It was myself, the former or the now minority owner and the office manager who were doing all the financials before I joined and then so joined them and then did four acquisitions, grew internationally and just very much complicated things which required building out a team and getting very comfortable, hiring people, getting them into the right spots and growing things vastly.
Acquiring Minds
A Few Hours Per Week, a Few States Away
Excerpts · 303 segments · ~1:31:18 long
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And so I learned early on that I'd much rather hand something off to somebody and set the expectation that they're going to make mistakes and they're probably going to screw something up and it's not the end of the world. Almost anything they can do, we can fix.
And so it was lessons from that that I learned that helped me go into this business and look at what the seller and his wife were doing that maybe someone else could be doing, whether they were already in the business or that we could hire for them to do.
And so try to be very intentional about in those first couple weeks and months, documenting what that was, trying to figure out what might work well and then start executing on getting that out of my hands and leveraging the team to do that work. Definitely a few iterations of that.
Some stuff that didn't work, you know, going down the path of looking at different software solutions, only to really look at, okay, does this maybe over complicate things? So some trial and error, but was able to take a lot of what was done and you've got a very competent and capable foreman. So some of the stuff, you know, leveraging his skill set, knowledge anyway to do that and just getting…
In other cases it was moving from a very paper based system to digital system and then also hiring a virtual accountant out of the Philippines who's been amazing and has just been able to take things that I felt very comfortable with, you know, the invoicing, all the finance and accounting things that I could easily do.
Myself, but that were taking quite a bit of my time and maybe one of the best value add that I can hand off to her and she can knock out and do and just frees me up immensely. Is she full time? She is. Originally I was thinking she might be 20 to 30 hours, but she's been able to take the tasks that I've been able to hand off to her and then add to that pretty significantly. So I think right now…
Yes, taking on even more work. So things like you've probably seen the signs that 811 call before you dig for every lot we do. So like if there's power lines or anything, you need to call or go online and make sure that the area is marked properly so that you know anytime you dig in the earth, you're not digging into a power line or cable line.
So with every lot we do, we have to submit that. So it's things like that that every time a PO comes in now it's on her task list to go ahead and submit that request, get that done. Stuff that the seller and his wife were doing and how many hours in.
Total were they working in the business combined? Combined, I think they represented that maybe he was doing around 20, 25 hours of work a week. She was maybe doing similar on the back end.
His wife was doing all the accounting. A lot of the administrative things. He was driving around kind of that.
Driving around in circles. He was driving around to the various sites to see, okay, we can do that. Lots driveway next. Okay, they're excavating this ground.
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