Scaling as a Real Estate Agent
Marcus, a residential real estate agent in California, struggled to scale his business. After hiring Inside Out, he found a way to delegate lower level tasks and dedicate his energy on work that helped him win and close new business to get him to $1,000,000 in net commissions.
The Problem
Marcus, a residential real estate agent in California, struggled for years trying to scale his business. The market conditions were up and down, then came covid, it felt like he had no reprieve but he was persistent in achieving his ambitions of growing his business to a million dollar business, he just needed to find a solution to his problems.
Marcus failed to scale due to a lack of capital, support staff, energy and time. He had too many tasks to complete and couldn't afford to hire someone to take the lower dollar/hour tasks off his plate. The only way Marcus was going to make more money was to delegate all of his lower dollar/hour tasks to someone else and focus all of his energy on the tasks that helped him win and close more business.
The problem was…. he couldn’t afford to hire someone in the United States, let alone California. Then he found Inside Out, hired a couple of virtual assistants to delegate his low level tasks to and is now one of the most successful residential real estate agents in Southern California. Marcus has dominated the market and is positioned to surpass $1,000,000 in net commissions this year.
The Solution
Marcus was able to 10x his income in less than 2 years by capitalizing on lower cost labor overseas. He no longer had to wait until he could afford to pay a support staff $60,000-70,000 per year and was able to hire a virtual assistant for a fraction of the cost. While most of his competitors had to wait until they were earning at least $200,000 to hire support staff, Marcus was able to “leapfrog” everyone and hire 1 virtual assistant immediately. He quickly understood how he was able to leverage his time by delegating work to his virtual assistant and over 12 months he hired 5 more virtual assistants one of which manages all of his other virtual assistants. Marcus is working on mapping out detailed systems and processes within his business and plans to hire and train 5 more virtual assistants in the next year. I am confident that once he does he will easily surpass his goal of $1,000,000 in net commissions.
THE GAME CHANGER FOR MARCUS
Marcus’ main challenge when starting out was finding new clients. His market was incredibly competitive and he had no help running his business day to day. He found himself grinding it out, pounding the phone on a daily basis, only to find most of his prospects had existing relationships with other agents or they were getting cold called so frequently they hung up during his introduction. Hundreds of unsuccessful cold calls were leading Marcus straight towards burn out. Sound familiar?
I worked with Marcus to help him develop a cold calling sales funnel in which he outsourced 90% of the work to virtual assistants. His virtual assistants compile lists, research phone numbers, upload them to his auto-dialer, call & qualify the prospects and set meetings for Marcus. Marcus was smart about investing his time up front training his virtual assistants very thoroughly and as a result now has a prospecting system in place that is almost completely automated. Marcus went from hand dialing and cold calling 40-50 phone numbers per day to having his virtual assistants collectively dial over 2,000 phone numbers per day consistently. Marcus’ team of virtual assistants are able to call over 40x more phone numbers per day than Marcus can on his own. He is accomplishing 40x more prospecting with no effort of his own! This is what happens when you put 5 virtual assistants on an auto-dialer for 8 hours a day 5 days per week. Instead of Marcus having to call hundreds of leads to find one that is a qualified prospect, Marcus’ new “virtual assistant call center” spends their time and energy qualifying leads for him. With cold calling partially being a numbers game, you can see the power in outsourcing cold calling to virtual assistants.
Now that Marcus has his prospecting systems in-place and fully automated by his team of virtual assistants, he plans to spend this year hiring and training more virtual assistants to help with transaction management. One of the most powerful parts of Marcus’ system is that he hired a virtual assistant to manage his other 5 virtual assistants. Marcus now has a single point of contact within his virtual team who reports to him and ensures the virtual assistants are working consistently and productively. Most days Marcus does not find it necessary to talk to any of his virtual assistants because he is confident his manager will keep his systems running smoothly.
While Marcus is glad to have increased his revenue generating capacity to $1,000,000 in net commissions, he’s looking to increase his business even more in the future and hire another two more virtual assistants to help him get there.