I had a Virtual Assistant Steal $3,000 From Me - Lessons Learned from 10 Years in REI

[Cornelius Garland]

Biggerpockets has been a tremendous wealth of information joined in 2015. The posts that have been the most helpful have been the ones where others have shared their experiences, so I'd like to share a story of when I had a virtual assistant steal $3,000 from me. Hopefully, it can help others from making the same mistake I did. This is not to dissuade investors from building a team because I wouldn't be able to virtually wholesale in several markets without one. Recently, I've noticed investors are often too black and white in their viewpoints in the forums, and this imbalance can lead to some being overly cautious and not taking action or taking action without conducting proper research.

In 2018, I hired an executive assistant from Upwork who had a great resume, said the right things during the interview, and had impeccable English.

From the day she joined my team, I found myself limiting her role and tasks because her skills were limited. Eventually, it got to the point where I reduced her role to part time and then had to let her go. It felt like we parted ways amicably, and I never once expressed frustration with her. I just told her that "I didn't have any tasks for her and I will let her know if something changed. Let's keep in touch.".

I thought we ended on our working relationship on great terms. Two weeks later while I was up at 3 AM working on my business, I saw that my PayPal password was changed and I was locked out of my account. I received emails that $500 was being transferred to her. I felt completely helpless. This happened every 5 minutes 6 times. She could have drained my entire account, as I had a significant amount of funds in there.

Luckily, I was able to lock my account by using my main email, but PayPal was not able to be reached this early. I called them the next day, and they wouldn't give me my money back because they said that whoever accessed my account was given the password. I lost $3,000, and it could have been much worse.

This is the cost of making bad hires. From this point, I decided to create my own framework for hiring executive assistants, cold callers, lead managers, and acquisitions managers so I would never be bamboozled again. I look at two variables: Their MBTI (16 Personalities Type) and their birthday. These two variables tell a lot about someone. I have grouped each birthday into what roles are best for my company and which ones I would never hire.

Pro tip: People born in late-March, April and early-to-mid May make the best employees for an REI business. ANYTIME I deviate from my process and make an exception for someone, thy never work out.

The key takeaway is to ensure you have some way of vetting people and they have the right character and cognitive skills to succeed because you have a lot of people who are great at selling themselves.

ENTJs and ENFJs are the most common personality type you'll encounter when you're recruiting employees. See the image below of my hiring spreadsheet, with over 70% of them being ENTJs and ENFJs.

ENTJs often lack attention to detail and can be cut corners if they do not like the job they're doing. So if you need an operations manager or administrative specialist where attention to detail is paramount, I'd advise not hiring them for this role - barring certain birthdays (August 26th to September 4th).

ENFJs are great communicators but not great negotiators, so they make excellent cold callers but not lead managers or acquisitions managers.

Are there exceptions to the rule? YES, so please do not take what I'm saying as the absolute 100% truth. But for the most part, what I'm saying is accurate. When you layer the birthday profile with the MBTI, you can get 95% accuracy.

Let me know your thoughts.

[Don Konipol]

@Cornelius Garland. If you found a method that works for you, great.  Just don’t let the cat out of the bag; the leftist will want to make certain birthdays a “protected class “