Starting to Invest in Your Business w/ Bob Lachance

All right, welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is going to be an awesome conversation with a guy that has been in the business in different ways for. Let me do the math on it. 2004. Is that when you got into 2004?

It is, yeah. So you've.

We'll unpack all of it. You've seen. Bob Lachance has seen it all. He runs a company, an Investing Company. 220 transactions between flips, wholesales and wholetails. This year, you're involved in a residential retail team as well. And you've got a Riva Global that helps you do all this stuff. And how many clients in Riva Global right now?

So we have about a thousand virtual assistants total within the whole company.

I'm one of your clients. I've recently opted into that world. And so we'll get into that a little bit at the end. But Bob, let's start a little bit like in 90 to 120 seconds. Tell us your professional life story starting from 2004 to today. Give us like the lay of the land, why we want to pay attention and listen to the whole conversation.

All right, two second rundown. I actually played professional hockey for eight years prior to be jumping into the real estate world. I left school two classes early, so I did not have my degree. So I was a dropout. So anyway, now we'll start 2004. That was prior to that. I've gotten to real estate because, you know, real estate had zero barriers of entry. You know, a lot of agents, a lot of investors that get into the industry. There's a reason why we all get in because you don't have to go through, you know, any Series 7 testing or any kind of. I jumped in into the world of real estate. 2004, my first deal was a flip. Then I jumped into short sales. So the short sale world, I was there. And then 2004 to, you know, however long I was doing short sales also helped run a short sale coaching program. And then 2007 helped start one of the largest coaching real estate education coaching programs around leverage.

And then you discovered VAs. And let's kind of start with that point of the journey because I don't know if this.

We look at it through a different lens than when we're years ahead. We look at it. We look at it saying, all right, everything is a cost instead of an investment. That's what happens when you're newer and you're a lone wolf. Right? A lot of us, when we first start, we're like, oh, I want to do it myself. I want 100% of my commissions, I want 100% of the deals, 100% of the flips. And then as you go on, you realize that you need a team to really have a life that's going to be fulfilled. Because if it's just you think about this. If you're dating somebody or you have a wife, you have kids and everything is on your plate in the agent world, you're getting calls from 9am to almost 10pm doesn't matter if it's on the weekdays or weekends, you're getting hammered. So if you don't have someone to help you, it's going to really, really affect your home life and any type of time freedom that you want, Scalability, efficiency in your own business.

Yeah. So let's. From, from the investor standpoint, and then I'll give maybe a little perspective on it from the agent standpoint. What were those activities that you knew you needed to keep? And this is like you can even reflect on the different businesses you've been in. What are the core activities where you feel like, you know, for this season of my business, I need to keep these. But I know I can delegate these. Talk about that a little bit because I think, I think to your point, I don't think agents really, really are honest with themselves, you know, about like being in the car for half the day but realizing that they're literally just running errands.

Right, right.

And I know investors are like that too. You think you need to drive from the attorney's office to the home to the. But like, if you're out of the core activity. So talk about a little bit about that. How'd you go about processing things to keep and put more hours into versus things to delegate?

Yeah, it's interesting. And I always look at what puts money in your pocket. Right. You could break it up into anything you want. But I look at branding. If you're not always branding, you're not out there. That's on the social media side. If you're not, if you don't have someone posting for you all the time, you're irrelevant. Right. You need to be out there all the time. So I'll put that into the branding bucket. And I know you could go on a tangent with that because in your program, it's phenomenal when it comes to branding. The other side, I have to say, is lead generation. So whether an investor or an agent, if you do not have consistent lead generation, you will get, you know, the competition will run you Over. Right. So for me personally, you always need leads coming into your business. So like I said, out of the 120 transactions we're going to do, we do three main things. And I know you teach on many of this. We do direct mail, we do cold calling, and we do text messaging. Those are our three main sources of lead generation and what we're looking for. And I got to realize I used to do this myself. When I first started 2004, I door knocked from 10am to 3pm every Monday through Friday. Now door knocking has been taken over by cold calling and text messaging, which is phenomenal because door knocking is awful. I just want to be 100% transparent with everybody on this call because it is not fun. And I did that for a full year with the thought process. So I was, I had to learn the business from ground up. So that was my thought process. So those are the three, three channels that I look at that you can outsource right now, that you no longer have to do that in your business because you will get burnt out.

Awesome. So you said branding lead gen. What was the third?

So I used those two. I just broke them down too. Of course there's admin work that 100 that you already, that you already talked about, but if I had to pick two right off the top of my head, it would be branding lead gen. And you can throw admin in there because there's so much admin work that you need to get off your plate. You know, transaction coordinating. That's, that's admin. Let's call it what it is. A lot of it is admin. Of course there's, there's coordinating with buyers, sellers, attorneys, title companies, mortgage brokers, etc. But on top of that, that is, you know, those, so I would say those three, the admin, branding and Legion.

And then what are the things that, that you, in your world, that, that are things that if you could do it, if you had the, the stamina to do it for eight hours a day, it would, you know, lead you to any financial, you know, scenario that you wanted. What are those core things for you? And then I could comment it from a real estate agent.

Yeah. So I would have to say for, for the investor side, it is the lead gen side it is consistently going at. So it's, it's different. I know in, in the agent world sometimes a little different where, where you're, you're hitting your sphere and you're getting referral leads in, et cetera, et cetera, but direct to seller is really important because, and this is just my opinion, I think in the real estate agent world and the investor world, we have no choice but to go after the sellers because we don't know what is going on in someone's life. Right to where I talked to a potential motivated seller six months ago and then all of a sudden my cold caller, I put them back into another campaign and all of a sudden now they're ready to sell because something happened to a spouse or it was a probate situation or they wanted to move, they want to downsize, kids left the house, nobody knows. They wouldn't have a crystal ball. We could guess, but we don't have a crystal ball. And when that happens, so what we do in our office, we continually hit them, continually hit them. Each month, Each month, Each month. So that's, that's what I have seen.

So, so let's talk about this because I've recently just been exposed a little bit to the world of the amount of business that an investor steps over. So non investable leads. I was on a mission trip recently with a mastermind and there was a few investor types in this mission trip and I think he did like a hundred deals a year or something like that. So let's say that takes, I forget the numbers, but let's say it's like a thousand legit leads to buy 100 homes. They trash the 900, right. As an agent, so just think about that. Those are probably real numbers. I don't know what the numbers are actually, but you probably have like more than a thousand, you know, maybe a couple thousand leads. Right? People that respond to an advertisement that want more for their house than an investor would give them. But there is not an agent that I know anywhere that has like 900 extra sell. So let's unpack this because I think it's interesting and I think it fits into. There is this interesting cross section which I think is going to become more like the agent investor, investor agent. Some states are requiring licensure for wholesaling and that sort of stuff. So talk a little bit about like just like nuts and bolts tactically. And I know you monetize your dead leads so you've actually created the retail arm for your investor arm. But if you're an agent listening to this and you want to grow and scale your business, what advice could you give us in the market we're going to be in, the crap show we're going to be in for the next year? What are some of the things that are working that turn into and I think one of your advice, you know, your pieces of advice are be the investor.

I got two pieces. Advice. Yeah, I definitely got two pieces of advice. I'll start with that one. One is learn the investing side. So obviously your program have gone through, it seems like everything, it's, it's step two have success for anybody that goes through it. And I would add to that learning and understanding how to invest, whether it's buying whole. Right. Or whether it's, whether it's learning how to rehab, learning how to wholesale the investment side, because I always look at, I started in 2004, went through the crash, right. And if we weren't me personally, I have my license to, I'm an exp agent as well. So if I didn't have my license, I use my license to offset some costs because I was making money here, then I would have a three month gap and then I'd make more money. But that three month gap was filled with investor money. So having your license and understanding investing I think is really, really important in my, in this again, this is just my opinion. I've been doing this for, I don't know, 18 plus years, 19 plus years and I've seen that. I've worked with probably 50 plus thousand students out there in the investment world and I would always recommend get your license, get your license, get your license. And let's get back to the other answer. What I would do if I'm an agent right now and knowing what market we're in, I would join my local real estate investing association or meetup groups and what I would do is I would connect with those wholesalers because wholesalers are hurting. There's investors right now that are hurting because they don't have the same buyers anymore. Now if I'm an agent that has buyers, whether it's retail that want a little less money than what market bears, guess what? It's gonna be a home run for me, especially if I buy and hold investors. You're going to be getting deals and deals. You're going to make a lot of money in these markets, right. So I think those are two lenses I would definitely look at because again, I've experienced it myself. I know you have as well. You know, we were in the, we were in the downturn together in different, in different paths, but we were in the downturn together. And I know you, you've made a lot of money in the downturn. So it's a, it's probably the same kind of you and I probably have a ton in common in reference to that.

Yeah. Talk a little bit. We had a guy come in we do, we do a weekly mastermind. We had a guy come in and share him and his wife had acquired 200 properties in four years in four markets. So he did it. Exactly. He didn't monetize any of his dead leads. So direct to seller marketing, direct mail. I don't know if they cold called mostly direct mail. So how could, what could you teach us like if we're an agent that wants to do seller legion in the climate be in what are some of the things that are working right now where you know like how can we generate hundreds of viable seller leads in the next you know, three to six months? What are like unpack two or three things like this tool or a letter like this like what are the things that you're seeing working?

Yeah, I mean I'll tell you what's coming out of our office. What's driving all these leads. I pull lists, whether it's from Prior, I don't know where do you, where do you put this from?

I don't Prop stream is the tool that this guy.

Okay so that's what I use. I use prop stream. I also use real flow as well. R E A L E flow. So you see the prop stream real flow and I've used smart smart from this program. So I've used those three tools. They work very very well. So you do is you download a list, you get them skip trace which you find the best potential phone number for those records. We'll call them. You pull, let's say you pull 10,000 records, you skip trace them to try to get the best number that attaches to those records. Now what you do is you put those into an auto dialer and I have this, I have my virtual assistants do this. I don't do any of this because it's for me. It's a, it's a waste of time doing all this because what you're doing is you're siphoning through non motivated leads to get the motivated leads because as an agent or investor it's going to take all the time out of your day. Like I said, what I would do is I would door knock when I first started and then on pre foreclosure houses then I would come home and I would skip trace401.com I would skip trace these numbers and I would call from about 7 to 9 right after I was done dinner with the family. So it burns you out, this stuff burns you out. And if you. If you have something to do, like go coach a hockey game or go coach a soccer game or a baseball, whatever you're doing, then that activity does not happen. So I would say cold calling would be a 100% must. So what you do is you download that list, get the list, upload it to a dialer. I know I'm talking fast. Is that okay? I know. We know. In a limited time. Okay. And then you have a virtual assistant call to gauge seller motivation. Once the homeowner raised their hand and said, you know what? I like to entertain an offer for my house. This is why I come at them first as the investor, because this gauges seller motivation. I'm not going at them first as an agent. I know there's rules and all that stuff, but let's forget those for a second. So I'll just go over my process. So then I'll gauge seller motivation. The VA then virtual assistant then sends the email to me to say, this is what they're looking for. You know, and then my acquisition team calls them and decides which way to go.

Yeah, so. So as you're listening to this, there's. There's two things. So you. Because you have both ways to monetize. You can go retail, and again, there's processes and state, and.

Yeah.

Are you in the. You're in the U.S. or Canada?

I'm in Connecticut. Yeah, I'm in U.S. why do I.

Think you were in Canada? Have you ever been in Canada?

My father's in Canada. My brother lives in Canada. So.

So. But just listen to what Bob just said. Two things I want to highlight. First of all, guys, this may be a time where you need to do whatever equivalent of door knocking and putting the kids to bed and doing the thing after dinner. Because of the season you might be in, you might have to do those things again. Some of us. I'm going into parts of my business that I probably don't want to be in at this part of my journey, but I'm doing it anyway because I know this shit's going to hit the fan here. So that's one thing that I picked up. But the other part of what you just said is that all of that stuff happens. Cause I actually interviewed. They weren't with your team directly, but Bob has this company, Riva global, that provides VAs that actually create these leads or these prospects. I think they're leads at that point. And I had her take me through a script. I'm like, all right, pretend I'm the seller. And she literally went through the script. It's probably your script. So there are people that can. Everything you describe the loading up, you know, getting the list, skip tracing to get the numbers, auto dialing, essentially getting someone to take a conversation with you. And how long is the conversation? You're not doing those. Your acquisition managers are doing those conversations, right?

Correct. So this would be. So if I'm an agent.

Yeah. In retail speak, that's like a listing partner and that may be you in this case. So you can set up this entire system as a retail agent. Like Bob said, learn the investing side so you can have that hat on if you need to have it on. But now you can have a VA set that you can set this entire system up and have leads generated for it because you're just shifting your whole perspective. And this, I know it doesn't. This seems like this is old stuff for you, Bob, as you're hearing me say it. But I promise you, in the retail only world, this is like the craziest.

Thing that's ever been revealed in Lars. Let me add to that too. And I think it's important and just going through, you know, the changing times. The more opportunity, I like saying, you know, when you have a tool belt, right. The more opportunities and more tools you have in your belt to make money off something, it's very important. And it was funny, I was talking to an individual who was just a wholesaler and he was having a tough time and the market was down. I'm like, all right, you got your license and bang. It got them through the tough times. Because real estate's like this, let's call it what it is. And if we have other opportunities, other ways to make money, we don't have to leave the real estate arena, right. Instead of to get a part time job somewhere. Because that's what I see a lot of agents do. It's like, no, no, no, just educate yourself more on, on the investing side. You could do both and make more money in the meantime. Yeah.

And it's, I mean, it seems like I would have known this stuff. And it's only because a couple of guys that have been introduced to, through, through exp that I feel like this is the thing that's gonna, like the agents that are smart are going to like they're 100% retail. You're, you're now going to enter this world. You're going to set up all these systems. You're probably going to. Let me ask you this, what advice would you have some from. From someone that's always been retail that sets this system up. And they get on the phone with a seller, they're not going to speak the right line. They're going to. They're going to talk retail speak. What advice would you give for an agent that's getting set up with these leads on a regular basis?

I would go to YouTube. I mean, there's so much free content on YouTube. It's that simple. Just put, you know, wholesale script rehabs from acquisition script, cold calling scripts, investor scripts. Just go on YouTube and I guarantee you will get pitches. You know this guy, guy by the name of John Martinez. There's Steve Trang. There's a lot of different gentlemen out there that are very, very good. They give a lot of free content. That's what I would do first. I mean, the idea is we have to look at where we're. Where we are right now in this industry. And you nailed it at the beginning. I am a huge. I think, you know, you see where this industry is going. This industry is. Is making wholesalers or investors get their real estate license. So why wouldn't you. Think about it. Why wouldn't real estate agents learn the investing business? So it makes perfect sense. Because if one industry is going the other way, that means, you know, the other industry should also meet in the middle. Right. And then they should. It's just a way to make a lot of money. And again, you don't have to do any of this or all this by yourself. You leverage a team and do all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's awesome. And the. Even if you just set up that system, that's the system that investors use. Right. So even if you set up that system and you didn't have a desire to acquire properties, you would still list a bunch of homes and you'd probably trip over five or six deals that you couldn't not buy because they were so good.

Correct.

And that's probably for the next three years. You'll probably make an extra 150 grand a year on investing, even if you didn't want to, because you're going to start talking to someone's like, listen, my husband died. I cannot renovate this house. Can you help me? And you can actually come in and help them legitimately help them, you know, so that's one thing. If I had to go back in time, you know, I would have done differently. I just didn't know this world existed, you know, But I didn't do any investing. I did personal investing. But Just buy and hold properties. But this is just awesome. All right, before I get. I want you to talk about Reva specifically, because I think I've been involved with VA companies in the past and your process is different and the type of VAs that you're putting out there are different as well. But let me, let me ask you a couple questions. What advice? Politics aside, it just so happens as we're recording this, I have no idea what your politics are. I know what mine are. We are on the eve of a very important midterm election. I think we have challenging times ahead. No matter what happens in the midterm for 2024, I think there's just a bunch of shit we need to slog through because of every politician kicking the can on a bunch of stuff.

Yep.

What advice? Like just straight up, like your best buddy in the world is getting into everything you know about residential and investing. What three things would you tell your best buddy of how to get through these next three years?

I would say number one starts with Legion. And it's, it's number one is you have to set up a lead gen channel. And not only one, I would say multiple lead gen channels. So number two. Yeah.

Give us example. So the one you described with propstream, skip trace, that would be one lead gen channel.

Yep. And then that's cold calling. So I'll add cold calling into one lead gen. And then text messaging works very well for us. Today, this is today. This could change tomorrow. So whenever you air, who knows if like you said, crap hits the fan, but today this is working very well. Cold calling, text mess, same kind of concept. You, you get the list, you skip Tracy, upload it into whatever tool you're going to use, and then you have your virtual assistants run it on a daily basis. Text call, text call, and on the calling it's call, call, call, call, call, and then direct mail is. It would be another one. So that would be the third channel. If you're going to put channels.

Okay, okay. And then that's your first piece of advice. Set up lead gen channels. Second.

Second would be consistency. It has to be done on a daily basis. Daily basis for me is Monday through Friday.

And that's, that's all the Legion channels running smoothly. Probably some tracking behind it so you know what's going on and that's, that's leverage. Are you doing these at first? Is your best buddy doing these at first? Hypothetically. And then he's hiring a VA once he understands how to do it.

So now we just have My best buddy, I would have him outsourcing right away. Again, it's different. When I started, I. I would first say, if I was me in 2004, I would say door, knock first so you can learn the business. But knowing where we are right now, we don't have to do that. You could outsource it right away. So I would outsource it right away. I just went over this. Literally this same scenario. I went with my buddy who's been out of the business for a little while in Boston. We went through this exact same thing. It's kind of funny that we're doing this. Yeah. And then finally, I would say, you need a team. It's very, very difficult now in today's day and age to work as a lone wolf by yourself. So leveraging a team, it could be an inside assistant. It could be a virtual assistant. It could be getting a partner. Right. But it is. You have to work with each other to win. It could be just like we talked about, an agent going to network with investors, saying, hey, wholesalers. And they're gonna be struggling, but I'll work out some sort of referral agreement with you. If you're licensed, of course, you're not licensed. Some sort of marketing fee agreement, whatever, you know, you could do that obviously, is above board.

Awesome. I just had a question there. Why is it, and this is just a random question. Why is it that a lot of investors have business partners? Is it. Usually one is the. The. The feet on the. In the streets, and one is more money or systems. But I see a lot of guys have business partners in this world. Why is that?

A lot of times you could break it down into resources. Two resources are time and money. Sometimes a partner has more time on their hands, less money, and sometimes other business partners have more time on their hands or more money on their hands, but less time. So I find that to be how that works. Like, for me personally, I have business partners in my virtual assistant company, and I have business partner in my real estate company as well. So different companies. I like having business partners because. And this is just me personally, it's because you could. You could accomplish way more by having a team, and it goes back to a team, and you build off of those individuals. Can you. Can you have a successful business not having a party? Thousand percent. I know a lot of people that do.

Yeah.

Awesome.

All right, so. So Riva Global. Tell us a little bit about it. I just want to say, from the process standpoint, the thing that. And we didn't set it up this way. Although I'm sure we both our podcast, I mean you have a podcast or something. Don't.

Yep, yep.

I'm sure we've generated business and relationships from it, but so Bob and I connected and all of a sudden I was in his funnel. I was like, man, I need one of these virtual assistants. And the thing that you know, it came at it from the investor side but I know that the core skill I'm looking for will be served by, by, by the VAs. But it's like front end stuff. I've always, and I don't know why I think people in other countries can't do front stage stuff. I've always just sort of like assume that you know, VAs or you know, GEO Arbitrage, you know, having people in other countries work for you are more like administrative or backstage operations. But tell me. Well, tell us a little bit about Riva Global, how to get plugged in. But tell us about how you develop that, that front end skill set.

Yeah, you know we have the way we actually have our training. We have a four step recruiting and interview process where we have, we do a VA background check, we do VA system check to make sure all our systems are there. We have a three point competency and language proficiency check which is very important. We also do disc profiling, which I know you do as well and you teach your students on. So we go through all of those four while we're interviewing and we go through thousands of applications. So we weed out, we weed out the individuals that are going to be tire kicking or you know, don't have the best success rate setup. So we, we all them up and then we put them into a four week real estate intensive training program. We also, we do something that's pretty unique. We do offer a VA benefit package to our va. So we pay for their health care, paid time off days and paid training which is pretty cool. So we do a little bit of different to you know, to get the best of the best of the cream always rises to the top.

Yeah. And it's funny, I'm looking for essentially an sdr, so a sales development rep for my coaching business. And I interviewed four candidates the other day and one of them, three of them probably could have taken the position. One was just, bless his heart, he just knew, you know.

Yeah, yeah, totally new.

He probably has the profile but he doesn't have any experience. But one of the guys was just, he had had experience with a legit like sales organization with a corporation, like I think a US based corporation. And the only thing he knew how to sell was getting me. It was a SAS company, a tech company, getting me to a webinar. And so I'm like, let's just role play it. I'm an exec. Like, who you calling on? He's like, executives. I'm like, okay, I'm an exec. Just call me. And I couldn't. Every time I said no, he, he had a next thing and next thing. And I'm like, holy cow, this guy's a better salesperson than I've ever been. And it just so happened. I mean, there's an accent there, but it's not offensive. It's not like agents are going to hang up on this guy. But so that just really opened my mind, you know, as much as I've done in business, thousands and you know, 5,000 plus families served, thousand agents, real estate, B school. I'm still sort of blown by two things. My mind is blown by two things. The fact that, you know, generating investor leads so direct to seller is one thing that I think every agent needs to do and they can do it with the help of Global and then the fact that geo arbitrage and getting talent, people that want to work. This guy has four kids. He's a. We share the same faith. He's got four kids. I can tell he's going to, you know, he's going to work hard for, for us. So what's the best way to get plugged into your. Because you guys provide all the different types of VAs, but what's the best way to plug into your system?

Yeah, I mean, obviously just we do strategy sessions. So give us a call. Let's get up, set up for a strategy session. Go to our website@reva global r e v a global.com best way to do it. And I'm on a lot of podcasts if you want to do a search. I go through a lot of different stuff. I give away a lot of content as well. I mean, just like you. It's just. I think it's important nowadays to. And here's my opinion. I know Lars, I think the reason why your program is so good is because you also have created it and do the business, which I think is very, very important. So I think, you know, before anybody looks at a service out there, please, please, please, for your own good, just do some research on making sure that whoever runs that company or owns that company uses their own service. I think nowadays it's now more than ever because times have changed. So much is you know look at, look at the individual company and see make sure they use their own service. So it's up to date.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah so I highly recommend guys I think the tendency when, when things are chaotic or uncertain or there's fear is to sort of go inward and eliminate things. But guys I'm telling you this is the time just setting up that one system learning how to put in the investor hat getting some leverage someone that's going to generate leads for you. You know two four hour time blocks every day. Four one hour off and four hours on. That's how your process works. There's no way you can lose in these next few years I promise. This is where you add a zero to your net worth or a couple zeros to your net worth in in real estate. Bob, I appreciate your time brother. Go to Revlobal.com and we'll talk to you guys soon. Be good.

Awesome. Thanks Lars.