Episode #239 – Systems For Scaling Your REI Business with Bob Lachance, Part 1

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

0:40 All right, what is up everybody, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWords nerds.com. And this is the REI marketing nerds podcast. I am so happy to have you here as always. And this week, we have a really cool interview. Now, you may or may not know this about me, depending on how long you've been listening to the podcast, but I am a Systems person. And I am a Systems person primarily because without systems, I completely fall apart, right? Like I cannot keep things in my head. I am forgetful. I am absent minded.

I am just like the classic sort of absent minded Professor stereotype. And without lots of systems and note taking and automations and all these things. I really struggle. And so more or less, most of the success I've had in my life has come because I've been able to systemize a lot of things in my life and in my work. Now this week, we are talking to Bob law chance if you don't know Bob, he runs this company called Riva global. And this is what he does, he helps real estate investors put systems in place for their business, build outsource teams to work those systems and scale through them. Really smart dude got a ton to teach us about systems and real estate investing and team building and all those things. So without any further ado, let's jump into my interview with Bob Lowe chants from Riva global.com. I am here with Bob Lutz chants from Riva global.com.

That's our E V A global.com. Bob, welcome the show, man. Thank you so much for being here, Dan. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I am super pumped to have you not the least of which as you just reminded me, we're actually in the same town. We're doing this on Zoom. But we are like within 10 miles of each other, which has never happened to me, I think in the history of the show. So I appreciate that. We're buying our boulder freezing together right now. It's freezing. I just took a walk around the block before I did this. And I was like, yeah, it's legit cold out right now which is Yeah. Okay, so let's let's talk about Reba global for people that don't know the company aren't really familiar with, you just give people like a 30,000 foot overview of Reba global and what you guys do absolutely have a virtual staffing company.

So all my virtual assistants are out of the Philippines, we're at about 1000 virtual assistants right now, a high percentage of our real estate professional, virtual assistants, whether it's agents, investors, property managers, we have a number of them that do bookkeeping, social media management, etc, etc. And then the other the other percentage is on the medical side. So we have kind of a little bit of a mix. But we have, we have to work with a lot of real estate investors on that side that want to do either phone work or admin work. Because we know in our business right now, consistency is really what keeps us ahead of our competitors. Like we were talking about before, I also have an investment company. We did 166 transactions last year, and we're set to do to about 230, this year, and we use my virtual assistants to, you know, run a lot of our business, etc, etc. So it's pretty cool that I get to use my servers just like you were talking about this. You could use your service and a service provider and also actually do the actual business where you know, a lot of other servers Breyers don't have that unique ability to be able to do that.

Yeah. Okay, I wanted to dig into this idea of virtual assistants because I think I think a lot of people have it's weird, I think it's, it's really split down the middle, you know, this much better than I but my impression is that people are like, on opposite ends of this spectrum, where one they think they're gonna hire virtual assistants, and they'll never have to work again and they're gonna sleep on the beach every day and drink from a coconut or whatever. And then there are other people who are like, you can't use virtual assistants for serious work like they're, it's they're completely split. In like many things, I think the reality is somewhere in the middle, and I also think it's an incredible opportunity to leverage this really amazing, you know, sort of part of the workforce. So I want to dig in to virtual assistants and using them. I would love to start by doing that with you. You mentioned you have an investing sort of part of your business portfolio. You guys are doing well.

5:00 At least significant deal volume and you are using virtual assistants. So can you walk me through the beginning of that process when you started? Right? Did Did you always start the business using VAs for real estate? Was that like a learning curve for you? What was that process? Like for you guys? Yeah, it's funny that to say, I'll give you a quick rundown. I started investing back in 2004. So I've been in this business for quite some time. You know, pap pre court, right. Yeah, Pat and I were business partners back in the day for about 10 years. I know that that's awesome. Yeah. So we started in 2004. And I my first deal I did I flipped the property made about 32 grand but I knew nothing about real estate. Again, this is back in two data for the really weren't that many coaching programs, or I didn't know of any. Yeah, and the Word Online was kind of right at the beginning.

It's pretty interesting, right? There's so much content out there. Now. It's, it's, you know, it's advantageous now to start a business rather than we did back then. So, um, after I did that one transaction, I joined Connecticut Real Estate Association, CTA reo, and I saw a speaker on Pre Foreclosure speak. And I bought the course invested in the course and not the next meeting, you know, what everybody and as a what was the best short sale guy and kinetic, no appointed a pat, then went up the ladder said, Listen, I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking to join a team. I said, I'm not looking for a W two. I'm an investor. Now I play professional hockey for eight years, blah, blah, blah, I got no, you know, I was a college dropout. And, you know, now I'm here and I'm unwilling to do anything. He goes, You know what, I'm looking for a door knocker? I'm like, I had no idea what he meant. But like,

6:35 he handed me a list of pre foreclosure properties, and a script. So I went door to door from 10am to 3pm, every Monday through Friday, for a year straight. Wow. So just knocking on door knocking on doors. And my whole mindset was, listen, you gotta learn the business from ground up. And then, you know, in I didn't again, I had no formal education or business, I knew nothing, right. So I just figured, hey, you know, and I got a little money in a bank now and let me learn it. And then after a year, I graduated, and I became partners. And then I started negotiating with banks. I got a door knocker, you know, took my spot. And then, you know, we kind of evolved from there. But in 2007, we helped start a real estate education program, Fortune Miller's guys, and that were in New Haven that were down to San Diego. Yeah, they came to us.

And so Pat and I were running up the back end of a coaching program, another coach program for short sales, and they will, we're starting the process of going from regroup, to regroup to sell their course. And then that next step, there, it's fees. Typically, how that works is started the coaching sessions, Pat and I were already well versed in how to build one on the back end, is that hey, you guys want to be on the team? We got that on a partner? Or like, sure, we had no idea where it ended up. You know, fast forward is one of the biggest companies in the country for many, many years pretty Cogan. Right. So anyway, to get to the story, to preempt this. So when I'm working with students who went to probably ship the 100 1000s of students throughout the years, and when I was working one on one, because my job was to build up a coaching program to get new coaches in and build it up from there. And we went from zero to probably ended up with 70 Plus coaches in an organization. But there was a common theme.

A common theme was, every time we'd give somebody I like to call it homework assignments or action items that you know, there were newer or even seasoned, pretty much nine times out of 10 I give them two weeks worth of action items or homework, they wouldn't get 90% of stuff done. And I'd be like, Oh, why? Well, I'm busy. You know, kids soccer, I just got another job, you know, you're gonna hear everything, right? Vacation, golf, kids, dogs, sport, whatever it is, right? And I was always looking for that, that whatever that thing was, whether it's a product or a service to say, how could we help these individuals? And then 2013, I got introduced to what a virtual assistant was, and I'm like, huh, I think we're onto something. So 2014 a light bulb went on. And I saw individual speak as my first business partner back in the day. And I knew as a business right away, so I ended up start my first company 2014 testing it for two years. And then it was a it was really really big hit. And then 2000 You know, or what would have been two to almost $2.23 Right now we're over 1000 DVDs so good. Well of course there's a lot into that that we could talk about business wise, but that's really the long and short of it.

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9:56 I want to start with your time and Fortune Builders in Understanding, you know, working with so many people and understanding that the constraint on most people's progress, growth, success, whatever you want to call it was their ability to get the things they knew they needed to do done, right. Because it's really unique situation if you think about right, like most entrepreneurship problems are, I know, I need to do something, but I don't know what it is, right? It's complexity, you know, the future is uncertain. Here's like you told them what to tell him what to do, like, go do the thing. And they didn't do. So I understand that everybody's busy. Right. But what is underneath that? Is it really that there wasn't enough time for that person? And it was purely a time constraint? Was it that they knew basically what to do, but they didn't know enough about the exact step the step to actually get going? Was that that they were anxious about it? Like, if you step back and look at the broader picture of why we all have these things that we are doing that we know we need to do? Like, what is it this is just that there aren't enough hours in the day, like, what's the root cause?

I think it's pain. It's honestly, it's pain. And I'll explain what that means. Because when clients come on, they either want, you know, they want more time, because they don't have time, and they're busy in their day, they want to scale or they want to become more efficient. Those are typically the three things, but the pinning, and you look at all the tasks that we do in our business, right? I guarantee you, there's some tasks in your business that you absolutely hate. Right, you absolutely saved in your real estate investing, right? It's the same exact thing. Gifts, what, what happens, and I look at all the generators. So we will talk about marketing, right? Yeah, obviously, you'd have a marketing channel that brings in leads to US investor, right. That's one marketing channel. But there's also a consumer, and that's done consistently by YouTube.

That's a consistent basis, what happens as a real estate investor, me included, when I was actually doing this, before I understood how this stuff worked, and you needed help, it was the consistency, you know, behind it. And here's, here's what I did. And I'll give you a perfect example. So when I door knocked, what I would do without go home, and I would take those phone numbers and those names, and now it's skipping trace them like 401 dot com or white pages, in our get the best possible phone number for those individuals that are door knocked, then I would come home and I'll call it's all about seven o'clock or four, I'd have dinner and you know, spend time with the family, etc, etc. But that's what I would do every day challenge happens. Now you gotta bring your kid somewhere, guess what happens? Cool calls don't happen anymore. Lead start and stop coming in.

And there's a lot of pain in that you will get burnt out. If you're cold calling every single day, you will 100% get burnt out. And then you'll miss for weeks. Because we know what our business and has to be done consistent statement there. You got up guys market to drive us leads. That's done daily, right? No matter what the has to keep going. Same exact thing with a will go direct your listeners, we're talking about marketing, its direct seller, cold calling text messaging, right? Direct Mail, because you still have to get them to direct mail every single day. So if you're looking at all of that, I think it's it's the pain of getting that done. And that consistency, because if you don't do things consistently in any of our businesses, you're gonna you're gonna have a very, very difficult time to make money, especially when markets turn. I think that's a really, that's a really interesting point, right?

I hadn't really thought about that. But there's certainly tasks that are inherently enjoyable, like enjoyable in themselves, right? Like I love working on a Google sheet and like, great guy just like that, right? There's something satisfying about it. I don't particularly like, you know, email follow up or whatever it is. And so I'm less sort of motivated to do that. It also strikes me that a lot of the stuff that I think VA is and you know, company like Riva global if you're hooking somebody up with a process system, a team or whatever. And one of the things where that really shines is, in your example, it's the cut to skip tracing and calling the pre foreclosures, it's this work where that's a lead indicator of success. But the result of that doesn't happen for a while. So there's a whole stretch where you're doing this thing that's not super pleasant, and you get no, no benefit from it. Right?

So it's like, you start dieting for the first time and you're like, you're hungry, you look exactly the same. It's like, oh, you know, the benefit is down the line. And I think processes and systems like the one that you guys work with are so powerful for that because okay, and you just sort of get yourself out of that and you can just know that it's happening, reap the reward when it happens. And I'll give you I'll give you a quick example of just how it works in our office they're going to give it to two second you know, a two second run down so we have all of our cold callers we have six cold callers that are calling right all day long. Up from about nine to six at night is we haven't call and call and call every single day. We ever acquisition team learned how to write that offense. Three of eight acquisition guys are following up on all

15:00 those leads come in, so they don't have to waste their time at all. So they're just waiting, we hand them some very, very lean, lean. So it's their job that follow our obviously. And we train them follow a script and how we actually make money in our business that turns those into contracts. And then it goes to our, obviously, our selling side of our dispose side of our team, and they take it from there. But if we didn't have all of that upfront, cold calling, texting kind of same process, those leads are coming in 1020 30 a day to be followed up on by our team. If that wasn't happening, it'd be very, very difficult to be an acquisition guy. And you can also try to drive on all leads, right.

That's why you got that's why your company is so powerful when you drive leads, right? Yeah, I think and you're also hitting on this thing, too, which is, you said it before earlier in the interview, and I want to underline it again, right? Consistency is ultimately what creates the return. There's this idea, especially with like lead generation for for any online leads, right? It's like one of the primary factors that drives a client's success or failure in the channel is the speed with which, and the consistency with which they follow up on their leads, right? So it's one thing to say, well, I'm going to do that. And then like you said, that kid needs to get picked up at soccer practice. And that goes out the window, versus having a system outside of yourself that does that for you, which I think is so powerful. I wanted to ask you, I think a common complaint or maybe

16:29 anxiety that business owners have is if you are the one that is used to, for example, answering the phones being at the kitchen table doing the deal, or any part of that process, right, then acquisitions or follow up whatever it is, I think entrepreneurs often feel like they either can't or don't know how to break down that process in such a way that someone else could take it over from them, right? It's the sort of classic entrepreneurial, like I'm having trouble delegating this process. There are things that I am like that, right? I'm pretty systems oriented. But even I'm like, Well, I don't, I don't really know how to explain what I'm doing here. So how do you guys help people deal with that problem?

Or how do you deal with that problem in your own business? Where it seems pretty complex? How do you start to break it down in such a way that someone else can step in and help you out? That's fine. It's like the 8020 rule, right? The majority of us think that no one could do better than us. But guess what, if they could do it 80% As good as us, it's done consistently, because 100% of not consistent is not good in our business. So they could do it 80% As good as it gives us, then it's way better. But it's to get back to what you were asking is when we actually train our virtual assistants, or amongst straight on different stuff on handling skills, text messaging, social media, property management, there's a laundry list of stuff that we do. So they have a fantastic foundation in hate to where if I'm a new client, you know, the only thing that our virtual assistant says, Alright, What tool do you use. So now, we can also train them on the tool, like there's a lot of different text messaging tools, a lot of different cold calling tools, right, but they still have the base knowledge of how to tax how to call and drive leads.

So they have that base knowledge that foundation is already built. Also, if someone is looking and has kind of a unique system and process, what we do is we just say listen, get on, you know, download maybe a loom or or some sort of video type program, and just identify exactly what your system is for 10 minutes handed off to our team, and we'll create into a system and a process for it. Yeah, I think, you know, like you said, having someone who can almost look at it from the outside is very helpful, right? I think so You know, it's like a friend that often says, You can't read the label while you're inside the bottle. And it's like this very much like someone else can step into your business and say, like, Okay, I understand how this process is broken down into these components steps, whereas to you, it's just all one big thing. Yep.

So you mentioned your your VA are in the Philippines. I've also I've been doing over the past year, I did some consulting with a company in the Philippines, helping them train some of their people. So I've gotten to know a little bit about the workplace culture in the Philippines. I'm curious from someone who knows 100 times more about it than I've ever gotten to know. Right? What what do you see as the differences in the work culture between the Philippines in the States? What do you see as sort of the best practices for investors are thinking about hiring Bas and want to work with them effectively? Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, obviously, one of them is the investment costs, right? You look at the Philippines. If you if you're looking for anybody here in the United States to work for you for $10 or $11. You're not going to find anybody, right, especially in Connecticut, minimum wage keeps going up. US appliance Company and this is I sold it I think about two years ago, and I couldn't get a cleaner to to come on and clean for $12 an hour. So could you imagine trying to hire someone in your real estate business? If you can't find a cleaner in a different industry?

20:00 That's just an example. Right? So the point is, each state keeps going up on their minimum wage. Which means, right, that means if someone's college educated and they graduate, they're not working for $12 Now, or they're not working for 14, they didn't want 2025 30 As a small business, you know, all those pennies count every single dollar quarter, Niko, whenever I look at it, they all count for us as as small business owners. So, Philippines that our cost of living, it's a lot different than us, right? Their wages are smaller than ours. Ours are high, it costs a lot of money here, you know, and taxes keep going up, it seems like so when you start looking at that, for me, the Philippines has been fantastic.

From day one. The culture just fits exactly what we, as real estate investors need. It's more of a kind of a servant mentality, right to where they give your businesses, their business, rising tide lifts all ship ships, they're not looking as as a business owner, they know it's your business and they just want to give they want to, they want to support they want to make sure that you're successful. It's just a different mindset where, you know, a lot of individuals in the United States they see that you're successful. It's like crabs in a bucket, they want to pull you down rather than pick you up.

Right different kind of culture where they want to, they want to pick you up on your shoulders, they want to make sure that you're successful here and there's a lot of jealousy there's a lot of Facebook posting like you know, fake book and all that catalysts that we all see in our industry, I'm gonna hate I we all know people that will post something and we're like, and probably I know for a fact that that's not true, but we're not going to call them out on it. So different culture different. I've been around I've been around a long time, so I'm okay with saying this stuff. Hey guys, hope you enjoyed part one of this episode is just too good to limit one show. Join us next week to hear the rest

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