Let’s face it, you can’t be everywhere at every time. Although the Filthy Riches premise affords you the luxury of buying and selling properties without ever having to leave your office, your business is likely going to get so busy you’ll need to get help to get the job done.
There are two ways you can do this: hiring someone locally or outsourcing tasks as they come up. But who is the best man or woman for the job?
First of all, you need to identify where your strengths and weaknesses are. Make a list of all the steps you go through when you’re buying and selling a piece of property. What areas do you think could be improved upon? What are the tasks you really don’t like? Could the person you hire be tailored to work through these duties?
Here are some ideas you may consider:
Hire a Closing Coordinator. Closing services are tailored specifically to help realtors close their transactions, but they’re flexible enough that you could use them for your transactions as well. A closing coordinator works through the full process of closing a deal: ordering title searches and surveys, inspections, loan documents, payoffs… pretty much the gamut of what you need for a successful closing.
You can have the closing coordinator work directly with the buyer, the seller or a note buyer. In my course, I have provided a complete checklist of every process and procedure for completing a Filthy Riches transaction. Just provide this to your closing coordinator and this will ensure all the applicable tasks are followed and completed.
Hire a Virtual Assistant. As the work-from-home movement has gained popularity and technology has advanced to be able to support this, there is a lot of talk about hiring virtual assistants to help get the job done. A virtual assistant is someone you hire to completes tasks for you from their own location. You can hire them to respond to emails, answer phones, make outgoing calls, general secretarial work, database entry, sales, or a graphic designer.
Virtual assistants can be an invaluable tool to help get those little things done that seem to eat up half of your day, pulling you away from other jobs you would rather focus on.
There are a number of freelancing sites where you can find virtual assistants. Simply create a job/project and a budget, either by the project or by the hour. From here, just sit back and wait for potential employees to come to you. You’ll see their profile, resume, country of origin, skills, reviews from other projects, etc. Simply match your needs with these skills and their availability.
The great thing about hiring a freelancer is that it can be an “at will” hire. If you aren’t ready to commit to hiring someone full time, you can hire someone to help fill in the gaps until their services are no longer needed.
Hire people to bring in house. This is a great idea as you’re increasing your purchases. Many of my hires are structured as an “apprentice” or a “team leader”. An apprentice uses the Filthy Riches training to buy and sell properties, while following the guidelines I’ve set forth. Each new employee has 90 days to close their first transaction. After an apprentice closes five deals, and I feel he or she is ready, the natural progression is to be a team leader. When an employee is a team leader, they buy and sell properties following certain guidelines, but also to train a new apprentice. Compensation is commission based.
As you are preparing to hire, it’s important to find people who are honest, ethical and moral. You want to have the level of trust that you don’t have to worry about them building your business, contacts and funding sources only to branch out later with their newly found knowledge to become your direct competition.
One way to do this is to have a frank, direct conversation with them in the beginning. Of course, everyone has dreams and aspirations. It’s important to find out what they support. This all helps to ensure a close connection and you can get a sense of if they are content to work with you, or if they have plans to take the real estate world by storm.
As I’ve developed my systems, I try to anticipate what might be the next level to take myself out of the equation and hire employees to free up more of my time. Consider this: if you are a solo act in your business, you are the only one to identify properties, make offers, buying houses and selling houses. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, this seriously limits you in the number of properties you can make transactions on.
To this end, I was careful to note every task or challenge I faced, and how to work through it. I wanted to be able to automate the system so that I could effectively teach someone else how to take that section of the transaction over. As you’re identifying your own needs, take careful notes about how you might be able to educate someone you hire, either immediately, or in the future.
You need to make sure you know the ins and outs of your business thoroughly before hiring assistance. After all, you don’t want someone to work for you who knows more about your business than you do. Also, make sure you “sign off” on every upcoming closing so you always know where things stand.
Also, before hiring someone, make sure you know all of your state’s rules and regulations about hiring and paying employees, including reporting and paying taxes. This includes employees or independent contractors. To determine the difference, the IRS has a 20-question test which you can find at www.IRS.gov.
Hiring assistance is the natural progression for many small businesses. It opens up more opportunities and time for you to be able to take your Filthy Riches transactions to a whole new level of success.