Breakdown of How to Hire Staff (LA 1456)
| Breakdown of How to Hire Staff (LA 1456) |
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sweet Scottsdale, Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about the breakdown of how to hire staff. Super, super popular topic with our customer service people and on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Do you know why this makes me so happy?
Steven Butala:
Tell me.
Jill DeWit:
Because that means so many people are doing it right, and they’re getting busy, and they need help.
Steven Butala:
Oh, sure. Right, I didn’t think of that.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. If you’re not thinking about hiring, you’re not doing any volume. You’re not busy, you’re doing just fine. But this many people, this is such a hot topic right now. And I’m like, “Oh, it’s going great for a lot of people.”
Steven Butala:
This is the single most challenging thing in my career, is hiring people. And fortunately, now we’ve got staff now to hire other staff. And they’re very, very good at it, much better than I ever was. Steve jobs said one time, if you do everything right in your career, at some point you will end up being a recruiter. And I think that’s really telling.
Jill DeWit:
I love that. I agree.
Steven Butala:
We actually just recently put up a webpage on all of our sites about careers and our help wanted.
Jill DeWit:
I hoped it’s to the public now. It’s on landinvestors.com. If you go to the top and look at jobs there. And it’s not just us, we have our own jobs posted, and it’s a place for you as a member to for free post your jobs.
Steven Butala:
Does anybody use it?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, there’s actually other people on there.
Steven Butala:
That’s great.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Totally.
Steven Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free, and if you’re a Land Academy member already, please join us on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Rachel wrote, “Hi all, I’m looking to join a mastermind group where I can contribute and continue growing as a land investor. Are there any groups willing to open the doors for one more? I can be reached here and we can also connect on Discord.” Thank you for any consideration, Rachel. First I was going to say, Rachel, you’re on discord, so you’re a member. I hope you’re in the Land Academy ladies group. So definitely join there, because we have people from, oh boy, all levels.
Steven Butala:
I’ll tell you, that’s free, and these women are doing deals together. Jill’s a ringleader. And it’s worked out. A lot of times you start these products and they just don’t work. I don’t know, three out of 10 maybe. This thing worked, this lady’s group, they’re kicking it.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s awesome, and it’s fun.
Steven Butala:
Here’s the thing, we’ve got the regular Land Academy, we’ve got Land Investors, we’ve got discord, we have Jill’s ladies group, we have the accountability group. This is a closed group, we have to cap it. Then it’s very, very popular, and it’s hard to get into. Reach out to service@landacademy.com. Jill and I are doing it presently, we’re going to get other people to get involved, other members who’ve shown interest in teaching. And it doesn’t cost anything, at the moment anyway, but it’s hard to get into. I was actually considering doing two, so we’ll see what happens. We have tons and tons of people trying to sign up for it. And then ultimately, we just started Career Path.
Jill DeWit:
It just recently launched by the way. What day are we airing…. This is Wednesday.
Steven Butala:
It’s April 4th.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Butala:
When it starts. Land Academy Career Path is a paid-for 15 person cap, Jill and I’ll teach the class. And at the end of it, you’ll be selling the real estate you bought during the class. Talk about discipline from yesterday.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). We’ll get you there. Whatever level it is, which is great about that. So Rachel, you’re doing everything right. So we’re all here, there’s plenty of people. That’s the value of this group. It’s amazing how collaborative and helpful in knowledge and money everyone is in our community. And it makes me so happy. So I’m sorry, if you’re not here to help, or you’re not generous, or you’re not here to make some money, maybe with a partner, you’re not in the right place.
Steven Butala:
Wow mom.
Jill DeWit:
You like that?
Steven Butala:
I feel like I got scolded a little there.
Jill DeWit:
You didn’t get scolded.
Steven Butala:
Not me, but the people on the other side of the camera.
Jill DeWit:
I’m just bragging about how cool our people are.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, a breakdown of how to hire staff. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit:
Yep. This tells me there’s a lot of people doing everything right, because if you’re at the point now where you can bring on some help and you can pay them, you have a consistent income and it’s going to only get better. And you’re doing enough deals that you are getting bogged down and probably losing money because you can’t complete them all on your own, so now you need to bring on some staff so you can make even more. And that’s awesome. So there’s a couple of steps to this. First thing is, identify your weak spots, because that’s what you want to fill in first. What’s the jobs you hate? What do you stink at?
Steven Butala:
Well said, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
What do you just struggle? Even if you’re good at it, you just can’t stand it. “If I got to post another property or got to answer another phone or I got to do duh, duh, duh.” That’s where I want you to start. And there’s so many ways to start this easily and comfortably. You could pay hourly, you could pay people by project. Let me give you some examples. Or by task. So, first of all, hourly. It’s really easy to say, “I need a transaction coordinator to help me just get deals done from A to B. Once I find them, they need to walk them through escrow. I just didn’t get that. I need to be doing the front end stuff and the sales stuff, I just need help in the middle there.”
Jill DeWit:
You could easily find someone for 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, whatever it is, it could be two hours a day. And they jump in and they do all those phone calls and things like that. So that’s one example. Another example is by… What was my other thing? By task. Say it’s just the mere task of answering the phone. You hate talking on the phone. Well, that’s easy. Hire a company like PATLive that you could do, they’ll take that right off your plate. It could be for the seller side, it could be the buyer side, whatever it is. It’s easy to outsource that and put someone in that place. And then, that was my third one? I had hourly-
Steven Butala:
Could be two.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, by project.
Steven Butala:
Oh.
Jill DeWit:
Oh wait, I had by project. You could pay someone just to post properties and you could pay them a flat rate per posting. So I want to talk about all the different options that you have. So you could say, “Every posting you do, it’s 25 bucks.” I don’t know, whatever it is, because I figure it takes an hour, because I have everything loaded ready to go, I have all the photos, I just don’t want to do it, kind of thing. And they do five a day, 125 bucks. This is all good, this makes sense to me. So that’s for me where you start as just getting going. Now when you’re next level like, “All right, I’m past that,” I’ve got these things outsourced… Do you want me to keep going or do you have some things you want to jump in?
Steven Butala:
At the end, I’ll just tell you. I only have really one point to make and I’ll do it at the end.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Now you’re getting bigger. You have outsource, you have VAs. And by the way, you can do people all over the country, people all over the world for these positions. I love it. So you’ve identified it, you want to put it out there and hire, you want to be very clear on what you’re going to pay, how you’re going to pay, when you’re going to pay. And that’s where you come into, there’s W2, there’s 1099, you can do 1099 via PayPal for VAs and things like that. And you can cover more on that. Do you want to jump in?
Steven Butala:
No, here’s my big point.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
If you make more than $10,000 a month, net, buying and selling land, and you’ve got some accumulated capital for acquisitions or you use deal funding or however that works for you and it’s consistent, which is the vast majority of active members that we have, this is my suggestion. Jill might disagree. You’re probably already doing the things that Jill said, you’re outsourcing the things you hate. There’s a group in the Philippines, her name’s [Gillian 00:08:41], she works for every member who specializes in land. So there’s not something you would ask her to do or her team to do that they haven’t already done for somebody else. So that’s really good. But I’ll tell you, if you make more than $10,000 month, get yourself an employee full time. Hopefully it’s one of your children. If your children are not meatheads, and congratulations by the way because that’s a lot harder than it sounds, get them in there.
Steven Butala:
All three of our kids in some capacity work for us. One of them full-time, she runs a ton of stuff for us. And she’s been with us since she was 15, so she knows it in and out. And of the three, by leaps and bounds, the most responsible. To this day, I remember how my life changed in the early nineties when I got that first W2 employee, when I had to set up ADP. And all the stuff I didn’t want to do, she did. So man, that’s just life changing because now what the result of that for me was I immediately started to send out more mail, go to more auctions, at the time I was going to tax auctions. It freed me up to do acquisitions, and it’s doubled the amount of money I made. I didn’t have to do the HTML anymore, I didn’t have post properties any longer, I didn’t have to answer the phone and on and on and on and on, do any of the tech stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
So that first employee is critical. And yeah, outsourcing takes a lot of time. I don’t care…
Jill DeWit:
That’s perfect. We just covered both extremes. Mine was [crosstalk 00:10:13]-
Steven Butala:
Can I just… This is a personal heartfelt personal experience. And then that person, this is long before I met Jill, managed all the stuff that we were outsourcing. So it allowed me to outsource a lot more. So I really would really, really consider, you should really consider and plan for, even if you’re not there yet, I’m planting the seed in your head about hiring somebody to physically sit there and work with you.
Jill DeWit:
Well, that’s perfect. That’s the next step after my different variations of help that you’re going to get. You’re new, you’re starting out, you don’t have a budget but you need some help. Then the next step is hiring that person, like you just said, your right-hand person. That’s how I would do it too. And they manage those people now. Now you don’t manage those people, they manage those people. And then you just keep moving that person up and bringing other people in as needed. And a few things I’ve learned along the way is, the day you have that… Or any employee, always have a standard operating procedure, an SOP of tasks and what you want each person to do.
Jill DeWit:
A, when you post the job, that’s what they’re going to do, it’s very easy for you to write the posting because this is all the steps of what you’re going to be doing. No brainer. And then B, you’re making it easy for yourself to train. And then when they come on, have them use that and expand on it. So someday in a perfect world, they’re going to train their replacement and it’s all ready to go. Little things I wish I knew along the way. I would also say, another tip that I wish I knew a long time ago, fire faster.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, that’s for sure.
Jill DeWit:
I’ll leave it on this because I could talk for a week on this topic.
Steven Butala:
I did have one question at the end, go ahead.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. I wish someone had taught me that. Don’t struggle with somebody because for whatever reason, they’re just not good at this or not good at that, and you need to work with them more.
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
It’s usually not you, it’s them. And it’s just not a good fit, they’re not a bad person. And you need to let them go.
Steven Butala:
Jill and I got in a little tiny little spat over a long time ago, and this is what she said out of anger, “You’re choosing money over people.” To which I say, I remind her of this frequently. This was years ago.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, it comes up all the time, thanks.
Steven Butala:
This is like a decade ago.
Jill DeWit:
It’s on a sticky note on my mirror, because I might be next.
Steven Butala:
Because you know what? Now she says stuff like fire faster.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
Because yeah, I do choose money over people. If people aren’t going to fall in line, they’re not going to work here.
Jill DeWit:
Well, I would argue that you’re doing them a favor. Hold on, please.
Steven Butala:
This is not California.
Jill DeWit:
Seriously, you’re doing them a favor. If they are not good at it, they don’t want to sit there too and be unhappy. They don’t want to work for someone who’s miserable, they want to be happy and know they’re doing a good job too. So you fire faster. We’ve all been in these situations. Oh my gosh, I thought the sky was falling, everything was over. And then, “Oh, this turned out to be better.” See? So there you go. It’s not a bad thing.
Steven Butala:
That’s beautiful, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
I know, that’s the way I like to end things.
Steven Butala:
So we talked about the types of staff and why it’s important, but the title is the breakdown of how to hire staff. So how do you hire staff?
Jill DeWit:
Put a posting out there and be very descriptive. Show your website, who you are, make them do the research too, coming to you. We have a couple of phases depending on the position. Sometimes, say it’s a data-driven position, I will make part of the phase one of the interview process a task. They’re not even going to be screened by somebody yet until they complete a task. Because that A shows their interest. I had one time a long time ago, I said, “Do a mail merge and make a video of you doing a mail merge.” And that was for me to show that, A, you were interested in doing this, and B, you could figure out how to do a video, and C, you could do a mail merge.
Steven Butala:
And you care enough about the potential position to do something. Versus just say, “I work at Starbucks, but I’m applying for this executive vice president of acquisitions position.”
Jill DeWit:
Right. No. So that was so beneficial. So if you can give them a job or something like that, have them do something, I would do it right off the bat. Another thing that I do, because we’re so technology, everybody is nowadays. I do an initial phone screening by somebody on my staff, because we need to make sure, can they think on their feet? How do they sound? How do they answer questions? Because so much of what we do is remote, I don’t care what you’re doing, it’s remote, or there’s a remote component. So that’s the first phase. And the second video, I want to make sure they can figure out Zoom, they can figure out Teams, they can figure out whatever, and they look good. They know how to position their camera and adjust a microphone to have a conversation. That weeds a lot of people out right there too.
Jill DeWit:
And then the next thing is I usually have a trial period and I’m very upfront and honest with that. And if they have another job at the time, I’m flexible. I want to make sure it’s a good fit for you and for me, and they like that. So I’ll give him a couple of projects. We do this specially with marketing people, give them some projects, give them some tasks, don’t quit your job. Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page, and then after a couple of weeks, we’ll know.
Steven Butala:
I had a job interview a long time ago, I actually ended up getting the job. It was a, “Get on an airplane, fly across the country,” job. And the person who interviewed me said, “Please bring a red pen.” And I didn’t ask why, they just said, “Make sure you bring a red pen.” And I hung up the phone and I said, “All right, I got a red pen,” and put it in my suit pocket so I wouldn’t forget. And then I brought a red pen and the first thing he said was, “Did you bring a red pen?” I said, “Yeah, I got it right here.” And he said, “Good, because 80% of the people that I ask on this job interview can’t remember to bring a red pen and it’s the simplest thing ever.”
Jill DeWit:
And I’m not going to hire him for that.
Steven Butala:
I think that’s great.
Jill DeWit:
I think that’s really good. That’s a funny little thing.
Steven Butala:
It was KPMG, I got the job on the spot.
Jill DeWit:
Because you had a red pen. That was it? That’s their hiring criteria?
Steven Butala:
It wasn’t good looks, that’s for sure.
Jill DeWit:
That’s awesome. Do you have any more questions that you want to ask me about this?
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. I think we’ve got a good thing-
Steven Butala:
Interview a lot of people. I did the math one time, about 11 people that I’ve historically hired, one worked out.
Jill DeWit:
It does happen, you’re going to go through people.
Steven Butala:
And I would highly recommend everybody’s 1099 for at least a month or two months, just to see. Without exceptions. Especially not because everybody’s working from home, try them out first. And they want to try you out, there’s people that are like, “I can’t work with you anymore.”
Jill DeWit:
I had one lady, she was so sweet. I hired her as a transaction coordinator because she was really good at reading contracts, it was a big commercial investment company in California. And I thought she was great, she had a great personality. Everything was awesome, but she couldn’t handle the volume of what was coming at her, and she needed-
Steven Butala:
She left.
Jill DeWit:
That’s what was so funny. So I gave her the out. And she’s so sweet, I was a Thursday night. As she’s going home, I could see it coming, I was working with her, I was really trying, trust was there, loyal. She loved everything that we were doing. Like, “I love how you’re helping all these people, and what I could learn from you is awesome.” So finally, on Thursday night, I said, “Look,” I can’t remember her name, but I said, “Please think about this. I can see you’re struggling. And it will not hurt my feelings at all if this is too much for you. I totally understand. So please think about it tonight, and then let me know tomorrow if you want to continue.” It was at the end of the first two weeks.
Steven Butala:
She said, “Let me run out of the door right now.”
Jill DeWit:
No, so she was so sweet. She really thought about it. And so the next morning she emailed me.
Steven Butala:
She didn’t come in at all?
Jill DeWit:
No.
Steven Butala:
I don’t know why I love stuff like that.
Jill DeWit:
And it was like, “I got the sweetest breakup letter.” It was a beautiful breakup letter. She was like, “You know what, Jill? I really thought about what you said, and I really appreciate how you handled this.” And she said, “I know myself, and I’m in over my head. I can’t keep up with you. I can’t. I’m struggling to learn these programs.” And it was [inaudible 00:19:03]. “I’m struggling to keep up with the amount of deals that you’ve got going on. And this isn’t a good fit for me.” And she did, she wrote, “I will follow you, I love everything, your message.” I’m not kidding. “Everything that you’re doing. I think this is awesome.”
Steven Butala:
It’s not you, it’s me.
Jill DeWit:
Pretty much. “I want to be a part of this, but I can’t do this,” kind of thing. And I said, “Thank you.” It was very sweet. And I said, “I will sure keep you in mind if something else comes along that I think would be great.” And so it was very nice.
Steven Butala:
If you have to break up with a girl, don’t say, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Don’t say that.
Jill DeWit:
I think we’re all past that. I hope that.
Steven Butala:
They hate that.
Jill DeWit:
I hope that no one uses that line anymore.
Steven Butala:
No matter what you do, they’re going to be extremely angry. So it’s not you, that’s just how it works.
Jill DeWit:
We parted ways as well on this one. You can have a good breakup.
Steven Butala:
No, that’s, I’m talking about… Nevermind.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called, “How much available investment capital is really in the Land Academy group?” You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Millions and millions of dollars.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. That list just went out.
Steven Butala:
People have millions of dollars.
Jill DeWit:
We’ll talk about that.
Steven Butala:
Dying to do your real estate deal.
Jill DeWit:
I’ll tell you what we did, we do this every year, how much we’re talking about, what this really means, it’s awesome. You know what else is awesome? If you need any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood map overlays, check out neighborscoop.com. Created by investors, that’s us, for investors, like you. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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