Outsourcing my Wholesaling business.

[Trevon Peracca]

Hey BP

I am looking to outsource my wholesaling business. I have not been able to answer the phone much during my current direct-mail campaign, to be honest I haven't had much time at all. I work 12-18 hours per day 6-7 days per week. I have been strongly considering obtaining services such as PATLive, Podio, and a VA. I want to hear from other investors out there that utilize these services together with successful results.

I am looking for the benefits and limitations of each of these services. Please let me know if other investors have found a more automated way of running their wholesaling business.

Also, I made the mistake of not filtering by equity on my current mailing list, so I have been getting a lot of time wasting calls from people that are upside down in their mortgages. Is there a way to salvage my current list or should I just purchase a new one? I am also willing to get help from people experienced in direct mail campaigns. Please let me know any advice available.

I just want to know what works, and the budget it’s going to take, so i can sell the idea to my wife and get rolling.

Best Regards,

Trevon Peracca

[Robert Laird]

Trevon,

These are all good questions.

First I would have you ask yourself what you are trying to obtain by "automating your business" as you put it. At the end of the day if you do end up paying for a service like PatLive are you really going to have the time to read through all the messages? If your as busy as you say and you can not pick up the phone in time. In addition, if it has become too hard for you to make all your call backs, a VA is not going to change that. They are just going to type out your messages and email them to you. You still have to make the call backs. You understand what I mean? Unless you find a VA that will make outbound calls for you and write offers, they will only take off work load in terms of inbound calls.

The only way I can recommend you "automate your wholesaling business" is to have a message on your answering machine that asks people to leave a message with their name, address of property they want to sell, phone number and best time to contact. Then anyone motivated enough will leave you messages and every night you check your messages and call people back for 30min - 1 hour. If you want to further automate your business, find someone to do this for you and pay them hourly. However, as you do this, your costs are going to go up, which is hard to front if you have not done a deal yet. 

In regards to your mailing list, I would not scrap it just yet. There may be a field on there that indicates equity and if you can filter them out you will still have some addresses left. Just make sure to do that with your next list purchase. In the beginning it is important to check your lists and check them twice to make sure your marketing budget will go the longest yard. Even if it takes you 2 hours to manually filter out bad addresses/recipients, that is 2 hours of saved mailer money. 

I would work up some figures and a budget. Show your significant other the hard numbers for the best case scenario and the worst case scenario. As long as your worst case scenario looks better than your financial life right now, I think she will go for it, because what is there to lose? You just have to make sure you are on the same page so no one gets surprised later on. I hope some of this will help you and good luck.