My 3-Step Formula For Organizing Your Virtual Team | Tim Hubbard

As your team continues to grow, how do you stay organized? How do you keep people accountable? Especially if you're working with virtual assistants or have a remote team. That's what we're going to talk about this week. I want to give you my three step process to stay on top of everything. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Here we are one more week, another week, another topic. And this week I want to talk about how I personally stay organized with my team and my virtual team. We've been growing quite a bit. I think the three step process that I use could help you out quite a bit as well. No matter how big your team is, even if you're only working with one person. So I want to break that down for you this week in a nutshell. So first off, whoever you're working with, there has to be a clear understanding of what the job roles and the job tasks are, right? So everyone that's on our team has a work agreement. Now, it doesn't mean it's set in stone and it can't change, but it is the basis for that position. That, that could be a housekeeper, that could be a manager, that could be a receptionist, it could be a, an accountant. Anyone that's helping you with your team, with your real estate, with your portfolio. It's good to have a general agreement what that is that you can review from time to time, make sure you stay on the right page. So that's the starting point. At least that's the starting point for me. Now there's a special little place where I store this work agreement and all of the notes and all the projects and all the reviews that I do with each team member. And that special little place is Notion for. I've talked about it before. If you haven't heard the first episode about Notion, go back and check it out. It will dive into some of the features and some of the reasons why I think it is one of the most amazing organization tools available. So check that prior episode out if you haven't already. But that is where I store it and that's also where I store our call reviews. So most of the time I'm only reviewing with my team members. Maybe once a week, it depends on the task or the person's position, but maybe once a week, sometimes not Even once a week, sometimes once a month. But the beautiful thing about the way I have it set up is that you never miss a beat. So with Notion, we've got our old call notes shared right in there. Notion. Just to make this podcast a little easier for you to understand, it's basically a place to store a bunch of notes online and you can link to whatever you want. That's as far as I'm going to go into that. But I use Notion to store everything. So we've got a work agreement on there. We have maybe some current projects that we're working on. And then each week when we do a call review, I do it via Zoom. Makes it really easy. I like. I like having the video as well. And we leave some notes in there, and then when we touch base next time, I can refer back to the old notes and we can say, okay, how did we do with this task? What was our progress here? So on and so on. So it's a really easy place to stay organized. And. And also in this page, which is shared with this team member, by the way. So if I think of something that I want to talk with them about the next time we have a brief call, I can jot a note down in there and then nothing escapes me. Right? So. And they can do the same. So it's a shared page that we can both see. It makes it really, really easy. And they can access it from their phone, from their computer, wherever you have an Internet connection, basically. So that is where we store all of our notes and we keep working organized. Now, since I'm only reviewing with most team members periodically, you've got to have another way to hold them accountable and to track progress. Right. And for that, I use a Google form, and it's really easy to set up. The Google form is going to be different for each team member. But for example, I might have. What did you do today? What were your tasks today? What? What did you get done? Might have a question that says, what can I help you with? Might have a question that says, what do you think can make our property better? Or our properties or our business, or anything related to that person's tasks that they're dealing with on a regular basis. How can we improve? And that's a really important question. Right? So you can edit the document however you want. It's going to depend on the person's tasks, right? Another question that I like to throw in, and this is not mandatory for anyone, but it's really nice to see it's a simple question. That says, what are you grateful for today? What's one thing you're grateful for today? And I love reading these responses. It lets us go past work just for a slight second to think about something that we're grateful for. And it's not mandatory, but I would say I really enjoy reading the responses and allows me to get to know my team a little better personally outside of the work, just with that simple question. So that is how we hold our team members accountable. That's how we track their progress. And I just ask that every day that they're working, they fill out one sheet. Only takes them a few minutes. And on the back end, this Google form gets turned into a Google sheet. So usually what I'll do is we'll join our zoom call. I'll pull up notion where we have all of our notes together and then I will share my screen and, and then I will pull up their daily tasks and then we can read through them together. And if they answered a question one day that said, what can I help with? And there's a response there, well, then we can talk about that versus maybe getting a question here, maybe getting a question there, and kind of just being all over the place. This helps us keep organized and I think it works really well for both sides. So that is how we keep people accountable. Now, if you want to go a little further than that, a good way to track time and to track activity, especially if someone's working for you virtually, that's to use hubstaff and that can track your hours. It can also require that the person give access to their computer. So it takes a random screenshot ever so often if they're working for you virtually. So that in a NutShell is my three piece system for working with our team members. And we work with quite a lot of team members now to help with the properties and help with other businesses and things that I've got going on, maybe, you know, close to seven to 10 full time. And then we're probably working with maybe up to 20 people on a regular basis in total. So our team's growing. And if you haven't read the book who, Not How, I did a podcast episode on that. I highly recommend going back and reading that. In a nutshell, that one says that we don't need to know how to do everything. We just need to know who to find essentially who to have on our team that knows how to do that thing. So we can't do everything ourself. And the more you get into real estate and the bigger your portfolio gets, the more help you're going to need. And so it's a crucial, crucial element to have good communication with your team members. And so if you use this three step process that I use, I guarantee you're going to have good results. So to break it down again, we use Notion to track all of our tasks and notes and everything like that. We use a Google form that they fill out every day they're working. And then to track actual activity, we use Hubstaff. So check out those three different resources if you haven't already used them. And until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day. Cheers.

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