Hiring your first real estate assistant can be intimidating. Especially when you think about how much it’s going to cost you. But honestly, it’s costing you more money not having an assistant in your real estate business than it would to hire one. If you don’t have a real estate assistant, you are the assistant, which is holding your business back from growing, and keeping you from doing the highest dollar productive activities as a real estate agent and business owner.
Calculate How Much Your Time Is Worth
Start by working backwards and find out how much your time is really worth, how much do you make an hour as a real estate agenet? If you’re making $50,000 a year, that works out to around $25 an hour. If you can pay a part time real estate assistant $15 an hour to take the minutiae off of your plate, you can focus on the work that either brings in the most money, or the work that you enjoy. Not only are you propelling your real estate business forward, but you’re profiting the difference.
If you’re on the fence of whether or not you’re ready to hire an executive real estate assistant, take into consideration maybe some of the other things that are taking up your time.
Landscaping, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, washing the cars, these are probably chores that are taking up the majority of your weekend that you could either be putting back into your business, or doing the things you actually enjoy doing like spending time with your family, exercising, golf, or whatever hobbies you’d like to pursue. Whether you’re hiring the neighbor kid for $10 bucks an hour, or paying professional landscapers, you’re likely saving money. It’s these chores in your personal life that are usually the cheapest to outsource.
Now if pulling weeds in your yard is something you enjoy, go for it. But if you hate landscaping or folding laundry, outsource it.
Once you have the cheaper personal and labor items outsourced, now it’s time to start looking at your business. Break all of the things you do on a daily basis into four categories. I got these four categories from Gino Wickman’s book, Traction.
Love it and are great at it
Like it and are good at it
Don’t like, but you’re good at it
Don’t like, and not good at it
Anything in your don’t like and not good at it column should be the first thing you hire out and train your new assistant to work on.
For me, that’s always been the paperwork, spreadsheets, filing, and tedious time consuming detail work. It drives me nuts, I can make myself be good at it, but at the expense of becoming entirely frustrated.
This is mostly $15 an hour work in my area. In my first year I made $100,000 in my real estate business, which works out to about $50 an hour. I realized it was costing me more to continue doing my transaction coordination than it would to pay someone else to do it.
And of course, nobody is going to be as good as you at the job. Or at least it might feel that way at first. But you have to elevate your people and delegate these tasks. If someone can do a job 80% as good as you, then it’s time to pass that item off to someone who can free up your time to do income producing activities and the items in your “love it and are great at it” column.
It took me 3 tries to figure it out and get the right person in that executive assistant seat, but finding the right person and paying them what they were worth allowed me to literally triple my real estate business to over $300,000 in income that second year. I was able to afford paying him a salary over $50,000 that year, and have a high quality team member, because I was freed up to do the income producing activities and focus on growing the business.
Remember if you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant. Don’t go off hiring out other parts of your real estate business or hiring more real estate agent salespeople. If you don’t have an assistant, you are forever going to be doing the assistant’s work for yourself and your other salespeople. Let it sink in that if you don’t have a landscaper, you are the landscaper. If you don’t have a house cleaner, you are the house cleaner. Wouldn’t it make more sense to hand these tasks off and focus on other items you could be doing to propel yourself and your business forward?
Step 1 – Training Manual
The first action step is to build out a training manual for what you’ll be having your new real estate assistant do for you. I use google drive and google docs to write out the procedures for exactly how to do the duties of each team member. You can also do screen recording videos so that you aren’t having to give the same lesson more than once. You should be doing this from the time you start your business, because once you get to the point that you’re hiring, you are going to wish that you had all of your procedures written down somewhere so your executive real estate assistant has a playbook to follow.
Step 2 – Make A Hiring Ad
Next, make an ad. I personally use Indeed, Craigslist, and Facebook. You’ll get an obnoxious amount of applications using Facebook, so I’ve had most of my luck finding quality team members with Indeed and Craigslist.
Step 3 – Utilizing The DISC Test
Third is to test your executive real estate assistant before hiring them. In my application process I give them the task of completing the DISC test. This is going to allow me to see their personality results and if they would be a good fit for the position.
The message goes something like:
I appreciate your interest in our open position. Based upon your resume we would like you to complete the next step for consideration for an in person interview.
If you could please respond to this email with your answers to the following questions:
Why do you want this job?
What makes you a good fit for this position?
We would also like for you to complete the assessment you can find in the link below, and attach the results in pdf format to your email response.
This not only gets me the DISC test results, but I also get to see a written response from them to see their written communication abilities since that’s an important part of my business. I also get to see their ability to follow instruction. If they don’t attach their results in pdf format, then they fail the test.
If they fail the test before the interview, they are most likely not getting that interview.
Step 4 – Phone Interview
Next, have a phone interview with the applicants who pass the test and have the DISC results that you are looking for. This is where you’ll ask about past work experience, standard interview questions, and get an overall feel for the person.
Step 5 – TEAM Interview
And lastly, bring the top applicants that pass the phone interview in for a TEAM interview. This is where you and your team will conduct an interview on your top applicants together. If it’s currently just you in your organization that’s fine, but if you are hiring a new person and already have a team, I have found that culture is an extremely important part of running a successful business. And if any of your team members veto that person, then that applicant isn’t the right person for the job.
If you follow this process you will find the right person who fits into your organization seamlessly.
Follow the “hire slow, fire fast method”. We follow this process to make sure that we are getting the best person in the seat the first time. And if we made a mistake, then get them out of the seat as soon as possible, because it’s only going to get harder the longer you put it off.
I’m sure you’ve heard business people and other real estate agents complain and say that they can’t find good people, but that isn’t really the case. If you follow the steps that I layed out for you here, you will eliminate the applicants who aren’t right for the job, and find people who are more than qualified. Beyond that, how they do is a direct result of your training. How can you expect a great assistant to do a great job when your systems and processes suck? Take the time to write down and record anything you do more than once in your business that you’ll eventually be handing off to your executive real estate assistant.
I’m hiring another real estate assistant right now and am going through the painful process of backtracking through all of their duties and creating procedures. I wish I would have watched a video like this 3 or 4 years ago and I’m sure my business would be even one step further ahead.
I hope you guys are able to put this information to use. If you enjoyed this video don’t forget to slap that like button for me, and subscribe to the channel to follow us on the journey to real estate millionaire. Appreciate you guys supporting the channel and look forward to seeing you next week!