Expanding your team

[Sharad M.]

Last year or so has been very busy for my business and it has helped me focus on my top money making priorities and expand my team to take care of other lower value, but extremely critical, activities.

I thought I would share my experience with the group on some of the things I have learned as I have grown my team.

For me, the key has been focusing on my strengths and bringing in someone who's strengths compliment my weaknesses.

When I first started out, there were always a number of things that I hated doing or thought I should spend my time on other higher value things. So I started creating a list of things that I didn't enjoy doing and that list basically became a job description for the 1st person I brought on board. The 1st position that I created as a result was a leasing agent. The work was too much for 1 leasing agent so I got another one on board.

Then I repeated the same process of creating a list of things I didn't enjoy doing and that resulted in the position of my Office Manager and she has been a life saver. My Office Manager has been with me for couple of weeks and now I am in the process of hiring a part time person to assist the Office Manager with some daily admin work, so I can delegate more responsibilities to my Office Manager.

I read other peoples' experience on BP and that motivated me initially (for a VERY SHORT period of time) to do some maintenance work myself. I even bought a 123 Home Repair book from HD and the first task I tried to tackle was taking out some wall paper from a bathroom and I have to be honest I absolutely hated it. I tried changing a lock in one of my properties and it took me over an hour to complete and I disliked every minute of it. A task that a professional could have done in 15 minutes took me over an hour and I got nothing out of it, but saved $15 or so when I could have spent that hour dealing with sellers and making multiples of money I saved.

Since that experience, I don't do any work, not even changing a light bulb in one of my properties because that is not my strength. I might be on one extreme end when it comes to doing any work myself, but I have focused my limited time on revenue generating activities rather than spending it on money saving activities and it has worked well for me.

Would love to hear other people's experience.