The big break, the corona, the zoom revolution, the scattering and the focus.
Entrepreneur of the Week Yuval Naveh # Post 5
Towards the end of 2019 the company settled on 2-4 trades per month on average, and then came the corona. The uncertainty was huge and the months of January and February 2020, which were already considered slow months were horrible.
THE ZOOM REVOLUTION: In my life we started using Zoom long before everyone else (just a pity we didn’t buy stocks) in order to overlap and teach those 4-5 employees we had at the time.
With the corona came the free time and especially the flood of talented and needy workers from home. The company was already half mature, so we took the opportunity with both hands. We started recruiting dozens of additional employees. Eyal, who was in charge of the recruitment, brought a real "reality": former stewards, people with experience, and more. With the help of some of my veteran employees, I created an intensive set of purchasing and sales overlaps, and Eyal does the same in the Back Office Lead generation. When the company is already starting to do all these operations In House and getting better results from week to week. Slowly we reached dozens of hot leads a day and an overlapping manpower capable of handling them.
The system:
Proper recruitment of employees - jumping off work and discipline - and intensive overlaps
Cold Leads - Hot Leads - Signed Contracts - Field People Go to Properties Take Photos and Assess the Condition of the Property - and at the end of the process, either selling the contract in most cases (because we just don't have enough cash to buy 30 deals a month) or saving the properties - renovating, selling or holding.
At that time we already understood that the administration printed a lot of money and real estate came out of uncertainty to tremendous growth thanks to the virus and thanks to many investors who came from the capital market. The private homes, which are the bread and butter of our company, have been in huge demand due to the desire to get out of buildings.
We were in the right place at the right time, and by the middle of the year the company had already employed close to 30 employees, doubled its operations and also expanded and opened a branch in Houston Texas with two local Israeli partners.
Dispersion:
While in Cleveland we were used to an average profit of a deal between 7-15K per deal, in our first two months in Houston we discovered that the same amount of sales could be made with double profit!
We were dazzled and opened our Orlando, Florida and Dallas, Texas. We were confident that our path to the major markets in the US with our powerful System is paved!
Very quickly we found out that not all glitter is gold… Orlando closed after three months without a single hand !!!! Dallas has made two or three deals in six months and its expenses have exceeded revenues. And in Houston, too, we ran into difficulties.
We realized that these markets are very competitive and that the sellers in them are more intelligent and aware of the value of their assets, and we have already turned to them with thousands of wholesalers before us.
Focus:
Akron - Towards the end of the year we opened Akron (a suburb of Cleveland), a market that has always been physically close and also close to the heart. We have found that it is much easier for us to operate in small markets. At the same time we also started to keep more and more deals with us and even find buyers in this area.
2021 - This year we already fully understood that this was the direction and opened Lorraine, Canton and Lake (all around the same Cleveland metro).
We continued to grow, doubling the number of employees, and recruiting more people - both for office work and as field workers. Our sales volume has stabilized at 10-20 transactions per month including working with large clients such as American and European funds. In addition, we started buying properties directly - some for flips that we have end customers for or flips in the market, and of course more and more holdings.
Today we try to buy ourselves 2-4 properties every month, with the goal being to keep and hold as much as possible.
In the same year we also opened another company to outsource our data services: telephones, lead telephones, lead filtering, letters and other services.
Just recently we left Ohio again and opened a new area in Georgia. The ambitions for the coming year are again to double our activity and open 2 more new markets that are already in our sights.
Hope you enjoyed, in the next post I will attach some advertising content and how I would love to work with you.
In the pictures below:
My veteran employee interviews a new candidate and sends me the idea as an example of the zoom revolution.
And I'm with one of the field workers in Cleveland.
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