Build a Real Estate Team That Doesn't Suck

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Hey. What's going on, guys? On this little Friday Focus today, we're doing something a little bit different. So this is a recording from a scale community group call that we had earlier this week that was specifically around hiring and managing a team. And after we

Mike DeHaan: [0:13] did it, I just thought

Mike DeHaan: [0:14] that it was a really valuable piece of content that

Mike DeHaan: [0:17] I want to release to

Mike DeHaan: [0:17] you guys. It starts with a little presentation that kinda goes into my thesis around managing and building a small team, and then it finishes with some q and a with a handful of members that were on the call

Mike DeHaan: [0:28] with us. So hopefully, you

Mike DeHaan: [0:29] find some value from it. And if these are the kind of conversations that you want to be

Mike DeHaan: [0:33] a part of in the future, then you should go to

Mike DeHaan: [0:35] claytonkeys.com/scale. See if this scale community makes sense for you. And we would love to have you come and contribute your own entrepreneurial ideas to the community. So thanks everybody and enjoy.

Mike DeHaan: [0:46] Hiring and employee management. Building a team that doesn't suck. Right? It's ultimately what we all want to do here. Because honestly, if you have a team that sucks, going it's to end up costing you a lot more time and money than if you just did it all yourself. So this is a quote that I got from the GoBundance event in Utah last weekend that I thought was really good. To attract top talent, you need to have a vision so big that their vision fits inside yours. It's my first type already. So attract top talent you to have a vision so big that their vision fits inside yours. So this is from David Osborne, who if you're not familiar with him, he's the founder of GoBundance. He's worth several $100,000,000. Very, very successful entrepreneur and real estate investor. And I thought this was a really good quote because I think a lot of people tend to approach hiring the incorrect way, where they always think it's about compensation and stability and all sorts of things that they think are important. But top talent doesn't care about that quite as much. If you're getting button pushers, those things matter. Right? But if you're looking really looking for top people, what matters most is do your visions align and do they feel like they can accomplish what they want to do by working for you? And so building a team starts with vision. Why are you hiring? Why are we all hiring?

Mike DeHaan: [1:58] To make more money? To work less? Have more flexibility? Buy back your time? Do you guys this is why all of you guys want to hire people for all of this, I'm assuming. That's why I definitely want to hire people. Here's the problem though. None of these reasons make people want to work for you. We're in a funny place just in general in like, I don't know if the world, The United States, whatever, where we live in a capitalistic society that's anti capitalist, especially for people that are, you know, in the middle or at the bottom of the totem pole. And so those things, the things, the reasons that you want to hire people are not reasons people want to work for you. So building a team starts with vision, right? These are reasons that make people want to work for you. To build a top real estate flippingwholesale company in your market, Right? To grow a brand respected and recognized in the local real estate investor community. To improve your town by turning condemned slash distressed houses into family owned homes. To give your team the opportunity and confidence to invest themselves. Even if you don't give a shit about these things, these are what you need to portray to your prospects when you're hiring. Right? Even though if at the core your real goal is to just buy back your time, make more money, that's why we're all in this, these are the things that you need to be pushing out there into your messaging and into your conversations and make this more of your being. And I promise you we'll attract better talent if you do that.

Mike DeHaan: [3:19] So you need find your why, then the who will become easier to find. This has honestly been a really big thing with the podcast, which has been helpful for us. People always ask me about what the benefits are of the podcast. You know, have scale which is cool. Like I've gotten to meet all you guys which is fun. We get a little bit of name recognition, you know, here and there. Like honestly we don't make that much money off of scale compared to like a wholesale business. I'm not, we're not like big enough that I like in getting recognized in the streets. It's usually like other real estate events. Right? But the one thing that has been noticeably beneficial has been how easy it is to hire people. Right? Or how much more interest we get from employee prospects just because we have this show that has over 400 episodes that people can go and see who we are. Right? So like why when sometimes I talk to some of you guys trying to hire, I got no job applications. I unfortunately can't even relate to that anymore because the last couple jobs we've hired for, we've gotten fifty, sixty, 70 applicants. And a lot of the time what I find is the people that I talk to, they've at their time went and looked up the show. They found us. They like our vibe. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [4:22] But the show is a big part of our building our why. They get to know kind of what we're doing and that interests people. So who should you hire first? This is always one of the biggest questions I get asked and of course the answer is all. It depends. So you should hire the opposite of your personal DISC type. So basically a DISC is a personality test that helps you figure out whether you're dominant, which is D, influential, stable focused, or I think conscientious is C. And so the DI types tend to be the salesman, the SCs tend to be the operators in the back end. So if you're a sales pro high, you're a high DI, bring in an integrator. If you're a back office SC type, in a closer. One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of people make is they fall into this DI category and the first thing they want to do is bring in a salesperson because they want to work less. It's not a good reason to hire somebody. And there was another question from Leila Hermozzi. And it was something along the lines of you have no business trying to work less in your business until you're making at least $5,000,000 a year. Right? I think that number skews a little bit depending on the industry, but I don't fully disagree with that. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is they have a business. They're making like $300 a year and they decide that they want to hire out so they don't have to work as much. They're not really making any money yet. That can go away so quickly.

Mike DeHaan: [5:34] Okay. So first hire should be focused on finding a very small business culture fit. Skills don't matter as much yet. Right? That's something else that I think people tend to get wrong is they want to hire someone that they think is like a killer, has a lot of real estate experience, right? Or like has everything they would consider to be like future potential. The problem is if you're a very small business and they don't understand that and they're not a culture fit and your vision isn't big enough to fit theirs in, they're not going to stick around very long. They're going to be generally unhappy. People don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. I think this is one of the biggest false statements in America, like in business in general. I feel like this is something that HR people tend to tell themselves when they have like a good candidate to leave. Right? And they like need to justify why they just wasted so much time grooming that person. Maybe like big corporations, but in very small business it's a complete lie. You can be a great manager, but if you have poor opportunity, mediocre pay, unfair expectations, and flexible scheduling, double standards, people will leave regardless.

Mike DeHaan: [6:40] Okay. So I can tell you this from experience. I think especially in this industry, the industry is very hard. The sales process is very taxing and there is a lot of up and down that occurs in the workflow as well as in the opportunity. This is one of the few businesses that I've ever seen where you can have a month where you make like $300 and the next month you make nothing. That's pretty hard to do. If you're selling like widgets you have like a service industry, you're generally going to have like some kind of linear progression. This is such an up and down business and that does work. Management is a skill. The best way to improve skills is by having reps. So ways to get managerial reps. I have daily kickoff meetings with active conversations. This is something that I've personally always prided myself on being able to do pretty well. And what I mean by active conversations is you're not just going on you're saying cool, so what's good today everybody? But you're cued in enough with your system and your process that you're able to drive a conversation. You're able to like dive into some of the problem people are facing and already kind of know that they exist. So you're not having to start from square one. Right? You're able to be present with the team and you're not above the team. I think that's really important, especially in small business.

Mike DeHaan: [7:45] Do monthly check ins with staff, talk about their goals, but a plan to reach their goals. It's gonna be really, really simple. I used to do this with our entire team and we had like 14 people, 13 people. And I would have thirty minute check ins with everyone every month. The only thing is I stopped doing that mostly because we were starting to go a different direction with the company. And also too I found that with some of these check ins with a handful of people it would just kind of turn into like a complain fast and I didn't feel like it was very healthy. But funnily enough as soon as I started doing that the performance of the team also started to drop. They felt less heard. So I tried different types, different kinds of planning meetings, goal setting meet meeting structures, and see what sticks. The other thing is too, there's no playbook for this stuff guys. You gotta try what works for you and don't be afraid to change it up. Provide feedback, not criticism, Whenever you have issues, both or, you know, where things are going well, provide feedback about it. What they can do better and what they did wrong to make difference. Right? You know, where things that are going great, things that are going amazing, like, really promote the small wins.

Mike DeHaan: [8:48] Something that we always try to do. Have hard conversations with productive outcomes. Right? This is a really good managerial skills being comfortable having hard conversations. But the goal is you always want to have a productive outcome. Whether that's a next step for them to improve, whether that's a response or like a direction for some issues that they were having, right? Those things will go a long way. And don't be afraid to try something new and keep notes of what works for you. Being a manager is different for everybody. Some people are like leader managers. Some people are technical managers. Some people are like their, you know, beat the chest, get people excited. You got to pick on what lines up for you. Bad team member doesn't mean you're a bad manager, but it's also important to differentiate between performance issues and management issues. This is like newbie manager 101. I find this happens a lot, is people will mistake management issues for performance issues. Right? So the last one isn't doing what they need to do and they blame the person and not necessarily themselves. When, depending on your view, I tend to come from the view that most people inherently do want to do a good job. Like the malicious people out there that are just trying to like take advantage are a small percentage of the population in my mind.

Mike DeHaan: [9:57] If you want to take advantage of situation and not do a good job, they're typically not going to work in general. They're going go mooch off the system. If they want to get a job, they want to do a good job. So people don't do things for three reasons. They don't know how, they didn't know they were supposed to, or they choose not to do it. Right? Those are the only reasons that people don't do something. One and two can be fixed. Number three means they have to go. So I'm gonna check for performance issues, the actual outcome here. Show them how to do something. Record it so they don't forget. Put a little Zoom recording together. Put it on Loom, whatever it is. Ideally, you hop on a call with them. You show them live so they can ask questions. You record it. You send it to them and document it from the review. Document the new expectations. So after you show them how to do something, make sure that you document very clearly when and how it needs to be done. This can be as simple as sending them a message on Slack or putting it on full on SOP. Just make sure that it's actually in writing so they're completely clear on the expectations. Bonus points if there's a KPI associated with it. But don't let it become a slippery slope where you now have 25 KPIs because that's unreasonable. Verify the work is being done.

Mike DeHaan: [11:00] You should always have a way to verify the work's being done. Whether that's you are monitoring your CRM, whether that's you're, you know, able to like track the Google Sheet or Google Docs, whether if you have them report that the work is being done, that's something you can do as well. T though, you don't want to be a helicopter parent. Like you don't want to be trekking in at like, if you tell them end of day and end of day is at 05:00, you don't want to be looking at 04:30 and then DMing them being like, hey, why haven't you done it yet? It's about thirty minutes. Right? Don't be that guy. No. Nobody likes that guy. Have guys ever had a boss like that? I used to have a boss like that when I worked at Boeing. He every day, we're supposed to be at the office at, 06:30 in the morning and he would come at 06:31 and he would go and he would walk and he would like peer over the cubicles to make sure you're your desk. It was hell. Then if you still have issues at that point, you go through all that, it's time to move on. The best thing about humans is there's like 8,000,000,000 of them. So you really think your enemy on your team is irreplaceable. One of my mentors told me this. I'm not gonna put his name on here because I don't if he wants be associated with it because it is kind of a harsh statement. But I really like this quote that he told me and I think about this on a pretty regular basis. Just, I don't know, the pessimist sort of view in me or like it's a view on humanity.

Mike DeHaan: [12:15] Think it's very interesting when you put it this way. Because it's very true. Like realistically, how many people in the world are completely irreplaceable? Nobody. Maybe Jeff Bezos. Like can anyone like replace him at one for one? That would be pretty hard. There's like 100 people, honestly. So main takeaways from this whole thing. Focus on the why before worrying about the who. As a very small business, hire for culture fit first. Understand management is a skill that improves with reps. Help team members meet their goals. Then they will be happy to help you reach yours. And don't mistake management issues for performance issues. Okay. Oh, and team members are replaceable and so are you as a boss. Right? That last thing is very important because going back to this, right? It's 8,000,000,000 people. You really think your inner team is replaceable. You are just as replaceable to them as a provider, right? As a boss, as a manager as they are to you. So keep that in mind. But if you suck, they have every right to leave and you should expect them to do so. There we go. What do guys think? Where are guys at with hiring? I made that more of a general overview because I think that's more important. People always want to talk about the tactical pieces of hiring and management.

Mike DeHaan: [13:23] But honestly those things are easy but also really hard at the same time because they're you can copy and paste them but you also need to kind of figure out what works for you and you don't know that to be tracked. But I've hired and fired a lot of people over the years so I've covered the full gambit.

Wes: [13:39] I think there's a lot to be said for, you you tend to hire somebody and you think that you can maybe change them or when they're just really not the right person. And because I've been a manager before and I've actually kind of run a business, I have a completely different perspective on what the job is, you know, and what looking at it from the other side perspective, but there's some people that just don't do that and they just either they're immature or they just aren't those kind of people. So I think that, you know, like I always say, hire slow and fire fast.

Mike DeHaan: [14:12] Yep. What I tend to say as a small business, slightly counter to that is you got to hire fast and fire faster. Right? I also think that's something that a lot of small businesses do is they spend forever shopping around for the perfect person. And realistically, where your business is at right now, whoever's perfect for it right now probably won't be a good fit for your business in a year if you continue to grow. Right? Sometimes they are if they grow with you, but a lot of people don't, which is really interesting. What do you guys think? What else have you guys been hired recently to hear, Carl?

Carl: [14:39] Yeah. I guess, you know, I'm kinda going through a lot of this right now. We have two lead managers on our team. I don't even know if we need two lead lead managers, but I try to hold them accountable, make sure that expectations are very, very clear, and then kinda, like you said, having those KPIs in front of them to say, hey. Are you doing your job? And making sure that I'm also a good manager and supporting them wherever possible. You know, as you know, I I'm not a huge fan of the sales process, so trying to work on that. But I think one of the things is the double standards because I'm expecting them to do a lot, yet I'm not, you know, holding up my end of the bargain on the sales side. So I'm working on improving that.

Mike DeHaan: [15:16] What part of the sales side are you not holding up?

Carl: [15:19] Follow-up and getting back to leads. You know, I'm just in the weeds with all of our rentals, with all of our flips, with all the things, and so that's the last thing to do.

Mike DeHaan: [15:28] So you're, basically you're having them schedule like callback appointments and you're missing them? Yep. Oof. That's brutal. Yep. Basically, you're telling them that what they do is not important. Correct. Yeah. That's tough.

Carl: [15:41] That's their biggest focus right now. How many flips do

Mike DeHaan: [15:44] you have going at

Carl: [15:44] a time? We got five going on right now. Interesting.

Mike DeHaan: [15:49] I would almost say an easier hire for you because I know you've really struggled to find an AM up there in rural Wisconsin where there's apparently no people because I know you've tried to hire them like five or six times. You might have been able to find like a product manager. The manager flips. Yeah. Or a

Carl: [16:05] better executive assistant to Yeah. Kick off of some stuff. So Yeah. We're looking into all those and actually brought on a company to help us hire for an AM as well. And they're struggling as well to find somebody local, so we're looking at more of a virtual role. Sure.

Mike DeHaan: [16:21] Yeah. I mean, I think we've chatted about that before. I think that virtual role could be a good fit for you. Right? And then you're basically the boots on the ground, which isn't a bad way to go. You can get pretty far doing that. And then, I mean, you're gonna represent your own company better than anyone else in person. And then you just have them have the the offer conversations.

Carl: [16:38] Correct. Yep. So I guess one of the things right now, you know, our lead managers, I'm trying to hold them accountable as much as possible. It's easy to see how many dials they're doing a day, how many texts they're sending a day, either through RE or through, you know, our other outbound cold outreach methods. But it's like, how do you how are you tracking, I guess, their true value of their activities? You know, they can check a box. Like, call that guy, call that guy, But, call that you know, if their talk time is five minutes a day, then we're missing something. But if nobody answers, then that's not their fault. So we're kind of trying to figure out the best way to measure that, you know, number of calls, number of texts, but also, like, talk time and contact rate.

Mike DeHaan: [17:20] When was the last time you did a, quality test for them? Basically, meaning you reviewed their calls. Probably three weeks ago. Do you do that with them or privately? With them. Perfect. Yeah. What I would recommend you do to help with the especially because you have a small team right now, do that like weekly. Yeah. Right? We used to do this with our team. We had a big virtual team and guys generally liked it where we would do like a weekly call review and I would have someone either ring a call that they thought they did really well or a call that they felt like they needed help with. And what was really interesting about that was people's egos always showed through because the people with big egos would bring the call where they thought they crushed it. And then the people that wanted to improve, they brought the call that they thought they needed help on. So what I would recommend you do is you tell them to send you one of each and then you randomly pick which call you're going to do. You don't tell them ahead of time.

Carl: [18:12] Mhmm. Right. That's a good point.

Mike DeHaan: [18:13] And so that way they're not going to be trying to like flex, but they're also not going to be, you know, feeling like they're going be under the gun when you're like, give me your worst call. Right? That's like a hard thing for someone to admit. Yeah. So but I would recommend you do that weekly. And you know, since you have two of them, you can alternate who does each week so neither of them feel like they're getting beat up all the time. Because also too, I think you can learn an incredible amount about sales listening to other people get call reviews. I know you guys have gotten a lot of value doing like the call reviews that we do on here. People feel that same way with with the team too. I also think that it builds some camaraderie because they're getting involved in each other's business. Makes sense. Yeah. What's your situation look like, Wes?

Wes: [18:53] I've got a part time VA

Mike DeHaan: [18:57] K.

Wes: [18:57] That I mean, she's pretty decent for the amount of oversight that I have on her. I mean, I told her what I expected out of her, and she does it. She set up all sorts of templates and stuff for texting and calling and kind of runs around stuff. But I got in there yesterday just to check her warm leads and stuff that I'd flipped over from active leads to warm and told her to put into the call mix. There's several that haven't been touched in three or four months. Good. So I think she read the note and moved on, and I've gotta create the task when I move it over for her to call tomorrow, and then she'll do it. She gets it in the mix. But if I just flip it over, just sits there.

Mike DeHaan: [19:38] Okay. So that so this this goes back to that point about why people don't do things. Right? They don't know how they were supposed to. They choose not to. So in this particular situation, which one of those do you think she is?

Wes: [19:51] I'm pretty certain that she just didn't know she needed to. Cool. I tagged her in a comment. She probably read the comment, went about did the rest of her tasks and just flat forgot it because she's real good about doing what she's supposed to otherwise. But I've also considering trying to hire somebody locally and just letting her go for the cost. You know, we got to talking in our squad. I think Kyle's hired somebody for fifteen bucks an hour locally. I'm paying this gal $10 an hour or $12 an hour because she's part time through Rocket Station. Yeah. If I get somebody for just a couple bucks more an hour who's local, I can meet with them, sit down with them. And, again, I live in the Midwest, so when you get a call from somebody that's, you know, got a little bit of an accent, you know, their cadence is a little off in the way that they talk, it probably reduces your your ability to connect and build rapport by a significant percent. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [20:48] You think you can hire somebody for $15 an hour?

Wes: [20:51] Even if it was, like, $20 an hour for part time to do some of that admin stuff because she's pulling, like, the local pre foreclosure stuff, getting the divorce data, all that kinda niche stuff from the county and state websites, and then doing my follow-up. I've only got a 105 leads on my warm page. I've got 50 on the actives, and we've got 400 deads. There's probably maybe 20 that could be revived from the dead side. Yeah. But I'm not real quick to flip them over the dead. I don't have a huge backlog of leads. And honestly, if I just sat my ass at this computer, I could probably get through that 150 that I need to touch each week pretty quickly. For sure.

Mike DeHaan: [21:33] Yeah. And I think with how you operate too, like, that could make sense. The one thing I will say with overseas talent versus US based talent when it comes to that really tedious admin stuff is just by nature they have less burnout, right? So generally American people, if you're putting them in something where they're just like manually scraping data, doing data entry, they're gonna have dreams of doing anything else pretty fast. Whereas like the Filipinos will say, you know, yes sir, no sir, and just do it for three years and not flush it. Yeah. So I think that you're, especially if you're on the phone and with your lead flow, if you're able to get that part time signal that totally makes sense. Yeah, I mean like we talked about the managerial piece, it's a skill that has reps. So you just got to sort of like try that and see what works. What I would do before letting someone go is you bring that person on and have them work part time for you for three weeks, four weeks. Make sure they don't burn out. You will be double paying people for that period of time. What you don't want to do is rely on the new person. They suck and then you already let the first person go. Right? That's not ideal.

Wes: [22:44] Right. And to a certain extent, I feel kind of like Carl does about, you know, when I worked in the corporate world, they always said clean your doorstep first, make sure you get your shit done. And I know end of every day, there's stuff that I didn't get done. So it's hard for me to like really press on somebody to to get their stuff done when I know that I left a little bit on the table each day.

Mike DeHaan: [23:04] Totally. Especially if it's things that they're being up for you. Right? Like it's a really big issue if you're if you're having them do work that you're not following up on. So like I said to Carl, it makes it it lets them know that what they do is not important to you, which is not ideal.

Carl: [23:19] Yeah. And to that point, you know, I think I also think I need to be clear on when to pass things along to me. That's something that we are working on right now because it's like a lot of data gathering and then just sending it along to me where it's like, no. We need to dive deeper, build rapport, ask the right questions before I talk to them. You know, if it's a hot lead, I'm on top of that right away, but it's a lot of these just warm tire kickers are not ready yet that they need to be massaging a little bit more before it's sent over to me. So that's something that I got to clear up with them as well.

Mike DeHaan: [23:48] That's a training issue for sure. Correct.

Carl: [23:50] And that's what we're working

Mike DeHaan: [23:51] on right now. Something else that you can do too that will help with that kind of training is if you have calls that you've done that you feel are better, send those to them to review. Yep. And then what I always try to do when you have people review other stuff like that is try to come away with, like, one or two, let's say, like, skills or, like, things they can apply, like, on their next call. Right? And make it like a goal. Say, okay, cool. Did you hear how this time I paused after I made the offer? You know that I'm making offer calls. It's just like my example. Right? Let's have you do that on the next one. It's like, you hear how on this one? When I asked about the condition of the property, I said, when was the last time you updated the kitchen and the roof? Right. Let's say that on the next one. And then slowly you'll start to build their playbook as opposed to giving someone a, you know, just like a list or like a script where people when they get in like the heat of battle, lack of better terms, and they're having active conversation, it's easy to stray for that.

Wes: [24:49] What do got Wes? So, Karl kind of brought up a question for me. So I've got a handful that I've been working for quite a while, and I built some rapport with these folks. And realistically, these are people that Christine, my VA, should be doing the follow-up and just kind of keeping it alive. I mean, what's that conversation look like with them when you're, hey. Listen. I've got I've got an overseas VA who's gonna check-in with you. Like, do you just pass it off that way?

Mike DeHaan: [25:18] Or But you gotta be overseas.

Wes: [25:20] Well, they'll know. Just to give them a heads up that somebody who sounds like they're overseas is gonna be calling them and don't like f bomb them and hang up because it's us.

Mike DeHaan: [25:29] I'm gonna show them as a team member like everybody else. Right?

Wes: [25:32] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [25:32] Like, in my opinion, if it's a warm follow-up, the accent matters less, right? If it is a cold call, totally. That's, I don't if it's like first conversation, totally. You want to have the highest quality conversation right off the bat. If it's somebody that you weren't able to reach terms with and they're now going into the system to be, you know, followed up with down the line and they talk to a VA that tends to have a little bit of an accent, there's questions about, yeah she works on her team, works over there, she follows up with 5,100, 200 people in a week. She's on the team. She's part of your sales team. Right? I think that that's fine. People are used to that at this point.

Wes: [26:13] Okay.

Mike DeHaan: [26:14] You know? Also, you can I don't know how metropolitan Kansas City is?

Wes: [26:19] Certain parts the younger folks are, but Sure.

Mike DeHaan: [26:22] But like, you know, depending on where you're at, like if you're up in Alex's area, around Northern California, if you get someone that's calling from a Filipino accent, no one will give a shit.

Mason: [26:30] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [26:30] That's like half the people up there. Right? It's like same with throughout in Seattle dude. Like Seattle is one of the largest Filipino populations in The United States. So that's something to keep in mind. I mean and that's also something to keep in mind too while you're hiring virtual staff. You know, it's like for someone like Drake and Andrew down in San Antonio, they really should be looking to hire people from Mexico or Central America who are going to understand the the lingo, right? They're going to probably speak Spanish. At least I would assume if they're from Mexico, actually they don't speak Spanish. I don't know what to tell them, you know. But they're going to have like a tone and a cadence that already is going to vibe with a lot of their sellers. Right? So in Kansas City, I don't know, there must be something there that aligns maybe a little bit better than the Filipinos.

Wes: [27:12] Yeah. I mean if you had somebody with a Hispanic accent, probably

Mike DeHaan: [27:15] would

Wes: [27:16] be more accepted.

Mike DeHaan: [27:18] That's something to think about because you can get Central and South American talent that is the same price as Filipino talent. What else you guys got on this? What you, Mason?

Mason: [27:29] I've had this girl start as a lead like, you know, I hired her as an independent contractor, $15 an hour as a lead manager. Been talking to her for going on four or five months now. She actually got one of my pieces of mail. She just called me. So I think the unique thing about my hire is the first hire is that she had two years of experience at a wholesale company out of Macon. It's a pretty big city here in Georgia, and the team that she was with was spending a lot of money on marketing, like $40.50 grand. It's probably not in business anymore. So she had a ton of opportunity, right? They sent her to the Tiffany and Josh High sales thing. So like all that to say, like, she's got experience. I think the biggest thing for me is just gonna have to be managing her expectations. I it was Otto who gave me some really good feedback about under promise, over deliver. And that's just going be my mantra for the first six months. You know, eventually I think she could be a full time acquisitions person. She lives forty five minutes away in a market that I market to. So what I'm finding is these first couple of days, just like I sat down to do onboarding over the weekend, like put together some stuff, and I was just like, there's so much. Like my brain was going a million different ways. And I was like, I'm gonna pump out a fucking manual if I sit here and try and do this. So I just cleared off two hours yesterday and today, and we've just been kind of going through the CRM, you know, setting stuff up. She's going through warm leads, asking me about certain scenarios.

Mason: [29:04] But I think what I'm struggling with is like, I don't know how to like set the proper expectations or like put the SOPs in place until like we actually just start doing it. And like she calls me and goes, what do I do in this scenario? It's not going wrong.

Mike DeHaan: [29:17] That's also one of the biggest farces I find with small business. I feel like people want to have all their SOPs and everything unlocked before they bring anybody in, right? Especially when they're hiring for a position they've never had before. Right. They'd be like, oh I need to figure out exactly what this looks like when that person comes in. If you're like a massive corporation, sure. When you're a small business, no. Like the job is always going to be built by the first person to do it, you know. Because it's not even if you like copy a lot of our stuff, right, you're gonna have your own market nuances, how you want to run your own business, your own levels of lead flow, your own types of conversations. Those are the small things that will vary in every market, right, with every company. And so I think it was, I don't if it was at the last at the KeysCon in Palm Springs or the one in Arizona, but we talked about hiring a little bit at one of those. And the big thing is like use your team to build your SOPs for you. You give them some direction and like learn from their struggles and the stuff that they can't figure out and use that to create an opportunity to force you what you actually need to put together, right? Because you also have a thing, and I can tell you this from a very personal experience, you can spend a hell of a lot of time writing the most like awesome freaking book, like for your entire business, how to do everything. They're not going to read it anyway.

Mike DeHaan: [30:39] They never do.

Wes: [30:39] Yeah. Well and that

Mason: [30:41] was, that's a good timing because that was the kind of conversation we just had on this last call where, you know, it's just so I don't know. I don't even have like, I don't have set hours. I told her I can't pay her more than $35 an hour or thirty five hours for the week. And, you know, it's just I told her, I said, look, you've got some experience. There are certain things that I like to do. I'm gonna set you up for as much success as I possibly can. But as you start to make calls, there's gonna be scenarios that pop up and we're gonna have to kind of figure out what works best for you and for me. I also have her call in return mail on the dialer or cold call. Like, I didn't even know how to use the dialer feature. So we're kind of learning together, and that was the exact conversation I just had with her. I was like, you're gonna month in, you're gonna find a way that like works for you, and we might adjust it a little bit and then like we'll put it on paper.

Wes: [31:33] I'm sitting here trying

Mason: [31:34] to build out this onboarding doc for you, and it just doesn't really make any sense, and it's stuff you already have experience with. So I think my biggest thing with her is I'm gonna have to dial her back because she's already asking me, like, offer strategies and stuff. And I'm like, I know you can do that, but that's not where we're at. Like, I need you to go into the 300 warm leads and fish out more opportunities. Sure.

Mike DeHaan: [31:55] And and since she's coming from a bigger company, that's to be expected. Right? Like, she's going from a high volume environment to a low volume, high quality. When you're spending $50,000 a month on marketing, you can afford to botch half your leads or, like, fall behind on stuff because there will always be more that comes in. When you're spending $10 a month on marketing, dropping the ball on, you know, even 5 or 10 percent of your leads, that can be the difference between having a profitable month and not. Like those five or 10% could be where all your deals are, right?

Mason: [32:26] Right. I'm not even there yet. Mean I'm at like $7,000 and that's a recent increase. I was at like 4,000.

Wes: [32:34] That's why I'm making I can hire

Mike DeHaan: [32:36] a month off of $4 in marketing. What the fuck?

Mason: [32:39] Yeah. I don't know, dude. I stacked up a good October through January. But yeah, I mean, that was just the biggest thing is I didn't hire her immediately because I was like, I don't think I have enough business for you. And then I finally was just like, hey, look, I need help with follow-up and stuff. And, you know, eventually this could blend into you taking, like, intake calls. It could eventually blend into like you still got connections in the space too. Said, hey, if you get stuff like people call you and like they're presenting a deal to you, like put it in the system, I mean, you can look at it together. Like it's gonna be fluid. But I just told her a million times, I was like, I don't know. I can't promise you anything, right?

Mike DeHaan: [33:19] So to attract top talent, you need to have a vision so big that their vision fits inside of yours. What's her vision? What does she want to do? Yeah. So here's here's what I'm hearing, right, is I think she sounds like a great prospect, but I can't really see the future here. If you don't basically grow your vision to align with what she wants to do or you don't figure out what she wants to do and figure out how make that work, she's not gonna stick around really.

Mason: [33:43] Yeah. And I guess we haven't really had that full blown conversation. Like, it's that's the only kind of quest yeah, it's kind of a question mark as to why she I don't know. She has a degree in like Spanish and French and has kind of traveled around, like worked at golf courses and worked at a wholesale company. I don't really know, had her own contracting business, so I get the sense that maybe she doesn't really fully understand what she wants. But I did have the conversation with her about like, this is my vision for my business. And we did sit down yesterday and I said, like, this is what the plans are for 2025. Like, you know, we're gonna double this. And, you know, I said eventually I can see this being a five to six person company, you know, that's doing 5 to 6,000,000 in top line revenue, and we're well known in this area. It's going be rocking and rolling. And with the revenue we're generating, maybe we can take on, like, cooler projects like new construction or renovating an old historic building or whatever. So but cool. It's good feedback, and, you know, I'll be curious to see how it goes, and we'll update y'all as we get into it.

Mike DeHaan: [34:48] Yeah. Just align those expectations. And, you know, she has that experience, it's probably someone you're gonna have to pay a little bit more than you want to. But it's one of those things that if it becomes one plus one equals five, who cares?

Mason: [34:58] Yeah, I told her that. I said I don't mind paying you like what you were making at that last company, but like can't pay you that right now.

Mike DeHaan: [35:05] You got to build up to it, which is fine. Right? Think that's perfectly reasonable, you know. But what I would recommend is that you have a like a plan for what that looks like. If the next six months pan out like this, we'll be able to get you there. That Because eliminates a lot of the uncertainty. Generally for staff members, uncertainty is like the worst thing. Uncertainty in like the process, uncertainty in like what their future looks like, where the company is going. People want a general level of certainty, especially when it comes to promotion and things like that. That's one of the great things that corporate America has done that's so brilliant is they'll have like these like five year tracks become a manager. And then people that go in, they get so bought into that and they're like, well I was gonna go another job, but I'm only a year and a half away from becoming a manager too at Dick Face Co, whatever. And so they

Mason: [35:55] say, Oh

Wes: [35:55] yeah. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [35:57] That's what they do.

Mason: [35:58] I've been there before. Trust me. I get it.

Mike DeHaan: [36:01] Well, there you go, guys.

Mike DeHaan: [36:02] It's a little glimpse into our collecting keys scale community, which is full of other real estate entrepreneurs that are working to grow their flipping, wholesaling,

Mike DeHaan: [36:12] and investing businesses. And the cool

Mike DeHaan: [36:14] thing is in that you didn't necessarily pick that up, but three of those guys that were on that call with us that were speaking, they are on

Mike DeHaan: [36:20] track to do a million dollars this year in their business already, and

Mike DeHaan: [36:24] it's only January. They were

Mike DeHaan: [36:26] all posting $70.80, and $90,000 months. So they've been crushing it. And so these are the kind of conversations that we have

Mike DeHaan: [36:32] on a regular basis. If that sounds like something that you would like to participate in or to hear more of, then go to collectingkeys.com/scale, and I

Mike DeHaan: [36:40] would love to chat and see

Mike DeHaan: [36:41] if the scale community is right for you.