Geo Arbitrage & Real Estate

Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00): Welcome to another episode of the Off Market Operator. Today's show you guys is all about global talent, globalization, remote workers, what I call geo arbitrage. A term I heard that I love. It's how you can build your business in a profitable way with staff that wants to work for you, staff that will stay with you for a long time. You know, a really meaningful way for any business owner to start thinking about scaling their company without breaking the bank, which is a win-win for you and a win-win for the global talent. So, without further ado, let's get right into the show. People don't fail at real estate because they suck, they fail because there's too many ways to succeed. That's why I suggest you focus on the most important skill in all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Cole Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps I've used to source 400 deals by age 24. This will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make unlimited income, and build your empire as an off market operator. (01:01): What's up guys? Just got back from Maui, as I mentioned in the last episode, but I'm already losing my tan. I've been home for about five days, but somehow, you know, I thought I had at this time I thought I put enough hours in the sun to have a little more consistency in my tan for, you know, at least two weeks. But I've failed yet again in that regard. But today I show you guys I'm pumped for this one. This is something that I was talking about this week with a friend and I'm a client of his for a certain thing and we were talking about geo arbitrage, right? Geo arbitrage is a powerful thing, right? I think we're in the, the warmups of using remote overseas talent to support stateside smb, small businesses and real estate companies specifically. So this episode is all about how you can vertically integrate remote overseas talent and geo arbitrage for your company. (01:46): Get cost down, get profit up and get more done. And I have some one-on-one clients I work with closely in the real estate space and I've been helping a lot of them with this. Dial this in cuz it changes your life. I mean there's really like, what's the saying is like 20% of what you spend your time on is what actually moves the needle. It's the 80 20 rule. Everything you do, 20% of it's the stuff that is actually moving the needle forward. And another quote of mine that I love is successful people aren't successful uh, because of what they do during the day. It's because of what they don't do. And then just showing kind of the discrepancy of, you know, how little things move the needle and things we think are important like our email and like slack and stuff like that. How actually unimportant they are. (02:26): And so for me, what I've found in my business, right, the more I get into geo arbitrage, the more I realize big companies, you guys have been doing this forever. Like it's, it's us that are behind, right? In our political system right now, there's so much backlash about, you know, using globalization, extorting global employees. But it's not that When I went down to see our Belize office in person, when I talk to our remote teams in Egypt, our remote teams in the Philippines, you see smiles on their faces cuz you're giving them an employment opportunity that a lot of those people don't have in those countries, right? You're paying them three, four, $5 an hour US dollars, which is nothing to us. But at the end of the day then the minimum wage is $2 an hour. U s D and Belize paying them three 50 an hour. (03:02): That's an incredible life. And they work in a safe space. They have a natural ascension in their career. That's a beautiful thing on, on both ends when you really actually are, are on the ground. You see it on both sides. So companies like Nike, right? Nike people that are making our clothes and making our shoes and making our hats and making our to design our bags, they're getting paid $3 an hour all over the world. Nike's been doing this forever. Okay? Same thing. You look at your iPhone, where do you think Apple makes these things? Apple doesn't make these things in an American factory somewhere. Paying people $30 an hour. They're made by people putting those things together for $3 50 cents an hour all over the world. These big corporations have figured out globalization and they've figured out geo arbitrage to a point that no one else is really touching on at all. (03:46): And in terms of like the real estate space, no one's really talking about how powerful this is yet we've heard of lead managers and we've heard of cold callers or we've heard of admin, virtual assistance, but no one's really talking about how you can build a whole business around geo arbitrage. Okay? And not only that, it becomes a vertically integrated thing that you can point to other, uh, people as client, potential clients and other industries in other businesses. So when we talk about geo arbitrage, you guys, the first thing you have to do and understand is one, you can't treat these people like they're anyone else other than your normal employees. The biggest mistake people make when we talk about geo arbitrage is they go and they hire someone from the Philippines or from Egypt or from Belize or from South America or from Mexico. (04:24): And what they do is they start treating them like they're below everyone else and their staff, right? Communication's bad. You don't give them compliments, you're not training them, you're not coaching them, you're not mentoring them, you're not giving them a clear path to success. And that matters. You guys, I can tell you we've had some virtual assistance with us for four plus years, some even longer than that. And the reason that we've had so much success with them is cuz we treat them like an internal part of our team and we make sure that when we train them on something, we train them the right way. So many people just do not know how to manage and train and you can't put that on your remote talent. When you start to geo arbitrage at scale, you're gonna get frustrated and go, oh, these people suck. (05:00): But really what it is, is you suck. Okay? If you can't manage someone overseas for three, four, $5 an hour, that means you probably suck at managing your state side team too. So for the first thing with geo arbitrage, you guys are gonna start looking at it more, right? Every single task in your business should be written down and if it, it's not involved with hiring, recruiting, and training people, improving systems and processes or creating content internally and externally, it's not a thing you should be doing if you're a responsible business owner that's scaling a company. Okay? When I really internalize this, all my companies have gone to a level that I can't imagine this week sitting in May, beginning of June, we've, we've done across my company's about 300 k cash collected this week, okay? And the reason we've been able to do that is cuz instead of going, oh, I'm gonna do busy work, I'm gonna do emails, I'm gonna do Slack, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, I've really dialed in on every single thing I spend my time on, right? (05:46): It's creating a new system and process that can give my team to build out training, recruiting, and spending time with our team, with our people and content like this. Like I make one podcast and this lives, people can come to my YouTube channel and watch this forever. People hit me up all the time. Hey Cole, I saw your podcast, saw your YouTube, but I have to do this one time. I spent 30 minutes recording this episode one time and then I'm done. And then you guys can consume it forever. That's high leverage. So with geo arbitrage, you want to hand off everything, high input, low output, even high input and high output to a geo arbitrage person. If there's any critical decision making, then you wanna keep that internal on your internal team in terms of repetitive tasks. Geo arbitrage is the way to go. (06:25): Virtual assistance overseas talent is the way to go. And I'm gonna start shouting that from the rooftops for all of you guys that will listen to this podcast or follow me across social media to listen to because it's important, it can change your life. It's changed my life in more ways than one. Taking it back a step. You guys, what I've done, the changes that I've made in my companies is, you know, we just have, we kind of follow EEO s but we have a very dialed in process of all of my time goes to is those things. So for example, with, with my assistant, so now I have an executive assistant, okay? She's actually moving up. Her name's mj, she's incredible. If you guys have messaged me at all, you've probably talked to her. She's gonna be moving up the chief of staff, okay, well that chief of staff position is in my organization across all of my orgs, okay? (07:04): She's responsible for strategic projects, okay? She makes good money, she makes well over $70,000 a year, gonna be close to a hundred thousand dollars a year here in the next two weeks if she fully evolved. And that chief of staff position is responsible for complex projects. Okay? So I'm not going and giving MJ and she's not in Philippines, she lives in Toronto. Incredible part of our team and the chief of staff position in our org. Okay? What that org chart is, is i, I give her a complex task. So hey, go create this system. Go create the process. I need to learn about this. Go find me the three best courses. Okay? I need, I need X, y, z done. I need to, I need to recruit and train someone in this department. Let's go give, bring me five candidates. That's her job. Now, chief of staff below her, what she was doing was my executive assistant. (07:47): So she was handling my emails, my slacks, uh, my calls, my calendar, my bills, my travel, all that kind of stuff. And now we're bringing the second person under her to take over that department so she can focus on the chief of staff position way more in depth. So that's, that's what her responsibility is on that side of things, okay? Below her we have an army of people, you know, gr arbitrage people overseas that work in our call centers across our real estate company or other things we do, we probably have 20 plus. So all in all, we have fully employee, well over 200 people that live outta the United States that are part of this kind of globalization thing I'm talking about. And the the best thing as well is it creates internal competition because people in our organization know if they're not performing well on certain tasks, it's gonna be taken from them, given to someone who will perform that task. (08:28): And a lot of time it's gonna go overseas. And so it creates a culture. For example, in our call center, all of our leaders in our call center, they all have designated virtual staff they can use to delegate any tasks too, okay? So not only do we use them as strategic positions, but every single leader in our company has access to those people. So as they're doing their time audits, cause I have our leaders in our company submit me time, audits not cause I wanna micromanage, well cause I wanna help them get stuff off their plate so they can spend their time on their highest and best use, which is normally not going to be email, slack, calendar, follow up, contract renewals, that kind of stuff. We either solved that through automation or globalization. So if you guys want to go hire global talent, you guys, I've made a virtual assistant, uh, podcast way, you know, probably a couple months ago. (09:09): But overall you guys can go to work. I works an incredible place for global talent. Fiver is an incredible place for global talent. Online jobs.ph is an incredible place for global talent. Shepherd's a great place for global talent. There's so many different places where you can source global talent, but what I can tell you is action is way more important. Im perfection. Don't try to create the perfect job ad don't try to create the perfect job posting. Don't try to have the perfect interview process. Get a job, add up, start talking to people, get someone hired, and then create the SOPs and, and system for them to succeed in your organization. Whether you are a real estate broker, an investor, s and b owner, whoever you are that listens to this podcast, you need to pay attention as you arbitrage and start implementing this into your company. (09:51): A S A P. If you want any chance of keeping up with a lot of the people that are finding out about this, especially in the the real estate industry, okay? We're not even in the first ending, you guys we're in warmups of this. And the companies that really learn how to hire, train, delegate, and manage overseas talent, okay? And make them part of their org are going to have profit margins, companies and teams that people can't compete with, right? Because the more margin you have on a menial tasks overseas, the more you can pay your leaders, the better leaders in your company you have that can take your company to a level. You can't imagine. My manager philosophy is hire good people will get outta their way. And so I go source, vet, recruit and hire really good people and I get outta their way and I'm able to do that because our profit margins so good because all the low level tasks is hired out to VAs. So that's the show for today, guys. Hope you enjoyed it and I will see you next time. (10:41): Boom. Great show you guys. Thank you for coming back for another episode of the off market operator where I try to give you and serve you up tactical tips you can implement into your company right now where that's real estate, SM B, whatever that is that you're doing in your company. Tactical tips that you can take to go from h to O to a, from hustler to operator to architect and man understanding VR arbitrage and global talent can really move the needle for you on, uh, going from hustler to operator and eventually operator to architect and your company, your companies. And as always, you guys please hit me in the DM on my stories, share this podcast with a friend means the world we can help other people continue on their journey at entrepreneurship as well. And please, wherever you listen, apple, Spotify, wherever that may be a like a five star review, it's the world. So without further ado, as always, you guys, you are one deal away.