Pro Finds the Perfect VA for You! Featuring Bob Lachance

Episode 534: Pro Finds the Perfect VA for You! Featuring Bob Lachance

View this episode on:

Find the Perfect VA for YOU!

You can’t always do everything on your own in your business and expect to grow. It’s time to accept the reality that you may need help to scale your business.

In this episode, Bob LaChance shares the secret to success: hiring virtual assistants.

Bob is an ex-professional hockey player, a college dropout who began his career in real estate investment by self-education. 

Mitch and Bob talk about the different advantages and even the struggles he faced working with Virtual Assistants.

His company has developed efficient trainings for VAs and offers a variety of ready-to-work assistants that can take the work off YOU.

So stay tuned and find the perfect VA for you!

—

Watch the episode here

I’m here with Bob LaChance. He specializes in help finding you the exact correct VA help that you need. He is a pro and has been around for a long time. He is an ex-professional athlete. I always liked those guys because they have this competitive spirit and this drive that you can always count on. I liked that about athletes, ex-Marines, Black Ops guys or whatever.

You are not going to shut them down. They might hit a roadblock but they are going to find a way around it. That is what I like about that. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. I know you have done a lot of things. I do not want to list the things that are superfluous. Tell us about some of your background and how you got here.

Before I jumped into the virtual assistant business, I played professional hockey for eight years. Four years here in the United States and four years in Europe. I left school two classes short from getting my degree. That was a pivotal moment. Eight years after that, I make made a decision to go back to school or jump into an industry that did not have a not too high barrier of entry. I decided not to go back to school and jump into real estate investing. This was 2004.

I did my first flip and I started a couple of real estate education programs throughout the years, 2006. In the short sale world, we did over 1,000 short-sale transactions. Towards the end of 2007, I helped start a company called FortuneBuilders with a couple of our buddies here in Connecticut. They moved out back to San Diego because they are from California. My other business partner stayed out here.

Our main job was to set up the coaching program, run all the coaches and build from within. We built and grew that successfully. Within that process, one of the things I have always noticed is a lot of students either work part-time or full-time. There is something that is missing, which is a lack of time. I was always looking for that one product or one service out there for seven years. I finally found it in virtual assistance. Once I realized what a virtual assistant was in 2013, a light bulb went on. I was like, “There is a business out there. This is exactly what our students need.

You can be a successful household that needs a virtual assistant like, “Research this for me. Find out where this way. Where is the closest theater to me? I need you to book tickets for the show.”

You could go across the grain for things like that and tasks that you need help with.

I do not think anybody who is a mover, a shaker and certainly an entrepreneur. The general problem with entrepreneurs and I think you will agree is that they are overloaded.

That is self-sabotaging because we add one thing and we add another. That is what we do to ourselves but it is part of the game. I started my first company in 2014. Now I use my virtual assistants in my own business. We did over 150 transactions in 2021, more apparent in Connecticut. We do two different types of real estate investing whether it is wholesaling, wholetailing and fix and flip but we do stuff nationally. We are reigning that back in and bringing it back in our own market and going deeper rather than wider.

There are different cultures everywhere you go, different city ordinances and all kinds of things. When you start getting further out, you start bumping into problems that you would not even know where to look for because you have never seen before. You are in a different county or a different state. It is different. We are going to talk about the VAs. The link for more info from you is going to be 1000Houses.com/VAHelp.

You’ll be able to get anything we talk about on here, any websites, any opportunities, any giveaway, we are going to have a giveaway here. We are going to be talking about where to start with a VA or how to find that right person for the VA. What Bob and his company specialize in is helping you find that exact right person.

You can go out there, place ads and do stuff if you want. Here are the two choices. You hire a professional company like Bob’s or you go out, train people, they quit and you have got to retrain. It is a ton of energy suck. There is a choice there. Let’s start from the beginning. How are they finding the right person for them?

You could go on your own. Go do yourself. You could post ads, run interviews, do all the pre-screening, make sure they have the right hardware on their laptop and they have a backup. You could do all of that 100%. The first virtual assistant that I had back in 2013 took me a long time only to do what you said, Mitch. I spent about a month finding him. At the end of week one, they all of a sudden left. I had to rinse and repeat. Part of the reason why we started my company is because of that pain that I felt.

Anyone could do that. There are some sites out there. You could Google it. There are companies like myself, the one that I own that you could get to by the link that you gave, which is under 1000Houses.com/VAHelp. We do all of it. We recruit source, train and pre-screen. We do a predictive index and DISC profiling. If you go to us and say, “This is the type of DISC profile or the type of predictive index that I want in the makeup of the virtual assistant,” we will match that perfect virtual assistant with exactly what you need in your business. We take care of the majority of the heavy lifting.

It is about transparency. I’m going to hit you with some hard questions because I have had to make a choice. The difference is I’m going to pay this much an hour but where is my time worth? Let’s talk about the disparity and the two prices. If you go on your own, what could you save? There is a lot in that. You can talk about your savings if you go do it on your own.

Number one, are you any good at it? That will show up if you have to keep hiring people over and over again. Number two, what are you worth per hour? The lowest house makes $15,000 or $20,000. What are you trying to save a few dollars an hour for? One house extra instead of doing that and doing what you are supposed to do pays for years of difference in this price.

That separates the successful individuals from the non-successful individuals. This is what I found since I started in real estate. You and I were talking a little bit about this. If you spend time doing $10 an hour tasks, it is going to equate to a $10 an hour bank account. That is how that works. If you are looking at the price and the cost of something, rather than investment, you are looking to bargain shop. You will get a bargain but you are also going to get the quality of that bargain. That’s what I realized throughout this business especially in the virtual assistant world.

If we are talking traditional shopping, you have wasted all this time, fuel, wear and tear on your vehicle. You are not adding up everything that costs you generally.

You could find your own and get them anywhere. There has a mix of them. Some people claim you can get them anywhere from $3 to whatever dollars but are you going to get that quality. I have tried every $3 an hour VA, Mitch, and it is not worth once.

The minute they get a $0.50 bump, they are gone. If someone offers them $4, you are out of the window. Since they are only making $3, they feel undervalued. They got two other people they are working for on the side that you do not know about. That is paying them maybe $3 or $4 each. Now they are double billing hours and stuff. You can get into that game if you want.

It is going to be a bad time for you as an entrepreneur because our jobs are money-producing activities as an entrepreneur. Let’s have our VA stick to admin cell phone work, text messaging, transaction coordinating. There is a whole laundry list of tasks that you need to offload off your plate and give to your virtual assistant.

The giveaway now is 100 tasks that your VA can do for you to plant in your head and get your mind rolling on what all they can do. We are going to save you the drain bramage. Go ahead and get the list. That will get your juices flowing. You can probably add to that list once you plug it into your own personal system but go to 1000Houses.com/VAHelp. Go over there.

That is the conclusion I came to. I have seen people do it over again and I said, “You can go try to save a couple of bucks an hour or you can get on with what makes you the money, which is buying houses or finding houses at discount prices.” If you are saving a couple of bucks an hour and you miss a house that can make you $20,000, you are not ahead at all. You are behind. You can see it on a chart while it was happening in real-time. You would throw up.

You are spoken like a true veteran right there, Mitch. That is exactly how I look at the same thing.

It is no secret. I have to make every mistake before I figure it out. I have made every mistake. I’m pretty sure. I won’t say that because as soon as I say that, I will find another mistake I have not made and I will make it. I’m going to say I’m a pro at learning from my mistakes. Tell us what your organization looks like. Do you go to the Philippines? Do you meet people? Do you have an office in the Philippines? Tell us what a VA company like yours looks like.

We do have an office in the Philippines. We are also a work-from-home-type structured company. I started my first company in 2014. Now we are at over 800 virtual assistants nationwide. That is made up of both the real estate virtual assistants. We have property managers, real estate agents, any type of investor, wholesalers, lease option, rental, whatever type of investor that you want or that you could think of, we have as clients. We also have a medical division side that we run like doctor’s offices, hospitals and things like that

Virtual Assistant: There’s a business out there, and virtual assistants are exactly what our students need.

No matter what business you are in, get ahold of Bob and tell him what you are looking for. A lot of people think VAs are from the Philippines. What could they possibly know? Not even hardly minimum wage for us. They are running hospital floors and store managers. What is the minimum wage now? I do not even know.

It keeps going up every day. Can I raise theirs? California could be $15. I could be wrong.

You pay $15 in the United States. You are going to get the bottom of the barrel. You pay $12 or whatever in the Philippines. I’m not setting your price. I’m not saying but I’m saying you can pay substantially less per hour, which is thousands of dollars per year depending on how many you have. It could be tens of thousands a year and you are getting a much higher quality person.

All of our virtual assistants were four-year college degrees. The majority have background and call center experience. You already have that experience that you need typically for the tasks that you are trying to outsource. That is an important point there, Mitch. I’m glad you brought that up.

I have learned these people from the Philippines opened up a middle-income class from these jobs. They were poor and you were rich but the internet has set these people up to have a middle-class or to start building a middle-class. They are opposite hours of us.

It is their graveyard shift.

They are used to working the graveyard shift. I was concerned about it when I called. I said, “What hours we got to work so you will have a real-life and everything?” The five that I asked that question to all said the same thing, “I’m here to work when you want me to work.” They know where their value is.

Mitch, they are huge on family there. I do not know if you have ever been there but the traffic is like New York City and Los Angeles put together. It is chaos. For them to go 1 mile down the street is going to take them two hours, as an example. It is difficult for them to get anywhere because it is a populated country especially in the bigger cities like Manila, down South in Cebu and things like that.

They are used to working from home, working from their laptops and working the night shift. I find surprisingly enough, if this is a requirement, they can speak good English as anybody on the planet.

English is one of the first languages. A lot of people do not know that.

They share in the American holidays. The other thing I love about my VAs is I can give them their base, bonus them or give them a commission when something goes right that does not have to break my bank. $50, $100, to $200 goes a long way. I want to ask you this question. My biggest fear is if I paid the person $500, it would be way less than I would have paid anybody else. Sometimes I’m afraid to give the VA $500 because I’m afraid I will give them so much money that they will quit.

Do not think like that because for me personally, on all of our deals closed, we bonus them pretty substantially. Everyone’s definition of substantially is different. If you are going to get a $30,000 profit, give them $300, $20,000, give them $200, $10,000, give them $100. All of that goes a long way. Think about this, if you have ten closings with the same virtual assistant that drove you the same lead, that money adds up big time. They will not go anywhere.

You have got to remember. VAs that are making what we call minimum wage around here, they got servants because the servants in the VA are working for $1.50 or $2 an hour. Those low-level workers are not getting paid hardly anything in the VA. I wanted to ask you about that. Is it possible to overpay them too much? You do not want to give them too much because if you paid the commissions that you pay here in the United States to them, they could live for two years off of that.

The way I look at it, you give reasonable.

Do you give 10%?

You look at that percentage.

Christmas is always a big one. I will give you $100. Thanksgiving, I give you $50. It probably takes care of their whole meal for their whole extended family and more. It is very easy to be good to them.

Make them part of your team. I know it is a virtual assistant. It is not sitting in your office but it is important to make sure you make them part of your team. Get them into all of your daily huddles if you have huddles. If you have team meetings, include them. Think about this, Mitch. If you and I are working. You are in Texas and I’m in Connecticut. If we do not have those huddles, there is a disconnect.

Even though we are working together or partnering with each other, whatever it is, there is going to be a disconnect if we do not touch base on a daily basis. It is the same concept. This is virtual. Now we are in a virtual world. COVID has done some very incredible things for allowing individuals to feel confident and comfortable to work with a virtual employee, a virtual assistant or however you want to coin it.

Let me put in perspective what Bob was saying and how we are dealing with it. One is our salespeople and our acquisition people do not need to have an office to come to because it does not change anything they do. They all are getting paid upon success. They have to work to get paid. I do not have to ride shotgun over them.

The reason why we have offices for them in an office is so that there is a comradery and there is an environment where they are having interaction with each other, with us and our staff. We can start to bond and start to build a culture. What happens if everyone works from home? There is no culture. It is not getting any love or affection. You drift off because there is no interaction besides the job that you do.

The prospects that you are talking to can’t give you what you need. You need something from the other side, from the guy who did three houses, “What am I doing wrong because I had the same amount of calls you did? I did not close the half. What is going on? How can you help me close my deals better?” They need something from the other side. It is the same with the VAs.

We found out that if we do not meet with the VAs once a week and have some homework for them to do, to turn it in on another day for the week. We are going to listen to a couple of your recordings of your calls to see if we can up your game and see if we can all get better. We have to involve them about once a week or they will have a tendency to drift off. They will get lonely out there and start running.

The feedback for anybody in this world, it does not matter if you are in sports or in business. Feedback leads to motivation and to production. That is the important part to look at, no matter what industry you are in. It could be sports, business or whatever it is. It is coaching kids. It is the whole nine yards. That is how that cycle goes.

We have talked to a person who had a VA that was doing good for this company. We asked him, “We are not going to try to scrape your VA from you but can we talk to him? We want to hear from a VA themselves, what is important to them, from a Filipino VA?” We talked to this guy. What he said was he wanted to feel valued. This was most important. He wants to feel like he is going to have his job for a long time. He is not here for 1, 2, a quarter or whatever and then you let him go. He is trying to not worry about where he is going to have to find his next job.

Long-term security is what they like. In our business, that is what we offer. We offer that for our virtual assistants. We continue to market consistently. Our VA stays with our clients the longest in the industry, which is a good mark for our company. That is one of the things we pride ourselves on.

Virtual Assistant: It’s a virtual assistant. It’s not sitting in your office, but it’s very important to make sure that you make them part of your team, get them into all of your daily huddles.

They want stability and long-term security. That is number one. They also want to feel valued and they want to be communicated with. Those were the three things they said. They are loyal people, as far as I could tell, in my limited amount. They do not want to hop around. We can’t generalize everybody but for the most part, it seems like they would want what anybody would want, the same thing.

I saw an interesting concept, which got me all reinvigorated about VAs. I was talking to a guy who does a lot of houses. He is a virtual flipper. He had two screens behind his desk. There was a VA on one and a VA on the other. They were muted but they were on the phone with their headset and they were talking. You can see their lips moving all the time.

Every now and then, while I was talking to this guy on Zoom, they would punch in and go, “We have a hot one. They are on the line now. Can you talk to him?” He would say, “Yes, I can talk to him.” She said, “Let me give you the rundown quick.” She went through her little microphone and read their answers. They transferred to the guy, which is smart because half the problem is getting back to your prospects.

They do not recognize your phone number. They do not know who is calling them. When the VA had someone hot, they turned them over to the acquisition man now while they were on the phone. I thought, “That is brilliant.” These people, you know they are working because they have the same hours that he had. 9:00 to 7:00 or whatever he worked. They showed up at the same time.

They said, “Good morning. How was your day?” They got that sense of belonging built into it. The only problem with that for me is I’m not going to an office and sitting there from whenever to whenever. If he could find a way to put this monitor in my truck, maybe I would do it but that probably would not be safe.

This is all important stuff. If you have not dealt in the world of VAs or you are barely starting, this stuff is dead on. It is what is going to kill you. The interaction and to make up your mind that you are going to keep these people whether it be part-time or full-time. I do not see hardly any reason for anyone to have a part-time VA because there is so much to be done. If you have them part-time, they got to divide their time between you and someone else. That could get competitive in dollars, cents or they may decide they want to go full-time and now your part-time guy is gone. To me, it is either full-time or nothing.

I would check out the 100 plus tasks to have done for you by a virtual assistant. That is important. We could go over how I use VAs in my business. I have 6 cold callers, 3 text messages, 2 lead managers, 2 data scrapers and 1 transaction coordinator helping our main TC here in the office. That is a little high level in what I do because, on the cold calling side, I think you have cold-called before. Cold calling, beat you up. When I first started, I was hammering the phones. I was door-knocking first. I was going over in door-knocking, skip tracing, finding the phone number and hammering the phones. Once you do that, you want to quit.

That is what happened in 2022. My acquisition managers were celebrating their 4th, 5th and 6th anniversary. You could see the toll the cold calling was taking on them. They used to call 200 a week. Now they are down to 80 a week. They are not looking forward to that 80 either. We sat them down at the beginning of the year. We saw their income levels come in.

My acquisition managers made between $150,000 and $250,000. The upper end was closer to $250,000 and the lower end was close to $150,000 but he only worked three quarters because he had COVID for an extended period of time. Once we saw they were making good money, we called them in the room and said, “In 2022, you all have to have a full-time VA because you are burning out. Your calls are down. You can’t be wanting to make another 200 calls a week for 2022. You can’t be wanting to do that.” They all agreed.

They did not want to but one says, “I do not want to spend the money on a VA, $2,000 or whatever dollars a month.” I said, “Let’s do it for a quarter. I’m going to make you do it for a quarter. You have to pay for it. If you are not happy at the end of the quarter, we will put everyone’s results on the table, yours and the other two guys. If you all are not happy, we won’t do it but you are going to be happy because you are going to save $6,000 in a quarter. If you buy one extra property, you are going to make an extra $10,000.” It is probably going to be a lot more lopsided than that and it was.

In the first month of getting the new VAs, while we were training them, they brought in six extra deals, which was two extra deals per person. It was about $20,000 apiece extra for each person in the first month. They are not even trained yet and honed in to what we wanted from them. They were not dumb and starting green. They had done this business before but they had not learned exactly how we wanted it.

It is funny on that side of it, Mitch. A lot of people ask, “Why do you do real estate if you have 800 plus virtual assistants?” Are you successful enough in that one business?” I have always been the type of person where if I have a business in a service business like you doing in this show, you better be an investor to do a show because if you are not buying houses, what are you? I have a service business. I better be using that business. Too many people out there that are full of you-know-what that are going on podcasts or have a service business and they do not use their product or service in their business. I do not like that.

I have the perfect example. It is over in Jack Bosch’s book called Forever Cash. I got this from Jack Bosch. I will give credit where credit’s due. I knew this stuff but every now and then, when someone says something, it puts it in a perfect perspective. There is the one-time cash, which is fix and flip. You sell cars and you sold the car or you place VAs and you place a VA. There is the one-time cash. You get it, you get paid and then there is temporary cash, which is more like what you do. You place the VA, there is a set-up charge but you make a little bit off of them for however long they are. Sooner or later, this relationship ends. It stops. It is temporary.

You got to take the money that you are making from the temporary cash events or services and you have to buy into a forever strategy, which is an apartment building, rental houses, strip centers something that you rent or quite possibly, maybe and I’m not big enough to talk on this because I have never done it but a business that you own and there is a CEO under you. You are on the cruise boat checking in with your CEO maybe twice a week.

There is another good book there along with Jack is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

To me, if I was a real estate agent, my whole year would be measured on how many houses I bought by the end of the year, not how many I sold. I would still stay afloat, pay my bills, stay in the game and get privy to the information that I need to still bargain properties. For lack of better words, morally, pick up great deals. I have never understood that. I talked to realtors. I was like, “How long have you been a realtor or a broker?” “Twenty years.” “Do you have a pretty big rental portfolio? Do you buy a lot of properties?” “I won’t touch this stuff.” I’m like, “Are you crazy?”

They have opportunities too. The thing is, as an agent, you have an opportunity to get motivated sellers especially on the landlord side that you can buy income-producing properties. They get those all the time. I’m not saying everybody, a lot of agents look at that one time hit on, “What can I buy with that commission of $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, to $10,000 but they do not look at what I can do with that money to keep that money flowing in.

The part of the problem that our entrepreneurial has and I do not have many original quotes but one of the quotes that I been repeated on is, “The hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever do is have one great idea and finish big.” They see opportunity in many things. They start fragmenting themselves and they are no good at any of it. It is all hobbling along.

At the same time, I also believe in multiple streams of income. You have to be careful where you pick your additional stream. My stream is always something that is broke off of what I have done already. The exhaust from my house flipping business is what started my note servicing business. The exhaust from my raising private money business, where I had to raise private money to buy these houses from my house flipping or my house investing business was what caused me to open up a hard money lending business.

People offered me so much money I could not get it out. If I did not get it out, they were going to leave and go do something else. I had to fragment. Every time I have fragmented, I learned to do something that was important. I picked a partner that was way better in that business than I would ever be. They took the helm and showed up every day. I kept feeding them.

In this case, in the hard money business, I provided the money for the short-term loans to the house flippers, where they were in and out. I could tie the money up for several months. If I needed it, I could not put it back out again. I could use it myself but if I did not need it, I could roll it to the next flipper or extend their loan. That’s how I occupied $26 million as I took little bitty bites out of it myself and it eventually consumed at all.

That is the same exact story as I have, real estate investor first, got into the coaching program, got into the VA business. It is like the grocery store model. You got all of this stuff in the middle, you got a bakery and you got the produce. Everything works together to make a meal.

I do not know why this is important to me. Maybe there is some logic to it or some usefulness to it. I noticed they always put the milk in the far back-end corner. You have to walk through the entire frigging store to get the basics.

It is a margin business. My buddy owns two supermarkets. He told me the different margins. They put all the stuff that is in the middle that does not make money. They walk you like a herd of cattle around the exterior of it, which gives you a 30% plus margin on certain things.

Hoping on the way back when you shortcut through one of the aisles, you will do an impulse buy and pick up some of that other stuff. What are the top few mistakes people make when they want to hire a VA?

They come in not knowing what tasks to outsource. For instance, you know you need lead generation. You could be a fish out of the water if you say, “There are cold calling, texting, direct mail, PPC, all this stuff.” If you do not pinpoint what you are looking for, like a cold caller, be clear on what you want your virtual assistant to do. That is important. A lot of people come in and say, “I know I need help. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a fish out of water.” They do not know what they want their virtual assistant to do. It is the same thing if you hire an employee.

Virtual Assistant: COVID has actually done some very incredible things allowing individuals to feel confident and comfortable to work with a virtual employee.

You needed to have a deep, intricate, specific job description.

We will help you with that too. That is what we do as a company. If you say, “I need cold calling,” we will ask another question, “Where are you getting your list from? Where are you skiptracing those lists from? Do you have a dialer?” These are the questions that we will ask. We will peel back the onion for you. If you have ever done cold calling, we will help you along with those. We also have a client service manager that oversees the virtual assistant and your relationship. We can help you with all of that.

Go to 1000Houses.com/VAHelp. If you are even thinking about obtaining a VA to lighten the load and especially, I want you part-time real estate investors or part-time entrepreneurs to read carefully. If you are part-time and you are trying to get a business off the ground or you are a part-time investor, you cannot not have a VA. The first move you make is you get help.

At least something can be getting done during those eight hours you are at your job. The object is to get out of your job but you got to use the whole 24 hours. Something is got to be happening while you are at your job or you are going to postpone your time at that job for another 1 or 2 years. You can cut your stay down drastically but you got to have help. I tell all of my new investors, “The minute you get a couple of hits, it is time to roll back some of that money into a VA and lighten your load. Start getting things done while you are still at your job.”

The best thing to do as an entrepreneur is either working part-time or full-time real estate investors, we all need leads. If you are working all day long, you have to come home, cold call and try to drum up those leads to be able to call back. You will be worn out, beat up and you won’t have the motivation to do this business.

That is even after what I’m talking about. You need help to shorten the time that you need a job. The most important thing in my humble opinion, Bob is that you get out of your job. The first goal you should have is whatever your job is paying you is to get that much a month coming in from a different source. Once you have it coming in passively like more or less mailbox money, I do not believe in the word passive hardly at all but let’s say cashflow, you have got a steady cashflow. It is never passive but as passive as it can be.

Once your cashflow comes up and meets what your job is paying you, this is why it is important, you can quit your job. You have freed up 2,600 fricking hours to devote to yourself and to find out who you are, what you are good at and what you are supposed to do in this life, 2,600 hours a year. Your first goal, in my humble opinion, is to make enough to pay a VA then make enough for you and your VA to replace whatever you are making at your job.

If you do not have a big job and you have a tiny little job with a tiny little salary, that may be your luckiest day of the moment in this conversation because someone who only is making $35,000 or $40,000 a year, they got a lot easier chance to get free and free up 2,600 hours. The guy that is making $250,000 with the insurance on the car and the phone. For once in your life, if you do not make much money, read this. You are the prime candidate to get this done. Because you do not make much money, you will get free much faster if you will use your head with what time you have while you have a job.

Mitch, I have a perfect example for you. We use our virtual assistants for lead gen whether it is cold calling, text messaging. All those leads go into my sales floor like your acquisition guys. We had a guy that was making $15,000 for the last several years. We pulled him. He was an agent. I do not know what company he was, I think it was KW. In $15,000 a year for the last couple of years, he came in and made $30,000 in one month. This business works. This is tying the lead generation from a VA that he did not do and he made $30,000 in a month.

He used to be the VA in his same business. Are you trying to help him get more listings?

We pulled them over as an agent. He was a struggling agent and we taught them both. We would give them leads for listings and for wholesaling and wholetailing because that was our exit strategy. He made him on both wholesaling and wholesaling. That was pretty good. He was a struggling agent pulled over to the investment world.

He is used to making a year in that industry in a month. We would not be on this call if it did not work. People sometimes call me and say, “Mitch, does owner financing work?” I said, “It works for people all over the United States. It works everywhere. The question is, can you figure out how to make it work for you? To do that, you need some counseling or coaching. You need to be with someone that has been there. That still does not mean you are going to do it because I do not know you. Maybe you do not get your ass up off the sofa. The strategy works. I can show you millions of reasons and evidence.” We go to wrap it up here towards the end but I do not want to leave anything out. Is there anything we have not said, talked about or you want the audience to know maybe before we wrap it up?

It takes action. A lot of our clients or customers come to us. They want more time. They want their time freedom. They want to become more efficient in their business or they want to scale. Those are typically three things that people look at when they are looking at a virtual assistant. If you have any questions, you have them on the landing page over there 1000Houses.com/VAHelp.

There is a strategy session button on there, Mitch, that you put on there to talk to our teams. If you have any questions at all, set up a strategy session, we will answer any questions you have. If you are trying to figure out where you are at in your business, we will help to determine tasks that the VA can do for you and your business. That’s important.

Here is the common thought process of a person that is pushing outside their limits and has never had an employer and had help. They look at it like it is an expense but this is going to be $2,000 to $2,400 a month that I do not make. That is completely wrong. That means you do not have the right help, do not have the right strategy that you are trying to use, do not have the right pitch deck or something is broken.

If your business that you are trying to improve and you get it set up at all correctly, the VA is going to up the number of dollars that come in. They will make enough money to pay themselves and will be money to be left over for you sometimes in hordes. How much does the VA cost at one month for that guy who made $30,000 in a month? What was he paying? Does it matter what they paid him? It does not matter if they paid them $12, $14 or $13 an hour. Does it even matter at that point?

It is going to be a lot less than the commission you are paying your acquisition person if you have acquisition people in your office. Let’s put it that way.

I’m going to correlate this one when people think about coaching. “That is going to cost me $25,000.” No, if you have got the right coach. They teach you how to make $25,000 extra a month. It is the same thing with the VA. It costs so much a month. If it costs $3,000 a month for something and it brings in $10,000 gross profit a month, you make an extra $7,000. This guy has no expense. He is paying for himself. You can look at it like you are writing the check but the guy should be paying for himself.

It is not like an office clerk or a receptionist. A receptionist is a dead weight, “How are you doing? Go sit over there. He wants to see you now.” She did not generate any money. VAs generate money. You need to get there quickly. Sometimes you have got to take a month or so. If you do not make a profit off your VA the first month, do not panic. Say, “Are we making progress? Is he getting it down? Is he doing?”

I have not had VAs as a whole that did not make money the first month. You got to decide what they want to do. We got to pick this person for the tasks that you need them to do and give them a fighting chance to pull their weight. If you threw a VA and said, “Help me make money. I do not know what to tell you.” He does not know what to do. Go to 1000Houses.com/VAHelp, get your list of 100 things a VA can do for you. Let them get your wheels pranking. This is probably geared towards real estate investors, knowing it is wide open

It is real estate professionals. We have a lot of property managers and clients too. We have Airbnb. When I say investor, I mean niche from seller financing, owner financing, however you want to say it. It is all the gamut.

This is 100 things from a real estate broker, investor, whatever perspective. There could probably be 500 ways if we open this up to all the different businesses but I do not care what business you are in. If you are an entrepreneur and you are overwhelmed, call, talk and get that free consult that you may not even know what you want them to do. Let them help you figure out how you can help yourself by hiring a VA and increasing your income. We met at a mastermind. I’m talking to you personally now, Bob. I thought you were a great guy. I appreciate the short conversations we had. There was a lot to do there a lot but I did connect with you. You are a great guy. If you ever get down to San Antonio, you have to look me up.

Send me a nice layout of your ranch and it is beautiful. I love to come down.

If you want to make up a reason to come down for that, that is fine with me. I’m good at all. You won’t have to pay for a hotel or anything. I got a few rooms down there.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

I would like to thank LiveComm.com for sponsoring this episode. It is all about lead generation. Imagine if every time someone called one of your signs that had a LiveComm smartphone number on it and that you captured their cell phone, how many leads would that help generate for your business? We can show you how to use it. We can show you how to get creative and get people that would never have called you before to call in and expose that they are interested in your service or your product. It is phenomenal.

I use it in my own business in all different levels, how to find coaching students, how to find properties, how to sell properties. You would not believe what it does for me. My properties now because of LiveComm in a little tactic, I am four days on the market and I use no signs, not even one sign in my front yard. It is almost all free. It is chunk change pennies. If someone asks you, you are going to have to throw down this on the ground and walk away. You might not even shed a tear. Check it out, LiveComm.com. Thank you very much. We are out of here.

Thanks.

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/VAHelp
• 1000Houses.com/TFF
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm
• 1000Houses.com/Coaching
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/101

About Bob LaChance

Bob Lachance is a nationally recognized speaker, mentor, and trainer who specializes in helping customers build their businesses through automation and outsourcing.