How to Effectively Work with Virtual Assistants in the Land Business

Hey, it's Mark Punolski, the Land Geek, with your favorite digit real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's Roundtable podcast, if you're interested about how to work with VAs or the VA that you like working with the most or getting the most out of your VAs, delegating versus advocating, this is the podcast to listen to. And on this week's Roundtable podcast, we've got. I love it when you call me Big Papa. Hey, Litchfield. Hey. How are things in Sin City?

Things are good. A little bit chilly. I feel bad for everybody else, but it's colder than I like in Vegas right now.

Nice, nice. And we've got a special treat. The Brain, the Professor, your flight school Sherpa. You know you love them. Scott Todd from Landmoto.com is here. Mr. Professor, how you doing? What's up, brother?

It's like the gang is back. The small. The OG Gang.

The OG Gang is back.

Yeah, Here we go.

That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the topic is really good, especially in the era of AI. AI Agents, right? I think right now, the dream is we're all going to get, like this Optimus prime from Elon. It's going to do all our stuff physically. Maybe it's going to remind us to do things, you know, electronically as well. It'll be like our second brain. And then we're going to have, like, thousands of AI agents doing all the little tasks that human beings are doing right now, and we're all going to have these, you know, companies of one. The reality is.

That'S the dream. Is that the dream or is that the nightmare?

I don't know if that's a dream. Is it? Because that nightmare, too?

I'm just saying, like, I know you guys are super big on it, and I'm just going to be devil's advocate, because I know Scott's about to lay down some really cool tech on us. Just. I'm just going to raise my hand for those who are just nervous still. I'm still nervous. Okay. I'm going to put that out there.

Is it fair to say that AI right now, Chat GPT, the large language models, is still a really good Internet, and he wouldn't ship any of the work it provides? Scott's nodding his head.

Yeah, yeah, I think. I think it's. It's still an intern. Absolutely. I. I would review it. I would. I would not just ship it straight, but obviously it gets better and better, and I still think that it's no different than just a member of your team. Right. Like.

Right.

You know, I don't think they're at production level yet, but they're close.

They're getting close. Tate, what about you?

Yeah, I mean, I think we started using that phrase artificial intern years ago for it, and I kind of like that. I think it's an appendage of the business, and if you use it correctly, it could be, you know, it can be your proofreader, it can be your problem solver, it can be your go to helper. But I don't know if I'm ready to get rid of everybody on the team. Right. Like, I don't.

I definitely don't want to do that. I think there's something about having a team that makes business. So it could be like your own utopia, and you get to make the rules and. And your teammates get to improve the business in ways that they see fit, and. And you have all these minds coming together. But I do think that AI does boost everyone's productivity, not just the entrepreneurs, but the team as well. But I think that the. The idea being. And we were talking about this before the podcast, I think the idea being like, hey, I'm hiring this person. I'm going to give them some training, and I'm going to let them run. And I would say that's abdicating the role. And so, Tate Scott, I'd love to hear how you guys actually work with your VAs to leverage your time, but also be more productive, but also have an effective virtual assistant where there is accountability and there is, you know, an outcome that you're working for, they're working on. So, Tate, you want to start?

Yeah. You know, I think when I work with a team member, doesn't matter what the role is. I need to start with the end in mind. Right. And so I need to have almost a roadmap or a vision of what this person is going to do, what the end product will look like, and how that benefits me. So when I hire, I don't have to have a perfect knowledge of how everything is going to work or what the steps are, but I need to have this vision of why I need this person, how they're going to help me, and how we're going to measure success. Because if you're not measuring success, well, how do you know if they're even working or producing or being affected? So those are things that I look at, you know, and we come up with some sort of, like, daily training, and I work very closely with a group of sales managers right now. And the one thing that I've learned in working with them is what I thought was a quality process or system has plenty of faults in it. Right. There's flaws. And I've learned that doing things at a slower rate than I even want is annoying. But it's the only way for somebody to learn. And I'm really trying to hire somebody and keep them and retain that person for long, long periods of time. And if that is my goal to keep them for years, not months or not tasks, my mindset has shifted from, here's a bunch of info, take it, leave it, good luck, you know, be successful or not. It's really up to you. I don't want to do that. So I'm giving myself more time and giving my team more time to execute correctly. But I'm also a believer in extreme ownership. So if they're failing right out of the gate, it's not their fault. Right? It's mine. That's what I'm learning.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I love that. Scott. Todd, what are your thoughts? You know, I, I think that, I.

Think, and I used to fall within this trap. I used to think, okay, I hired this person to do this job and then that's it. Like, you just do this job and you're, you're good. And for the most part, people can do that.

Right?

Like, especially on some simple task. But then as you grow your team, just like with any other company, you then have to then circle back and think about, okay, yes, they know what to do or they're capable of doing it, but then I still have to provide leadership for them. Okay. So I have two people on my team that joined me back in June. Okay. And I truly thought in June, I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to apply the 30x rule that I teach. The 30x rule says that for every hour that you do something in your business, like on a weekly basis, that you, you allocate 30 times that amount in order to train them up to speed. And I thought, okay, well, I'll give them, I don't know, I'll give them 150 hours, maybe that's 150 days. Well, what I've realized is that they've become so important to my business that I meet with them daily. And sometimes it's, it's a, it's a longer meeting. So I have a standing one hour meeting with a finance manager every, every Monday, Monday, or every morning, Monday through Friday, 9am Eastern Time. And we get together and we go through things. Sometimes she's working on a project that I've assigned to her, or sometimes she's reviewing things, sometimes she's stuck. Sometimes the call is an hour, sometimes it's five minutes. Today we jumped on there. She's like, I'm still working on this task you gave me. I should be done with it today. I'm going to start doing this next thing. I don't really have anything today. I didn't have anything because I want her working on that, that other stuff. Five minute call. So I found 55 minutes in my day. Same thing with my other assistant who's helping me with social media, et cetera, that kind of stuff. Social media manager, well, she only needed like three minutes today, on and off, off we go. But Yesterday she needed 30 minutes. So, you know, I, I am dedicating the time, I'm block, still blocking the time in order to help them. And what I find is that it's not necessarily about, here, just go do this thing. They know how to do it. But it's my ability as the manager to understand where they're stuck and kind of work to remove those roadblocks for them or to make it simpler or to say, hey, let's go do this, or let's, let's change this playbook around. So I think that, that the way that you kind of have to approach building a VA team is that it's not about, oh, I no longer have to deal with it at all. No, you still have to deal with it, but now you can let them do it and you can still provide guidance to generate the outcome that you want. Right. So instead of being specific to you doing it the way that you want to do it now, you can tell them the outcomes that you expect and you can coach them to get them, to get them produce for you. Repeat the repeatable outcome every single time.

Yeah, no, I, I absolutely love that. And there's, there's so much to unpack there because oftentimes when we think, oh, I'm going to delegate, that means I'm not going to do anything anymore. And, and as Scott and T are saying, like, no, these daily huddles, whether it's five minutes, three minutes, it's an hour or 90 minutes, they're super critical to really making that, that team member more productive, more valuable. And it's, it's an investment like any other investment. And oftentimes I think the, the, the fantasy is, well, I can just async with them. Maybe I, I'll slap them today or I'll send them a VOX message. And it's to the 31, you know, the 31 rule. It's not enough. Especially when you're laser focused on not this is the task I want you to do, but this is the outcome that I want you to produce. And, you know, we're going to give you a scorecard on this and we're gonna, we're gonna evaluate it every week or every month so that you know you're winning and there's no ambiguity about what, am I doing a good job for Taylor Scott or not?

Now, Mark, something I want to add is, you know, Scott just mentioned. Yeah, he's meeting with this person on a daily basis. And you've probably got VAs on your team that you're meeting with very, very frequently. We're not saying that every position needs to have a daily meeting or a daily huddle. In fact, I would argue that most positions don't. You don't need to set yourself up to where it's like, I've got four hours of reoccurring daily meetings. I'm not trying to do that. I'm not. That goes, that's counterintuitive to the land investor business model.

Right.

Like, we want to work in areas and it goes back to like, the root of why this business works. We work in areas that are easily outsourceable and where we see repetition, if we're seeing repetition in the types of properties that we're buying and the types of properties that we're marketing and the types of customers were attracting, then we could build something that's predictable. And if it's predictable, it's scalable. What we want to avoid at all costs is creating a business that's got a whole bunch of unknowns. Now, Scott's va, maybe they're managing money. Right. I don't know what this person's doing. He didn't say. But if, yeah, if they're in charge of the comings and goings of money or things like that, yeah, you got to keep your finger on that pulse. But somebody who's in charge of your deal of the week email campaign.

That'S.

Not a daily link up. Exactly.

Good point.

Yeah. Scott, what are your thoughts? Where, where do you see the meeting cadence? Is it on a position? Is it on a team basis? Is it a leadership position?

I think it's really where, where there's a lot of gray area.

Right.

As Tate said, if something's repeatable, like I have VAs that continue to post properties for us, we have VAs that process sales for us, we have VAsthat put sales into Geek Pay, for example, the loans into Geek Pay. I don't need to meet with them every single day, right? Like that's not a position I need to meet with them on. But where you start to get into gray area, not necessarily predictable outcomes like social media, marketing. Right. So social media for example, as we think about how we're going to share our message on social media there, there's a lot of information there. Hey, I'm, you know, your cue is up to this point or hey, here's the stats or you know, hey, people are asking these questions how, how would I help them? Those are more important I think in order to meet on a regular cadence. And maybe it's daily, maybe it's not daily. Right. It just, I think it just depends for me. And when we talk about finance, there's always things to be doing on the finance side because it's an important role within our organization. So as a result of that I choose to meet with them daily. And again, sometimes, sometimes it's a, it's an hour meeting, sometimes it can be and depends on the time of the month too, right. So sometimes it can get down to a 30 minute meeting and then sometimes honestly I don't have anything to talk about and I'm there to just say do you have anything that's stopping you from doing any work? Like today I didn't really, I'm waiting on them to provide information but if they're not ready then I just. As long as there's nothing stopping them then why, why waste the time? Just get on the call and in fact should have told them today, like well if you don't need the time, just tell me you don't need the time. And if I agree, we just don't meet. But I didn't do that. Like I still will meet with them and I, so I think it's really, to me it's about outcome based. Is it something that's gray area where it's unpredictable? Well then they, they need more of your time. If it's something that's predictable, then they need less of your time.

Absolutely.

I like that. I, I also think, you know, when we, when we look at these VAs, there is a benefit of being available. Right. And that's something I had to learn the hard way of like if you are having problems, let me know. Right? Like don't be afraid of me, don't be afraid of anyone on the team. Like, we are here to contribute on the same common goal. So I'm available, right? Being available, being present, that might eliminate a lot of your meetings is just your team knowing that, hey, if you don't understand something or a format or whatever it is, you can. You can message me, you can shoot me an email, and I will respond because I want you to succeed. So just being available helps.

I love it. So, okay, for each one of you, which VA would you not want to live without? I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if they're listening. If they're listening. All of you, you're all right. I couldn't do it without any of you guys. We've got a. A VA who helps a lot with existing customers and customer service. So. Customer service, you know, client rep. She's awesome. She's really, really valuable. You know, people call, and despite geek pay, having all the information about their loan online and easily accessible, we still have people who call every month to make sure that their payment was received. I cannot do those phone calls anymore. I just can't do it. She will, and I'm grateful for that.

Amazing. Scott, what about you?

I would say today it's probably my finance manager, right? Only because there's parts of that that had become a major headache for me, and since July, the headache has gone down, and you know, it. We. We have an accounting team, and the accounting team is really good, right? So they understand accounting for land investors. They. They do all that. They follow what we teach or what I teach in accounting for land investors. But I think what happened was we didn't have enough kind of management staff, right? So we. We had people who were doing the work, and they're doing a great job. But then when it came to some of the more complex transactions that we do, then they were stuck, and then that would fall back to me, and I became a bottleneck. And then by adding this person into the. Into the role, what happened was I was able to bring her up to speed on what needed to get done. And even now, she will still rely on me for some of the complex things. But then instead of answering the question, I now push back. And so she might say, well, this isn't right. And I'll say, you're right. It's not right. What's wrong with it? And she always looks at me like, if I knew what was wrong with it, I wouldn't be asking you. And I kind of. I. I kind of ask questions. Okay. I'm asking her questions to kind of Take her mental process on how she's thinking about it to get to the, to the outcome. So I might say, you know, well, did you look up the loan in Geek Pay? Is it, is it an active loan or is it default? Oh, yeah, it's a default loan. Okay, well, what is our process for that? You know, like, walk me through the process. And so it's not always about just swooping in and solving the problem. That's not what you want to do. You want to guide them, you want to coach them, you want to, you might know the answer and It's a quick 30 second answer, but there's no way that they're going to learn if you're just doing it. And that's a very hard thing to do. Everybody, like I'm taught, I still struggle with it. I'm like, here, I got it. Move I got. But that's, that's the wrong approach. We have to take the time to coach the team, to encourage them and to let them fail and be okay with them failing in the answer and knowing that it's going to fail and just sitting back and being like, well, I could have seen that coming, but now that it failed, let's, let's think about it from a different approach and it's really about doing that. And it's okay to have things mess up, even to your customers. It's okay.

Yeah, such a good point. Chris Ducker talks about that in virtual freedom, that superhero syndrome where the entrepreneur wants to swoop in and feel valuable and, and rescue and, and save the day. And ultimately what Scott's saying is you're not doing them or yourself any, any favors. And this is a crass way to say it, but I remember being hearing Dan Martell speak. He's like, you don't, you don't buy a dog to bark for it, and you don't hire a VA and pay a VA to do their work for them. You, you do the Socratic method, what Scott's talking about, so that they're leveling up, they're getting smarter and feeling more confident, but they've got to get those reps in. And you have to have that discipline not to say, oh, this is going to take me two seconds here, right? Or this is going to take you five seconds here. Because those five seconds over a year, compound and compound. And next thing you know, you've built yourself a terrible job that to do.

I would also say that the thing that you do too is you begin if you're doing all the work, jumping in there, you also become. You. You become hostile to your employee. You become hostile to your team member. Right. You. You begin to not appreciate them. You begin to, you know, feel like, well, they're not doing anything. I'm still doing all the work. Well, you create that.

Right?

Like, you create that as opposed to teaching them or. Yeah. Making them go back and do it again. And if it might take them eight hours and they could still come back and go, look, I've been working on this all day today. I don't. I don't. I can't figure it out. Okay, here, let's. Let's come up with some ideas on what we can do. But there's nothing stronger in your world than giving a VA the opportunity to learn, because then when. Once they do it, you'll never, ever, ever deal with that problem again. Unless. Unless they truly didn't learn it the first time. Right.

But when they've learned it.

They'Ve learned it.

That's it.

Yeah.

Well, look, this is. This is fantastic. And, Tate Scott, your mentorship has been invaluable, but we're at that point in the podcast now where I'm going to ask for a tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of Passive Income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. But before we do that, I have a special. A special sponsor, which is Wealth Without Wall street podcast. So are you tired of the stock market roller coaster? Ready to take control of your finances and build wealth on your terms? Let me introduce you to my friends, Russ Morgan and Joey Murray over at Wealth Without Wall Street. These guys are the real deal when it comes to helping you break free from traditional investing. They specialize in teaching you how to create your own bank. Yes, you heard that right. Your own bank. Imagine funding your land deals and other investments without relying on the whims of Wall street or big banks. Russ and Joey have cracked the code on building a passive income operating system that puts you in control. And the best part, they share everything you know on their podcast, Wealth Without Wall Street. So if you're ready to start creating financial freedom and passive income streams, don't wait. Head over to their podcast now and let Russ and Joey show you the way. Wealth Without Wall street, your ticket to financial independence. Check it out today. All right, who's got the tip of the week? I've got a tip if you guys have one.

It's a. It's really. It's not a tool or anything, but it. It is a tip. Okay. And what I would say is there's a lot going on with AI, right? Like, we talk about AI you hear all the time, especially if you're in business. AI, AI, AI, all this other stuff. And, you know, I think that everybody has to take some time of their week. It doesn't matter how often, how long you take of it, and go mess with it. Like, you don't. You might, you might say, like, I, I don't enjoy tech. I'm like a Luddite. I'm not going to do anything cool. Still, go mess with something. Go Mess around with ChatGPT, go play with it. And also, don't be afraid of messing something up. I mean, I was messing the other day with a. With a AI age, okay? And I'm like, okay, this thing is going to be cool because it's going to take over my email and do some things. And I activated it and then the next thing you know, it went bonkers, okay? It starts sending messages, the wrong messages to people. And I'm like, oh, I must look like an idiot. But I'm thinking, like, I would never have uncovered that had I not messed with it. And it's okay, right? Like, no. People got some strange emails from me and nobody said anything. I know they saw it because it's in my scent form. Or I'm like, oops, nobody said anything. And if they did, I'd say, yeah, it's. It's a bot gone crazy. That's it. Like, what do you. What? You have no better excuse than the. The bots have gone crazy, right? Like, I don't know. So take the time. Go learn, explore and look, figure out maybe, maybe there's something it can help you in your business, but you'll never know if you don't take a little bit of time and go mess with it and, and just see. See how it can help you.

That's a great tip. It's called the FAFO Method. Fool around and find out. There you go. Yeah, exactly.

That's the PG version.

That's the PG version. The FAFO Method. All right, well, thank you, fellas. I want to thank the listeners. Remind you the only way that I'm going to be able to bribe Scott Todd to come back do you do three little favors. Follow rate. Review the podcast, Send a screenshot of that, review supportlangic.com and I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich, or maybe Dirt Rich too, if you already have Dirt Rich. So please do it. And selfishly do it for yourself because we get better guests when you do that. All right, ready to do this? 1, 2, 3. Let's freedom free. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let freedom ring it.