“The most important qualification for becoming a champion is an intense burning desire.” Bob Lachance is the founder of Reva global and is a commercial real estate owner.
He shared his story about how he had a struggle getting out of his own way and how now he helps other people do the same thing by hiring virtual assistants.
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Creating Scale, Efficiency, and Time-Freedom For Your Business With Trained Virtual Assistants With Bob Lachance
I bring on guests to we’re going to help you to grow your business or wealth before you have a sale event right before you’re selling that multifamily property or that dental practice, or, or that high-end primary home. And you’re looking to delegate you’re looking to for efficiencies. And with that, you have to figure out a way to get out of your own way. And so our next guest is an expert in doing just that. Bob Lachance. He is the founder of Reva global and is a commercial real estate owner himself. He has done fix and flips. And he has a story to tell us about how he had a struggle getting out of his own way and how now he helps other people do the same thing by hiring virtual assistants. So essentially how to create space and get out of your own way with Bob the chance right now. Hey, Bob, how you doing?
Very good, how you doing?
Hey, better than I deserve? I’m so glad you’re on with us and excited to dive into this topic. Would you give our listeners a little bit about your background and your current focus?
Virtual Assistant: Operating from an ABUNDANCE MINDSET allows you to cast your vision, make an action plan, and know that everything that you need to achieve that goal already lies within you or could be immediately available to you. It just needs activation.” – Taylor Lane
Absolutely two-second rundown. It’s a long, long background. So I’ll just keep it within a couple seconds or a couple of minutes, I guess. I have a virtual assistant company that has trained virtual assistants to do tasks. We have a real estate side division and a med side. So a med VA side as well where our virtual assistants work with doctors and different offices to do insurance verifications, and prior authorizations, etc. And also in the real estate side, we have property managers, commercial owners, fixing flippers, the whole gamut on the real estate side agents as well. So we have two sides of our business. And we also have other business owners, like financial advisors that use our services as well that take off different types of tasks, whether it’s, you know, lead generation, etc, phone work. So we run a game of that. But I started, started investing in real estate back in 2004. Prior to that, I played professional hockey for eight years, four years here in the US four years in Europe, which is pretty cool. We’ll talk some stories off offline if you want, and have a great time doing that. And it was a great learning experience. So I jumped in the business world, like I said, in 2004. And through that time, I’ve done well over the north of 800 transactions, both on the residential side and on the commercial side, buying hold syndications as well. So I also started a couple of real estate education programs on the coaching side, the mentoring side helped build that up in the back end. And then through that time, I realized there’s a huge need. I was talking to a lot of my buddies that are business owners as well. And one of the same things that keep one of the same topics keep coming up, and that was, I need time, I need more time in my day, I need to be able to scale my business, I need to create more efficiency, affordably, right for hearing. I live in Connecticut over here. So I know for me if I’m going to hire someone as a four-year college education, the average right now is when they come out of school they want about $48,000 so that’s $4,000 give or take per month. And as some small business owners, guess what, that’s sometimes a challenge. We have some high net worth individuals that they don’t care about but you got to fix that you got to look at both sides of it. So I saw there was a need in the industry, meaning whatever business owner there was, so back in 2013 I tested the concept to see if it worked, 2014 I launched my first virtual assistant company, and then today, I not only invest in real estate, but I also run a very successful virtual assistant company.
Absolutely love it. Thank you for that overview, and it’s such a needed space. And so I’m really excited to dive into a few of those secrets here. But before we get there, Bob, I’m curious, you know, what was the strength you were given? I think we’re all been given certain, you know, God-given gifts and some people call superpowers, but what is that one gift that you were given? And maybe you identify it when you’re a kid that helps you help people today?
I would probably have to say it’s building teams, building rapport and building teams, and keeping individuals together. You know, I look at my background has to do with sports, I played sports growing up. And as you know, many, many athletes that play a team sport, have the ability to work with each other and together as a team. And now you fast forward into the business world. It’s very difficult to be a lone wolf right now and be successful, right? You need individuals, you need to work with financial planners, you need to work with attorneys, if you’re looking to build your wealth through real estate, you got to work with brokers, you got to work with private money, hard money, everything, it all comes together, you have to be able to work with people. And we’re in a people industry, especially, you know, what’s going on right now everybody’s doing work through the internet through zoom as an example, right? So If we can't build relationships, build rapport, and create a team through the computer, then you're going to be in a very challenging position. Click To Tweet
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And absolutely, I resonate with you, I played football and basketball, growing up playing baseball, and I was really young. And then it was fortunate to play basketball in college on a scholarship. And, and it is almost like, you know, my faith in God, my wife, my kids, and then it’s like basketball. Like if I could play every single day and my knees not fall off, I don’t have the time, I have five kids. So it’s tough to get too much time. But that being said, team sports and the ability to connect with one another to know your role to, you know, work together to achieve a goal. It’s irreplaceable. In my background, it helped me to be who I am today. With that being said, we’re curious what hockey teams you pay? Give me a little bit more about that.
So I went to Boston University and played there from 1992 to 96, fortunate enough to win a national championship to Wow, yeah, I like you have bad knees. I’ve had three surgeries. On my right knee, I was actually playing basketball with my kids in the backyard yesterday, and we are not good. That’s not our sport, I’m just gonna throw it out there. We are not good at that. So it was ugly, but fun. And then I signed with the St. Louis Blues, I played in their organization for four years. And I went to Europe for four more years. So now I coach my three kids in hockey. So once the ranks open back up, you know, it’s gonna be a good day.
Absolutely, absolutely be grateful when they do so. So let’s dive right into a couple of the secrets here. So better efficiency, scale, and time freedom. So what’s the, you know, the number one way, or the top couple ways to help us get out of the way? Imagine, Hey, remember, I’m Brett, I’m an entrepreneur, I struggle with these challenges of control and giving it up. But walk me through as if, as if perhaps, I’m being you know, figuring this out for the first time. So what would you say to me,
I would give you a simple exercise to do, I would grab a piece of paper and write a T down the middle of paper. And I would put income-producing tasks on one side, and then non-income producing tasks on the other. Right, and I would just spend some time writing down every single thing that you do, that’s just a waste of your time. Right? And then I would look at all of the tasks on the other side that say, Alright, what puts about 80% of the income in my pocket? Right? Are they examples? Are they you know, talking to clients on the phone? Or is it actually scraping leads off the internet, skip tracing them, right? To me, that would be a non-income-producing task, that’s when I’m sitting I always look at if I’m sitting on my butt, I know, now everyone’s gonna be sitting on their butt more. But even when I do this, even when we’re talking, I’m standing up, I stand up a lot. So I figure when you’re sitting down, you’re not making money a lot of times, but when you’re standing up, you’re making money. So for instance, if I’m meeting face to face, or if I’m meeting with individuals that actually can, we could work together as a team and make money with each other. That is an income-producing task for me. Right? So you know, I have individuals do it, we get a lot of different answers. That you know, a lot of it has to do with your non-income producing tasks would be, you know, working on a website, maybe posting ads, maybe doing some legal research, drafting agreements, as an example, right? If you’re in the leasing space, commercial leasing space, that’s a huge waste of time doing any type of paperwork, all the paperwork stuff that can be outsourced, that is a non-producing task, right? Whereas the producing tasks are the tasks that again, are going to be a lot of It is phone work, right? Whether it’s following up, whether it’s talking to brokers, talking to clients, closing deals, those are some of the things that would be producing tasks. I give an example, before on the intro here. So we do have a lot of doctor’s offices as well, because we have a med division side for small business, you know, dentists, etc. And what we do there is we take care of all of the insurance verifications, because that’s, you know, your, you got to look at it, where you’re paying somebody, it could be 50, 60 or $70,000, to do tasks, being on the phone, but verifying someone’s insurance verification, I think I might have said income, income verification, I mean, insurance verifications on the phone, that takes a lot of time, because you have a new patient coming in your office, and you actually have to verify what they’re covered under, right. So there’s a lot of tasks like that they could get off your plate, to where really, as a business owner, you could save a lot of money, I always look at it as I look at it as if you’re doing a $10 an hour task is usually equates to a $10 an hour bank account, we definitely don’t want that. Right?
Absolutely, that makes perfect sense, income-producing activities and energy that that that produces, you know, really more good for more people, using the best gifts that you’ve been given in freeing up that time and energy to be able to use those gifts, versus non-income producing and typically one staining or face to face or communicating, you know, with the client, and the other ones, or maybe sitting down and it’s more screen time or, or, you know, really detailed tasks. So, okay, so that makes perfect sense, maybe what’s the next step from there.
So the next step for there, then you decide, looking at all those tasks, then you decide which ones you’re actually going to offshoot, and then you set up. So this is what I do in my business. So every time I’m talking to somebody, and I’m, let’s say, We’re going back and forth, and then I create I have our customers or clients then create a standard operating procedure task. So for instance, if you want someone to manage your emails, there’s probably three steps that you want them to do that’s particular to you, right, because you’re probably gonna have to color code some, some, some emails, or you’re gonna have to create a folder for another email. Right, so now they come in, and they’re put into all these folders, you know, I get thousands of emails every single day, my, you know, if I literally have to look at my phone every single time it beeps, I won’t be able to get anything done. Right? out of you know, you’re dealing with the same stuff. So that would be one of the things creating, creating little tasks, or underneath the big tasks. So you get a subtask. And if you start identifying with assessors, so your standard operating procedure for each of those tasks, then you could bundle it up and outsource it, right. And it’s very good, you know, when you look at everything you do, that’s a great way to systemize your business anyway. So Every single thing you do in your business, if you start creating standard operating procedures for each thing, then you could expand, you could scale, you could create more efficiency in your business. Click To Tweet And that’s something it took me a long time to figure out a long time to do. I started that, six, seven years, when I got into business, you know, again, I grew up in a hockey locker room, per se, right. And I didn’t learn anything when it came to business. But through the years, through all the coaching and through all the mentoring that I personally got, someone taught me on how to create, how to document every single thing that I did to create then create a standard operating procedure where I could remove myself and hire someone to put them in that spot.
Makes perfect sense. So you know, so creating standard operating procedures, making subtasks underneath those documented at all, and then being able to delegate that I imagine that delegation part is challenging and or finding the right person to be the fit. So is the next step. Is that where you guys come in, where you’re saying, Hey, we’re gonna connect those two things, or walk me through your service a little bit and how this all comes together here.
Yep, yep. So whether it’s my service or anything else, I always keep it the same way. You have to make sure when we’re bringing anybody on, we’re hiring someone. This is some advice I always give. There’s four things we need to know. Number one, you need to know the role. You need to know. So the four R’s, Roles, Responsibilities, Requirements, Results. So for me when I’m looking at it, I look at whether we have to make sure we’re crystal clear on what role we want to actually take-off of our desk or off of our lists that are in outsource that. So if it’s, if it’s lead generation, right, make sure it’s identified and there’s a job description created underneath that one task of lead generation. Next is responsibilities. That’s where each task is identified underneath that role, right? So in the real estate investing world, let’s just say I want to call collar as an example, right. And I want them just to call each and every day to gauge seller motivation. If I’m calling on property managers, let’s just say, and I want to make sure that I’m calling every single property manager, and I have a set script, that’s the role, but their responsibilities are going to be, alright, you log in to this software, you upload this list to the software, you hit go on the dialer, and to keep dialing, and you follow this script. And then once you actually connect with someone, you get someone who’s motivated and working with you, then you fill out the form and it automatically emails to the client. That would be the tasks under the responsibility. So you get roles, responsibilities. And then what are your requirements? Do you require somebody who’s got a four-year college education with a certain type of Bachelor Degree in there to require certain experience? Or can you just have someone fresh out of college? Or you don’t even need anybody who has a college education? What are those requirements for you? And then the last one are results? What are the results you expect, out of that particular individual that’s filling that role. So if you follow those particular steps, I think it’s going to help out very, very much with hiring someone and bringing someone on whether it’s again, this is what I do in my virtual assistant business all the time. So this is how we work with all of our clients as well, the same steps when we bring on a new client.
Beautiful, I love that role, responsibilities, requirements, results, and maybe walk us through your story with maybe what was or maybe the last five years, what’s the biggest one that you were the biggest hire that you had? and walk us through how that changed your business and had the most impact?
Yep, so I’ll go with my virtual assistant company, we have literally, our executive of the Philippines. You know, when you start a business in a different country, there’s a lot of different rules, a lot of different regulations, you have to build the correct team. So I found my perfect person to take care of, obviously, all of the Philippine side of things. And what I first said is that, what role did I want this person to fill, and it was the executive it was to manage our sourcing recruiting department, it was the manager training department. There’s the manager placements department, and finally, our operations department. So that’s who I was looking for. And the responsibilities, of course, those are vast, you could be adding a lot of stuff because each department has some subtasks. And then finally, the requirements, I wanted someone who had experience and the experience I was looking for. For me personally, I wasn’t looking for, hey, this is what degree you had, I wanted to see what type of experience you had in the call center industry. Because that was what I was looking for. Because that’s we have a kind of a virtual call center space where we have worked from home individuals on a one on one basis. So those were the requirements I was looking for. And then the results, someone that was hard working hard-charging, that will help create each department. And each department has their own subtasks of results that we wanted to hit. So some of the results we want to hit, we want to make sure let’s go and talk a little bit about the recruiting side, you know, we want to hit at least 300 to 400 applications a month to fulfill the demand that we had over here, not just an example of walking through a little type of roles, responsibilities, requirements, results,
Makes perfect sense now, maybe connected all to someone who says yes, I need that. I want that. How would they? You know, and we are showing an implementation but like, hey, I want to hire Bob, what does that look like on a 30,60,90 day, you know, walk us through that kind of process.
“As someone who regularly hires for online jobs for clients, let me share a little secret with you: the competition is never as fierce as you think.” – Deya Aliaga
So we walked through a consultation, we have a couple consultation representatives that will actually work with you and take down exactly what tasks you’re looking for. And then that gets sent over to our recruiting sourcing department. That and then we look at what we’re looking for. And then that trickles in. So they have training as well. So we have a month of training. And then it goes to our placements departments. Our placements team will look now at what the sale just came in. Let’s just say right, if we were talking about that type of sales and fulfillment, it all boils down to so few if you could actually picture two lines coming together we have admission slash sales, meeting up at placements. So the VA goes through the placements pool in our placements advisor. Then we’ll look at all the tasks that you want done. And then she will go to the pool of virtual assistants to see what they have on their experience, their resume, and again exactly what you’re looking for, whether it’s a phone, virtual assistant or an admin virtual assistant, it’s almost like matchmaker.com. Right? match.com where you’re putting, you’re putting two people together that are gonna be a perfect match so they could have a great working marriage.
Make sense? That makes a great sense. And I am, by the way, you can find Bob a chance and his company, Revaglobal.com. So, Bob, are you ready for the lightning round?
I’m ready
All right, no, here, here we go. So knowing what you know, now, if you could go back to your 25-year-old self, what’s the one Golden Nugget? You would make it? Sure you did?
I wanna smack myself around. First and foremost, that smarten up a little bit. But all seriousness, I would actually, I would have had myself start reading business books. Because when I went to school, I mean, unfortunately, I was on a scholarship just like you, in what happens when you get something for free, you don’t quite take full advantage of it. So I would actually go back to my 25-year-old self. And I would give him a list of books that I would read today.
What is that? Great. And with that being said, what is the number one book you’ve recommended or gifted the most in the past year?
There are two of them. One is leader shift, by John Maxwell, very good book especially for, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs and high-level individuals, because it just, there’s a lot of great takeaways, especially for all of us leaders that are listening on this on this call, and the other one is Traction by Gino Wickman.
Excellent. Give me a digital or mobile resource you recommend for your business,
Digital or mobile resources, I do a lot of reading. So you know, Housing Wire would be one of them. I know, that’s because all the stuff that I do, there’s a lot of groups that I’m in, within Facebook. So I would look at that as digital. I also use a lot of different software just in my business that has data, I use a CRM called real flow and also, prop stream is a very, very good one as well to find data.
Excellent, favorite leadership quote, or theme that you live by,
I would have to save the one right here, right behind me is from the making of a champion tape that my wife, she was a University of Florida gymnast as well gave me some tapes because I was struggling my freshman year. And the quote is The most important qualification for becoming a champion is an intense burning desire. Click To Tweet
Beautiful. What are you curious about right now, Bob?
I am curious about you know what’s going to happen in the next six months to a year in reference to new technology coming out, because now we’re really in where we are really in a virtual space. So what’s a new technology that’s going to come out that’s gonna allow us to run our business more efficiently?
Excellent. So that point, you mentioned real flow? How many CRMs? Did you go through before you found real flow is the one and why did you choose real flow?
There’s a lot of different CRM. Yeah, I’m buddies with the owner. I’ve known the owner for a long time. And they have a fantastic product and they keep adding to it. You know, they every single day, they’re adding new features that actually just helps my business.
Beautiful. How do you stay centered in your values, Bob, after all, your success and all your achievements, 100 properties, a virtual assistant business empowering equipping people with your services? How do you stay centered in your values, and encouraged to charge forward to reach new goals?
There’s always somebody better. That’s what I always say, there’s always somebody better. So for me, personally, I’ve always been driven to be the best and to be the best. I mean, there’s Michael Jordan’s out there, there’s LeBron James is out there. So for those individuals in, you know, you take those names, you put them into our space, right, whatever, whatever space that is, there’s always someone better out there. So for me, I’m always chasing, I’m always trying to push myself reading different books and, you know, learning different strategies. In the end, you know, you get better and better and better before you know it. So you could pass all those things down to your kids, tell them through stories and what you learn and through your experience. So that’s probably what I would, I would say now.
Beautiful, hey, I want to thank you for being on the show and sharing your gifts, your talents, and your inspiration for us here to get out of our own way. Right and to start to delegate and hire a virtual assistant. For our listeners who want to connect with you to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing and how we’re working. Where can they find you?
Again on my website that’s Revaglobal.com that’s revaglobal.com you can email me direct Bob@Revaglobal.com. And also, we do have a podcast called Friday coffee break. Like, every Friday morning, 10:10 am PST, bring your cup of coffee, bring your questions. It’s an open q&a question and answer for everything, whether it’s real estate non-real estate specific. We do it live. So there’s no hiding. Fantastic, which is a great, great thing to do. I mean, the same thing you do here. So I absolutely love what you do. So I appreciate you for having me. Yeah.
Bob Lachance, Thank you so much, and that’s Revaglobal.com. Thanks for being on the show.
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About Bob Lachance
Bob Lachance has been an active business owner and real estate investor since 2004. Bob is an entrepreneur by nature and currently owns, operates and manages many different businesses around the world. Bob helped create one of the top Real Estate Coaching and Mentor programs in existence today and also created one of the premiere Virtual Assistants Staffing companies, REVA Global LLC. Bob is an expert in the real estate investing space and has an incredible reputation for creation, implementation, and execution.
Bob is a sought-after mentor and industry expert, lending his voice to countless real estate investors, startups and entrepreneurs looking to take their businesses to the next level.
