FCP 051: Who Do You Hire First When You Start Your Company?

Jack: Hello there. This is Jack Bosch speaking, and welcome to another episode of the Forever Cash live podcast. Today, I’m alone. Michelle is traveling, so you will have to do without her. But, the subject of today’s podcast is going to be, who do you hire first, when you start your business, right? You’ve gotten your business going, you’ve got a few things going, you got started, and you’re kind of running out of time, too many things to do during the day. If you have to hire somebody, who do you hire first? And also, how do you expand from there?All right, I’ll see you right after this little intro, here.

Announcer: Welcome to the Forever Cash Live Real Estate Investing podcast, with your hosts, Jack and Michelle Bosch. Together, let’s uncover the secrets to building true wealth through real estate, and living a purpose-driven life.

Jack: Okay, we are back. All right, so, the subject is hiring, really, right? Hiring, organization, how do you grow properly, who do you hire first, which roles are there in the business, all those kind of things, right? I’m excited about that, because this is obviously very, very important, and I get that question all the time. Michelle and I get that when we do our live events, we get these questions. When we do webinars, we get this question. On a one-on-one basis, we get this question. So, obviously, needless to say, we get this question all the time.

So, here’s the thing. So, let’s put the following assumption in place. You are having, still a job. A J-O-B, which means, as you know, Just Over Broke, right? You have a job, you’re working in that job, and you are now looking at starting real estate.

So, you went to jackbosch.com/land. You got the land profit generator, our land and lot flipping home study course that allows you to do everything that house flippers do, just without houses. And without much competition, right? So, with mostly no competition. And then, you got started.

You started, perhaps you attended one of our live events. Either way, you now sent out your letters. You got your deals coming in. You’re analyzing your deals, and you realize that these deals coming in, you realize this is actually working. Well, that’s the good news.

So, now, when you realize that, you are starting to come up against the limit of time. You’re not yet ready to quit your job, and at the same time, you’re like, okay, you sent out 1000 letters, and you get like 100 phone calls, because literally, when you go off to the right markets and follow our steps here, then you will get, on average, a 6 to 20% response rate. So, let’s say an average 10% response rate, meaning you get 100 phone calls on 1000 letters.

So, now, 100 phone calls, they need to be taken. They need to be answered. And then, you need to do a little value analysis. You need to send out your offers and so on. So, with that, at some point of time, you do all of that. You make time for yourself, like in the evenings, on the weekends, you make time for yourself, you send out these offers, you get deals accepted, then you market them, send them out, and that’s really all you need to do.

But, there is a few steps, right? Contrary to the housing world, you don’t need to inspect the properties. You don’t need to go and inspect them for roof damages and for mold issues and for air-condition issues and stuff like that. You just have to send out some marketing, process some of the responses, make some offers, and then when you get them accepted, go list the properties, right? So, soon enough, that’s easy.

So, now, who do you hire first? Well, here comes the question. The question I want to ask you is, what do you enjoy most? Really, it comes down to that, because listen, guys. If you’re already doing a business, and you’re already building a business, don’t you want to have fun doing that? Yeah, I would think so, right?

So, if you want to have fun doing this business, you want to focus on the stuff that is most joyful for yourself. So, if you love doing data analysis, if you love doing value analysis, if you love crunching numbers and doing research about these properties… Now, it should only take 5, 10 minutes, per property, to do this. But if you enjoy that part, then don’t give it up.

Now, if you hate that part, that’s somebody to hire. So, hire, in that case, a virtual assistant that has a brain, right, not just somebody from any country, doesn’t matter which country, that’s like at a minimum. Because, typically, with the virtual assistants, you get what you pay for. So, you pay somebody 300 bucks in the Philippines, they have a brain, but they’re probably…if they’re happy with 300 bucks a month, then they’re probably not good at doing creative work themselves. They’re just good at doing repetitive things.

So, if you’re willing to pay somebody 800 bucks a month, or 700 bucks a month, then you get somebody that might even have a degree over there, and perhaps also that speaks good English, and that can work with you and actually can be doing more self-managing kind of work. So, think about that point of view. Think about what role you want to outsource, and based on that, the right person either fits or… You need to find the right person, right?

So, on the other hand, what if you are really bad at computers? Because most of our sales, to be honest, happen online these days, right? Where do people start looking for real estate? Online. They go to Zillow, Realtor, Trulia, they go to LandWatch, LANDFLIP, all these different websites. They go to Craigslist, they go to Facebook Marketplace, they go to a million more places, just a little handful of the many places they can go to. If you are not comfortable listing your properties there, but you’re comfortable with all the other pieces, guess what? Then hire a sales guy first.

So, as you can tell, the answer is not clear cut. The answer is really depending on what you’re good at, and what you enjoy. That’s truly the answer.

Another thing you want to hire then, sooner or later, is a great CPA, right? Great CPA, potentially even a bookkeeper, because you want to have your numbers right, right? Now, some CPAs have a bookkeeping branch, that you can pay them a few bucks an hour, and they do the bookkeeping for you. At the beginning, it’s not going to be very complicated, but it’s great to have good numbers right from the beginning, so that you actually know if you’re progressing or if you’re going backwards.

But, let’s go back to the operational part of the business. So, I see most people should be… The way I look at it, most people that we work with in our mentorship program, that come to our live events and so on… Again, if you want to check out more about what we do, you can go to jackbosch.com/land and watch some videos, go watch a training class, and so on. And you can also call our office. We put the phone number right here, or we put the phone number below. It’s 602-712-0183. Talk to our guys.

But, the bottom line is, when you select somebody, most of our students, I see them needing help either in just like the repetitive kind of work of gathering data about properties, like gathering some research about how far away they are from electricity, getting research about aerial pictures and things like that. And then, also, I see them needing help on the side of the selling.

So, you look at those pieces, and you identify where you need help, and that’s the person you hire. In other words, the thing that you don’t like, that you’re not good at.

The other angle of looking at that is that you want to hire somebody that is actually good at helping you free up time. So, you want to look at, what is the parts in your business, if you have a limited amount of time because you have a job, you look into them, what is currently taking up the most time in this business, for you?

And for different people, it’s different things. Like, I’m very quick at property analysis and value analysis. Some people take an hour to find the value of a property, right? So, it shouldn’t take an hour long, but if you can bring in somebody…like if it’s your nephew or it’s your son, your cousin, your uncle, or so on, that is good at those things, then that would be a good person to [inaudible 00:08:09] start for.

If you spend an hour… Let’s say you send out 1000 letters. You’ve got 100 people in. That means you’ve got to do value analysis on 100 properties. You’ve got to figure out what these properties are worth. So, if it takes you an hour on that, it’s going to take you 100 hours to figure this out. Well, that’s not really that… If you only have 10 hours a week, it’s gonna take you 10 weeks to be able to make those hundred offers.

And by the way, that’s actually not a problem in the land and lot flipping area, because there’s not much competition whatsoever, so you can actually take 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks to make an offer. But wouldn’t you be willing or wanting to do 10 times as many deals? If you can get all these deals out in a week, right? And out of these hundred offers, let’s say you get five accepted, or four accepted, and each of them has a $10,000 margin, and you could get them all done in a week, wouldn’t that be easier to hire somebody to help you in that time period, for that work, so that you can make a hundred offers a week and you can really crank these up and you can get three, four deals a week? That means you can get like 12 to 15 deals a month. That’s 180 deals a year, up to 180 deals a year, at a profit of $10,000 a deal, that’s $1.8 million in profits.

I mean, do you get what I’m saying? Even if it’s just $5000 in profit, that’s $900,000 in profits. You understand how the investment allows you to accelerate your process, and because you accelerate your process, you accelerate your path to success?

So, you want to look at that with a business mindset. And the business mindset is… Really, what you’re truly doing is a bottleneck analysis. That’s what it’s called in business, right? I went to business school, and Michelle went to business school. Not that it really helps us in our business, but it did help us understand these business terms, and think about it in a business manner. And if you not gone to business school, or not gone to college, or whatever it is, that doesn’t matter. You can learn these business terms, and you can learn to think that way.

And the bottleneck analysis is really looking at, where am I the holdup in that entire process, of getting this deal…getting to the point of doing a deal 2, 3, 5, 10 or 15 deals a month, whatever your goal is, right? And if it is, in that bottleneck, that space that you see that there’s a bottleneck, that’s where stuff gets held up, that is the one that you need to solve. And you can solve it either by reducing your hours in your job and therefore having more time for it, or quitting your job, or you can solve it by bringing in somebody else. Or, you can solve it by stopping to freaking go to Bunco sessions and not watch football anymore, and so on.

Because people tell me constantly, they have no time. But then, I hear them talk about the NBA basketball game last night. “Did you see LeBron? Did you see how he won this game by one point?” Or something like that. Guys, I haven’t watched a basketball game for years, on television, because I either spend my time with my family, it’s quality time, or I do something that brings my business forward or so, or I just read a book or something like that, to further my mind, right?

So, if you tell me you have no time, but you have a favorite HBO show or a favorite Netflix show or a favorite Amazon show or a favorite sports thing that you watch all day long, or something like that in the evenings, then you have time. You just have your priorities upside down, right?

So, make sure you make time for this, and again, back to the bottleneck analysis, that’s the piece. You have the time for it if you make the time, if you set your priorities right. Now, of course, I’m not talking about everyone. If you’re working three jobs, I understand. You have no time. But then, perhaps, it might be worth, if you can still make ends meet, to quit one of these jobs and use that time for your personal furtherment. Because one deal at 5 or 10 grand a piece, even on the low side of it, will make you more than that third job makes you, right?

So, there’s the thing. There’s no clear-cut answer for who you should hire first. But the clear-cut answer is, analyze where your bottleneck are. Where are you struggling with most? Outsource that. Where are you spending the most time, without seeing equivalent results? Outsource that, right? And look at your skill set. If you suck at something, outsource that. Those need to be the people that you hire first. And you know what they are in your life.

All right, so go get that done, and hopefully, in the next podcast episode, I have my wonderful Michelle next to me again. All right, see you there.

Last thing, post below. Post it. Let’s be honest. If you see this as a video, go, and there should be an ability for you to post a comment below. If you listen to this as an audio in iTunes, make sure you give us a 5-star review right now. But also, if you listen to this or watch this anywhere else, and there is a comment possibility, go below there right now and post a comment about what is the one area that you know that you need to outsource first. I’m interested to hear what your answers are. I’m interested in engaging with you. I’m gonna read them, I’m gonna answer them, and I’ll see you on the next podcast. Bye-bye.

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