Outsourcing business activities is the only way the self-employed can ascend beyond their self-imposed job and become actual entrepreneurs.
If you ask anyone who owns their own business what their greatest challenges to growth are, they’ll say: money, and sales.
While no one can argue that having an abundance of money and sales would fix a lot of problems, the real culprit to stagnated growth is time.
Without enough time, marketing and sales activities get sidelined in order to work on the project at hand. Budding entrepreneurs get stuck in a cycle where they yearn for more money, and sales, but they don’t have enough time to make it happen. For real estate investors this cycle can be especially deadly because our transactions can take months before we get paid and without another deal on the horizon, we’re dead in the water.
Michael Gerber wrote an entire book about this problem called the E-Myth. Most business owners like to think that they are entrepreneurs, when in fact, they just own a job. You see, if your business comes to a screeching halt if you don’t show up, then you are merely an employee of your own company.
And it looks something like this…
Breaking the Cycle
If you can relate to that entrepreneurial org chart, then it’s time to start making some changes.
The first thing you need to do is get help. You need to outsource as much as possible. Keep in mind, there are some things that you need to continue doing yourself — like approving offers, hiring the right contractors and other activities that will have a significant effect on your bottom line. For everything else, there is a virtual assistant just waiting for you to hire them. They are the technicians you need on your team to do repetitive tasks that keep falling to you. By adding help, you will have more time to work on the business instead of in the business.
Social media activities are perfect for outsourcing, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to hire these social media managers.Â
Outsourcing Social Media
When it comes to outsourcing your marketing, you have a plethora of talent pools to choose from. This list is not comprehensive, but it does represent the most popular options:
College Interns
Upwork
Fiverr
Part-time employee
Be Ready to Train and Manage
No matter where you source your help, you’re going to have to have to train them and you’re going to have to manage their work. Nobody starts their own business to end up being a manager. However, the manager level is the first step beyond the technician role. You’re going to have to become a manager before you can become a full-fledged entrepreneur.
Don’t Give Up Too Soon
If you didn’t think you had enough time already, then get ready for a bumpy road ahead. One of the mistakes investors make is to give up on their new hire too soon. It may seem like it’s faster to do it all yourself, rather than to train and guide your new hire, but remember this is short-term pain for long-term gain.
Hire for a Task Not a Role
Ideally, you will be hiring many virtual assistants to do many activities. In fact, the more you can break up a task into bite-sized pieces the easier it’s going to be for you.
Here’s why:
Training for a small, repetitive tasks takes less time than to train for an entire role with many duties.
If your new hire quits, or doesn’t meet your quality standards, you’re only missing a small piece of the overall role that is easy to pick up yourself (temporarily) while you re-hire.
Easier to manage the quality. It’s much easier to spot when someone is falling down on the job if their tasks are not buried underneath a long list of duties. Mistakes are easier to spot quickly.
Make it Easy
Real estate investing is unfamiliar to most people, and if you’re going offshore your help, the real estate investing concept is going to be very foreign. Your help is going to be more familiar with vanilla real estate agent posts. These posts will NOT target the right audience, and they may even make it seem like you are a licensed agent. This can cause legal issues if the real estate board thinks you are transacting without a license.
The best thing to do, is to give them ready made posts with messages tailored to your ideal sellers.
REI Social is the solution for quick outsourcing of your social media while making sure it’s done right.
About REI Social Posts
The right blend of engaging content, combined with the consistency your assistant will provide gives investors the best path toward social media success.
Our posts focus on helping you become an authority in your market while providing a variety of posts to educate and build an audience.
All your new assistant will need is access to your account so they can begin scheduling your posts day after day while you continue to build your empire!
