Find The Best VA With Brady Morgan

Episode 521: Find The Best VA With Brady Morgan

 

We all want to create a business that will still run even if we step out of it. If we can’t, we’ll all get to the end of the road so exhausted that we want to throw the business away. Avoid experiencing burnout by finding the best virtual assistant. Mitch Stephen brings Brady Morgan on today’s show to talk about hiring virtual assistants. You don’t have to work yourself into the ground in order to succeed. Listen carefully as Brady shares tips on what skills to look for and how they can be taken care of in the long term.

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I’m here with Brady Morgan. He is an expert in helping you connect with professional VAs overseas, cut your costs and get you some assistance in many different fields, areas, departments. Everyone in the creative real estate business doesn’t have to be just a creative real estate business, but usually, we entrepreneurs start as a one-man show and we’re wearing every hat. The sooner you start to get some help, the sooner you can watch your numbers go up because it’s the truth. 1 plus 1 equals 3 or 4, sometimes 6. You have to get the right people in place. How are you doing?

I appreciate you having me on.

It’s my pleasure to have you. I’m a big fan of VAs. Before we get started, I got to pay homage to my sponsor, TaxFreeFuture.com. If you are tired of leaving your investments used up there in Wall Street, do you want to roll over your retirement plans over to a self-directed retirement plan with checkbook control and know that your annual dues are never going to be more than about $200 plus or minus? You’ll want to look into TaxFreeFuture.com.

The problem is when you have retirement plans, some people let you start a retirement plan with no upfront costs, just the amount of money that you need to open the account. They then start to fee you every time you turn around, payoffs, transactions, even a yearly maintenance fee based on the value of your account. If you’re a mover and a shaker, it is much better to pay upfront to get into one and then have a fixed annual fee for the rest of the duration of your account, which could be decades.

Check it out. TaxFreeFuture.com. If you give your little micro information, first name, last name, phone number and email address, you’ll get privy to about 37 and counting little video vignettes. They are very big eye-openers about what you can do with these things and how lucrative they can be. Most importantly, how to take a small amount of money and make it into a large amount of money in a short time. There are strategies out there that are perfectly legal, which is one reason the rich get richer. They study these kinds of things. Let’s talk a little bit about your background first. Where do you come from? You’re in Nashville, Tennessee?

I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

Probably the best-kept secret in the world is I’ve been writing songs for so many years. I love that town. It’s a brutal town if you’re a songwriter, but it’s a great town. A lot of the greatest music in the world comes out of a couple of blocks down there. I like Nashville. This business that you run, I suppose that you could run it from anywhere?

If you keep your eye on that road, stay in the middle of that road, and keep inching your way towards that goal, you eventually get there. Click To Tweet

Run it from anywhere. I work from home full-time and I love it.

That is part of the point and why you may be interested in VAs. Whether it be the creative real estate business, or any business, as soon as you start looking at it, “How do I step out of this business and still run without me or with very minimal time from me,” you’re starting to create a real business. That should be the goal of everyone. When we start out, I understand that that seems like a very long road. If you keep your eye on that road, stay in the middle of that road and keep inching your way towards that goal, you eventually get there. Let me tell you what happens if you don’t do that. You get to the end of the road and you’re so exhausted that you’ll want to throw your business away. Even though it makes some decent money, you can’t do it anymore because you’re burned out.

It’s almost too late at that point to start trying to automate your business and get people in place because there’s nothing emotionally left in you. Don’t wait till you get to that point. It will come. I promise you, especially if you’re wholesalers, house finders or house flippers. I’ve done it for 27 years. I know what burnout looks like. It can take a few years or a lot of years for some people. It can take a few years for other people. It is grueling. I suppose any business is that way. What do you think about what I’ve said, as far as making your business and that you’re going to get burnt out sooner or later if you don’t watch out?

That’s something that people don’t necessarily anticipate when they start their own business. You’re super excited in the beginning. There’s that honeymoon phase, but things can begin to become not fun anymore. Business is stressful. There’s a lot of things that happen that are unforeseen, money loss, people and relationships lost and that’s going to happen as part of it.

What can you control? Can you control relationships and money being lost? Maybe, but you do have full control over your time. I thoroughly believe that. I understand the beginning and it’s a lot of wearing every single hat, but there becomes that point where your business is no longer fun. It starts to feel like a job. Your business owns you rather than you owning it. That’s what you’re saying. Implement virtual staff and domestic staff into your business. Remove yourself, focus on only the things that excite you and that you’re good at and it’s no longer a job. It’s a passion. You own the business again at that point.

I have about 7 or 8 VAs. I’ve got it narrowed down to what I like to do in my business. What do I like to do in my business? I’m responsible for making sure that there’s enough money to buy every single house that walks in the door or that contract that comes through my door. I like to pick people for dinners, basketball games and football games. I like to entertain wealthy people or people with some residual income or savings to invest. That’s what I do for my company now, because I like it. It’s socializing, moving around, going to events and dinners. I happen to like that stuff.

What I do for my company right now does not feel like a job. I would be doing these things anyway. I’m double-dipping and using my social time as business time as well. That’s the reason why I have $26 million in private money, non-recourse, collateral only, payable monthly, 8% 10- and-15-year money. That’s what I spend my whole time doing. It’s amazing when you focus on the thing you’re good at and see how big that little department can get. If I had ever thought that I would have $26 million of private money, that I got to make payments to everybody on the first, I would’ve said, “You’re crazy.” I thought I would take a cut in pay when I put people on. I’m going to have to take out of my money and pay them.

What happens is you start doing more business. The reason is the person in that chair has only one thing to do. I might’ve been better than them at that one thing, but because I have that one thing, plus ten other things to do, I’m not nearly as good as that guy doing the one thing that I trained him to do. You get 7 or 8 people like that in your business with their specialty as that one thing, then the numbers start to rack up. You don’t take a cut and pay to have all this help. You make more money than you’ve ever made. I’ve heard it said. I didn’t believe it. I don’t believe any of these concepts I read until I do them. I see them with my own two eyes with my own business. All of a sudden, I own the concept in my heart.

The more time you spend on things that you enjoy, the more value you inevitably provide. That’s where that correlation is. The more value you provide, the more money you make. It has nothing to do with anything else other than providing more value and making more money. It comes to a point where we might be segueing into this. A lot of people struggle to give up control. A lot of business owners inherently have egos because we think we can succeed at something by ourselves in the beginning. We have an ego to think that we do everything the best and we might do a particular thing the best in the beginning. That’s fine.

You can’t do everything the best.

You can’t do everything the best, but you can do some things the best. It’s those things that are not allowing you to focus on what you’re supposed to be doing. I was good at finance and accounting because I have a background in that. Does that make me money? No, it doesn’t make me money, but I’m good at it. It’s important to understand that being good at something doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it. It means you need to do the thing that moves the needle until you enjoy doing like those toys from my ten-month-old son. If I was trying to do every single thing and wear every hat in my business, do you think I had any time to play with my son, hang out with my wife or work on myself? No, you don’t. People have this idea that they have to work themselves into the ground to succeed. That is not true.

 

I’ve had contractors come up to me and say, “What work do you specialize in?” I say, “We do it all.” That’s a big no-no to tell Mitch Stephen. You’re a contractor and you tell me that you do it all. I’m going to say to myself, “This guy is no good at anything. I can do a little plumbing. I do a little electrical, but what I’m good at is sheetrock.” There’s my sheetrock guy. What I want to do is sheetrock. The only exception to that is if there’s a foreman and they know how to hire good specialists. They’re an anomaly and you have to pay the markup, which is fine with me. If I’ve got a good form, I don’t have to worry about it and I have one. Let’s start with the obvious question. What separates you from the other VA finder, helper, labor people out there? You’re not the only one out there.

There’s DIY, do-it-yourself. You can go to Fiverr, Upwork and OnlineJobs.ph and those platforms are great. I’m not going to dog any of those platforms. The issue is oftentimes when you’re trying to find virtual staff, you need an employee, someone who will work for you long-term. That automatically removes Fiverr and Upwork because those are more project-based platforms.

The issue with those platforms, too, is they charge fees that go directly to that middleman. That’s that and they don’t offer any value. The only value Fiverr and Upwork offered by charging a fee is like, “I allowed you to come onto our website and find this person for project-based projects.” It removes those. You got OnlineJobs.ph, a great platform, probably the biggest hub for Filipino talent in the world

However, $100 or $70 a month does not mean that you hired someone. That means you have access to hire somebody. You have to pay before hiring someone, which is fine, but information overload. There are millions of people on there. Good luck finding who you’re looking for and spending all of your time interviewing people when you might not even know what you’re looking for. You can find a full-time employee there, but now it’s a concept of time. You have to spend a lot of time on that platform to find what you’re looking for.

It's amazing when you focus on the thing you're good at how big that little department can get. Click To Tweet

You go the other route. You have these agencies and they’re like, “Don’t worry. You pay us monthly $1,500 a month. I’m going to give you ten hours a week for this resource. You can only work with this resource during this allotted time because the other time during their workday, they’re working for other clients.” That’s fine. You have your time back because someone else found the resource for you, but you’re spending more money, hourly, $1,500 for 10 hours a week. That’s an example, just to put it out there. It’s more expensive hourly and you don’t have that control. “I have to work with this person for this timeframe. What if I need them a different time from?” “We’re going to find you another resource.” “What if I don’t like that resource?” “I don’t know what to tell you.” There’s a lack of control there to the client when it’s their employee in the first place.

There’s that and there’s us. We’re a hybrid approach. We’re going to find everybody for you. We have the database, connections and a grading system that allows us to place very quickly. We have about 2,500 vetted candidates in our grading system. We have a Facebook group, one of the biggest of its kind. We use it to source about 15,000 people, but we give you the control. We’re going to do all those sources, save your time and find the top candidates. We can give you control to find, pick and choose from the top 3 to 5 of your favorite. They get to work on your schedule. That’s your schedule. There are two models that we also offer. You might not want to pay us monthly. You might want not want to pay us a management fee.

That doesn’t matter to me. We’ll charge you an upfront fee, no recurring fees. Only fees that are going to be left and you use it directly to the VA. That’s fine. People understand that. I don’t want to pay a company. I don’t want to pay a middleman monthly. I don’t mind paying that up front, but I also do want help on a monthly basis. “Can you handle payroll, time tracking, efficiency and productivity management stuff?” I’m not going to mark you up 150% like most companies.

We charge $2 per hour extra. A $6 per hour resource is now $8 per hour. You have access to us 100%. What we’re doing is we’re giving the client and control. We’re giving them more cost-efficient solutions and we’re making their lives easier to where, when they get a resource, they don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops and walk on eggshells whether when they can or can’t work with this person and what they can or can’t say. “This is technically your employee. They happened to be under our HR department.” The way it works is we give more control. We save you time and we can give you a full-time employee or project-based person who is completely up to the client.

Some of this stuff I’m going to say is my personal opinion. You can take it or leave it. My personal opinion is, you need someone who only works for you. What I’ve learned and tell me if I’m wrong, but what I gathered from my time with VAs, what they value is is that they’re going to have a long-term job with you. They trust you that you’re not going to be there for a month or two and then they’re going to have to be looking for another job again. They appreciate the company that they work for that takes care of them. They’re not so entrepreneurial per se. I’m not lumping all Filipinos in a general bucket here, but, in general, they take pride in working for a good company or someone who takes care of them.

It’s easy to take care of VAs. Real little things like giving a Filipino VA a bonus is like you going out to a couple of dinners. A $100 for Christmas or $50 for Thanksgiving, as a thank you. It’s not a big deal, into the year bonuses, $500. I’ve always wanted to ask you this question. I worry about overpaying them a little bit because I’m afraid that the American dollar goes so far with them that they’ll take 1 or 2 years off if we pay them too much.

Let me stop you right there because a lot of people have that same question. The biggest problem in this industry is turnover. It does not matter where you’re located. People quit or get fired. It’s part of it. We found through our research that financial-related reasons are only half the battle. People need to be paid adequately. People have to understand that if you are not getting bonuses, not getting financial incentives, probably underpaying what the VA wants hourly, they’re gone once they get a $1 more per hour offer from another company. What we do with our company is when the VA has come in, we allow them to dictate their hourly rate. Are you worth $8 per hour? Prove it through your interview and resumé. I believe you. I’m not going to say you’re not worth $8 per hour. People got to eat. Different locations have different expenses.

 

The other half of the battle is contribution and communication. If you have a $4 or $5 per hour VA, they’re happy with that. If they’re bored all day long, they’re going to quit. It doesn’t matter if you’re making $1 million a year. If you hate what you do and you’re bored all day, you’re going to find something else to do. We’re humans. We need it. We need to enjoy what our days consist of. There’s that contribution and communication. Communicate with them, make them feel like they’re part of the family and make them feel like you care about them because you should. Where we also differentiate is we give client training to people who don’t have the experience to say, like, “Don’t worry about the money part.”

We’ve already solidified. They’re getting paid when they want to get paid hourly. What you have to focus on is how you can be a good leader to this person? How can you help them contribute to your overall mission? How can you communicate effectively with them? That’s the other half of the battle. When we started instituting this training and allowing them to dictate their hourly rate, turnover went down dramatically.

Of course, you have those outliers of people who suck. It’s part of it. People do suck, but again, you have to think about it. It’s not just money. Money does play a role, but you have to make them feel like a part of your team. To answer your question, if you overpay them, if they love what they do, that’s a bonus. They got paid a lot more to do what they love to do and they’re going to keep doing it.

I talked to my readers about what are their goals. What are they shooting for in life? What do they need to do? One of my VA said, “I want to build a house.” I said, “How much does a house in the Philippines cost?” He needed to build for his family about $5,000 or $6,000 for a house. They already had the land. I’m thinking, “This guy’s not going to quit. He has goals that are going to take some resources from him and it’s going to take some time, so if he does good, he’s going to take that money and put it into this house or to the building this house. He’s going to be around for a while because he’s not going to be able to finish it all at one time.”

I like to be generous with my VAs, but it’s so easy because of the exchange rate. In the United States of America, we pay $10 or $12 for our lowest level employees and they can’t even clean a toilet right. They can’t do anything right. We see it every day. I go to the drive-in, order a hamburger, fries and a couple of other things and it’s always wrong in the bag. When you hire someone for $6 or $8 an hour in the Philippines, you’re getting people that have managed hospital floors. Talk to me about the exchange rate. What is $6 an hour like in the Philippines?

The best example I can give you is a story about a couple retiring in the Philippines for ten years on only $100,000. To make it simplistic, if you’re going to retire, you’d probably need $100,000 per year to live. It’s expensive. It depends on location. Let’s use that simple explanation. That means $10,000 in the Philippines is equal to $100,000 here in the US. Just by that simple explanation and calculation, if you pay somebody $10,000 a year, which equals six figures here in the US, you divide that by 2,080 hours working hours, that’s $4.80. I know and I understand that with locations and experience levels, it’s all going to differ. Your $100,000 in LA does not go as far as it might in Montana. That’s part of it.

Same thing in the Philippines. Based on that simple explanation, we argue that the economy in the Philippines is probably 10% to 20% of what it is in the US, so when you think about that exchange rate, you feel better about, “I’m not taking advantage of somebody,” but I can also pay someone $6 per hour. What does that portray in the US? I’m getting a good employee who can do more than clean toilets. They can do analysis, talk to clients, do project management, whatever the case might be. It’s opening people’s eyes up because people see that low hourly rate. They lump them in with the high schoolers here in the United States that are around that hourly rate. They’re like, “There’s no way.” It’s not the same at all.

The one reason I want to bring that up is that you’re not taking advantage of people overseas. People that make $8, $9 or $10 an hour overseas have maids or servants because they’re paying those servants $1 or $2 an hour to clean their house. It’s relevant. I want to make sure that nobody thinks that you’re taking advantage of somebody overseas because you can. It’s not the case. It’s the exchange rate and the cost of living. There’s a big difference. When you’re paying $6 or $8 an hour to a Filipino VA, you’re getting management material, as you said, analysis, list building, computer savvy, can go and build lists, get in your courthouse, do things. I’m always referring to the real estate world, but these VAs can help different businesses, not creative real estate investing.

There’s a job that is a lot more technical. We placed two software developers. One of them was $10 per hour. The other one was $13 per hour. They are really good and very talented. There’s absolutely no way you would find that here in the United States. You think about front-end and back-end, $10 per hour, let’s assume full-time, is $20,800 per year. The other full-time is $27,040 per year. How in the world, in the US, would you get two software developers, very talented, for $47,000 or $48,000 per year? You wouldn’t.

$48,000 is a starting salary, maybe in the US and certain parts of the US. You should think about the talent that exists over there. We’re not taking advantage. I can’t speak for other companies. I don’t know if other companies take advantage. I’ve heard of VAs underpaid forcibly at other agencies. I’m not going to talk bad about them, but we allow the VAs to dictate their hourly rate.

That makes sense because someone says, “How much are you paying?” He says, “It doesn’t matter. What are you going to be happy with? Let’s go from there because if you’re not happy, you’re not going to stay. I need something.”

That’s the whole thing. If I underpay you, what’s the point in training you if you’re going to quit in two months? There is no point.

It is because someone offered you $1 or more. The truth is at $6, $8, $10, if this guy is doing what he’s supposed to be doing, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all because I’m making money. Plus, or minus a little bit, I’m still making big money. I also want to talk about engagement. We first had some trouble with our VAs hanging around because we would give them their task and go away. We wouldn’t talk to them for weeks. They would drift off. There was no engagement. I was talking to Larry Goins. I was interviewing him and he has these two computer screens behind him. There are two Vietnamese ladies on these screens, and I find out he has his VAs work from 8:00 to 5:00, like everybody else.

The more value you provide, the more money you make. Click To Tweet

They show up at their desk, turn on their Zoom camera and he’s got them. All they have to do is hit a button to talk to each other. What they’re doing is they’re calling, trying to find motivated sellers. Whenever they get someone hot on the line, they are blaring and say, “Larry, we’ve got someone that meets all the criteria. They’re all on the line right now. Do you want to talk to him?” He says, “Yes.” He’s talking to him right now, but that’s one of the things he does to keep them engaged.

They are at his office. He sees them every day. He asked him how their morning was, how their evening was and how their weekend was. They have engagement. Every Thursday, he takes a couple of their recorded calls because he has their calls, archived everything they say from the time they pick up the phone is recorded and he critiques two of their calls to help them get better, another form of engagement.

He likes to give them some time on Friday to learn some skills that will help his business. He buys them a course for X, Y or Z. They take time and he helps get them better at what they need to be better at, something where they can grow even personally, like how to set goals or anything. He stays engaged with them all the time. He’s had these people for years. That’s part of the reason why there is engagement.

We, at my office, are in the process right now of duplicating exactly that. We’ll have four screens because I have four acquisition managers. I’m demanding that all my acquisition managers now get a VA to start making all the calls and start doing a lot of the work because I can see where my acquisition managers are starting to burn out on calling 100 people a day. I don’t need my acquisition managers to go away. I’m making them get a VA and get this off their plate so they can do more of what they enjoy, which is basically showing up and getting a contract signed. That’s what they want to do. That’s what makes them excited, not the call.

As far as engagement and a lot of people miss the mark on this, what we do is every morning. They say, “Good morning,” and whenever they’re about to leave, “Thanks for today.” We have a daily status report that they always fill out. Talk about their day, “What went wrong? What went right?” Any questions I got, we do a weekly huddle every Friday afternoon, talking about what happened during the week, what they’re looking forward to next week, talking about what plans they have on the weekend. It’s not hard to engage with your VAs. People need to make it a priority because they are team members. It’s not so much financial. It’s, “Do they feel like they’re contributing to the overall mission of the team?” That’s important moving forward.

You and I are the same way. We all need some interaction to keep it healthy. Our acquisition managers could work at home. They could work anywhere they want. We make them come to the office. There is that banter and rivalry. They can hold a contest between themselves and go to lunch. They were sitting at home, making 100 phone calls a day and trying to negotiate all by your lonesome. It’s not very fulfilling. The whole world thinks they have figured out how they don’t need office space anymore and everyone can work virtually. That’s going to backfire in a lot of cases. Productivity will go down because it’s too easy for them to sit down and not do the job when no one’s watching.

 

It depends. Some people work well remotely and some people don’t. It’s figuring out what that environment is, what people prefer and then going from there. The nature of virtual assistants, they’re all going to work remotely from home. 1) Making sure they have the correct equipment. 2) Making sure they know how to do their job and 3) Communicating with them. Making sure they’re on top of their tasks. You’re good to go.

What we do is we say, “Here are your deliverables. I’m going to pay you for $40 hours a week. If it takes you twenty hours to deliver your deliverables, that’s fine. Do what you got to do, but we’re going to pay you $40. It motivates people when they feel like they’re being compensated correctly. 1) “I’m going to have a salary here.” 2) When it’s like, “They’re engaging with me. I’m working from home. I like my job. This is great.” Everybody’s different. It’s communicating, figuring out their environment and what they like and then moving forward from there.

I find that I needed to pay about $6 or $7 an hour to someone. They speak English well. They understand more. There’s a lot of people that have already been trained by other companies that we don’t have to do everything. My courthouse has some specific tasks that I want to be more specific about, but they’re not new to this game. Some of them are quite highly qualified. How do you know that you’re getting the right quality VA?

There are three different components. First and foremost is culture fit. You need to be able to get along with this person well. You normally know that you’re talking to them in the first few minutes, but you need to figure that out before you hire them. That’s why through our process, we suggest what we call a panel interview. You pick your favorite 2 or 3 applicants that we’ve provided and talk to them in a panel interview. My team sets all that up and you’re good to go, but culture fits first and foremost. It doesn’t matter how good they are or how well they speak English. It will not work if they don’t want to get a culture fit.

English proficiency, we assess for that in our application process, both on a written audible and a spoken perspective. That’s something that you further assess in the panel interview process. That’s something that you can much tell right off the bat. If they can speak well, they’re a good culture fit. What’s next? Skill. It’s going to be different. What are you looking for? That can mean a lot of different things, but it knows the right questions to ask. We handled the initial base questions around that particular position. For instance, in software development, even though this guy’s a front-end software developer, there might be a specific language or a specific thing that the employer wants to ask about.

You got to know the right questions to ask. The first two things, culture and English proficiency, you can tell that very quickly. Skill is the hardest one to assess for, but you have to know the right questions to ask. You have to know what you’re hiring for in the first place. If you have a very vague job description, you have to have the SOP. If you can’t ask those questions, “Do you know how to manage email?” That’s a very vague question. Anybody can manage email. How do you want your email managed? Create that process and you can give it to the VA. You can tell that culture and English proficiency very quickly and skill is all about knowing the right questions to ask.

If someone wants to talk to Brady Morgan or his team, I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/VAtoday. Tell us about some of your success stories with your VAs in companies that you help find VAs.

We worked with a couple of hundred clients of ours. We placed several hundred VAs. There’s no vertical that we can’t work with. I’ll say that. Every vertical can use the VA. My real estate mortgage, digital marketing, software development, whatever we can work with you, we’ve worked with a lot of different verticals. Our major success stories, one of the companies is called Hook Point. It’s a major digital marketing agency out of LA. They’ve worked with Rihanna and Taylor Swift. A lot of big names.

We worked with a company called Elevator Studio. They are another digital marketing company, influence and marketing more so. They worked with Jake Paul, Postmates, Dan Bilzerian. That’s a big company we’ve worked with. I’ve worked with one of the largest mortgage brokers in Canada. We’ve worked with one of the largest property management companies. It’s the Northern or the Northwest United States Real Property Management. I’m sure I’m missing a few, but there’s a lot of big companies we worked with, but I want to preface it with this.

If you’re a small or a medium-sized company, it doesn’t matter if you’re well-known. It doesn’t matter who you are. You probably need a VA and that’s the best place to start when you’re a smaller to medium size or a smaller knit team. Any of those virtual staff, into your team, family, allowing them to grow in whatever position or vertical you need them to be in. They can 100% do it. For us, those are the biggest companies that we’ve worked with. We’ve worked with several others. A lot of individuals are big in their respective niches. There’s no vertical that we can’t work with. We can work with anybody.

I always tell people, the one-off entrepreneurs, who wear all the hats, he’s a solo guy, doing it all by himself, which is typical, starting out. I did it. Probably, you did it a lot. Almost everybody starts that way. I always tell him, “Take the easiest things and delegate them first.” Bookkeeping, delegate it, no servicing or property management. Get all the things that are easy to get off your plate. I don’t think about this when about bookkeepers, but there are some good bookkeepers in the Philippines. Also, have you ever helped anyone find a property manager from the Philippines?

We’ve done that before.

Property management can be expensive and they don’t care about your company because they have a whole bunch of companies to deal with. You’re another company. It might be better to get a Filipino VA and train them in property management and in your properties and how you do business. They work for your company and only your company and their jobs to save you money. To make sure that the maintenance man is not ripping you off and all this stuff. Some of the things you don’t think about, you can get a Filipino VA to do that too. People are a little bit worried about doing my books overseas in the Philippines. It sounds risky, like they can get to me somehow. I don’t think that’s the case.

There are platforms out there that can protect you. I understand people who are wary about letting a stranger into their QuickBooks account. I get it. It doesn’t matter if that’s domestic either. Someone in the US can 100% scam you too. It doesn’t matter where they’re located, but the platform that we found out if you’re just now getting a bookkeeper for the first time is called Tiller Money. Essentially, you sign up for $80 a year. You connect all of your financial accounts to it, credit cards and checking accounts and it pushes all raw transactions to a spreadsheet.

If you don’t use QuickBooks, this is great. If you’re getting started because the bookkeeper is going to know what they need to do if all those raw transactions are in a spreadsheet, they can do what they have to do for reconciliation purposes, monthly reports and income statements, balance sheets. That’s what we used in the beginning. We’ve moved on from that a bit, but it works. The only access the bookkeeper has is to the Google sheet, with the raw transactions and what are they going to do with that? It’s TillerHq.com.

My advice to the young entrepreneurs out there is to get something off your plate. One at a time, get this off your plate, get them trained up. Once you feel comfortable that you can walk away from that person that’s in that seat now and they can do a fine job, you start working on the next seat. If you keep working on one seat after another, it’s like building blocks. You look up one day and you’ve built a castle and it’s strong and it sturdy and you can leave it and come back to it when you want to and it’s still there. That’s the whole point. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that the whole point of business and money is freedom.

That’s the only reason you do it. Start looking at your business like that. Maybe you get ahold of Brady Morgan and his company over 1000Houses.com/VAtoday and get a consult. Tell them what you’re looking for. Discuss your fears if you’re afraid of something. If you think the person you’re looking for is going to be impossible to find overseas, give them a call because they may already know someone, they may already have someone, or they may be very confident that they can find them. It sounds like that you are confident that you can find about anything.

There probably isn’t a fear that hasn’t been addressed already. Bring them to me and we can sort them out together.

This is money very well spent. Any entrepreneur out there, any business, get some help, please. The sooner, the better don’t wait until you’re burned out because then there’s nothing left inside of you to go try to fix your business. I almost made that mistake. It was a horrible mistake. I almost threw my whole business away. I couldn’t do it anymore. $1 million a year. It’s like, “I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore.” At one point, if I never saw another house in my career, that was going to be fine with me. I was going to quit. I figured out over about a year and two months, one chair at a time, to get it running like a train down a track.

I thought it would take a cut in pay to do that. I’d have to pay out of my pocket these people so I could get some freedom. It turned out I make about 75% more than I’ve ever made. I don’t even have a desk at my office. I haven’t seen the last 400 houses I bought and I have not seen the last 400 people that bought my houses. It’s a wonderful thing. Is there anything you want to add before we wrap it up?

That’s it. It’s just understanding, realizing and asking yourself, “What is your time worth? Are you willing to spend $4 to $12 per hour to get that time back?”

It doesn't matter if you're making a million dollars a year. If you hate what you do and you're bored all day, you're going to find something else to do. Click To Tweet

Thank you, Brady Morgan, for showing up and taking the time. I believe that you should get some business deservingly from this show because it will strike a chord with the readers. I know who’s reading out there and I know you’re working your bum in the ground and you’re not delegating. If you’re one of those people with separation anxiety from your job, or you can’t let go, or you’re not good at delegating. I had two of those people in my business. They would not let go of their stuff. They would not relinquish their duties. They were afraid to. I found out they were afraid because they never felt like they had the right qualified person that they could trust to hand it to.

Let Brady work to find the right qualified, high enough level person. Integrity, work ethic and all that. Let them find that person so that maybe your person in your office that’s not delegating. Maybe they’ll have the confidence to delegate to this particular person because they’re a step up. We’ve tested some of our VAs and we’ve tested some of our assistants that have come in from the United States to make sure that’s another little step. Sometimes it’s a little expensive, but when you’re looking for the right person, you can also do some personality tests and get a deeper insight into who they are. What comes naturally to them? Not that they’re lying to you or anything. It’s like a lot of people don’t know what to express who they are, but some of these tests are accurate.

The tests that I gave people, I would’ve never hired the person that the test had to hire, but my hiring myself was going so bad that I decided you couldn’t do any worse than I was doing. Let’s go ahead and go with the test. This time I’ve done it with three people. All three people, I didn’t think would make it. The test said they would. All three of those people have been with me for years now. They’re good at what they do.

Thank you to TaxFreeFuture.com. Please go over there and check it out. If you’re thinking about rolling over your retirement accounts, tax-deferred or tax-free accounts, into a self-directed situation, then go ahead and take it. Check out TaxFreeFuture.com. It’s backed up by attorney Tim Berry, who specialized in retirement plans and all the legal ease and everything that goes with it. He makes it simple. You tell him what you want to accomplish. There’s usually a way to get it done. TaxFreeFuture.com. Check it out. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate having you on and we’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks, Mitch.

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/VAtoday
• 1000Houses.com/TFF
• 1000Houses.com/LiveComm
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/101

 

About Brady Morgan

Brady Morgan is the founder of Virtual Assistant Staffing Agency, the premier business for your outsourcing needs. Aside from business, he loves spending time with his wife and son, and reading.

 

 

 

 

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