15 at 5 #11: The Struggles of Scaling

What's going on, people? 15 at 5. We have, um, another episode, normal episode. We're gonna go through the struggles of scaling because that is what we are doing right now, and that's what we are struggling with right now. Struggling in a good way, obviously, right? I mean, when you're growing, you're always struggling, but Um, something we're really in the thick of right now, uh, something I kind of wanted to further explain. So what's going on, Isaiah?

Yeah, nothing much. Yeah, scaling's definitely a big aspect of this business. So, uh, yeah, a lot to talk about here. Hi, how are you, Jake?

It's great, I'm doing good. Long day, but you know, we're getting after it at 15:05. Um, I think one of the biggest things— well, what is scaling, first of all, right? I think you're going to bring up something about a book that's really beneficial for learning how to scale. But scaling is essentially building the business up, right? Hiring employees. And if you think about an organizational chart, we're at the— when you are starting a business, say there's 10 positions, you're wearing all 10 hats, right? So when you scale, you're starting to move up. So maybe you're in these bottom positions, right? You're creating the systems, And then as you create those systems, you hire people to fill those roles and you scale up to the next level. So now my responsibilities are only 6 or 7 roles, right? Doing those roles, creating the systems, and you move up again. Now my roles are only the top 3 and you have people underneath you. So I think that's one component of scaling. And then the other component of scaling is just doing more, getting people to fill those roles. What do you think about that?

Yeah, no, 100%. It's just, yeah, you start out wearing all the We call them hats. And so like for us, we were just like to give an actual example, I was wearing like, we're wearing the cold calling hat, like bringing leads in the door. And then we have the lead follow-up hat, we're basically nurturing those leads. And then we have the person who's actually closing the leads. So we're wearing like 3 different hats and it's kind of different verbiage every time depending on what hat you wear. Also, like the solution that you provide as well. Say I wear my realtor hat, or the seller's goals are, their main goals are to sell it for max price. And so that's where I would put my realtor hat. So it's just being aware of what hat to wear and being in that mode has been a huge thing for us. So that's huge. That was a pretty big mindset shift when we realized that like, Based on the conversation, what hat are we wearing?

Yeah, because when you're, when you're not scaled out, you have to wear all the hats. That's the point, right? It's like you have to wear all the hats, but to start, you have to know that you're wearing multiple hats, right? You have to know that you're playing multiple positions. So like me, on some of the wholesaling acquisitions, I have to know when I have my cold caller hat on, when I have my lead follow-up hat on, and when I have my acquisitions hat on, right? It's 3 different positions. That I'm doing throughout the day. So I need to— and as I'm doing those positions, I have a notepad for each position, like what you do, best practices, all that. At this point, we've scaled out cold calling, right? So we have a cold caller, so I no longer need to do that. So we have systems and processes in place, but part of that struggle is making sure that our cold caller Grace has enough leads to call, right? Making sure she's trained and she's doing role plays and she's doing call calibration. So When you start to scale, you take it from a job to a business, right? 'Cause once you have people working under you, there's a lot of other things you have to account for besides just bringing money in the door. I actually had a social media post about this yesterday, this exact thing, right? It's not about going out and getting the next check, it's about creating the systems so that you can scale up. And by scale up, I mean hire people to fill those roles and you can work less in the business, right?

And going off of that, Jake, feel like the mindset of rather than working in the business, because you're working in it, you're doing all the stuff, but then dedicating time to work on the business. Huge mindset shift, I think, for the most of us. So we dedicate time, usually on the weekends is when we work on the business. But yeah, it's pretty great.

Ryan Walls commented on Instagram, cold calling right now.

Let's go.

Let's go, Wally. I thought Wally was in Like, you can call her under or something.

Must have came in.

Anyways, digression. Yeah, so working on the business instead of in the business, right? That's a huge thing. So I think why it's essential though to scale up is so that you can take it from a job to a business. That's the whole point, right? You hire people, you create systems, you take it from a job to a business by putting people under you, regaining your time. Perfect. So what are we dealing with right now in the business right now. So right now I'm kind of building the, um, doing some acquisitions for the wholesale single-family side. So like I said, we have a cold caller, um, right now, and we're trying to figure out, uh, how we can get more leads. How can we get more leads? And I was talking to Isaiah about this the other day. I think it's just business is so simple. Everything's so simple in general, right? Whether you're working out or trying to be successful in a business or playing the guitar or doing anything, it's really just doing the simple basic things repeatedly over time. So when you really think about it, it's just a numbers game like they always say, right? But I think we just need to do personally more cold calling. So we have one cold caller on a triple line dial right now. Ideally, I think we need to get by July, I want like another cold caller in like Florida, right? So hopefully we can generate enough leads that we can then hire a lead manager because the goal by the end of the year is to have 2 cold callers and a lead follow-up manager. So that way I, I've scaled out of both of those positions, right? I've scaled out of lead gen, I've scaled out of lead follow-up. Now I am just an acquisition manager, so I'm only talking to leads that are 30 to 60 days from, uh, being closed. So that's kind of how that scale works, right? Like, I started out only cold calling. Like, when I was in college, I was doing cold call, lead follow-up, and AM work, right? Now I'm only LM and AM, right? Lead Manager, Acquisition Manager. And by the end of the year, hopefully I'm only AM.

Yeah, basically we give ourselves promotions. That's kind of what it is. But in order to give ourselves a promotion, we have to master that role and create the steps so we can put it off to somebody else. So that's what basically a very high level of what we're doing. So like Jake for cold calling, He created all the steps and everything, he just like mastered it. And then he promoted himself to now the lead follow-up manager, acquisition manager. And slowly, both of our roles were just slowly promoting ourselves once we feel comfortable and we have the, I guess, the systems in place to bring somebody in to fill the role.

Yeah, and Isaiah was— I was doing a lot of cold calling, Isaiah was working on a different— we like to call it cogs. We think of cogs in our business, right? Like we have all these lead generation cogs. So you have a lead generation cog, and then underneath that you have two smaller cogs, which are the types of lead generation, which is one for us is cold calling, one is emailing. Soon we'll have texting in there too. But share your experiences with emails and some of the biggest, not specifically what we're using and stuff, but the challenges that you faced when trying to, one, email a ton of people, and two, have someone take over that responsibility of emailing a ton of people.

Yeah, so this kind of overlaps with people taking over our systems, but when it comes to the emails, I was just like, "Oh, I'm not going to be emailing every day," because I was emailing for like 6, 7 hours a day. And then I realized that there's a platform that you can use, and there's a lot of different platforms that you could use, but I used the platform, I created the steps for it. And what I learned was I created the steps for it, and then I handed it off to somebody, but I wasn't like, I wasn't 100% sure that those were the right steps, so it kind of broke, and so I had to go back into the platform and basically redo the steps to make it more efficient. So that stinks. That's not ideal.

Wait, when did that happen? Did that happen with Eileen or someone else?

No, I would say it's been constantly happening for all the platforms that we've used, like the Excel spreadsheet.

Yeah, yeah.

We wrote out the steps and then it just didn't work kind of thing.

Yeah, that's a huge point. That's why you got to make sure you master the position first before you scale out. That's why I think it's good to start in all the positions so you can really understand it. So when you hire it out, you understand how it needs to work so you can help them get trained. So just buying a business, it's hard unless all the systems are there.

Exactly. Then the book that I was going to reference is E-Myth. I don't know if you guys read that book, E-Myth, but super good on the whole idea of just working rather than working in your business, working on it, and then creating those systems, basically the steps where you can hire out and kind of promote yourself like I mentioned before. And it's super hard though to identify what positions you need to create. That's a huge thing for us. Like we try to every like month or week, we try to be aware of like what, what are we doing that we shouldn't be doing? And then Being aware of that is the first step and then creating the steps in order to bring ourselves out. So there's a lot that's to it, but huge thing is just being aware of it in the first place.

Yeah, I think a big part of that, yeah, it's like figuring out what is the corporate structure even look like, right? Like you need to know all the positions in the corporate structure. So like I said, you can know what hat you're wearing. So for us, we've kind of figured it out through other people who are like a few steps ahead of us who have that structure. So whatever their business looks like, we're kind of not trying to reinvent the wheel, but just trying to emulate it in a sense. But having an idea of that corporate structure helps you understand which hat you're wearing, then how you're going to scale up. And then another point I think you made is as we're doing tasks, we're like, okay, I definitely shouldn't be doing this task. Which position in the organizational structure should this task fall under, right? Like today I was messing with the dialer. Because the phone numbers weren't working for Grace. I'm like, I should not be doing this. I was on freaking chat with BatchDialer for like 30 minutes. I'm like, this is a classic case of this should be like the systems managers. They should be in there. Whenever something breaks in the dialer, they fix it. I should be talking to people who are looking to sell their property, not fiddling with the dialer. You know what I mean? So like that, for example, today I went under the fixer position. And I was like, yep, managing systems when they break, that's one thing they should be doing, but 100%.

And dude, going off that, it's kind of the mindset that you acquired was the who, not how mindset. I don't know if you've heard of that. Basically, instead of asking yourself, how do I do this? How do I fix the emails and stuff? Or in your case, the phone numbers, asking yourself with the mindset, the question being who Who can do it for me? So that was huge. And then with kind of going off of that, I came up with the idea of what, not how, because AI, AI being a thing, it's like a what, it's not a who, it's not a person. So adopting that mindset of, okay, what can be used? Like, okay, this type of AI can replace this aspect of this business, or who can replace it? Obviously who is sometimes more expensive 'cause you're hiring somebody. But yeah, this is just mindsets to have when, uh, trying to grow out of the business.

Yeah, ideally, ideally, um, what is way better than who, right? Because dealing with people is hard. It's hard to manage people. Ideally, you just write a code, have a robot do it. So if you could have AI do it, we'd prefer that, right? Like, for SMS, there's this thing called WooSender that's like completely AI, like sends a text out, feels the responses, and then If the text makes it up the decision tree, it'll book an appointment on your calendar. That's ideal. No one to manage. Like, it'll do the exact same thing every single time. No mistakes. So What Not How could be the next New York Times bestseller.

I could be—

I could be up for sure. Um, love it. We'll keep this one short because I actually have a call at 5:15 I have to take. But, um, yeah, I just want to go into some scaling stuff, just some surface level stuff. And like I say every time, comment what you found interesting or that you want us to talk about next week, because if you want us to dive deeper into a topic, then we'll do that. But this whole 15 at 5 thing is just about a quick 15 minutes every Monday. We're going to go surface level on some sort of topic just to give you kind of a high level. And then we're just going to keep doing that until someone wants to hear something in depth and we can go into that in depth as well. Um, that's it. Anything else, Lisa?

No, 100%. Uh, yeah, just, uh, talking about our business and what we're doing. So, and yeah, just, yeah, it's good stuff.

That's it. That's the struggle. All right, peace, guys. Have a good week. We'll, uh, we'll see you next week. I got Mike Gomes coming on, um, to talk about building a sales team and just acquisitions in general. Um, he's an absolute killer, so that'll be exciting. That'll be an extended edition 30 minutes long, um, but it's going to be— or sorry, that's not next week, it's in 2 weeks. Get my weeks mixed up. Next week will be Isaiah and I again. We'll figure out what we're gonna do, but peace, guys.

I don't get the extended