Course: Building Your Team- NEW
Chapter 1: Lesson 1
In this outline we’ll be covering the importance of building relationships through various tools such as networking, marketing and researching competitors. This means knowing what roles are involved in the business, how to fill those roles with internal and external resources, and knowing your competition to leverage them as a part of your network. Networking and getting to know your competition is a huge part of our business. Now a lot of times people associate competition with people who you’re going to be competing against, and ill tell you that one of the biggest shifts that you can make is not looking at your competition as exactly competition but looking at them as fellow colleagues in the same industry. In other words, there’s way more opportunity for us to make money working together than as competitors working against each other or competing against each other. I know in my business, we grew way faster as long as I could continue to put deals together. As a wholesaler I would work with other wholesalers, and as a rehabber I would work with other rehabbers. When I have a project I can’t take on I can wholesale it to another rehabber and with wholesalers, I would network with other wholesalers because if I didn’t have buyer for a particular project I would go leverage another wholesaler’s list and give them a part of the profit so that the deal got done and that is just the way we work together as opposed to us competing against each other.
Chapter 1: Lesson 2
Identifying Roles and Responsibilities:
By identifying and defining roles and responsibilities within your company you are creating systems. Having systems in place give employees direction, increase quality control, reduce human error, maintains consistency, increases efficiency, avoids duplication of work effort and allows for accountability and measurability. If any action or process is does repeatedly within your business you should always systemize it. By establishing clear roles and responsibilities within your company and putting systems in place you will not only relieve yourself of a lot of the stress but it will also increase your business productivity and overall success. There are four simple steps to consider when identifying roles and responsibilities. Number one, creating departments. We will actually provide you with a template to utilize for various departments so check this off your to do list. Number two: identifying jobs and responsibilities within each department. Make a list of what jobs and associated responsibilities align with their respective department. For example, your accountant role will belong in your financing department. Number three: assign roles. When you’re starting out, most of the responsibilities will have your name assigned to the role. Don’t worry if you don’t have many team members yet, even if youre still responsible for all of the deparetments right now, you’re creating systems so that when you’re ready to pass it on to someone else you can. Number four: checks and balances. Put some simple controls in place so that you’ll know when work is getting done. This doesn’t mean that you have to micro manage nor does it mean you’ll go and simply trust someone to get work done. As an example, we always have a weekly meeting to make sure we’re tracking progress as a team. So each department has the opportunity to show what they accomplished last week and what their looking to accomplish this week.
Chapter 1: Lesson 4: Assigning Roles
You might find that there are still some empty squares and that’s ok, for now. The goal is to work yourself out of a job. You can also assign responsibilities within a certain role to somebody else. For example, do you know anyone who can stuff, seal and stamp envelopes that would work for cheap? Maybe a family member, maybe a friend that’s in between jobs? My kids love to work with me and it allows me to spend more quality time together when these types of tasks are getting done. Refer to the chart in the course materials that lists all of the roles and several responsibilities and see how many names you can assign to each square. So let’s go to the next chapter and look how you can build your team so you can remove your name from a few more of these squares.
Chapter 2: Lesson 1: Building Your Real Estate Super Team
Real estate investing is a team sport. The investors who assemble the best teams, with the strongest contributing members are always the most successful. It is vital that you surround yourself with the right people as it directly corresponds to your level of success. The key members of your real estate dream team will include: real estate agents and brokers, attorneys, lenders, contractors, buyers and investors, other professionals such as virtual assistants. These are all people who you are going to be enrolling onto your team. You not only need to find people who can fill these roles, you need to find the right people to fill these roles as they are an extension of you and your business.
So let’s look at each team member in more detail. Real Estate Agents/Brokers: You want as many realtors and brokers as possible to bring you deals. If you do not have a real estate license you will need access to the MLS (Multiple Listing Service). Look for in an agent/broker that has experience with or willing to learn to work with investors. Attorneys can also bring you deals and they can help you with complicated transactions. You’re looking for someone with a solid understanding of contract laws and other aspects of law relating to real estate proceedings. Lenders – you want both private and hard money lenders as you’re looking for funding on properties that most banks shy away from. Have these lenders lined up and knowledgeable about your business so when you have a deal, funding is ready to go. Contractors are also key. You need someone reliable that can produce a quality product. You’ll have general contractors and subcontractors and need to build a trusting relationship with them so you spend less time at a job site and more time getting deals. Later we’ll discuss in more detail your competitors, however, you need to think of other investors as buyers as well as people who can bring you deals. Other professionals include a CPA, stagers and photographers. These team members contribute to the success of your business and should not be overlooked. Finally, I want to mention or introduce virtual assistants, otherwise known as VAs. These are people that are usually hired online through a service like myoutdesk.com, eLance or odesk.com are just a few of the services and can perform functions virtually. This typically is a team member you identify after performing the function yourself several times and have a solid system in place for them to follow. All of these roles can help you with your business yet are not necessarily part of the day to day activities, except maybe the VA. So the key question is how do you build this team? Before we dive into the how, let’s do a quick activity to ensure you are able to identify these team members that can help you build your business.
Chapter 3: Lesson 1 Networking to Build Your Team and Buyers List
There are three primary strategies you’ll utilize throughout your business to build your buyers list and get deals; Networking, Marketing and Researching your competition. Networking is meeting and communicating with individuals with the goal of establishing relationships for mutual benefit. You should always be networking whether in person or online. Here are a few in person networking opportunity suggestions, be sure to refer to the Network Marketing Manual for more information on each: Auctions, Local Real Estate Investor Association, also known as REIA, Meetings; Homebuilders association meetings, and home or trade shows. Additionally, you can create your own networking events, which happen to be the most powerful. . You also want to use online resources as well such as meetup.com, linkedin.com, facebook groups and angie’s list are just a few options. These relationships can lead to more business either directly or indirectly through referrals. It takes daily commitment to establish and keep relationships alive. The overall goal of networking is to promote business and to educate the widest possible audience on services offered by your company and find ways that you and others can be mutually beneficial to each other. Broader exposure often leads to new opportunities, prospective clients and new ideas and there’s no better way to achieve this goal than through networking. Marketing is another strategy that I’m not going to go too far into at this point as we have an entire phase dedicated to it. The key here is your marketing efforts should be consistent. Without marketing no-one knows your business exists. We’ll talk about various campaigns to implement so you can make sure your business is the leader in your market. Researching your competition ties very closely with both networking and marketing as you’ll utilize both to learn more about other investors in your area and how you may be able to work together. The key take aways are you need to get to know people, determine if they are the right fit, develop the relationship, manage contact information and provide opportunities that can benefit all parties. As an example: One of the relationships that has been very beneficial to my business is with my hard money lender. Now I’ll tell you, my hard money lender loves me because as a wholesaler I always give him referrals of people who are looking to buy my wholesale transactions and they always need to fund the transactions so I directly connect them to my hard money lender and I get a referral fee. It’s a wonderful relationship where everyone wins. We have a number of stories just like this one all because we are continuously building our team which in turn builds our buyers list and gets deals done. Let’s dig into details and look at how you can leverage your systems to build your team.
Chapter 3: Lesson 2
Alright, let’s talk briefly about where to network. We should be networking anywhere and everywhere we go. If we are in a room with another person that is breathing; it’s an opportunity to network. The unique thing about the industry of real estate is the pretty much everybody in our country has a need for it. Its not like we are focused in on a niche like women’s perfume or something like that. Everyone has a need for our services or will know somebody that does. So throughout our day to day actions, just through the course of life in general there’s going to be many opportunities; in the grocery store, at the bank, in at the gym. We always want to be on alert looking for opportunities. And then on the other side we are going to have those specific tasks that we set up like networking events that we join where we go to a meeting at 7pm with networking in mind and just as a side note, one thing I like to tell our students is look for networking groups that aren’t just real estate specific. I’ve built a lot of my business through relationships I’ve met in groups in general where business owners meet. So don't just isolate yourself to REIA meetings. Let me tell you some other places that would be good for you to network: auctions, online, etc.
Chapter 3: Lesson 3 Building Your Buyers List
One of the most important parts of your master contact list is your buyer’s list. This is a list that you will compile of potential buyers who you will market your deals to. It is critical for you to begin developing this list as soon as possible. It will help you greatly when it becomes time to market your wholesale deals to potential buyers allowing you to locate qualified buyers quickly and efficiently. You can find buyers in several places and every time you find one add them to your contact list. There are a number of strategies to build your buyers list, like going to REIAs, executing direct mail campaigns, posting on craigslist, utilizing bandit signs. We won’t go into detail, as this is part of your Top Marketing Campaigns course, but I would like to share a couple of ways that I build my buyers list really fast and efficiently. Now the first way goes back to right when I was getting started as a Mastery student and I was going to the foreclosure auction just to understand the foreclosure process and utilize it as an educational tool. And what I found there was that this was a place that every single Friday at the courthouse steps there would be a gathering of all cash buyers. Not only were they all cash buyers but they were motivated enough to buy properties sight unseen. Now, there couldn’t be a better place for me to build my buyers list than utilizing the auction as a networking event for my buyers list. It worked awesome. The other way that I built my buyers list very quickly and efficiently was by posting a craigslist ad every time I had a deal, looking for all cash buyers. So I would continuously put out ads on craigslist about the deals that I had and every time I did that I would get calls from all cash buyers looking to purchase my transactions. Even though I had maybe already sold the transaction, I would still answer the phone and interview potential buyers and through that consistent process, my buyers list grew exponentially.
Chapter 4: Lesson 1
What is an Elevator Pitch
Hey what’s up Mastery. Today we’re going to talk about your elevator pitch and why it’s so important, but before I get into that let’s just talk about what an elevator pitch is. It’s really simply just a 30 to 60 second conversation that we’re going to have in many different places throughout the course of our life. It could be bumping into somebody at a grocery store, could be going to a networking event and knowing we’re going in there for that reason, but really the term elevator pitch was coined just with the idea that if you got into the elevator on the 4th floor and you’re going up to the 12th and you have the opportunity to engage with someone on there can we summarize our business, what were about and the potential opportunity in that time frame before they get off.