00;00;00;15 - 00;00;24;15
Unknown
Welcome back to the Seven Figure Flipping Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Whitney, the CEO of Seven Finger Flipping and Blackjack Real Estate, where we've done over 1000 deals and hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. Today, we're talking about going from the solo operator, the person who's sitting in every seat to an architect of your business. And I have with me today, my guest co-host Lindsey.
00;00;24;15 - 00;00;48;05
Unknown
Our go. Hey, there. Cool. Let's get into it. A lot of people are trying to grow their business, but they're stuck because they're wearing all of the hats and they're developing skills personally. But it's also crushing their souls because it's taking all of their time. Right? They just they just replaced a full time job with another full time job at this point.
00;00;48;12 - 00;01;13;18
Unknown
Maybe they replace their one 40 hour a week, full time job with two 40 hour a week, full time jobs. Now they work 80 hours a week and they make less money, and they added more stress to their life. So a lot of investors, they think that they're burned out, but really they're just trapped wearing all the hats in their business.
00;01;13;21 - 00;01;42;28
Unknown
And in our community, we talk a lot about how to responsibly grow a business to a level where it's operationally efficient and profitable. And one of the biggest things that people struggle with is getting out of that 1 or 2 person team, and maybe getting to a 5 to 10 person team that's humming and highly profitable. What have you seen the best ambassadors do to grow their teams like that?
00;01;43;00 - 00;02;04;15
Unknown
Systems and process. We say that a lot, but the only way that you can ever grow a team and hand off responsibility to somebody else is if you actually have a system and a process for somebody else to follow. Otherwise, you lock yourself in to having to do those things all the time because nobody else knows how to do them.
00;02;04;22 - 00;02;24;10
Unknown
And I think a lot of people think that they have a workload problem, but they have a system problem. And when we talk about actually growing your business to fuel your life and the impact you want to make, it is largely about people. But here's the thing. The precursor to people is systems and processes. You cannot bring people into a dumpster fire.
00;02;24;13 - 00;02;52;05
Unknown
No, because then you will just have a more complicated dumpster fire. Then nobody is going to follow like flustered leader. If the sky is always falling, you're always scrambled. You can't give clear direction. Then nobody will follow you. Nobody's going to want to work with you. We do something really cool in our community called People Plus, and we have the ability to help build organizational charts, help to understand what roles you need in your business to achieve the goals that you have.
00;02;52;05 - 00;03;16;29
Unknown
And look, every business doesn't need to look the same. You don't need 30 or 50 US based employees to have a business that actually fuels the freedom that you're looking for. We know and we have. And to include us a team of 12 ish, I think on our team, mostly overseas Vas and we have a very operationally efficient business where a lot of the heavy lift is off of our shoulders.
00;03;17;02 - 00;03;50;18
Unknown
So that's what our business looks like. We also have people who have dozens of US based employees and super high volume. And, you know, that's a whole different world. And then we have the smaller mom and pop shows that are like 2 or 3 people total, total lifestyle, business, total happy. But what I love about the people, plus stuff that we do is we help people build what that should look like at your revenue level and the revenue level you're trying to grow to, how to hire these people, how to understand what personality profiles you need and then help you get the right personality profile.
00;03;50;20 - 00;04;15;09
Unknown
How to build job ads. How to, how to put a good, funnel up to bring in as many candidates as possible, how to interviews. We do all this stuff to help take some of the heavy load off of these businesses who are already too busy and the people are the solution to freedom in your business, but you're oftentimes the bottleneck in the problem.
00;04;15;13 - 00;04;39;06
Unknown
Yeah. And I think sometimes too, when people hear like, oh, blackjack has 12 employees, that almost seems overwhelming. Like I don't have one employee, how am I going to get 12? And you know what? We didn't have 12 to start, right? We started it started with one virtual assistant and we grew from there. The really amazing thing about people, plus in the system we have inside our community, is that we have a coach who coaches it.
00;04;39;08 - 00;05;02;12
Unknown
That's incredible. But also it actually takes a look at who you are at your core and how you're performing in your role, and it will give you a very clear indication of whether you're winning or not winning. It'll probably even tell you if you feel frustrated or if you feel fulfilled. And so using that tool, we can help somebody build a team to reach their goal.
00;05;02;12 - 00;05;23;07
Unknown
So if your goal is to have a team of 12 people, we can use that that system in that process to help you get there. If you want to be an operator and just want some support, we can do that too. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, and I think that most the key here is for entrepreneurs to try to I talk about this a lot, build other people's businesses.
00;05;23;09 - 00;05;46;11
Unknown
It's to stay grounded and on what your goals are for your business and for your life. If you want a lifestyle business, build a lifestyle business. But business doesn't run without you. And when you're small, so you will need team members along the way. And oftentimes what happens is we get these mindsets where, either I can barely do it well enough or I'm the only one who can do it well enough.
00;05;46;11 - 00;06;12;01
Unknown
Nobody could ever do it as good as me. And instead of being a leader and training people and holding people accountable, they just do it all themselves. And they sit in frustration and burnout. And the truth is, they just don't have systems and people in place to actually give them what they actually desire. Yeah. What would what do you think would be the first thing you would tell somebody to do if they felt overwhelmed, like maybe they need some help?
00;06;12;03 - 00;06;30;26
Unknown
Yeah, I would, I would, I would take a sheet of paper. So grab a white sheet of paper right now. And I want you to draw a line down the middle and through it horizontally. And then in the top left quadrant I want you to write. I love doing it and I'm good at it. And in the top right quadrant I want you to write.
00;06;30;26 - 00;06;46;17
Unknown
I love doing it. And I'm bad at it. And the bottom left right. I'm not good at it, but I love doing it. And in the bottom right? Right. I'm not good at it. And I don't love doing it. And then I want you to take everything that you do inside your business and put it in the appropriate quadrant.
00;06;46;18 - 00;07;10;21
Unknown
Now, if it's in the I'm not good at it. And I don't love doing it. You guys should get rid of that task immediately to somebody else. If it's in the I love doing it and I'm good at it, then those are the tasks that you keep and the other three boxes, you find a way to delegate those things out unless they're are really, really, really important revenue driver that, you don't want to let go of.
00;07;10;21 - 00;07;31;04
Unknown
That's fine. I think sometimes people do that, but if you're feeling that way, you should do that exercise right now. Yeah, that that's something that we actually do within our company. A couple times a year. It's it's not something that you do once and then never again because the season changes the business changes, the people sometimes change.
00;07;31;04 - 00;07;53;26
Unknown
And so what you want to do today or what you're great at today might not make sense. Six months, 12 months from now. And I think I have some people that I remember just talking to about what they're doing. For example, I'm talking to somebody who is making meaningful money. Seven figures, not seven figures. I'm not talking about like, revenue.
00;07;53;28 - 00;08;17;00
Unknown
And they were cutting their rental grass to save 200 bucks. And we had to we we talked about going through this exercise of the time value of money. And it's right. In addition to the quadrants, write down all of the things that you do in your business, in your life, and then assign a dollar per hour value to it.
00;08;17;03 - 00;08;41;25
Unknown
And think about the things that you do that give you the most leverage in your life. Now, look, it's not all about money, but it's what money buys you. So when that person did that, I watched them like three acts their business over the next 18 months. Needless to say, they weren't cutting the grass anymore. Yeah, yeah, had to find a new way to exercise, but hit the treadmill morning mornings on the treadmill.
00;08;41;25 - 00;09;00;02
Unknown
But I think the point, the point for that person was, control this illusion of control. If I'm doing it, I'm in control. It's a complete illusion. Because what you're really doing is you're limiting your ability to grow and to build the thing that you actually set off to build. Yeah. And we've got we went through this exercise ourselves.
00;09;00;02 - 00;09;23;09
Unknown
So for me, I have always felt that because I am a very good underwriter, that I need to underwrite all the deals and that is not true. But I do want to be the person who has final approval. And so the skill that I am really good at, I still utilize. I just don't do it 100 times a week, right?
00;09;23;12 - 00;09;44;16
Unknown
My team does it. They bring it to me and then I sign off on approval. Let's talk about some of the traps that people fall into when adding team members. I talk to people and let's say they they look at us and they go, I hey, I want to hire somebody in my business like you have like, okay, cool, here's what we did.
00;09;44;18 - 00;10;05;24
Unknown
And then they go out and do that and they hire the person and they dump the load of things on them. And then they don't. They come back three months later and they say it didn't work out. I had to let that person go. What are some of the symptoms you see that causes that? Oh, well, you know, hiring and being good at hiring is actually a skill.
00;10;05;27 - 00;10;40;16
Unknown
And so if you've never hired somebody before, you need to start with a framework. There's a common theme here. Everything we do has a framework, right. And a blueprint a checklist. But that's very, very important because you want to be able to have conversations with people and and grade them fairly based on consistent lines of questioning. We follow the Who process, and the what that enables us to do is be able to ask the same questions of every single candidate so that we have an accurate depiction of who each person is.
00;10;40;23 - 00;11;04;28
Unknown
We can't do that. If I just have a random conversation and I just happen to vibe with one person, and actually this just recently happened. We did a live training here in our land O'Lakes office, and my friend Anna wanted me to interview, somebody that she was hiring for an acquisitions role. She had already identified that the role she likes to do the least is acquisitions.
00;11;04;28 - 00;11;28;25
Unknown
And so that was what she was going to replace. So we had a whole roomful of trainees from our membership, and we did the interview. We projected it live. We did it over zoom. And the girl who had interviewed was charismatic. She was really well-spoken, but she did not meet any of the the key components of the job.
00;11;28;27 - 00;11;47;08
Unknown
But when we ended the interview, I pulled the room and asked every single person if they would hire her. Three quarters of the room said yes, and because she sounded great, she sounded great, but she wasn't. We were looking at a role that's doing acquisitions and closing, and she wasn't a killer. She was never going to be able to go for the clothes.
00;11;47;09 - 00;12;03;23
Unknown
Money was not important to her. She didn't. Yeah. So then like closing deals, she's good to just make a monthly payment and not caring about closing deals and making more money. So yeah, there were a lot of red flags there that people didn't see. And by the way, you mentioned the book Who by Jeff Smart and Randy Street.
00;12;03;25 - 00;12;26;11
Unknown
That book talks about a process, a multi-step process for hiring and provide some questions. That's the process in which we use in our business. Now, that's that's a great point. So first and foremost is clearly understanding who you're looking for. And then going through a process and understanding the components that if you don't see them, they're red flags so that you can select the right person.
00;12;26;11 - 00;12;47;05
Unknown
You get to the right person. And the second part that I see people fail at, whether you get the right person or not as you hire them. And then there's no 30, 60 or 9090 day onboarding plan, right? If if you don't know what you're going to train somebody on the day they start, they will fail. So you have to have that planned out.
00;12;47;07 - 00;13;12;15
Unknown
The easiest way to do that is as you're thinking about hiring for a position, is to start using loom videos to record the things that you're doing. So you create a library of learning. So when you do have somebody come in, you do have to train them 1 to 1. You do have to put time into that person, but you also have a video library of everything that you requiring them to do, and that will shorten their learning curve.
00;13;12;18 - 00;13;33;25
Unknown
Okay, cool. So as we kind of go back to the people Plus program that we have in seven bigger flipping, and we look at what we do for businesses in our community. The personality profile is kind of the start of everything, and we do use it for hiring, but it's just as important to use on yourself because your strengths and your personality strengths.
00;13;33;25 - 00;13;54;22
Unknown
You might be a complete introvert, want to be in the spreadsheets? Don't want to talk to people who you hire around you matters. You might need more charismatic people around you, people who are different than you. For like me, I can do details. I don't love them. I do them just fine. But I want to go fast and talk to a lot of people.
00;13;54;27 - 00;14;15;25
Unknown
So I need infrastructure around me to keep me grounded. I need people who are detail oriented who could be a second memory for me. And I need a little more structure around me. And I also need people who are driven around me. And if you look at my profile or your profile, which is similar, different but similar, we're both of a super fast pace, right?
00;14;15;27 - 00;14;36;15
Unknown
So if somebody is, a slower pace person, they like to think about it. They're probably not a good fit to work with us because we're moving quick and we don't have patience for those people. But in the People Plus program, when Dave takes people through that, he's looking at them first to say, yeah, that is a good fit for that profile.
00;14;36;15 - 00;14;52;22
Unknown
But that's not the only good fit for that job role. And you won't enjoy working with that person. You will burn each other out. So let's do it this way. Let's look for this person. So they have long devotee of you. Yeah. And when you when you do that you know we talk about it, it would frustrate us.
00;14;52;29 - 00;15;10;17
Unknown
But we're also talking about being fair to that person that you hire somebody who feels like you're running at 100 miles an hour and they can only run it 20 is exhausted by you. Right. So they're not going to be fulfilled. And it'll end in a big disaster. So when you're when you're looking to hire, you have to take personality into consideration.
00;15;10;17 - 00;15;41;11
Unknown
The other thing is specifically if we're talking about acquisitions that we need to take into consideration is what are your expectations of the role and what does your sales process look like? Because we've interviewed we've even had really great salespeople work in our organization that couldn't adapt to our process. And that was critical. When we found somebody that really did do that, it it changed the dynamic of our sales department and also changed our results.
00;15;41;13 - 00;16;04;02
Unknown
And I think the market conditions are also important to think about. So let's take two different sales reps today. Sales rep one is is a maverick. They're they're running and gunning. You come in there month one. They'll sign ten deals up for you. Now they won't have any notes in the CRM. You won't know exactly how they got to their offer price.
00;16;04;04 - 00;16;21;00
Unknown
It'll be a little bit of a mess, but they're like they're rainmakers. They're going to go out and make it happen. Salesperson two A little bit more methodical, a little bit more detail oriented. It's going to be more intentional about their deals. They might sign up less deals, but they're going to close. They're going to be high margin deals.
00;16;21;02 - 00;16;45;25
Unknown
And they're just a different type of person. I don't think either is right or wrong. But if I juxtapose our current market conditions against that, you have to be really good at getting good deals in this market. You can't just buy any trash and throw it on the MLS. The maverick salesperson. The closer 2021 that perfect, that person's perfect because just buy as much as you possibly can.
00;16;45;25 - 00;17;10;04
Unknown
Everything will sell for more. In today's market, I want somebody who's a little more methodical, a little, better underwriter. I want somebody who's going to keep good notes and I don't, and I'm not wholesaling all my deals anymore. I'm actually buying them. So there's not a right exact right salesperson. There's two different types, in my opinion. It so it market is important right.
00;17;10;04 - 00;17;41;13
Unknown
What's going on in the market I completely agree with you. The dynamic of the rest of your team is very important. This maverick that we're talking about, this person who signs up all these deals, what kind of stress are they going to put on the rest of the team? For example, your dispo person, right. If they're having to, you know, push out deals that are bad, reject deals that are bad, if they're having to go back and push for for recovery, if they're having to go back and push for reductions, that creates instability in your team and distrust.
00;17;41;13 - 00;18;04;14
Unknown
And so you have to really have your, your team set up in a way that maybe your dispo person is pre approving deals so that you're only signing up deals that are within, you know, you're allotted by box, whereas the other person, they may struggle to make enough offers because they are so methodical. They are so good at underwriting.
00;18;04;14 - 00;18;25;23
Unknown
They are so good at following process. Maybe they won't take enough swings of the bat, so maybe they won't take enough risks and you might not end up with enough deals. There's a giving a take there, and really, what you have to decide for your organization is what is your tolerance and what can you manage, and what are your standards and your processes.
00;18;25;23 - 00;18;45;13
Unknown
And like we have a very process. We have a very process driven sales, like the way that we do sales, very process driven. So we last year, so we have a very detail oriented guy is fantastic. He good with his numbers, great with his notes. Like for a lot of reasons. He's good at what he does, but he doesn't.
00;18;45;14 - 00;19;02;06
Unknown
He's not going to go sign up 30 deals in a month. Last year we looked at potentially working with another guy that we were going to bring on to our team who had experience, and we knew he was the Maverick profile. And we started to put things in place as we thought he was going to come on.
00;19;02;06 - 00;19;25;22
Unknown
We started to put things in place because we have a systems and process and a whole company organization that works really well. So how do we bring this person in? Let them increase our top line through their skill set, but put enough administrative infrastructure and support under this person so it doesn't break the rest of our system. Can you talk about some of our thought process and conversations that happen for that?
00;19;25;25 - 00;20;04;05
Unknown
Yeah. So, so actually, we were were well, you were worried about how I was going to feel after hiring that person because I do run a very process driven sales team. And so I was concerned about the the team dynamic, what that would do to the team. So here's what we talked about doing. We were looking to put in, a way for the notes to be transcribed and entered into the CRM so that he wouldn't have been taxed with doing that, because that was something that was probably not going to be accurate and two time consuming for that particular person.
00;20;04;07 - 00;20;29;06
Unknown
And not the best use of his time on. No, no, because he's a, he's a great, phenomenal sales guy. Yeah. But then also somebody to do the underwriting on the front end for him. Again underwriting not a strength details. No details. But what will bring you a lot of contracts. So how could we utilize our team to provide him the data that he needs to be able to make the offers that he's so great at making?
00;20;29;08 - 00;20;49;15
Unknown
And, and that could keep our team running without having to undo deals that maybe didn't make sense. We wouldn't have to worry about our closing rate failing. We wouldn't have to worry about having deals that maybe didn't pencil out in the end. Yeah. And I think if we just bring this back full circle, it starts with what does your business look like today?
00;20;49;15 - 00;21;09;12
Unknown
What do you want it to look like? What infrastructure and people do you need in place. What's your plan to go find those people? What's your plan once you find them to bring them in 30, 60, 90? Once you do that and you get them trained, who do you need next? Building out the entire organizational or accountability chart.
00;21;09;15 - 00;21;30;18
Unknown
And how are you managing those people in the right way based on their personality profiles? All of those are incredibly important components. And then as we went into detail, nuance in a sales role, for example, you as a leader got to understand your strengths and weaknesses of your team. So I don't know if you guys know this, but we do this in seven figure flipping.
00;21;30;25 - 00;22;00;05
Unknown
We have two communities. One is called the seven figure runway community. And it's for typically newer investors who are like 1 to 10 deals and building consistency and growing their businesses. And then we have a high level mastermind called the seven figure altitude. Mastermind and and altitude are, a bunch of businesses that are either at scale or they've built a lifestyle business that is very meaningful and they are building towards actual freedom.
00;22;00;09 - 00;22;22;29
Unknown
And we don't like to talk about you got to do 100 deals to be in this group, or you got to do, you know, $5 million annually because we focus on what we focus on legitimate businesses and then what their freedom is to them. And to me, that's way more important because I've seen a lot of dead bodies on the road to scale in their business.
00;22;23;01 - 00;22;39;00
Unknown
And they're or people who are scaled up, who hate their lives, their marriage is falling apart. And that's just not a community that we want to be a part of, of course, we have minimums, and everybody in there's running a legitimate business doing deals every single month. But, that's our high level mastermind, and we do a lot of in-person stuff.
00;22;39;00 - 00;23;03;20
Unknown
We're getting ready to go to Cancun together, here in about a month or 45 days or so. So and we're actually we're going to do a training at the tropical Mastermind, specifically on the Who method for hiring. Yeah, we're going to go into hiring. We're going to go into leadership. We have a unique business operating system that we call re boss, and we will help the businesses in our community gain momentum through implementation.
00;23;03;27 - 00;23;23;29
Unknown
I think people are going to absolutely love it. Of course they usually do. Plus we get to be in Cancun for a week. And if you didn't know this, we also do, occasional trainings for the public for higher level businesses. And we don't always do it, but we put them on. We just did one. We called that achieve scale.
00;23;24;05 - 00;23;48;06
Unknown
We're going to do another one here that later this month in February. That's going to be all about hiring and PR people plus system. And it's going to be open to anybody that training is going on on February 19th. So if you want to check that out, there'll be a link for that training in the description. Okay. Lindsay, give me some nuggets on what not to do.
00;23;48;06 - 00;24;12;00
Unknown
And some of the problems and mistakes that people make when hiring somebody. So a no hire is better than a bad hire. So get really clear on that quadrant that you suggested. Everybody write out what they are great at and what they like all the way through, what they are terrible at and what they don't like and figure out who you want to hire first, then interview, hire.
00;24;12;01 - 00;24;33;25
Unknown
Slow, fire. Fast. Yeah. And everybody you hear that right? And it doesn't become real and tangible until you've hired somebody. You go, oh crap, I need to get rid of this person. And then you sit on them for six months, and then it's been a year and they're just sucking the life out of your business. So we can actually we can talk about something that happened in our business this week.
00;24;33;25 - 00;24;55;20
Unknown
Right. It's scary. Go ahead. So maybe you don't know this yet. I'm just kidding. So we we actually had identified our operations manager. Diane had identified that we had an employee who was working a second job while she was working for us, and at first, she was a little bit conflicted about what she should do about it.
00;24;55;23 - 00;25;28;08
Unknown
And so as we talked about it, we we walked through what would happen if she did not let this person go if we didn't take immediate action and the impact it would have on the rest of our team? And right before that, you had just posted in our slack channel about standards. Yeah, yeah. The standards. We a lot of times I think we just we just kind of like, do just enough, right?
00;25;28;08 - 00;25;49;08
Unknown
Either we take a job and we're doing just enough, and I. I thought about this that morning. I've never done anything in my life where meeting the standard was enough. Like, I always viewed the standard as the bare minimum. And I attacked every job or every role I've ever had with, well, what's the max I can do? How can I set the record right?
00;25;49;09 - 00;26;09;00
Unknown
Like, how do I max this out? And I even think back to I always think back to a physical fitness test in the Marine Corps, which is a three mile run. It used to be set ups, 100, 100 set ups or crunches. Now it's a plank, but, for for when I was then it was a three mile run and it was, set ups.
00;26;09;00 - 00;26;32;17
Unknown
And then it was, pull ups, dead hang pull ups. So you needed to do 23 pull ups dead hang consecutively to get the max score. You needed to do 100 set ups to get the max score in two minutes. And then you needed to run an 18 minute three mile. So a six minute mile pace. I don't even know what the minimums were.
00;26;32;20 - 00;26;54;09
Unknown
And the score was out of 300. The only question I ever had was, am I going to get a 285, or am I going to get a 300? And if it was ever even under a 285, which by the way, the minimum score you can get to pass I think was like around 200 or 225. If I only had like a 279, I would be so angry at the preparation that I did for that.
00;26;54;12 - 00;27;09;11
Unknown
And then I think I look and we say, you know, hey, for a call or get 200 calls a day, that's the standard. And then you see somebody coming in at 200 a day, it's like, well, is that the max you can do? And they're like, no, like, what do you mean? Then why are you only getting 200?
00;27;09;11 - 00;27;29;11
Unknown
Like, how can you just want to do the minimum. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's not that is against our core values. And so that's why it's so important to have core values, but to also have standards. And the expectation of our team is that we surpass our standards every single day and that we hold each other accountable to those.
00;27;29;13 - 00;27;55;27
Unknown
And so Diane was really great about how she handled it, because she said she acknowledged, if I accept this behavior from this person, I have to accept this behavior from everybody. You get what you tolerate. What would our team look like? If everybody behave that way, we would fall apart. That's not an option. And so we had had other employees in good faith come and say, would it be okay if I took a second job?
00;27;55;27 - 00;28;12;20
Unknown
Or is there more work that you can give me? And we have told those people? No, because we show up and we're the best versions of ourself every day because our focus is on the business and we expect that of the rest of our team. So we can't allow for one person to do it. And I was really proud of how she handled it.
00;28;12;22 - 00;28;45;10
Unknown
She had never terminated, somebody position before, but, the person had lied and then they violated the standard. I think it's it's super powerful. Again on later this month, there will be a link in the comments. We're going to do a training. Anybody can come to it. Ideal. You come to it if you're in growth mode, like you have a business that's doing deals and you're looking to to grow your team, get some of your time back or grow your business, you'd be a good fit to come to that training.
00;28;45;10 - 00;29;01;26
Unknown
It will be a little more advanced talking about building a team and systems around them. So if you're like brand new, sure, you can come check it out, but it's not really for you, and it may be a distraction from what you're trying to do if you're brand new. So if you're if you're not brand new, if you got some deals under your belt, you're building a team.
00;29;01;29 - 00;29;18;24
Unknown
You're starting to maximize what you're able to do and you want to bring out more people, then you should come to the training, later this month. But definitely check it out in the show notes. All right. Another amazing seven figure flipping podcast. Lindsay, thank you so much. I hope you guys got a ton out of this one.
00;29;18;24 - 00;29;26;27
Unknown
I know you did. So go ahead and leave us a five star review or come check out some of the training we're doing down in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next one.
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