From Real Estate To Operations

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I knew at some point we were gonna hit, you know, some roadblocks where I either couldn't grow the company and couldn't accept new clients, or I was gonna have to start delegating out. So with being a brand new entrepreneur, I did, I learned a lot. Like I made mistakes. I hired the wrong people. I did the wrong thing. I didn't show up like maybe I should have, right? Um, and I I would say that I've learned a lot from that. And I've I've also been able to help a lot of our clients and stuff with their growth as well, because I've experienced it.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Welcome back to Plan Like a Boss. I'm your host, Tanya Lawson, and today I am so excited to be here with Jennifer Stats. Jennifer is chief of staff at ShurSend, an AI-powered CRM your team will actually use. Before joining Shuresend, Jennifer spent over a decade as the founder of Stats Solution, a leading operations and marketing consulting agency where she worked inside dozens of brokerages, mortgage teams, and service businesses nationwide, training agents and admins at scale, building hiring and onboarding systems, and helping owners create businesses that didn't depend on them being in the room every day. And she's a contributing author to Owning It, a best-selling collection of essays about women stepping fully into ownership of their lives and work. Jennifer, welcome. I'm so happy to have you here. That was quite the introduction.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

I'm excited to be here as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Awesome. Well, I I'd like to start every interview on the show with your story. Tell us how did you get here?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yeah, it's it's actually funny where I started. So when I was 20, I decided to get my real estate license. I don't know why. Everyone asks me that like, what made you get your real estate license? I don't remember the exact reason, but I I did that. Um, I started selling, I had the opportunity to start running an office, and I that's when it clicked. Like that was my thing. Like the operation side, helping run businesses was, you know, definitely something that like really, I really loved and I felt like I was really passionate about. Um, fast forward to having my first kid, and I decided I was not gonna work a nine to five anymore, and I was gonna start my own thing. And this was pre-COVID. So it, you know, I was like, I'm gonna try to start a virtual operations management company. I had never heard of anything like that. I don't think there was anything really in the space like that, but I'm like, I'm just gonna try. And it completely took off. And we had, you know, within six months, I started having to hire and scale the company because we had a lot of clients knocking on our door. Um, and then, you know, fast forward, the company year over year doubled in size. And um the company now has grown to the point where it doesn't need me as much anymore. And so as of January 1st, I took a job with um Easy Home Search and Shuresend as their chief of staff. So it's been a long road, but now I'm here.

SPEAKER_02 3:05

That's great. I love that story. And I love that, like you said, having a child made you want to like ditch the nine to five and start something on your own.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

So, and I know a lot of women out there can really relate to that. Now, let me ask you this. You mentioned as as it started growing quickly, you had to you had to hire. How did you handle that as a new entrepreneur? Like reaching out and having to do all those hires.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Lots of learning, lots of learning. But I knew because my goal of starting my company was to be really present with my kids, I knew that in order to to like offer the service that I knew

Early Hiring Mistakes And Lessons

SPEAKER_00 3:47

I wanted to provide, that I didn't want to end up with like an 80-hour week job. So I knew at some point we were gonna hit, you know, some roadblocks where I either couldn't grow the company and couldn't accept new clients, or I was gonna have to start delegating out. So with being a brand new entrepreneur, I did, I learned a lot. Like I made mistakes. I hired the wrong people, I did the wrong thing, I didn't show up like maybe I should have, right? Um, and I I would say that I've learned a lot from that. And I've I've also been able to help a lot of our clients and stuff with their growth as well, because I've experienced it, you know? Um, but definitely a lot of trial and error and learning um with a growing company.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

I think that's the fastest and I don't want to say easiest, but easiest way to learn is that trial by fire, right? Yeah. No, speaking of hiring um a lot of my audience, solopreneurs or entrepreneurs with small teams, like you were when you were first starting out. Their first hire is often a VA. Now, time after time, I've seen these VA relationships completely fail. Based on your experience, what is the real reason that most onboarding fails? And what does a tight onboarding system look like for a solopreneur or an entrepreneur with a really small team?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Yeah. I love that because I feel like there's so many times that you you listen to

Why VA Onboarding Usually Fails

SPEAKER_00 5:15

podcasts or you go to a conference and they're like, you need to hire a VA. You need to hire a VA. That's what you need to do. You need to scale by hiring. And I don't disagree. Like it can really, really leverage your business on a really high scale, but you need to be ready, you know, and you need to be ready for any hire. Like it's you when you're onboarding anybody, you need to be ready for that person you're bringing on. But I often find that the virtual team members you bring on have a much higher failure rate than in-person. And a lot of times it's because the in-person team members, they're probably sitting right next to you. They can look over your shoulder. Maybe you're the type of an entrepreneur that hasn't gone, you know, you know, paperless yet, so they can look at the desk. And so I like to say with any onboarding, this could be in-person if you're a real estate broker, this could be a contractor, this could be an agent, any of it. But more often than not, the reason why your hire is gonna fail is because you weren't ready for them. And a lot of time that starts with onboarding. So imagine you show up to your job on Monday, you know, Monday's your first day, you're really excited, you get to work, uh, you don't have a you don't have the password to your computer, you don't know the Wi-Fi, you don't have an email address set up, there's no training, your boss didn't put enough time on the schedule to even show you what you're supposed to be doing, and you're sitting there like, oh, this kind of sucks, right? That doesn't feel good for the person starting. And then generally what ends up happening is that the onboarding or the training takes so much longer, the person doing the hiring is also not happy. So you're starting out this relationship really, really poorly. So, what I tell a lot of people, especially when you're hiring a VA for the first time, is you need to be ready. And that's gonna start with onboarding. Okay, do you have a very clear system? And it can just start as a checklist because everyone gets overwhelmed with like this crazy thing, fancy thing you need to have. No. Start with a checklist. Okay, what do they need? They maybe need a computer, maybe they need a password to a computer, they need an email address. What type of usernames need to be created before they log in on Monday? Um, do you have time set aside? This is the most important part. Do you have either recorded trainings or do you have time set aside in your week to train this person? Because most of the time, what I hear is we're really busy. Maybe we're a solopreneur at that point. We've never hired. We are just maybe our hair is on fire, we're just that busy. And we think that by bringing that person on, it's gonna solve all of their all of our problems, and we're gonna magically have a lot more extra time. And I'm gonna say that that's actually the opposite, generally, in those first couple of weeks. You're gonna need to invest a little bit more time with this person, and then you'll get a but much more time back. But I find so many times with a lot of our clients that six months into hiring someone, they're like, they're just not going to do a good job. And I talk to their admin, and their admin's like, well, they've never, I've asked them a million times to show me how to do these steps. They won't sit down with me, they won't show me. I don't have weekly meetings or check-ins with them. And it's like, well, you didn't invest the time in this person. So setting up a really good onboarding plan is really important. And then also as you're scaling, so as you start to scale more and more and more, let's say you're at the point where you want to bring on a couple different people in one week, right? That feels really overwhelming. But if you have a really solid onboarding plan and you know exactly how much time that's gonna take you to do, you know what you need that week. Like I know our onboarding plan at stats. I tell new employees, you don't even need me for the first three days because there's so much documented and ready for you to just hop in and do it. They could do it over the weekend and they could really start working on Monday if they wanted to. And so I'm confident that I can hire three, five, ten people at one time because I've got it all documented. They know exactly what to do. There's other people chiming there, you know, they have we have a system of like who's making the email signatures and stuff like that. But you just need to start out with like a simple checklist to begin with.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Gotcha. And it sounds to me like a lot of people may say, I don't have time to train them, but in reality, you don't not have time to train them. You have to take that time.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

That's my thought. I mean, you need to have some recorded stuff where you need to spend the time with that person one-on-one. You gotta do something.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Well, it may be the first time as you're training them, record it on Loom so that the next person can watch it. Gotcha. Okay, now a lot of entrepreneurs also sometimes hire out of need or out of sheer panic. Like this company is getting out of control. I've got to hire people, I don't know what to do. So, for any entrepreneur out there who's currently flying solo or maybe just has an assistant, how can they tie their hiring trajectory to their own goal setting of the company and hire proactively rather than reactively?

SPEAKER_00 10:24

That is a common problem. Everyone that's listening, you've I bet

Proactive Hiring With Goal Planning

SPEAKER_00 10:29

you about 50% of them have done the, oh my gosh, I really need someone, I need help. I'm gonna hire someone's sister. And maybe it wasn't the right hire for the position, but it was the most convenient one, or maybe it was the cheapest one or something like that. Um, but you know, like I said before, when when we're looking at some of these systems and these plans, right? So if we're talking about onboarding or something like that, we can start to gauge how much time something in our business takes, as you start to look at the growth trajectory of your business, you can start to see, okay, if my goal is to go from two clients to 10, and I know that every client approximately takes me, let's say five hours a week, right? You can start to spot as your growth is going up when you're going to need to hire. Don't hire when you're over here. You need to hire when you're over here so this person's trained and ready to help you get to here because it's gonna, you know, create some, you know, a bottleneck right there. Um, so you just have to look at what do you need in your business? And everyone's business is so different, right? So it's like, okay, to get from here to here, do I need someone in customer support? Do I need someone in marketing? Maybe if I hired someone to do my bookkeeping, it would get me a little bit of time back in my life, right? Um, so I always do an exercise like with my clients. So I'm like, okay, where what are we trying to do? What are we trying to get to? And what do we need to either delegate out or what do we need to just maybe there's items that we've never done before to get to the next level. Um, and so you really do need to think more proactively with some of these things and look at the products you're offering, right? What is it gonna take? And maybe it's not people, maybe it's technology or something like that, but you still need to look at that before you get to this point. Because then what ends up happening with a lot of us entrepreneurs, we're like, oh my gosh, we got here, we have the 20 clients, the 30 clients, and now we're working 80 hours a week and we're burnt out. So you wanna make that, you know, start delegating earlier than later.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Okay. You mentioned technology. Now, with all of the AI tools that are out here right now, I know a lot of entrepreneurs out there, they pay for AI tools. They don't even know they're paying for anymore. So, what kind of technology stack would you recommend to someone with a very small team or a solopreneur to help them out with

The Lean Tech Stack That Works

SPEAKER_02 13:02

without maybe, maybe they don't have the money to hire the full team they need. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yeah. So I love AI. I use it on a daily basis. Um, I also don't really see it as a thing to fully replace my team. I I really like looking at it as like, okay, now my marketer, instead of doing this amount of work, she now can do this much work because she has she can leverage AI. I'm not getting rid of her. I'm just, we can do so much more now than we could before. Um, but if I were to say the very first piece of tech that someone needs to, in my opinion, invest in is a good CRM. It's like the basis of all of our businesses, right? And within that CRM, a good CRM, you can manage sales, you can manage clients, you can manage, you know, pipelines. Where is this person in the process? You can measure marketing, you know, all of those things. Generally, CRMs are not very expensive. I mean, they can, like there's certain CRMs out there that can be quite, quite expensive. But to me, that's where the basis of like your client journey can live, right? So then when maybe at this point you're not ready to hire yet. And that's fine. Like you can do a lot by yourself. Maybe your business model isn't that you want to leverage people, but you can start building out some of these checklists in a CRM. You could start building out some of your workflows. Um, it's gonna sound so boring, but you can start building out templates and stuff like that. Like, how many of us, every time we get a client, we send a similar email, welcoming them, giving them instructions. That's your email templates. That's what you're gonna give your hire in the future and be like, this is how I onboard a client, this is how I deliver my service. And now all of a sudden, you've created a system. It's much quicker to do the next try. Now you have you have a system that you can hand to maybe an assistant or a customer service rep, and it's your language and how you would have done it. And so you continue to scale the business with without you, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Yes, I love that. And you bring up such a good point. Um, I am I have one team member part-time, and she does one thing and I do something completely different. And I have my own workflows documented just for me. And because there's so many elements to what I do that if I don't have it documented, I'm gonna drop the ball on something. Yeah. And if you're just starting out, you know, Jennifer brings up a good point. Document what you do, it will help you. And then down the road, you're going to be set up to bring on an assistant, a VA, or someone else on the team, and you can just hand over what you've already been following.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Yeah. Yeah, that you bring up a great point because like I used to do this for myself too when I was actively selling in real estate. It was like I didn't have an assistant yet, but I still sure as heck had a checklist that I had in my CRM. So I could be like, okay, this is what's happening. I need to do this. Maybe I need to buy a client gift, maybe I need to send out and ask for a review. And I often see, and I'm just doing it for myself, right? Because I want to make sure that the client journey is consistent with my own self and I'm not recreating the wheel every time. Cause I hear that so many times, especially in the real estate space, where they're like, I have no reviews online. And I'm like, but you sell 300 homes a year. How, how is nobody leaving you a review? Well, I just never ask them to. And I'm like, okay, it's a very just simple thing in your checklist that you have either you or your admin or whatever, you have an email template that says, Great working with you, please leave us a review. And all of a sudden you have a hundred reviews. But it's part of that checklist in their CRM that just prompts them, hey, do you want to send this email? Yes, send. Done, two seconds. And now your Google My Business is has a million reviews on it.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

Yeah. And so many people think, or maybe they feel uncomfortable asking, but really, if if you provided a service that the client is pleased with, they're gonna be more than willing to leave a review. Now, as any entrepreneur starts to build a business, the business is their baby. And it's so hard to let go of that control. To the point that a lot of business owners become a bottleneck in their own business without even realizing it. So, what are some some of the first signs that that is happening? And what do they need to do about it before it starts getting worse? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

This is so common. I think I have like two emails in my inbox

When You Become The Bottleneck

SPEAKER_00 17:52

right now about business owners reaching out because they're just getting in their own way. Um a lot of it takes self-reflection. And and I'm gonna tell everyone as your business hits certain thresholds, you're gonna continuously have to watch yourself and figure out, constantly asking yourself, like, what is the bottleneck? What is going to be the bottleneck, right? So as you're looking at your yearly goals and as you're looking at how your business is working, you need to look at it and go, okay, when am I gonna get in my own way? Maybe there's other people on the team that are gonna be the bottleneck because there's, you know, maybe there's too many, they make too many decisions or there's too much on their plate. Um, some of the signs I've noticed when maybe someone hasn't even realized they're the bottleneck yet is they're getting frustrated. Maybe they have too much on their plate. It's not going like they had anticipated it going. Um, and or their team members are starting to get frustrated because they can't get answers that they need, or the the workflows are not flowing like they want to, because maybe the business owner always needs to review things before they go out, or maybe there's certain things on the business owner's plate that they just can't get to, right? Um, and so you really need to be looking at yourself quite often, being like, should I be doing this? Is there a better way to be doing this? And look at your team members too, right? Like a lot of us as business owners are like, I'm the only one that can do this. And that's fine. I'm not saying that you need to delegate out your entire role, but maybe there's a more efficient way to do it. Um, one piece of feedback that I've given my team when I felt like I was being a little bit of a bottleneck, because I have multiple times over my career. Um, I would empower them. I would empower them and go, hey, I trust you, I believe in you, you've been trained, I all these things. Get the project to 95% before you even send it to me. Get it there, because then my review time is going to be much, much less and I can get through things a lot quicker. But then me as the business owner, I've also learned that in the beginning, I probably would have given or tweaked things way more than I do now because I was realizing I'm the bottleneck because things can be done a little different than maybe I had, or maybe a graphic would be done a little different than I would have made it, but I didn't make it. And is it actually beneficial to edit those things or do those things? So really just kind of being self-aware and then trusting your team too, that you're building around you, that they can do things. And then once you start to let go a little bit, you realize that a lot of the people are that you're building your team with can do a lot of these things better than you can. And that's when you really truly start to let go.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

100%. But the hardest part, I think, is that initial letting go and giving giving your team that permission. But I think sometimes if you give people the freedom to do what they do best, because that's why you hired them in the first place, and you don't try to control them all the time and let them actually do the job you hired them to do, like you said, it takes a weight off you, but it it also makes your business better.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:14

Mm-hmm. Now, you built Stat Solution to the point where you could go into, you know, you could step into a full-time executive role while it kept running. Okay. What does a business actually need before an owner can actually really truly step back from the day-to-day?

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Yeah. I mean, you need good systems. Like there is not any part of me that doesn't

Systems To Step Back Daily

SPEAKER_00 21:40

still have oversight on my company. And that's because I have systems in place where I can go and I can look at the customer journey. I can look at meeting notes, I can do all these things, and I can have a very high level view of what's going on everywhere, right? It took a long time to get the systems to where. I could really step back and just kind of poke in and make sure everything's flowing like I want it to be flowing, right? Um, but that's what it takes. It's gonna take you going through your business, making sure that everything's documented, that there are clear checklists that are everyone has a clear understanding of what they're supposed to be doing and how they're supposed to be doing it, right? If that doesn't, if that isn't there yet, that's fine, but you need to get it there if that's your goal. And a lot of entrepreneurs, they want to start another business, or maybe they want another start another line, or maybe they want to get ready to retire, right? You need to get the business to that point. And it and the one thing, the main thing to really understand is it doesn't have to 100% be on you. I am constantly working with our team to make sure the system is really well refined. And a lot of times when you ask an admin to, hey, can you create SOPs on that? Can you create a checklist? Can you create a loom or training on it? They're instantly thinking, are you trying to get rid of me? Like, why do I need to create a system that I already know how to do it? And I'm always empowering the team of like, no, that I'm not trying to get rid of you. I'm trying to make sure that there's a clear system that if you want to take tomorrow off, someone can help you, right? It's always a very like team approach at stats, which has worked out really well because that you know it's not me creating every single SOP and every checklist. It's me working with my leadership team, being like, hey, let's relook at our client onboarding. Does it make sense? Are we providing a really amazing service? Let's tweak some of these steps because there was a lot of questions that came up, and they're tweaking it with me. So then I can really have that high overview on the company. So that's really the feedback that I would give if you're listening to this and you either want to get to the point where you can retire or you want to get to the point where you can start something else. A lot of our clients at Stat Solutions, that's what they do. They, you know, they have one successful company and they want to do another one. And you can't be in the weeds on every single one of them. So really creating that level of support and that level of systems that you can go in there and you can trust that the process is being done exactly how you would want it done. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Now, let's say, let's take this kind of a step further. So they've built the they've built their business up, or or maybe, maybe they haven't. Maybe they're still a team of one. And they really want to maybe bring on one other person. They want to only work maybe 30 hours a week. They want to have the flexibility to spend time with their families.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Yeah.

Boundaries That Protect Your Time

SPEAKER_02 24:44

How do they set up systems and boundaries in a manner that makes that possible?

SPEAKER_00 24:53

I I I want to like take a step back. And when I'm talking about systems and checklists, there's so many people that just glaze over and they're like, I don't even want to touch any of that. That sounds really boring. It sounds like a lot of work, it's really hard. And I want to like urge anyone that's listening that it's really not as bad as it sounds. Like I we always start with a very simple checklist. Here are all the steps to do this thing. Okay. And we we can use onboarding as an example because we've talked about that a couple of times. But it's like, here are all the like really high level check, check, check, check, check. This is what it takes to onboard a person. And then over time, we go back through that checklist and we add steps. So, like if a person that never worked within the company could come in there, they would they would be able to follow the steps and be able to mostly do most of the projects. And then we layer on who's responsible for that, right? So, and I I usually don't ever like a person. I don't like that task to be assigned to Jennifer stats. It is a role. It's like the administrative, the manager, the da-da-da. That's who I put on any of these workflows. Because you need to have an understanding of if I want to take Thursday off and we have to do X, Y, Z, who is doing what task, right? So no matter what platform you're using, whether it's in your CRM or Asana or if it's on a Google Sheet, you need to understand who's owning that. That way, if maybe you're off for the day, you can put someone in there for that, right? Or you can say, hey, I'm not gonna do that today. It's gonna be tomorrow when I get back on. But you need really clear guidelines and boundaries of who's doing what, when is that gonna happen, how does it happen? So you don't come back, you're like, well, I took Thursday off, but now I came back on Friday and I have a thousand tasks to do, right? You really need to make sure that you have a clear understanding of what it's gonna take for you to do that. Because again, if we go back to like the company growth, right? If I know that for every client that I bring on, 20 of those tasks are assigned to me and it takes me five hours, and I want to bring on 50 clients, I've hit my cap, right? So that's really easy for you to go back through a checklist like that and go, okay, you know, this this step is really important. It needs to be me, but maybe this step could either be automated with AI now. There's a lot of things that you can do with that, that doesn't need to be you anymore. Maybe it needs to be delegated to a human. And then you can start to figure out who you need to hire, what you need to do. So you can you do that because I that's really important too. I mean, I did that with sets for a long time. I took, I took Thursdays off. And so I really I wanted to be a mom on that day that was like very important to me as my kids were little, and so it took a lot of that looking at it like, is this reasonable? Can I take on another client? Or it can be as simple as based on what I want my business to be, and based on me wanting to work 30 hours, I can't take another client. And that's fine too. But you need to have an understanding of what that's gonna take.

SPEAKER_02 28:00

I love the way you explain that. Now, the majority of my listeners are possibly you when you were first starting out, starting that business. So I want you to think way, way back to that, Jennifer. If you could give her one piece of advice, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 28:19

I mean, I I think going back, it's we're so ingrained as business owners. I I

Advice For New Entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_00 28:28

think just that you have to work 80 hours a week to be successful. I feel like that in the back of my mind, it was like, you have to work weekends, you have to work nights, you have to be available, you have to do all this stuff, and you have to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, build it, build, build, build, build. And so I, and I would beat myself up about it, right? Like I'd be like, oh my gosh, I we're not growing as fast as I want to, and we're doing all these things. And I and I so I would say, like, it's your business. You can grow it as fast or as slow as you want it to go. And because you're to me, it's you're building your life with it. And so that's one thing I'm really proud of looking back is I like I did grow slower than I could have, but I was able to drop the kids off at school every day. I took Thursdays off and I was able to take them to kids stuff. And that can also be, it doesn't have to be kids, right? It could be, I want to be able to go to the gym. I want to be able to go play on a softball team. Like there's other things that are important as well as your business. And so really go into it looking not only excited about the business you're growing, but your life as well.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Excellent, excellent advice. So, where can people find you? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

If you want to reach out to me personally, it's pretty easy. I've had my Instagram handle for forever. So you can find me at Jennifer the Realtor. Um, you know, feel free to message me. I love helping people with their businesses. If you want to learn about SureSend, um, which is where I'm the chief of staff, um, you can go to sure send.ai. We do have a 14-day free trial. You can go in there, get in there for two weeks, play

Where To Find Jennifer

SPEAKER_00 30:04

around, see how that's going to benefit your business and help it grow. Great.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Well, thank you so much. It's been so much fun talking to you. And like Jennifer said, your business is your business and you need to grow it in a way that aligns with you. So until next time, keep planning like a boss.