2163 - Walking Your Way to Health and Business Success with VPM Solutions' Pete Neubig

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1:05With us right now is Pete Neubig. Pete, you are the co-founder and CEO at VPM Solutions. Your website is vpmsolutions.com. Pete, it's great to have you. Josh, you're the man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this discussion. Thank you. You are the man as well, from one man to another. Pete, tell me about, before we kind of talk about VPM Solutions and the work that you do, tell me what you do for fun. All right. So people are going to think I'm boring. But right now what I do for fun is I walk. I love to walk. I love to walk. I used to be an Ironman triathlon triathlete.

1:47And I used to race bicycles. I used to be a marathon runner. I used to chase the, you know, the Boston qualifier, the New York qualifier, you know, chase even tried to try to qualify for Hawaii Ironman. So I was always this huge athlete and back problems got me kind of derailed a little bit. And I'm going to be 55 this year, which I know is not super old, but trying to train 20 hours a week, it gets tough. It's the training. It's not so much the race. It's the training that kills you. Racing is fun. Right? Yeah. Racing is fun. It's the training. Yeah. Yeah. I've done two marathons. It was a while back, probably about 12 years ago.

2:27um i've done a bunch i've done a bunch of halves um i can't imagine i'll ever do a full marathon again it's just cost benefit analysis like if my son wanted to run one i might do it but other than that i'm my marathon days are done like it's it's it is it's tax really taxing on the body basically what happened to me is i got out of the iron man stuff and i really got into like working all the time and then i got fat because when you're an iron man triathlon triathlete you can eat almost anything. Right. Right. And then when you stop doing it, you continue to eat like you're like you're training for a triathlon.

3:00And so I gained a bunch of weight. And so the walking is actually I lost about 30 pounds last year. And the walking has got me to like lose the weight. And then of course, I, you know, I track my food. And believe it or not, walking is actually like I walk in the mornings. And now I actually look at the sunrise, I actually stop and smell the roses. And I've never done that before. Literally years of training. And it's really, it's helped me mentally, to be honest with you. I'm much more calm and Zen now than I've ever been. You know, if someone wants to pursue this and think about, you know, there's a concept of awe, right?

3:35And A-A-W-E, look at that and look at the power of awe. And that's kind of what you're talking about, looking at a sunset, experiencing nature. And so some of this is very meditative for you. And I would imagine now, are you also, do you just go out completely, um, I would say naked ears. Are, are you listening to things? Are you multitasking? Are you reading? Are you, it's a little bit of all the above. Like I always put my earbuds in and I gotta be honest about 20 % of the time, maybe 25 % of the time. I never turn on my phone and I never listen to anything. The earbuds kind of keep the outside noise out.

4:10Yes. And for whatever reason, I just, I just enjoy it. Now, um, I may do half my walk with, with not listening to anything. And then the second half, I'm either listening to something business wise or something fun. Sometimes I just, I just like to watch, you know, YouTube shorts for an hour. It's really not there. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to like learn new stuff while I'm walking all the time. It just, it gets mind numbing sometimes to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. You know, stupid stuff about sports, Like just, just, yeah, yeah. No, listen, the brain needs that. You know, I like to call it chewing gum for the brain.

4:44Right. Um, like it is, and I don't want to devalue that. That is so important to me. I am like, and I suspect like you, right. I want to be on like on, on for about six hours a day. And then the other time of my day, I don't want to be thinking about work. Like I want to be at 100 % during that six hours so that I can compartmentalize my life. And Pete, have you tried, just because I love what you're talking about, and I hope that we've inspired other people to make this a part. And by the way, congratulations on your weight loss. And some people might say, wait a minute, I don't get it. How are you losing weight just walking?

5:25And guess what? How would you answer that? I'll say it's not just walking. I started tracking all my food. So that's the big, that's really the big thing. But the reason why walking works instead of running, running burns just high level, running burns carbs, walking burns fat. And when you burn carbs, when you eat, you just replenish the carbs. So you actually never lose weight. When you burn fat and you eat, you're not replenishing fat, you're replenishing carbs, which of course, if you don't walk or train, turns into fat over time. So you want to keep your heart rate down and walk and burn fat.

6:02I love it. And I am so inspired to it. Listen to our friend that's listening, get out of your car right now, wherever you are, just pull over, get out, keep your AirPods in for the rest of this conversation. Get out and walk while you enjoy our conversation. Pete, tell me about what you do with VPM Solutions. Yeah. So VPM Solutions is a marketplace. It's an online marketplace that connects businesses in the US and Canada with remote team members in second and third world countries. We're in about 120 countries. it's uh it's called a direct hire model so you can you know you can create a free profile on the platform you can browse i think we have over 40 000 profiles for people looking for work we have a full vpm academy so people can actually take courses and they can test on those courses and test out and become get a certification and then you can hire them you negotiate we don't they don't work for me that we're just like a marketplace like indeed and then you hire them you negotiate your hourly rate and then you pay them through our platform.

7:00The way we make money is we don't charge you as the company, any, any money. We charge the virtual assistant that gets a job through you 10 % of what they make. And they see that when they apply for the job. So a lot of them, like maybe they want six bucks an hour, but they may say, I want six 60 an hour to try to kind of push that onto the company. But what we have found is the average rate is about eight to$9 an hour on the platform. and it's really for back office work that obviously does not need or require some kind of license or anything or does not require to be in the office. We focus mainly in the real estate industry, but we have doctor's offices, contractors.

7:39We have all sorts of people that use us. Our training is really more for real estate and for business owners. We have like a disc course training. We have how to run a meeting training. So we have some training, especially if you're new to business, we have some training for you. And we have, I think we're at 45 different training courses right now for on the platform and they're all free. All the training is free as well. Wow. Do you mind maybe just talking about some of the roles and positions, the job descriptions that you fill a lot of? Yeah. So we actually have in, when you post a job, you can actually click down and we have like about 50 different job descriptions, templates that you can just utilize.

8:23Because we focus for property management and real estate, a lot of the jobs are like leasing coordinator, maintenance coordinator, executive assistant, SEO marketing, appointment setter, marketing coordination, marketing assistant, property accountant, just accountant. And we're starting to see some senior level stuff. We're starting to see like assistant property managers, property managers, CFOs. We just had a couple of CFOs get hired off the platform. So it's pretty cool to see. But we focus on really back office work. So think of like marketing, accounting, HR, we have a chief person officer, we have a couple of those that got hired to the platform, which I thought was really cool.

9:03So it's the first time we've had some C-suiters. So, you know, back in the day, Josh, everybody said, Oh, I love virtual assistants, I'm going to give a tick list or a checklist. And then I'm going to scan it to them. And then they're going to, you know, fill the checklist. That was kind of version one of virtual team members. Version two was like, okay, they can own a process, whether it's like a lease renewal process or accounting process or marketing process, they can own a process. Level three is like they can actually supervise other people that are remote, right? So now I have a supervisor.

9:34And now level four, we're actually seeing managers. Like I had people that work for me that manage people in the United States. I mean, they were in Mexico and they manage people. And now level five is really the C-suite levels we're seeing. So we're seeing C-suites like CFO, CMO, CPOs, things of that nature. So it's really come full circle. Yeah, and just to be clear, these are all virtual, right? Because they could be, they're not going to necessarily, or they're not going to be in person. That is correct. They're going to be basically on your Zoom and working for you full-time from their home in Mexico, Philippines, South Africa, uh, Kenya, wherever.

10:15Okay. And, and I would imagine that there are probably some distinct advantages to going through VPM versus like an Upwork or something. Yeah. So for, uh, the main difference for us is we, we, I like to say we're Upwork for the real estate industry. So, um, we have, uh, you know, again, I think we have a much easier interface to, to go through. We have our own application tracking system. We have different ways you can slice and dice. It's not as overwhelming is Upwork. But if you are in the real estate industry, there really is no reason to go to Upwork because we have the training. We actually have resources.

10:49We're literally built. We're niched down for the real estate industry. So that's where we get the most power. But anybody can utilize us because we're, like I said, we're free and we have a pretty good interface to be able to get through candidates really quickly. Yeah. How is AI impacting the property management world? And how are you and the folks that are connected through VPM adapting or have been adapting over the past year? Because I wonder if there have been a lot of rules historically that have been outsourced to AI. And now, well, guess what? We need operators to run that AI. You know, I think it's a little too early to tell.

11:40There are some AI that is coming into this industry, the property management industry that I'm seeing. But the average property manager is about my age, about 50 to 55 years old. And so these guys are not really dying to get into AI. Matter of fact, virtual assistance is a big stretch for them. So AI becomes a little bit bigger stretch. not to say that it's not it's it's not happening but it's happening a lot a lot slower than i think than in some other verticals also that that smells like opportunity for me if that's the case yeah yeah and i think you know where i'm going with that yeah i i also think ai is just not really there yet like when you listen to an ai bot it doesn't sound human still sounds a little mechanical still.

12:25So I think we need some growth there. Keep checking the news. Because every single day, I used to say every month, every week, and now it's every day, there's some sort of new enhancement there. This is inevitable, right? And so here's the silver lining, I guess, what I want to get to, is that there might be someone that's listening to us. They are not AI savvy. They're like, they've probably experimented with chat GPT, maybe had to write some stuff from or whatever. But in terms of like, using it operationally, they just might be stymied. They're like, I don't even know what to do. I guess the opportunity is, well, okay.

13:11But maybe you could hire someone who does know how to create better and faster outcomes, leveraging AI tools and platforms. Yeah, I think AI is very similar to, you know, I'm old enough to live through the dot-com error or the dot-bomb error when uh when you know computers were first you know showing up in offices right let alone homes that were showing up in offices for the first time and everybody's like oh they're gonna take computers gonna take jobs away what it did is it created a whole new industry with you know in a higher paying industry um you know and then that got broken into all these different sub-industries right like originally in the 90s you were just a computer guy.

13:50By 1999, you were either a hardware guy, a software guy, a developer, a programmer, a new name, a security guy, a website guy. And I think you're going to start seeing the same thing with AI. It's going to be this huge explosion. It's going to be all these job opportunities that are going to be higher paid. And then you're going to get into, I'm AI and I focus on this. I'm AI and I focus on this and this. And I think you'll see that growth over time. It's already happening. And so, yeah, I, to our friend that's listening, get on it. Yeah, we're, we have, we're, we have on our roadmap to, to start developing.

14:28I mean, we're behind the curve already, but we have our, our, our, on our roadmap. Everybody is. Everybody is. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it, it, and it's, and it's exciting. Like we're in exciting times right now. So what are other trends that, that you are seeing generally, you know, in addition to obviously helping with staffing and stuff, what are some larger trends? So for those of us who are not actively involved in the property management world, like what's going on there right now? Yeah. So initially I'm actually speaking at the, at the national association of property managers here next month, and I'm doing a little bit of research.

15:03And one of the things that I uncovered, which is pretty interesting is that there's a bigger trend over the last five years, I think since like maybe the pandemic, that more people are using third party managers to manage the their properties. So when I started back in 2012, it was like 80 % of people self managed. Yeah, that would be unheard of, right? Because then if it starts to feel like, well, this isn't my business anymore. And then somehow there's like a badge of honor, if you did everything. Yeah, yeah. People, you know, they're like, Oh, they're cheap, but then they don't realize how much their time is worth.

15:40And I think that's the biggest challenge. So we're seeing a trend now. It's actually flipped the other way for the first time. It's like 65 % of people now. It's economies to scale. It just makes mathematical sense. Rather than have to create a whole department. No, no, no. That department's already created for you. And because they do this across a thousand clients or whatever, you can't compete with what they are able to do it. I mean, that's my suspicion. I mean, I see the same story elsewhere, but is that kind of what your experience is? Yeah. Well, look, I'm always a pro property manager guy because I was an old property manager.

16:18And I think a lot of people just think like if I'm an investor and I buy a couple of houses, then I just think, well, all I have to do is collect the rent. And there's so much more that goes beyond that little, you know, beyond the surface, you know, underneath, not just collect the rent, but do you actually, you know, do you have an application? Do you have a lease? Do you, do you walk the property? Do you know what, you know, what the property rents for? Do you have, you know, do you, do you, can you call the maintenance company? Do you have good maintenance team? Are they going to be there when, when the, when the AC goes out, you know, we have one house, I have 500 that I manage.

16:51So there's so many, there's so many things that go into managing a property and that's not even keeping, reducing your liability that people don't really think about. And so I think for those reasons, and we're seeing a lot more legislation come into property management, right? There's a lot more tenant advocacy groups that are, that are creating some legislation. So I think you're starting to see people for the first time really say, you know what, I want to be a property manager. And anyone who's read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is always like, oh man, owning property is passive. I can promise you I've owned a lot of property.

17:24It's anything but passive. Yeah.

17:30Passive not owning property. Exactly. But you know what? I got to tell you though, you know, if, you know, it's almost like active versus passive investing. Like if you're really, if you've got a strong work ethic and you, and you can, you know, you can out, I don't want to say it's not outworking, right. But you, you've got better business acumen than the average property manager. You're going to win because you've got skills. You don't want it to be accessible to everybody because then there's not as much opportunity, right? You want there to be a little bit of a learning curve and a little bit of like a, Hey, you got to put your big boy, big girl pants on.

18:11If you want to make it in this world, that's good. Yeah. I think, look, whenever you, whatever business you own, right, there's a, you know, like if you take it, if you become professional at it and you take it like very, like, you know, sincere, right? Like for property management, there's a lot of real estate agents that do property management on the side. There's a lot of guys that have side hustles. if you decide that hey this is my thing i'm going to be super professional at it i'm going to join all of the national organizations i'm going to actually give back and i'm going to be on the board and i'm going to become a you know a person who is an influencer in this industry you're going to do much better because you're going to know all the trends you're going to know all the the contacts you're going to have all the relationships and you're going to be able to do much better in your business than somebody who kind of half half does it and from an investor's point of view.

19:02Nice self-censoring there, by the way. And from an investor point of view, if I were to... That's right. I'm not allowed to cuss on my podcast, so I don't like to cuss on other people's podcasts. But when we have a whiskey at the bar, forget it. There we go. That's where we do the cussing. But if you're an investor and you want to unclog the toilet yourself and you pat yourself on the back for saving$110 for not sending a plumber out there, what is your time actually worth like most of my investors they were um they were you know i'm in houston so they were engineers making 250 000 a year i don't know divide that by 20 80 what that's more than 140 bucks an hour and that's just to actually do it right you have to drive to home people get the plunger you have to drive right now it takes you four freaking hours and it's like and so yes why not just give the 10 an hour job to the property management firm and then you spend your money and time on finding new deals, getting better partnerships, getting money.

20:01That's really the important thing. And so anything, whatever business you have, eventually you have to stop taking off all the hats and wear the CEO hat or the visionary integrator hat. Go read E-Myth Revisited if you need a refresher on what Pete's talking about. Pete Neubig, co-founder and CEO at VPM Solutions, your website, vpmsolutions.com. When somebody goes there, Pete, what should they click on? What do they do? You can click on create a free profile. That's it. And just create a free profile. It's three steps. And then you can literally check out thousands of people. Sometimes I just get on the platform and I just start browsing people.

20:40It's just kind of fun to see what those resumes look like with their, they have videos. So they do resume videos, they have paper resumes. They have skill sets. You can search by which certifications did it take. We even have personality profile disk. They could take disk tests on there so you can see what their disks are. So I find it fascinating. I just kind of browse around and just check people out. I'm a creeper, I guess. Yeah. You're, again, the website, VPM Solutions. And did you mention that in terms of content as well, you have a podcast? I do. I have a podcast. I'm the host of the NARPAM radio.

21:18That's a mouthful, the national association of residential property managers. And it's really for anybody who is a property manager or is, is in that industry. So it's super niche down. We don't get the volume that you get, the downloads that you get Josh, but it's, it's really be surprised. I've got dozens of listeners, dozens. That's great. Cause I got about four. My mom, my sister. Pete Neubig, vpmsolutions.com. Pete, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Take care, everybody.

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