How to Outsource Consulting Work (and Diligence Real Estate)

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Hi team!

The consulting business is beautiful. One big reason why is how quickly it can scale.

Here’s a terrible company to scale: a DTC brand, like Allbirds shoes.

Allbirds launched with just one product: their flagship shoe.

But, they sold it to men and women. And they needed 10 different sizes for each gender.

Suddenly, that one shoe turned into 20 different SKUs.

And they needed inventory, so they had to purchase thousands of pairs of shoes for each SKU.

That becomes a logistical nightmare for a startup. Logistical nightmares are not fun to scale!

Consulting is the exact opposite.

You don’t have different SKUs. You don’t have to pre-order inventory.

You simply sell your hours. You can sell more hours, up to maybe 10-12 a day, without any issues. You don’t need to buy more inventory of shoes to sell more hours!

That’s why it’s possible to go from $0-$500K in a year.

But, what happens when you run out of hours? Or, you have tasks that will absorb too many of your hours?

That’s when you need to hire freelance support.

Or, maybe you need to do so earlier?

Today we’re talking about

1. When to hire help as a consultant

2. How to hire help

3. A sneaky real estate diligence trick

Here we go!

1. When to hire help as a consultant

“Hiring” is a fluid term these days. When most think of hiring, they think of HR and onboarding and full time salaries.

Most independent consultants don’t want to hire full time employees. They will never “hire” in the traditional sense.

(That’s a longer conversation I’ll touch on at a different point. The headline is this: a consulting business scales beautifully from $0=> $$$$, but it does not scale well from 1 employee to 10 employees)

But if we’re talking hiring freelance help for spot projects: then you should be hiring earlier than you think you should.

Back at my “big consulting” firm, they used to teach us to outsource work if it takes more than 15 minutes of repetitive work.

An easy way to tell you’re doing this is if you’re clicking a lot. If you find yourself repeatedly clicking, you’re likely doing something manual.

And if you’re doing something manual, you should be sending it to someone else to do.

Think about it from the client’s perspective

The client is paying you (likely) $100+/hour. If you spend 15 minutes on a basic task, the client just paid $25 for you to do that.

Would the client be happy with the $25 dollars they just spent for you to download big datasets?

Or, would they have preferred you to focus on higher level tasks and outsourced help for the manual stuff?

Here’s another tip: if you would feel embarrassed telling the client how much time you spent on a manual task, then you shouldn’t have done it.

This will feel uncomfortable at first, because you’ll notice there is opportunity to outsource work a couple times each day.

Here’s a line my old consulting firm told me during training: “If you are not outsourcing something at least every day, you are doing this job wrong.”

2. How to hire help

Great! You found something manual you’re doing that will take a good amount of time. Let’s outsource it!

There’s a LOT that goes into hiring.

We’ll focus on one element of it today: how to structure the work.

In my experience, the best way to do this is:

• Create what you want the output to look like

• Create a Loom video on how you want the output completed

• Send both to a freelancer

Check out this Google Link

Included in there is an example of both structured work, an example Loom of how I would send the work, and why I send Looms.

(BTW: sorry for last week’s Loom video not working! It sounds like it didn’t work for everyone!!)

Interesting Property of the Week

Normally, I highlight an interesting property here.

Today, we’re going to briefly talk about a nifty trick.

Check out this property. Outside of the broken door, the kitchen looks normal.

However, I would bet anything the inspection report will be terrible.

Here’s the trick: there is no vent hood over the stove. You need a fan, vent, or a microwave with a fan over the stove.

This is a gimme. Every single contractor worth their salt will refuse to install a stove without a fan. Every single inspector would notice this and put it into their report.

Contrast that with this kitchen. This kitchen “passes” because it has a microwave over the stove.

In my experience, a home without a vent indicates that at least some “work” was done on the house by an extremely inexperienced contractor.

That typically means lots of issues in the house, and that you’ll get an absolutely terrible inspection report back.

But, that doesn’t have to be you!

I love this trick because every single listing on Zillow has pictures of their kitchen on it. That means you can always check for this issue before you go visit the house yourself!

How can I help?

If you reply to this email, it will come directly to me & I’ll respond.

This email comes out on Friday’s so I’ll likely get back to you next Monday or Tuesday

I don’t have any formalized training to help people get started consulting, but will next year. My goal is to make people $350M in consulting (more on that here)

Investing in single family homes in 10/10, elite high school districts has been the best investment of my career. (More on that thesis here)

A real estate rockstar and I are teaming up to scale this thesis into a real estate fund. If you are interested in investing, or would like to watch a fund creation process, feel free to follow along here!