Starting a business and scaling can be a daunting thing. Hiring someone to help you do this can be even more daunting. For me and my real estate business, I’ve been a jack-of-all-trades from the beginning up until recently. I’ve decided within the last few weeks to hire a virtual assistant and relieve myself and my partners of the time and effort it takes to prospect for leads. Because of the efficiency and reliability our VA brings to the table generating leads, we are now able to grow our business on a higher level, and do more deals than ever before. Within the first week of having our VA on board, we already have our first deal with her under contract. If we can keep this pace up, doing deals will become a weekly thing. The time spent working in our business has been significantly reduced, and we can now look for ways to grow and expand our business by creating new funnels of deal flow as well as onboarding more staff to do prospecting and eventually promoting them to higher levels. This is the concept of elevation, and to run a successful business you must continually do this until you’re out of the business almost completely and have a well-oiled machine. I went through a lot of struggles and mental hurdles before hiring my first VA. If you know what you need to do to grow your business but lack the confidence to execute, then this blog is for you.
Knowing when to take the next step
When your business is taking over your whole life and you don’t have the time to work on your business instead of working in it, it is time to hire someone to take on some of the responsibility of working in it. Let’s unpack this for better clarity. Using my real estate business example, I used to spend hours and hours prospecting for deals. Driving around looking for distressed properties, going to networking meetings, looking on market, calling potential leads, etc. All this work was hard on me and kept me from being able to scale my business at all, plus I had very little success going about it this way. When I was doing this, I felt like my business was backing me into a corner like a bully in high school ready to beat me up. It was time to figure out what I needed and fast for me to be able to elevate myself from prospecting, and work on my business instead of in it.
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses
For me, talking to people who are interested in anything to do with real estate comes pretty easy. I like helping people get rid of their unwanted properties or solve problems for people where I can. I really like the west coast of Florida for real estate investing, and so I pitched the idea to two of my friends, Nick and Zach, (both of whom I had worked with previously) on sticking to that west coast of Florida market and crushing the wholesale and buy and hold game. Nick and I live in New York so we’d be remote, however Zach is a licensed and successful agent down in Florida in the market we want to invest in. The way we set it up took into account our strengths as individuals as well as our geographical constraints. Zach acts as boots on the ground. He goes to look at properties, organize any sort of inspections or construction, and write up and explain contracts to sellers. Nick handles underwriting and coming up with exit strategies for our deals. I handle the phone and follow up with leads from our VA and get them from lead to contract. Together, we meet daily and figure out what is working and what isn’t. We also have daily meetings with our VA and her manager who coaches her and makes sure leads are being called on every single list we pull. Together, we are forming a well-oiled machine that will hopefully be able to convert deals weekly. Now I know I have a business rather than a job. It’s a much better feeling than running around like a chicken with its head cut off like I was doing before.
Scaling from here
Hopefully, in the near future, we will hire more VAs to prospect for more leads for us. We also want to develop a PPC website in which we generate more leads online. We want to fill our pipeline with deals so much that we feel overwhelmed. This type of pressure leads to growth as individuals and as a business. Our plan at that point is to onboard or promote a current VA to acquisitions manager, and do the same with the position of transaction coordinator. These two people will close deals and then guide them from contracts to closing. This goal is a ways away and would mean we have a business operating like a well-oiled machine with us doing little to no work in it. Instead, this frees us up to look for more ways to grow and expand as our team grows and expands with talented individuals. The best thing about having a business is that if you do it right one time, it isn’t as difficult to do again because you know what must be done in terms of elevating yourself from day one. This and this alone is how you know you have a business and you are the owner rather than being self-employed. Elevate yourself and scale with VAs if that is what makes sense for you.