So, I got a call into my podcast hotline… an investor wanted to know when she should hire an acquisitions manager.
Great question! In fact, I recently covered this topic in another email, but I’m taking a little bit of a different spin on it this time.
I want to explain not just when to hire, but why you should consider outsourcing this aspect of your business, how to find potential applicants and a little about the hiring process.
So, here’s what I did for my business…
When I first started investing, while I still had my J.O.B. I was doing A TON of marketing myself and getting lots and lots of leads, but I didn’t have the time to call all the leads back.
Good problem to have.
So at the time, I decided to hire a local friend of mine—who was interested in real estate—to take calls live and call other sellers back. I also gave him some of my training courses and told him to start reading and learning, which he did.
Our agreement was that we’d split the deals 50/50.
And it worked really well for us. In fact, we got so many deals that I had to hire a Realtor to turn around and sell all those deals.
Again, a good problem to have.
A few years later, I needed to add another acquisitions person to my team. So I put an ad on Facebook. And another ad on Craigslist.
I remember getting 20–30 applications from those ads, and asking my assistant to prescreen those applicants for me, so I just talked to the ones she liked. 🙂
So, I ended up hiring a guy and it went pretty darn well. But I learned something from that hire too…
See, this guy was with me for several months and he was doing awesome… but he had learned other parts of the business too, so he came to me one day and said:
“Joe, I’m literally doing all the work but only getting only 50% of the profit.
No hard feelings, man, but I’m gonna go out on my own.”
I couldn’t be mad at him, cause he was right. He was doing it all for only half the pay. But we did part ways as friends.
So, here’s what I learned… do NOT give away all the inside info of your business. In other words, when you hire someone, make sure you’re not giving them all the keys and training them to drive every car in your operation.
Because my guy knew everything about how to run my business, he simply went off and made his own business. And became rather successful, I’m happy to say! 🙂
So because of this, I strongly suggest that you work with your buyers and your acquisitions guy (or gal, I’m not sexist 🙂 should primarily only work with sellers—the acquisition side of any deal.
Okay…
To find a quality acquisitions person, in my experience, all you need is a good ad.
Here’s how my good buddy and fellow investor, Todd Toback, does his ads for an acquisitions manager:
“We’re the premier real estate investing company in San Diego. We’re looking for superstars. You need to be awesome at sales. If you don’t think you are, please don’t apply.”
He also asks applicants to submit a video to his Podio app. And Todd has consistently found really great people that way.
So if that’s HOW to hire an acquisitions person, here’s the WHEN…
First of all, I think this is the last position that you should outsource. You should be the one talking to sellers because that’s where you make your money.
I believe these are the ONLY two reasons you should hire an acquisitions guy or gal:
- When you simply do not have the time to handle the seller conversations yourself, because you’re super busy doing other money-making tasks.
- Or, if you are already super-skilled at talking with sellers and you’re ready to level up and expand your business.
See, a HUGE mistake I often hear about is investors wanting an automated business right away, so they start outsourcing everything…
They hire a virtual assistant (VA) for $500-$1,000 a month to do the marketing and prescreening and talking to sellers… everything.
DON’T do that.
You have to know what you’re doing first with each aspect of this business and how to do it all.
How are you going to train people if even you don’t know what you’re doing?
And here’s something else to consider… the more people you hire on your team, the less money you make per deal because you have to pay your team members.
In other words, the percentage you make on each deal will go down and you’ll need to do more deals to make up for it.
So, make sure you look at your numbers.
And remember… there is a place and a time to hire an acquisitions manager. Just make sure you’re doing it right.
