From First Client to Fully Booked: How to Scale a Service Business

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Charles Drown, owner of Square One Home Inspections, to break down the real, unfiltered journey of building a small business from the ground up.

Charles shares what most people don’t talk about...like the constant pressure of ownership, the early days of struggling to find customers, and why not all work is good work. From cold starts and stacks of unused business cards to building a referral engine through social media, he walks through the exact strategies that helped him grow.

They dive into:

How to use Instagram to build real business relationships (not just followers)
Why giving away free value is the fastest path to long-term growth
The biggest mistakes new business owners make with pricing
When to raise your prices—and when not to
Systems and tools that save time and scale your operations
The mindset shift from technician to business owner

Charles also shares blunt advice for anyone thinking about starting their own business: you don’t need permission, you just need to start.

If you're a small business owner (or want to be one), this episode is packed with practical strategies, honest insights, and a no-BS look at what it really takes to grow.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, we're back with another episode all about helping small business owners with their growth, strategy, playbooks, getting to that next best thing in their business. And I got another great guest here today, another small business owner who's gonna dive in with us all about what it's like to grow a business. And it's Charles Drown. And I'm just gonna start with a big question here, Charles. But what's the hardest part about being a small business owner that nobody talks about?

SPEAKER_00 0:22

One of the hardest things is balancing your personal life with the business. But I think that's talked about quite a bit, right? When you're a business owner, it's almost like having another child that it's like having an infant that's constantly needs food, needs its diaper change, it's crying in the middle of the night. That's kind of the analogy for owning a small business is that constant attention that it requires from you. And it doesn't matter if you're on vacation, it doesn't matter what you're doing or what time it is, if it needs attention, it's kind of one of those things that you have to address.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

I love it. Great response. It's so true. I've got three kids of my own. I've changed plenty of diapers, and I think I'd rather do that than worry about a lot of the problems in my business at times. So great analogy. I love it. Um, Charles, why don't you introduce yourself? Give it give everyone just kind of a little rundown of kind of who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

So my name is Charles Drown. I'm the owner of Square One Home Inspections. And so we do home inspections on typically pre-purchase uh homes or they're a pre-purchase inspection uh for homes when somebody's buying, and we do the whole service the whole valley, and occasionally we'd go up to Flagstaff and Sedona and stuff if we could fit it into our schedule. Started my business just over seven years ago. I uh I'm the father of four kids. My wife's a stay-at-home mom, and we homeschool our kids. You know, that's why I I mentioned the work-life balance. I spent a lot of time between spending time with my family and then working on the business. And uh been very busy. I have two employees. I'm hiring. Hiring is another huge challenge that I don't I will probably get into, finding the right people. It's been a really fun thing. And now that I am a business owner, I don't know if I could ever go back to working for somebody else. Yeah. Unhirable at this point, huh?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yeah, totally. I hear you. Well, good. Well, thank you so much. I if it's all right, let's just dive back into kind of those early years uh starting the business. We all know the kind of the the table stakes of starting a business from getting your first logo and business card design and all that fun stuff. But tell me about your first year in business. What was it really like? What did you what were some of those obstacles that you came across?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

I wish I had been able to listen to a podcast like this before when I started my business. So the first year I was kind of just screwballing. I couldn't, I was trying to figure out how to generate business. I started my business, I I got a website, I got the logo, and then it was just like, well, what do I do now? Right. In my case, my first year, I targeted really heavily meeting up with realtors at Broker Open and different social events and shaking hands with a lot of people and exchanging numbers that way. It was a very slow process. I did get a couple good contacts that way. I used to carry uh a stack of business cards of people who never called me, right? I had a huge stack of them on my desk because like that was a reminder of like how many reps I put in and to get where I was. And then I started listening to Gary V. I'm sure people have heard of Gary V. And he started pushing um talking about social media and providing free value to people, right? And so towards the end of the first year, I hopped on social media and I grew my business through primarily through social media.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Oh, that's fantastic. What is it a lot of content about just a day in a life of being out there inspecting homes, or is it more like tutorials like how two tips? And you know, you're a local service. A lot of our listeners are also local service business owners. How did you distinguish between a local audience versus someone across the country who couldn't be kind of the right customer?

SPEAKER_00 4:10

So for me, it's a little easier because I'm trying to get in front of agents, real estate agents, because they are the ones that refer you to the client. So it's very easy for me to narrow down who I want um to get in front of. And essentially, what I did through my Instagram is I would follow realtors in Arizona. And then if they followed me back, I would DM them a personal, a personalized DM of like, hey, thanks for the follow. You know, this is what we offer. If you want to meet up for coffee, we can talk about what we provide. You know, I'm happy to do that. And in the early days of my business, I had enough time to do that, you know. So I didn't meet up with there's one agent in particular. She had just got her license, and it was like six years ago. We met up for coffee, and um, we've been working together ever since, and we've done like a hundred plus transactions together.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

So I love the and that's that's purely uh that's a Gary Vee strategy right there, right? Kind of the jab jab, go out, build relationships, comment, engage with them, then the right time you ask for their business. But how would you feel like you get referrals from these agents? Is when it's is it just more that diligent of following through with them just to make sure that you're top of mind? How do you how do you pull out more referrals?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

I guess I didn't finish answering the first question, but the other part of it is you're adding value. And so, like if you go onto home inspector pages, most home inspectors are like complaining and showing horrific defects of the house, right? And that gets a lot of engagement. Um, but it doesn't necessarily get you in front of the agent that was like, because you're you're showing a lot of scary things, right? And so my approach was I want to showcase what I'm doing, like I want to show what I'm looking at. I want to provide value. So I would be like, oh, this is how we decode a serial number for a water heater or an air conditioner, or these are things to be mindful of, or these are common things that we see on every home. And then I would do that not just in posts, but on stories every day. And it kind of builds a reputation or rapport with the people that are following you. So they can see is this the per type of person that I'd like to do business with? And they can kind of follow you in the background until they're ready to be like, hey, I think I want to start using you. Um, you know, my other guy just retired, or we're not happy with the service they're providing, and we'd like to give you a shot. So you already are building a relationship with the client without even like knowing it. But you it requires every day you gotta post content, you gotta and and provide content that's valuable, not just like, hey, look at this terrible thing I found in a house.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah, I love that. I and if I could kind of regurgitate back to you what I'm hearing you do is number one, is you know your core audience, you know exactly who is gonna refer you the business, but then you're empowering them with your content. So you're educating them to almost feel like they're micro experts. So maybe when they're walking houses or showing homes with their clients, they've got a little bit of a sense of kind of in their back pocket, some common things to look for, some insights, and that kind of comes back to you as the trusted source. Is that right? Is that kind of the end goal and strategy? Correct.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

You want to provide um free value, right? You want to add value to their life. And another thing that I did offer, and I still do, is even if people weren't working with me in particularly, I noticed that a lot of these older reports were very difficult to kind of pick through and figure out, you know, what was actually important in the report. And I would tell them, like, hey, if you have a listing and you get this inspection and you can't figure out what items are actually significant in this report, send it to me and I'll help you outline outline the critical things. And so again, I was giving away, um, I was I was adding value and um and yeah, building a rapid uh rapport with with people.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

That's fantastic. You find yourself spending more time on Instagram? Is that kind of your platform of choice, or where do you see yourselves kind of getting the most engagement?

SPEAKER_00 8:26

For me, yeah, Instagram. I have my Instagram tied to my Facebook, so whatever I post on Instagram goes on to Facebook. Very little engagement on Facebook in comparison to Instagram. Um, I know a lot of people use TikTok now. I've kind of held back from using TikTok just because it's an additional platform that I would have to invest time into, and I might have so much time. So Instagram I think is broadly used by everyone, where TikTok is uh probably has a younger crowd, although I'm sure there are quite a few realtors and older people on it's on TikTok, but um I think uh Instagram probably has just like a broader range of people on it.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Uh sounds like you're a busy guy, Charles. Help me understand how you avoid making mistakes and spending time in the wrong spots. If there's somebody else out there that's just starting, maybe want to help them avoid some pitfalls. Where do you make sure you don't spend time uh to get the wrong marketing results?

SPEAKER_00 9:28

I like to say that not all work is good work, right? And um, so it's not that you necessarily want all the work, you really want to carve out good relationships that transfers over to any industry. I used to be a plumber, um, and just because you got a job doesn't mean you're gonna make money on that job, right? So getting in front of the right people is is uh I feel critical. And I think um knowing your value and holding to it is really important. A lot of people will be like, hey, well, this other company does it for X price, or can you match that? In the earlier days of starting my business, I would price match, and I learned that that for me at least was kind of a mistake because what you're essentially doing is your value is negotiable, right? And it sets a precedent over like, oh, really, this isn't the this the service that I provide really isn't worth this amount that I'm trying to charge, right? People that are just focused on the dollar amount and they can't see the value that you're providing, those types of people you probably don't want to work with anyway. You probably want to work with people that like when you go, when you buy a Mercedes, you buy a Mercedes because it's a Mercedes, right? You're not buying it because it's the cheapest or whatever, because there's already a perceived value of that product. And the same thing with whatever industry or service you're providing.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Absolutely. Well, I think staying busy and you know trying to maximize our efficiency of our days comes down to more systems and tools that we use within our business to kind of be more productive. What are a couple of the systems and tools that you could never go without now that you're implementing them into your business?

SPEAKER_00 11:16

My primary tool is my stupid phone. I can't get off of it, unfortunately. That is a tool that we do the reports on. And you know, I do inspections, I do the same amount of inspections as my guys, but I'd also answer our phone. So the our website, our Google, the phone number on there is my cell phone. Um on our website, it's my cell phone. Um, I manage our schedule. My wife manages payroll, but I kind of oversee some of that. And so obviously the phone is a big tool. Systems, and I think this could be integrated into any business. If you're a service, right, you need a way for somebody to look at your availability, book online. Nobody wants to call and book over the phone anymore. People want to just hop on your website and look at your availability block a time. If there's a way to integrate pricing on there, that's important too. People want to know pricing before they book, right? They want to figure out what they're paying. We use a software that does that, that it's integrated into our website where you can see our calendar, you can see our availability, you can see the pricing before they submit the booking. And I think that's a crucial tool. And there's a lot of different services that provide this, but then it will also automate emails like confirmation emails. There's credit card processing integrated in there. And without that, I couldn't do half as many jobs as I do. I just I would be I would spend all my time sending those emails and doing all that other stuff, or I'd have to pay somebody whatever$20,$30 an hour to do that.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

So it's now is that is a specific software for your industry for home inspectors, or is this a third-party tool that you've adapted?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

So there are third parties that do it. We use Spectora, which is a industry-specific version of it. Like, for instance, my barber has a very similar system for bookings on his his website, and I'm not even sure what it is, but I love it because it's it's very similar. I'm like, oh, select the barber, select the time, select the service. You know, you can pay in person or you can pay um right there in that in that um in that hyperlink. So I think everyone needs to do that. Everyone needs to have mobile friendly websites because everyone's doing everything on their phone. Mobile friendly, uh automated emails. You know, if they can give you a link where you can put it in your iCalendar too. Like when we set up this appointment, I had a link for my iCalendar. Uh and that all that stuff is like I think almost industry standard now.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, fantastic. Charles, I want to talk to you, change gears just a little bit, and talk to you a little bit about pricing. What I found is a lot of business owners um really price the wrong way from the very beginning. Either they find themselves thinking they're too much of a premium and they charge too much, or they completely undercut them all themselves to try and get their foot in the door and they attract the wrong type of customer, as kind of we talked about in the past. How do you know when to raise your prices and how do you know when to stay competitive versus be a premium?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

I knew from the start uh when I started my business, because in order to get licensed to be a home inspector, you have to do parallel inspections with other inspection companies. I used like four different companies and I saw how they were filling out reports, and I thought to myself, I can do a better job. And then I looked at their pricing and I was like, well, I want to be mid to high on their pricing. Initially, maybe that deterred some people, but once they saw the product, once you get the product in front of them, they can see the value, right? And the people that can't see the value in a product, you don't, like we discussed earlier, you don't really want those people. As far as when to raise your prices, uh a couple years ago, we had you know, gas prices were really high. Every like we had all this inflation, people were raising their prices on everything. And I actually refrained from raising my prices for the whole year just out of protest of all the price hikes that we were having. Because you know, we were having the issues with like you know, chips were like twice the as expensive, everything was so super expensive. And so to try to combat that, I I did like just I refrained from raising all my prices. But what I find is if you're so busy, you're just booked up and you're turning away business, that's probably a good time to raise your pricing for sure. I mean, that's like a dead giveaway because it's like, okay, well, you could you might reduce your workload by 10 to 15 percent of the people that check your pricing, but you're still making about the same amount of money. Anytime I raise my prices personally, I want to be able to morally justify it. So I want to look and be like, are we adding additional value or am I just raising my prices to raise prices? I'll give an example of my person that I'm struggling with with my personal business. We offer sewer scope inspections where we run a camera down the sewer line. A lot of inspection companies charge 250 or even$300 to do that service. We've been charging$185. And I was I was charging$175 for like years, and then I raised it to$185, but it's still super low, and I could justify charging more because other companies charge more. I prefer in the case of the sewer scope where it's an add-on service and it doesn't take that much longer. I prefer the client to have that affordability to add it on because knowing what's in a sewer line is really, really important. So the main bulk of our inspection, maybe it's a little bit higher, but then the add-on services are a bit less. And because of that, we do a lot of sewer scopes. Similar with started doing mold inspections, and we are doing those add-on services cheaper because I know we're providing a lot of value, but we also want the client to be like, well, that's a good deal.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Let's add it on. I think there's a lot to be learned there that there's going to be the lead price, which people are looking for. Maybe you stay competitive there, but maybe there's some strategy there with your add-on services to kind of get you more to market rate or to add some incremental revenue without a whole lot of extra time added to your workload. So I think that's a great, great way to look at it. You know, Charles, I found as I've talked with hundreds and thousands of other small business owners, we all learn differently on how to be better, you know, masters of our craft. What are you doing and what have you found to be effective as a way to help you become a better business owner? Yeah, are there any specific things that you do or engage with to help you uh be a little bit stronger as a business owner?

SPEAKER_00 17:56

I tell my the the people that I work with. So in this case, my it's realtors, right? I I tell people straight up, I'm like, hey, if there's something that I can do to make your experience better, I want to hear. I mean, I've been doing this for seven years. We've done thousands of homes at this point, but we've done 25 million dollar houses. I'm still am humble. I still want to learn. I'm learning every day. And I and I want to keep learning and I want to keep growing and doing better. I don't think that I'm ever going to be imperfect as a business owner, but I'm I strive every day to be better than the day before. And so I always ask people, I'm like, hey, if there's a way that I can provide more value to you or do a better job or make things more clear, let me know. You know, if my guys can do something better, let me know. I mean, it's nice to hear the positive feedback, but I want to hear the negative feedback too. And I'm open to changing the way we're doing things if it provides a better service.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Yeah, candid feedback is critical, right? If you don't know, you can't fix it. So I like that. Very good. All right, Charles, last question for you. We get a fair amount of folks that are still stuck in the trades that want to jump into being their own boss and be that run their own business. If you were to start in 2026 or 2027 here, what advice would you give to somebody that wants to get out on their own and and start from scratch? Do it.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Do it. I think um we're all scared and nobody really knows what they're doing, right? Even me, who I I mean, I you could call me a successful business owner. I was definitely a successful business owner, but the reality is, is you just have to you have to be delusionally optimistic in your own success. And there will be tons of outside criticism. There'll be tons of people like, ah, you know, that's never gonna work. Oh, that will fail. My mom famously uh she was like, Well, do you think you can really run your own business? She's not a business owner. She's she, you know, I'm like, who are you to even question? I mean, like, why don't you just let me try, right? Elon Musk said this. I wanna I don't want to be uh fraudulent and say this is my my thought, but if you need words of encouragement to be an entrepreneur, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. You need to just you need to do it. And the reality is there are a lot of guys in the trades that could do it. The biggest obstacle for for guys starting out is switching over from doing the work to actually managing a business and and all that entails. Yeah, there are guys that are like, oh, I need to go to college and get a business degree to be uh to run a business, and I think that's a fairly good waste of time. I think um if you want a business degree, you should start a business. The odds are against you. You're gonna you might fail. Um, but you have to try and you you have to go for it.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Charles, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. How can people follow your journey and your story? I know you're active on Instagram. Why don't you share a little bit about kind of some of your social profiles?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Um, so the primary one is just square one home inspections. So if you look, um there's two companies that are square one home inspections on Instagram, uh, one in Virginia, that's obviously not us, and then there's one in Arizona, but it's square underscore one underscore home underscore inspections. But you'll see you'll see my face on there. Um, that's a primary way to follow. My um anyone that listens to this, if you want to call me or text me with direct questions, all my my phone number is public information, and uh you're welcome to do that. I I love answering people's questions if they're interested in the home inspection industry. I I've uh mentored quite a few people that started their own home inspection company. I've trained my competition. I love that. I there's a there's plenty of pie to go around. So uh Facebook is another good one. Square one home inspection is there too.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Awesome. Thank you so much. It was our pleasure to have you on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you, Charles.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate it.