How I Run 11 Sober Living Homes In Less Than 1 Hour A Day

Running sober living homes can be very rewarding work, but it can also feel overwhelming at the beginning. What if you could focus on automating 80% of the work and focus on growing your business instead? By the end of this video, you'll have a complete system for automating and streamlining applications, monthly fee collections, maintenance, staff communication and compliance, all while working less. I personally started three sober living homes in a six month period. 5. My first 12 months and those first three homes, I 100% felt overwhelmed. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I had no idea how to handle or manage one of these homes, let alone work with people in recovery. I just really wanted to help people. And I had real estate experience and so I knew how to get homes up and running very quickly. But I had a learning curve for sure that first six months of trying to figure out how to make this work. I was a busy real estate agent, a busy real estate investor, looking at new properties, new deals all the time, and I had to manage the people inside of our homes now who I had no idea had to deal with. And the amount of worry you have and just anxiety at the very beginning, doing something new often causes you to overreact, overthink. And there were many days where I would legitimately walk to every single one of my properties every day, check in just to make sure things were good, just to make sure that if anything was going wrong, that it would be addressed right away. Only to realize that honestly, most of the time nobody was home and I didn't really need to do that. So I started thinking, you know, why am I making myself go to every property every day? Why am I worried about it? There's probably some very simple things I can put in place. And so today we're going to talk about what some of those things are that allowed me to get my time back, get peace of mind again, and really make sure that my homes are running smoothly whether I was there or not. Because here's the honest truth. If you don't build systems, you are the system. And so if you want your business to operate without you someday, you have to be able to put certain things in place, different processes, document them, streamline them, and then delegate them, either through leverage, which would be a tool, a system or person so that you never have to touch it again. So some of the key things that you can automate are your intake and resident onboarding process, bed availability, tracking the monthly fee collection, and just finances in general, house rules enforcement, staff communication and team management. And maintenance and security. We'll even talk about automating the discharge process. So first and foremost, let's talk about automating your intake process and bed availability. Just knowing what beds are available, where. If you're first starting off, you might just have one home. I grew really fast and so we had multiple properties that we had to manage and figure out was a bed available here, is it available there? And then what's cool about having multiple locations is you actually get to give people choice, especially if you're across multiple cities or in different neighborhoods, so that they can be close to work, close to family, things like that. So it's important to know at any given time what beds are available, which it's literally a KPI you should be tracking in your business. The KPI is a key performance indicator. It's going to be one of those numbers that matter most to the success of your business. And for us, that is the occupancy rate. How many vacant beds do we have versus how many occupied beds do we have? We want to stay above 85%. The tool we like using for this is Sobriety Hub. Basically, Sobriety Hub is a web application where you can track intakes, discharges, how long somebody's been in your home. There's an application process that's fully digital. And what's cool is people can actually fill out that application. And instead of immediately being like an intake and assigned a bed, it kind of sits in a, in a gray area. It's like this holding pattern. Until you're able to review that application and then assign them to. To a bed. One other thing you can do inside of there is actually assign them a chore once they're inside the home. So it really makes onboarding super simple or even just collecting applications. So we literally have a button on our website where people can click to reserve a bed, fill out the application, agree to and sign our house rules and really be ready to move in. Once we're able to talk with them and make sure they're a good fit and they do the intake. What I love about it is does have the electronic signature feature built in so that I don't have to buy a standalone or pay for a standalone service like DocuSign or PandaDoc. It's literally inside of the application. They can sign it on a mobile device using their finger or online just using their mouse. You also get an email notification as soon as that happens. So if you're just kind of monitoring thing and managing multiple homes and you have staff inside of each home handling this process, you still get notified when a new application or a new intake takes place. If you want to get started with Sobriety Hub yourself or check it out, they do offer demos and there's a link below. You can simply use code Andrew and get a 10% discount. Now, the next thing we're going to talk about is automating your collections and your financials. So there's a couple of tools we use for this. There is some embedded functionality inside of Sobriety Hub for this, but what we do most often for people who are paying out of pocket is we're either using Cash app or tool like Schedule My Rent, which is an online rent collection tool. Very affordable, very cheap. What I like about Cash app is you can just plug in your your business account information and automatically deposit the cash app funds into your business account without having to pay any kind of additional fees, which is very nice. Schedule My Rent does cost a little bit of money. I think it' dollars. It's very little for the landlord or for you as the owner of the property. The residents, the sober living occupants are going to pay for the fees for doing whatever they need to do. But what's cool about it is in sober living, you run into a lot of people who don't have bank accounts. And the reason for that is banks actually check your credit when you're opening a checking and savings account. So if you have poor credit, imagine being, you know, in addiction previously, what that does, the havoc it wreaks on your life and you know, you have evictions, you have charge offs, judgments, all these different things, terrible credit. Many people are not able to establish a bank account again very quickly. And so it ends up being a very cash business. And people are paying with money orders. They might get a check, cash it at Walmart, get a money order and then pay you. So that was happening to me a lot. What's cool about Schedule My Rent is it allows people to pay their monthly fees by money order. Another tool just for tracking financials, total income, total expenses would be QuickBooks. We use that because it is the standard for bookkeeping across America and it's going to give you your P and L at the end of the year. If you're looking to establish business credit and looking to honestly just like get any kind of financing or funding for your business, even personally, if this becomes your main income like it has mine, then you're going to want to be able to show a P and L, especially when it comes to tax time. But more specifically, Just to be able to actually show that you're making money doing this. And it allows you to do everything else you do in life like get home loans and get, you know, new, new credit. I will put a link with a discounted rate for QuickBooks down below as well. Basically every tool we talk about, I'm going to try to give you hookup and it'll be in the description so that you can just click there instead of having to figure all this out on your own. Now, when it comes to actually just making sure that your finances are protected, that you know that you have legal and liability protection from the way your company is set up in the first place, you typically want to start with an llc. This is a very simple system to protect yourself that a lot of people don't think of when they're starting their first business or, you know, jumping into sober living. So I do think it makes sense to establish an LLC to protect yourself and have an operating business. We do that through Prime Corporate Services. They are an excellent service. I've used them for all of my entities except my very first one, which I did through LegalZoom and honestly regret doing because I had a lot of issues with that initial setup and had to do a lot of other things myself. And so for every other subsequent business I've used Prime Corporate Services, literally they just charge the hard cost, what it is to set up your first LLC with them. They do not charge you additionally. And they'll charge like maybe an extra hundred dollars for filing your beneficial ownership interest form, which I think is something you have to do again. That's been on again, off again, but I think it's back on currently. And so they will handle that for you. Get your EIN number, get all that stuff so you can just walk into the bank, set up your get a business credit card and you're good to go to get that set up and to go and get, you know, a special rate through prime, you can go to sober livingriches.com LLC. Now, when it comes to automation of house rules and resident accountability, there's a few things that we do here. Number one, I do have a team and we use Slack for internal communication. So Slack is a great tool just for teams to be able to talk to each other. We have different channels. For example, we have one for repairs in our homes. We have one for new intakes. We have one for. For just general. Slack always has a general channel. You can't delete it. So just kind of general communication. We even have one for the Higher level services that we do now. And so we will communicate based specifically on those services like case management or things like that. We will also use Google Workspace number one for our domain and our emails attached to our domain. So all of our emails are company emails. We love Google Workspace for that reason. We also use it for Google Drive. We share a lot of documents there. None of them are HIPAA compliant documents. You do have the ability through Google Workspace to actually add in HIPAA compl, but we don't like to share personal, private client information there. But we do share SOPs, you know, different policies and procedures, different things there so that our team can access them at any given time. And then lastly, making sure that the rules are being followed, making sure that people aren't coming and going when they're not supposed to. Because we do have our curfew, there's a couple of things. Number one is we use keypads instead of locks with, you know, regular keys. The reason why is we want to give people codes. Imagine like an Airbnb where you had to give every single person a key. Like that's just ridiculous. And so since we have a lot of people coming and going, we just use keypads like Quick Set Halos. We give people a code when they come in and then we can actually make that code time based so that it doesn't work after 11 o' clock during the week, 12 o' clock on the weekends, which is typically our curfew. Because I tell people nothing good happens after midnight, which is 100% true, especially if you're focused on rebuilding your life. We can remove that code in the case we want to discharge somebody. So we're never messing around with keys. And it's very easy to tell because there's a log and it shows who tried to access the home and at what time. And you can see the history of it. So super helpful to have that. The second thing is, Kim, cameras everywhere, literally. Doorbell cameras, motion sensing floodlight cameras around the house and then indoor cameras inside so we can see and hear what's going on. A lot of times people inside of your home don't realize even though it's in the agreement and they're agreeing to it when they move in, they don't realize that we could hear everything they're saying. So if you listen in, you'll hear some interesting things. People don't usually act on it. They just say some crazy things sometimes. But it's been great for catching people doing things they aren't supposed to do. But most importantly, it is a proactive deterrent to somebody doing something stupid. So we have it on the kitchen, because in a lot of traditional sober living homes, you would hear the complaint that, you know, food was getting stolen and things were coming up missing from the refrigerator or the pantry. And so we always, from day one, after hearing this, put a camera on the kitchen and on the pantry, on the refrigerator, just so that people understand they're being recorded. And that keeps everyone honest. No one even tries to steal anything. We rarely, if ever, hear about anything like that happening because we were just proactive in making sure people understood we're watching you. And so don't do anything dumb because we're watching you. Literally, a lot of these upfront preventative measures solve so many headaches on the back end that I'm just so happy we did it. So my first six months, we didn't have this. We had a lot of problems, a lot of issues. My second six months, like, 99% of the problems went away because we had these proactive things in place. So I mentioned that we have a Slack channel for repairs, but when it comes to maintenance requests, we really want to build a team. And so we have a handyman. We do have a lot of people in the trades inside of our home. So occasionally we'll identify somebody who communicates well and is responsible, and we will hire them to do some work around the homes. Occasionally some people might try to just do work on their own. And so I've been surprised with people saying, hey, I fixed this, I fixed that. But we try to limit that because we want licensed skilled workers working on our homes. So we'll identify just a few people who might. It might make sense to pay like a handyman fee or kind of fee for service. And they can do some things around the home. But the way we track that actually is through Google forms. So we have a form that our team submits for what the main entrance request is. Again, these can come up during our weekly house meetings. Or it could just be a house manager inside of the home saying, hey, this is what I was told needs to be fixed right away, or like an emergency situation or a plumbing issue. And so we get that form, it fills out a spreadsheet, and what we try to do is get back to that and fix it within as soon as possible. But nothing should drag on past seven days for sure, even if it's a small thing. Something else that we like to do is work with virtual assistants. And so if you are not familiar you can literally hire people from all over the world to do things for you. I know people who have hired virtual assistants in the Philippines to just watch their security cameras. I personally don't do that. I have enough of a team to handle that here in the States. But these are folks who typically going to get some kind of arbitrage on meaning Instead of paying $25 an hour in California, you could pay three or four dollars an hour in the Philippines. That's a good living for someone in the Philippines to do just kind of menial tasks, maybe data entry, things like that. So we do have virtual assistants who work in our business and that actually helps things run really smoothly and make sure that, you know, certain things stay updated when otherwise they wouldn't be where it would cost an arm and a leg in the United States, especially in expensive California where I am, just to make sure simple things get done. So that is basically it. I mean we talked through a lot of the different systems. I don't like to use too many because I just want to, you know, the mental bandwidth it takes to think of a million different softwares is annoying. So I try to find, you know, some, some Swiss army knife tools like Sobriety Hub that can really make life easy for sober living owners. And once you automate, you stop working in the business and can start working on the business. As a CEO, as the owner of a sober living home, you should simply be in charge of the big relationships, right, the key relationships that keep sending people to your homes. You should be in charge of making sure, you know, overall the homes are safe, secure. But you can also focus on growth and looking at new potential opportunities for locations, new relationships that you want to work with, new contracts. You shouldn't have to be too involved in the day to day. And honestly, as long as you have an intake process dialed in, like our seven page intake sheet, as long as you have the automated process of not having to use a whole bunch of paper, honestly our intake stuff is all online now, but it used to be paper. Literally used to sit down with every single person for 30 minutes and go through the sheet until I realized holy crap, I can just put this online and they can do it before I even sit down and meet with them. Or maybe I don't need to meet with them. We can talk for five minutes on the phone now because I got the full application online. So these are things that really saved me a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of headache and made it so that I can now run hello and sober living homes and spend less than an hour a day doing it. If you like this information, please like subscribe and comment below. Let us know if this helped or if you have additional questions. Other things you want to cover on future videos here, please drop that in the comments and let me know. Also, every single link of the tools that we talked about today will be in the description to make life easier for you. They typically will come with a discount because we like to hook you up here. And again, if you know if you're here, thank you for spending your time watching in this channel. And if you need additional help starting and running a sub reliving home, maybe you've tried to start one and you're not quite filling up or it's an idea you have and you want to shortcut the time to implement and get this thing up and running without making all the mistakes I made early on. Click the link below and book a call with my team. We'd be happy to talk through your specific scenario, your state, the legalities, the regulations that might happen in your area or there might not be any, and talk through what this could look like for you and give you a roadmap to success. We'll see you next time.