Welcome back to the show, I’m glad you’re here again.

If you’ve been in the short term rental world for a while, you know there’s a lot of moving pieces, and it’s hard for us to manage all of those pieces by ourselves.

So I’ve very often recommended hiring a virtual assistant.

But one of the challenges that’s come up recently, or more recently, is that a lot of virtual assistants are working multiple jobs.

So I want to give you three signs that they may be working another job and how you can handle it.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actual items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back, I’m glad you’re here again.

We’ve talked a lot about virtual assistants in the past.

We’ve got quite a few episodes on it.

If you go to strriches.com, you can go back and find all those old episodes that have great interviewing tips, they have the places to go to, which we’ve hired a lot of people off online jobs, and another site called Job Rack that is more in Eastern Europe.

I received an email recently from the CEO of Online Jobs.

I actually was out on his newsletter, so he didn’t send it to me personally.

But it did have some good information, and it did have something that’s very relevant with our business, and that is that a lot of virtual assistants are working multiple jobs these days.

And so before we jump into this, before we jump into some of the signs that maybe your virtual assistant is working another job and how you might handle that, I want to just lay this out there.

It’s not that having multiple jobs is bad.

In fact, I think that’s great.

If you’re hustling and you want to earn more money and multiple jobs is the best way to do that, then that’s great.

The problem is, if you’re working another job on someone else’s dime, it’s essentially stealing, right?

It’s dishonest for sure.

You’re taking up resources from your employer, from the company, the person that hired you, and worse yet, if you’re working on a team, you’re really taking away resources from the rest of your team members.

And so it’s dishonest in our company.

Honesty is one of our core values, and it’s something we’re really, really strict about.

So unfortunately, we have let a few people go recently because of this.

So before we get into the signs, let’s just jump into why a virtual assistant might do this.

Well, it’s pretty obvious, right?

Instead of just making one stream of income, they could make two or three or four.

Who knows?

It really just depends on the type of work that that person’s doing.

And if they’re able to do that in a way that sort of drags their employers along, thinking that they’re fully engaged, well, then they might make three or four times more than they would if they were just dedicated to the one position.

So where is this happening?

Well, we know that it’s easier than ever to hire people virtually, which is fantastic.

And don’t get me wrong, we have some amazing people on our team that have been with us for years.

And I’m excited to work with them for a long, long time into the future.

It’s just that this has gotten a little more challenging.

And so we need to keep an eye out for some of these signs.

And when something’s not working out, we need to make some decisions.

So this is really happening all over the world, right?

But if we look at some of the places that are more renowned for having virtual assistant work, like the Philippines, I would say in my experience, from hiring in South America, from hiring in the Philippines, and from hiring in Eastern Europe, that we are seeing more of this in the Philippines.

A part of their culture for a long time now has been virtual work, right?

There’s lots of call centers set up, but people prefer to work from home, and so this is just one of those challenges that comes with a little more freedom in the workplace working from home.

There are tools out there, I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, that allow you to track someone’s time, they allow you to track someone’s engagement, actually monitor their screen by taking random screenshots.

The challenge with these tools is that it’s really easy for someone to get around them if they want to.

They could just have another monitor, right?

They could have another computer, they could be working off their phone and be working on another job on the other computer.

So that’s not really a solution for solving it, right?

And I do have a solution, I’m going to get to it, but we’ve used these time trackers before.

They do help us occasionally, you know, if we see productivity drop and we have found people on our team, unfortunately, that we’re working on things or other jobs.

And needless to say, those people are no longer on our team.

So how do you know if one of your virtual assistants is working another job?

Well, it’s really hard to say with 100% certainty, but there’s some very clear signs, right?

So one of them is just delayed responses.

Another one would be just excuses, right?

And so if the way you set up your position with that virtual assistant was for a fixed schedule, which most of our team members are like that, and that’s the way I really recommend that you do hire someone.

We got to remember, right?

A lot of times people are hiring virtual assistants for their short-term rentals, thinking that they’re going to be on call 24 hours, but that’s not the case, right?

That’s not a long-term solution.

No one wants to be on call 24 hours.

And so the way we do it with our company is to hire eight-hour shifts, and we expect the people on our team to be available during those eight-hour shifts.

In fact, we put it right in our work agreement that you are not allowed to work for someone else while you’re working for us.

What you do outside of that time is totally up to you, but while you’re working for us, we are your sole employer.

So delayed response times are pretty easy clue.

One of the rules that we have with our receptionist team is a five-minute response time or less.

So all of the messages that we get from our guests, they have to be responded to within five minutes.

And so if someone is continuously not responding, well, then there’s something going on, right?

And that’s an easy sign.

If you’re new to the show, by the way, my team and I have managed over 40,000 guests.

We’re in nearly 20 cities now.

We have properties in five countries.

We’re completely virtual.

We would love to work with you to help with your back-end operations, to help with your revenue management, to help with your listing optimization.

Our partners are seeing incredible results.

Our last partner that we just brought on in Costa Rica, we increased his revenue 50% this month in October versus last year.

So we’re seeing some really good results.

If you’re interested in chatting with us, you can head over to strriches.com.

You’ll see a little property management button there.

We can set up a time to chat.

So delayed response times, that’s a pretty good clue.

Excuses or low availability when someone’s supposed to be available is another good sign, but it ultimately comes down to productivity.

A really good friend of mine started an amazing company.

They do a bunch of app development, and they have currently over 750 virtual employees on their team.

They’ve hired from all over the place.

And I was a little frustrated recently, and I reached out to him and I said, Mike, how are you guys handling this issue?

And he just said, productivity.

And he said that they’re not using the time tracking tools.

They’re not using the screen capturing tools.

They basically measure everything off of productivity.

And so there’s some really good apps for that now.

Depending on where you are with your short term rental journey, if you just have one property or you’ve got a couple, then you’re not really gonna need like a project management tool like monday.com.

That’s one that we are currently implementing.

But if you do have a virtual assistant helping with your short term rental, you should have a pretty good idea of how long certain types of tasks are going to take, right?

And if you don’t, then you need to reach out to your assistant and ask and find out a little bit more information.

If you guys are both on the same page that, hey, you know, I have a support call with Airbnb, and this should take X amount of time generally, then if they haven’t responded all day, you know, there’s probably something else going on, right?

If they’re helping with your reception, make sure that those response times are nice and quick.

And if you’re trying to meet up and you keep getting excuses, well, then there’s probably something else going on there as well.

So I don’t want to make this episode just completely negative.

I mean, we have some amazing people on our team that I’m really excited to grow with, and the reality is that we just cannot do this job by ourselves if we plan on scaling, right?

If we have one, two, or a handful of properties, well, we can do a lot of these things ourselves, but it doesn’t mean we have all the time or want to, maybe have another job.

And so hiring someone virtual is an excellent, excellent solution.

But we need to make sure that we have those expectations set up front.

A couple just quick tips on hiring, I would ask for references.

I would be really up front about the fact that you know that people are working multiple jobs and that it’s dishonest and it’s not something that you will tolerate on your team.

It’s not fair to your teammates.

It’s not fair to anyone.

And so I’d be really clear about that.

Ask for references.

Go back and check out some of our other episodes on hiring.

You can go to strriches.com.

We even have a cool little bot right in the bottom corner.

You can just ask it, hey, what are your tips on hiring?

We’ve got some great questions there.

And if you do bring someone on and fortunately these things start to come up, well, I would give them a warning.

Maybe you give them two weeks and you monitor things closely.

And if it happens again, well, I would let them go.

So not a super positive topic out there.

This is just going on more and more.

So I want to bring it to your attention if you’re just getting ready to hire your first assistant.

Make sure that you have some way to measure the productivity, measure the progress, whatever sort of tasks you’re working on, whether you want to use a project management tool or whether you just Google Sheets, you kind of need to have an idea of how much work you expect there to be.

And if they’re handling all that work, that’s fantastic.

But at the end of the day, we want someone on our team that’s actually proactive, right?

And that’s going beyond.

And that results in higher pay, right?

If we’re all growing together and we’re doing a better job, then the pay range that we start at is not what we expect people to work at forever, right?

And so that’s what we’re looking for on our team.

Again, we have an amazing team and I feel really happy and grateful.

I just know that this is more challenging.

And I got that email that the CEO sent out that yes, this is very clearly happening and it’s unfortunate.

So let’s do a better job of hiring.

Let’s make this really upfront.

And hopefully this trend sort of goes in the opposite direction.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Whether you’re just getting started or you have dozens of properties, one thing remains the same.

Poor management can crush your investment returns.

Our team has learned a lot managing over 40,000 guests and we’ve compiled our biggest takeaways into a handy guidebook to help you better manage your property.

Equipped with checklists for guest verification to pricing strategies, it breaks down our whole process from start to finish.

Best of all, it’s free for you for being one of our loyal subscribers.

You can get your copy by going to strriches.com.

That’s strriches.com and I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.