Welcome back to Becoming a Better Business Broker in 30 Days!
This concise series title describes exactly what we hope you get out it - becoming a broker that can close more deals with less work.
If you missed yesterday, check out Becoming a Better Business Broker Day 13: How To Receive Multiple Offers.
Many brokers view business brokerage as a solo venture - it's hard not to. We generally have a one-to-one relationship with the client, we are on 100% commission, and it's possible to close deals by yourself.
Sure, but what if I told you it's possible to convert your brokerage into a deal-closing factory? A factory where each broker can handle over 20 listings at a given time, provide better client service, and increase your brokerage's EBITDA?
Hogwash? Well, that's a term we haven't heard in a while. But no, these claims aren't fake, they're entirely possible - thanks to a combination of remote work + AI.
Now let's glaze into the future at your 2030 brokerage 🔮
The Business Brokerage Support Team
There are a lot of caveats to this article, so let's get'em out of the way:
- If you're a happy solo broker doing a volume of deals you're happy with - don't try to scale your brokerage for scale's sake.
- If your brokerage isn't super profitable - hiring for new roles is a scary proposition - we get it. Fortunately, the access to high-quality, low-cost global talent is better than ever. Basically, the recommendations below won't break the bank.
Now, let's talk about the various roles in your brokerage support team.
Key Roles in Your Support Team
The migration from craftsmen to the assembly line resulted in exponential growth for the American economy.
While we don't tell this to clients - selling businesses is like an assembly line.
Hear us out, regardless of the deal, there are 5 key stages:
- Prospecting - signing the client under a listing/engagement agreement.
- Listing - developing a CBR/CIM and publishing the deal to buyers.
- Buyer Meetings - following up with buyer inquiries, buyer-seller meetings, and general buyer questions.
- Writing Offers - drafting LOIs, negotiating deal points with both parties, and dealing with either party's lawyers.
- Due Diligence - facilitating the transfer of requests and documents between Buyers and Sellers.
All together, it looks like this:
Here's the team on your factory floor helping you get deals closed:
1) Virtual Assistant
- The right overseas assistant can 2x your productivity for 1/5th the cost.
- Starting from as little as $800/month USD, you can have a full-time assistant capable of handling your emails, scheduling, data entry, processing NDAs, keeping track of condition removal dates, and more.
- There are a lot of recruiting agencies specializing in hiring remote assistants. We have had success with Support Shepherd in the past.
Where to delegate:
- Prospecting: meeting notes, email follow-ups.
- Listings: entering data entry into DealBuilder to generate the CIM, entering listing details into the various buy-sites.
- Buyer Meetings: call follow-ups with buyers submitting inquiries
- Writing Offers: sending offers out for e-signatures
- Due Diligence: document uploads, updating item request lists, etc.).
2) Marketing Specialist
- Most small brokerages (1-3 brokers) should probably outsource their marketing to an agency specializing in growth marketing. What is growth marketing? This is paid ads, and organic content (blog writing), helping you develop 'lead funnels' to bring in both buyers and sellers to your database.
- The reason we recommend outsourcing is that hiring in-house means a monthly salary ≠less budget for advertising (when most budgets are already small).
Where to delegate
- Prospecting: the agency or Marketing Specialist should have a target number of sell-side meetings booked in your calendar each week (but you will need to be realistic with your budget).
- Listings: this is a one-time task - but have a marketing agency do a 360º review of your email newsletter, copywriting for listings, and general email sequences. Remember, these firms are experts at removing friction for customers who want to buy - make sure your process isn't full of accidental friction points.
3) Deal Associate
- This is a salary + bonus role that focuses on keeping deals in your pipeline moving forward. This could be the first draft of an LOI based on the buyer's comments via email, the first draft of a valuation, or writing updates to both buyer & seller during the diligence process - essentially your own mini-me.
- Of all 3 positions in the Deal Factory - this is the most underrated. It's also the most difficult to delegate since you are putting a lot of trust in the associate.
- A hidden gem is hiring out of LATAM for multiple reasons: operating in the same timezone, lower compensation requirements, and great English-speaking abilities.
- The best part? A Deal Associate isn't a 1:1 relationship with a Broker. As you can likely have a Deal Associate work with 2-4 Deal Partners at a given time depending on the volume of deals each Partner has in place.
Where to delegate
- Prospecting: these individuals can be trained to complete your 'screening' calls with potential new clients - sending you deals they suspect are in your sweet spot.
- Listings: they can coordinate with your VA to get CIMs created in DealBuilder and published to the buyer database.
- Buyer Meetings: working alongside the VA, get your deal associate to jump on buyer calls to understand their goals, concerns, and questions about the deal. They can then update your CRM and help you book buyer <> seller meetings with buyers who are the best fit.
- Writing Offers: deal associates will start by shadowing you, but can gradually take over the first draft of LOIs on behalf of buyers, cutting down your time per deal dramatically.
- Due Diligence: similar to that of a Customer Support Representative, your Deal Associate in Diligence is going to escalate any issues that emerge from the Buyer, Seller, Accountant, Lawyer, etc. to you. Primarily their job is to ensure that documents are being uploaded and that the Virtual Assistant is checking off items and ensuring timelines are being met.
Superpower Your Support Team with Technology
Doesn't it seem like every day there is a new AI breakthrough coming out? The good news is that you can use AI to superpower your support team. Here are a few of our favorite tools right now:
- Fathom - AI notetaker to summarize meeting notes (crazy good for buyer-seller meeting recaps).
- Superhuman - you will never battle email the same again.
- DealBuilder - you didn't think we'd miss adding this one in here 😉
- Apollo.io - generate high-quality lead lists and have it write the outreach email for you.
- DialPad - auto-summarize photo calls and sync them to your CRM so follow-up tasks are automatically scheduled
Back to the Future: Your Business Brokerage Support Team
How did it feel to look into your future? Did you feel less tension in your shoulders? Start daydreaming about increasing your bandwidth so much you could go on vacation (maybe).
In the introduction to this article, we talked about your 2030 brokerage. Well, that future can start today, as long as you put in the work to get your support team in place. Need some help with getting started? Book a call with our team, we're happy to chat about how we can help you source a business-broker-trained VA, implement our technology, and share our playbook for training Deal Associates.
Join us tomorrow as we keep this party alive, this time it might get a bit personal. Because we'll be chatting about Developing Your Personal Brand as a Business Broker.
We're sorry for that joke, we're shutting the computer now.
If you want to learn more about automating your business brokerage with DealBuilder, please visit our site or book a demo here.
