I, Brett Thompson have always been a person bored by doing the same things.
In 2001 I started doing drive by home occupancy determinations for banks. After a few years of doing this, my employer wanted to get into doing deeper in depth home inspections. He asked for volunteers to learn the trade. I accepted, and became certified to be a Home Inspector.
After 8 years and almost 1 million miles on my cars, I got into doing work in the foreclosed homes market. In that profession I cut lawns, winterized houses, boarded up props and removed debris. Then in 2008, the real estate market crashed. Banks started shifting work requirements and decreasing payout to contractors, making it no longer profitable to stay in business working on their houses. So what to do?
I took a look at my tools, and equipment and determined I would start offering services to private clients. Then I had a spark of inspiration- Use cheap grass cuts to build a client base, and then sell them on other services- So I asked myself “ what price could people not be able to say no to?” I arrived at $15 for a ¼ acre or smaller lawn. Made some good looking yard signs, and within a month I had 25 lawns. That led into landscaping, that led into lawn maintenance, that led into gutter cleaning, that led into siding repairs, repeat, repeat, repeat.
After a couple years of saying “ yes” to most every job request that came along, I had built a fairly large collection of tools and skills. Then I started accepting jobs for all kinds of work, interior, exterior, landscaping- you name it. Along the way there were several times I mis bid jobs, and had to eat it. Made some mistakes, paid someone else to fix my errors a couple times- Ouch. Did some work on commercial properties, and did a rehab or two. After a few years of trying to do everything, I reigned in the work we do to home and commercial repairs and Inspection services. We will leave the large concrete work, driveway replacement and framing full houses to other people. Now, we service a nice little niche’ in houses that are pre and post sale, as well as realtor needs.
