David Lecko
David Lecko has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Driving For Dollars the Modern Way with David Lecko CEO of DealMachine
David Lecko, founder of DealMachine, explains how a personal widget for pinning run-down houses grew into a software business that has done roughly $60 million in revenue since 2017. He walks through his exact process for hiring and managing driving-for-dollars drivers, the Profit First framework he uses to pay himself, and what happened when he over-hired engineers and watched a $3 million profit drop to zero.
Key takeaways
- Pay drivers hourly, not per property or per closed deal — commission-only structures cause drivers to quit before a deal closes and waste your training time. Look up Amazon delivery driver pay in your market and add about $5/hour to cover their vehicle and gas.
- Screen applicants with a small paid test project. Lecko asks applicants to download DealMachine, add a house, and message him for a $10 Venmo — out of 100 applicants, about four complete it, but those four already know how to use the app.
- Hold a 15-minute weekly check-in with drivers to review the properties they added and give feedback, and set expectations like a 20-hour weekly minimum and roughly 12 properties added per hour.
- Driving for dollars may be under 20% of deal flow for a scaled operator, but Lecko cites Simple Wholesaling in Indianapolis seeing about three times the spread on those deals.