These days, you aren’t limited to the area your business is located when looking for great team members. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Laith Masarweh from Assistantly to talk about how hiring VAs can help you scale your business.

You’ll Learn

[01:34] Creating an Offshore Talent Acquisition Company

[09:38] Importance of a People Process

[16:11] Virtual Executive Assistants and Operators

[24:57] Finding Your Unicorn

Tweetables

” Having community and good compensation definitely is going to allow you to attract and have the best people.”

“ If you are operating your business, you are not growing your business.”

“ When you have good people, they help other good people grow.”

“ The bottleneck is you.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laith: When you have good people, they help other good people grow.

[00:00:03] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager.

[00:00:23] DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management, growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow.

[00:01:04] Now let's get into the show.

[00:01:07] All right. So my guest today is Laith. Laith, tell me how to say your last name. So I don't butcher it.

[00:01:13] Laith: It's all good, man. It's Masarweh.

[00:01:15] Jason: Masarweh. All right. Laith Masarweh. And awesome to have you here on the show. So in this episode, we're going to dive into the power of offshore talent, explore how businesses from startups to fortune 500s can unlock exponential growth.

[00:01:31] And you run a company called Assistantly. Which I've heard great things about. You came highly recommended by one of my mentors, Sharran Srivatsa a, who runs a multi billion dollar real estate company called Real. And so tell me like a little bit about your background.

[00:01:48] How'd you get into this? How did you get into entrepreneurism?

[00:01:51] Yeah.

[00:01:54] Laith: I mean, I think I always had the entrepreneur inspiration since I was a kid. My dad always had like a small business that he was running and, you know, it made me want to be an entrepreneur from a young age.

[00:02:03] He used to have me working in the grocery store shop since I was eight years old and it was cool to kind of develop, I guess, my like interpersonal and just learning more about the business at a, you know, such a young age and, you know, I knew I wanted to start my own business. I didn't know what I wanted to start it in.

[00:02:18] Of course, you know, I attended Chapman University. I went to the business school. I thought I was into like virtual reality and tech. Didn't really know what my fit was. Got into corporate after college. I knew that wasn't a fit, even though I tried it. Didn't really work very well and then I started a real estate marketing company here in Orange County, California where we help agents, brokers whether you're residential, commercial, property management you know, we just have done what's like real estate marketing needs and during the pandemic, we got extremely busy and You know, we couldn't, there's too much demand and our team was super small and somebody was like, Hey, you should hire a virtual assistant.

[00:02:53] And I thought that was like an AI robot and I didn't understand what that was. And I never learned about offshoring in college or any of that kind of stuff. And I got introduced to somebody thought she was local. She ended up being in the Philippines. I was like blown out of my mind because I've actually been working with her for years thinking she was in Irvine, California, but she was actually in the Philippines the entire time.

[00:03:12] Our time I had, you could not tell any difference. And then I kind of got the spark in my head and I go, man, I work with so many real estate professionals, you know, and they're always asking me for help, whether it's administrative or operations or marketing. And I, you know, when I asked this girl, Hey, how many people are highly skilled, great communication skills, you know, looking for employment, like you? And she goes, I don't know, maybe like hundreds of thousands. And I said, hundreds of thousands, there's hundreds of thousands of talented people like you? And she goes, Oh yeah. And it kind of just clicked in my head. I'm like, Oh, People need this and it can't just be me.

[00:03:45] And I pretty much started Assistantly 45 minutes after learning what offshoring was didn't know anything about it. And I'm just like, let me go, you know, I'll send it and kind of see kind of test it out, pilot it with a couple of my, you know, people in my network. And four years later, here we are.

[00:03:58] And we started this obviously real estate, property management, law, tech, healthcare, finance, a little bit of everything.

[00:04:04] Jason: Yeah. All right. Awesome. So, so let's get into this. I mean, there's a lot of challenges that people have with this and everybody's had, I mean, a lot of property managers have tested the waters of working with, you know, VAs in the Philippines or maybe Mexico and there's kind of mixed feelings about how that's gone. If you've done this at all, you've had some bad experiences and maybe some good ones. And so it can be really difficult. And so you're kind of at the mercy, if you're using a company like yours or some third party company, you're kind of at the mercy of their hiring process to some degree.

[00:04:43] And some of these vendors that provide VAs have better hiring processes than others. Some of them, you know, they all claim, Hey, we've got amazing talent or they all might sound American, you know, but then you end up kind of getting somebody that has a heavy accent. They aren't showing up, you know, on time or they just disappear and ghost you because they're non confrontational sometimes in the Philippines or some of these sort of issues, and I'm sure you see, you see some of this, right.

[00:05:13] How do you kind of do things you think maybe differently at Assistantly versus some of these other players in the marketplace

[00:05:22] Laith: Yes, it's a great question, you know, obviously I started off, you know, really when I got into the industry I started hiring these people on my own whether they're from like people going to the upworks or the fivers of the world or like job boards and to like Interview a whole bunch of candidates to understand where they're located in the Philippines.

[00:05:38] Like what type of equipment do they have? You Internet connection speeds. Do they really have that much experience? You know, because people obviously, whether you're US, Philippines, anywhere, they will always oversell on an interview or a resume. There's a lot of things that we do on like on our end.

[00:05:52] So like, number one you taught me this and I think we had a conversation when we were, when I met you in Franklin about like that job description is so important when sourcing somebody, right? You know, everybody obviously wants a job, but you want to essentially attract people that are like, you know, that's their zone of genius, and they're passionate about it.

[00:06:10] That's why we actually follow the four R's that Jason taught us a long time ago. And it's something that we actually, it's really important. The first step is crafting the job description to compel to candidates. So they're actually passionate and interested about it. So that's number one, filling that top of the funnel.

[00:06:25] Number two, there's, you know, there's obviously a series of interviews. You can't just have one interview. We did multiple interviews. But like, I think obviously experience matters, of course. Like I want people that are mid to senior level that know what they're doing. If they're in property management, you know, I want, you know, helping with like property admin stuff, tenant communication daily operations through Appfolio.

[00:06:42] Like I look for those types ...