Giving Back

Hollis Brown is awarded the 2023 ASHI John E. Cox Award.

March 15, 2024

Hollis Brown is satisfied. He’s had multiple careers, he’s surrounded by peers striving to do their best work, and he’s both learning new things and sharing the things he’s learned with others. This year Hollis was also recognized as the John E. Cox Member of the Year. The annual award recognizes an ASHI Certified Inspector (ACI) who has made exceptional contributions to an ASHI Chapter.

“ASHI is better because of having Hollis as part of our Society,” says Scott Johnson, ACI, ASHI President Elect, and a member of ASHI Georgia. “Hollis has been instrumental in mentoring me, personally, in my leadership and volunteerism in ASHI.”

Brown is a member of ASHI’s Mid-Atlantic Chapter and Northern Virginia Chapter, past speaker of the ASHI Council of Representatives, and has more than 25 years of residential construction experience.
He founded the ASHI Online Meeting Group (OMG)—the first virtual chapter. We recently spoke with
Brown to learn about these accomplishments and more from his career—including how he got to where he is today.

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Why Home Inspection?

“I did construction work for long enough to recognize I couldn’t do it forever, and this opportunity came along,” Brown said, recalling the day he received a brochure advertising a class for future home inspectors. “I found myself sitting in the classroom looking at the teacher thinking to myself, ‘I could be that guy.’ Be careful what you wish for.”
Brown moved to home inspecting full-time in his 40s and has been an ACI since 1997 in the DC area suburbs. He’s a member of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of ASHI (MAC) of Rockville, Maryland as well as NoVa ASHI of Fairfax. He owns ThoroSpec, where he’s the sole inspector, as well as the Home Inspector Training Academy, which he acquired from HomeTech in the early 2000s, where he now teaches class on Saturdays, to help accommodate budding inspectors’ schedules.

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Lessons Learned

“Home inspection for me was a real character builder,” Brown said. “I had spent the last 25 years on construction sites wearing cutoff jeans in the summertime, but it was energizing at the time—and fun. It was a good time of my life, but there are certain skills and opportunities you can’t develop out there on a construction site.”

Brown’s first challenge in home inspection was understanding the technology, he said, but the biggest learning curve was working with people. “How to interact with professional adults in family situations—those were skills I didn’t have the opportunity to exercise on the construction site. I’m certainly a better person for having made the decision to go into home inspections. I take a lot of pride in what I’ve done.”

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From Learner to Leader

Brown said he was more of a “consumer of the chapter experience” for the first 10 to 15 years of his ASHI membership. “I was the new guy trying to figure it out and discovering attending these meetings was beneficial. I became a better home inspector as a function of these meetings.”

At the time, he didn’t see himself as a leader. But as he spent more time with mentors and saw the people leading the way, carving new paths, and volunteering much of their time to local chapters, he realized all their efforts were directly beneficial to him. “They were the ones who went out and found the speakers and collected the money and paid the bills and rented the facilities,” he said. “All I did was pay my dues and show up and grow.”
One day a board member told him he could get minimally involved—as chapter vice president. While the minimal part turned out to be untrue, it was a wonderful experience. “He said ’Since you’re here, why don’t you hang out at the board meetings and we’ll give you this title of vice president. Don’t worry. We’re not asking you to do any work.’ I fell for that,” Brown laughed.

By now I had been around a little while. I did have some organizational skills, some leadership skills. I had gotten so much from the chapter experience. It was time to give back.”

Giving Back

The more Brown talked with other ACIs and heard chapter leaders’ stories, the more he realized he did have something to share. “By now I had been around a little while. I did have some organizational skills, some leadership skills,” he said. “I had gotten so much from the chapter experience. It was time to give back.”

It was around that time that his chapter elected him to the ASHI Council of Representatives (CoR). That experience showed him there was room to do even more. Participation in those meetings at the time was sparse, and he wondered why.

After Brown took a leadership role in the CoR, he learned that 60% of ASHI members were not affiliated with any chapter at all. He did the math; there were thousands of inspectors out there eligible to participate in the chapter experience. Many of them just couldn’t get to one because of distance or scheduling. “There was an opportunity there for somebody to figure out how to make this chapter experience available to
this large number of people,” he said.

Johnson said Brown’s idea, in hindsight, was amazing. “More than five years ago, he started promoting meeting on virtual platforms. He had the foresight to develop an online ASHI Chapter. I thought he was crazy,” Johnson said. “Then Covid happened and suddenly, Hollis, you are a genius. The Online Meeting Group, OMG, was born. Not only has Hollis built up the OMG to 80-plus attendees per meeting, he helps to support the virtual production of several regional chapters.”

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Bringing Mentorship to the People

While Brown said Covid further highlighted the convenience of technology like video conferencing,
no one was certain how folks would respond once people began to return to pre-pandemic routines. However, more and more people seem to find meeting from home beneficial. It’s especially helpful for inspectors who would otherwise have to drive far to find an in-person meeting, losing out on important time when they could be working.

Brown has helped to streamline other processes across ASHI chapters using technology, too. He points to the annual turnover of ASHI leadership positions as one area of improvement. “There’s always a new board, a new treasurer, a new secretary, and there is a learning curve,” he said. “Right around the time someone starts to excel in their position, it seemed like it was time to switch again. I thought it would be better if we could automate some of the process to become more streamlined.”

He and colleague Dan Abrams worked to develop a web-based platform for chapter management, first for his own chapters to try out. Today Chapter Office is an online tool that is used by multiple ASHI chapters to facilitate basic chapter activities. And as Brown oversees this and other audio/video for multiple hybrid ASHI seminars, he gets insight into trends and needs across chapters. This opens up another opportunity for universal solutions, he said, instead of chapters struggling in silos, some of them not even perhaps realizing they have the same problem.

“Hollis recently recognized emerging trends and invested in technology necessary to improve the quality of hybrid events,” said Dave Goldberg,
MAC ASHI President. “He has taken the lead on organizing, promoting, and delivering quality content to audiences—both in-house and virtual.”

Goldberg said that, as MAC ASHI president, Brown set a standard his successors have strived to emulate. “Following his presidency, having become familiar with the process and procedures that a chapter repeats annually, he began development of his web-based chapter management tool. This software has significantly lightened the loads of our chapter volunteers in that it automated so many routine tasks.”

Learn more from Brown himself in the April issue of the Reporter, when he recounts his experience
in starting OMG.

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