As businesses become more globalized and reliant on technology, the need for remote workers has become more prevalent. Virtual assistants are one type of remote worker that can provide various services to businesses, such as customer service, administrative support, social media management, and customer acquisition. With the help of VAs, you can free up your time to focus on other aspects of your business or help you with tasks outside your skill set. And that is what Stacy Rossetti talks about today. Stacey shares how she found her first VA to now having 15 VAs on her team. She also discusses the tools and software she uses to seamlessly operate her business with personnel on the opposite side of the globe.
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Hiring Virtual Assistants To Help Find Storage Facilities
We have eleven storage facilities. We also have 200 in contract and looking to buy more facilities. I’m looking forward to the next couple of years. The storage industry is going to be a lot of fun. I feel very blessed to be in this industry and help you educate yourself and get into it because it’s a good industry to be in. Give me your thoughts on what you think is going to happen over the next couple of years in the storage industry. I did a session. I can’t remember what session it was and you can always go onto my YouTube channel. You can search Stacy Rossetti Teaches and then find all my previous sessions.
I did a session about the market and what’s going to happen to storage in the next couple of years. I’m in a couple of storage groups and some private groups. A lot of owners are saying that the market is cooling and their vacancies are going up. Keep that in mind when you’re purchasing. I feel like the market is going to cool. The cap rates are going to start increasing. This is my opinion but I feel like this is what’s going to happen.
When you get out and start a storage facility, you have to keep in mind what’s going to happen. If you get into a tertiary market and run numbers at a 6% cap, you might be hurting down the road because typically, a tertiary market is an 8% cap pre-COVID at least. Even more than that, I was buying simple like 9% and 10% cap pre-COVID. I feel like the market is going to cool a little bit and the cap rates are also going to cool. You’d have to keep that in mind when you get out there and start looking for storage facilities. When I say tertiary market, for everybody that doesn’t know, it means country.
I typically buy storage facilities that are $1 million or less in either secondary or tertiary markets. I am not a huge big storage facility buyer with 300, 400 or 500 units. Typically, my units are anywhere from 75 to 150 units. I’ll go up to 200 units. We’re looking at facilities that have got 200 to 220 units as long as it’s in that threshold of around $1 million to something like this. Keep that in mind. I’m telling this to my virtual assistants. That’s what we’re going to talk about, virtual assistants and hiring virtual assistants.
Mobile Home Parks
Mobile home parks and self-storage facilities hold the best rates, which is true. It’s so funny because we talked about this. For all of you that don’t know, I travel full-time and we are staying in RV parks. It’s the summer so we’re staying here. We’re at the Grand Tetons. The RV park that we’re staying in is quite large. It’s a beautiful, brand-new RV park.
They’re full. I feel like maybe over the summer, they might start filling up. We have been to many parks since January 2022. January to June 2022 is when RV parks are not filling up. You have to keep that in mind if you’re looking for an RV park. A lot of people are turning to RV parks, storage facilities and mobile home parks, trying to figure out which industry they should be in because residential is not a place to be in and also, multifamily, which is way too much competition. A lot of people are looking for storage, mobile, home parks and RV parks.
I want StorageNerds to be a great coaching program for everybody. It is only a great coaching program if my students buy storage facilities.
The truth is that storage facilities are also cooling. Keep that in mind because in all these Facebook groups I’m in, everybody is telling me that vacancies are up. If you do own a storage facility, let me know if vacancies are up. I’ve talked to a couple of students inside the Storage Nerds Mastermind who own storage facilities. They’re also saying that it has been slower than before. You have to keep that in mind when you’re looking for facilities to buy. The market is cooling. You don’t want to be running your numbers at such a low cap rate when it could increase over the next couple of months to a year and then you’re losing money.
Make sure that you’re buying at the right cap rate. That’s my life. That’s my tip for the day on buying storage facilities. The market is cooling. Buy at the right cap rate. What is the right cap rate? I don’t know. It’s whatever you think the right cap rate is. It’s whatever you see that you’re going to be able to sell the facility later too as well. I would say tertiary markets are anywhere from 7% to 8%.
This is what I’m telling all my virtual assistants. Secondary markets are 6% to 7%. I feel like we’re going to have a different number. It’ll go back to the way it was pre-covid. We used to buy stuff at 8%, 9% and 10% caps in income-producing properties that have good cap rates and then for 2 years, that was gone. We’re all lowering our cap rates. Things are getting back up there again.
What I wanted to talk to everybody about were virtual assistants and how and when to hire a virtual assistant. For all of you that follow me, I appreciate you. I teach, find them, fund them and run them. That’s like the way that I teach. What I wanted to do was go over virtual assistants, how to find them section, the fund them section and the run them section.
Why & When To Hire A Virtual Assistant
I’ll show you a couple of different things, places and stuff that you can look and things that you could do. Let’s talk about virtual assistants. When should you hire a virtual assistant? I’ve never told anybody this but my husband and I have about 30 people that work for us. We have a huge, big team of people that work for us. The reason why we have so many people is that we have a lot of different companies. We have thirteen different companies.
We started a new company which is called StorageNerds Acquisitions. It’s a way for my students to be able to hire my acquisitions team to find the facilities. They are rocking and rolling. We have a team of 12 virtual assistants but the goal is 15. Those virtual assistants are all from the Philippines. A lot of people ask, “What is a virtual assistant?” A virtual assistant is somebody that can do tasks or full-on jobs for you. I decided to hire a team of virtual assistants to help my students find deals.
The reason why is I want StorageNerds to be a great coaching program for everybody. The only way it’s a great coaching program is if my students are buying storage facilities. How can I get them to buy storage facilities? I can help them find storage facilities to buy. That’s what it’s looking like. We started this at the beginning of 2022, started to talk about it and think about how we’re going to do it. We’re working together with Chris, who’s my acquisitions manager and he’s been with me for several years. We were talking about this concept. I decided to hire some virtual assistants that could help me do some simple tasks.
How To Hire VA On Upwork
This was not about acquisitions at all. What I did was I went on to Upwork. If you don’t know Upwork, it’s a website where you can hire freelancers. You can come in and it’s free. You come in and post a job. Essentially, you create your job. A virtual assistant could be short or long-term work. We hired acquisitions specialists.
You go through and fill it out. They take you through a step-by-step process to create a job post. I am going to ask everybody, have you ever created a job post on Upwork? What kind of a job was it for? I would love to know. Was the person successful or not successful? What country were they from? Were they from America? Were they from outside of America?
You can hire every single type of person from across the board. If you don’t want to hire anybody outside the country, you could click the button, “I only want it to be inside America.” If you want to do it worldwide, you can do it. I always do worldwide because I want to know who’s looking at my stuff. It’s interesting to see people from all over the world trying to find work and stuff.
What I did is I went on to Upwork. I needed some tasks done and one of the tasks that I needed to be done was a competition tracker sheet. This is available to all of my students in coach accountable. We own eleven storage facilities and what we do internally is keep an eye on our competition. What are they charging? It was all of our facilities. We have eleven tabs. Essentially, Ball Ground and Fayetteville are two of our facilities. I have a good handful of people but I said, “I want a spreadsheet that can show me the competition, what they offer and how much they’re charging.”
We came up with this spreadsheet. The truth is the spreadsheet when she first started was 3 or 4 columns. As she started going through and looking stuff up, I was like, “You should add this.” She started going back and adding everything and stuff too. Essentially, this was her very first task. Her name is Karen and I hired her from Upwork. The task was, “I want you to create this master competition tracker sheet.” She ended up creating this beautiful spreadsheet that had everything that you could imagine about the competition. I sat with her a week later when we had our meeting and I was like, “What did you come up with?”
When you have a virtual team and you’re growing, you want everybody to feel connected with you.
She went through it. I was like, “This is so good.” It started to get me thinking of maybe I should be hiring more virtual assistants to do more stuff. Maybe they could do more. That’s where the conversation started. I asked her to do the next task, which was all of the facilities in Texas. I was like, “Why don’t I hire her to start making a list of facilities?” I happened to be in Austin spending time there.
Wherever I go, I always drive for storage because that’s how I find storage facilities. I went around and found a whole bunch of storage facilities. I was like, “Can you please put these on a list and make a list for me?” She made this spreadsheet for me, which was amazing. She put this spreadsheet together, which was the storage facility address, city and population. We do several stars, reviews, notes and stuff.
When I met with her the next time to look at her sheet, I was like, “That’s such a good sheet.” She took the time to put this awesome sheet together. I was like, “I need to give her some more tasks. Maybe she should start calling all of these people on the list. Maybe she can be the one that calls instead of Chris or me.” We asked her, “Would you be interested in calling owners?” She was like, “I can do that.”
She was all up for it. She’s from the Philippines. Some Filipinos are very reserved, nice and friendly. They’re not disrespectful at all. She was very cordial. Chris, our acquisitions manager, worked with her to get on the phone and start talking on the phone. She started calling all these people on the list. She started to get leads from them. Essentially the whole process was I was only going to hire her to do a couple of tasks. I was like, “I’m going to find some tasks.”
One of the tasks was, “Let’s make some spreadsheets. All the stuff that I don’t want to do, let’s do that.” She was so good at making all these spreadsheets and stuff. I was like, “This is good. Maybe I should hire her full-time so that she could start working for us.” She then started doing the cold calling for half a day. The other half of the day, she was building the list. That was her job. The 1st half of the morning calling and the 2nd half in the morning building the list.
From there, she started getting all these leads. I only pay her $7 an hour. That’s it. She started the first week and I paid her $100. Now, she works full-time and I pay her less than $300 a week. She builds the list. How does she build the list? She goes onto Google Maps and looks on Google Maps to build lists. She started building the list and then calling. She has 3 deals that she’s working on for 2 of my students.
The Acquisition Specialists
This is all in a couple of months. We let her do that small task for a couple of weeks and then she started building a list and then we started training her on the call. She’s already working on three deals and putting offers in on deals. I can get into the process for that. Essentially my whole point is that all I did was go on to Upwork and made a post of some tasks that I know I don’t want to do but I need to be done. I paid a couple of dollars for those to be done.
I tested out other projects on this person. I decided that this person was somebody that I wanted to hire. She’s part of the team and she’s rocking and rolling. She’s the reason why StorageNerds Acquisition started. It was like, “I could train this person to come in and do the sales and call.” The people that we work for us, we call them acquisition specialists. Their job is to make one offer a week, which doesn’t sound like a lot. The truth is that making an offer is quite a lot of work. If you think about it, you have to build the list or get a list from somewhere.
You have to build a list and then call. The way that their week looks so you have an idea of how it works, their job is to make one offer a week. That means on Mondays and Tuesdays, they are hustling, bustling, calling and trying to get a hot lead that somebody wants to have an offer on. Chris is my acquisitions manager, which is my lead trainer. His job is to help them on the phone because, essentially, they’re people from a different country trying to call people in America. If you know how that is, that’s hard in itself, trying to talk to them.
On top of that, try to talk to an owner and get them to want to get an offer. That’s a lot of work and training. Chris’s job is to work with this person to be able to talk to people on the phone and strangers on the phone and get them to want to get data. When I call, people want to talk to me. When Chris calls, people want to talk to me. When some stranger calls that has an accent, a lot of people don’t want to talk to you. That’s what he’s doing. On Mondays and Tuesdays, they’re calling. Their job is to find somebody that wants an offer.
Once they find somebody that wants an offer, they have to get all the information from them for us to be able to make an offer. That’s getting the purchase price if we can get the purchase price. Some of them don’t want to give the purchase price. They’re like, “I want this much.” You have to get the income, the number of units, the total square footage, the property taxes, the utilities, the insurance and then the unit mix. We’ve taken this to a whole other level.
Essentially Mondays and Tuesdays are calling and they’re getting that lead. Wednesday, they’re working with that owner. “I need this information.” Wednesday, they’re putting everything into the deal analyzer. All of my students have access to the deal analyzer. They’re filling out our deal analyzer with the unit mix and all the information on the input sheet. Also, they’re filling out all the information on the competition. The competition is the hardest part. You have to look for competition and then get all their prices and information. The competitive analysis is the most important part of the equation. That takes a lot of time and effort to get in there and input all this onto the deal analyzer.
It would help if you worked with a virtual assistant to get better at getting the owner to want the offer. That’s the key to your success if you want to hire a virtual assistant to help you find facilities right now.
There are pictures of the property and property information. They’re finding pictures on Regrid. They use Regrid because it’s free. They use Google Maps and put pictures of whatever they can find. I like to have aerial view views. I like to have in front of views of the facility. They’re putting the property information and the property report card. It comes right from the county. Another thing that they do is the executive summary.
I’ve been doing this for years. Essentially, the executive summary is a synopsis of the deal so that I can look at the deal in an instant and decide whether or not this is a good deal or not. They can also look at the deal. Chris or a lender can look at it or whoever. That’s what they put together. They got stuff here off of Regrid. There is the property report card, a map of the location and some information about the county and the deal analyzers here. There are pictures and videos. They put all that together for me because we have fifteen virtual assistants that are putting deals together, putting offers for us. We need to be able to go through these quickly. We do executive summaries so I can quickly take a look at them.
In the beginning, when I hired all these virtual assistants, the way it worked was I hired Karen and then Karen suggested a friend of hers come work. Also, another virtual assistant that I had worked for me for five years, his name’s Ivan, asked if his brother could come work. They all started telling me, “Hire this person.”
Communication Process
Out of everybody that we’ve hired, all fifteen of the people that we have, Karen is the only one that I found on Upwork. She’s the one that started the train. Everybody on the team is like family because they all have worked together with other people. We communicate through Skype. We have the acquisitions team and all of them say good morning in the morning.
In the evening time, every single person has to post an end-of-shift report. They tell everybody on the team what each person has done for the day. Karen, we’ll check their emails and call. She communicated with Ellen of storage to confirm other inflow, updated the deal analyzer, communicated with an agent of Mesa storage, downloaded documents and pictures and started to create the deal analyzer for the new lead. She communicated with Chris and asked for help with other concerns. Every day, they all post out their end-of-shift reports so that we all know.
This is a way for us to all talk to each other. If you have any questions or anything like this, then it’s all here. I hire Sharice. Everybody’s welcoming her. The reason we started putting everybody into Skype was that, first of all, we needed to communicate with each other. Everybody’s all over the place. When you have a virtual team and you’re running a virtual team, you want everybody to feel connected with you and everybody else. Some people may know we talk, goof off and share what we’re doing.
I share what I’m doing. They all know what I’m doing. At the end of the day, I also put my report in and Chris also puts his report in as well. They can know what stuff that we’re working on so they can feel connected to us as well too. You need more of a connection when it’s virtual. That’s what they do on the acquisitions team. The process is that they do Mondays and Tuesdays, building the list and calling. I’ve asked all my acquisitions managers how many people are calling in a day and they’re calling around 25 owners a day.
Remember I said, “They can’t call anybody until they have a list of 300 names.” That’s the goal. It takes a good couple of weeks for them to build 300 names up. They then start calling and it takes time to start getting acclimated, figure things out and stuff like this. After one month, you should be able to make one offer a week. Mondays and Tuesdays, they’re calling. Wednesdays, they’re working with the owner to try to get information from them so they can run the deal analysis. Thursdays and Fridays, Chris or I go over the deal and do the offer. They also put the offer in.
We have what’s called the magic letter. Essentially, it’s a cash offer. The acquisition specialists make the offer. They learn how to fill out and run the numbers for all of the owner financings. For the first couple of times, we help but I’m telling you, they pick this up super quick. They are the ones that finish the offer. Once they finish the offer, they’ll send it for approval from us and over to the owner. Once they send it to the owner, they have to make sure that the owner has received the offer because essentially, a lot of times, we email it and then the owner never sees it.
They always email it, call and let the owner know. If the owner doesn’t pick up, then they leave a voicemail. If the owner does pick up, then they talk to them and let them know. Also, if the owner doesn’t pick up, they text message. That’s one thing I didn’t talk about but we use JustCall for all of our virtual assistants for them to call out. It’s a phone operating system. This is where you can come in and then set up a way for your virtual systems to be able to make phone calls.
It’s super-duper easy peasy. It was not even that expensive. I don’t know how much it costs, honestly, because I don’t pay attention. I’ve used a lot of different online phone systems. The reason why I like JustCall is that it records the call. That way, Chris can go back and listen to the calls to make sure that they’re saying what they should be saying to help and improve them while they’re on their calls. That’s Chris’s job.
We have fifteen virtual assistants so that’s a job in itself but essentially, your job would be to be able to listen to the phone calls that your virtual assistants are doing so that you can help them get better. The hardest part about phone sales is that it’s a phone sale. We want them to be good. They can get it there online. You can find all the data and they can input the deal analyzer. They can do the magic letter offer but it’s getting the owner to want an offer. That’s the hardest part of everything. You work with them to get better at that. That’s the key to your success if you do want to hire a virtual assistant to help you find facilities.
You can’t call a storage facility owner and have a script. They want to like and trust you. So, try not to use scripts.
Remember, we pay our virtual assistants $7 an hour, which is very nice pay in the Philippines. That’s a good rate because a lot of people will pay less but I give a living wage. I do pay a little bit more and they’re all very grateful for that. They think $7 an hour is very good. You can say, “You can work 30 hours a week. It could be $210 a week or $200 a week.” You can have them work 40 hours a week, which is $280. I feel that’s a very reasonable fee for somebody to become involved in all the work that they’re doing.
We do have a couple of deals under contract that our virtual assistants have found. For anyone that we close on, they do get a bonus and it’s going to be $1,000. That’s where our bonus is going to be. That’s a very nice bonus for them as well too so that they can make some money and we all make money together. You want to make sure that you treat your employees like family and then they’ll stick around forever.
That is the acquisition of virtual assistants. I’ve been using virtual assistants for many years. We got a whole bunch of questions here and I’ll do the fun of them in one part here. It says, “Did you do this so that you could target these facilities to purchase?” We have virtual assistants internally and all they do is find facilities for me. I’ve got several, honestly but then also we have virtual assistants that are working for our students as well too. They’re finding facilities for them as well. We do it for anybody in StorageNerds that want to hire our team.
“Where is she located?” She’s located in the Philippines. Everybody that’s a virtual assistant for the calls is all Filipino. I also have a handful of employees that are from Pakistan as well too. I love working with Pakistanis because they’re super hard workers. I love working with them as well too. They’re a little bit more expensive but not too bad. I highly recommend checking them out as well too. You also have to remember too when you’re hiring a virtual assistant, you have to think of their time zone.
This is something that Chris struggled with when he first started. I was like, “They’re twelve hours ahead of you.” It’s like night and day. Even in Pakistan, it’s opposite time zones. You have to keep that in mind. If they’re coming into work late at night and working through the night, having a meeting in the morning time is the night for them. They’ve been working the whole time. You don’t want to have an early meeting with them and they aren’t thinking very well. At least that’s what I’ve noticed.
Getting Rid Of Cold Calling Scripts
They do have cold calling scripts. We’ve written out several scripts for them. It’s so funny when I do interviews with them. You can tell this country when they get hired for positions or get interviewed for positions, they have scripts. Everything is so scripted. It’s like scripts over there. They’ll come on with an interview and the first things that they say, you can tell they’ve memorized it. It’s like, “Hi, my name’s Christian. I would love to come work for you. I’ve been listening to this thing.”
I ask them some random thing like, “What do you do for fun?” They’re looking at me like, “What?” You can tell that they’re trying to figure out what to say. Make sure on the interviews that you ask them random stuff. Ask them questions that get them thinking. Questions like, “Do you know what a storage facility is? Have you read anything about storage? Tell me anything that you know about storage facilities. Tell me what you know about the real estate market in the United States.” Questions that they’re not going to think that you’re going to ask because they’re so scripted.
First of all, I want to hear their English and make sure that they can speak English properly. Secondly, I want them to be able to use their head because the truth is you can’t call a storage facility owner and have a script. It doesn’t work that way. They want to know, like and trust you. They need to trust you over the phone. We try not to honestly use scripts. We teach them to think and listen to the owners. This goes for you as well too. Listen to what the owners are saying and then respond to what they’re saying instead of like, “What about this?” It doesn’t work.
Cole said, “You need to pay her more.” She gets a bonus. They get $1,000 bonuses for every deal they close. That’s a pretty good deal. Dave says, “Are all those people in the Philippines?” Yes, all the acquisitions people are all in the Philippines. “Will you share your list?” All of my files and everything are all offered to my students in the StorageNerds coaching program.
If you want any access to that, you can get access there. I do offer some stuff in the course Super Simple Self-Storage. If you want access to my deal analyzer and the facility sheet, due diligence stuff and all kinds of stuff, there’s a whole bunch of different templates that come with the quotes as well too. You can always get the course if you want that.
Sales And Automation Process
“Do you continue to follow up with the owners that may initially not want an offer letter?” Yes, we do. We have a whole follow-up process. Once a quarter, we touch base with everybody. We use Pipedrive. I don’t know if anybody has ever heard of it but it’s sales and automation software. That’s what we use internally to keep all of our facilities. If you think about it, if we have 15 different virtual assistants and they’re each doing an offer a week, that’s 15 different offers. That’s like you got a lot of different offers going around every single week. What Pipedrive does is create your stages.
You can create whatever you want. For instance, we have the seller offer stage, the deal analysis stage, the made an offer stage, the under-contract stage and then the closing stage. We have five different stages. You move each lead. Once it goes finishes one stage, it can move into the next stage. You can visually see all the different offers from all the different people. You can keep track of what’s needed for each one. You can’t move it from one stage to the other unless everything from that stage is complete. There are these required sections and stuff.
If you don’t have all the required fields filled out, you can’t move it to the next stage. It’s called Pipedrive. It’s great software. Anybody can use it. It was a little bit expensive but not too bad for what it’s worth. It’s great. If you’re one of these people that has a lot of deals, you want to be able to handle all those deals. You have to check out Pipedrive.
“When talking to owners, how do they refer to you or the acquisitions manager?” That’s exactly what they say. Chris is the head acquisitions manager and their boss. I’m the owner. Sometimes they’re like, “I want to talk to the owner.” A lot of times, Chris will call first and then introduce himself. The truth is a lot of owners give information to the team. We don’t need to be too involved. What we’re involved with is giving them a thumbs up that the offers are good and making sure everything that we need for the offer is inside the folder.
We quickly go over that and then give them a thumbs up to send that information out. That’s what we do. That’s the acquisition specialist for virtual assistants. That’s only one of many different virtual assistants. I didn’t think it was going to take that long to talk about it but this is a good session. I can always talk about the virtual assistants that we have for the run-it side and the management side as well too because my husband, Pete, manages all of our facilities and the fund’s facilities.
We have about 1,000 doors. There are 6 of them to run 1,000 doors. We’re growing. We’re about to add 300 more doors. There’ll be six of them to manage that. Those are all virtual assistants and things like that as well too. In the next one, my husband talked about how we manage our facilities in several different episodes and YouTube videos. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of managing and hiring people on the management side, then I recommend that you check out all those episodes there.
That’s it. I’m not going to get into any more information about virtual assistants. We’ll do another session with all of the other virtual assistants that I have. If you’re interested, I’m going to my pitch, which is StacyRossetti.com/Fund. I have a 506(c) Reg D fund, which is a fund that you can invest in passively. You put the money in and I will do all the work for you. I always pitch it right after the session. If you’re interested in that, you’ll have a great deal under contract. I’m trying to raise money for this deal so that we can close it and make some money. I appreciate your time during this session. I will see you next time. Take care, everybody.
