EP 565 – The Four 4 R’s Of Hiring Virtual Assistants With Bob Lachance

This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the no Closer Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here with the day, and I'm jacked up to have a very special guest who I think is going to save a lot of you guys a lot of time, save a lot of money, and help you streamline or systemize a lot of the things that you guys are doing out there. Our guest today is a nationally recognized speaker, mentor and trainer who specializes in helping customers build their businesses through automation and outsourcing. He's the owner of Reba Global llc, which is one of the premier virtual assistant staffing companies which focuses on offering trained real estate virtual assistants to real estate professional. He's also a seasoned real estate Investor, completing over 700 different transactions since he started as real estate Investor back in 2004. He's also an ex professional hockey player. But we're honored to have the man, the myth, the legend, Bob Ochance join us here on the Nucleus show today. How's it going today, Bob?

Very good. I appreciate having me on.

Excited to have you, man. And you've got an interesting story, but you've really done a great job out there of really helping. Like you said, you've got a passion for helping people really take their businesses to the next level. So let's talk a little about that. What are probably some of the things that you see that drive you bonkers when you're talking to entrepreneurs on things that you're like, oh, you can do this so easy, right?

Yeah. You know what? A lot of what we offer two are three main things. It's efficiency, scale and time. You know, your time freedom. Because those three things, those are the main things that each and every one of us when we look at, when we take a step back and look at our businesses in our lives, we all fit within one of those three.

Right?

Because if you look at efficiency and you look at business, no matter what type of business you're in, real estate, professional or anything else, it doesn't matter. We're all looking to get more and more efficient.

Right.

We need to accomplish more in less time. That's really the goal. So our company Riva Global. Obviously we offer virtual assistant services and that's one of the things that really helps within the efficiency with their business. The other one is like I said, you know, you have time, freedom and also scalability. On the scale side, everyone's in a different part of their business.

Right.

Some of your listeners may not be ready to scale yet, but maybe looking to scale in the future. And the definition of scale goes a couple different ways. Some people may look at scale saying, hey, when I want to hire an in house employee or a virtual employee or a virtual 1099, let's call them. I know, employees, that's a bad word sometimes. Every time we say that because there's a lot of stuff that goes along with that. But on the 1099 side and scaling our business, that can really, when you peel back the layers, you can look at it and say, all right, scale to me actually means if I'm overwhelmed on one, you know, I wake up in the morning, I look at my calendar and I'm overwhelmed. I'm sweating because I know I'm not going to be able to get through all of this stuff that I need to get through.

Right.

We all have our list. We all use different types of calendaring and I use Google Calendar and individuals that come to us that say, hey, Bob, you know what? When do I first hire someone? When do I bring someone to my team? First thing I say is, when you feel overwhelmed, when you look at those tasks, they don't fire you up anymore. So for instance, when I first started real estate, I door knocked all the time. I literally door knocked from 10am and I have a funny story after because I know you had Pat Precourt on Patrick Precord on your show and him and I were business partners for 10 years. So we could go off on a tangent on that. One of the best guys I've ever met. Ethics, integrity, man. The best. And considered my first mentor and very lucky I actually met him to get in the business and go in the right direction. So that's just a plug for my man Pat. So if you don't mind, like to say that.

Nothing wrong with that. You can check out Pat's previous episode back a few weeks ago. Great, great guy. Known Pat for a few years and he mentioned you. I was like, oh, yes, we got you. If you're afraid of Pat, he's a good guy. Yeah, definite right of mind.

That's right, that's right. So getting back to the scale side of it, when you start looking at those things, the pain Points in your business that you're not excited to do. Like, like I said, I would start a door knocking and then I would go home and I would skip tracing, cold call. Well, after a while, once you're skip tracing and cold calling, you get beat down, you get tired, you know you're getting rejected.

Right.

And those are great, very good and high. A lot of our clients actually use our virtual assistants for that alone. They just do that on a consistent basis.

Right.

To really skip trace, outbound dial, to gauge selling motivation, then send them over to me and my team to then take it to the next level. So that would be considered scaling, part of scaling and obviously, you know, adding in more cold callers, individuals, a text message. There's a bunch of other tasks we could go over, and the final one is time freedom.

Right.

So a lot of the tasks that we do in our day are admin tasks. I always like to say, if I'm sitting on my butt, right, I'm not typically not making money. All right? If I'm not going to think about this, Real estate investors, real estate agents, real estate professionals, if they're not out checking out properties, meeting with sellers, meeting with buyers, meeting with attorneys, meeting with mortgage brokers, private money lenders, yourself, masterminds, etc. Typically you're not making money. And I think, you know, there's a stat about 90% of all what we do is either through a computer or phone, which means that you could outsource a majority of those tasks and time freedom. For me, I have a wife and three kids. My kids are 10, 12, and 16, and they all play hockey. So I want to make sure that I'm able to coach every single one of them without worrying that my business is not going to run. If I have to travel to a hockey tournament, I want to make sure, you know, if I'm gone Thursday, Friday, I want to make sure that the phone's getting answered, the outbound calls are getting made, the text messages are getting sent out and replied to, and my social media is getting taken care of, et cetera. I have buddies that call. You'll love this one, Scott. I have buddies that call me all the time. Oh, you're on LinkedIn again. I'm like, I am. So I don't know half of the stuff that's going out there, but that's part of branding our business. And I think that those are the things that we have to replace ourself and give it over to, whether it's a virtual assistant or someone in your Office.

Yeah, I would agree to that totally. You should only be doing the most profitable income generating topics or activities on a daily basis. If it's clerical or due diligence or meal work, it should be outsourced. But that's the one of the biggest things I think as entrepreneurs is overcome that inner control freak a little bit, right? Oh, they're not going to do it as good as I am. And can you talk a little bit to that aspect of things and that we have to realize, hey, yeah, they're not, but they're gonna do a pretty good job and get better as you can coach them.

Absolutely. You know, this is something I learned. I have to go back and learn from Pat too. I mean, I'll talk a lot about him because he taught me, like I said, a ton about this business. When I first got into real estate, it's back in 2004, I drove around neighbors. I bought a real estate course. Just like a lot of us, probably rich dad, poor dad and I, I was in right into two feet into real estate. I bought a course all about real estate, but all about nothing, pretty much. It kind of a global look at what real estate is. But one of the things that I took from that were farming areas. So I got in my car, drove in areas, was looking at anything with a high grass roof's all messed up, et cetera. So I saw this one property, it was actually listed by an agent called the Agent properties listed for 175, made an offer on 135. And a lot of people may think that they're scared to make that first offer because it's so much lower than what that value is. But the one thing we don't know is the motivation behind it. It was a vacant property, right? When I opened the door, it smelled really bad. Smell of cat pee, the smell of.

Piss and shit is all money, man, isn't it?

That's exactly right. That's exactly. I remember reading in this book, it's kind of funny. So I put on an offer, they accepted it. And then first thing I thought, I'm like, oh, what the hell do I do now? Right? I didn't know anything about, think about this. I didn't have any contractors. I'm brand, I just retired from hockey. Then I just all of a sudden now I'm a real estate investor, right? Just out of the blue. Because I designed myself as a real estate investor, so I might as well be. So I didn't have any contractors, I had a little money put away, but I didn't, you know, I didn't have the full gamut of money with rehabbers or rehab money. So I found money, found rehabbers, rehabbed the property in a month, ended up making $32,000, right? Fantastic. All happy. But yeah, that is the sound of money, right? However, I took a step back and I said, you know what, what do I do next? Because I'm back and forth, I'm a Home Depot. This is no joke. I'm back and forth, hot Depot about three to four times, at least a day going back because, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. All of a sudden I was a contractor. Now, I didn't know contractors were supposed to actually outsource that stuff. A two second funny story. I know we'll go off on a tangent here, but we're good. So the first day I closed on the house, I had to rip a roof on a small garage. Just rained the first day, the day before. So I put my ladder up and I didn't know anything about back in a ladder, right? Thank God the roof wasn't a high roof. So I'm ripping the roof, ripping the roof, the ladder smoke slips out. So I fall down, right? I land on my feet, but the ladder comes in and drills me right on my shins. And I thought, I literally thought I broke my shins. I had some huge lumps on my shins. But right then and there, that's when I learned I have to be a contractor, not an actual worker. I didn't do anything in that property for the rest of the time. And I learned pretty quick. I had a crew, junior, and they did everything from then on. But fast forward to that. I also realized that I had no systems, no process. I didn't understand what marketing was. So I joined my local RIA Group Real Estate Investment Association. And I asked around, I said, who is the best person in Connecticut as an investor? And they all pointed to Pat. Walked up to Pat, and I said, pat, you don't know me, but I'm willing to do anything. Do you have any openings? He goes, actually, you know what? I'm looking for a door knocker. And I'm like, of course you are. I didn't know that then. Now I laugh about him. I'm like, all right, you know what? I'll do anything. Because my thought process was I want to learn from ground up. Because I'm a firm believer that if you learn anything from ground up. And the other thing Pat taught me, he said, you know what? You go Into a partnership, assume after two years you're going to hate each other. And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, this is back in 2005 or 2004. 2005. He said, you know, the average partnerships only last around that amount. So again, great advice. So I took everything like a sponge, learned from him. And through the years, we did got into short sales from then. We did a lot of stuff, actually, really cool. We helped start a real estate education short sale program and then another real estate education coaching program as well on top of that. And then in 2013, got introduced to what a virtual assistant was. And then 2014, launched my first company and obviously, yeah, flipping properties within that time as well. Still do it today.

Sure, sure. Good stuff there. So when somebody's looking at a virtual assistant, it's, I don't have the time to train them or the big thing that I always pulls my hair out. I don't have the money to hire an assistant. So why don't we talk about overcoming those obstacles a little bit and the myths associated with either this? Because we both know that's not true, right, Bob?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, that's one of the things. That's one of the pain points that we cover too, with our company. We take care of all the sourcing, all the recruiting. I have a recruiting department out of the Philippines. Our virtual assistants are the Philippines. First and foremost. We picked the Philippines. I started all over the world, right? I went through the pain of number one, trying to go into different companies, trying to find my own vascular, trying to go through all of the resumes, trying to screen through everything, going through a hundred to pick one. For me, that was a big pain point. So when I figured out the business model and how we want to do it, we take away all of that pain points to be able to find the VAs, right? But the training side, we also set up training team. So we got the recruiting, sourcing team. We have our trading team, placements team, and then our operations team that actually manages the virtual assistant and the client together. Which is another pain point that we took away from hiring a va. Because when I had hired my first va, I got them up upwork. Or it was before, it wasn't called upwork, but let's say upwork today got them up upwork. And then all of a sudden, they. They didn't show up one day and I'm like, well, where are you? There's no one I could call. There's no one I could talk to. There was that was one of the pain points that, another pain point that we actually fixed within that whole process. So when you go back, our recruiting team gets them, but to answer your question, we put them through a one month training session, a very intensive training session for one month. If you're going to do it yourself, what I highly recommend is whatever you're doing on a computer, just record it, right. Every step that you take and give it off to your whoever. Even if it's in house. Right. If you have an in house individual, this is how you're going to train them. We go through, like I said, a full month, but there is 20% of everyone's business. It's something that my company can't train. We need to partner on that and help train. Because 20% of everyone's business, that's the gold. That's what separates the top from not the top, if you will.

Right.

Because your area in the country, you know you're in Austin, right? I'm in Connecticut. It is a little different. My 20% of investing strategy may be a little different than yours. You do lease options, rent to own maybe and note buying notes. Right. There's different tasks within that than there are with my wholesaling and rehabbing type business up here in Connecticut. Right. So that's just a little example. I think I answered your question.

Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing is I see a lot of people trying to go, oh, I'm gonna go the elance route or upwork route or fiverr route. And I think some of those are great for initial short projects. But look, if you can make a list of what you're doing on a daily basis for a couple days and then pick the most important things remaining 80% of what you're doing digitally online, due diligence, skip tracing, especially in the notes space here. Some of the things that we outsource is the due diligence aspect of things. If you don't need to go in here and Google an address and pull Zillow value or E appraisal value. You can check rent rates, you can check other things. You can have your va, as we like to say, virtually stalk our borrowers. You can have them jump on LinkedIn and reach out to asset managers or bankers or all that good stuff or even dollar for dollars, I imagine too.

That's right. Yeah. There's two things I know one of I actually didn't answer why I picked the Philippines a little while ago. But when you're looking to bring on a virtual assistant I think you nailed it with the tasks because if you're looking at notes, you have a list of tasks. If you're buying notes, a list of tasks that you need to do. If you're wholesaling, there's some other tasks that you need to do.

Right.

And I could give, we have a hundred task lists that I could actually give to you as well. And there's also some different in rehabbing and property management, et cetera, and real estate agents and brokers, etc.

Right.

So you start looking at all of those different task lists. And when you're bringing on a virtual assistant or anyone, anyone in your office, I like to call it the four R's.

Right?

You have roles, responsibilities, requirements and results. Now, I have to footnote this. I didn't come up with this, I heard it off a podcast. But I absolutely loved it. I'm a podcast junkie, like probably a lot of us, Right. I know you are as well. Number one on roles, make sure that you know what role you're hiring for. Because one of the big things that I see that a big common mistake they get in, they say, hey, I want help, but they don't know what role they want to fill.

Right.

If you want a cold caller that's different than somebody that you want to help with admin.

Right.

With something different than closing on properties and property management tasks, working with tenants, all a little different. So just make sure you identify what those roles are first. Next you have to identify responsibilities. So exactly what are those responsibilities that you want them to do like the tasks?

Right.

You will. And then after that, what are the requirements that you want out of that? Whether it's a virtual assistant or whether it's someone in your office.

Right.

What kind of background do you want them to have? 4 year college degree. Do you want them to have experience in a call center?

Right.

Do you want them to have. If you're bringing them a US based person, do you want them to be a real estate agent? Right. I don't know. Whatever that is. And then finally, results. Results are what do you expect out of that individual?

Right.

And I think this is something that I know we touched upon a little bit, but really, really important. The results mean if you want to hire somebody and you want to bring someone on like a virtual assistant to get your time back, those are different results than if you bring someone on the cold call.

Right?

Because one of them is business growth scaling, the other one is getting your time back. Maybe it's you want to go on vacation with your family and not have your phone right next to you and it blowing up, literally calling and you're saying that you're thinking to yourself, that could be a 20, 30, $40,000 loss. Where your spouse is looking at you saying, if you pick that up, I'm gonna kill you. Right? So, you know, that's, that's time, right? And I know we're up. We all fight with that dichotomy of, you know, that's, that's just something that we do as, as entrepreneurs and investors and real estate professionals are the time aspects of it and, or scaling or making money. Just make sure those results you want are crystal, crystal clear.

That's a big thing. The more clear you can on everything, the happier you're going to be. Because I think a lot of we'll just say control freak entrepreneurs. We all start off with that. At some point, we got to manage it, we got to touch it, we got to control it. We look at things, oh, I'm not happy they do it as good as I did. Well, you guys spend some time getting feedback back and forth, as you said, going back and forth. And if one of those Rs are out of alignment, you're not going to be happy.

You know, and let me, let me touch upon that. And that's something you said before. And I realized that an answer question, right? The whole thing of someone can't do it better than me, you know what, that's okay to feel that way, to think that way, but you're only gonna be limited in what you can do. So there's another thing I pull off a podcast. If you're doing $10 an hour tasks, that typically means you're gonna have a $10 an hour bank account. Yeah, hang on a second.

Hang on.

I will slow it down. If you are doing $10 an hour task tasks, that means you're going to have a $10 an hour bank account. So to answer your question and take that to the next step and next level, if you are looking at that saying, all right, I could do that $10 an hour task better than anybody else, well, then, I mean, what value are we putting on ourselves, right? Do we want to make $100, $200, $300, $400 an hour, or $10?

I love that. I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna steal that quote from.

I love it. Yeah, exactly.

Because I always tell people, like, listen, if you have a set of goal for yourself, a lot of people want to leave their job, make more money in Real estate, what's your goal going to be? You know, if you want to make a 120 grand, it means, okay, that means you're making 10 grand a month. That means you're making 2,500 a week. That means you're making 6250 an hour. You can't be doing $10 an hour jobs. If you want to be making 120 grand, you're losing $52 there. Go do the 62 and it pays somebody to come in and do the $10 an hour job to grow yourself. That's the way that we get away with growing is that delegation of duties to the people that can go get that done. And a $10 an hour job with a VA may not be 10 bucks, it may be cheaper, but you're making money that way by saving with having somebody doing it remotely or doing it when you're asleep. Getting duties done as well too. Right, Bob?

Absolutely. And that's one of the things I learned that everything that you do, everything that we do, we should document it. And then when I basically my. When I started door knocking, I documented everything that I did my script, everything at the door knocking, I replaced myself and I got a door knocker. And then Pat and I, like I was saying, we're partners for a little around 10 years. And then I graduated from that to negotiating with banks. So we're doing short sales. And then I documented the whole process. We created actually a short sale course where I was selling on stage, Pat was selling on stage when we took the next step in the. Into the info space. Right. But then what I did at that point is I moved, replaced myself and I brought on a loss mitigator, brought out another loss mitigator, so then created a short sale department in a loss mitigation company. And then we're doing that for other investors, ourselves and other agents through the years. But the point is we created standard operating procedures and we would replace ourselves. Kind of like what we were talking about of recording a video and then giving it over to your virtual assistant for that last 20% of training. That's specific to you.

Right.

So I think that's really, really important no matter what we do. And that's one thing Pat told me. He said you got to create stuff like one day you're going to sell it. Whether you're going to sell it or not, what it really does is it helps you create systems and processes in your business and you'll be able to see any types of holes that you have in your business. Along the way because it's really, really important. If you never do that at the beginning, you won't even know what the heck you're missing.

So true on that. Start with the end in mind that you are going to sell it, that you are not the bottleneck in your business. Remove yourself and oftentimes business will work a whole lot better too. For you. Seen it happen, been there, got the T shirt and the scars to go along with it. I think we all have. Right, man?

Oh, absolutely. You know, going back, it's funny how many times you talk to another investor that's been in the business for 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 plus years and looks back, say, I wish I knew what I know now. Back then. I wish I learned that strategy. I wish I learned how to buy notes. I wish I learned how to rent owns, lease options. I wish I would actually start a passive Inc. My first year in business.

Right.

There's a lot of I wishes, but you learn that over time and that's okay.

Right?

Right now with the clients that you work with and I know you probably don't have an exact number, but for those that really embrace the fact and bringing on at least one va, one assistant, what do you think it's worth, bottom line, as far as profitability in a year, by any chance, do you think it's worth at least six figures?

So the answer is 100%? Yes. But it's also twofold. It's one of them. What is your time worth? Because you look at how much money you're going to make and you look. So it's on the value side. Yeah, I'd say over six figures for sure. Because they're going to make you X amount of money per year. And if the value of you going on vacation three times a year with your family, right. And you not having the headache and you not getting an argument with your spouse or your family and saying, dad, mom, you're always on the phone. Is that worth six figures? I think so.

Right.

It allows me to coach my kids and not have to worry about checking my phone when I'm on the bench coaching my kids. That's worth six figures for me.

I would say so. You don't want to be doing that and get a puck in the face or anything.

Hey, two second story to my first pro shift. When I signed, I went to Boston University because we had masks on, right? You had to wear masks. First shift took my mask off skating through the center of the ice or right in front of their net. Slap shot. Right between the eyes. Oh, thank God it hit me right here. Because if it hit, you know, anywhere else, I'd be one eye less than I have right now. So that's a positive thing.

You mean without the O?

The O, that's exactly right.

That's funny that. It's funny. What do you see? What are probably the most common things that you're seeing? New clients delegate immediately. Yep.

So I look at it. So let's just talk about real estate investors, right? You have to look at what we do with marketing. If you have no marketing, you have no business, right? You have lead intake. If you have no one to take leads, you have no business. Deal analysis. You got to analyze deals, right. And then at that point get something under contract. And I know everyone has different departments and then it's really contract to close. But what I see are two different things. Number one, help on the marketing side. And I'll explain some of those Lead intake and follow up. Follow up is there's a stat. I pulled this up for you. It said, did you know. And this is from marketing donut. Did you know that only 2% of sales close at the initial meeting?

Right.

Which is ridiculous. That means 44. It keeps going down. It said 44% of sales reps stop following after one rejection. 22 stop after two. 14 stop after three. 12 stop after four. That means 92% of people are done trying after the fourth. No. So that is a huge statistic. And that is one of the things that a lot of our individuals clients use. So let me take a step back on the marketing side. We have a lot of cold callers. So what they do. And I'll just go over the quick short process of it, right? It's they compile a list wherever, you know, there's a lot of places to get different list providers out there. They get them skip traced, they put them in an auto dialer, they hammer the phones every single day, whether it's through an auto dialer or you have your cell phone or whatever call rail, let's just say whatever type of system you're going to use. And then what they're doing is gauging seller motivation. What I want to know is if we have a seller that raised their hand that said, yep, I will entertain an offer, I want that virtual assistant to send that right to my desk. It's my job to make money on that. Right? And here's the best advice I could give somebody. If they're only wholesaling, they're gonna have lesser chance to make money on that lead. But if they're rehabbing and wholesaling, they have a higher level. If they do lease options, they have a higher level. If they buy an old hole, they could do a higher level. If they also list properties, they have a. You know what I mean? So you could make money along the gamut, right? So that's the way I always like telling people, because that's the reality of it. The more you buy notes, right, you have another level, all of those levels, if you have those strategies and then your back pocket or your tool belt, you're going to be way better off, right? So same thing on that side of it, you could add in, take out cold calling and add in text messaging, right? So the virtual assistant, same thing. You're compiling a list, you're getting skip trace, you're putting into the text message platform, right? I use launch control. Very good for me. Launch control, we have a virtual assistance. We train them on how to actually send out the first respond back and forth again. Now sending it over to me for a hot lead. Hot or warm lead, someone says, yep, I'll entertain an offer. Perfect. We call that an its, which is an interested to sell goes to myself, my acquisition team. It's our job to turn that into cash. Ringless voicemails, you do the same thing. Except the VA would be now inbound taking inbound leads. So one of them is on the marketing side, right? Setting up a lot of those marketing campaigns. There's social media stuff they do as well, but the second one would be lead intake. So it's the same thing. If you're outbound dialing your gauge seller motivation. If you're inbound dialing, if you have a direct mail campaign or if you do ringless voicemails and you have your virtual assistant answer the phone, they're doing the same thing. Hey, this is Bob from Reva Global. How can I help you? Oh, you know, I just got a piece of mail. Okay, great. Now you run them through the script. Gauge seller motivation, send it over to me on the ground, the acquisition person or my team.

Right?

Same kind of concept. Another level would be skip tracing or, sorry, running comps, comparables, market research, etc. The main one, which I know we touched upon before with this statistic right here, follow up. That is getting to be our highest level of client using follow up. Because think about this. Whether you're an investor or an agent, doesn't matter. You spend a lot of money getting leads, right? Now, what happens if they call you back? You'll get 20 leads this week, 20 leads next week, maybe 10, maybe 30 the week after. So now in a month you're going to have, I don't know, math. I just did. Let's just say 70.

Yep.

Right. With a seven area 70, let's go 80, let's go. So now you have 80 leads and you probably only got a hold of 20% of those or 30. Let's go 50%. Easy math. You got a hold of 40 sellers. Now you rinse and repeat the next week you do the same next month. You do the same thing next month. Before you know it you have 250 people you never talked to or you did talk to them, but they weren't ready today. And the only one you're going to be working with is someone that says yes today. It's low hanging fruit, right? So you got to look at that. And on average, I mean you're part of all these masterminds. It takes between six to eight touches to get a deal.

Yeah, 80% of sales are made up for the fifth contact. And it's all about that follow up. And that's where we have found, what we do is just to follow up on sales, follow up on the note sellers. Hey, did those deals close that we didn't succeed in? Or the follow up on a monthly basis with asset managers or via emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn, just touching bases, get the word out. It's not hard to do. It's just systemizing it and having somebody to do that for you when you don't have the time to do it yourself.

It's easy to create those scripts.

Right.

Say we talk about, you know, a lot of us have our standard operating procedures. That's all we need to do is hand it off to a virtual assistant to have them just follow up. Because think about this. A no to them is different than a no to us. A no to us. If we keep getting no, no, no, no, no, then we'll get gun shy. So why not just outsource that part of the no business to somebody else? Because it's part of. I don't care what business you're in, no's are part of growing.

Right.

And I think I touched upon something too about why we picked the Philippines. I know, I didn't say that because we kind of go off on some tangents here, which is fine, but out of all the countries, you know, one of the things that I've realized that first of all English is one of their national languages, which is really, really important. Which means that they typically have neutral accents, really good, very excellent English proficiency, which is important. And we have every one of our virtual assistants have a four year college degree. And I know that's for me, that's really important. I'm here in Connecticut. For me to hire somebody with a four year college degree, it costs a lot of money to be able to hire them. So that's really important. One of the things about their culture that I find fascinating is that they're extremely family oriented. They cherish, they put a high value on education, natural caretakers. And the reason why I say that is as a business owner, why do I care? It's because they look at your business as their business.

Right.

If you succeed, they succeed. So it's really, really important to, if you're going to outsource anywhere or if you're going to hire in house, make sure that they are a culture fit for you and your business. And that's why I love the Philippines.

I think that's hit the nail right in the head there for several of those reasons. You want to have somebody that cares about what you care what your business and it takes ownership. And it's harder, I think it's harder these days to find people that actually buy in and take ownership of stuff. Especially when you're hiring. I hate to say it, but sometimes you're not hiring new people out of college. They walk into expecting something. I got a four year degree. If you make it 70 grand a year. No, that's not how it works all the way, you know, or 100 grand.

Yeah, yeah. We're in a lot of the ME society, right. I mean, because with social media, that's the challenge is. And it's funny, I was talking to my wife about this last night. It's different than when we grew up, right. We didn't have social media, we didn't have a taking pictures yourself, selfies and all that kind of stuff. And if we know that going in, we just have to. Now we have to be very selective on who we bring in and make sure they're a team player. That's right. When I hire here and I look for somebody, I have an acquisition guy coming in tomorrow. His background is hockey, Right. You know, I know he's a team player. I'm hoping he's a team player. But I look at individuals that want to be part of a team, right. So I think that's really, really important. When anybody brings on somebody, they look at those kinds of things.

That's huge. I think team Players in sports equals team players in business. I found a lot of times athletes, they get the work eth, they understand it takes time, they stick to it. Yeah, it's a smart, smart play there for sure. Now let's get to the numbers on this because I, you know, I got people are going to be asking here, hey, so okay, this sounds great. What's it going to cost me, bottom line? Can I, can I. Do I have to start off with like 40 hours a week or 10 hours a week with somebody? And how do you go that part?

Yeah, we have a simple system. It's part time, full time. So what we have is our part time is 1060 an hour. There's no hidden fees, nothing. It's just 1060 full time is 960. So you have a dollar less obviously for 40 hours. So 1060 is 20 hours full time, which is 20 hours, full time is 40 hours and that's 960 an hour. So we keep it very simple. We've tested other models along the way, but that seems to fit with our company.

That's great, man. It's cheap. Now is that just paid on a portal or are we at an issue a 1099 at the end of the year or W2 or anything like that or. No.

Yeah. So we handle everything right. So you just pay us direct. We handle. So we pay. What we do is a lot of. And my wife always yell at me because she's in business with me and she says you got to explain it right. Because in the Philippines a lot of stuff that we do is we pay for their health care, we do other benefits like 0% interest loans. We have a, a lot of training that we offer them. We do a charity over there as well. So there's a lot of stuff that we do within our team. I personally don't do it as just, I don't do justice as my wife does when she explains it, but I do the best I can at explaining it. But one of the things that is really, really important is that we bring on the best of the best of the Philippines. We have a lot of pride in our customer service and really doing the right things. And again I anchor back to. I'm lucky that I actually got that mentorship from Pat Precorp because I was in the day, back in the day when the first recession hit. I can't say first, but when I was in business.

Right.

And you could have gone one or two ways, right? That's the mortgage. When mortgages were blowing up, you know, Pat And I kept asking Pat, should we get into mortgages? Should we get into mortgages? He goes, listen, no, let's stay the course. Because what's happening, because he saw the writing on the wall. He's very good at seeing a lot of things happen before they happen. And he saw some of the people taking advantage of other people.

Right.

And selling them mortgages they shouldn't have ever done. And he would always preach that to me. And I thank him to this day because he kept me on the right path, which is integrity is everything. I mean, you know this. A lot of people now come to. I've been in this industry for a long time and there aren't as many people when we started that are still in this industry. When times get tough, they usually phase out the best, most integrity, the individuals with most integrity ethics are still in business. So that's the way I like to look at it. And again, I'm very grateful and thankful that Pat taught me that from day one. So. And that's how I run my business today.

Yeah, that's definitely. And if you've been a short sale warrior, you ran a short sale negotiation company here with a mortgage company before I got to the no business side. And so, yeah, different now than it was then. Now all these people doing short sales have it easy versus what we had to go through back then a decade ago. Right.

So I knew you were nuts. I knew you're nuts. Anyone in the short sale world. I'll tell you what though, we were nuts. But a great way to learn the business because you have the gamut of everything going on and working with sellers, working with buyers, working with banks, working with lender. Like it's such a great thing to understand and do because you learn a lot with people too because it's a people world.

Amen to that. And that's really doing a lot of good. Really. Creating lemonade out of a position of lemons back then with people's value values dropping out weren't the people's fault or the borrower's fault that things were happening just a bad time and you just had to do what you had to do. So that's awesome out there. What's the best way for people to look to get started? What's the best way? Should they reach out to you? Is there a website? Should they go, should you go to. What's the best way for our listeners who want to add the four R's to the bottom line, as I like, you know.

Sure, yeah, they can visit us. They could email me direct or visit our website@revaglobal.com so that's www.revaglobal.com or email me direct at Bob Eva global.com We also have videos that we publish. Just get on our email list or our website and we give weekly tips, tricks, etc.

So that's awesome out there. Yeah guys, that's the biggest thing. I mean look, I love your pricing model. I think it's ideal. That's great. I think back to all the money I've lost trying to train somebody and hire and rehire and retrain and retrain where I somebody that's there, dedicated and stuff like that, who's already trained, who's got coaching, is part of a team and wants to buy into a team, so forth. I mean that's think about that 20 hours a week, it's 180, 200 bucks a week you can squeeze that into because you're more exponentially going to recoup that back by being more effective in your marketing, being more effective in your lead gen and you're reaching out your due diligence because that's the big thing that I see out there is everybody that's still working that wants to transition to a full time investor, they try to do it in 10 hours a week and they can do that for only for so long before time constraints either starts to hurt them. You know, the bottleneck of being able to work so many hours and being the person that's a touch everything, you really need an assistant to take it to that next level. And I always tell people, look, before you need one, hire one. So that when you start closing a lot of deals you've got somebody ready to rock and roll versus them to transmit that point. Right Bob?

Yeah. And the one thing I just, I'll leave everyone on is that what if you had that extra 20 hours a week, what if you had an extra 40 hours a week, what would that do for you? Whether time or profitability.

Right.

I mean I know for me when I have an extra 20 hours a week, it's life changing.

Right?

40 hours a week, it's game changing, right. Whether it's like I said, business or family wise or whatever you want to do on that time, it is game changing.

Yeah, definitely. Well and if you ever read Rich Dad, Poor dad, if you're doing it all yourself, you're not a business owner, you're self employed. It's a big head jump over to the other side of the cash flow quadrant to own a business owner having other people do things for you that you can do whatever you want to do, whether it's coaching hockey, hanging out in the cruise ship or doing something with your family or friends or whatever. So, Bob, I want to say thank you for coming on here. Great nuggets once again, everybody. Best way to reach out is to go to Reva Global. Reva Global.com Correct.

Correct.

Go there, check it out. Great videos, great training and either Bob or somebody's team will get reached out to you and get rock and roll in there and help you take your business the next level. It's time to add another zero on the left side of the decimal point to your bottom line this year. Right?

Awesome.

Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chat.

Yeah. All right, guys, that's going to wrap it up for this episode. Go out, check it out. Reva global.com we'll have the links and everything in the show, notes in the description. If you're watching this on the YouTube channel as well, check it out. They work with entrepreneurs all across the country for you. So if you're in note nation anywhere from the east coast to the west coast, check them out and go take some action and we'll see you all top everybody. Bye.