, yeah. I don't know if we're at 16 yet, but it's getting there. I wasn't dedicated every day until probably 2008. Sure.
00:16:17
Speaker
Okay. So there's, there's one other thing that you do that sort of came into focus in 2008, which is you started using social media to promote.
Leveraging Social Media Platforms
00:16:29
Speaker
And when I say promote the business again, you weren't very salesy. What did you, what did you do? And you do this once a day, every day.
00:16:37
Speaker
Facebook photo of the day. That's when Facebook was very new, at least new to me. I signed up for a Facebook account only so I could use it with the business. I didn't really understand what Facebook was, but I thought, all right, I heard people are doing this. So Monday through Friday, first thing in the morning, photo of the day, just something interesting.
00:17:00
Speaker
something that'll make you laugh, something that'll make you gasp, stuff that we find during home inspections because we have a never ending supply of crazy photos as home inspectors. So that is our photo of the day. So I have my favorite photos of the day. One of my favorites that you found in a home was a ceiling fan that the tines of the ceiling fan were so wilted by water damage.
00:17:27
Speaker
That looked like a tulip hanging from the ceiling. I know the one you're talking about, yes. Then the toilet of fire. Oh my gosh, what was that? They had plumbed in the hot water to the toilet, right? Yes. So you took an infrared picture of the toilet
00:17:48
Speaker
because the hot line, the cold water wasn't going to the toilet, hot water was, and it looked like the toilet was on fire. Yes, and you know what, to be perfectly honest, I may have flushed that toilet a few extra times to get it hot before it came out.
00:18:08
Speaker
What are some of your favorite photos of the day that you've put out that are just spectacular? Oh, I'll tell you, one of my craziest ones ever. It's one you had to stare at for a minute. They put an addition on this house in Hopkins.
00:18:25
Speaker
And there was a crawl space, and it looks like there's a tire buried in concrete. And you got to look at it for a minute. You can see half the tire, and then eventually you realize that the entire addition is built on top of a trailer.
00:18:40
Speaker
and that the tire is actually part of this trailer. Like, like a trailer you would tow behind a truck. That's what the addition was built on top of. So that tire, that is a load bearing tire you're looking at. And it took me forever during the inspection. I'm just staring at it going, what am I looking at? Why is this tire? Is that an axle? Are those springs?
00:19:04
Speaker
Finally figured out what I was looking at. Yeah, that was wild. Some other crazy ones are just...
00:19:12
Speaker
And some of these we probably haven't posted, but it's just the human condition where you have disorders, like hoarder houses. Yeah, those are awful. And you can't even walk into the house because it's so full of stuff. I mean, there's rooms where there's stuff piled up to chest height. You can't enter the room. I remember one of those, the photo never did it justice, but
00:19:35
Speaker
It was a hoarder house like that, and then we went down, we turned on the boiler, we come downstairs, and the boiler was so filthy with soot and all this stuff on the burners that the flames were coming out and licking up the side of the outside of the boiler. That was one of the craziest things I ever saw. We've seen a lot of crazy stuff. And I think I'm trying to remember what, there was one that was, there was a sign on the toilet
00:20:15
Speaker
We know this toilet is clogged. We think our son flushed a prophylactic device. We're having somebody come out to look at it. Yes, yes. That was hilarious because all they had to say was, please don't operate the toilet. It's clogged and we're having somebody look at it. Did you really need to bust your son out and say what you suspected he did? Did you have to go into all this detail? No, you could have just said, I think the toilet's clogged.
00:20:27
Speaker
that said, and I'll confess, this is my house, the house that I bought.
00:20:45
Speaker
I still have that photo and I don't think I ever shared it. I think it made the top 10 eight, nine years ago. I must have at least pixelated what they thought their son had flushed down the toilet.
00:21:01
Speaker
I want to go back to the website because I know one of the things that you do on your website that's really important to you is that you have a picture of literally everybody. You have a team picture of literally everybody who works at the company.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, we do. And that it's done in a very specific way. And that was originated by a photographer that you and I know named Laura Halvorson calls it the Charlie's Angels photo. So can you explain how that's done and how you do that? Cause you don't get all 35 people together every time you hire or let somebody go.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, we have not been in the same room together ever, I think, even though we tried. We've never got everybody together. It's just, uh, we, we have individual photos taken and then we turn it over to someone who knows how to use Adobe Illustrator or something like that. So I don't know what they use, but they put everybody's images together and they make it look like we're all standing together in the same room. And that way we don't need to do a new group shot every time somebody gets added or leaves the company.
00:22:05
Speaker
which is such a brilliant hack that I've shared with people over the years to be able to do. I wanted to make sure that we covered that. But you always call it the hero image, right? Well, the hero image is the top image on a website. It's that first thing that you see. Oh, okay. Got it. I mean, I know, because I've known you for a long time, how important it is that everybody at the company gets represented. And that first thing, even no matter how big you get,
00:22:35
Speaker
There were times in the evolution of structure tech where I was the one who was editing that photo, where it was, I think eight or nine people. And now it's even, it's way past that. So we blogged every week for 15 years. And then you post every day on social media religiously. True. Just the picture of the day. What else do you do to promote your business?
00:23:00
Speaker
Well, like I said, the YouTube channel, that has really helped. And I think we probably get a lot more traction with YouTube today than we do with blogging. I'm not 100% sure about that.
00:23:16
Speaker
boy, there's a lot of people who watch those YouTube videos. And when it comes to people talking about it, I mean, telling me, oh, I saw your content. People always say, I saw your video. Nobody tells me they read my blog anymore. Kind of hurts. I know people still do because Google Analytics is telling me they do, but I never have people talk about it. They talk about watching the video.
00:23:39
Speaker
Do a lot of videos. And then kind of the latest thing is what I'm doing with you right now is podcasting. We started doing podcasting about three and a half years ago. We officially said we're on our fourth season now, I think, or maybe it's season five. I don't know. It's been about three and a half years since we've been doing a podcast and that's been great too. I don't know.
00:24:08
Speaker
how much it's really moved the needle. I, you know, we get, we get probably less than a thousand downloads a week, which probably isn't a great metric for a podcast that's been around for three and a half years, but we have some very loyal listeners and I've really enjoyed doing the interviews with our guests and I've learned a ton just by interviewing all these different people on the podcast. So that's, that's the latest.
00:24:37
Speaker
Which all that being said, your thought leadership doesn't keep you restricted to the geographic area where you live. You also get asked to speak a lot.
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, I've become a very well-known name in the home inspection field.
Thought Leadership and Speaking Engagements
00:25:01
Speaker
Which I know because I've known you for a long time. It's painful for you to say out loud because you're one of the most humble people I know too.
00:25:10
Speaker
Trig me, you know me. I felt my face turning red as I was saying that. It's weird to say, but I will call a spade a spade. My name is quite well known in the home inspection field. I'm qualifying this. I'm being very specific about it. But yeah, I've done a lot of teaching, a lot of speaking throughout the country at different home inspection events because I enjoy doing it. I love teaching.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that permeates into what you do and how you promote the business. Because like I said, you don't really sell anything. Your goal of the blog is just to teach because of all the things that you see.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's one of our core values. I mean, we kind of copied Keller Williams for a long time. Keller Williams joked around that they were an education company disguised as a real estate company. And so we kind of copy them a little and say we're an education company disguised as a home inspection company. So just for giggles, I pulled your site statistics. Do you have an idea of the page, kind of how big your site's gotten?
00:26:19
Speaker
We've talked about this before, and I'm always wildly off. I mean, my guess would be about a thousand pages. Dave, do you want to take a guess? I'm going to guess 3,000. As of this morning, it's 41,000.
00:26:36
Speaker
41,000 including blogs? Well, it's mostly blogs, I would imagine, right? It's blogs, it's assets, but it's going back 15 years and each one of these blogs has probably three or four pictures in it.
00:26:50
Speaker
all of which is a marketable asset because all the pictures are unique and original. And optimized for SEO. And optimized for SEO and all titled. And so one of the things that Ruben's done really well also recently is made the website ADA compliant. So there's descriptions in the pictures of what the pictures are too, which then gives him triple the link juice because now not only is it
00:27:20
Speaker
words on the page but it's also the picture and the description of the picture.
00:27:24
Speaker
And you know what, that triggers something for me. And let me ask you guys this. I don't know if there's value in this, but back when we first started doing our podcast, we had a handful of listeners say, you know, I know you're doing this podcast and I can kind of listen, but I'm hearing impaired. And if there's any way you could have a transcribe, I'd really appreciate it. We got a handful of people asking us to do that. So now we transcribe all of our podcasts.
Value of Podcast Transcription
00:27:53
Speaker
And I think there's value in that too.
00:27:56
Speaker
But what do you guys think? I mean, do you transcribe your podcasts? We do. And if you post the contents of the transcription as part of it, that gives you those extra keywords because otherwise Google, as brilliant as it is, doesn't have a way to grab the audio and transpose it into something. So you need to do that for you. So I'm sure that's where you're getting most of the SEO value on the podcast right now.
00:28:25
Speaker
Okay. All right. Good. Well, and plus it's just genuinely the right thing to do. If somebody came to the podcast because it's an audit audio medium, then you think the goal is always to be helpful and be educational. So sure. That's it's, it's a, it's a fairly easy thing to do. Yeah, it's, it's easy, but it's also not free.
00:28:45
Speaker
I got to pay people on my team to grab the audio, send it over, get it back. And then when we get it back, we got to go through it all because they don't get everything right. And we got to fix a bunch of it. And not only that, but they charge money. I mean, I just looked at the receipt this morning and we spent 1500 bucks transcribing last year. It's like,
00:29:07
Speaker
Am I doing this for three people? I mean, if there's three people who are hearing impaired, how much am I willing to spend on that? Yeah. Well, maybe that's not even a good question to ask. Well, the good, the good answer on the question is you're doing it for the three people, but you're also doing it so that the 30,000 people that want to listen are going to be able to find it because it'll show up better on Google. Sure.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of those things where if you do it for the three people, there's a karmic after effect and a ripple effect that is all of the positive. So we've talked a lot about the good stuff and the growth, but what are some of the things that have tripped you up along
00:29:56
Speaker
Um, you know, probably, that's a tough one.
Challenges in Hiring New Talent
00:30:00
Speaker
I wasn't prepared for this. I'd say bad hires. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Hiring, hiring people to be a home inspector and learning.
00:30:12
Speaker
a week in, a month in, six months in, a year in that they're not the right person. And I've had all of these different things. That has been extremely frustrating. And I still don't have it dialed in. I mean, we've gone through personality profiles and all these different learning assessments and behavioral assessments, and we've tried everything under the sun.
00:30:41
Speaker
And I have not yet found something that is going to reliably tell me whether someone's going to be a good hire or not. I mean, there was one person we hired and they were fantastic. And turns out they had a chemical dependency problem that resurfaced about three months into training. And it was just like, okay, this is over.
00:31:09
Speaker
but I don't know how I can screen for that. So people, that's definitely one of the biggest challenges. And I think we've been very good at it. I mean, I make it sound bad. The vast majority of our hires have been fantastic hires, fantastic people who are still on the team, but the handful who didn't make it, every one of those feels like a scar.
00:31:35
Speaker
That's a heartbreaker. You know, you invest in people and you really love working with people. And so if they don't show up like they're supposed to and, or if they switch on you, that's, that's just tough. And the market is hard right now. So I'm sure you're doing a bunch and your website is so brilliant at getting people to your website. But also like Trigby mentioned at the beginning with the about page, if you scroll all the way down to the about page, it says your name could be here, which I love.
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah. And right now we're not having any trouble.
00:32:10
Speaker
finding people we're not hiring at the moment. Real estate market has been
Effects of Housing Market Changes
00:32:17
Speaker
down. We're down about 40% this year from what we were at last year. I'm sorry, did you say 40%? 40%. Wow. Did any of that switch up when the market was super hot too and people weren't getting inspections when they should have?
00:32:35
Speaker
You know, what ended up happening is the market gets so hot that you get this backward curve. The line goes up, it goes up, it goes up, and then all of a sudden it curves backward where demand is so high that it's exactly what you just said or aren't getting home inspections because they want to be competitive. They want to get the house. And we saw a big drop in our business in 2022. 2022 was the first year
00:33:05
Speaker
that we didn't have a record year. We were actually down and our sales for the year ended up closer to about what we had in 2020, which was really unusual for us. But we saw a lot of people skipping home inspections and then the feds increased rates and all of a sudden people weren't skipping home inspections, but then people weren't buying houses.
00:33:33
Speaker
So it's like it over corrected. There was a really sweet spot for about three weeks where everything was nicely balanced and we were booked to capacity. And I was telling my inspectors, if there's anything more you can possibly do, I mean, we were scrambling and we're turning away business for about three weeks and then everything crossed back the other direction. So it was a really strange year for us.
00:33:58
Speaker
To that end, I know one of the things that you've done is people think that home inspections is just on a purchase, but you don't limit yourselves just to purchase, right? Do you own other parts of your business? Yeah. We do single item inspections.
00:34:14
Speaker
frost in their attic. They've got ice dams. They want to figure out why all of this is happening. All these different people are telling them different stories. We'll go out there and tell them what's really going on with their house. We do a lot of troubleshooting single item inspections like that. We do home maintenance inspections for people who just want to know exactly what's going on. They've been in the house for 10 years.
00:34:35
Speaker
What do I need to prioritize right now? And we do a lot of inspections for people who are getting ready to sell their house. And they want to know when a buyer has an inspector come through, what are they going to hear? And what can I do to be proactive so I'm not getting gouged and the buyer is asking me to take $5,000 off the price of my house when I could have had it fixed for $500 ahead of time. So a lot of those sellers inspections too.
00:35:06
Speaker
So I know we've talked a lot about the value of digital marketing and the website and SEO and how that's really improved your business. But there's a whole other thing that is going to be hard for you to talk about because you're not going to like talking about yourselves. But that's not the only thing that has grown your business. The other thing is you are consistently one of the hardest workers in any room that you get into.
00:35:34
Speaker
Oh, thanks, man. And so how much time do you really put into a week? I know you're up at five or so, right? Yeah, I get up early, depends on the day, usually between 4.45 and 5.30, somewhere in there, depending on what's going on. It's one of those two times.
00:35:54
Speaker
And I will say though, that I have become way more intentional and focused with my time. I probably don't put in more hours than anybody else. I try to really limit that. I mean, like I said at the beginning, one of the biggest reasons I wanted to grow this company was to have time freedom. So I can have time to do what I want, have time to spend with my family.
00:36:20
Speaker
when i'm working i'm very intentional about it i start my day thinking about what it is that i need to get done i spend time meditating and i write out my list of things that must get done that day and that's that's the most important stuff and i mean even
00:36:39
Speaker
I mean, even email, I keep my email closed throughout the day. I don't respond to emails throughout the day. I mean, Trey, you know this. Sometimes you'll leave me a voicemail. I won't get back to it until the next day. I always feel bad, but I don't let things interrupt my workflow. I am very focused on what it is that I'm doing right now. And then I'll take a break at say 1 p.m.
00:37:02
Speaker
and I'll respond to emails and then I'll close my email back down. If I'm writing a blog post, I am laser focused on getting this done. So more than spending a ton of time and being distracted and checking Facebook and all that, I'd say I'm good at being focused and getting a lot done with the time that I have. For sure. And you mentioned you write the blog posts. I do write the blog posts. Yeah. Amazing. Do you do all the social stuff as well?
00:37:31
Speaker
Some of it, I mean, the Facebook posts, I do those. We've started getting into Instagram, which I don't understand. And somebody else on our team does the Instagram posts.
00:37:43
Speaker
Amazing. And then there's the whole TikTok thing that's happening and that's amazing to me. I got to get in on that. When you do, you're going to get a billion viewers there. Yeah, we got to figure that out. Quickly. So with the economic downturn and the housing changes, what are you doing to continue to keep your ranking as the top guy in town?
Customer Communication and Engagement
00:38:11
Speaker
Man, we just had an eight hour meeting with the leadership team at StructureTech talking about all of that. Like, what are we going to do?
00:38:22
Speaker
I don't know what the magic bullet is. The best thing we know of is better communication with everybody who works with us, listening to our customers, having follow-up phone calls, emails, text messages, just engaging people and listening and doing what people are asking for and trying to deliver the best service we possibly can. Short of that, I don't know what's left.
00:38:50
Speaker
Gotcha. Well, I know I am a consistent and constant follower of what you do on social media. If people are looking to find this, because it really is a hoot because not only does it, there's a good, good amount of schadenfreude, but it's educational and you learn why it's a problem.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, as well. Like I think one of the most recent posts that was on there was it was kind of a head scratcher because it was a temporary joist that was pushing up, but then you kind of had to look at it a little carefully. And when you looked at it, you realized, oh, they had cut into the header in order to put the temporary joist up instead of like moving it like an inch to the left.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And all the different ways people use duct tape and all the different ways that people get harmed by ice stands. It makes you a better homeowner, but it does so incrementally because it's a couple, three minutes of your time. Yep. So when I had a unique experience in my own home where one day I went in the laundry room and there was water in the light fixture.
00:40:03
Speaker
And it was sloshing around and it was like, huh, that shouldn't do that. And that's probably going to kill somebody. So I called Ruben to come out and he sent out one of his guys to figure out why is there water in there? And it turns out one of the sinks from overhead was, had a little pinhole leak and over the years and it just built up and built up and built up.
00:40:29
Speaker
wild. It happens. Yeah. So home inspection is not something that I think people you shouldn't shy away from just on a home purchase. There's so many things that happen in a home that I think to me sort of get down into
00:40:45
Speaker
keeping water out and the management of water. Yes. And the flow of water. As a man, as a homeowner, that's your primary responsibility is the ebb and flow of water in and out of your house and keeping water out of your house. So good.
00:41:05
Speaker
Yeah. So if people want to start following along and start taking the structure check, right. Oh, there's one before we get to that. I wanted to ask you, I know you and I've known each other for a long time. You are one of the only people that I've known who, what was your, when I met you, what was your, what was your website address?
Acquiring the Domain: structuretech.com
00:41:25
Speaker
Oh, StructuredTech1.com. Okay. What is it now? StructuredTech.com. Ooh. How did you get StructuredTech.com? Well, we originally wanted StructuredTech.com back in 97 or whatever when we first created a website when my dad bought this business and StructuredTech was not available. Somebody had purchased it, one of those web squatters.
00:41:52
Speaker
And we tried to buy it and over the years we kept coming back to it. And at some point, I think at the height, we could have purchased it for like $80,000. Yeah, it just, it was not worth it. We're not going to get an $80,000 return, but I don't know. I asked once and it was owned by a guy in Korea and he wanted 45,000 euros for it.
00:42:16
Speaker
And I, yeah, just ridiculous amounts of money. But then I don't know, in 2019, I think it was.
00:42:25
Speaker
I inquired into it again. I thought, I'm gonna bite the bullet. What's it gonna be this time? And it was down to like 5,000 somebody wanted. And I said, all right, let's do it. We wanna be big boys. We're dropping the one. It's structuretech.com. The one is cheesy. And we finally did it. We bit the below, paid about 5,000 bucks and bought the real domain name. Has it made a difference?
00:42:53
Speaker
I don't think so. Maybe in my own mind, but it's a brand. It's like if you have commercials on the radio, do they make a difference? Well, nobody calls our company from hearing a commercial on the radio, but it's brand recognition. It's just cementing this in people's minds. So I think it was well worth it.
00:43:16
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm curious also because you have so much branding on everything, what were the after effects of that? In addition, just as something as simple as changing the website from dropping the one. Zero, zero after effects. And I will say you guys helped with that. I mean, it was a matter of redirecting everything and having everything that went to structuretechone.com to structuretech.com. It was, it was seamless.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah. And I made a few 44,000 pages. Yeah. Yeah. It took a little bit of time. You know, I'm sure you guys spent an hour or two, uh, or maybe even more working on all of that. Just remove the one across there and put it into a 301 redirect page, right? But no, it was, it was a lot more complicated than we have to give defense to the people who aren't here. That was a lot harder.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, did I say hour? I meant to say month or two. I meant to say month or two working on that. You know, you were a little older. Why isn't it done yet? Well, because you'd think there's a thousand pages and there's not. Yeah. Yeah. But thankfully it still works. I mean, if you send an email to my old email, Ruben at structuretech1.com, it's still going to get to me. Everything still works.
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah. I think I've told people this for a long time that if anybody really wants to look at how to grow your business using digital marketing, you are the standard bearer and I've always maintained that. Oh, thanks. Like you said in our discussion today, the blogging became just part of your daily weekly routine.
00:44:55
Speaker
And you just did it consistently and constantly. And it didn't turn over right away, but it had a snowball effect that all of a sudden, the more you did it, the more you rolled, the bigger you got.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's looking for that long-term effect. You're thinking about it as farming. You're not fishing. You're not trying to catch somebody looking for a home inspector today. You're just planting all those seeds and it's going to pay off big in the long run. Yeah. So how do people find you if they want to check out some of the fun photos?
00:45:35
Speaker
You got to leave us with one funny photo. You talked about the trailer, but you got to come up with something better than that. Okay. All right. Well, I'll say if you want to find us, you can go to our website. It's structuretech.com. Or if you Google structure tech.
00:45:53
Speaker
You will definitely find us. That's a good way to do it. And you want a good funny photo, check out one of our latest blog posts. It's the top 20 home inspection photos from 2022. One of my favorite ones in there was somebody took their bathroom exhaust fan,
00:46:10
Speaker
and they put the duct for it and they terminated it right above the entry door. So you walk into the house and whatever's going on in the bathroom, somebody goes in there and destroys the bathroom, you take all those orders and bam, right in front of somebody walking in the door, you're just pumping. So if you're in the bathroom and need to use the fan, you're now sharing it with the front door. Exactly. Okay. I love that.
00:46:39
Speaker
Uh-huh. It's a great company. It's a great educational resource and it truly is one of the most dialed in companies I've ever seen. Yes. Your sweetheart. Ruben, thanks for joining us and following along on all the major socials. We are there.