Has anyone “E-Mythed” their creative real estate biz? In other words have you set it up like a franchise, complete with org charts, manuals, etc?
great book. haven’t been able to extract myself from the day to day details as of yet. it’s a must that i do as I am the bottleneck in my biz.
Hassan,
Good to have you back sir. Did you ever end up buying any houses?
I agree, it’s a super book that relates to any business. I too am mired in the day to day details, and yearn for the day where I can set up my business on “autopilot” more or less, where I’m working on the business instead of in it. I never realized how easy it is to get bogged down in non-revenue-producing activities.
I plan to take baby steps, starting with simply hiring a virtual assistant for like $4-5 bucks an hour to do some of the menial tasks that seem to suck up so much of my day. Then I’ll have the time to get this thing together.
Great book, VERY annoying was of telling the story about the bakery but still good book 
I had it setup for a while, but as I switched focus, I let go from some of it. I still have my marketing on auto-pilot running in the background. I spend about $30 to $90 a month depending on some factors. I get calls, and deals but i pass most of them on because I am interested in doing other things however, just picked up an 8-unit, and passed on two properties with very nice equity.
You need to make sure you own the marketing and purchase side of it. You can outsource the bookkeeping, or manage your finances yourself for now.
What are the type of resources you may need?
- Marketing - should always be you, never rely on someone else to run it.
- Later you can hire someone to do the manual work for the marketing, but you still own the selection of prospects, the message, and the methods and they only implement it.
- The bookkeeping. all receipts get logged into a software. Later on you can hire someone to do it for you
- Selling, you sell yourself until it impacts your marketing and buying power. By then you will know how you want to do the selling and you can contract someone to do it for you by following your steps.
Read the one he wrote afterwards… Business isnt about systems… Its all about finding the damn money to be in business…
I think someone should write a book entitled “The Autopilot Myth”. That would be more accurate.
Mike
Fadi, I am going to steal this. You said in 20 words that I have been trying to get people to understand using paragraphs.
I assume your point is the fact that there is no such thing as a truly “autopilot” creative real estate business. I admit that by its very nature, this will never be a totally hands-off type of enterprise.
But would you agree that many of the tasks most real estate investors perform every day are truly NOT revenue-producing activities, and therefore should be outsourced/delegated to employees and/or contractors? This is the extent of what I mean by autopilot. I plan to continue to make the offers but virtually everything else can (and in my opinion SHOULD) be outsourced or delegated to the highest degree possible.
But would you agree that many of the tasks most real estate investors perform every day are truly NOT revenue-producing activities, and therefore should be outsourced/delegated to employees and/or contractors?
No, I certainly would not agree with that. Until you get to the point that your business is so successful that you CAN’T do things yourself, you’re just throwing away a bunch of money by hiring people to do things for you. The only exception to this is for people that make a lot of money AND have no time to do these things themselves. For example, if you were a brain surgeon who works 14 hours a day and yet you want to get involved in real estate, then it would make sense to pay someone to do the manual labor.
That is not the case for the vast majority of people. The vast majority of newbies are more along the lines of being broke and having bad credit. Someone like that outsourcing ANYTHING is a big joke! This entire “autopilot” thing originated with the gurus who must convince newbies that real estate investing is effortless in order to fleece them. Lazy people will not spend thousands on guru info if they think their new business will require them to work hard. If you think I’m wrong, just look at ANY guru material for any type of get-rich-quick scheme (real estate, stock market, MLM, selling vitamins, etc) and you’ll see that they ALL promise instant riches without work!
Mike
Mike is so correct. There was a time when my monthly operating budget was 80k… Sure would like to have a few of those months back…
I always thought it was how many deals you did that meant success… Forgot it was how much money you KEPT that began to defined success.
I think ego and greed gets in the way most of the time and some of us, me included, don’t want or won’t hear the advice that make true success stories.
Heck I had a staff of 12 doing everything… Escrows closed as predictable as a chicken crowed. Then one day the friggin bottom fell out… The friggin chicken died…
As I start doing it all over again… my business plan is simple… advertise consistently, always be looking for the money, negotiate the deals myself, deposit my checks (can’t believe I had someone on payroll that did that), live with less stress( means fewer deals not fewer dollars) and most importantly make sure I get paid.
It aint rocket science… thank God ‘cus I am not an astronaut.
I disagree.
There are tasks that take so much time and that you can outsource for such a small amount of money that it makes no sense to do them from Day 1.
A total newbie could pay other people or companies to execute marketing campaigns for them, so they get leads and do deals–unless you think every 40-year old single mom who wants to invest should be swinging a pick to put up bandit signs.
No business will be 100% auto-pilot, as you have to at least read the reports & metrics and make marketing decisions.
“Work the System” is a great book about a man who took his call-center business (I can’t imagine a worse business to manage) and went from working 90 hours/week down to 2.
The problem is that it takes years to document and write systems for every process in your business, and it is a VERY tedious and time-consuming process (although worth it).
I have yet to see a real estate investing “systems manual” that fully documents EVERY process of the business to the level of detail that I would want (from strategy/planning to marketing/offer acceptance to funding/bookkeeping to managing a team to managing every deal from start to finish–due diligence/buying/renovating/leasing/selling).
The best we can do is learn how to write our own systems and then learn as much as we can from books, courses, and each other about the best practices of the specific areas of our business that we want to implement or improve and make into a system.
—Side Note about The Emyth—
I liked the book so much I went through the Emyth Mastery Program (took 2 years and about $13,000). It pretty much explained every aspect of how to run a business and gave their system for writing your own systems.
Over the course of 2 years, I wrote 300 pages of an operations manual for my team to use when running my real estate business for me. Looking back, I’m NOT a big fan of that method, because for each process I was writing a 10-page MANUAL which took forever and no one felt like reading through it anyway.
So my advice would be to make simple checklists of who does what & when, and all the steps involved in doing it as efficiently and effectively as possible.
And when you’ve got to demonstrate how to do something, just talk into a digital recorder in your car, tape it with a flipcam, or use www.jingproject.com to record screenshots of yourself doing something, and it hardly takes any time to train someone.
And, if nothing else, make a simple system for the 5-10 things that take the most time, or that you hate doing, or that create revenue for you.
Automating your business is not a myth. It’s just a lot of work, but if you do it it’s the ONLY way to really get free of your business. Just make sure you change your investing strategy and make key decisions with the times, or you could still wake up in a real bind someday. You can’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Sorry to take so long, but systems are a real passion of mine.
Michael Quarles, it brings tears to my eyes reading your story. Along with ego and greed, did ethics also get you down? And now you have to start from humble begining again … so sorry to hear that.
nsu1997,
Do you have the skills to perform basic repairs & maintenance for properties or would you HAVE to hire things out because you can’t do them? It sounds like you’ve heard too much guru nonsense. Unless you come across some PHENOMENAL deals, you’re not going to have enough coming in off a property to hire everything out.
Sure didn’t make me cry… And ethics never was an issue. And not starting from the ground up… Hell real estate investing is one of the easiest career choices once you learn how… I just became side tracked with mentoring and developing a software program… I am so surprised that new investors are staying out of the game today… It has to be one of the best times for our business in years… One just has to change their model to include passive income and understand negotiations with lenders. Those with large eggs will make a ton…
Good Luck…
I never said I ever intend to hire everything out. Matter of fact I said the exact opposite…this business will never be a completely auto-pilot type of enterprise.
However I’d rather not put out bandit signs, clean houses, print marketing pieces, lick envelopes, etc when I can pay someone chump change to do these tasks. I do most of these things myself now because I have to, but the way I see it I’m one phenomenal deal away from being able to afford to hire out the more menial tasks. This frees up my time doing things like finding more deals and making offers. However after reading Michael Quarles’ post I realize I will still need to work and work hard, otherwise I’ll end up with an $80k/mo operations budget and the ship will crash. I don’t have a problem working hard, I’m just not interested in being busy doing the wrong kind of work.
If you’re more of a hands-on type that’s cool with me - I just have a different philosophy.
nsu1997,
Not to mention start a mentoring program to milk the innocent and develop software :))
nsu,
Understood. To each his own I guess. Our best deals financially are the ones that need the most work. If we had to hire someone to do every bit of the rehab & prep work to get them ready to rent, they would cease to be our best deals. I enjoy doing a lot of the repairs myself. We don’t need to do mailers and bandit signs. Our Realtor finds things for us all the time - some of which are not listed on the MLS. One day in the future I’d like to have things set up where we could hire most things out (especially if we move out of our current market), but it’s ok this way for now.
dude stop taking cheap shots. Michael is 100 times the investor you’ll ever dream of being.
If people followed your advice, they would still be trying to carve their tires from stone because they are so paranoid everyone is out to get their money and refuse to buy a pre-made tires.
Fadi… It is okay… He is a good person who I treated less then I should have. I cant say he is wrong for feeling the way he does. I am certain he will become a great investor…
Michael