Warning, this article is not geared for the sedate, just glad to be a home inspector with a job. In writing this article I started to give an example of the average home inspectors hourly rate- but nixed this route right off, as this article isn't for the average home inspector.

This was an article that was going to go to the crux of how incredibly successful inspectors grow their businesses by understanding the value of their productive time. Once you understand what your productive time is worth, everything changes to reflect that knowledge.

In this article, I'm going to show you that ambitious inspectors can't have successful incomes working more hours, unless they work more productive hours. I am talking about an income commiserate with the insane hours, self education, and the number of hats you need to wear in order to really make your un-sedate dreams come true.

So what is a productive hour? Sorry, it's not the hours you actually do an inspection or the hours that you spend learning, reading email, answering your phone, or most of the crap that you seem to be caught up in everyday at the office.

A productive hour is an hour that you spend marketing your home inspection services or products, improving your marketing process, or putting in place a system that creates scalability. These would be considered on-going activities that can be turned into systems and fine tuned for a return on your investment.

Doing a home inspection should be thought of as more of a project. Something with a definite beginning and end. As an entrepreneur, your goal is to continually develop, install, and improve the systems inside your business- while also being involved in a limited number of projects.

Oh, oh, did he just use that big word "entrepreneur". Yeah, I did. Don't worry though, this stuff about systems will still apply to all of you one man shops, but there's a limit to your income as the bottleneck or constraint, "you" is not scalable.

Now, before we can find out how much a productive hour of an entrepreneur is worth at an income level of $250,000(I only use this figure as an example of what might be considered very successful)we have to know how many productive hours he is going to work.

Remember the definition of productive work. It's safe to say that if you put a timer on your desk and set it for one hour you would be unable to stay at productive work only for the full hour. The national average for an entrepreneur is 2 hours a day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year- which gives you a total of 600 hours. So a person who makes $250,000 a year makes $416.66 an hour or $6.95 a minute. About $832.00 a day, everyday for 300 days a year.

To produce an income of $250,000 it will typically take a multi-inspector firm of about 6 inspectors (one of which is you), and at least one office staff person. Don't you just love fuzzy math? The tricky part for all of us is to recognize where we make the real money, and develop a habit of working on the productive hours over the crap we all seem to get caught up in.

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