I met a delightful neighbor of mine today.
In his 90s now, but back in the day he was an architect and apprenticed with none other than Eero Saarinen (St Louis Arch, Dulles Airport, and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport).
One of my all-time favorite architects. A legend.
I asked him what Eero was like.
He made an interesting comment.
He said people always showed up with their fancy resumes and portfolios full of work samples and letters of recommendations, and they were always eager to try and show off to get Eero’s attention.
But Eero didn’t care.
Instead, he’d push all that aside and look at the person intently and say, in a super slow voice, “Draw a picture of a horse for me” and then walk away.
When he came back, he’d look at the drawing and make a decision about whether or not he wanted to hire the person.
Apparently he could see all he needed to see from the way they drew.
Fascinating.
I do something similar when hiring assistants.
I ask them to do something very specific in how they submit their application to me, and if they don’t follow my instructions to a T, I don’t even bother looking at their application and I reject them summarily.
Why?
Because if they can’t follow specific instructions to get a job with me, then they won’t do any of the work I want them to do correctly. And I’ll spend my time aggravated and frustrated by having to deal with them.
So I screen them aggressively right from the start.
Much like Eero did.
(Guess I’m in good company.)
Interestingly, I used to have my Virtual Assistants do all the research on properties that I found by Driving for Deals.
It’s a lot of little detailed work that required lots of different research techniques to try and find the owner and to get the full low-down on the property.
But these days I have an even better system.
All that little detailed work, and all those different research techniques — all that time-consuming stuff (thus why I outsourced it) — is now done much easier in a fabulous one-stop-shop software app called DealMachine.
As I drive by a property I’m interested in, all I do is tap it on my phone to add it to a list and then pull up all the tax record information, and even skip trace information.
So much easier than having a virtual assistant do it.
It’s like Eero asking to have you draw a horse.
It just tells you everything you need to know.
Simple and straightforward.
I like it.
And I daresay you’ll like it too.
After all, “Driving for Deals” is one of the fastest and most straight-forward ways to find deals.
That’s what we’re teaching at the next Traction REIA meeting, which is being held totally ONLINE.
#1. ONLINE :: Main Monthly Meeting
Matt Kamp from DealMachine– “7 Days To Traction: Finding Off-Market Deals Challenge”
***SPECIAL ONLINE REIA MEETING***
Thursday March 23rd
6pm to 9pm Eastern
5pm to 8pm Central
4pm to 7pm Mountain
3pm to 6pm Pacific
Tom Zeeb
President
Traction REIA:
13+ Consecutive Year Recipient of the National REIA “Honors of Merit”
and the “Award of Excellence”
For Best Real Estate Investor Association!
