1189 » Simple Steps to Find, Hire & Train Virtual Assistants – Part 2 with Vance Courtney

Joe: Hey. What’s going on, guys? Joe McCall, the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Welcome to another great episode. Today we’re going to be talking with Vance, part two about how to find, hire and train virtual assistants. And if you’ve missed the first episode, you’ve got to go see it, because we actually delve deep into creating a job posting in Upwork and how to find the right people. And we give so many tips and tricks on there. It was amazing and we gave you some free resources and guides how to create the job descriptions and how to find the right people. So today is going to be part two and we’re going to finish that discussion with Vance, and I’ll bring him on here in a second. I’m excited about this episode because business I could not do what I do without virtual assistants. And I remember when I first before I hired my first VA, I was really nervous. I was scared about am I going to give them enough work to do? Can I trust them? Are they going to make me more productive or are they going to actually suck up more of my time because I have now more people I have to help do things for me. And immediately I was hooked. Here’s the point. You cannot afford not to have a good assistant, right? Maybe if you’re just getting started out, starting off, you don’t need a VA. You need to kind of bootstrap and do much as much of it yourself as possible because you need to learn how to do deals from A to Z or whatever. But I’m telling you, you cannot afford not to have a virtual assistant, somebody helping you in your business doing deals. Cool. All right. Now this podcast is brought to you by my new book. I don’t like the cover. I know, I know, but I’m going to get a new one. That’s a book I wrote called Simple Land Flips How to Make 10K in 10 hours. What, $10,000? 10 hours a week? 10,000? $10,000 a month working 10 hours a week. This is a strategy. You’ve heard me talk about it over and over again on how my sons and I flip vacant land. And it’s an amazing story. The strategy of flipping vacant land. It ties in especially to what we’re going to be talking about today with virtual assistants, because you can get VAs to help you do vast, vast majority of the work for you and you can even do it with your sons. Earlier today on Facebook, one of my students, Miriam. Hey, Miriam, if you’re out there posting something on her Facebook of how she has been doing deals with her son, and I think they’ve closed the date they’ve sold to date for deals. They’ve got four more in the pipeline. And they got they bought one property even for their own personal use. And they’ve got like I think they just found one seller that has 12 or 13 properties that they want to sell and they got those under contract. So she’s killing it. She’s working hard, but she’s been doing it with her son. This is one of the reasons why I love this business so much. And I talk about in this book and you get this book for free by going to simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com is a free webinar that I do that teaches you all of the steps from A to Z. And at the end of the webinar, I’m going to show you how to get your hands on this book. A PDF absolutely free walk through all of the steps. I’m looking at it right now, walking through all of the steps on how to do deals, pick the right market, pull a list of people in that market, set up a voicemail system with our CRM, sending them a simple letter that leads them to a 24 hour recorded voicemail, sending the offers, following up and how to market and sell the deals. We keep this really, really simple. That’s why I call it simple land flips. So go to simple and class dot com. Register for the next webinar that we’re doing. And when you do, you’ll get the book for free. All right. So check that out. Let’s bring Vance. Vance, how are you, my man?

Vance: What’s going on, Joe? Doing well, how about yourself?

Joe: Doing really, really good. This is part two. And if you guys remember on our last podcast, we sent you to a link to get Vance’s job description document, which I’m looking at all right now. I can’t show it to you. I guess maybe I could, but you can get this for free at Joe McCall dot com slash Vance, Joe McCall dot com slash Vance V as in Victor A N C E and job description and the job requirements. Is that right?

Vance: Yes. Those are the two documents here.

Joe: Awesome. Now, refresh everybody who was maybe didn’t listen yet to episode number one. What did we talk about then?

Vance: So specifically, we talk about posting your job description, the process behind it, and even like a part two on that that we kind of ran through and we gave out the video on as well is how do you filter and find the eight candidates? So the posting and then filtering to make to make sure you can get top quality candidates.

Joe: Yeah, I remember too when we finished that already had about a dozen people apply for my job. Really, really good quality. I felt bad I had to close the job because we were just doing this as a demonstration. I felt bad about closing the job on them, but yeah, it’s pretty cool. And we were using a website called Upwork, but we don’t have to use Upwork, right? There’s other tools we can use.

Vance: You can use Fiverr. I mean, this works on multiple different platforms on this two step process, you know, minus the filtering will work or even on something like online jobs that there’s multiple tools. They all work so long as you work it.

Joe: Okay, cool. So to get those free resources we talked about the job posting, the job description and the job requirements from Vance for free go to Joe McCall dot com slash Vance and we’ll get those to you. So what are we going to talk about today, Vance?

Vance: So now we’re going to take that to the next step. After you’ve already posted the job, we started getting more candidates. How do you know which ones like the A player? How do you know which candidate to pick? And then how do you make sure that the work that you’re doing with it is going to be a success? So there’s multiple little tips, tricks and hacks that we’re going to talk about on how to make that really good.

Joe: Let’s get started.

Vance: All right. So I’m just going to kind of run through some tips. I got some notes over here that I just want to be able to run through here. Yeah. So some quick tips. The hacks is going to be hiring two at the same time. So that’s one thing I want to start talking about is interesting. Yes. Hire two at the same time because not everybody who’s a 100% or not or even 98%, if you’re using the filter you’re going to get 100% are all treated equally. And here’s why. You may not like their communication, you may not like the formatting. They may be real quick to apply for the job, but then the whole work process is just not the quality you’re looking for. So hiring two at the same time. But a common question, will is, man, what if I have this like two hour transcription that I want to have done? Like I got a two hour recording and I want it to be transcribed. That might be expensive and I don’t want to pay for it twice. Well, this will lead into the next thing, which is create a minimal viable product. What does that mean? A minimal a viable product or assignment? It’s real simple. Instead of having them transcribe 2 hours, do 5 minutes, and now you can charge a lot less, send it to multiple candidates, but I recommend at least two to see how do they do the work? How are they responding? You get to sample the work before they do the full entire hour, two, two hour video. Or maybe you have tons and tons of videos. You need not just smaller sample size to see how they work and see how they communicate. More importantly.

Joe: Oh, this is so good. I’ve done this a lot and I did this recently when I hired a new admin assistant for FreedomSoft. I wanted a VA that could do some FreedomSoft customizations for me, and I wanted somebody that would be a resource to my students who buy my land flipping course. Right. And so it was really simple. I started thinking about I hired actually four I hired four VA’s right. And I told them this is going to be a full time job and I was going to be willing to pay very, very well. So I had a lot of applications. I hired the top four and I knew I told them upfront, this is you’re going to go into a little test to see which one we want to keep. And so some of the things I told them to do was go into freedom soft and watch these. I gave them three or four tutorial videos to watch. Now I’m paying them during this test, right?

Vance: Absolutely.

Joe: You can’t have them do this stuff for free. So I paid them. I said watch these three or four tutorial videos because I want them to learn FreedomSoft. And so I sent them to the FreedomSoft website to learn. Right then I said, I want you to create a campaign and call it Zillow, Des Moines. Okay, that’s I just gave them a real specific Zillow, Des Moines. It’s a city in Iowa. And I said, I want you to then go and scrape ten properties from Zillow and listen notice, hear the detailed instructions, guys that I’m giving them, right? Go to Zillow and scrape ten properties. What I mean by scrape is copy and paste the information into this campaign and FreedomSoft ten properties that are between 1214 hundred dollars a month and rent that are three bedrooms and at least 1500 square feet. Simple stuff like that. Paste these six or seven things into FreedomSoft. So to do that, they had to create a campaign. They had to go to Zillow, find the information, put it into the lead, into FreedomSoft, right? And then I said, when that’s done, send me an email and in the subject line, put a smiley face. Then the next thing I told them to do is I want you to build a simple website that looks like this. And I showed them a real simple squeeze page that I found on Google somewhere, and I said, Build a website that looks like this from FreedomSoft. And I didn’t even tell them how. I didn’t tell them where to go to get that information or anything. To do that though, they have to go to the FreedomSoft tutorials. Watch the tutorial videos on how to build a website. And then that website, it’s going to be super easy to build if they watch the tutorials and how to learn how to do it inside of FreedomSoft. Anyway, of the four, there were only two of those people that I hired that actually got all the work done. One of them got it done in like a couple hours. I couldn’t believe it. I was blown away. And this guy’s been working with us now for like three or four years. Super smart guy. And he wanted to quit because he wanted to go to school, but I begged him, Listen, just work for us part time. And we kept him. But I love that idea of hiring several people, two or more, testing them, giving them things to do not. And you don’t feel like you have to teach them how to do it, just like the resources they need to go learn how to do it right.

Vance: I want to dissect a little bit about what you said, cause you gave out multiple golden nuggets that could have been completely overlooked. So first off, you did give some detail. So you weren’t just go scrape this place or go pull this information and didn’t explicitly tell them what kinds of information what you did is you told them and here’s where super important what to do. You told them what the outcome should look like, but you don’t give the exact tips on how to give them all the tools and the resources that they need. One of my favorite little things, and if you can take this exact method that you did put a smiley face in the subject line. Now, Joe, why is that so important? Like, why does that matter?

Joe: I want to see if they can follow instructions.

Vance: Yeah, it’s that attention to detail, which is what you’re really looking for when you bring it on in the virtual assistant. Because if you’re probably in the entrepreneur type personality here, that’s probably where you might be lacking a little bit or even want some help. And so that’s a key nugget. So smiley face. I love it. We use something very similar as well. And then the last part is, I really like how you gave the timeframe. Like you just let people go with it and you determine as a qualifying metric what the timeframe was. Did you tell them how soon they had to get it done by. Did you give at least.

Joe: No, I didn’t give them a deadline. Maybe I should have.

Vance: That always helped. But what matters is that’s what you’re checking. So if we tell them every little thing on what success looks like, they might all meet it. But what I like to do is I want to see what they determine as like what’s good, what’s not. So when you didn’t put the timeline in, you were impressed. That’s what I’m looking for, is I’m impressed with the results here. Nice you went with for like if you can do more, the more merrier. You get great information. I’m impressed.

Joe: One thing we did too one time is when we hired somebody that we wanted to answer the phones for us we wanted somebody with real good English and we hired before we even hired them. I think we did this. I don’t know if Upwork allows you to do this anymore, but we told them to read this paragraph and send us a voice recording of them reading that paragraph. And again, only half the people we sent that to actually even did it. And then the of the half, only a few of them, we felt like had good enough English for us to hire.

Vance: That’s a huge amount of work that’s going on to another tip. Don’t settle for the lack of communication, meaning you want them to be fluent in English. That is that that is a non-negotiable, right? Because communication will be then challenging. So if you think they’re having a hard time, you can read especially written communication because that’s how you probably get to communicate the most. Yeah, right. We’re not going to be on all these huddles when I’m working with these teams like you might with other team members. But yes, I want to hit on that again. Fluent in your language, not you don’t understand that way. They’re just there to help and be a servant with you and you serve them as well.

Joe: So you hire a couple of them, give them some tests and you keep the best ones.

Vance: On or that number of minimum viable product short night time line, it’ll save you a little bit of money. I’d rather pay 20 $30 for four or five six people to test on than to pay 30 $40 for somebody to complete. The one task can be inefficient. I don’t know if I found a good one or not. This is going to tie in to the next thing. Treat this when you’re on Upwork specifically treat it like Uber, right? What do I mean by treat it like Uber? You don’t get to just rate the people that do the work, the employees, so to speak. They get to rate the employer as well, free, responsive. So it’s almost like a social profile that you want to do to validate. And that’s how you’ll find your child. They’re going to want to start doing more jobs for you and they realize that you’re great communication. You get five star reviews just like an Uber. So it’s super critical that were that were all doing the same thing. Right. Like I just like to say that serving split in a job, you want to find the right person and they want to find the right employer. Two.

Joe: Very good. They’re all right. Good. What else?

Vance: All right, so I want to hit it again. I know we’re kind of hit on it last time, but if you didn’t do it, here’s a quick five filters that I like to use. Just a verbal really quick. Make sure that you have a job. Success of 100%, even 90% is still not sufficient because why pick so many 98? If you can have somebody have 100% success rate, there’s so many fish you’ll see in this case. The next one is make sure that they charge over 1000 hours, over 1000 hours, because that means that they’re doing work, that people are working. Okay. Yeah. And then I want to make sure that build over $10,000. Okay. What this means is they’re getting paid for multiple things. What I don’t want is somebody who did 5 minutes of work, got paid five bucks and has 100% success rate. I have no idea if that’s going to be a great candidate or not moving forward. The next one is like we already talked about the fluency. I want a native, fluent English when it comes to this. And then the next one is going to be, I do a filter on your hourly rate. So that way you’re not getting all these high end 50 $100 of people and candidates.

Joe: Yeah.

Vance: Those are the quick five filters to make sure you’re applying when you’re doing this.

Joe: Nice.

Vance: Joe, you kind of hit on something like you don’t know if they do like recordings and whatnot. I’m a fan of setting up a timer. If you want to do a live Zoom call, if you know that you need to like do a test with everybody and you want to just quickly go through and do a five minute process or whatever, if especially if you’re interviewing candidates, do one shot, have multiple people in the waiting room. They’re actually used to this. They’re actually used to being in a waiting room and then coming on one at a time instead of trying to schedule tons of 30 minute interviews, because that’s hiring us based people. It’s just not it’s a different culture when you’re hiring.

Joe: But I’ve never thought of that. So you’re saying like, you need to interview them, you need to talk to them face to face.

Vance: Absolutely. Depending on the job. Right. If it’s a one time task like an example where you only have one video and need to transcribe, do I need to know like what they sound like or do or communicate? That’s fine. But if you’re looking for people and you want that, then bring them in. You’ll know with them and make them less than five minute interviews. And matter of fact, that’ll be a give we can do. Joe I was like, What questions do you ask them to interview? We’ll give you these few questions to ask to determine. And what you’re looking for is do you know, like and trust them right off the bat from 30 seconds. You don’t know if you like somebody or not, just by the way, they present themselves or by the way they speak or how they handle themselves. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, it’s good.

Vance: But I would recommend doing a Zoom call during the interview and then you’ll be able to bring them all in one by one.

Joe: Yeah, I like that idea.

Vance: So also I know we’re I just kind of draw and draw great techniques when you’re hunting. Joe kind of did this last time. So if you do get a chance to go back and check out that first video, but when you’re out there and you your filter and candidates leverage the search criteria, leverage the search criteria, and here’s what I mean. Do the quick search know maybe you want a sales funnel creation to search for that. Then on the right, there’s gonna be an advanced search. That’s where you want to search. And then you can say and have these other words, and that’s where you put in the product that you’re looking for. Maybe you’re okay, you use like Clickfunnels, you put a comma and then you have the job. What happens is on the back and it’s doing a cool thing of saying must have this and this or that. It’s making it all work toward a find. You, the individuals that are the funnels, the sales funnel creation that also knows Clickfunnels or Joby or whatever tool you want because there are so many candidates that you have the right to pick, the best of the best for the products that you use, but you can’t iterate that enough. Leverage the search and don’t just be quick to speed to pick, put a little bit of effort on the front end. It’ll save you a lot on the back end. You know, when you’re hiring, you’ll save you on the firing.

Joe: And so when you when you’re searching for a word, you click on the advanced search.

Vance: And it should have a pop up where you can save any of these words. And when you put in a word, you can have a comma space and it’ll know that you mean this or this or this. So you can actually search because maybe you don’t want to hire somebody. And I know I’m getting technical here, but this applies to anything. But maybe you don’t you use Thinkific, you use Clickfunnels versus Kajabi, right? I know we’re talking terms but you know, maybe you want somebody who knows how to work on Windows and not Mac. Right. So you’ll search for Windows instead because you don’t want to have people that know how to work on a Mac and then you got to teach them Windows. Yeah, that’s you’re here for you can hire talent. It’s crazy. I can’t say that or not. You’re hiring talent, not just resources and human hours.

Joe: That’s really good.

Vance: That’s like the huge, huge tick with we’re good.

Joe: Excellent.

Vance: And then the next real big one is again I want to iterate. This is worldwide. Do not forget to uncheck the US only on the right when you’re searching. Talent is worldwide what you can unless you’re hiring locals and if you’re hiring local I wouldn’t even be on Upwork can you a different platform but you’re hiring for the virtual assistant and I’m not I don’t like don’t be specific even on the countries as heavy as you think because you’re going to be fluent in English and that’s going to already be your filter. So if you feel like you’re not finding people in the Philippines, that’s my first step. But be open. We have people working with us from Pakistan, Egypt all over the world now get more hourly rate. So I just want to be clear that you might hear about where do I hire in the Philippines, the most common but don’t commit just because of the country location. I care about the quality of the work. If we can communicate.

Joe: Good, good. I know some people are thinking, okay, this is great, but what? What could I actually have my VAs do for me? So let’s talk to somebody who is a real estate investor. They want to do vacant land deals, they want to do wholesaling houses and stuff like that. What are some work? What’s some things that a virtual assistant can do?

Vance: Joe I love that you asked that because I made a note here with your simple land flips. Don’t get that book and start with just the very beginning of it and have a little the little section of like setting up a system, take a snippet of the book and have a VA go set this up and do this. That’s the first thing to do. What is the first thing you need to have accomplished? You don’t even have to necessarily know what the real success looks like. If you have a great resource and I know that you have the best resources that comes out there air, you should be able to pick this up, follow it and figure it out. If there’s sufficient. If they come to you for questions and you don’t happen to know the answer to it, then that’s already starting to be some red flags because they should be resourceful. And that’s what I’m looking for, is resourceful virtual assistants.

Joe: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things I tell my VAs a lot sometimes is if you don’t know the answer, go here to this place, watch the tutorials here or go to YouTube and just watch this and look for some YouTube videos and find out how to do it. Or just give them my course.

Vance: The secret URL just little log in, log into the course that you have. Like that’s exactly, exactly what we do. That’s what I would do if I was getting started in land flips. We’re starting from ground zero. The only thing that I wouldn’t hire. So if you’re clear on what you want to hire, the only thing that I wouldn’t hire right off the bat is talking to the seller. Yeah, that’s just personal.

Joe: That’s really big. Know people asking too? What are some things a VA can do? Like, number one, I want them to do my marketing for me. That’s what I like to think of. I want them to send make sure my marketing is being sent out or if it’s if we’re using a third party direct mail company, they’re managing the list and the schedule of the mail. Yeah, tracking the stats and all of that. So manage the marketing, outbound marketing. And part of that could be sending 25, 50 emails a day, text messages, sending letters, scraping data, putting it into a spreadsheet for you to call them or for them to skip due to cold call or skip trace or whatever. Then be responsible for the marketing. Which reminds me of something else I thought was really good that I had Vas do for me at one time. Let me get back to that. It has to do with how to get evictions. And you got to forget, the second thing is you want them to update the CRM, right? Let them be the CRM manager. Okay. Then the third thing is do all the follow up for you. Make sure they do the follow up. So in your CRM, your database, you have tasks for every seller that’s in there. To follow up with 30 days in two weeks and three months or whatever, and make that VA’s responsibility to manage all that follow up, all of the follow up tasks that are in there. Make sure they’re doing that right.

Vance: Like this. I want to go back to your second point, because right now, like, what if they don’t know, like how to do this? There’s the VA gauntlet and I want to make another shout out to that one. It’s another podcast that you did for Tom Krol on the exact process on how to use that as an acquisition assistant, how to use a virtual assistant and work together. I mean, step by step, it works out to this day. This is actually a process that we’re still using now.

Joe: When it comes to updating the CRM and you’re just communicating with that VA by Voxer or WhatsApp. And after you talk to a seller, you just record a voice memo, send it to the VA. The VA then updates that lead with the next steps, the status they create, the appointment they create, the contract, the letter they send it, they update the CRM. So you want to make sure every single lead gets updated. Have your VA be the one that is the CRM expert. Okay. One of the things I remember when it came to marketing, one of the best lists that you can send letters to for houses is the eviction list. And a lot of times courts will have public records in the court, websites, evictions. Right. Well, it’s kind of a manual process. So you can have a VA go in. And this is something that I’ve hired VAs to do several times. And I create a simple video using something like Loom of me going into it’s the Google Missouri case net. It’s a list of all of the websites from all of the courts in the state of Missouri. And then you just got to get a little familiar with it and you find out, okay, well, let’s look at I think it’s a civil court and you open up hundreds of cases by the week. You see a big list of them. And you can tell by a category whether it’s an eviction is called rent and possession or landlord actions or something like that. If you go in to that list, you can also find judgments on people who have unpaid credit card bills or unpaid utility bills and stuff like that. So you think a seller might be motivated, starting to get motivated to sell if they have if they’re just in the process of evicting a tenant, if somebody in that house is not paying their discovery card bill, they’re not paying the water utility or the sewer bill. Right. So then you can have a VA click on these buttons, open up the thing and then give you the that the thing gives you the list of the plaintiffs and the defendants address, the plaintiff address and the defendant’s address. The defendant is usually the tenant or the person being sued for whatever the judgments. And so you can get that information so your VA can do all of this every day, once a week, and put all of these things into a spreadsheet. Right. And then from that spreadsheet, you can decide what you want to do. You can skip, trace it and cold. Call them or you can send. To a direct mail company to send letters for you. You can even get the VA to do the letters for you. I had the VA do this for a long time. They put the letters that create the letters in click to mail and then send the letters to the owners themselves from me. So anyway, just a little.

Vance: I love how you said that, right? Because instead of whenever we’re hearing you can do this right and listen to them talking on the phone like all those steps, tracing the active building the list, the storage on all those lists, the management of those lists can all be done with your if your virtual assistant. They can even upload it so you can start calling it through a date or even if you’re going to handle, they can start giving you like this is your goal for the day to call right out.

Joe: Very good.

Vance: Yes. So like everything besides, as soon as I get to the point of the call, you can of those voices that are looming out right green dot com and do a recording just like Joe was saying and get it to them. And then you’re working on just the hi this is this here I want to really iterate this is when we talk about what is $5 an hour activity or $500 an hour activity or $100 an hour activity. This is what we’re talking about, because all of these steps that we’re discussing or it’s all required to be done in the business, the only question is who if you’re doing all of these things, that’s how you get this average hourly rate of 20 or $40 an hour. You may only be making 60 or 80 K a year because you’re doing all these things that are able to leverage your time to do the high dollar activity. So when you can go bring on somebody at $5 an hour, right, they’re able to do those things. And I’m telling you this, if you don’t have a virtual assistant, you’re paying yourself $5 an hour. I know that was painful for me to hear. I didn’t process it when I was first getting started. I was doing it all. I was like, Now, now they’re going to mess it up, right? We kind of talked about this. They’re going to suck up all your time. Like, I don’t have time to train, I just need to do it. And in that term, what I’m saying is I value my time at $5 an hour because I’m not well, understand, you know what the higher level activity is training. People don’t have an assessment because they don’t see an instant return on investment of your time because you’re not closing a deal. But training is a very highly leveraged time and activity. Training is your $500 an hour task. You’re now building a team that can do everything together. So don’t underestimate that. When what are the tasks? Training. Just remember, training is a $500 an hour activity. That is how you create $1,000,000. Your business is through is through that process.

Joe: Oh, man, this is getting me so excited. Let me can I give an example of this, guys? What you could have your VAs do for you? Yeah. You cannot afford not to have a VA do this stuff. All right, so I’m going to share something. Let me move this window out, and I’m going to share the screen here. Missouri case. All right, cool. This is Missouri case net. I just Googled it takes you here. And these are all of the different courts in Missouri. And I went did a seven day search like what you have to do here so you have to find this for your own area. And I went to page two and here is a AC contract slash account. I don’t know what it means, but look, it’s a metropolitan sewer, Saint Louis that’s a utility made that if you don’t pay your sewer bill, then they put a lean on your property. You click this, you click right here, parties and attorneys. And these are the defendants. So Metropolitan Saint Louis sewer district if you don’t pay is might be water and sewer one of those two I’m not sure. Look at the address of the defendant. There’s two of them, Larry Elbert. So you copy this. And this is again something you just train your VA to do, put it in freedom, soft, okay? And this property comes up right here and you can see that they’ve own this property for five years. There’s Larry Elbert. The mailing address is the same as the property address. So you know then that this is not an absentee landlord, somebody who owns the house, but if they can’t pay the utility bill, maybe something’s going wrong and they need some help. Okay, well, guess what? You can add them to a lead list right here. And this is all something your VA could do. You could add it to a lead list, then you can view the lead. Here it is. Their owner information is brought right into here. You got the notes. Okay. And then you could do whatever. Like from here you could skip trace the owner if you wanted to get their email address and phone numbers and call them. Or you could just create a letter like this. This is a letter that I’ve used before. Let’s just do this one. Vacant rental. I don’t know if it’s vacant or not. Just as an example. Boom, here’s a letter. I think you on the property at 1132 Highmont Drive in Saint Louis. You wouldn’t consider selling it, would you? I’m looking to buy another property in the area. Give me a call or text and we can talk. All right, click complete. That letter’s generating right there. Your VA can do this at like 2 a.m. in the morning. Your time. How many of these how many of these can your Vas do a day?

Vance: I want you for that. Again, you’re able to you’re telling me that you’re able to replicate what you’re capable of doing 24/7, three able to do it.

Joe: Yeah. So all I’m doing here is I’m going to loom. L O O M. Right and it’s fine. I know how much it costs, but there’s free for free version of it and you can just do a video of you doing this. All right? It’s like, all right, go here to Missouri, case net, find these properties, put them in to here. Create this letter. Here’s the letter. Right here. How do you get your visa in the Philippines to send direct mail for you? Well, there’s a service called Click to log emailed to gmail.com. So go to quick to mail, email to gmail.com. Right. And again, you don’t even have to do this. You can say, hey, VA, you know, go learn how to do this. But if you look at it here, you can email your PDF and send it to click to mail as an attachment. Next day, next business day, click to mail will print that attachment and mail it to the seller. So here’s the attachment right here. Right. I could just click email. I have a contact in here called Mailbox and I have an email template called Email to Mail. If I wanted to just click send email here and it would send an email to click to mail. Click to mail gets this prince, it sends it to the seller next business day. Right. Just like that, you can have your seller, your VA’s now send letters for you to these leads and then you say, all right, after that one, go back here. Go to the next one. I’m just showing you some things. This is this is crazy. Yeah.

Vance: This is the part where it’s like you’re doing it once, maybe twice when you spend a little bit of time getting the steps ironed out. I mean, you hand it off and it’s infinite done. And with this, people misinterpret what a system is. System. It’s not just technology, it’s your people working the process as well and your technology all working seamlessly together.

Joe: Here is a never navy federal credit union is has some kind of suit against somebody for something. I don’t know. But there’s the defendant’s address right there. Maybe they’re having some trouble paying a bill. Maybe they’re also behind on their mortgage payment. Right. This isn’t taking advantage. I’m not sending them letters saying, hey, we can help you with your tax problems or your or your paying your bills. Ah, here’s another metropolitan Saint Louis sewer district right there. Let me show you. I want to find a see, like if you’re doing this forever, there’s 4000 entries. I’m only through 80 of them right now. Right. You can go through this and like, here’s a divorce. There’s a divorce. What if you sent them to see if they wanted to sell their house? And eventually here you’ll find some rent and possessions or landlord actions. Yeah. So have your VA do this anyway. The other thing I’d have my VA do is I have them go into Zillow and let’s say I’m doing deals in Saint Charles County, Missouri, and I did a lot of lease options. I love the Saint Louis, the Saint Charles County. It’s a suburb of Saint Louis. Right. And have the VA go in, look for any property listed for rent, three plus bedrooms, houses. And I have all of these settings in here. No acreage sizes. Okay, boom. Right now there’s 146 rental properties in Saint Charles County. Guess what? A lot of these will sort it from newest. So we’ll go down here, too. There’s got to be on there for at least a week. Let’s say six days, six days, seven days. Right. A lot of these properties that are listed for rent here are not showing up yet. As I used to own a house right on the street. No way. Right. It was like, wow. All right. Anyway, so a lot of these are not showing up yet as absentee owners or these are huge hedge funds and they’re trying to sell these things right now. Right. You know what? If you just had your VA go through and put each of these as a new lead inside of your freedom safe so you could send the owner of the property a letter. This one is listed by Main Street Renewal. Right. Well, let’s look at this here. Five, look at that property in here. Pull it up. All right. The master insurer issuer. So they just bought it. They’re out of Austin, Texas. So that’s what I have my VA just get. But then go to the next one, right? You’re going to see a lot of these properties that are listed as rentals are not showing up yet in the county records as absentee owners. Oh, this one’s interesting here. Let’s look at this one. They’re asking 12 2400 a month again. Boom. Here you go. Here’s an example. This is the mailing address and county records right here is the same as the property address. What does that mean? But if you look at the house, it’s vacant. Yeah, right. This is a great lease option property and I don’t know, sometimes these pictures are really, really nice pictures and they look like they were listing photos and they couldn’t sell it. So now they’re just renting it out. Well, guess what? Maybe they want to sell this and they’re not getting any mail from their investors yet because they’re not showing up as absentee owners.

Vance: They’re not popping up on anybody else right now.

Joe: So what happened? They bought this thing four years ago and it’s already vacant. Maybe they tried to sell it. Maybe they went through a divorce or something. They’ve moved job transfer and I can send them a letter. I can just right here, click add, delete list, view lead. I could skip trace them if I wanted to just like that. And then I could create a letter, send them the letter, and a VA can do all this for you. And then, yeah, you make it. So when you got a VA that’s helping you with all this stuff, you can say every day, I want you to do 30 of these things. You go into the eviction courts for judgments or evictions, then go into Zillow and look for rental properties that are listed for rent where the address is the same as the property mailing address is the same as the property address. They’re not getting any mail. And when you can send a letter to that seller saying, Hey, would you like to sell your property? What if you also sent them to like, let’s check this out. This is so cool what you said. Okay, then after that, after you do 20 of those every day, I want you to go to Redfin and I want you to look in this area, Saint Louis, Missouri. Let’s remove out line. I want you to go into for sale. I want you to look for every house. Let’s just do under 400,000, okay? And I want homes, houses only, and I want at least three plus bedrooms. Cool. And then I want every house that has been on the market more than 90 days for. All right, there’s 397. If I zoom out now, there are 602 and then tell the VA to sort this by days on Redfin right here, and then go down and then take it. Take these properties. You can even if you scroll all the way down, you can download them into a spreadsheet, but sometimes they only let you download 350 at a time, but then take each of these properties. This one has been on the MLS for 350 days. You can tell the VA’s look for the ones that are vacant. This one’s not vacant. Right.

Vance: Real quick, how can you tell if they’re not vacant? What’s a telltale sign, literally?

Joe: Well, there’s a picture of there’s nothing there. Yeah, that’s a good sign. This is a good property right here. So tell that VA. All right, put the address into FreedomSoft or whatever. And this is a this is open door, open doors, putting. So then you can just tell the VA to find the realtor and Google their name and company name and look for their contact information. Like if I click on this open door brokerage, you can see the realtor name here. Maybe it’s under still realtors. Yeah, you can have them Google it and find who that broker is and then just put it into a database so that you can call them the next day. You can just go through your list and you have all these people to call, right? Then you can like. I want to find a good example here. Sure.

Vance: I just want to be able to make a comment that you’ve now taken a virtual assistant that people look at as a cost, an investment. It’s mean generation. Yeah, this. This right here is the lead generation. You have a person going out and generating leads that it doesn’t cost anything. You’re already working with the assistant. With the virtual assistant. This is released.

Joe: So look at this one here. This is a property that’s been on the market for 94 days and it hasn’t sold yet. It’s listed for 125 grand. So what if your VA put this information then into. FreedomSoft with the realtors. They could they could go do the work of Googling this realtor to give you the name and phone number. There’s a phone number right there. Okay. 636 And then put that into your CRM and data is and then also have them take this address right here, put it into something like freedom soft so you can get the owners name Apple Cappel, Apple Drive. This is where they bought it in in like ten months ago, 11 months ago. And they have a loan on it and they’re selling it. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but what if you sent them the owner a letter and you could just say, hey, if I could get you, I want to buy your house. If I could get you close to you, if I could get you your asking price of like if I get you something close to your asking price, would you consider carrying back some financing? Would you do at least can I Lisa for me for a little bit and then buy it? Can you owner finance it? Maybe just make them a blind offer? I’ve done that before so you can send now with listed properties if you’re not an agent. Have your virtual assistant find these properties that need updating and need work. This doesn’t have any pictures, right? Just have them go through all these properties. Find the ones that need updating like this one, and then send a letter to the owner. Would you consider maybe carrying back some seller financing? Get some information on the realtor. You can send the realtor an email like this one. Only an investor would buy. Right. So ask the ask the realtor if the seller is negotiable on their price. I interviewed a guy one time from Israel. He did a lot of deals, Vance And he just had his VAs. He had three VAs that would send, on average, each of them 100 emails a day. So three VAs would send 300 emails a day to properties that were on the MLS that needed work and would just ask this. The Realtor I saw your property at one, two, three Main Street. It looks like it’s an interesting property. Looks like it needs a little bit of work. We might be able to offer X for it. So before we waste your time and send you a contract, is your client negotiable? Would they accept something like that? Okay. And it’s a numbers game. And what he would find out is the VA would go find these properties in like six different markets across the U.S. He was doing deals virtually in six different markets. Send 300 emails. Now he’s not sending. Oh, he also would attach a proof of funds letter. Yeah. Okay. So he would attach a proof of funds and said, if I give you all for your client something like this, would they be interested? And that guess what happens, he’s averaging 5 to 10 deals a month from that stuff, right? And he’s doing this from Israel. His Vas are in the Philippines sending blind offers. So the VAs would have this little formula he did. He basically say, all right, go look to see what the property’s worth. Subtract 40 grand for repairs, it times 70%, minus ten grand for wholesale fee and offer this but make sure that number is less than the list price right that the list price is 50 and you’re saying would they accept 80 that’s not going to work. So if the if if the list price is less than this calculated offer, then do 75% of the list price. But he would the VAs would send hundreds of emails a day in six or seven different markets to realtors lowballing, making offers, but not sending a contract, just saying we could offer something like this. Would you? Would you would your client be interested? Here’s a proof of funds and you could do deals that way right off the MLS. So they’re I’m excited about this because these are things guys you can have virtual assistants do for you while you’re sleeping. Going to court records, look for evictions, divorces, unpaid bills and utility bills and judgments. Right. Send the letter the owner of those homes an email. You could also have them go look for garage sales and Craigslist and Facebook marketplace estate sales. Pull those addresses, send them a letter. You could go look on Zillow for rental properties. On Zillow, where the owner’s address is the same as the property address, the mailing address is the same. Send the owner of those houses letter. Look for older listings that need updating in Redfin. Send a letter to the owner, send an email to the realtor. Guys, if you’re worried about I don’t have enough work for a VA to do, you’re not getting the big picture there’s so you could have those three or four or five things I just showed you. You can have one or two full time. VA is doing that marketing for you right now.

Vance: I mean, that’s it. Like I get excited for that because that means you have a full on system working the whole time, even while you’re not working. If somebody overseas, not even in the US is able to do this, anybody can do this from anywhere. I mean, this just proves it doesn’t matter about your location. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a place where it’s got a population of only 300 people or a place where there’s like tens of millions. And you’re worried about there are millions where you’re worried about competition. You can go anywhere doing this with any location. It doesn’t matter.

Joe: And you can even my gosh, like one of these properties that I was just looking at with, I got to show this guy I geek out with this stuff. So I just sort of went into Propstream and this is one of the properties we were just looking at. And you can in prop string you can go to MLS details and it gives you all of the realtors information right here. So there’s the agent’s email. There’s two different emails that I see here of the realtor. So your VA can send them emails at two in the morning. I have I have an email here and we lost fans. But Vance, I see you. You’re back. I have an email here in my FreedomSoft. It’s a template that we send to realtors, and it looks like this high puts the realtors first name there. I saw your listing out address in city. I’m looking to buy some more investment properties in the area. Is the property properties still available? Before I send you an actual contract and proof of funds. Would your clients consider something around that? And then we would attach a proof of funds or something like that. So this is a simple email you could send from inside of FreedomSoft. And then we had another email here for lease seller financing or lease purchase, and you can send this to the realtor. Hey, I’m an investor, a realtor with broker name or whatever I saw you’re getting your VA sends this stuff for you. I saw your listing at address and city state. I’m looking for some investment properties in the area. It looks like a really nice house. I’m surprised you haven’t sold it yet. I might be able to get the seller the price they’re looking for. If they would consider selling with owner financing or as a lease purchase, that wouldn’t work for them, would it? You can reply, text or call me at this number. By the way, I’ll make sure you get your full commissions if they sell them terms. Thanks. If this house doesn’t work out, do you have any other properties? You see what I’m doing there? Yeah. So, like, just you can create different emails and letters that you can send to these sellers. Here’s a soft pass offer email. I’m a investor with so-and-so. I saw your listing. I’m looking for more investment properties in the areas still available. How negotiable are they on there? How negotiable is the seller on their price? I don’t want to waste your time with a ridiculous low offer. Thanks, Joe. And then once your VA puts all that information into your CRM like FreedomSoft, then you can create follow up tasks once a month. Send that realtor an email, send that email, send that realtor a text. Hey, how you doing? You don’t remember me? Just following up. Do you have any deals? No. Boom.

Vance: No, I can’t. I can’t get enough when we’re talking about, like, these types. Right. Try transaction coordination, anybody that you can communicate with as well. So when we’re talking about the different types of task, if you if you’re going to post on Craigslist or scrape off Craigslist posting on social media like Facebook or scraping off of social media, and you’re trying to go in, you know, build out for some people, you know, buyers list or scraping for deals that are out there that you want to make offers on it because people are posting are deals left and right and they have no way of exiting it. And if you’re doing a lease option, you can be that person as well to pay and connect with the seller. Tons and tons of options where your virtual assistant can do this. So again, I just like to make it really simple. If you’re clicking on the computer, you more than likely can give that away to a virtual assistant. To do that, it’s really just keep it really simple because there are lots of tasks. And here’s what I want to say about what tasks to delegate, right? What task you want them to do. Don’t go create random work first. Delegate what you’re doing inside today. If you are out there doing deals right now or you’re looking to get your first one and you find yourself too busy doing everything but talking to the seller, what you are doing is the thing to delegate, not what you think you want to do. Don’t create busy work and pay for it for no reason. Alleviate what you’re doing and helping you get the results that you’re trying to achieve. All that kind of makes sense because I do find people saying I’m bringing on a virtual assistant to go do this random thing and I’m like, But you’re still doing all these tasks. Let’s, let’s delegate that right, hand that off to a virtual assistant to do.

Joe: Yeah, very good for whatever it whether it’s cool things you got events.

Vance: Those are the biggest things. So here’s the cool part I want to want to dove into like when you take this to the next step so you know how we create these little videos, know and then like you can create like a document where it’s like a nice little checklist of what is completion look like. But why don’t you start getting down this process, even the process of creating a four piece, you can record a little video and delegate out the process of creating the procedures. Yeah. So that’s what we do is we’ll take a little media will send it out and then we come back with a really awesome document that somebody can use to follow because some people are visual learners and some just need a checklist, a reminder and a quick search. Yeah, that’s a hack that I like to do for creating SOPs.

Joe: SOP stands for standard operating procedures. Right. So you want your VA’s to create training for their replacements. Yeah, that’s so important. You want them. You don’t need to be. One creating the SOPs to have make sure that’s one of the main tasks for VA’s do. So if you need more help, if you need to hire someone to help the existing VA or the VA quits or whatever, all you have to do is share with them the video, the Google doc and things like that. So the VA’s can just pick up from where the other one left off, but make it your VA’s responsibility to create the Loom videos and the Google doc for the S ops so that they can they can get somebody to replace them or help them out if they need it.

Vance: Yeah. And the other candidate, this is when the website gets updated. It’s not on you to go figure out the new steps that often say, hey, once you figure this out, let’s create the new procedure. Because I want to make it clear that procedures aren’t a thing they create once they’re done. That’s why you want to hand this off to a virtual assistant that’s ever living, ever changing, because things are getting updated all the time.

Joe: Nice. Yes. All right. I am gonna to get going here texting my assistant because I have a call scheduled. Okay. Now, real quick about. Yes, ongoing support, right? Some people, when they hire a VA, they’re just like, all right. I give them what to do and I don’t want to ever talk to them again, which doesn’t make any sense to me. You need to treat these VA’s just like they were an employee in your office, right? Yeah. And one of the biggest things I see people fail with when they’re hiring and managing and working with VA’s is poor communication. So what do you recommend on the communication front? How frequently should you be communicating with your VAs?

Vance: So it really is going to depend on the topic and the subject. So what I mean by that is if you’re doing a little project communication, at least the very beginning in the end is critical and even if they have questions along the way, daily is a minimum. When you bring it out, somebody must have a daily. How you might, you must at least be able to seek up what they’re trying to complete. What’s going on. I purposely when I especially when you’re first getting started that there for most I’m just going to say make it easy. There’s never like there’s never too much communication at the beginning. What’s actually what we see is a big trend here is was actually not enough. So what happens is people think I can just give them a chance and they delegate it by giving them a task and saying, just tell me when it’s done, or I don’t even want to know anything about it, about the process and status and the update. And that’s not actually delegation. That’s a fun word for application, right? You’re just saying go do this and you don’t want to be informed. Delegation is the process of being informed along the way. I mean, even providing resources to them to help them achieve the goal. This is a we mission we are trying to accomplish just for the company. We are doing this, but they are 100% maybe doing that task 100%. I will do everything in my power. But that task to help support them and communications is I can’t say it’s paramount. It’s kind of said this before. It’s the first thing that like when I work within the military, it’s the first thing they try to take out is communication. It destroys everything.

Joe: Especially when you hire the VAs for the first time. You’ve got to be communicating with them every day. Once it just it is just a few minutes, just on Zoom. It’s like on Voxer is what I like to use. But just update me on what you did today. What did you get done today? What were your some of your challenges or roadblocks? And if you give them a scorecard and something that they can update on their stuff, so you can see it in a spreadsheet again, make them create that. But it’s so important because especially as you’re learning this stuff, your expectations may be unrealistic. They may be out of whack. You may be thinking that they can send 50 of these emails a day, but they’re only sending 25. And if you’re not communicating with them every day, you’re going to find out two weeks later you’re going to be mad and they’re going to be scared and disappointed in themselves and like it’s your fault because you have unrealistic, unrealistic expectations and you’ve got to have that communication upfront with them right there.

Vance: So here’s a three phase approach for my daily huddle. This is like the three steps. So if you’re wondering like, how do I have the meeting or what do I talk about? What do I do? Here’s the three pieces that we like to use. One. Start off with gratitude. Make it personal. These are human. What are you grateful for or what is your win? Some people like that. What are you grateful for? Let’s be positive. Want to create that atmosphere. Click the culture that you want. The second thing like it was What were your numbers for yesterday? So how many? What did you do yesterday or what did your numbers? Or when we say that, like how many emails did you send out? How many leads did you add? How many entries in you’re out on your list, right? Whatever that task may be. So review it so you can let them know if they’re on track or not and you can correct it before it becomes a real problem. And then the third one, which is my favorite, is what are your issues or issues or blockers? Because I never want a day going by where they’re thinking, that’s on me and I think it’s on them. And then two weeks later, we’re like, I’m like, What’s up that we complete the project? You’re like, Oh no. I went on for two weeks for this, so I never like 24 hours going by where we don’t clarify, like, hey, I kind of try to reassure you, but I’m still waiting on you for this. Here’s all roadblocks less than 24 hours. Those are my three pieces that I love my day. We hope that also create the community and the culture are looking for.

Joe: Yeah, very good. All right, guys, we got to wrap this up again. More information on Vance, Joe McCall dot com slash Vance. Joe McCall dot com slash Vance. Is there anything that we talked about today that we can maybe even add to this, Vance?

Vance: I don’t mind giving out the a filter that we use. So that way we can kind of recap as a resource. And I have this master list of every VA task that you can possibly think of, pages of pages on it. So you can just search for what you’re looking for or scroll by the category. I’d be willing to give that up here.

Joe: So the filter, what is this filter list again?

Vance: The Upwork filter. Remember, we kind of discuss it, but like we’ll actually give you nice little snippets and screenshot in the clarity of like what to check on that list and cost.

Joe: All right. So we’ll add the filter already on there. We have Vance’s virtual assistant job description and job requirements, things. We have the filter we’re going to be adding in the filter for that he uses for Upwork and a master list for VA tasks that you can get for free, no strings attached. Just got to Joe McCall Slash Vance.

Vance: Absolutely, Joe.

Joe: Vance, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, what’s your company name? Are you active on social media, Facebook, Instagram?

Vance: Absolutely. You can reach out to me. I am on Facebook, Vance Courtney. Look for me if you want, Scale By Systems dot com, take a look and those in primary ways I’m always available on social media.

Joe: All right. Scale By Systems dot com, Scale By Systems dot com to get all those free stuff we just talked about guys again Joe McCall dot com slash Vance hey this has been very, very good, man. I appreciate you, Vance.

Vance: Hey, thank you so much Joe, I appreciate you.

Joe: See you guys, everybody.