In Episode 64 of The Ride Along, filmed at Inspection Fuel in New Orleans, Brad and Matt sat down with Charles Bellefontaine, founder of Get Sync and leader of a 15-inspector operation in Chicago. This episode is a masterclass in how growing inspection companies can scale without adding overhead or losing operational consistency.
For teams juggling schedules, inspectors, and a steady flow of new customers, his approach is simple: make the first touchpoint instant, make the message clear, and let automation handle the rest.
And you know we keep it real over here – Matt shares a quick story about a new-construction job that wasn’t anywhere near ready – a reminder that the field gets messy, which is exactly why your systems shouldn’t be.
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Ride Along newsletter to get episodes like this delivered straight to your inbox.
Transcript
Brad Lowery
Dude, Matt, what a week, first of all.
Matt Brading
I mean, week, a couple of weeks. I think it’s pretty intense here.
Brad Lowery
No, it has. we honestly, we’re, kind of recording an intro to the new episode now, but we haven’t really gotten to sit down and do a beginning podcast portion in a, in a month, a Sunday, simply because there was so much content that we folded inspection.
Matt Brading
Plus, we’ve just been busy. I mean, I’ve been out in the field. You moved.
Brad Lowery
You know, did. just moved up to Nashville. So for all of y’all, I was formerly down in Florida inspecting down there, but I honestly, Hey, look, sound off in the comments. If you guys would take some value away from a segment on this channel about, you want to start a home inspection business. Cause basically what I’m going to do it, honestly, I could film from start to end the process of moving my inspection business and relaunching it in the state of Tennessee. I mean, I feel like that would kind of be pretty cool.
Matt Brading
That would be pretty cool. And plus like, do you actually want to deal with everything that goes on with home inspection? mean, I was completely utterly frustrated yesterday with a new construction home inspection. I up problems and I, I feel like I gotta announce this like to the builders out there, like make sure these houses are ready. Okay. They need to be substantially completed before, before we go to inspect it. The buyers are paying for an inspection. We’re supposed to be inspecting things to see what you might have missed.
Brad Lowery
Now you tell me.
Matt Brading
what you might have not done correctly, not just what you haven’t done yet. They’re using me as a punch list and they’re doing it on the buyer’s dollar. I’m not happy about that.
Brad Lowery
No, honestly, man, I can’t even imagine. But what were you seeing there? Like as far as things that were not resolved, not finished. You were sounding off a little bit about on the phone a while ago.
Matt Brading
There was, it was a five and a half bathroom house, three showers that didn’t work. There were two sinks that were not hooked up. There were two ACs. One of them worked not well on that one had a dehumidifier wasn’t even plugged in and it had excessive condensation dripping from the bottom of the unit and the downstairs unit didn’t work at all. I mean, that’s just a couple of things that are coming to the top of my head. You know, I mean, like this is just, and the gas was off at the property. So like I couldn’t run the furnace. couldn’t check the cooking equipment. I couldn’t check the fireplace. I couldn’t check the water heater. And there’s just a ton of stuff right there. That just a ton of limitations. And what do they do? That that means that they want to have me back out whenever it’s done. And it’s like, well, I don’t want to go twice.
Brad Lowery
A lot easier for everybody if everything was just done before you actually got there.
Matt Brading
It’s my pet peeve.
Brad Lowery
I, but like, tell you as, as much as, you know, I love creating content. I love everything that we get to do with this, but there’s a simplicity to getting on a job site and performing an inspection where you are just start to finish. You could do that job in your sleep. Not that you’re not paying attention, but it’s, me, it’s almost like when you’re painting a house where it’s like, I know I’m a really dang good painter and I could just focus and be present on that. And there’s nothing else in my mind about anything else in the world, right? Except for what’s right in front of me with the, with the job or the house that I’m looking at.
Matt Brading
Yeah, when it goes well, it is that cool, right? Like, yeah, yeah, because you know, I do, had the process down, you know, I go into a house, there’s no weird nonsense like that. New household house doesn’t really matter, you know, but like, you know, when there’s a dozen people around the house working and like multiple things that don’t function, and, you know, a clearly a job that hasn’t been completed, it just makes for a rough day. It seems weird, because you’d think it’d be like, okay, well, all that stuff you didn’t have to do, right. But I still had to go find out that it didn’t work. So I sort of do all the work that is around doing it. just only did not really have the gratifying part of actually being able to inspect.
Brad Lowery
It’s, but at the same time, it’s like, that’s, that’s part of why we do the inspections. Cause maybe they thought this was going to be done and it wasn’t, but at the same time, it’s like, these are easy things that don’t need to be in the report if they were just done.
Matt Brading
Yeah, well, it’s just, I just don’t really, you know, I want to work. I work for the buyer, right? I have their interests in mind. And this was clearly the wrong time to do the inspection. It is not ready. And I know why the, the, the builder is telling them, they pushed them for this date. I know why, because it gets them a punch list. It tells them what they need to do. And it’s like, that’s what you pay people to do. You know, the, the buyer’s paying me to check up on you. Not to go find what you haven’t finished yet to give you a list like and you’re doing that and the buyer’s paying for it. I just don’t agree with it.
Brad Lowery
I totally get it. I’m still marveling at the five bathrooms. I’m like, look, I feel good when I had had two and like my old house in Virginia was a thirty five hundred square foot house with two and a half bath, but five bathrooms. I remember when I was, I was a young lad, like almost, you know, like nineteen, almost twenty. And, um, my dad in trying to encourage us towards some semblance of fiscal responsibility. Whenever we would buy something or do something, we just had no business doing, you know, we weren’t, I certainly didn’t make all that much money. It just like opinion, my brothers and sisters be like, you know, y’all can’t afford a pot to piss in. Then I mean, imagine buying that house with five bathrooms and had just texted your daddy being like, how about five pots to piss in? Right.
Matt Brading
Right. Well, this was almost five thousand square foot house and they had a butler’s pantry.
Brad Lowery
Did it now.
Matt Brading
It was nice. It was nice place. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not the best shit.
Brad Lowery
In that nice, there shouldn’t be that many things that are just obvious things that are wrong.
Matt Brading
I agree. just wrong time. They just have me there at the wrong time. That’s all it was.
Brad Lowery
I get it, man. I definitely get it. Well, this is the right time to do something that we’ve never gotten to do on this show before, because for the first time ever in the history of The Ride Along, Matt, we have a sponsor and the sponsor is also going to be the guest today. This is going to be the one of the last episodes from inspection fuel, which, cause we got so much content there, man. Amazing people, amazing vendors, amazing inspectors, go check out any of the other stuff from fuel if you haven’t, but today we’re going to be featuring Mr. Charles Bell Fontaine.
Matt Brading
That’s right.
Brad Lowery
He’s been in the game for a long time. He’s up out of Chicago area. But he is going to be today’s sponsor with his company gets sick and that we, you know, if this next part sounds a bit verbose and, uh, it’s because it is, we have a read guys. This is what they call on the professional, uh, audio industry, a sponsored read.
Matt Brading
Well, let me get ready for that.
Brad Lowery
Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. What the whistle. All right. All right. We ready to do this? Guys today sponsor gets think. Listen, we know how tough it is to run a home inspection business with missed calls. Tasting reviews. Does and that’s why we’re excited about today’s sponsor get sink.
Matt Brading
Alright, late night emails. It eats up all your time. That’s right. They help home inspectors capture every lead, follow up automatically and keep calendars full without having to hire extra staff. Inspectors using Get Sync are seeing faster response times and more reviews and real business growth.
Brad Lowery
all while cutting overhead. So, if you’re ready to spend more time inspecting and less time on admin, head over to Get Sync.pro and see how it works. Guys, that is how it goes. So, thank you so much to Get Sync and thank you so much to Charles Belafontein. Without further ado, let’s cut back to the interview from Inspection Fuel with Mr. Charles. Guys, day two here at Inspection Fuel in… And how are you feeling, Matt? I mean, it’s been a couple of fun nights.
Matt Brading
New Orleans. Feeling great.
Brad Lowery
This is-
Matt Brading
I’m not, I’m actually in good shape. I know that might be surprising considering how much fun I’ve had, but I’m in great shape.
Brad Lowery
Now, we both are and we’ve got a guest here today who’s in great shape as well. And honestly, thank you so much for joining the show. Mr. Charles, how are you?
Charles Bellefontaine
Doing well and it’s something I’m getting used to on the South is Mr. Charleston up north nobody does that yes that’s what it is it’s very kind
Brad Lowery
Some manners down here. Yep, definitely. you’re one of our vendors here, but you’re also a home inspector as well. Have a home inspection company up in Chicago. But you’re here with Get Sync. And tell us a little bit about that and your background as an inspector.
Charles Bellefontaine
Sure, I started home inspecting in nineteen ninety three, had my roller coaster ride. We were doing about fifteen hundred inspections or so with seven inspectors in two thousand and four or five-ish. The two thousand seven, eight came along, everything turned off like a light switch. I was running really heavy and it crushed my family. It got really ugly at home. You know, everything was fine. I worked thirty days a month. I never took any time off. I thought it was a smart thing to do. Hustle, hustle, hustle. I wanted to be a provider, but I started neglecting my children and my wife. And, you know, so I don’t blame anybody but me. So we did end up getting divorced. Business went to a crashing halt, basically. I kept my license and stuff and just kept dabbling. Two thousand eighteen, I retired from the fire department. And I asked my current wife if I could build this up again. And she kind of laughed at me, goes, can you? And I’m like, yeah, I think I can, you know, but I don’t like working with the real estate agents. And I understand the value that, you know, I’m the absolute minority at this convention, but I know how what people want that are buying a home. And I want to go ahead and provide that. So now we’re up to fit since two thousand eighteen. Got fifteen inspectors. We do roughly about two thousand inspections a year. We’re just under two million, I’m sorry.
Matt Brading
No, that’s good. That’s fantastic. Listen, you were saying that you’re the minority here and I actually kind of disagree a little bit. mean, I don’t. And yeah, I think the thing is, is that they don’t know how to achieve it, right? It is when you are a new agent or a new inspector. The best avenue for you to at least historically, most of the time, I’m anxious to hear what you have to say about it. But what I have encouraged people to do, what I did and what really seems to work is.
Charles Bellefontaine
That makes me excited.
Matt Brading
Getting relationships with realtors, that is how you start building your business because how else are you going to get to the general public on any type of level that will actually scale your business.
Charles Bellefontaine
What if I told you that I can move to anywhere in this country and within two weeks I’d have my schedule full and nobody knows me? Does that sound BS? Amazing. No, it sounds bullshit, doesn’t it? I’m sorry I swore on your can say it. Okay. But I’ll prove it if you let me. Yeah, no. Super.
Matt Brading
I mean, I mean, it sounds amazing.
Brad Lowery
You went there.
Matt Brading
I want you to think. I think people here want to do that. I just don’t think they know how.
Charles Bellefontaine
I’ll show you. I’ll tell you how right now. And that’s kind of what I want to do is tell everybody how. So the first thing is you got to do research and find out who your client is. And one of the things that I start, I like playing with this AI stuff. All right. So it just helps me create a prompt to do research for me. So when I left the fire department, I actually spent about grand hiring a private consultant to help me design and build a business that’s gonna be marketing direct to consumers. They did a great job. It took them two months to do everything. They told me all the pain points of home buyers. They were talking about, they ended up interviewing a lot of my past clients. Everybody wanted to know. That was the biggest thing for my past clients. They want to know. They wanna make their own decision. They just don’t want me to make the decision for them. So they want a big long list. They want more time with me. They want more tools and they want me to make a more thorough list. Well, that’s what I wanted to do. So that’s a good fit for me. So once you find out what somebody wants and you go ahead and supply what they want, they’re going to give you money for it. It’s that simple. But nobody ever does that. And a lot of those clients that are going outside the box or outside the real estate referral, they don’t know what’s a good home inspector or not. And all we do as home inspectors when we answer that phone is we answer questions. Well, if they’re only gonna ask me the question of how much and what do you do, that doesn’t really allow me to say what separates me from everyone else. So I’m more of a put it in writing guy and I get that to the client in writing and I don’t like to answer the phone when it comes to that stuff. So when we find out their pain points and what they want and we’re the solution to it, because we know that’s what they’re looking for. And let me tell you, home buyers, they need to buy now, okay? Because realize what happened. They’re looking at houses, they’ve been on a house, it got accepted. The real estate agent gave them referrals, maybe three of home inspectors. That client has a relationship with the real estate agent already, but they’re on the internet looking for another home inspector. So the real question is why? Why would somebody not trust the referrals from the real estate agents? Usually it has to do with something that bad happened to them or their family or something else. So we got a lot of people that might go for…Quick home inspection, short list, things like that. I just don’t want to be that guy. And my clients don’t want that.
Brad Lowery
Yeah, they wouldn’t want that. Plus, the other thing too with consumers right now, the way that information is available, the number one person that clients trust in any sort of transaction, a major transaction, is themself.
Charles Bellefontaine
All right.
Brad Lowery
They trust their own eyes, they trust their own ability to get on their own personal Google machine and look at a review and make a decision, right? Plus there’s ownership in that. If you are completely putting blind faith and trust in an agent, which is already a huge step of faith for them as they’re getting ready to make a move, there’s some tangible level of control over, I want to find the guy that I like with the reviews that I like at the price point that I like. And so they want to shop for themselves, right? So it’s genius what you’re doing, what you’re talking about.
Charles Bellefontaine
So you brought up a really good point, you know, and when it comes to website design, and this is another place that a lot of people fail, is there’s a section called the hero section. And I don’t, a of people, what’s the hero section? The hero section is where they have buyer, exactly how you describe them. They’re the hero, all right? I’m the solution. They’re gonna be the hero if they find our company that’s gonna be doing the work for them. So when we put everything up there, it’s not to make me and how great I am. It’s this is what your need is and this is how I meet that need. I’m the solution to your pain. All right. So they’re going to want somebody you need to express. I’m going to be longer. I want to be independent from the real estate agents. want more tools, more time. know, once you can go ahead and prove that you’re the answer, then they come back with you.
Brad Lowery
So I’ve got two follow-up questions. We can kind of go off of this. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? I don’t think anybody that’s under the age of thirty watches is going to know what those are. But those were fun. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, let’s choose our own adventure on here. When it comes to solving for a pain point, we can either go personal and talk about how restructuring your business solves your own personal pain point in your personal life.
Charles Bellefontaine
Sorry.
Brad Lowery
Which we’ve all got stories on, divorcee as well. And we can talk about the methodology that you’ve taken in shifting your marketing tech in order to better communicate how to solve their pain point and the things that you’re doing for that. would you like?
Charles Bellefontaine
You choose, I’m game either way.
Brad Lowery
What do you think? The ladder. The ladder. you guys. Get away from the heavy.
Charles Bellefontaine
We
Matt Brading
I mean, that’s more what I want to know about. Like that has to do with like the question that I wanted to ask. Like before we started this, we were sitting here talking to Charles for a minute and we were talking about marketing. I was talking about direct to consumer marketing via social media, which is what I have had success doing. And Charles was like, hey, I think you did a.
Charles Bellefontaine
I did. I gave you a Mac.
Matt Brading
He is not exactly the fan of right. The biggest fan of it has been very successful to me and I don’t know any other ways of doing it. And so I think I want to know and I think if we hit a little bit tighter on. How are you doing that? What? How are you getting out of these people? And then we can backtrack and get some details on that. That’s where I wanted to take us.
Charles Bellefontaine
Yeah, so I’ll go down that road. Yeah, there there’s two types of internet marketing There’s funnel marketing and then there’s website marketing and a lot of people don’t understand the difference So what our funnel marketing is nurturing that is for when you have you have a buyer or consumer out there? They always want your product and you just have to keep in touch with them and keep giving them more and more micro Yes reasons that they’re gonna choose your product and buy your product. That’s funnel management. All right. So when we deal with social media, that’s long-term nurturing, touches. You use the term branding, all right? So that’s what it is. Name recognition, branding, you’re in front of them all the time, you know? And the problem is that home buyers only buy houses and they only need us once out of every seven or years. So they really don’t need us during all that other marketing time. Now websites is for I want it now. So I’m hungry. I’m in New Orleans. I want a pizza. I want a really good pizza and I don’t know where to go. So I’m going to get on Google. I’m going to search. I’m going to look for reviews. I’m going to see Yelp sites and then I’m going to go and choose somebody and I’m ordering it now. But I don’t have months, weeks, days to make a decision. I got hours. All right. When somebody is looking online, they’ve already signed a contract, they’re buying now, you don’t have time to nurture that client. You gotta dump every possible reason that you have to hire you into their lap. And if you do it in writing instead of verbally, now even if they can’t remember it, they’re gonna have it there and they can review it again. All right, so that’s why I gave you the man that. I want to have every possible reason. I’m not here to entertain. I’m not here to build relationships of trust with anybody. I’m here to say this is what we’re going to do. It’s going to be better than everybody else. It’s going to be more expensive than everyone else because I’m going to disagree when you said they want price. These type of clients, they don’t want price. They want thoroughness and they’re willing to pay for it. I’m sorry.
Brad Lowery
I just I can only disagree because this only has happened to me a couple times in Florida. You have major price disparity regions around the Tampa area. If you get just rural enough outside of Tampa, people don’t want to pay Tampa prices. And I’ve lost a couple of inspections because of that. I price myself around my contemporaries in the Tampa area. But you have a lot, because there’s such a huge volume of inspectors in Florida, you’ve got the cut rate guys that get to, they’ll steal a couple, like a shark that grabs your grouper as you’re reeling it in, you know? They’ll grab that one just because it’s two hundred dollars less than what you want. And they’re like, oh, you’re going to give a home inspection, a four point and a win mint for four hundred dollars? I’m sorry, you just did a standard home inspection for two hundred bucks. We are almost done. But people have gone for them for that. But I’m like, well, I’m sorry. You can go ahead and get what you pay for.
Charles Bellefontaine
So we get eighty percent of the people that contact us. We don’t get a hundred percent. Right, yeah. I don’t need hundred percent.
Matt Brading
Some people that are at it price, after the lowest price. And so we just need to get to more people so that we can get more of the people that don’t care about. Those are the clients we want.
Charles Bellefontaine
Once you get your percentage of close, once you know how many calls come in and you know what your percentage of closes, and especially if it’s all done automated and consistently, then now it’s a numbers game. All right. All I do, you we keep our calendar full. We’re week booked out all the time. We never really slow down. If the market, I look at it on Monday evenings, and usually we’re ninety percent full, which means I’m not going to touch a single thing and I need more people. But if all of a sudden we’re less than that, all I do is dial up my ad spend. That makes the phone ring more. I know I’m still at eighty percent and boom, the calendar’s full again and then I’ll back it down the next week. I advertise on Google Local Service ads and Yelp.
Matt Brading
Dialing up what do you. That’s the thing. That’s how you were getting to people.
Charles Bellefontaine
Well, that’s step one. That’s three steps to get jobs on the Internet. Step one, you got to be found. And you can do the search engine optimization. You can do everything else, but that doesn’t guarantee you the absolute top spot. When you go ahead and do the Google Google local service ads, you’re going to be number one. And I know that everybody’s going to give me the evil eye and I’m going to give it right back to you right now. All right. But Yelp is not a bad company. All right. People just don’t know how to work. All right. When people… What’s nice about Yelp is they usually show up in the top one, two or three on the organic searches. So now I’m going to be at the top of the Google search and then I’m going to be on a trustworthy site like Yelp on the other ones. But you got to be quick to respond to everything. All right. And that’s why when somebody calls in, we allow them to get a text. They press one on their phone and my entire sales pitch is instantly sent to their phone. And they got nine pages of PDF document they may or not read but if they want somebody who’s sterile they want somebody who’s gonna use more tools they want somebody who’s going to you know make a longer list and they’re willing to pay more for it perfect and I didn’t spend one second of my time talking to them when I gave them the information and that’s what they want they don’t they may want to still hear my voice and they’ll have my cell phone number then as well then they could call me direct if they do want to talk but they want the information give it to them give them what they want
Brad Lowery
So there’s a couple of other ways that you’re giving information too, right? I feel like we’ve hit on one of your three points, right? Have we gotten to the others?
Charles Bellefontaine
Well, the three points are going to be getting found. So that’s where we buy the Number two is going to be that hero section. So I hate this phrase, but I don’t know any other way. It’s called a hook. Yeah. And when you hook the client and what you’re doing, and you only got seconds to do this when they’re on your web page, this is your headline and your sub headline and your eyebrows statement. And on there, this is where you use the pain agitating solution. So the pain points that I go after, the clients that I go after, they made a mistake or a family member made a mistake with the home inspector, it was fast, it was short, missed a bunch of stuff. They don’t want that again. So they want to make a smarter decision. So our headline says why smart home buyers choose us. Our sub headline, that’s the agitator, all right, because it’s your home, it’s your family, it’s your money, you deserve the best. And then we also agitate with the eyebrow, but I didn’t put an eyebrow on my website yet. Then we come in there with both a video and words on there because everything needs to be quick and easy. What are the major things that I’m answering your pain points? The goal is not to get them to hire me with that. The goal is to get me in the final three and then they’re going to investigate me deeper. And then hopefully I’ll have the best value. Okay. Right. So those are the three steps.
Brad Lowery
Okay, awesome. as we were kind of getting to at the beginning of this, you’re not as, because you’re trying to increase revenue. You want to increase your bond line, make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time possible by clients finding you, by marketing directly to them. Where does social media come in for you? And how is that disparity here between what Matt does and what you’re looking at?
Charles Bellefontaine
I see social media as marketing to the real estate agents and building relationships with them. All right, because that’s where the long term, the touches come into play. Whenever we talk about the branding, you know, we want name recognition. Real estate agents year round are going to be referring home inspectors. So they really need you year round, right? Let’s go. Let’s go. I’m old. I’ll get my bucket. I’m good.
Matt Brading
It has. So I respectfully disagree because that the social media marketing is what opened me up to direct to consumer marketing. That’s the only way I found that I was able to get to them. Yeah. mean search engine optimization, you know, getting ranked up on Google, those type of things that still happens. But and look, the thing is, is like my situation is unique. OK, because I have much larger following than most home inspectors. are some of us out there that have really large accounts. I mean, I literally get calls and people asking me for referrals all around the country a lot. I’ve referred people in Canada, you know, and it’s because of my reach.
Charles Bellefontaine
How much is that following? I’m just curious. That’s a big thing. I got three thousand. Okay. All right.
Matt Brading
I’ve got a quarter million on Instagram and then I got some platforms that are right in that same range as well. a large reach, right? And so that’s how I was able to get to these people. A lot of it is like people, it can be resale homes, but also it’s a lot of new construction stuff that don’t even have an agent.
Charles Bellefontaine
But how long did it take you to get that? And I apologize for interrupting you. I don’t like that.
Matt Brading
I mean we’re just talking here so yeah no how long did it take well I started making content in about two thousand eighteen. okay look some people do this for years and don’t get successful with it one day it just kind of took off and so I a few after a few years of making content it really started to take off and grow and then it just kind of grew from there so I mean I’ve been doing it a while but I probably saw success about two years or so, like really at first it was trying to get real to his attention. No doubt. That’s what I was trying to do. And it would be so exciting whenever they did call me, right? Like, Oh, you saw one of our videos, you know, great. And then one day it changed, right? The reach changed. And all of a sudden it was just people that reached out that want to be now. I have a quick question. I don’t know if this is on topic or off topic guys, I just met Charles. We have met a lot of people through here. I don’t know you very well. I’m not familiar with your company. You are you have your home inspection company, which is Chicago Land Home Inspection is correct, but correct your tag says Get Sync. What is that? What you do? Do you help other people achieve what you’re talking about here? Is that what Get Sync is?
Charles Bellefontaine
It is. It’s a high level product and high level is a content management system, contact management system. And that’s what I use to build my automations in my business. And then all of a sudden, a lot of other friends started saying, hey, I want to market like you do because it’s automatic. I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night and answer the phone. If I’m at dinner or whatever, I’m on the bathroom toilet. I don’t have to answer the phone. You know, our system does everything automatically and I don’t have any salary. I don’t have any staff, no salespeople, nothing. I run lean like there’s no tomorrow. I’m worried about another O seven, O eight. I don’t want the big overhead. So yeah, we got fifteen inspectors. We do just under two million. I started building the business in eighteen. Same is with you. But my whole thing about the branding and building relationships, because I also moved to a new part of Chicago. I didn’t know anybody. And I didn’t want to take all that time to ramp it up. So with this, it’s instant. I guarantee you that whatever part of the country is, there’s gonna be people out there right now searching for a home inspector that need to hire somebody today. All right, why not go after those people?
Matt Brading
For sure. So if somebody, like I want to contact Get Sync, what do you do? What are you going to do for that person? Like what do you offer? Like packages or something for them? What is it that you do for people?
Charles Bellefontaine
What do I do? It’s basically next to nothing. We charge fifty dollars a month or five hundred dollars a year. All right. And this is a full blown out phone answering system. It’s your social media posting. It’s your email blast marketing. does phone drops. It does. Yeah. No, it does. And that part is actually pretty.
Matt Brading
You see social media posting?
Brad Lowery
I had to. Is it the consumer or the realtor?
Charles Bellefontaine
Whoever you want it to be, you know, it’s, yeah, no, I’m with you. But what’s cool, what they do with this is, and they upgrade it every week and you know, they have it. So you make one post and then it automatically reformats all your posts and it puts, know, this, so they, and they put it on all the different platforms for you. And then they put it into a repository and you can go ahead and group those repositories and it’ll regurgitate those same posts two, three years. So once you get your collection, now it just keeps going on and on and you just keep adding to it and you know, and it’s run for nobody. You’re not paying anyone to do it. It’s all part of that same system, but it’s websites, funnels, forums, surveys. mean, the list is really long and anybody I’m going to do a plug here. Anybody who goes to get sink dot com. I’m sorry, get sink dot pro and you look on there, you’ll see the pricing and you’ll see everything that’s included and is a stupidly long list. I mean, you should.
Matt Brading
Plug that, right?
Charles Bellefontaine
That’s what we’re here for, just did. Yeah. No, good. You know, no shame. Let me give everyone the Jedi mind trick. Get Sync.Pro.
Brad Lowery
And a sponsor of the show here as well.
Charles Bellefontaine
So, I’m excited. I have listened to past things and I think what you guys are doing is very valuable because you’re helping everybody try and improve their business and that’s the key. it’s okay that we want to do things differently. %. It’s okay. Yeah. But we should all share with what we do and then everybody can pick and choose what they want to do because it’s their business.
Matt Brading
Yeah, I mean, disagreement is, you know, that’s what it’s all about. Yeah, we have to talk about our differences. Whether or not we agree on something doesn’t mean that we are not friends. You know, doesn’t sound like. No, think we are in it all for the same reasons, right? So no.
Charles Bellefontaine
So bully. I want to help somebody with one of their basic needs. Buying a home is a big deal. All right. And we are the most important person in that real estate transaction. I’m sorry.
Brad Lowery
And go ahead, what saying? Oh, go ahead. Now I was going say, and on improving a basic need, how has all of this helped to kind of reshape your business structure and your systems to improve your life the way that you’ve been wanted to?
Charles Bellefontaine
I don’t work those thirty days anymore. You know, my mistake with ruining my first family, and by the way, I wouldn’t wish a divorce on my worst enemy. It’s horrible thing, and I was depressed for many years, you know? And if you guys are out there working now, all these things like it did to me, you gotta stop. You you’re gonna lose them.
Brad Lowery
Absolutely not, not just that too, different tack and I don’t think I’ve ever said this on this show, but if there’s one thing that I did when I was going through it, it was double down and work even harder. And do know what that helped? Not an amp thing. It does it. Cause it’s like all I was doing was using work to avoid this, fixing this, right? And working on my side of things. But you know, it’s not a bad escape. There’s certainly a productive one, but nothing changed.
Charles Bellefontaine
Right. So in the firehouse we use an old saying, work smarter, not harder. And I had a problem of working harder all the time. And then the old guys, you you’re sitting there with the sledgehammer trying to bust something open and then he comes over there with a cry bar and one handed, all right, get out of my way. You know, it’s like, there’s better ways to do it. Absolutely. And that’s what I tried to do. I built automations. I don’t want to hire a bunch of people. I try to keep my overhead low. And in this way, you know, give people what they want. They want information so they can make a good choice. Be the answer to what they want. And then hopefully they’ll choose you. And then we even let them schedule automatically online. Now, I still have a VA to go ahead because not everybody, humans are different and not everybody wants to do everything online. So you give everybody the options. But that’s what’s nice about not answering the phone, give them the phone tree in the beginning. You get rid of the robo calls. If somebody wants to text, they’ll take the text. If they know it’s late and it’s after hours, they’re gonna have to leave a voicemail, but they’re still gonna be able to get the information, then do it. Even if you wanna leave a delay on that, you could do that. Have your phone ring first and if you don’t pick up, then let the information system go. Have a backup plan. There’s so many different things that we need to open up the options and how to get the information out there. Sorry.
Matt Brading
Is Get Sync synced specific to home inspection?
Charles Bellefontaine
Right now it is because it’s all I know right, you know, but this it’s, yeah, high level goes for just about any business All right, and you can get high level directly This is some of the problems that I had with other agents when I first started coming up this I asked for another coach Well, you could sell this for three hundred five hundred thousand dollars a month and I’m like they could get it themselves for ninety seven dollars a month.
Matt Brading
Seems like it could be.
Charles Bellefontaine
How the hell am I gonna show my face in front of another home inspector charging them three hundred, five hundred, thousand a month when they could get it on their own for ninety seven? So I decided to up my plan to an agency plan and it’s strictly my business. Now I could copy everything that I do in my business and I can give it to anyone else and they could edit and change it to them and we only charge fifty bucks a month. So to me, and we got guys that signed on with us. They cut their overhead by like a thousand a month and then so that’s huge man. It’s huge.
Brad Lowery
And now on top of a little bit of a different pivot here, know, Get Synced is a great name for a company. It’s also a great name for a boy band. And while you might not be in one, you do have a radio show. You got a voice for radio. We all hear, yeah.
Charles Bellefontaine
I got a face for radio is what you’re. No, it’s the radio show I did because again, I don’t even know I’m prejudice against real estate agent. I’ll confess that. All right. That doesn’t mean that there’s not real estate agents that are out there that have the same mindset as I do. I only I just don’t want to conform to what they want. I want them to conform to what I do. And that’s even with our email funnel system going after agents. Even with that, we want to explain who we were. But the radio show, we were doing that. We were advertising in Real Producers Magazine. Yeah, we were advertising in Real Producers Magazine. And then we would invite the agents that got an article in the magazine. We invited them to be on the radio show. So I would take them out to breakfast. I would spend about an hour and half with them. Then we would go over to the radio station and do the recording. That was another hour. I had a two and a half hour one-on-one with them. So if we’re gonna start getting to know and like each other so we can move on to the trust stage, I got my two and a half hours to get that far with them, all right, to build a relationship. The bottom line is mostly I just, they don’t, I don’t see eye to eye with them. know, most of the agents in our area, they want. If you’re on site more than forty five minutes. So if that’s going to be your target audience, it’s what it is. These people that market after the real estate agents, their biggest thing is speed. Get in, get out.
Brad Lowery
That’s what I used to do when I was inspecting in Virginia. I’m able to get through a house even to this day in two to two and a half hours tops. I don’t finish the report on site. A lot of other people do. But my whole thing is, and it’s a handicap because I used to do videos on Facebook and stuff like that when that was starting to come out. Got into doing this right about the time that TikTok boomed and you guys were taking off doing the fast home inspection, a fast thorough home inspection doesn’t free you up for content, it doesn’t give you the time to do the report on site, but for me, especially in the Northern Virginia and DC market where it’s, my whole thing was get as much information to the buyer and the agent in as brief amount of time as possible so that I could get to the next job and they can get to the next thing that they need to do. And then I would finish the report later. Not the preferred method for everybody, right, yeah.
Charles Bellefontaine
We’ll only do one inspection a day. We’re probably we schedule five hours for the appointment. We’re usually outside around three for a typical twenty five hundred square foot house, basement, gas, fourth, air furnish. You know, that’s typical, but we don’t know what we’re going to run into. We don’t know if there’s a house with a bunch of issues in there. I don’t know if I’m going to have a client that’s going to have a lot of questions. And I want my client there. We don’t let the people our people, our inspectors. We don’t let our inspectors write the report on site unless the client decided not to show. Because that’s another rule of three. You got to focus on the house. You got to focus on your client. You got to focus on writing the report. You just can’t do all three. Pick two. All right. So I want my guys focusing on the client because they those reviews that people have. And I’ll tell you what, if you guys want to see something that’s like, holy crap, you know, do a search for Chicagoland home inspectors. And we have offices in Northbrook, Illinois and downtown Chicago, Illinois and read our reviews. You’re going to see photos. These people write books that come on there. We go everything about exceeding those expectations that they have. And that is why future people keep choosing us. Because if they’re researching and comparing, social proof means a lot.
Matt Brading
Yeah, so I want to say, you I know how you feel about real estate agents and I can’t say that to some degree I kind of agree and to some degree I feel the same. But I will say something that I think I have seen and this could be area specific. But I see just like home inspection has changed a lot. You started in ninety three, right? Home inspection probably looks a lot different than it in ninety three. I see and how, you know, like there’s been a shift in that, but I see a shift in real estate agents. And again I do a lot of direct-to-consumer so I’m working there a lot so I can pick and choose the agents right and they’re just like there are some people that only want a cheap inspection there are actually agents out there you know who you are okay and so thank you there are agents that do agree with me you know and they want the thorough report they want it to take a while they want all of the information and if it if it kills the deal they want to go find another house.
Charles Bellefontaine
He’s the most important person to them and me too.
Matt Brading
To me, those are like partners.
Charles Bellefontaine
The hard part is finding them. Because building a relationship doesn’t happen in the snap of a finger. You gotta get to know somebody, you gotta get to like somebody, and then you can trust somebody. And that takes time, and that’s the problem I have with real estate agent marketing. It doesn’t happen overnight. But somebody who needs to hire me today, if I could be the solution to what they’re looking for, they’re gonna hire me today. That’s it.
Brad Lowery
Now Charles, this has all been awesome, man. We got to wrap here. We’re running short on memory card time. Sorry about that, No, no, this is great, is how good the conversation’s been. There’s been so many of these at Inspection Fuel this week. It really has. And so thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you again at the website and then any social media you got?
Charles Bellefontaine
It’s Get Sync that pro and no I’m I’m gonna boomer for crying out loud, you know First of all, you said the word wrong. It’s boomer. Yeah, exactly like we’re annoying and we
Brad Lowery
Lot of cool boomers on TikTok and stuff.
Well, that’s what the Gen Zers are saying about Millennials now, so we get it.
Charles Bellefontaine
Yeah, I like all this. So no, it’s Get Sync App Pro and our phone numbers, everything else. Somebody wants a tour, but it’s a no brainer. You know, and even if you want to go without us and you want to do it on your own, it’s get or I’m sorry, gohighlevel.com is their website. And if anyone wants like a thirty day of them without us, just let me know. I’ll send you a link to get a free trial with them. But otherwise, please, you know, it’s, we have a learning platform and everything else. So I want to coach on what I believe is the way it’s supposed to be. So people ask me, and we meet every week on Saturday morning, and we just share ideas. And I learn as much from other people that are using our system as I share. So I’m a giver.
Brad Lowery
Hey, that’s the best way and honestly when you’re giving like that, good things come back around. this has been a great talk. It’s been a good time for us. Absolutely. Thank you for joining us. Thank you guys so much for watching. Stay tuned. More coming from Inspection Fuel right here on…
Matt Brading
The Ride Along.