The VA Hiring Blueprint: Michael Sjogren's Proven Strategies

All right, everybody, welcome back to the Boosted podcast. Today I want to talk about something which I know a lot of you struggle with. I see it all the time in the hospitality community, the boostly community, and further afield, and it's hiring. There's a certain point in your business career where you go from doing everything yourself and you go, right, I want to hire. And then, you know, you've heard of things like upwork and onlinejobs, ph and all those crazy places, and you go out and you hire, and it's a disaster. And there's many reasons why it is a. Is a disaster. And then, you know, you have to start all over again. And if you get burnt the first time, you get overwhelmed, you never do it again. You just got, Sorry, I'm not doing that. But I heard about a solution. My good friend is with me on the left, and I really want to. I wanted to get him on. It's taken a while for us to do it, but I'm really glad we're going to get it done now because this service is something that I want you all to dial into. There's a link we're going to give you, so make sure you check out for that. We'll have it in all the notes and all the things, but without further. Michael Shogun, thank you very much for coming back. I believe this is the Hat Trick, the third appearance on the podcast. So get the Hat Trick ball next time I see you. So thank you for coming.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

So by now everybody knows who you are, the story, the journey, etc, but can you just sort of. Let's wound it back to the day that you realized that this service that you're offering now and what we're talking about now, what made you, like, get that light bulb moment of, actually, I think I can do something with this.

Yeah. You know, it comes back to, like, why I started from the beginning. I mentioned it, and I'll keep it short, but, like, I. I talked about it in Nashville last year. I was like, I didn't get into this business because I loved hosting and all that stuff. And, you know, that's great if you're into it. I got into it as a business opportunity because my kid was sick and I wanted to create a business that didn't rely on me, like, something that I could build, that eventually I could build a team and I wouldn't have to trade time for money. And when I got around eight properties, that's when I really started to notice, like, my My tech was dialed in, my systems were dialed in. I had a lot of AI and automation, but at the eight property mark I just, I couldn't step away and I kept getting sucked back in and I was like, man, I'm spending way too much time like in the weeds. And you know, like a lot of people, I went to upwork, I went to online jobs, ph I went through a lot of different services and you know, found somebody, they seemed good, brought them on. And the thing that I hear the most and I resonate with is like I feel like they just ask me questions all day. It's like I should just do it myself, right? And I learned a lot. I went through 4vs before I eventually found Mark and ended up scaling my team from there. And now we have like six. Yeah, six VAs.

But.

The reality was, like you said, it was a multitude of factors. The first one was I had no set criteria for what I was even looking for. It was just like somebody with a pulse that was somewhat responsible, that could, could help me. So I really had to get clear about what I wanted from this person. And the biggest recommendation I can make for people is to do a two week time study. And I got this from Alex Charfen a couple years ago who was big on this. And it's, it's so simple. But create it in a spreadsheet or a Google sheet or whatever, just Sunday to Saturday from 5am to 10pm or whatever your waking hours are, print it out and then every 15 minutes just write down what you're doing. It's not just work, it's everything. You know, every 15 minutes, write it down. And then at the end of the two weeks you want to go through that and figure out where were the biggest time sucks in my business that I could use help with. And if you just do that one thing, it's going to give you so much clarity, right? And then from that point it was like, okay, I started to learn about personality assessments, right? You could talk to Steve Trover over at Better Talent and those guys, like they've got that stuff dialed in, but I'm like, okay, who's going to be naturally good at the things that I need help with? Because somebody can suck it up and do it for a while, but if they're not going to enjoy it and they're not going to want to stay long term, what's the point? I'm gonna have to go through this all over again, right? So really getting the right, right bots in the right seats and Then from that point it's like, okay, now I've got the right person, they have the right skill sets, or at least the right personality type for those skill sets. Now what do I do? And when I was first onboarding people, it was basically all right, on Monday we're going to jump on Zoom and you're just going to shadow me for the day. Right. I know a lot of people have done this and I want you to put yourself in that person's shoes for a second. Imagine you left a job to go work for some company and they had no formal onboarding, they had no SOPs for you to look at. There was no employee manual. Your boss just said, hey, you're just going to shadow me, we're going to figure this out. Like, it doesn't exactly set the right tone that you're a reputable business.

Where did you get your, your inspiration from? Because obviously the thing I love about you, and I've said this to a lot of people, is that I feel like your vertical has fallen upon some short term rentals. But you are so knowledgeable and you've got so much discipline and structure in place. You could have gone on any vertical, you could have gone down cars, it could have been anything. You would have been the success into it. So how have you brought all of this into your world? Like, what's the books that have inspired you? What are the, who are the people that you've entered into? Sort of train your brain to be this way.

Yeah. So like a lot of people, man, I reading Rich Dad, Poor dad, in my mid-20s, it was like the light bulb went off. I was like, you know, and I went through college, got my undergrad, my mba, CPA license, all this stuff. But that book changed my life. So I knew real estate investing was going to be the vehicle and I thought I was going to raise money and buy apartment buildings. You know, since 2014, I started like diving into that, hired coaches and mentors in that space. But it was a struggle, man, and I just didn't get any traction. I was trying to raise money, I was trying to find deals, I was working a full time job. Know I had a sick kid who was just born. Like it was just crazy. And then I met a guy in a mastermind group, Marcos, who, his primary thing was tax deeds and tax liens. I think he's, I think his IG is the tax deed hunter or something like that. But he introduced me to short term rentals. He was doing arbitrage back in 2016, 2017 before it was a huge thing. And I was like, this is interesting. I don't know if this is legal, but it's really interesting. Right? And I told Kristen about it, and I was like, I think this is going to be our ticket. Because traditional rentals, you might make 100, 200, maybe 300 bucks a month. With this, you're making 1,000, $2,000 a month. And he didn't even need to own the properties. So that was the light bulb moment. And then I ran into guys like Eric Mueller, Jay Massey, a lot of these guys that had just started getting into it, scaling it up, and I was like, okay, so, like, this is a viable thing. And so I just devoured as much information as I could. I went through different programs, went through Eric's stuff, I went through Jay stuff, I went through Marcos stuff. And that was it, man. Like, that was the spark. And I started to get a little bit of success. And then a lot of my focus shifted to the stuff that you talked about. I read looking at my bookshelf. I went through the E Myth and then Traction, just like you talked about. And then I went through all Mike Michalowicz's stuff, like, devoured all of that. And my goal from the beginning was to work no more than four hours a week on the business. I'm like, if this is what I'm. If I'm going for time, freedom, that has to be my guiding light. So how do I do that? And it was just getting around people like that and reading books like that, listening to podcasts, and, you know, Alex Charfen was a great one. I was in his mastermind for a year. I hired a attraction coach through EOS to help me get that system set up. Like, I was just. I've always been a fan of education. Like, I reinvest a lot into, like, coaches, mentorships, everything. Because it's just a cheat code. It's like, if I'm trying to get this result, somebody already else has. Like, I'm happy to pay them for that, you know, fast lane.

So just walk us through exactly what this all means, how you go about working and how the process looks and why should a short term rental host decide to. To book a call?

Yeah, I mean, at the beginning, it was just folks that were in our Mastermind program. I was teaching them how to go out and recruit people. And they were like, well, can you just go recruit some people for me? And I kept getting that over and over and over again. And then finally I approached Mark, who was My operations manager at the time. And we had an unfair advantage, to be honest. So he was employee number three at Airbnb's call center in the Philippines, and he grew it to 5,000 agents. So he built a call center over there, so he knows everybody that's working over there. So he just goes and cherry picks people that used to work for him and just offers them a new opportunity. And so we started doing that for folks in the Mastermind, and then through different speaking engagements and conferences and everything else, people kept asking me, like, hey, can you just recruit bas for us? And I was like, well, it's. It's only for the Mastermind people. I kind of do it as, like, a favor for them and whatever. And I just. It just kept coming up and coming up and coming up. And so finally we just said, all right, well, let's just put something together, whether they're with us or not, that we can at least help them. Because the. The true, honest truth is if you don't build a good team, you will never have time, freedom. You just won't. As good as your systems are, you will always have that anxiety in the back of your head that you can't shut this thing off. You just can't. You can't shut your phone off. So the team is what really gives it to you. And so what we started doing was just offering the recruiting, and then what we found is, okay, we could give you the best candidate, but if you don't have the right systems, you don't have the right cadence, you don't have the right meeting structure, all of that, it's not going to work. So we packaged it all together. So we'll recruit people for you, we'll help you build out your systems. I give you my entire SOP playbook if you have nothing to use for now, and then we'll help you build yours while we go recruit people for you, and then we integrate them into your business. And Mark no longer runs my portfolio. He does this full time, and he manages all the VAs on the back end and gives them continuous support. So it's worked out pretty well, man. And people are grateful because, you know, as you scale, you build that traction. You're not afraid to get deals now you're growing, but it's like, how the hell do you step out of the day to day and just focus on the things that you want to focus on? And it's through building a good team, having a blast, Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like, Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tee.

Is loose leaf Making up those rhymes.

Don'T write it, just do it loosely.