Shelby Johnson
Shelby Johnson has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch, 2 times.
Real Estate Rockstars Podcast Guest Spot: How to Outsource Cold Calling with Dan Austin
A crossover episode where Dan Austin appears on Shelby Johnson Real Estate Rockstars podcast to walk through the full process of hiring and managing virtual assistant cold callers. He covers where to source VAs (Upwork, Reddit, staffing companies), how to screen with call recordings and DISC assessments, typical pay rates, onboarding tools, daily accountability, and when to cut someone loose.
Key takeaways
- Upwork is still a strong source for cold callers, and Egypt is an underrated country for hiring because accents tend to be lighter than other regions; Dan has also found VAs through Reddit and staffing companies.
- Screen applicants by requiring a recorded script read (or a recording about a hobby) plus a DISC assessment — the people who don't complete those steps filter themselves out. Dan looks for high D and high I profiles for phone roles.
- Expect to pay roughly $5-$6/hour for cold callers and team leads, and $9-$10/hour for lead or pipeline management roles, where South and Central American hires have worked well.
- Hiring a cold caller doesn't remove the work — you become a cold caller manager. Dan's team runs a daily 8:30am kickoff with call reviews, KPI reviews, and script coaching, and uses Slack for logging in/out and Zoom for meetings.
Going from Investor to Business Owner with Shelby Johnson
Shelby Johnson explains how she built 74 rentals in three years using BRRRR, courthouse foreclosures, bank lines of credit and private money after leaving the Army in 2018 — and why she later shut down all 18 of her Fayetteville Airbnbs and stopped viewing cash flow as income. She also walks through rebuilding her Keller Williams-style brokerage team into an eXp community for agents who want to own businesses, plus running Pints & Properties meetups across 11 states.
Key takeaways
- Cash flow is a defensive metric, not a paycheck: Shelby doesn't touch hers because deferred capex (a roof she knew had five years left in 2018) and turnover costs come due — she put roughly $50k into one quad in a single year.
- Buy short-term rentals on long-term rental numbers so you have an exit. When Fayetteville went from under 100 Airbnbs to over 800, she sold some, let arbitrage leases expire, and converted the rest back to long-term.
- She avoided hard money by layering financing: First Citizens lines of credit for the 15% down and rehab on sub-$100k investment loans, then delayed financing refis into 30-year fixed debt.
- Traditional 50/50 team splits attracted 'coattail riders' once the startup phase ended; switching to eXp's revenue share let her share systems without owing members anything in exchange for splits.