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MONDAY MORNING MARKETER

Message From the American Institute of Inspectors®

December 28, 1998

GOOOOOD MORNING A.I.I.™

It's a great day at Michael Leavitt & Co Home Inspections!!! I can't believe that 1998 is drawing to an end. Last week we celebrated Aaron's first birthday, followed by a huge celebration of Christ's birth on Christmas. Presents were plentiful and family was all around. I took 2 days off and enjoyed myself with my family. We still have about 5" of snow on the ground left over from last week's storm but didn't get the big storm on Christmas Eve as predicted. That was just fine with me and my in-laws who were visiting from Southern California.

The big ball in Times Square is about ready to drop and bring with it the new year. 1999 promises to be spectacular for A.I.I. Home Inspectors. Here at Michael Leavitt & Co Home Inspections, we met our lofty sales goal for 1998 and look forward to an even more prosperous 1999. That means the sky is still the limit if we fully apply ourselves. Isn't it wonderful to be self-employed and in control of our own financial destiny?!

There are thousands of self-help, self-improvement marketing strategies and programs available in the marketplace that promise business success. The Monday Morning Marketer is proud to be one of them. The key is....

Marketing tip for 1999

None of the business success help aids and programs work UNLESS YOU DO!!!

Yes, the New Year is about to arrive and the question is whether or not you are ready for it. A famous 1970's rock song talks about how "10 years have come and gone, but you've missed the starting gun." This is the final week to make sure that your marketing strategies are in place for the new year. The starting gun for the New Year goes off Friday morning--whether you are ready for it or not.

How will you advertise in 1999? (Updated 1998 Message)

Most of the successful Home Inspectors that I know rely highly on fliers to spread their name and fame. Most of the unsuccessful Home Inspectors that I know rely highly on their expensive Yellow Page ads to get their business phone ringing.

Fliers can bring sure success if they are delivered in a timely, well-planned manner. I'll share with you my plan for attack with flier delivery in 1999. I have about 900 agents in the county where I do 99% of my business. I don't like to drive very far, so I prefer to stay in the central and northern parts of Utah County. The further south I go in the county, the older the homes get and the less money people have. That means that in the south part of the county, only the piece of junk old homes get inspected, and as you know, they are a lot more work for about the same fee. There are times I feel like, "The Old Home, Piece-of-Junk Home Inspector," and I don't want to specialize in that area! Therefore, I concentrate my efforts closer to home.

ADVANCED MARKETING TIP

I take advantage of a Real Estate delivery service which delivers 500 fliers a week to any office with more than 5 agents in Utah County. When I started with them about 10 months ago the fee was $25 a week. But now a year later, the fee is $20 a week. I use the brightest color paper imaginable for my fliers, so that it will wake up the agents when they see it each Thursday morning. The copying fee at Kinko's runs about $100 for 2,000 astrobright fliers. This puts me out about $50 a week, or about $200 a month. Multiply that by 12 and I'm looking to expend about $2,400 on flier deliveries for 1998. Now that I lease a digital copy machine I do all of my advertising copies at home.

$2,400 sounds like an awful lot of money to spend on printed paper that finds about 98% to 99% ending up in the trash can. That is why most Home Inspectors make about 6 to 10 flier deliveries in a year and think they are really doing something special. My competition all feel like flier delivery is a total waste of time. I want them to continue thinking that way because I'm making a killing while they increase the size of their Yellow Page ads.

Now let's get down to the hard figures....98% to 99% of the fliers that are delivered are trash can bound. That is a pessimistic outlook! I prefer to think that 1% to 2% will be of use. That means that 5 to 10 fliers out of each weeks 500 will be utilized. That means 20 to 40 of them a month, and 240 to 480 a year. Being totally optimistic, 480 times an average fee of $250 is $120,000. I don't know how that number strikes you, but $120,000 in my marketplace is quite respectable. Even the pessimistic view of 1% success will work out to $60,000 for the upcoming year. All of this from a measly $2,400 expense is really an outstanding return on my investment.

CONSISTENCY

The only way that this magic formula will work is if you are consistent in your delivery. The return will not be immediate if you have not already established your business name, but the fruits of your labor will not be long in the making if you start now. Remember that out of small things, great things will come to pass.

START-UP MARKETING TIP

I used to try and do all of the flier deliveries myself, but I soon found that I was only getting to about half of the locations about half as often. If I had no inspections lined up and nothing but a full tank of gas and a day to kill, then I would do it myself. After all, while personally delivering the fliers, an inspector could get lucky and actually talk to somebody in the Real Estate office. Wait a minute, that could be a self-delivery personal goal....

Each time I enter an office to deliver fliers or deliver reports, I will not leave without talking to an agent about my business!!!

I'm certain that fulfilling that goal will bring nothing but success, but remember....The goal will never work unless you DO IT. I'm even more certain that there are those of you reading this message, scoffing at what I've stated as though I am just puffing smoke. "Prove me now herewith..." and try it for the 1999 year. I know that you will be out $2,400 dollars.... but without a shadow of a doubt, your bank account will be much richer. The fruits of your hard labor will reap success.

NEW AII™ LEADERS

It is unknown yet who the new 1999 Leadership of AII™ is, but as of Friday, I will have completed my term as President of this great Association. It has been a great year that has been action-packed. I will now reprint the latest President's Message from our most recent AII™ newsletter......

"1998 - AII™ Conquers the Internet"

It is hard to believe how quickly my year of service for the Association has passed. 1999 is just around the corner and the Home Inspection industry is bigger and better than ever. This has been a wonderful year filled with a lot of hard work and now I get to hold myself accountable and compare last years projected goals with the current realities.

GOAL #1 - COMMUNICATION - A little over a year ago Brent Foster and I made a commitment to resolve the communication challenges that were facing AII's™ growing membership. Brent being from Washington and myself from Utah were both experiencing "Lonely Member Syndrome." We envisioned using faxes, snail mail and the internet as our tools to bind this Association together.

REALITY#1 - Faxing was very expensive and time consuming so the idea was unfeasible and set aside for then. Snail mail quickly lost it's priority when we saw the potential of E-mail and the internet. Snail mail is slow and difficult to get information out in a timely manner. This is still the case, and if you don't believe me just remember reading one of our 1998 newsletters. Upon receiving our hard copy newsletters most of us looked at them and said... "I read this in the Monday Morning Marketer over a month ago." Our newsletters were good, but this is why we focused so hard on our vision for the internet. "Get the information to the members as quickly as possible" became the motto.

GOAL #2 - AII™ WEBSITE - The origination of the AII™ website was over a year in the making. Long before my leadership term there were members hard at work trying to figure out what the next step was to get a website. It was all new territory for us and we were truly clueless; "Babes in the woods." Just a year ago most of our membership was either not online or they were newborn infants in their ability to use the technology. The goal was to establish a website that would become an information center for Inspectors, Buyers, Sellers, and Real Estate Agents.

REALITY #2 - Work was quickly done by several members to get the AII™ website up and running. None of us knew exactly what to do. We did get the www.Inspection.org established. I took some time to get the very basics on the site and then I planned to get back to it after I tackled some other challenges. The harsh reality is that I never got back to it. For that I apologize.

The goal before the leadership now is to hire out the needed services. Discussions have already been taking place with a website designer and the check the work is being laid out. The improved site will include a user friendly information exchange, including an inspector directory. I think that next year's President's Message will glow with satisfaction about www. Inspection.org.

GOAL #3 INSPECTOR HOTLINE - We established the goal to get our membership online and able to communicate with the other members via an e-mail type forum.

REALITY #3 - I can't express how difficult it was to set up this system. It was a challenge because we didn't even know what the thing was called. Have you ever tried to search out something in cyberspace that you can barely even describe? We had no clue where or how to set it up. The groundwork was the difficult and time consuming part.

As you all know, we succeeded in establishing the AII™ HOME INSPECTOR HOTLINE. The 19th issue of the MMM on March 23, 1998 announced that the HOTLINE was up and running. That was 3 1/2 months after we stood up at the Annual Meeting and announced our plans. What a great tool the HOTLINE has turned out to be. I have seen information quickly exchanged in a way that I never dreamed possible a few years ago. This AII™ tool was the biggest solution for our interstate "Lonely Member Syndrome." The legwork setting up the system was all worthwhile.

GOAL #4 MONDAY MORNING MARKETER - November 1998 found me standing before the membership saying that I was going to start to produce a weekly marketing based e-mail for the membership. The AII™ membership listened to my "I Have A Dream" type talk with some degree of well deserved skepticism. I vowed to produce the MMM if they would agree to get online.

REALITY #4 - The Monday Morning Marketer has evolved into a raving success. It has been worth the hundreds of hours devoted to it's creation. I'm happy to say that not a week has passed without it being promptly sent out to the membership. The majority has been authored by my wife and I, but a key reason it has been successful is because of the interactive membership participation in the process. The MMM was started months before the HOTLINE was born and it was our original means of quick information transfer. Input from our membership inspired what topics were addressed and explored further.

The beauty of the MMM is that there were no limitations to size, and publishing was immediate. Topics could be explored without having to trim and edit to fit space requirements. This meant that we could be wordy instead of short and quippy. Several MMM issues went out with blatant errors that were quickly caught by the membership. I would receive the e-mails identifying the errors and I quickly modified the documents and reloaded the corrected versions back into cyberspace. This is a key benefit that makes the electronic information transfer of the MMM superior to hard copy snail mailing.

The MMM has evolved into a much different type of document than I originally dreamed. It has retained the MMM name, but the information shared goes way beyond just marketing strategies. Inspecting tips, recalls and inspection war stories also grace it's pages.

None of us who are online can dispute the difference that computerization, websites and e-mailing has made in our lives. Information is quickly and professionally shared. It is economical ("CHEAP") to log on to the internet and pose our questions to the AII™ forum. Our membership is a wealthy information resource to tap into. Who would have thought all of this was possible when I joined AII™ 3 1/2 years ago; surely not I.

I vowed to produce the MMM if the membership would get online. A year ago less than 10% of the members had e-mail addresses, while today over 75% join in the cyberspace experience. AII™ members have caught the vision and are reaping the benefits. I encourage all of you who have not taken the "Leap of Faith" into the cyber world to follow those Inspectors who have blazed the trail ahead of you. I'm eagerly excited and look forward to the improvements that the new leadership will implement in 1999.

Michael Leavitt
1998 AII™ President

This means that I will also have to trade in my President 1998 logo for the "Past President" version. I hope to be able to include the welcome addresses of the new leadership as soon as they are able to compose them........ Stay tuned.