Assistants - Life Support for the Busy Real Estate Investor

The idea of hiring Assistants should not come as a surprise to you after reading my "Team" section.

After all, there are only so many hours in the day, and once your real estate investing business begins to take off, you want to be as efficient as possible. Delegating duties to assistants should not be a hard decision to make once you determine what efforts will give you the biggest return for your time spent.

It's probably safe to say that checking e-mails, returning general phone calls, bookkeeping, going to the post office, typing correspondence, updating records, or filing are all things that are better left for someone else.

Even if real estate investing is not your full time business, if you have another job and are doing this on the side, then you will only be able to spend a certain amount of hours a week on the important tasks of locating properties, partners and financing; negotiating and closing deals; and establishing new team member relationships.

The highest and best use of your time is not doing work that you can hire someone to do for $10 an hour. Think about it? If you could hire someone for 10 hours a week at $10 an hour, or $400 a month, at least in the beginning, to do all the tasks you find difficult to accomplish, would that be worth it to you?

I know it has been to me. I've even taken it one step further. I do not clean my house, I do not shop for my own groceries, and I haven't been to an office supply store in months. I don't get my own oil changed in my car, go to the bank, or buy gifts for parties or events I'm going to.

I know some extremely successful entrepreneurs who don't do their own laundry or cook their own meals. They either have their assistant do these things or take care of them online.

When you first hear this idea, you may think it is a bit radical. After all, the idea of not cooking or cleaning sounds like you have to be rich or something, right? But with the number of franchises that are out there today, if you can dream it, someone is offering that service. And the internet makes shopping and having it delivered right to your door easier than ever.

Once you begin using assistants and putting life support systems in place, you'll wonder how you ever did it before. Isn't it nice that you don't have to?