No One Gets There Alone, So Who Do You Need on Your Team?

No matter what business you’re trying to run, building your team is important. You’ve got to understand this. And when you do, at the end of the day, you can deliver more value to more people.

When it comes to being an entrepreneur, it’s not overly complicated. It’s not even about earning money. The bottom line?

It’s about delivering enough value to the marketplace.

So, how do you do this? You build a team.

Let’s look at it this way. Let’s say you have a single unit of production. In my business, this would be one short term rental unit. With one unit of production, you can deliver value in 30-day increments. You get paid for 30 days.

If you have two units, the same 30 days go by, but now you receive economic value equal to 60 days. It doesn’t take a math genius to see that three units gives you 90 days’ worth of income in 30 days, and 10 units brings in 300 days’ worth of income in 30 days.

I don’t know about you, but I get excited about that kind of growth. Once you’re at 12 units, you get an entire year’s value in a single month.

The real question is: what is the difference between an entrepreneur with one lemonade stand and an entrepreneur with twelve lemonade stands? Efficient systems, for one thing, but today we’re going to focus on this question: who is on your team that can help you deliver more economic value in the same period of time?

I want to help you design and develop your ideal team.

What kind of team is necessary for you to build a successful business? Regardless of what kind of business you have, there are certain elements we all need when we’re building a team that will get the job done.

When you’re designing your team, it always starts with YOU. You’re at the top. For the sake of this conversation, we’re going to call you CEO, the Chief Everything Officer. At the beginning, that’s pretty much how it is. You don’t have a staff, a team—you don’t have all the pieces yet.

As part of my 12-month Roadmap to Retirement program for those interested in the short term rental business, I help you break it all down, so that you can put together all the pieces and build a system—and a team—designed for success.

This system helps you make as much in one month as you used to make in one year. It takes your day-to-day workload down to one hour a day.

How does that sound?

Even if you’re not in the market for a short term rental business right now, there are still some basic team-building principles that apply to all businesses across the board. Let’s talk about some of those right now.

First, we need to get rid of some things. One of the most important things to get rid of when you’re beginning to build a business is your calendar, your scheduling. You need some software or—even better—an admin assistant. So many people are hesitant to delegate this simple, yet time-consuming, task.

I want to submit for your acceptance that the moment you promote yourself to CEO, you need to ask the question: is this activity the highest and best use of my time?

Because of where I’m at in my business journey, I set the bar at $500/hour. Is the activity I’m doing right now worth $500/hour? If it could bring $500/hour of economic value to the table, I’ll do it myself. If it doesn’t, I don’t do it. It still needs to be done, but it doesn’t need to be done by me. I can pay someone else a heck of a lot less than $500/hour to manage my schedule for me.

If I take the time to do my own calendar/scheduling, I lose money. You will too.

The more literally you take this, the easier it becomes to build your team.

The next thing you need to start building as soon as humanly possible is your financial team. You’ll need a bookkeeper and a tax preparer. As you grow, you’ll need a CFO.

The bookkeeper is the first and most important person at the beginning of the financial team chain. You can’t delay hiring either a bookkeeper or admin assistant. If you skip either one of these at the beginning, it will come back later to compound-bite you, and you’ll lose way more revenue than you can afford.

“But I know how to do my books myself,” you say.

I believe you. A lot of people know how to do that. But, if you wouldn’t pay a bookkeeper $500/hour to do your books, then you shouldn’t be spending your valuable time on it. Once you become CEO, your job is to organize existing resources so that you can deliver economic value to the marketplace.

The next pieces of your puzzle: team members in an operational capacity who help you deliver your day-to-day service. This is the exciting part. Customer experience, direct liaisons with all your guests and direct connections to maintenance and other vendors (like pest control), landlords.

All of these people make your business run every single day.

Then you’ll build people in a sales capacity. You need someone to manage relationships with Airbnbs, etc.—a channel manager. Someone who manages the relationships between your business and other organizations, understanding how to operate each channel. You’ll need a reservation manager. That person will have a bank of individuals responsible for keeping properties filled.

Everyone works together in order to make everything happen—and as smoothly as possible.

Next, you’ll build your team in a legal capacity. Not in-house—at least not in the beginning—but eventually. The more you grow, the more people will be involved on the legal side. A business formation attorney, an attorney for your contracts, a landlord/tenant attorney. You can’t afford to make expensive legal mistakes because you tried to do it all on your own. (You can’t do this part on your own if you didn’t go to law school.)

Then last, but by no means least, human resources. At our company, we tend to use HR on a contract basis. You’ll do what’s best for your own business as you grow.

These are all the things you will execute in order to make sure your business gets properly built.

It takes time for us humans to learn how to put this all together in a successful system. When you sign up for our program, my team will provide you with expert tools, but learning to use those tools expertly takes time. There’s no super secret sauce.

We all know the tools exist. But, if we can’t use them well, they don’t matter. A basketball is a tool that, in Michael Jordan’s hands, is more valuable than it is in yours or mine. It’s not about the basketball. It’s about learning how to use the basketball expertly.

You’ll learn—with time, experience, and training—how to expertly use the tools.

So, how does all of this change when we’re dealing with COVID-19?

As every marketplace changes, we do our best to continue to provide. In the short term rental market, travel is down, but travelers are not our only customer. People in the medical community need temporary housing. So do individuals responding to the health crisis in countless other ways. There are people in quarantine for various reasons, who can’t stay safely in their own homes.

In our Roadmap to Retirement, we teach you flexibility and adaptability. The Roadmap is structured in such a way that you gain the ability to change with the marketplace, even during a global pandemic. Especially during a global pandemic.

You get 12 months of consistent training with me and our team. All 37 of our courses—and additional information—are all made available to you, so you can build your business long-term. You can watch content from guest experts, DM your accountability coach. This is all accessible on your mobile device.

We want you to experience success quickly. We’ll give you the tools you need to get to the next level. We’ll help you grow your team.

And we’ll help you do it right.

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