Christian Osgood built multiple six- and seven-figure businesses in two years by documenting every process in manuals, then hiring fast and firing fast to keep only A-players. He color-codes tasks to decide what to outsource, delegate, or keep, and gives key team members limited equity to secure loyalty without losing control.
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If you want to build a business or multiple businesses like I did, you need to focus on your systems. Extremely intensive on the front end, but I've built a property management company, an education company, bought 200 rental units, done countless renovation projects. We own and manage a resort I own across multiple states, and I built this entire thing in 2 years with my business partner Cody Davis. How do we do this? Systems, systems, systems. Systems. We're going to share how to build this and how to build your team on this video. So welcome back to the channel. I'm Christian Osgood, and here we go. If you haven't yet, please like and subscribe to the channel. We talk business, real estate, creative finance, and much, much more. When you are scaling, you're going to hit a point very, very, very quickly where you need more people. Now, I have found that I am comfortable working up to 16 hours a day, and I can do this for a pretty long period of time. About 90 days of consistent 16 hours a day. I can do that day after day after day, 7 days a week. At some point, you will hit burnout, but I know that that is my max. I also know that I've spent a lot of time on efficiencies. In general, when I hire someone, I can usually do about twice the amount of work they can in their standard 8-hour day, which means while it's super cool that you as an entrepreneur might be able to do the work of 4 people, if you want to build a business that needs more than 4 people, You have to master scaling the people. How do you do the personnel? Who do you need for every role? This is really front-end heavy, but once it's done, it's done. So we're going to talk about systems and processes here. What I have found is when you're building a business, one of the first things that you need to do for every single section of your business is you need to take time, and it's going to be multiple days, where you write out every process of everything you do. For example, When we collect rents, instead of passing the knowledge along verbally like so many business owners do, we go, this is what happens. The check is received, it is taken to the bank. When it is deposited, these pictures are taken. These pictures are sent to our accounting team. We come back, we log the rents, we post the deposit, we make sure that the dates on the bank deposit match everything in our property management company. We go through the list for, hey, when we pay owners, these are the dates. We need to have this, this, this, this, and this checked for that time. We're gonna transfer money between the security accounts and the rent collection accounts at this time in this way for every single move-in and move-out. How do all these things happen? Because you write down the systems and processes. It is a pain. I want to make this clear. Almost nobody enjoys doing this. However, once it's done, it's done. When you need to train someone new or you need to scale, you can hand them the document, you can walk them through it, But when they have questions, if you've done a very good job of creating the workflow, you can send them to a document and they can click a link and they can have a majority of their questions answered. This is where you start to get the ability to remove yourself from your business, which you're eventually going to want to do if freedom is part of your reasoning for building a business, which it is for almost every single entrepreneur. I actually learned this from a few different people, but some of the most successful young people I've seen in real estate. I did a huge research project on some of the young investors, what made them successful. Now, not all of them are good at this, but a lot of them, what set them apart from other people in their age bracket is they put better systems in place so you can scale with people. Now, one of the things I've seen done, uh, this is someone named Josh Janus. He's actually a really, really, really smart guy, a hard worker. He works or lives— God, I'm blanking on the market now. I totally apologize. But middle of America. He wrote down every single thing he does in a day, like every single step of every single thing. And he color-coded it. And he said, this could be done by a VA. This should be done by an employee or in-house. This is something that should probably be done by me for now. And here's things that are always going to be things that I need to do. Color-coded them and then started actually building teams around, okay, let's get some VAs. Let's hire some people. Let's fire some people. And let's build out a team to do all the tasks that I want to get done. And as you do this, what you end up with is you have more hours a day because instead of having a 24-hour day like everyone else, you have everyone else's 8-hour workday. And so you can start having 100-hour workdays and 200-hour workdays because you have all these people doing all these tasks that you used to do. Now, tips for hiring and firing. I make this very, very simple. We've let go of a lot of people and I don't love doing that, but I've come to realize that when you let someone go from a job, you are almost always doing them a service if they are the wrong fit. Same thing goes for hiring. People spend so much time trying to find the right hires and it's so important to get the right hire, but people lie on their resume or they project what they think that you want to hire for in an interview. It is very, very, very hard, even if you are the best person in the world at reading people, which everyone seems to think they are and almost no one is. But when you choose these people, you're guessing. And at the end of the day, that's the best you can do. I have a good feeling about this person. I think they can do the job. When you hire, you guess. When you fire, you know. That hopefully makes it easier for you. That makes it a little bit easier for me when these things come up. When I'm like, okay, we put them in the role. We tried. We gave, I usually give 2 chances. You can absolutely mess up once on something, but when it keeps happening, we cut it off very quickly and go, okay, this is not the direction we want to go. We do want excellence. If you want an A-team, you need A-players. There is no middle ground there. Look at any sports team. It's a really easy illustration. The teams that have the best players who work the best together win everything. There's no exceptions to that. Football team with all the best, strongest, fastest players and the best teamwork is always going to win. If you do not have a championship team You're going to have to let players go and change your roster. It's just what you have to do. However, keep it super simple. Hire quickly, fire quickly. Once you find the people who you need in your business who are the right fit, do what you need to do to hold on to them. I know that can be raises in some cases. Key people, it is okay to give other people some equity in your company. Don't give control. But give some amount of equity. You can make your number 2 an owner, and really you should have a number 2. And when you're really free, all of your number 2 people have a number 2. So if something happens to them or they have another opportunity, they can be backfilled, and your organization is actually a living organism where you can swap players in and out. You have movable pieces. But that all requires scale, which means you have to get out of the mindset of, hey, I'm going to do everything, or Even worse, the entrepreneurial mindset of, well, no one does this task as well as I can. There are a lot of people who can do pretty much every individual task better than you can as the entrepreneur. Your job is to document the system, create something that is repeatable and scalable, and hand it off to someone who can do it better than you because they spend more time and more focus on that aspect of your business. That is Systems. I'm going to break this down as a quick recap because I think it's really important. Spend the time upfront to document every little thing you do, and you're going to hate it, and you will love it when it is done. You will have a better business, a stronger business, a faster business, a more scalable business. And if you ever go to exit your business, you have a business because all of a sudden your systems are for sale with the actual company. You have to do this step. 2, fire fast. Hire fast, build an A-team, and keep an A-team. Whatever it costs, within reason, get that A-team built and keep that A-team. Do not settle for someone who is almost good enough or acceptable. Excellence is what you're going for, so you need an excellent team. Do these things. This is how we built several businesses, some of them 7-figure, some of them 6-figure, but we put together millions of dollars of business in 2 years. It's a very sustainable model. It is a ton of work up front. When it is built, it is built. You can get people, you can scale, and you end up with employees who love their job. You get to work with people who you really enjoy working with, and ultimately you get to build a company that looks exactly like it should in your head, where your vision starts to become bigger than you ever imagined. So best of luck out there. We'll see you all on the next episode.
