How to use virtual assistants to grow your real estate business

Pete Neubig has been investing in real estate since 2001. He has owned and managed 39, 52, and 100-unit apartment complexes. He currently owns single-family homes and a 52-unit apartment complex. Pete created a property management company based on the motto "by investors for investors". His property management company has clients from Houston and all over the world. His technology-based systems allow owners to see everything that is happening at their property without having to be involved. Pete leverages virtual assistants to do more than he can do on his own. A real estate virtual assistant (VA) is a business admin who essentially acts as your right hand. A real estate VA can offer a variety of business services in-person or remotely. The right VA can cover diverse tasks like lead gen and database management, or even finance and marketing. Tune in for today's episode where Pete talks about how he uses virtual assistants and what real estate investors should be aware of when they want to take this step in building a team. Episode Link: https://www.vpmsolutions.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and joining me again today for a recurring visit is Pete Neubig and he is the founder of VPM solutions. He's gonna be talking to us today about virtual assistants and what we as investors should be aware of and how we can utilize them to our advantage. So let's get into it.   Pete Neubig what's going on man, you are back for more didn't have enough the first time we had.   Pete: Man, Michael, thank you so much for bringing me back on. I had we had such a blast. You know, last time just talking about my investor jury and then right at the end, we got to talking about my new venture and so I'm glad, thank you so much for having me back to talking about my new venture.   Michael: Of course, no, super, super excited. So for those who didn't catch the tail end of our conversation from your prior episode, give us a quick and dirty who you are, and what you're doing in real estate and what your company is all about.   Pete: Sure. Well, my name is Pete Neubig. I'm out of Houston, Texas, I started buying properties in 2001. I bought so many that I failed miserably at it that I ended up creating a property management firm in 2012, sold that firm in 2019 and in 2020, I started VPM solutions and we went live with our product in 2021 and VPM solutions is think of it as a dating service. It's like it's an online marketplace that connects people in the United States and Canada, like employers, you know, people in real estate, with contractors in mainly Philippines and Mexico, but we're in about 60 different countries where we have different contractors and so that's you know, so we're like, like dating service, like match.   Michael: I love it, I love it, I love it. Okay, so who are your clients? Kind of on the investor side and then who are your contractors on the contractor side, just random, random people?   Pete: Yeah, that's a great question. So we really try to stick with the real estate industry. So because I'm a property manager by trade, we started with property management and so we targeted property managers in the United States and Canada, right, because in property management, as most of your clients know, especially if they self-manage, is a process oriented and is a people oriented business, right? It there's a lot of things you have to do manually and so you can't automate as you can automate a lot. But there's still a lot that has to be done manually. So we started there. So that's our main clients, we're now breaking into the real estate and brokerage side of things because there's a lot of work, there's a lot of help, they need like transaction coordination, and just generating leads and appointment setting, so we're there, as well and on the contractor side, what we're looking we advertise we do quite a bit of advertising in different countries, just letting people know, hey, you can work from home, you can pretty much make a little bit more money than what you can get, you know, in your environment and we actually build some, it's called LMS. But it's video training, that you can literally take video training for free to learn more about right now is property management. But we're going to be built, we're going to be throwing some other videos out there always well, we'll be adding more video training out there and so are our contractors, somebody who's bilingual, someone who's educated, and somebody who's looking to make a little bit more than what they what they make in their own in their own country, and that they want to get into real estate, mainly property management or in the real estate industry.   Michael: Okay, interesting. So I am like, the whole concept of a VA is I understand it, but it's totally foreign to me, I've never utilized one but I know people who have so give all of our listeners who are listening, a little bit of background or insight like why should someone consider a VA, like what benefits do they bring?   Pete: Yeah, another great question, man. It's like, so, here's the main thing, right. What happens is, you get so much work, that you need to hire somebody, right? Whether it's whether you're self-managing, and like me and Steve, what my business partner, we were self-managing properties and next thing, you know, we had all these maintenance requests, we had all these leases that had been renewed and we had all these resident questions and we have lease marketing, and it gets daunting and all of a sudden your conical passive job becomes very, very active very quickly and so now you have to either A) hire somebody or B) you know, hire a property manager or hire somebody internally, right and so when you start looking at assistants in the United States, what happened was, especially after the pen EMIC with inflation. So what's happening is those low level low enjoyment tasks that that you don't want to do as the you know, as the investor or as the self-manager you want to give to somebody else? Well, if you, you try to hire that person United States, typically what happens is that job role doesn't pay what people want.   So for example, it might be like the job role might only pay 30,000 a year, right? That's a full time, whatever, but the person wants 50,000 a year and if you pay that person, what they wanted, you would make you would be negative cashflow, you will make any money. This happens quite a bit when you're managing your own properties and you're kind of building your portfolio and adding more properties to your portfolio. It's like all of a sudden, you're overwhelmed overworked, to hire somebody, now you're cash negative and so and then what happens is with these folks, what I found in my personal job, my personal company, Empire industries, when we when we started, we manage over 1000 units. When I hire people in the US, they have like a GED, or that you're getting very, like you're getting very low, you know, schooled, low education type people, and what happens is one, they're not appreciative of the opportunity get, and then two, they always want more money, and then three, they always bring in their outside challenges into your business, the car doesn't work, they take more time off, you know, they have family drama, that kind of comes into your business and so in the past, what happened was, you have to be stressed out to make money in property management. So I have I have, I have, I have all these doors are managing, I have all this work that needs to be done, I have to hire somebody. But as soon as I hire somebody, now I'm not profitable. So now I have to go get more properties to manage, so that I can bring the income up and now everybody's stressed again and the reason why everybody's stress is because I'm hiring people in the States, which, you know, demand a much higher hourly rate, if you will and so what I realized is, if I, if I hire if I outsourced, in a second or third world country, I can get educated people, bilingual educated people, that will work for a lot cheaper than somebody in the US and it's not, I'm just going to pay them less because they're in the Philippines or they're in Mexico, it's that in Mexico, $10 an hour goes a lot further than $10 an hour in Houston, or $10 an hour in Northern California. So the way I tell people look at is like this, if I took if I was doing the same job in Northern California, as I do in Houston, Texas, I'd get paid a lot more for that job in Northern California, because the cost of living, right, and then I'd get less money doing the same job in Houston, because of the cost of living and I probably make, I probably even get paid less if I was in like Arkansas, because of the cost of living. The dollar still travels just as far. Well just think of Mexico, as you know, as the next level down of cost of living. Just because you're paying somebody $10 an hour doesn't mean you're taking advantage of them. Matter of fact, $10 an hour in Mexico is a very good hourly wage. It's actually a very good wage and then in Philippines, to give you an idea, Michael $4 an hour is a good wage in the Philippines.   Michael: Wow.   Pete: And you think you save yourself? There's no way we're gonna take advantage these people? No, I mean, $4 an hour is a good wage in the Philippines. So it's, you know, as a criminal getting paid very well here in the States and so, the reason why people are outsourcing is because I can get bilingual and by the way, most of these people are either their high school educated or greater. They have some type of education after high school, whether it be associate's or a college degree. So you're getting educated people that that are bilingual, for a fraction of the costs in the United States that you are in the United States and because these low level jobs can, you can only pay so much. Now you can actually pay what the job role requires, which means now you can make more money in the company, right and then I'll turn this around on how we actually helped our US people, because I had people in Empire that were that were making some money. The ones I hired the virtual team members like oh, Pete, you got rid of jobs. Actually, no, they got rid of themselves because I couldn't afford them anymore. They wouldn't work at the level I needed them for the company make money. But once I hired these other virtual team members in the company started making money, I was able to actually pay my US people more, I was actually able to get better benefits for my US people, right because these are contract workers in the Philippines and Mexico and you know, Costa Rica, wherever you're going to hire them from and so they're contract workers, so they work they get paid, that's great. But your team members in the US once a company starts making more money, you can treat your kids because their employees right so you can treat them better stock options or 401k, whatever it was. So for us, it was bonuses, it was higher salary and we started doing we started we started looking at it we start doing health insurance. So that's how we were able to benefit out team. So the next question is, well, what can a VA do that somebody in the US?   Michael: Yeah, that's exactly where I was gonna go with it.   Pete: What I'll tell people is the VA can do anything that the person in us can do except for two things. One, obviously, if they need to be physically at the property, right, right, they can't they can't do that and then we'll do if they need a license, if they need a license to do something, they can't do license act, right. So give you an example, though. We actually had one of our virtual team members do all of our lease renewals? Well, you say, well, P That's a licensee Act and the you know, you need to be licensed to do lease renewals and the answer is actually, you don't need to be licensed to just create the lease renewal, you need to be licensed to negotiate the lease renewal. So what we would do is 90% of our lease renewals were not negotiated, most people just sign the lease renewal, right, most of our owner clients, or our residents would just sign the lease renewal and the ones that would have questions, that would get escalated to our property manager and so what we did just that one, just that one job role, what we did is we literally took 90% of the work away from the property manager gave it to give it to the virtual team member and then a product manager took the escalations. Now, I'm a big proponent of it, the way you can save your company, so to speak, a lot of a lot of stress and noise is can you automate through policy and can you automate through, you know, computer technology, in this case, what we did in this, you have to look at it but in Houston, we know that the average rate, the average renewal rate would go up about 2% per year over time. Now, some years, it would go up more in other years, it wouldn't go up at all, it actually would go down. But over time we…   Michael: need in terms of like the rent, like how much rent, you're getting rent increase the renewal… Yeah, okay.   Pete: So we did is we just create a policy that our rent increases every 2% every year, and we put that in the lease. So there was no negotiating, right on the residence side...   Michael: It wasn't up for discussion…   Pete: Right, so but if people say, hey, I'm gonna leave unless we do XY and Z, well, that would get escalated but we were able to reduce the escalations because of the part because of the policy we were able to automate and then we on the on the owner side, we would send something 90 days out, hey, do you want to renew your release or not, right like, we didn't ask them what the amount was, we because we built the 2% and so we stopped doing CMAs. So it is a lot of grunt work that we can stop doing, which then allows your virtual team ever to actually do a lot more, we have one person for 1000, doors, doing lease renewals, and, and reviewing inspections.   Michael: one person for all 1000 doors…?   Pete: For lease renewals and inspections. Yeah…   Michael: Holy smokes.   Pete: But then I had one person that did all collections. So I'll kind of go through the whole thing, right. So like, you can have a virtual team member, their whole job literally could be making sure that your collections are being done, your notices are getting sent out and that they can if you have if you have a third party company like we did that handle the evictions, they can actually be the gatekeeper with that third with that third party company and do all that stuff. My property managers did nothing with evictions   Michael: What?   Pete: Yeah, yeah. So we again, we had policies in place, right. So if, if the resident owed less than 50%, we, we wouldn't file evictions, if they owed, you know, 50% or more, we'd file the eviction we like so we just put on a different policy. You teach the VA, what the policies are, and then they just follow the process and what's cool is they actually know the process better than you and they, hey, can I do this or this or this instead, and they tweak the process and you're like, yeah, that sounds so much better and then they own the process. So if you're like an investor listening to this, and you don't like magic companies, for whatever reason, by the way, obviously, I own a magic company, I highly recommend. But let's just say, let's just say that you don't like me had a bad experience, and you're gun shy. But what you're finding is your leases aren't being renewed, right? You're your maintenance is overtime, the phone rings you like, I don't want to deal with this. You hate when somebody moves out, because you want to deal with the turn, your books are a mess, because you don't have time to do the books because you're, you know, a high net worth individual working 70-80 hours a week as it is, then a VA could do all of that stuff for you. They can do everything, you got to train them, of course. So just step back, take two steps forward. But they can do your property accounting, they could be your QuickBooks, they could do your business accounting, they could do your maintenance coordination, they could do your turn coordination, they can do your collections or evictions. So they can do your utility turn on and turn offs, like so all that stuff that you like, oh my god, they could do your onboarding for you. So I was going to get a new property you got to enter all that stuff in the in the computer system. They can do all of that stuff for you.   Michael: If anyone's watching the video here, you see that my jaw is like on the floor. So for anyone listening I just want wanted to bring you up to speed. But okay, so peace on, let me just understand. So they could do, like they could do all of this stuff and literally anything I mean sky's the limit is and with regard to things that they can do other than the two things you mentioned the license act, and then anything that requires them to physically be there. But when it comes to accounting, I mean, one thing that I'm thinking about is, there's very sensitive information, there's banking information, there's pat, you know, credit card information, as part of the accounting process that I do personally. So am I going to need to divulge personal information and sensitive information to the VA or like, how does that work?   Pete: Yeah, so, you know, in most in most instances, like in your QuickBooks, and in any property management software, they have different levels of permissions and even in your banking, like I bank with Chase, and Chase has different levels of permissions. So I can give you all the rights to, to my, my, my VA team, right, which I did, I gave them all the rights, so they can see everything, they can reconcile the bank statements, they can, they can look at everything, they just couldn't make any payments, right, they couldn't make any transactions. So that's, that's what we did. Now, we also had two property accountants that they did probably accounts for our third party folks and so they had access to, you know, sensitive information. So what we did is we did a bet we did a thorough background screening, there's a third party company out there that can do background screening, and they came up, you know, pretty, they came out really good. So we went forward, and then we just had our cyber liability insurance policy just to make sure go again, because we're a property manager firm with over 1000 units that we manage. So we wanted to make sure that we you know, we took care of ourselves. But if you're an individual with a handful of properties, or a small property manager, then you can do all of this through the permissions that your banking and that your that your software allows you to do.   Michael: Okay and so as I'm hearing you, you talk about as a man, I'm getting really excited, I'm trying my the wheels are kind of turning on all of the things that I might be able to outsource. What are some things that you should definitely not have a VA do? I mean, have you seen some things go really sideways or go really south because someone said, oh, well, Pete said, they can only can't do these two things. So I'm gonna give my VA everything else. I mean, what should I be thinking about in terms of limitations?   Pete: Yeah, so I gotta be honest, you, Michael I, at first, I always thought like, okay, I'm just gonna give him a list of things to do. I'm going to scan it to him and we're going to just do this stuff off the list, like a checklist thing. I quickly realized he could do much more. Then I said, hey, I own the process and they own the process and they can and now I do believe that I actually had VA supervise people in the States. So I had somebody in Mexico supervising people in the United States. So I believe they can get to that that supervisory level, what I will say is, they can do everything. So I'm not saying they can't do anything. But the one thing is you need to put in place some escalation paths…   Michael: What do you mean?   Pete: So even though they own so let's say for example, they own maintenance, right? Well, they're going to be able to handle 99 out of 10 maintenance calls, no problem. But then there's that mold call that comes in, right where the resident says they have mold, well, right there, that should be a buzzword that gets escalated to the property manager because they don't like they don't have mold in other areas of the country of the world that were that worried about mold as much as much as we do in the US. So if there's like an emergency, that could that can cause you know, a resident can get sick, right, or anything like that we're property code. So each, each state has their own little different property code, right. So like, for example, in Texas, believe it or not heat, if they have no heat, that's, that's a, that's an emergency. But if they have if they don't have air non-emergency, well, we treat no AC as an emergency in our in our company we did and so there was like three or four things that those got escalated a property manager. Now the property manager, at that point would say, I'm going to take it from here, or here's what you should do. But then the property manager is kind of co-managing that ticket. So I believe that in any business that you run, whether you own a property management firm, or you're a you know, an individual landlord that manages your 10 units, there's got to be certain. I call them taps on the shoulder, there's got to be certain tabs that you realize this is a potential problem, right? So let me deal with it or I call them taps two by fours and then getting run over by a man, right? On over by a Mack truck means that you're in a lawsuit, right? The two by four means somebody moved out because you didn't handle a maintenance request in a certain way and the tap is the maintenance request is 10 days, 15 days old, whatever it is, and no one's looking at it. Right, so how can you run your business through tabs? Well, if you have these vas, the great thing is you're not doing the work anymore, right? You're not creating the lease renewal you're not you know, calling, you know roto rooter to get out to the property. You're not doing that but what you have to do is you have to take a step above, right so you have to instead of being at the ground level, you got to be 2000 feet up, right, not 15 30,000 feet up, but at least 2000 feet up and as report you have to review and so if you see a property that's vacant for over so many days, that's a tap, if you see a maintenance request that's open for so many days, or major quests that hasn't been responded to, in so many days, these are tabs. So if you can identify what the potential problems are, your job now becomes manager, right? So I'm not the doer anymore. So you're getting rid of the task or hat, you put it on your manager hat. So if you hire a VA for him to do everything, and then you don't put your manager hat on, I can tell you, you're gonna, you're gonna get in trouble. Especially if you, especially if you do terrible training, which most people do.   Michael: That was gonna be like my next question and so like, for everyone listening, what what's the expectation around training? How long is it before a VA is really up and running and so as people are thinking about, okay, forecasting, I don't need a VA today, but maybe in 369 12 months, I maybe need one. So what's the runway lead up time to get someone effective?   Pete: You're gonna hit the answer, but it depends.   Michael: That's my favorite answer.   Pete: It depends, okay, so the more like, even if I'm a smaller firm, and only got 20 properties, I'm managing, I'm doing everything, you have to teach that VA, every piece of managing that property, right, from onboarding, to, you know, to utilities, to lease ups to move into maintenance, to collections to eviction, to move out, and you have to teach them everything… Well, just because only one move out happens a month, it doesn't make anything any easier, you have to learn, they have to learn how to do that they have to understand basically, property management. So that's going to take a lot longer than say, like, with me, I had one person like all they do is collections. Well, I can teach collections in less than two weeks. Right, especially if you have processes in place. So the big thing depends. So if I wanted to hire somebody for collections, it'd be about two weeks. But if I want to hire someone to do maintenance, the more I call them, if they analysis, the more decision points there are in the job. In the process, the longer the training, right maintenance, so many things go could happen with lease renewals, it's like there's three things, like you teach them the three things, and then they know, okay, I do these three, if this happens, I do this and if this happens, property manager, right. So to my least your own person, it really was like two weeks of training. My maintenance people, it was about two months to three months of training.   Michael: Wow. Okay, so yeah, you weren't kidding. When you said it depends.   Pete: It depends, yeah.   Michael: And then I guess, like, the next question that comes to mind is, what is the turnover look like if I'm an investor, and I'm investing two months, three months into a person really getting them up to speed, and then doesn't work out or they don't like it or they move on, like, what have you seen in terms of turnover?   Pete: That's a great question as well. So what I saw at Empire, I had 23, virtual team members, 23 different roles that that my virtual team members handled, and I had them for about five years, you know, most of the jobs some jobs were newer, but I had people there for five years and in those five years, I had to get rid of I let go of two and one person left. So I had three people, my churn rate was much lower on the VA side of things than they were on the US side of things…   Michael: I was gonna ask… in the US:::   Pete: Now, I'll tell you why my churn rate was low, though, okay, because I treated these people like team members, not like virtual assistants, right? So the old mentality of a virtual assistant is, I'm just going to throw you here's the work, you go do the work, I'm going to make sure it's done and like, that's it right. My guys that we have day out there on our website, they had videos, they were they were part of all of our company meetings, they had, they had ownership of each of their job roles so that they can, they can modify and do things they had, they had more control over certain things. We went down, I went down there to go visit them, because most of my people were one city in Mexico, so I paid them PTO like I gave them like if they even though there were contractors, if they needed a day off Mike just put the time in, that's okay, I'm gonna give you a day. So we the more you treat people like we can we put them on a bonus structure. So if their key performance indicator was met, they got a pat on the back, but if they exceeded it, they got they got 50 bucks, or something small, but $50 to somebody in California that Michael they're going to take the $50 thing it's critical and throw in your face like this isn't even a gallon of gas. You know, and but in you know, Mexico you give somebody 50 bucks that's like a half a day's work, like so again, you so you can make people happier with a lot less with a lot less money, right? because sometimes it's like, oh, it's not the thought. It's like, wow, man, you only gave me $20 like that's like almost like an insult you know, in the US where it's not a over there. So if you treat the people, right, so what does that mean? It's not just like paying them and treating them, right, make it part of the team, but also manage them correctly. A lot of people think like, I'm just gonna hire this VA, but they have, like, they hire the VA and then you're, you're not ready for the VA, like, you hire them because you like you got excited, you heard this podcast, I'm gonna hire VA, right and then it's like, okay, you don't have a good job description, you're not really sure what they should do, you don't know how to manage if they're doing a good job or not and so you hire somebody, and they don't really know what to do, and then you don't know what to do and then it doesn't work out, right. So I recommend anybody do is make sure like you, you create a job description first. So you can go about it two ways:   One is I want them to take this, this process from end to end or two is like I want to be an executive assistant and I want to do the things that I hate doing. So identify the low level low enjoyment tasks that you don't like, create a job description from that, post it out there, say this is what I'm looking for or say, man, I really want to give somebody collections evictions, you know, like that process? So it depends if you're if you're smaller than you may say, hey, I want them to be a property manager and give me all the things I have to do just understand it's a lot more training. So once you have the once you have the job description, so that you know what they should do they know what they should do. The next thing is what are the key indicators that you know they're doing a good job and the rule of thumb is 123 key indicators they call key performance indicators and every job role in the organization should have at least one if somebody has 14, that's way too many, I know because I live this I had my property manager API's and it's not it was way, way too much. So like, for example, your executive assistant. If that's where they are, you know, maybe they have to answer calls, well, maybe a KPI is answering 94% plus call rate, right or response to any email is in less than one day. Now, you the KPIs, you can pull them out of a hat, but they have you have to have a report that can show that, that they can put the KPI and so they have to get the data, the data has to be available, right? So if I say hey, I want a 90% call rate, but my call, my call software doesn't have call answer rate, I'm not gonna be able to get that number. Does that make sense?   Michael: It makes total sense.   Pete: And so you have to be able to report on it. So just because you want a KPI, but there's no way to report on it, then you have to figure out a way to report it and get that KPI. If not, you have to move to a different KPI. So if I have the job description set up, they know what to do that we have the key indicators, so they know what the scorecard is if they're doing a good job or not, and so to you, because so many of you will say, yeah, I feel like that he's not doing a good job. What the hell is that me show you?   Michael: How do you know?   Pete: Especially if they're, you know, 20,000 miles away for you in the Philippines? Like, yeah, like, so how do you know the key indicators and then if you have good training, and you spend the time with them, and then you should once you have the train, So training is like every day, right? You do every day for two weeks, maybe three weeks, you have training every day, hour a day video so they can rewatch it and they can build, they build the process manual, not us. So they build a process manual. Why is that important because if I had 100 page process manual for maintenance, I did Michael I swear at Empire had 110 page process manual…   Michael: We talk in single space, or double space?   Pete: Single space, I think. Like legit, it was legit. Nobody read it. Nobody knew how to navigate it and nobody learned once I had them build their own manuals, guess what happened, they started retaining stuff and they knew how to navigate their manual. So don't be don't be upset if they like let them create their own manual so they can navigate it. So now you know what they what you want them to do. They know what they know what they're supposed to do. You can you can you can scorecard it with the metrics, you train them, and now you manage them and the way you do that is you have a weekly meeting. Now if you're smaller, you're going to have you're going to meet with them every day, right my IV pm or smaller firm was five of us, I mean, when my VAs every day, because we're just we're so small, we have to talk about what to talk every day when I was at Empire because I have 40 people working for me. I met them once a week and I would meet my maintenance team, separate from my accounting team separate from my resident services teams and for my own services team. But I would go over with them each week and we'd go over, we'd say what's a feel good? Tell me something that's good, right because as humans, we have this habit of going below the line instead of like above the line. So let's start off the meeting really good. Let's go over to metrics, right individual and then the group metrics, the department metrics, then let's go over tasks from last week did they get done? Then let's go over challenges and each one of those a five minutes and challenges like 20 minutes, 25 minutes. You don't you can't solve all them all the time. But you can solve you know, a couple of them and if you could solve a couple of challenges each week, you're doing really, really good and then and then one thing I added was what's your stress level from zero to 10. This was interesting because sometimes they'd be at a 10 and it was because somebody was on vacation or we just got 50 new houses that week, it's worth, you know, 10 yeah, okay. But when it's 10 all the time, and that's the standard, that means you haven't to do too much and if somebody's attend all the time, it means they're ready to punch out. Like anybody in your team, you should literally take the pulse of your team on a weekly or monthly basis, right and but here's sometimes the 10 was because they had something going on personally and then I'd get everybody off the off the phone, and then I would talk to them personally and that gives you an incredible opportunity to create relationships with people who you never met, that working with you that are, you know, 5-10 1000 miles away and that is why they didn't leave me because they knew I cared, right, it wasn't a bonus. It was it was I cared, I want them to grow the company, I want them to, you know, to, to feel like they're wanted, but I also cared about their personal lives, I really did and so if somebody had an issue, you know, Hey, man, you know, we talk about so you get to learn a lot about people when you do that. But I did that each week and if a KPI was read two weeks in a row, and went to the issues list, you know, things and so you, if you have a structure with your business, you're the person you hire, the chances at whether that's in the US, like sitting next to you in the US, that's, you know, a few states away, that's working virtually, or a virtual team member outside the borders of the US. If you have structure, the chances of you hiring somebody successfully becomes great becomes very, you know, most cause much greater. But if you don't have that structure, the chances of hiring anybody is not going to be it's not going to be very, very, very good. It's going to be much lower rate of success.   Michael: Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Pete, have you ever had a VA hire and train another like another VA?   Pete: Oh, yeah, of course. That's the whole job, right? The whole goal, right? So monkey see monkey do, right? So when I forget Empire, the first round of vas, you're looking at the trainer. I was the guy I trained there. Okay but my maintenance team, once somebody would leave, and somebody would get hired, or they would hire a new person, I was out at a training business.   Michael: I love it.   Pete: They train them. So once you train that first batch, and by the way, here, Michael, here's the secret to at Empire, I was gonna hire two virtual team members. That was that's what was in the budget. I interviewed four people hired all four of them and here's the reason why one figure one person is going to wash out right? Can you figure that and then the second thing is, it's, I was hiring two to three people for one person United States.   Michael: Okay.   Pete: All right. So think about that hourly rate, I would get rid of one person us and I'd hire three people in Mexico and so do you think more stuff gets done with three people?   Michael: I would than one probably guessed.   Pete: So. Yeah. So then I'm like, okay, I'm gonna hire four people. So I was over budget, guess what happened within 30 days, I'm able to grow my business because more tasks are being done and so all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, and if one but I hired four, none of them washed out, I was one of them wasn't a good fit, they were a good fit for the organization, not a good fit for the role. So we moved on to a different role. So another important thing is when you hire and this is probably I mean, your team, your, your listeners probably know this. But every business has core values, that can be a sheet on the wall that you never look at, and they're not going to be any, they're not going to be worth anything for you. But you should have core values that you hire, fire, promote and demote on, and give raises to like, that's your core value. So who are the people you want on the bus with you, right and if you are, if you are an individual landlord, that you know has a bunch of house and you're looking to hire that first person. Well, that's a business, right Michael, would you teach that like, as soon as you're hired, as soon as you buy that first house, you are business…   Michael: Yeah, you are business…   Pete: You are business. So you need to have core values and if you don't, as a business, you should have them as an individual. So who are the people I called the fog. So who do people want to foxhole with you? That gets you the right person in the organization. But that doesn't mean they're the right person in the right seat, right because the right see, for example, like, if somebody's super outgoing, you want them in sales, if they're super outgoing, but not detail. You don't want them in accounting, right? I might have the right person. But if I put that outgoing person, and that's shipping and sales and accounting, he's going to do a terrible job. So I found the people through my core values, I then put them through a personality profile test. I like disk. It's super simple. I don't know what you would use. Do you have one that you use?   Michael: No, not personally, but I'm definitely going to be adopting one as I'm gonna get for virtual assistant, yeah…   Pete: There's, there's a lot of them out there. Disk is super easy. I know it very well. It's easy to learn. So I use disk. So that tells me I get the right person in the organization. I put them in the right seat and through my job description and my key performance indicators. I know they're going in the right direction. So if you do all of that, and then you do the training and then you do the managing the chances of you having somebody washed out or somebody leave, it goes down dramatically. It's not 100%. It's never 100.   Michel: Like anything… Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me, Pete this has been, this has been super eye opening, really exciting, exciting stuff for people that want to learn more want to take advantage of the cam solutions, like how do they get in touch with you? Where should they be going?   Pete: Yeah, so you can go to https://www.vpmsolutions.com/ , and create a free profile. So that's the other thing, Michael, everything on the company side is free. So creating a profile posting a job, searching for people, finding them is all free. When you thought when you hire somebody, they we charge the virtual team member a percentage, and that's how we make our money. So, it's free to the company. So all you're paying is the hourly rate, and a small processing fee that we pass on from the stripes of the world onto the onto the dude the company, but that's what it should go and if you want to email me directly, it's [email protected] and we have over 14,000 virtual team members in 60 countries on our on our site right now looking for work and we have property management video training that your listeners can actually take for free as well. So we have like, I think we have like 12 courses, it's over about nine hours of content it goes from, it's basically the lifecycle of property management. So if you are a, you know, a self-manager, and you want to learn more about how I can manage my property a little bit more efficiently, I highly recommend taking those courses and then when you post the job, you can actually ask your VA, these are the recommended courses that we recommend that you take and then people would actually take those courses on their time and they're done. So you're getting a little bit of people trained before you actually are paying them.   Michael: That's really slick and it probably helps weed out a little bit more of who's serious versus who's not is who's gonna put in the time in advance.   Pete: Absolutely, 100%...   Michael: Oh, man, I love it. Pete This has been so great. Thank you for coming on with us a second time. Definitely, we'll be in touch man.   Pete: Yeah, Michael, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.   Michael: You got it, take care. All right, everyone. That was our episode a big thank you to Pete for coming on. Super exciting. If you couldn't tell it was pretty giddy throughout the episode. It's something that I'm going to be very much looking into for my personal business. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, we love hearing from you reviews, comments, feedback questions are always welcome in the comment section, and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing…