Building Your Dream Team

By Tom Zeeb, TractionRealEstateMentors.com

Putting together a team is an important step in building your business.

The easiest way to build a team is to ask for referrals from other investors in your local area and then to piece together your team as you need them. You will need attorneys, accountants, realtors, contractors and others to succeed in this business.

Many newcomers try to assemble their team first, even though they have no business to bring to their team.

Certainly the realtor on your team can, and should, be put in place in advance of having a deal. This is because you will use them for marketing data and comps. But trying to put an attorney in place before you have any actual business to conduct can be difficult.

Your initial contact with the attorney will be lacking in substance if you are just another rookie investor who is hoping to have their first deal. The whole process will go much more smoothly when you actually have business to conduct with them.

This does not mean that you should not be asking around for referrals in advance of having a deal. It just means that your time will be better spent on other facets of the business, such as marketing at the beginning, and save the actual interaction with the attorney for when the time is right.

As you put members on your team, keep an eye on them. If you do not like working with them, or if they do not perform well for you, then drop them fast and find a new team member to replace them.

A major requirement for us is that team members use and are comfortable conducting business over email. We have had good attorneys in the past who we worked well with, but they did not use email for business. That made it very difficult to operate our systems with them, as so much of what we do is centered around email.

We want to conduct business in writing and have a written record of our interactions with people. Email makes this easy. So when we were only able to interface with this attorney via the phone, we lost written record of our progress. It also made it difficult to catch up on work after business hours since no one was available by phone at night. Email doesn’t have that problem, as you can send it and then wait for the response.

Think about these things when assembling your team.

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Tom Zeeb has been featured by CNBC, The Washington Post, Kiplinger's Magazine, The Washington Examiner, Financial Lifeline Radio and National Real Estate Investors Association's Magazine among others. He is the President of Traction REIA, the Recipient of the National REIA "Honors of Merit" and the "Award of Excellence" for Best Real Estate Investor Association! Traction REIA serves the Greater Washington DC Metro Area. Check out www.TractionREIA.com and www.TractionRealEstateMentors.com for more information.