David and Amanda Explained how they started in outsourcing

Lee, just introduce yourselves how you got into property and more importantly, how you got into the world of helping business owners outsourced.

Okay. I kicked off with property in 1999 and I think Amanda kicked off 2010. And over the years we built a steady portfolio of property, but nothing exciting and just using traditional buy to let models, you know, you're saving up the deposit, getting some modest cash flow. But we did pretty well because we caught a couple of decent upturns in market. So we did all right, but it pretty much kept us in the job. We are married couple and co directors. We run the businesses and we've got four companies now. Claris Living, Claris Manage, Property Cubed, we've just rebranded, we've got a coaching business and we've got Claris Property Investments and to break down Clarus Manage. I think what you're interested in here, Mark, is Claris Manage breaks down into SA Angels and Made in the UK being a remote admin service to service accommodation operators throughout the UK. And made in the UK's housekeeping business, which just really predominantly works down the M62 corridor. So, yeah, that's a potted version of what we've been doing the last few years.

Wow. So four companies. Obviously you direct and run them all. How much of what you do and how much of being able to have four different companies do you attribute to being able to outsource and grow a team?

It's really crucial. You need to outsource the jobs, take up your time. But I like low cost jobs to free up your time so your time can be used on the more sort of higher, higher level jobs.

I think we're going to really just scale it back and just go over some of the basics really of what outsourcing is all about. And there's a term that gets used a lot specifically around groups that we're all a part of and it's. And it's va. So can someone just break down exactly what the term VA means and what outsourcing means?

Okay, so VA stands for Virtual assistant. Virtual meaning that they're not sat in office with you. So with the advent of the Internet and the ability for you to contact anybody anywhere in the world at any time. So the first time we outsourced was upwork. We used upwork to go and find people to do jobs. And that's how we've, in fact, we've been quite successful with it because that's how we met Anna from Montenegro and she still works for us now. So she worked for us on and off. She started scraping data for purchase lease options. She did a really good job with that. She started to put to research some data for me and we've ended up taking her on full time now. So she works for us full time. Montenegro and I think it was about four or five years ago we met Harjot through upwork and he still works with us. We built essay angels with him. He's just recently this week gone. He's emigrated to Canada because hard jot was four and a half hours ahead of us. He's now four and a half hours behind us though. I've laughed and said that I'm going to start waking him up at 7 o' clock in the morning.

Yeah, exactly. So I mean you definitely hit the nail on the. On the head there massively. Is that the beauty of outsourcing and virtual assistants and with the Internet being just so easily readily available now you're able to. Not when you want to hire a member of staff, you don't have to hire somebody from the local area. Again you could, which is all well and good but you may not get the right person for what you need. And with, with like I say countries like the Philippines and like India where I mean I've been in traveled, I know like the state of living and the state of pay is so less. So if you. It just ticks loads of boxes for yourself you can find a quality member of staff that can do the tasks that you need and then for them they can get a wage and a job satisfaction. But for the most part, the reason why I love outsourcing, because I've done it for years with Boostly and obviously the family business, is that I can set a task at say 6pm and I know when I wake up the next morning it's done, means that so much more can get done and it pretty much can get done while you're sleeping.