How To Get Rid Of The Headache Of Hiring A VA

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is going to help us with all things headache related with our businesses, which is of course, you know it, I know it, virtual assistants. But before we talk to our guest, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, the brain, the professor, your flight school sherpa, Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com learn anything but anything. Investyourninjas.com Scott Todd, how are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm really good. I'm good because I'm very excited to talk to Bob Lachance about solving my VA problems. If you're not familiar with Bob, he's a big deal in real estate, an entrepreneur, and, you know, he's all over the place. You can see him on bigger pockets. He's, you know, he's, he's just big in every way. He currently operates and manages many different businesses around the world. He's helped create one of the top real estate coaching mentor programs in existence today. He's an expert in real estate investing space and his reputation's amazing. Bob Lachance, how are you?

Very good, very good. Thanks for having me, Scott. Mark, really appreciate it.

So, Bob, let's just get into it, all right? Let's just skip the pleasantries. Why, why virtual assistants? Why help people with that?

Yeah, you know, it's pretty interesting. It's, you know, whether you're investing in real estate or outside real estate, there's a huge missing piece within our lives. I mean, things go by fast, right? I'm one of my wife and I own or not own, I can't say we own a number of businesses, but we also have three kids and actually missing out on a lot of the stuff that we do. I coach a lot of ice hockey, which is, that was my past life. But a lot of things that we look at in our lives, it's time based and time's going by very, very fast. So that's one thing that I know we all need more of.

Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

Well, Mark, I mean, you say it all the time, right? You can always make more money, but you can't make more time. I mean, time is the one thing that we all have limited amount of. None of us know how long we have, so we better, we better use it while we have it.

Yeah. So, Bob, you briefly mentioned your background about Hockey. So kind of. Let's just rewind the tape a little bit and walk us through how your professional sporting days sort of helped you get into real estate and entrepreneurship.

Yep. I know you started, I think, back in 2000, I think Mark, right?

Yeah, I'm a real estate OG.

Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. So I started in 042004, but prior to that I played professional hockey for eight years. I went to Boston University for four and was fortunate enough to be offered a four year scholarship there and then a two year contract with St. Louis Blues after I was done my fourth year. Ended up playing in their minor leagues, played a couple exhibition games, or actually one exhibition game with St. Louis and was with their organization for a couple years. Then four more years here in the United States, four in Europe. And, you know, right when I was done playing, right at the end of my career, I kind of figured out, all right, it's time to move on. My wife is working here at my first child. So I decided, hey, I looked at all these different industries, what was suiting my needs best, and it always, you know, went back to real estate. So ended up jumping into real estate with two feet because I missed a big piece of it. I left school two classes short of getting my degree, so I needed to jump in an industry where I did not need a four year college degree. So they want to go back to school. So real estate investing was the easiest industry to jump into that had zero barriers of entry. So that's what I decided to do. And, you know, that was back in 2004.

All right, fantastic. So you don't know this about me, but I am from St. Louis and I grew up with the blues and, you know, Brett hall and all that. So very, very cool.

Offline, we'll tell a funny story because when I was in camp with Brett hall and Basil McRae. You remember Basil McRae.

I remember Basil McRae, yeah.

So we're in training camp and I'm a rookie and I was scared. You know what, Les? Right? So he comes up to drill me and I have my. I'm looking at the. The puck in my feet, comes to hit me and I reverse check him right on his back. And I'm like, I almost want to cry. I kid you not. And Brett Hall's on the bench going, are you kidding me? He's a little more colorful than this. You're gonna let a college, you know what, you know, knock you on your butt. Whistle blows and we're lined up and Basil McCray slashed me in the back of the. Like, now I know why I sucked during that first training camp because I was scared the whole time. But that's just a quick. I know we're digressing, but that was just a quick little story.

Well, you know, I like that story because I like how it really sort of, you know, we could use that story for business because I always say, like, if you are in business or entrepreneurship, and Scott, you've heard me say this before. It's a lot like hockey because the best hockey players have to be willing to get knocked down and they have to love hockey so much to get back up. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

And I think that's any sports item. Interrupt. Yeah, I think that's any sport which is really good. You know, hockey is one of them. I was fortunate enough to play. But, you know, everybody is, you know, they're in it as a team. They're in it together to win one, to win the championship. And that's the one goal that everybody, no matter what, it's a great team game and they're all pushing the same way. I know there's. There's some stars out there that unfortunately are a little bit outside that, but majority of them, I would say 90, 95% of the individuals that I played with were together for that one goal, and that was winning a championship together. And it wasn't just that one person that wins it because, you know, even Brett Hull, he couldn't win it by himself. He needs a team around him.

Absolutely. Scott, Todd, with your thoughts.

You know, Mark, the other thing I was thinking about when Bob was talking about, like, getting knocked down and standing back up again was the fact that and learning like first year whatever is no matter what you do. And like, that wasn't his first season playing hockey. Right. Like, he had gone through the ranks, you know, probably started off as a. As a youth, sports and gone high school, college, whatever, right? Like, it wasn't his first season, but it was his first season. Different league. And you're always going to suck at whatever you learn how to do, right. The first time you do it, the first few times you do it is terrible, right? I don't care if you learn how to mail. I don't care if you learn how to walk. I mean, we all remember learning how to walk, right? We were terrible at it. But you just keep getting up and you keep going and you're getting better, better, better, better, better. Next thing you know, you're running. Okay. Next thing you know, he's keeping up with everybody. Else. Because the other thing too is he raised his game. He started playing with better players. And every time you're playing with a better player, you're going to get better as well. So I think that, like you're saying in business, you got to keep raising your game, you got to keep raising the people around you. You got to keep pushing yourself to get better and stronger, because you will. Yeah.

And if you don't mind me adding that, Scott, that's a great point. Because, you know, we've all gone through different challenges, right? And I think every challenge, no matter what, if you're going to step up to that level, you're going to hit challenges. It doesn't matter. I don't care what business you're in. We use real estate investing. I know, Scott, you jumped in. Sorry, not Mark. I know you when you started. Cause I just heard your story on the podcast of Matt Therio. So I could use you as a good example. You know, you did all the stuff you had to do to get into land, right. You did whatever you took. I did really the same thing. I door knocked, I cold called, I did everything I had to to, you know, I licked my own stamps to get my direct mail out. Right. And then you have to do that at the beginning. And once you actually get that done, then you mailhouse to send out the mail for you, then you find someone else to call for you, someone else to text for you. So I think it's a natural progression when you're, you know, to go back to sports. It's whatever level that you're going to push yourself at, Scott, you nailed it. You can't stop first and foremost, because if you stop somebody, I mean, we're in the world where someone's going to try to get you. Once you're at the top, you can't stop because you have somebody nipping at your heels. And that's just the world that we're in.

No, absolutely. So I really like what you were talking about. With a team and real estate life, almost everything is sort of a team sport. If you show me anybody in this world that has made it on their own, and I will tell you that, look, that's a wonderful journalistic lie because nobody's gotten anywhere without someone helping them. We've all stood on the shoulders of giants and so. But, you know, getting back to the team idea is Riva Global. So we've, we've got this, let's say, task or process or system, and we've gotten to the point where, like, we know it well enough. At what point do we say, okay, I'm gonna pass this off to a virtual assistant?

Yep, great question. So the way I look at it is when you're looking at your own business, everyone's different and everyone's at their different stages, right? When you look at your business and it just gets. There's a couple different ways I look at it. I do this exercise in my own business and I always recommend individuals do it. Just grab a piece of paper, put a line in the middle and put income producing tasks and non income producing tasks. I'll give you a good example. Income producing tasks for me today was not hammering the phones all day long to gauge seller motivation. It's calling New Haven bank to figure out what rates they have and coming to find out that they actually had. It's all relationship building because we're building up our single family portfolio while my VA is out front outbound dialing to gauge seller motivation. So then when a seller raised their hand, that says, yes, you know what? I have a single family property that's three bed, one bath in the perfect area. Anything under $150,000. Guess what? Now I go over to my New Haven bank individual and get a loan from them. So it's really, I don't have to worry about the non income producing tasks up front that are going to take all my time out of my day. I. I need to be building my bank relationships over here. So that's something that just happened. Today is a perfect example.

Todd, that sounds a lot like a swim lane to me. Wait, Scott, you're mute. Still on mute.

Lost him a little bit.

We lost him, but I know what he was going to say.

Wait, can you hear me?

You gotcha now?

Yeah, sorry, my microphone died.

Actually, I think the battery died.

No, no, no, it's my microphone up here. I'm actually broadcasting from the surface now.

Thank you.

Now here's what I was going to say is that, you know, the thing is every day we have choices, right? Like we can focus on the stuff that we can get somebody else to go do it for pennies so I can go get the bigger dollars or I can go do the penny work, right? Like whenever I'm teaching flight school marketing, one of the things I always talk about is like when I talk about building a VA team and then I'm like, who here's still uploading their list in LG Pass? And like everybody's like raising their hand. I'm like, why? How much money does it make? You to upload a. Listen to LG Pass 0, right? Like, it doesn't make you a dime. It doesn't move the needle forward. It doesn't produce anything in your business in the future state. And people might argue like, oh, well, you know, if I don't have that, then I don't have the offers.

Cool.

But I can pay someone $4 an hour to do that work, or, I don't know, $11 an hour to do that work. Is your time worth $11 an hour or more? And if I took the $11 an hour work and gave it to somebody else, can I go focus on the $10,000 an hour work? And that's where my brain is, right? Like, I'm always looking for what is the highest and best use of my own time that will produce the most revenue back to me.

And, you know, it's got, I always say this, $10 an hour tasks. We'll put $10 an hour in your bank account. That's exactly where you're gonna get out of it. It is what it is. And that, that was, that was well put because we always teach that same thing. It's, it's, you know, you have to, you need leads, obviously, to make money in business, in real estate, right. So whether it's land, whether it's properties, we. No matter what it is, if it's, you know, if you're an agent, if you're a property manager, if you're an investor, if you buy land, it's the same process when you really look at it, because you have to generate leads up front, compiling, scraping leads online all time. It's a time suck. So that's the stuff you should get off, off your plate. And then as soon as that happens, then there's the marketing that jumps involved in that. And you need to either text, call, I mean, a lot of that stuff you have to do obviously with land because it's not in your backyard. Right. And then, then the other side is writing an offer and submitting an offer and closing the deal. Right. There's a lot of steps that are involved as well in all of those process that we said.

No. Exactly. So my question is, you know, why not go to Upwork or Fiverr? Why Riva Global, as far as hiring and training a real estate va. Yep, very good question.

So we tweaked our process. So back in, back in 2013 was the first time I used a virtual assistant. And I never knew what a virtual assistant was back then. And then I used my first one off of Upwork. And I had a very difficult time and I had to sift through, literally, I think it was between 50 to 75 resumes to finally get one on the phone that I wanted to talk to. And then I don't like that one. I had to go to the next one. I had to go to the next one. So for me to hire that one virtual assistant, it took me about a month to finally get up and running. And then after a month, they ghosted me, they left. And I was sitting there like, oh, crap, I gotta. Now I gotta start from the beginning. So then I look for a company that actually did all of that upfront work for me. And then the light bulb went on. My background, a little bit of my background. I helped start a couple of different coaching programs and education programs. And the light bulb went on and said, why don't I marry the two, right? The training and the virtual assistant world together, and then test it for two years to make sure that it is a need in the industry and then we'll go full bore. So that's what we did. And we created our own recruiting department in the Philippines then, because you got to look at the recruiting side of it and you know, the companies, like you mentioned a little bit earlier, what they do is they pull all the resumes, right? They source all the resumes, they put them up online for us to sift through, which is definitely part of some of the pain of doing this yourself, right? So they do fill that need, what we've done, and we've actually taken it to the next level. We source all of those resumes, we screen them to make sure they all have four years college degree, make sure they have call center experience and different types of experience that we want for our own business and for our clients. We also run them through two different interviews, an initial interview, a final interview, just looking for, you know, what type of communication skills they have, what kind of capacity they have, English proficiencies, et cetera. And the final step is a systems check, which quite very simply, we check what their operating system is, what their system specs are, how much RAM they have, disk space, just to make sure that the Internet connection is good and they have the proper backup. So those are a lot of things that I never knew up front. I had to go through the pain of understanding because there's nothing worse when you get on the phone with a virtual assistant and there's a bad connection. It's kind of like if you, you know, if we're doing this podcast and if it's cutting out all the time. It'll ruin the whole quality or ruin everything within your podcast. So then you just wasted time. Same thing with the virtual assistants. And then we added in a month of training on top of that with all the most common tasks that real estate investors use. And then, you know, we have a whole operations team and a management that actually manages the. The client VA relationship.

Fantastic. Scott. Todd.

That is one of the big things, right? Like when you're going to build an outsourced team is that it's a dedicated process, right? Like, you know, it's not just like, oh, here, I'm just going to go hire somebody and then I'm done, right? Like, you've got to go through the process. And you know, Mark, I worked for a big company, and the cool thing about working for a big company is that you have different people that do different things. Okay? Like, that's one of the cool things. So ultimately, like, I wanted to h someone in my big company. What did I do? I called the HR represent. I go, hey, listen, I want to hire someone. They're like, is it in budget? I'm like, it's in the budget. They're like, great. What's the job? I tell them what the job is, and then they go and they post the job out there. They start shifting through the resumes, right? Like, they do it all, and then they bring to me this candidate, and they're like, here, here's the candidate, here's a candidate, and here's another one. And here's another one. And sometimes you got to get on them, like, reduce the filters, change the filters. We're not getting enough. So, you know, you got to work with your partner, but the person there is doing the job, and they're bringing you offers and then or resumes, and then they take care of the offer, and then they, you know what? Then you turn over to the IT team, and the IT team gets their computer up to date, and it goes on and on. So ultimately, what happens is someone shows up to work on day one, and everything just works right? The person's there. Now, in your own business, you are all of those people. You're the HR rep. You got to go post a job, you got to shift through the resumes, you got to train them, you got to onboard them, you got to bring in, make sure their technologies go. Everything that Bob just said, you got to do it. And people don't realize, like, that's a lot of work.

Okay?

It really is a lot of work. And it's a process. You got to nail down that process too. And, you know, it's nice to know that there's a company out there that can do that.

Yeah, and you nailed it too, because going through it myself for, you know, back in 2013, that's a big, big pain point on top of that, too. On the hiring side, one of the things I definitely recommend is when you're looking. And this goes back to one of your questions earlier, Mark. You know, when someone looks at their own business, you know, there's a lot of different pain points within our business. One of them may be if it's lead generation. Right. Just create a step by step process of what lead generation looks like. Do you want to market to pre foreclosures as an example? If you do, where are you going to get your list? Are you going to scrape them online? Because different states are different, Right. Are you going to get those lists? Then where are you going to get your phone numbers to, you know, skip trace those phone numbers? And then what marketing action are you going to do from there? But it starts first with a role. We all. And I see this as a big challenge where some investors come to you. They say, bob, I need help. I'm like, okay, cool. What kind of help do you need? Well, I just know I have stuff all over the place. And then what we have to do is really hone it in. One of the exercises that I do say, besides the income producing tasks and non income producing tasks, is look at your business and document everything for about two to three weeks. It's very painful, Right. I'm sure you guys have done this too. Very, very painful. But you'll realize you'll start seeing that there's some common themes. Whether you started those at the beginning and then you never finished doing them here, those are. You definitely need help there. Because we know in this business, consistency is what matters. Just like your podcast, right. You guys are consistently putting out your podcast. If you stop it, you know your users or your listeners will fade away. Right. It's the same, same kind of concept of real estate where you got to consistently market, market, market. As soon as you stop, you know the phone's gonna stop ringing and you're gonna stop making money. So kind of the same concept of looking at your, you know, what help you need to outsource through a virtual system.

Yeah. And the only way we can consistently do this is with our virtual assistant team. So Scott and I are like Sinatra. All we do is show up and sing. Then as soon as we hang up, the process gets kicked off and sure enough, we get a podcast published. I mean, I've got the system documented, but it's been so long and it's managed by somebody else now that it's just fun for me. And that way it's a better podcast and a better quality podcast because I don't have to think about all those other things. My attention isn't split everywhere else. And that focus, I think can also be translated into, you know, real estate where you can just focus, like Scott said, on the 10,000, $20,000 an hour, you know, real like. And you said in the beginning, the money making tasks that really move the needle and your time and your attention isn't split because someone else is handling those lower dollar processes. So, Bob, this has been really, really great and educational and thank you for your mentorship. But at this point in the podcast, now we're going to ask you for one more tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable. With the art of passive income, listeners can go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

I would say the book Traction. Very good book. Gino Wickman breaks down the EOS system. And one of the things that I actually gained from looking at that book, it puts your business doesn't matter if you're by yourself or you're working solo or you have a team. It puts structure around exactly how you're going to be looking at your business from now, next month, the month after. So that's one of the things that I would highly, highly recommend.

All right, fantastic. Before we get to Scott Todd's tip of the week, I just want to mention our sponsor flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Go up the mountain of land, investing quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd, showing you step by step, doing in real time. How do we learn best, Scott Todd? By doing, by doing. We're going to do it together. By week two, you will be getting offers out. Learn how to do that. Schedule a call with Mike Zane or the Zen master Scott, the nightcap OG bossman. Figure out how to start building that passive income machine with none other than Scott Todd. Go to thelandgeek.com training. All right, Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

All right, listen, have you ever looked at a company logo and thought, man, that's a cool font, you know, like, I don't know, stripe, for example, it just pops up. Stripe, for example. They have a cool font, I think, well, go over, go over to this website font in logo.com and when you get there, like you can type in a company name and like Stripe is there on the bottom right. So if I as a featured one. So if I go in there and hit Stripe, for example, well then what would happen is, oops, sorry, I didn't mean to do that. What would happen is if I typed it in Stripe, well then basically what it would do is it would go out and it would search their database and tell me that Stripes font is ffango. And what I can do is if I click on the box, then I can go over and it gives me a link to download or to get the FF Bango link.

That's pretty cool. What do you think, Bob?

Love it. I just wrote it down. I just wrote it down.

That's really cool. I don't know how he comes up with these things. Anyways, my tip of the week though is actually going to make you money and save you time. Ultimately save you time can always solve our money problems, but solving our time problems is our, you know, times our only finite resource. Learn more. Go to Reva global.com Reva global.com we'll have a link to it and start hiring your VA team. They're already trained, they're already vetted, they've got good Internet, they've got good hardware. Let Bob deal with all the headaches. Why should we have to deal with the headaches? Bob, you don't mind, do you?

Not at all. Not at all. Bring it my way.

You know, that reminds me, what is sort of the one complaint that you see from clients where you think to yourself, well, if it's really, this is a client issue, not a VA issue.

Very good question. Some clients come to us and they want the virtual assistant to run their business for them. And we always say, listen, it doesn't matter if there's someone in the United States, someone in the Philippines somewhere, anyone else, they are someone who's going to help you with your business because it is your business. Your business runs the way. Exactly. You want your business to run and please don't hand it off to somebody else to let them run it. If you're going to do that, get a partner who is invested as much as you are into, you know, that your success. So it doesn't matter if you're United States because there's virtual assistants that are anywhere that aren't in your own office that are titled virtual assistants. So use them as a resource to help you and your business.

No, I love that. I'm writing another book now on how to scale your land business. And that's one of the issues I talked about is abdicating versus delegating. And a lot of people want to abdicate. They want this inexpensive VA to do everything for them. And then they get frustrated, like, well, they didn't do it the way I wanted them to do it. Like, no, no, you're abdicating. You need to delegate, and you have to be involved and understand the Scott Todd 30 to 1 ratio, which means that a task takes five minutes for you to do. You need to invest 30 times that to train to training and nurturing before you even make a decision if that VA is a good fit or not. Scott, did I do that justice?

You got it.

You nailed it.

All right, fantastic. Well, I hope everyone who's listening is getting value. And if you are, you got to do us three favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, you got to review the podcast. Send a screenshot of that review to support@thelandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 wholetailing course, how to double your money, 30 days or less. And if you don't do those reviews, we're never going to get a quality guest like a Bob Lachance from Riva Global. He's gonna look at the podcast. He's like, these guys don't have any reviews. I'm not going on there. So it's mutually beneficial, so please do that. Also, I just want to thank Bob and Scott Todd and ask you guys, Bob, are we good?

We're good. I appreciate you guys having me.

Scott Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

All right, let's do this. One, two, three. Let.

Let freedom.

Freedom.

Ring.

Ring.

That was terrible.

Horrible. Horrible.

We did it hockey style.

That's right. We did. We did. We could do it again. Could do it again. Nah, it's up.

One is too many times. One is waiting.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, the thing is, like, I don't know. We do our best.

I don't even know the Internet, man.

What can we say?

All right, I'm going to hang up before I say something dumb. Thanks, everybody. Cool.

Thanks, guys.