A few years ago, a coach with whom we were working at that time suggested that we hire a local personal assistant. The objective was to enable us to focus our attention ON our investment business, rather than keeping ourselves busy IN the business. Fair enough. It made sense.
So we put an ad in Craig’s List, seeking appropriate candidates. The response was great and we narrowed the list of candidates down to several good ones on paper. We then interviewed a few of the best candidates and were able to identify the “right one.” But, to our dismay, we ended up not being able to hire her. Why not? Two major reasons:
- We were simply not generating sufficient revenues to justify hiring her.
- We were not prepared to off-load the tasks that we were doing because we were not writing down our operating procedures.
Fast forward to mid-year 2014. We were travelling out of state nearly 2.5-months straight. Our wholesale business came to a screeching halt. Because of the weekly direct-marketing campaigns, to which we were committed whenever we were back in town, we were receiving residual leads electronically even during our absence. We were letting good leads go to waste simply because we were not in town to handle them ourselves. This was the moment when we realized that 50% of profit is better than 100% of zero profit.
With this background, we decided that it would make sense for us to work with a local partner on wholesale deals – a partner for whom both David and I already had a lot of respect. Working with him required no additional out-of-pocket expenses that would go directly to him. We were already spending money on generating leads weekly. Our partner knew that we were serious about our investment business. He proposed that we work together because (1) he did not enjoy the marketing part of the business and (2) he was good at making deals happen with the sellers. When the property is under contract, he has his list of buyers to whom he can advertise; and so do we. Voila! His proposition was to split the profit 50/50. We said, “Sure!”
David loves to travel. So one of our main goals has always been to get to a point where we can run our business profitably from anywhere around the world. In this day and age of the Internet, it should be relatively easy to implement such a system – so long as we have a good support system locally. We are fortunate to have stumbled onto a partner who can keep our wholesale business humming even during our absence.
Partnership is a form of delegation. And, at least in our case, there is no pay check that we have to cut. Nor do we have to provide an operating procedure on how to get his part of the job done; he already has plenty of experience doing what he does best. We are continuing to fill the pipeline for this partnership every single week. And I am monitoring the progress, or lack thereof, closely on a weekly basis. It will be interesting to see how we will have performed by the end of 2015.
There are many other tasks that David and I continue to perform ourselves, which can be delegated to a local personal assistant. To do it right, as part of our weekly business review, we began (1) figuring out who is doing what and (2) writing out the procedures – so that the next time we are ready to find the “right one,” all we need to do is show him/her our operating procedures. A few years ago, as noted above, we jumped into trying to hire someone when we did not know what we were doing. Today, we know that we will be ready to hire an assistant when we are convinced that doing so will result in tripling our revenues.
Happy Investing!
