REI goals versus REI operations

[John G.]

Setting REI goals is great, but I'm looking for easier ways to reach them. In other words, I'm looking to work smarter. I seem to get bogged down at one to two deals at a time. How do you scale up when you're one-person + a team of allied pros? Any thoughts are appreciated!

[J Scott]

Where -- SPECIFICALLY -- are you getting bogged down? What specific tasks are doing repeatedly that are taking up a significant amount of your time?

These are the tasks that you need to streamline, automate, systematize, delegate and/or create processes around.

For example, in my business, I was spending an inordinate amount of time on every rehab figuring out material lists, selecting materials, ordering them and picking them up (probably 10 hours per project). So, I decided to consolidate as much of my material shopping as possible to one store (Home Depot), spent a bunch of time scouring Home Depot to pick out the exact materials I'd use on every rehab, put together a spreadsheet of all these materials (and their SKUs) and spent some time getting to know one of the guys at the contractor pro desk.

Now, when I get a house, I mark my spreadsheet with the quantity of each item I need, I fax it to my guy at the pro desk, he quotes me a price, charges my credit card and has the materials delivered the next day. In total, I now spend less than 30 minutes per project dealing with materials.

For every task that I find myself repeating (and wasting a lot of time), I spend as much time as it takes to figure out how to create systems and processes to streamline the task in the future. If spending 5 hours to create processes now saves me 50 hours over the next 10 projects, it was worth it!

I also hired a full-time employee so I could delegate the tasks that weren't worth my time. Specifically, instead of me spending hours a day hiring contractors, verifying their references, overseeing their work, answering their questions, etc, I pay my employee to do this. Certainly, it eats into my profits, but I now have plenty of free time to look for more deals, so ultimately my profitability has increased.

Other options are hiring a virtual assistant (I find that I spend a LOT of time on the phone -- and on hold -- with utility companies, and a VA can do these sorts of things)...

Just some thoughts...