Joe McCall:
I have all these systems. Now I want to delegate them out. What do I do? What I do is real simple. I get a Google Doc and I write down everything that I do, and then I Jing it. What is Jing? Jing is a simple screen cast program. I don’t know if they’re offering Jing for free anymore. Just Google Jing and if you go to Jing, it might still be free. It is. They were threatening to take it away because they have another product they want people to pay for called Snag It.
There’s another tool called Screenr. What these programs do is they record your screen and they record your voice. It’s instant screen cast, just click record. Now I have this Google Doc. Here’s one I did for one of my students. I just let my student copy it and send it to his VA.
It says, “Hey, this is the purpose of what I’m doing here. I want to find nice homes. I’m doing this type of marketing and I want to do at least 40 homes a day. I want you to send this between 8:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. PST.” Remember, they’re doing this marketing from the Philippines. You don’t want them to send voice blasts and text messages at 2:00 a.m. I have to make it very clear, only between these hours. That’s happened to me, Jason.
Jason Medley:
You always say, “Ask me how I know.”
Joe McCall:
I got so many angry, ticked off people. They said, “What are you doing calling me at 4:00 a.m.?” I was so embarrassed.
Jason Medley:
Let me just stress to people, this is how you systematize your business. This is how you actually have a business. This is how you actually gain freedom rather than being a slave to your business. You have to go through and write things out step by step by step. You can write them down on paper, or you can do what Joe said which is called a screen cast where you basically, as you’re speaking about what you’re doing on the screen, it’s recording your voice onscreen. I’ve already had like 10 questions from you guys, “When are we going to get the replay?”
The only reason you’re going to get a replay is because I’ve used a product called Camtasia which is sold by the same company as Jing which is basically recording everything we’re doing. I’ll post it up on a blog and then you’ll get to use it and you’ll get to view that content again versus Joe and I having to come back on and do this call all over again because you couldn’t write as fast as we can talk.
The thing I want to drive home to everybody is this is how you systematize your business. You have to lay it out, step by step. That way you can give it off to someone else and then you can go do what you want to do.
Joe McCall:
Right. We just created bullet points. These are your search parameters. When you go into Craiglist, search for this. Look for minimum rents of $1,000.00, minimum bedrooms of three. They can ignore ads that have these words in them. Ignore ads in these areas.
Then what we did is we listed all this stuff, go to these websites. I didn’t even talk about FSBO sites. You can get tons of leads from FSBO sites. Do the marketing in this order.
What we do then is I write all this out and I record my screen in Jing or Screenr and I walk through how to do all this stuff. I walk through going through Craigslist and clicking on each of these ads and looking for certain things and taking this phone number and copying it into its Google Docs spreadsheet and how to check for duplicates.
Then, once you have all these numbers copied, upload them to Google Voice and send them a text message, then take these emails and send them these emails. In fact, on here we have the emails we want them to send. This is about four or five pages, but I give them three different email scripts. I want them to mix it up between these three different email scripts. It’s just one sentence, but I want them each different so that Craigslist doesn’t start blocking them.
They just follow these instructions, and then they have a video watching me do it. The cool thing now, and this is what gets me so excited about outsourcing, is when you lose your VA, and you will. You might fire them or let them go. All you need to do is unshared the document in Google Docs with your old VA, share it with your new VA, and say, “Hey, read this document and watch this video.”
In fact, here’s the link that I did for these instructions. It’s right there, it’s a link. If you go there it’ll bring up the video of us walking through that.
I did that a couple of years ago. There’s the video.
I’ve already trained all of my future VAs. Let’s say I want to bring on new VAs. I just create a new document maybe for a different city or something like that and I say, “Watch this video and do this every day.” I don’t have to train them. I’ll show you how I find my VAs here in a minute. I don’t have to worry about finding a VA who has really good English. If they can read that document and watch my videos, they can do exactly what I want them to do.
Are we doing okay with time?
Jason Medley:
We’re at about two hours. The thing is, everybody is still on the call but my only concern is that I’ve lost recordings before when go out this far because the bandwidth gets so bad.
Joe McCall:
Give me just two more minutes.
Jason Medley:
We have two more minutes, bro. We’re good.
Joe McCall:
The best source for VAs – my favorite website is oDesk.com. You can track your VAs. My full time VAs I don’t use oDesk, these are just my part time VAs. One lady who does my bookkeeping here and this one does some customer service calls for me.
You can go into oDesk and see how they work, what they’re doing when they’re working.
It takes screen shots of their screen every few minutes to show me that they’re working and doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Is that cool or what?
Jason Medley:
That is so cool.
I’ll give you a perfect example of how we use a VA, as well. I’m going to be starting an amazing new site and I’m working on it. It’s going to have a blog and I don’t want the site to have no content on it when I start it out. I have to get a bunch of content on it so when I roll it out to everybody when you go to it and I say, “Hey, go check it out,” there’s actually legitimate content on there and a lot of it.
I don’t want to take the time to write 100 articles about real estate, so I basically created a process today where I gave the VA the names of the three biggest blogs and forums on the internet, like Bigger Pockets and stuff like that, and I told her to go through on a lot of the most viewed articles, find out who the authors were and get their information, get their website, go to their website, get their contact information and then contact those individuals to ask them if we can reuse their articles on my new site as long as we gave them credit, etcetera.
I don’t want to call all those people. I don’t want to dig up all that information. That’s something that could take days to deal with. We just outsourced it on oDesk.
Joe McCall:
Here’s the cool thing – I created this job 24 days ago and I forgot about it. I feel like a total schmuck. In the county of St. Louis County, you can go in and find out who all of the delinquent taxpayers are, the delinquent property taxes. There’s a 500 page scanned PDF of all of these people who have been delinquent in taxes, long story. It’s like 500 freaking pages of a PDF.
I posted a job in oDesk saying I want somebody to go to every page, and each page has about six addresses. I want somebody to go through each page and type into a spreadsheet all of the addresses of these delinquent tax people. I’ve had 443 people apply for this job.
I posted another job. I wanted somebody to actually go into our county website and scrape information off of the county website. I had 14 or 15 people apply to that.
I have 443 here. You can sort by lowest rate if you wanted and you’re going to find people here. This guy is $61.00 an hour. Here’s $.06 an hour, $.56 an hour, $.89 an hour, $1.00 an hour. I don’t know how good these people are. A lot of the cheapest ones have zero work history, no feedback.
You can go in here and sort by highest feedback. I see my list here. Here’s somebody, $39.00 an hour, $11.00 an hour.
I’m surprised they’re this high. No wonder I had 443. This is not an hourly quote. Nobody from Hungary is asking for $28.00 an hour. Nobody from the Philippines is asking for $56.00 an hour. I asked for a per job quote, so I think these are quotes for the entire job. People are quoting me $44.00 to go through this PDF and type in these addresses.
Jason Medley:
Versus if you got somebody to do that in the States at even minimum wage.
Joe McCall:
Yeah, it would have been $500.00, I don’t know.
Jason Medley:
Yeah, it would have been $500.00. These are not hourly quotes, I forgot. These are people for the entire job, $44.00.
Sometimes these guys will quote you $11.00 and I’ll go ahead and give them the job. Maybe they can do it for $11.00. I don’t care if they screw it all up, it’s just $10.00 and maybe they’ll get it right.
VirtualStaffFinder.com is a great website to go to if you’re looking for a fulltime VA. You have to pay them $350.00, but they’ll go out and find you three prequalified VAs. You interview them and you hire one of them, and then you pay that VA directly. You don’t have to pay Virtual Staff Finder.
There’s another guy we know whose name is Daven Michaels. He runs a company called 123Employee.com. He’s a great resource to go to. He’s a little more expensive than Virtual Staff Finder.
oDesk is great for project specific VAs. Virtual Staff Finder and 123 Employee are really good for full time, dedicated VAs just for you.
The sellers send me pictures to show me the house, the realtor takes the calls and advertises the properties on postlets, vFlyers, and Craigslist. The realtors coordinate the showings and they handle the paperwork.
I find realtors by putting ads on Craigslist, of course. “I’m an investor looking for a realtor to help me lease my properties.” Realtors represent me, they don’t represent the sellers.
For phones, this is important. This is my last slide. When you’re traveling overseas you have to have good phones. You have to learn how to get good phones. I use Skype, Google Voice, Vumber is a great resource to use. Google Voice will only give you one number. Vumber will let you have as many as you want. I have probably 30. We do marketing for students with our VAs, so I have about 30 virtual phone numbers of different markets all over the country and it only costs me an extra $5.00 per number.
What Vumber does is my VAs can send all this marketing and it looks like it comes from this local number in that market. Then, when a sellers calls that Vumber it actually reroutes to the investor’s cell phone or it goes to voicemail or whatever. Let’s say you’re in Texas doing deals in California. You dial your Vumber and then you dial the number you want to call. That seller will see on their caller ID another local phone number. It makes it look like it’s completely virtual. Vumbers are great to put on banded signs, as well. It kind of cloaks your number.
Vonage is another great resource if you’re going to be international doing calls. If you’re going to be international you have to get a local cell phone. You can get prepaid phones for very cheap and you’ll do very well.