If you want to scale then you’ll need systems and processes so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed.

It's a lot of work upfront but once the team and systems are established it gets easier and as you get better you can expand to another city. 

Once you feel you've built a strong team with your first property and have solid systems in place, I would then start buying more aggressively and taking on bigger projects.I suggest reading this BP article on the core 4.https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/core-four-real-estate-team

Establish a system to stay in front of potential sellers & buyers.

These I have found are real, striving parents, working their butts off to provide the best housing and school system for their children.My ethos in this approach is exactly why we at LaPlante refer to them as Residents, as we consider "Tenant and Landlord" to be dated terms and rife with negative emotion.

I'm hoping to build a system to do a few of these a year in the same market for the next few years. 

Your first hire is unlikely to work out though, was you won't have a good hiring system in place. - So, recommend having that first hire document the crap out of what you want them to do.

The $56-a-unit process requires landlords to be up-to-date on their property taxes and for the properties to be free of any safety or building-code violations.Since landlords are not legally permitted to collect rent from tenants of a home with an inactive license, the system is designed to serve as a check on property owners, forcing them to address safety violations and pay their taxes.But Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections lacks the resources to hunt down property owners who flout those rules, said Karen Guss, a spokesperson for the agency.

•Integrate a system to rate property conditions using AI/ML models.

A third party company that integrates with our system.