Jack Thursday – Deadlines Deliverables and Communication (LA 1721)
Jack Thursday – Deadlines Deliverables and Communication (LA 1721)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Jack and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday, and I’m going to talk about deadlines, deliverables, and communication. Yes, there is a possibility that Jill’s going to be bored out of her skull.
Jill K DeWit:
Because I’ve already had this team meeting. I’ve had to sit in it several times. I have it down.
Steven Jack Butala:
All kidding aside, I just developed this thing recently, because we were having trouble getting stuff done in the education companies, like we call it around the office. Not so much the land companies, we’ve got that licked. Mostly because the people who have been working in the land companies under Jill’s direction, they just understand each other really well. But, our education companies are getting bigger and we’re hiring more staff and we needed a better way. And we built this deadlines, deliverables and communication thing after Jill’s model. She didn’t have a cute little label for it, and maybe I don’t either. I don’t know. But we built it off of what she’s been doing with her land transaction coordinators and people that work there and it’s working great.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. I appreciate the compliment.
Steven Jack Butala:
The goal is to never talk to your employees and never have them talk to you. And that’s what this accomplishes.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s the whole point here. That’s what he paid attention to. Like, wait a minute. I’m like, “No, Jan, I go weeks. We don’t, I feel bad, we don’t talk.” We have to like every two weeks we kind of sit down like, “How are you? Check in. You got 10 minutes?” “Sure.” And we catch up real quick, but all of our communication is all online and we don’t miss anything.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our land… Our members on the landinvestors.com online community is free. And don’t for forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows you like.
Jill K DeWit:
Chuck wrote, “Does anyone have a LinkedIn profile in which they have info about their land investing company and their current job on it? I love to see how much you lay out. I don’t know much about designing it.”
Jill K DeWit:
I do.
Steven Jack Butala:
I do too. Everyone does. I think LinkedIn, is it LinkedIn? Yeah. LinkedIn is a great place to put, just to lay it all out. Everything. Yep. I graduated from college or I didn’t graduate from college. This is a formal education I have. I’m still in college. Doesn’t matter. This is the 21st Century now. Nobody cares about that stuff really anymore. Unless you’re, you know,…
Jill K DeWit:
A doctor, attorney maybe…
Steven Jack Butala:
A doctor, a lawyer, and you’re going to work for a high price firm and that whole old school kind of concept. That’s all kind of gone. I say, just throw it all out there. Say, you know, “I live with my two dogs and my favorite person on a boat and wherever…” It just makes you that much more interesting. “Yeah. I’ve got this job over here. Sometimes I moonlight over here and I buy and sell land with Land Academy.”
Jill K DeWit:
Perfect.
Steven Jack Butala:
I think I, you get my instant respect if you just, if you got a lot of stuff going on,
Jill K DeWit:
I agree.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday. I’m going to talk about deadlines, deliverables, and communication. This is why you’re listening, or maybe not. Jill has a system set up and she’s going to explain it to us in great detail in a second here, because I modeled my education company system after her land system. It took her two years to do it, and I don’t think you really had any type of timeframe in mind, but boy, the finished product is amazing. Everything goes in Airtable. A deal comes in, Jill’s got a transaction coordinator named Jan. She does most of, or all of, up to a certain point. Jill takes it over from there, says yes or no. And then her transaction team goes and does a deal.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
And closes it, and hires real estate agents in some cases, from a pool vetted real estate agents that Jill has, to sell it. So there’s lots of deals now. It’s not uncommon for them to never talk about any real transaction. Maybe you guys talk socially. I don’t know.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s about it. It’s very rare. Can I jump in there? Yeah. No, that was a good, that was really good. So first of all, the transaction comes in, there’s a form that gets filled out. It’s either a phone call or a letter to my team, or maybe they filled out something on one of our websites out there, that they found us and they want to sell us the property. Or maybe it’s you looking for deal funding, same thing. You have a form that you fill out and it gets automatically put into Airtable. No one’s manually doing that. So from there then my transaction corner jumps in, and they review and make sure I have all the necessary information, and one thing is like a signed purchase agreement. Is it even worth me looking at, if I don’t have all those missing pieces? They work it out and it doesn’t get to me.
Jill K DeWit:
Sometimes I’m sure we don’t even get assigned purchase agreement and it never gets to me. Great. I didn’t need to get excited about it anyway. I should never be looking at property if I don’t have that. So they do that work and then they tag me with an Airtable and I see an alert pop up on my phone, in my email that I have stuff to go look at. So I usually try to pre-block chunks of time every week to go and catch up on all the deals is what’s going on. And then I’d reply back and they do exactly whatever’s needed. So when I sit down and I look at my Airtable with my tags, it might mean everything from this deal came in… And by the way, my team even does their own due diligence now.
Jill K DeWit:
Because it took a little time, but there’s a lot of like they know you’re going to probably like this one and you’re probably not going to like this one. This one’s underwater eight months out of the year and including the road that gets flooded, probably not going to want it. Or this one’s great, but they don’t know how much slope is too much slope. And I look at that stuff. So, and then I’d say, “This is great. Let’s buy it. Throw it in escrow.” And then they take it from there. I’ll have that kind of communication where I’ll look it up. Sometimes the communication is, here’s what the agent said, “They’ve got two people that they think are interested. You should be seeing on offer or whatever.” I get those kind of notifications.
Jill K DeWit:
I get notifications like, please check the bank balance. Those are my favorite ones. Please check this bank, because money gets deposited in different places. Please check this account, this balance. You should see this much money going in today. Like, oh I love those, and I just look at and send them notes back. But it’s very organized. Not a lot of talking. and we built it from scratch. Thank you. And we have a lot of property moving through the system all the time. I mean a lot. We probably average a deal a day. That’s you know, a new deal a day…
Steven Jack Butala:
Easy.
Jill K DeWit:
bought and sold. Yeah. Maybe more going through the system.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, what I did was I took a look at how successful this whole thing was. Jill doesn’t even know this, that I did this. I looked at Jill’s system because I have access to it. And sometimes at the end of the decision making process on the acquisition side, they, she needs my opinion. Not often, but once in a while she’s on the fence about a deal, she’s like take a look at it. So I’m in the system, I’m a regular user. I have access to it and I wanted to look at why is this so successful? Why is she so happy? Why is there, are her people that are involved in all of this, why are they so happy? Why is it working so well? And then I looked at my, I’m responsible for the education companies and Jill’s responsible for the land companies.
Steven Jack Butala:
So I looked at what’s working and what’s not working in the Land Company from an employee standpoint. And one of the things that’s actually working, is this podcast and how we process it. A lot of years ago, in 2015, I developed a system. It’s a bare bones version of a system that Jill has, but it works. And I looked at these two and I said, “Why do these work? And why does this other stuff over here not working so well?” And I came up with deadlines. There’s deadlines for everything, there’s deliverables. Her team knows exactly what she there’s there’s no…everybody knows what they’re supposed to do, and when they’re supposed to do it and how it’s getting communicated, and Airtables at the center of all this. And so everybody knows with this podcast, the people, there’s two or three people involved in it.
Steven Jack Butala:
They’re all, except for my lead person, they’re all virtual assistants, but they log into a system. It’s not Airtable, but it will be soon. And they know which days are supposed to happen, where the files are supposed to go. There’s, everybody knows exactly what’s expected of them. And they know when Jill and I are going to deliver the recorded files and all the raw data. And so it’s the same thing that’s going on with her. The deal comes in, everybody gets moving and it’s, there’s no real talking about it ever, unless there’s something really wrong. So, we implemented this new system. We’re implementing it now all through March. Jill and I are going through a systems wide review and implementing Airtable for all of these companies. And it’s, I couldn’t be happier. I hope you are.
Jill K DeWit:
Mm hm. So what does this mean for you? You should be doing this with you too. Even if you’re a person of one. You can’t operate with 18 million sticky notes around your desk and remember exactly what you should be doing when, so, and there’s a lot of members in Land Academy, that have, they’re team of one and they have their own Airtable and they’re working things through. Yes, starting out, you could just get comfortable, make sure you like this, use a spreadsheet. But after you start getting 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 properties, now it’s confusing. I don’t remember where I am with that one. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what title agent has that one. And did that guy list the property? Did I even see the listing agreement? Gosh, I don’t know. You’re going to get really bogged down quick if you don’t create your own deadlines, deliverables and communication. And it’s even if it’s communicating, to you, but you know, it’s done.
Steven Jack Butala:
Every single thing I do, I have a deadline. I give myself a deadline. So, that starts with that. But a deadline I learned is not enough. Is it done? Well what I think has done, and what people on my team think has done, is different. And Jill, with her team, there’s no mystery in that. They know exactly what’s done. Hey Jill it’s done at Jill Dewit. This is done and here’s the links to everything. It’s all in here. The seller’s waiting and someone needs to know by 5:00. So what’s the deliverable on that? Well, in that case, the deliverable for them is for Jill to say, “Let’s do the deal or let’s not do the deal or I need more information.” You can break all this stuff down pretty easily.
Jill K DeWit:
Or yeah, an open escrow. That’s the next task. There’s a task and a task and a task and a task.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s all broken down. And so what was happening and what is happening, in some of the other education companies, especially the new ones. Not necessarily Land Academy, not so much, because it’s older, but like Concierge Data or Career Path. Those are very new. Career Path and Concierge Data are less than a year old and so there’s people that work there that aren’t super clear what the deadlines are, or if they do know the deadlines, they don’t know what the exact deliverable is.
Jill K DeWit:
And it’s not their fault.
Steven Jack Butala:
Sure. No, no, no. It’s the leader’s fault for not setting up a system that’s easy to use.
Jill K DeWit:
Who’d you point at? Who’d you point at?
Steven Jack Butala:
Me.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Got it. Just checking. Like don’t be pointing at me.
Steven Jack Butala:
And a communication, forget it, it’s all in Airtable. And so if you communicate through that, here’s the other thing, if you’re a one person show, and you are trucking along and all of a sudden you get all these deals in, you’re going to have to sub some of this out. If you already have an existing Airtable mechanism in place, it’s really easy to do a bunch of little videos and share it with a virtual assistant, or whomever, and have them do some of the things that you don’t want to do, or don’t have time to do. And it’s so scalable. You get 20 people there if you want, easy, maybe more. So deadlines, deliverables, and communication is my way to, not sure that now after doing this episode should have been the title. But this is a silly system I taped together and it seems to be working well.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, you know what? I’m happy you’re proud of that. You should be proud of that. That you came up with that. That was brilliant. And I’m glad you put it as a title and we’ll never have to do that one again. What’s the show is that one? How many people watched that? Three?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Six people.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Awesome. Happy you can join us today. Five days a week you can find us here on the Land Academy show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow’s Jill Friday. And she’s going to talk about how female land investors unite. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Hey, happy St. Patrick’s Day.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, you too.
Jill K DeWit:
Yay. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we do appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button. And, if you are a Land Academy member, make sure you go into that next level and checking out all the content and everything that we’re doing with you on Discord.
Steven Jack Butala & Jill DeWit:
We’re Jack and Jill,
Steven Jack Butala:
Information
Jill K DeWit:
and Inspiration
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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