Section 2: Building Your Systems & Strategies
When first starting your wholesaling business, you’re more than likely balancing multiple roles within your business from acquiring properties, listing properties, managing properties, transactions and more.
You’ll want to have systems in place early on so when your wholesaling business begins to grow, you’ll have the infrastructure in place which will allow you to maintain structure throughout your organization.
In this Simple Guide, I want to share few tools and resources that will help you create systems and maintain organization within your business.
Map Out Your Process
The first thing you’ll want to do is map out your sales process from start to finish. Grab a whiteboard and spend a day walking through what happens from the time a letter is mailed to when the deal is closed.
Mapping out the process will help paint a clear picture which will aid in determining which roles and tools are needed to help from start to finish.
Tracking Team Productivity
I remember reading an article about how Charles Schwab wanted to evaluate how to increase his team’s productive. So he hired a consultant to help create a process that would allow his team to be more productive with their time.
The consultant first advised Charles Schwab to have each team member write down the top six tasks they were going to complete for the day.
Then once they had their top six tasks written down, he instructed them to prioritize each task from highest to least importance and then have them work their way down the list starting with the highest priority.
Our Simple Wholesaling team adopted this productivity strategy and we call it the Stick It Six.
Nowadays we are so distracted with emails, texts messages and social media that we can’t ever get anything done so the Stick It Six allows our team to stay on task and prioritize what’s most and least important.
The system is quite simple…
Each person on our team lists their six most important tasks they are going to tackle for the day on a spreadsheet.
Is this system flawless?
No, but it gives me a clear picture on what the entire team is doing especially since our team works remotely.
Now let’s talk about a few tools and software we use to help create systems.
Business Tools
Here are a few business tools that will help you keep things organized.
One of the most important systems you’ll need is some type of customer relationship management software (CRM).
A CRM is essentially some type of technology businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions. CRMs help real estate wholesaling companies keep track of motivated seller phone calls, track leads, add in details about phone calls, add in property details, schedule appointment reminders and schedule follow-up tasks for individuals within your organization.
We first started using a CRM called High Rise HQ which is a great CRM if you’re just starting out. The software is very simple but doesn’t have many advanced technology features such as follow-up systems and automatic tasks however it does give you the capability to add in notes about motivated sellers, leads, schedule appointments and things of that nature.
A lot of wholesalers use Podio but we use a CRM called Insightly which helps us manage some of our administrative tasks involved in real estate such as maintaining our contact records, transactions, purchase agreements, calls, appointments and calendar reminders.
We also use Call Rail to track calls and track where our leads are coming from to allow us to achieve a better return on investment for the money spent on lead generation marketing campaigns.
Here’s an example, say we send postcards to a list and receive 100 motivated seller phone calls. The following month, we decide to send yellow letters to the same list and receive 300 motivated seller phone calls.
Call Rail allows us to track the calls received from postcards and yellow letters which helps us determine that yellow letters perform better than postcards.
We all use this tool to track lists. Say you mail out an absentee owner list and then the next month you mail out the same letter to a tax delinquent list, you can use Call Rail to track your calls from each list to help determine which list generated the most motivated seller phone calls.
We used to use Google Voice which allows you to have multiple phone numbers routed to your cell phone to help keep business and personal phone calls separate but it doesn’t allow you to track where the lead came from.
Guys, there’s a lot of great CRMs out there. I would encourage you to research on BiggerPockets to see what other investors are using and try out the CRMs for at least 30 days to figure out which CRM best fits your needs.
Marketing Tools
Here are a few marketing tools we use here at Simple Wholesaling to help generate leads.
Direct Mail
Having a good direct mail provider is also important.
There’s a lot of direct mail companies out there and if you go to BiggerPockets you can research and find which direct mail service other investors are using.
We use a local company called Offset House here in Indianapolis but we’ve also used Yellow Letters as well.
In future Simple Guides, we’ll dive deeper into direct mail campaigns.
Bandit Signs
Bandit signs are also a great way to attract motivated seller leads at a low cost.
We use Sigs 4 Cheap but once again, there are lots of bandit sign providers out there so I would strongly recommend conducting your own research for the best prices.
We have tested many products and services so I would like to encourage you guys to visit our recommendations page on our website for the best tools and resources available for real estate wholesaling.
Conclusion
I hope you find these tools and resources useful in your business. These are tools and resources that have helped my team stay productive and organized.
Just remember, your systems don’t have to be perfect. Just start by mapping out your business as you are working to document each step from beginning to end, then once your team begins to expand, you’ll already have the blueprint in place.
So we’ve talked about defining your goals, core values, creating processes and tools to help you keep things organized, next week we’re going to transition into how to actually build a team from how to recruit, select team members and define roles.
See you on the flip!