From Burnout to Breakthrough: Why the Right Team Strategy Matters with Pete Neubig - Episode - 530

It all goes back to number one, it's lack of communication. Because if you communicated correctly with that property not being leased, like for example, if you have a house and I don't call you for a month, and then finally a month later I call you and say, hey, I think we need to decrease the price, that's a different conversation than if I'm calling you every 5 days.

You're not just investing in a deal, you're investing in the team behind it. Because at the end of the day, buildings don't execute plans, but people do. But what if the best operators aren't just local or even in the same time zone? In this episode, you'll meet someone who turned operational chaos into clarity, who built a company, sold it, and then built something even better, not just for himself, but for every investor Tired of bottlenecks, breakdowns, and burnout. So discover how discipline, systems, and virtual workforce strategies become an unexpected edge and why smart investors are paying close attention. Welcome to Streams to Impact. I'm your host, Dr. Allen Lomax. I'm a psychologist professor who lost everything in 2008 crash. And found healing, not just through investing, but by learning to trust again in people, in purpose, and in the power of smart systems. This podcast is for professionals who've built success and are now ready to build freedom. Here we talk about creating passive income, yes, but also we talk about the meaning behind it, because wealth without impact. is just accumulation. So let's build something better. My guest today knows how to turn vision into execution and overwhelm into opportunity. Pete Newbigg is the co-founder, and he scaled an empire industry into a leading property management firm, exited successfully, and later led operations at one of the most innovative real estate companies in the country. Today, he's the CEO of VMP Solutions, a platform that helps real estate professionals scale with global talent, operational discipline, and unmatched efficiencies. His story is one of reinvention, systematization, And the kind of leadership every passive investor should be looking for. So Pete, welcome, and let's rewind a bit. Take us back to the early days of building an empire industry, and what drove you to start that business, and what were the toughest operational lessons you learned along the way?

Well, thanks, Dr. Lomax, for having me here today. Really appreciate the opportunity. That one question is a lot to pack in that one question. So, I'll just kind of start from the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I was 41 when I started my entrepreneurial journey. I had worked for 4 or 5 companies throughout the last 20-plus years before that. So, I started, you know, when I graduated college at like 21, and I worked till I was 41. So for 20 years, I was in the IT industry. And the one thing about the IT industry, especially back in the '90s and early 2000s, was that it paid well, but it wouldn't make you wealthy, right? So you always got paid just enough that if you wanted to start your own thing, man, you're like, oh man, I really don't want to take that hit because I'm getting paid pretty good. Also, technology is always changing. Super fun until it wasn't. And I just remember one day I'm sitting there in my office and I'm making really good money, but I just didn't want to be there anymore. And I felt that there was something better for me. So I went home that night and I told my wife and I said, hey, a piece of me flecks off and dies every time I drive to that office. Like, there's something more that I can do. And she said those famous words that I tell everybody now, like, I believe in you, like, whatever you want to do. So, it took me a year, but I ended up starting Empire Property Management on the side, kind of a side hustle. And first, it started taking my time in the mornings, then it took my time at lunchtime, then it took my time in the evenings, and it was already taking my weekend time. Once I realized I have something here, you would think that I would have quit my job and started really going into that business. No, but I hired a business coach first. While I still had a job, I hired a business coach because I knew that I knew IT, but I didn't know anything about marketing, sales, operations, HR, you know, and finance. So, I hired the business coach. And he was the one who really was leading me to like, hey, man, I think it's time that you quit your job and start the business. So, I had a business partner, Steve Rosenberg and I, and we decided like I was going to quit my job. And I did. December 1st, 2012 was the last time I was employed by somebody until I sold my business back in 2019. And so, the main reason was I just wanted more out of life. I just thought like I can do more. My family, my uncles, my grandfather were businessmen. Unfortunately, they never taught me how to run a business, but I saw them from afar and I saw how they and my cousins lived and then how I lived. And my dad was a firefighter, my mom was a house mom, and they were living in Westchester County. I was living in the Bronx. They were going to better schools. I was going to public school. They had nice cars. I had a hoopty. And I could just see the difference of owning a business, how it could really impact your life, your kids' lives, and Now, my cousins are 50 years old. Their kids, they have a business. The kids are in the business. It became a legacy. So, I decided I was going to go ahead and start this business to do property management. And this is back in 2011. I started in 2012. I quit my job. I was grinding, Dr. Lomax. I was working 80, 90-hour weeks. I finally quit my job and I was still working 80, 90-hour weeks to get the business going, right? It's kind of like that water pump where you got to keep pushing the pump down and down and down until finally, like, a little speck of water comes out and finally, it starts flowing. And that's what we did. And we built the business, did not know of anyone else doing single-family property management. And this is back in '12.

Mm-hmm.

So, internet really wasn't what it was. And I thought I actually built the industry. Like, I thought like I was like, because everybody I knew did multifamily management. And then, I come out and I found out there's a national organization of residential property managers. There's thousands of people that do this. And it was really eye-opening. And I'm so thankful that I found the organization because they helped me build my operations.

Yeah.

And so, as we're building the business, the business coach was instrumental in helping us with our marketing and our sales, and we were growing the business. And then Narpen was instrumental in helping me understand how to run the business. And to run a people-focused business, which property management is, you need— as you grow the business, you need more people. It's almost impossible to run an efficient business unless you have the right processes in place and if you can build some automation and you have the right infrastructure. So, your org structure, your org chart, Really does matter. And I would say one of the biggest things that we did was we were in chaos mode for many years. We just, every time we would grow, we would outgrow our systems. We'd try to build a new system, we would outgrow it. And finally, once we built the org structure correctly, technology had gotten better by 2017, 2018, and we were able to find automation tools that we can automate a lot of our processes. Because in property management, when you do a lease renewal, it's the same. You're doing the same thing over and over, and there's just a few different scenarios. Resident doesn't want to renew, owner doesn't want to renew, resident doesn't allow the annual inspection, whatever it is. So you can literally create the right process and you can put some policy behind that. And so we really embraced automation. But before that, we had to embrace the remote team. And so, the number one thing that really allowed us to go from a company that was struggling to have profit to profitability was being able to find people in Mexico, Philippines, and the second and third world countries where you pay them a fair salary for where they live, But you're getting a deep discount. And it also allowed us to find great talent outside of our 20-minute radius of, hey, we need somebody in Houston where we were located. And with traffic, they can only live like 20 minutes away, right? Because no one wants to drive more than an hour away. So, we were able to really find bilingual folks, college-educated to to really do our entry-level jobs. And I was able to hire 3 people for every 1 person in the States based on the math.

Mm-hmm.

And because of that, we were able to handle way more tasks and my US-based team were able to level up, which allowed me to level up. And so, all of a sudden, instead of me wearing 4 or 5 hats, I was wearing 1 hat, CEO. My property managers weren't doing $10-an-hour jobs. They were doing their $50,000-a-year jobs by being asset managers. And so, we were able to level everybody up. And at the end of it, right before I sold, I was working about 20 hours a week. So, I went from those 90 hours early on hiring the staff, growing the business, creating automation, And leveling everybody up to the point where I was working about 4 hours a day. And then circumstances decided— my business partner and I, he really wanted to sell. I was kind of happy where we were, but he wanted to grow and move on. So, we sold the business and I took a job with that company, Mind Management, for about a year and a half. And I realized that I was no longer employable. And so, I created VPM Solutions. And the reason why I created VPM was it had helped me using remote team members and it literally went from no profitability to negative to profitability. And also, it helped— I noticed that it helped. I had 23 people working for me as remote. And those 23 people were making more money than they ever made. They pulled themselves out of poverty. So, I'm like, this is like a triple win, right? As a company, I could win. I can make revenue and I can hire people. I can get people jobs in Philippines, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and I can help small business owners become profitable and many of them for the first time in their life. So, we built the tech, the platform, VPM Solutions. And now, we're about 4 years in and we have about 12— I think it's like a little over 1,200 jobs that are posted and filled through the platform. And, you know, we got people getting work because they're able to connect through our platform, which is pretty cool.

Well, that's an interesting trajectory there. So you sold your company and then you went to work for the company that you had just sold, which isn't an unusual Uh, transition. Uh, there are a lot of entrepreneurs do that, uh, for a number of reasons. One, they know that company, and, uh, on the exit of that company, they want to be sure that it's a successful company after they exit. And so they stay on for, for those reasons. But that could have been a wonderful retirement, uh, moment, uh, for you. So, uh, You, you went back to work for them, and after a short period of time realized that, that you wanted more. Instead of retiring, you started the VPM Solutions. So what gaps were you seeing essentially in the industry that inspired you to start that, and what kind of gaps have you filled? I, you know, there's, there's Upwork, there's Fiverr, and all kinds of other things where people can go and find these virtual assistants. assistants, and I've certainly used those, and there's a lot of gaps there. So what gaps did you see, and what gaps is VPM actually filling there for you, for the industry?

Yeah, well, let me answer the question on why, you know, when we sold and I took the job with them, the main reason why I took the job with them is because I wasn't sure what I was going to do next, and I knew I didn't want to do nothing. So that's kind of why I took the job. Why I created VPM is, as I saw, so there is Upwork and we modeled our product very similar to Upwork, but we're niched in property management and real estate. And so some of the things that we do that are different, for example, is we have free training for candidates that they can come on and they could take a training course in property management, real estate, Like they could take a course on leasing, they could take a course on maintenance coordination, they could take a course on a software that's supported by the that supports the industry. They can then test out and they can get a VPM certification. So a lot of people look for quote unquote experience. Well, if you live in Philippines, the chances of you having experience in single family multi you know single family multifamily property management in Texas is about zero. But if I take these Property Management 101 courses and I take this maintenance coordinator course, well now I have. At least I can speak the lingo. At least I'm showing initiative. So, that's our biggest differentiator is that we have the free training. The next thing we offer is because we're so niched down, you can actually search and sort by specific skills inside the industry or specific software inside the industry. We also have video profiles and we have a personality profile test. So, we have DiSC, that we use. So, we try to do like, how do we look at the hiring system from a company standpoint, right? You have core values, you have job descriptions. By the way, we have over 50+ job descriptions that are templated so you can use those. Then, you have your training and then you have your personality profile. So, what we do is we try to build tools That will help the company find the right person for them. We also built an application tracking board so you can search and sort people and you can easily identify where they are in the hiring process. And then you hire them and you pay them through our platform and the remote team member enters time in the platform. It's all free for the company side. When they pay the virtual team member, the virtual team member pays us a percentage. A small percentage is how they pay us.

In terms of execution, what are the biggest operational breakdowns you see in the real estate business and what are really the primary ways that the virtual teams are actually solving these problems for Yeah, I would say the biggest challenge in property management is there's a lot of these low-level, low-enjoyment job roles, right?

They're just not— the job role doesn't require somebody to make $60,000, $70,000 a year, $50,000 a year, but that's what people in the States want, right? They want a job making at least that, if not more, and they don't really want to work that hard. And so, you know, if you look at the property, single-family property manager, especially like leasing coordinator, maintenance coordinator, assistant property management, you know, onboarding specialist, there's all these little jobs that take a lot of time because if you have 300, 400, 500 single-family homes, you got maintenance requests coming in, you got leases up, you got turns, you got utilities turned on and off, you got offboarding, onboarding, move-ins, move-outs. It's a lot of stuff that goes on, and it's it's and because it's it's all human based, it's it's a lot of phone calls and emails and communication. And what happens is, if you hire you, if you hire U.S. base, then you just have less people because the company can't afford to have all these people. And when you have less people, you turn your company into a reactionary company. So the biggest challenge I see with property management companies. Is that they don't have enough people because they can't afford them, and all the people they have are just waiting for the email to bing or the phone to ring. They are super reactionary. And then what happens is you're even if they're working on something, they don't have enough capacity to tell the client, "Hey, I'm working on something." The client doesn't hear anything. Quote unquote, lack of communication. The client now is reaching out to the property management company, saying, "Hey, what's going on with this turn?" Even if I have the answers. The challenge has already happened where the client now feels like they have to manage the management company versus having a phone call outbound versus having a call that just says, hey, how's it going? Are you looking for more property? Every time a property manager calls a client, their stomach gets into a knot because they're always calling them for a challenge because they never call them just to say what's up because they're so busy. And so that would— what happens is it creates churn. In the business, right? So if you're— even if you're not in property management, if your clients aren't— if you're not speaking to your clients and you're only calling them when things are bad, um, or worse, you're not calling them at all, or you keep— or you're not answering their call, or any kind of lack of communication, the client's going to leave. So churn rate goes up. Also, when you have so many, you know, um, tasks that have to be done in a timely fashion Your team has to work late or weekends or they're on call all the time. There's gonna be burnout and you're gonna have churn on your US team or your team in general. So if you can leverage more people but not pay more money, then it makes a lot of sense because more people just means more tasks can get done. And now you can become from a reactionary company to a proactive company, increase that line of communication. Which, by the way, most people say they leave because a house doesn't get leased or maintenance doesn't get done. It all goes back to number one: it's lack of communication. Because if you communicated correctly with that property not being leased, like for example, if you have a house and I don't call you for a month, and then finally a month later I call you and say, "Hey, I think we need to decrease the the price." That's a different conversation if I'm calling you every five days, you know, or if I even tell you up front, "Hey, look, we'll try it at the higher price, but let's go," you know. So. Again, it's it's it's not that you didn't get the property lease; it's the lack of communication throughout the process. And by hiring more people, it just allows you. The funny thing is, it allows you to actually have more people. A lot of people say, "Well, you're going to dehumanize it because now they have to talk to Fred in accounting and and Enrique in property management." But no, if if if you're a client and you get a call inbound to you as the client. It doesn't matter who you're talking to because they're giving you all the information. But when I call inbound, I want to call one person. So I always recommend that the property manager, the highest paid person in your organization, the one who's got the license, the one who is, you know, is probably US-based, they get that inbound call. Now, if that person has questions about maintenance, accounting, and, you know, a lease, then the property manager will go get that information and then schedule a time. Hey, let me call you back tomorrow at this time and I'll get you all the information. So now I only have one person to communicate inbound, but outbound, if you're calling me up to tell me about my lease or call me up to tell me about a maintenance or call me up, it doesn't matter who it comes from. So you can actually humanize the experience and give your client much better experience by being the proactive one and reaching out to them.

Well, that's, uh, so that's, that's very interesting. So if I'm really visualizing the structure that you have in place here, you have the central office in, uh, In the states located in the community in which they're managing these various different properties. And then under that, there is a team, and those teams are also coordinated for people who are offshore by your accounting specialist or your lease-up specialist. All of those are offshored. And under them, then there are the team members who are actually dealing with the, the day-to-day operations. Am I getting that correct?

Yep, yep. You're— depends on the different structures, but broadly speaking, you got that 100% correct.

Well, that would make a huge difference. Well, because certainly, as you have figured out there, Property management is a person-centered intensive business, and the cost of all of those employees is one reason it's very difficult to make property management companies profitable. So very different approach there, which could make a real big difference for a lot of property management companies to go from just scraping by to actually becoming profitable endeavors there. Yep.

I honestly, I believe it's any service-based organization. If you don't need the person to be at the office or at a location, you can offload a lot of that, a lot of those tasks, right? So we get a lot of general contractors, right? We like, well, Pete, general contractors, they need to go to the house and do the The hammering, I get that. But they don't need to be the ones— they can take photos and send it to their virtual assistants, and the assistants can send them the before and the after photos to the clients. The assistants can create invoicing. The assistants can be the ones that do the SEO, the marketing, all the accounting. What happens is these guys, they go home, they have all the— they might have lost half the receipts. They got to go back in. They got to start building all this stuff where they can actually just— You know, have have all that work done while they're hammering. They just take a couple of photos, send it to their assistants. So we're seeing this in in any service-based business. There is going to be work that supports the main the main person, right? In this case, the general contractor. In our case, the property manager. And if you can get you know great people that you're paying their local market wage, but it's way below our local market wage. You— that's, that's a— it's a hack. It really is like a business hack, and it allows you to get more done, lose less people, lose less business, and be more profitable.

So what advice do you have for someone who is in property management and they are, like many of them are, struggling to get by because they just don't have the personnel to do that? Certainly I understand that contacting you, you've got those processes in place to help them. But there's still a big gap there from running a property management business on their own and transitioning to what it is that you have to offer. So you've got the training for the operational side. How do you help a property manager step into this endeavor?

Yeah, well, we also offer, we also offer recruiting services. So we have a white glove service which is free where we'll help guide you through the process. And we also offer a gold glove service which is a paid-for service, but we handle everything. But even before that, it really goes to Dr. Lomax, it goes to the mindset.

Right?

How do I even— like, I have to believe that I can hire somebody remotely 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 miles away that can actually work for my business. And so, the first questions that we normally get is, well, how does that even work? Right? What can they even do? How do I manage them? How do I know they're not going to steal from me? You know, and so, these are the questions that we That we try to help people when they're kind of on the fence. What we see is some people, they bump into a friend, friend goes, oh yeah, I got a virtual assistant saving my life. And then they say, okay, I want a virtual assistant. And then we ask, well, what is that virtual assistant going to do? And they're like, well, I don't know. And so the first thing you have to do is once you get the mindset, it's like, this can work. I can hire somebody remote and I'm going to trust the process. The next thing is you have to really determine what that person is going to do, and that becomes the job description. And I'm not talking about like answer phone calls, all other duties assigned by manager, right? That is not a job description. The job description is what I call the rules of the game or the rules of how to operate the seat. Because I'm every— there's, you know, in my company, there's a bunch of seats. They're called job roles. And in that seat, you have to understand how to operate the seat. That's called the job description. And then, I want to find the right person in the seat. That's called personality profile, right? And to get on the boat, that's called core values. So, what we do is we try to teach people, like, the first thing you need to know and really understand is what is the job role? Let's get really— like, you don't have to post a job with every bullet point, But your job description has to have every bullet point. And then, you can write the job role or the job description for the right attitude for the person you're looking for because we truly believe these are entry-level jobs. I'm not Elon Musk. I'm not sending people to Mars. I am literally just trying to do lease renewals, maintenance coordination.

Mm-hmm.

So, I don't need somebody with 50 years' experience and a PhD. What I do need is somebody who has those same core values as I do as a company. Okay? So, if, you know, provide customers with a wow experience, integrity, you know, positive, whatever those are, that's the type of person you're looking for and those are the type of questions you should be asking in your interview. The next thing is they need to understand how to operate the seat. So, if I write a job posting that says, hey, this is the type of person I'm looking for, these are the things they have to do, and then this is the type of personality for that job role, I'm going to attract the right people. I don't want to attract 1,000 applicants, I want to attract 10, and then I want to weed them out and find the best fit for, uh, for our business. So, we try to— because what we found, um, most businesses, not just property management, they have a process for everything except hiring. But I, I'll be in a room with 100 people, I'll tell everybody, okay, who here has a process for hiring? Stand up. Like 3 people stand up out of 100. It's crazy. So, what we do is we teach them. That's what the white glove does. We kind of give them our hiring process and we walk them through it. That's why it's free. For gold glove, hey, I don't have time to learn the process. I'm just going to trust your process and then we use our process and we handle all of that. But that's— those are the things that we do. And then, of course, once you hire somebody, you have to grade them. And that's where key performance indicators come in. So, like— so, every job role, every job description that we have on our platform, we have recommended personality profiles. And recommended KPIs for that job role. I'm a big fan as a CEO that everybody in your organization should have at least one number that they're striving for, and that would be the KPI. Yeah.

Well, I'm frequently surprised at the level of education and the talent that is out there. And I have some excellent assistants myself. The issue that I continually run into is the language barrier. These individuals understand English and they can write and communicate quite well in English, but I cannot understand them. The accents are so strong that it is challenging to have a conversation with them. Do you run into that?

Yeah, of course. I mean, we have over 42,000 people on our platform. Not everybody is going to speak perfect English. The way we get around that is we do have an English test on our platform. So, okay, conceptually, do you understand the English language? But we also have self— we also have a video resume. So, most people on our platform, they have a video resume. So, you can go on our platform and watch the the 30-second, 1-minute video resume and determine right then and there, do they have the level of English you're looking for? If it's back office workers, I may pay a little bit less. And what I found is like English proficiency, the better they are, the better they speak the language, the more money that they can command. So if you're like, if you have a tight budget, but it's going to be real back office stuff and you can do most of your communication through email and it's going to be good enough, then you can hire somebody with a little bit less skilled in understanding them, knowing that you're going to have to do a lot of email or WhatsApp texting to understand them. But anybody who's customer-facing, then most people want somebody who has obviously clear, really decent English. And they also, for what it's worth, they're okay with like a Hispanic accent, maybe a South American or Central America or Mexico accent, but they're not okay with like the Indian accent. And for some reason, I think what happens is the US customer, when they get that South Indian accent, they've been taught, well, that's just some call center somewhere. And these are folks that are directly hired, right? So it's called a direct hired contractor. So it's not some call center in the Philippines. It's actually somebody who works with you full-time in the Philippines. So, so that's why for us, it's important that we have candidates, you know, all over the country— oh, I'm sorry, all over the world.

Yeah, the strongest accent I've had problems with is the Nigerian accent, but there are some talented people in Nigeria, but it's challenging to communicate with them. Well, Pete, it's been good having you. What are your closing thoughts?

Well, Dr. Lomax, first, just thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to always talk about business and VPM. I'm super passionate about it. I would say my closing thoughts, if you're listening to this and you're working full-time and you really want to start your business, I would say that don't quit your job and then try to figure out what you want to do next. Find out what you want to do and start doing that on the weekends and at nights. And then clear up any debt that you may have if you can. So this way you can take advantage of the opportunity because you will make less money those first 3 or 4 years than you're making today when you start a business. And if you're smarter than me, you wouldn't start a business, you actually buy one. So maybe you want to buy a business that already has revenue coming in. That would probably be smarter. I am a glutton for punishment starting 2 businesses. And then, if you're running a business and you are service-based and you're having trouble getting that profit, I would throw people at the problem first using remote team members. Then, that allows you to kind of let the dust settle. And then, I would look at how do you— what software in your industry can you utilize to create some automation? This way, you can have the same people, but now you can double in business and you don't have to increase your workforce. So, of course, AI is huge now. So, leverage automation, AI, and utilize the remote team members to even help you build those processes out is the way I would go about it. So, those are some parting thoughts.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Pete, for being with us. And you can find Pete at his website. Which is vpmsolutions.com. Thank you, Pete, for being with us. And Enlightened Investors, thank you for joining us once again. Please take a moment to like, share, and subscribe, and we'll see you in the next episode.

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