Real Estate Investor Hiring Process: Avoid the Panic Hire

A real estate investor hiring process that works looks nothing like what most operators actually do. The common version is reactive: something breaks, you post on your personal Facebook page, and you hire whoever answers. Jen Kolde of Minnesota Home Guys ran that play early on with a bookkeeper and spent years cleaning up the mess.

The alternative is a sequence: audit where your time goes, document the seat before you recruit for it, screen with an assessment plus multiple interviews, be blunt about your culture so bad fits self-select out, then onboard and hold a communication rhythm that keeps the new person aligned.

Below is that sequence, plus the department-level SOPs that let Kolde’s Minnesota operation run without its founders — which is what freed them to open Home Guys locations in Knoxville, San Antonio, and Orlando.

Why the First Hire Usually Fails Before the Interview

The hire fails at the definition stage, not the interview. Kolde is direct about how Home Guys did it wrong early: “We need a body. Hey, you’re breathing. Here, sit and answer phones.” That is panic hiring, and her assessment is that it hurts more down the road than it helps.

The clearest example was accounting. Nobody on the team wanted bookkeeping, so they posted on a personal Facebook page — anybody have any accounting background? Someone jumped in. It ended up being a mess they were still cleaning up years later. The cost of that hire was not the salary. It was the years of reconstruction.

There is a second failure mode that looks more respectable. Mike Hambright describes his old catchphrase: if he found a good athlete, he’d find a place for them on the team. Loyal, hard-working, no specific skill for a specific seat. Then the role would require something they weren’t good at, so that task got handed to somebody else, and the org chart bent around the people instead of the people fitting the org chart.

That caps scale. When you build roles around individuals, every departure means redesigning a job, and no seat has a clean standard anyone else could step into. Kolde’s fix is unglamorous and it happens before anyone applies: decide what the seat does, what it owns, and what success in it looks like. Everything downstream — screening, onboarding, accountability — depends on that document existing.

Deciding Which Hat to Hand Off First

Two questions decide the first hire: what is taking up the most of your time, and what are the $10 tasks. Not what hurts emotionally, not what you dislike most — what consumes hours that should be going to lead generation and deal-making.

For Home Guys the answer was a leads manager. James was answering the phone at 10 or 11 at night to protect speed to lead. He was also booking the next day’s appointments, driving the site visits, crunching the numbers, and writing scope of work. Kolde was picking up the phone too, between everything else.

The phone is the classic first handoff for a reason. Hambright calls it the hot potato: everybody knows it has to be answered, nobody owns it, so whoever is physically nearest grabs it. Shared responsibility with no owner means the task gets done inconsistently and interrupts every other function in the business. In acquisitions, inconsistent answering is directly lost deals.

Two things follow from that test.

• Start small. You do not need to hire an entire team. Hand off one defined block of work, get that seat producing, then run the audit again.
• Hand off the volume, not just the annoyance. The task you hate might only take two hours a month. The task eating fifteen hours a week is the one that buys back real capacity.

Kolde has since coached other operators through the same starting point, including the Knoxville team, whose owner came in saying he was doing everything. The answer was the same: break the work down, then get a leads manager in the seat.

They’re not going to move at your pace, they’re not going to do it your way, but that’s why you hired them. If you had a company full of James and Jaden’s, we’d just be spinning in circles.

— Jen Kolde, Minnesota Home Guys

Write the Role Before You Write the Job Post

Document the seat before you recruit for it. Kolde’s list is short: the job description, the specific tasks, the expectations, and the goals for that position. “It doesn’t have to be that complicated,” she says — how many calls, how many appointments, what this person owns.

She did not build those from scratch. Home Guys borrowed job description templates and tailored them to their business. That is the right move. A blank document invites vagueness, and vagueness is what produces a hire nobody can evaluate at ninety days.

The reason this matters beyond tidiness: expectations you never wrote down are expectations you cannot hold anyone to. If the leads manager doesn’t know the appointment target, missing it is a management failure, not a performance failure.

Hire for adaptability, teach the industry

Home Guys has hired a lot of people from outside real estate. Kolde is explicit that industry experience is not required — they can teach that. What they screen for instead is whether someone can connect with people, network, and build relationships, because that is what the business actually runs on.

Adaptability is the other filter, and she applies it even to back-office roles. Accounting looks black and white, but this industry moves, and the person in that seat has to be able to pivot.

The proof is Matt. Seven years ago Home Guys threw a post out looking for a marketing intern to manage social media leads — a catch-all position at the time. Matt replied fresh out of college and showed up to a jeans-and-shorts office in a suit. He has since moved through several departments and is now one of their top acquisitions agents.

Screening: Assessments, Multiple Interviews, and Being Blunt About Culture

Home Guys runs a three-part screen, and Kolde stresses it does not need to be elaborate — just deliberate.

1. The conversation. A first discussion to see whether there’s anything there at all.
2. The Predictive Index, early. They run it out of the gate to gauge whether the person is even a fit for that particular seat. Her caveat matters: it is a tool, not the end-all be-all. It informs the decision; it doesn’t make it.
3. Meetings with existing team members. The candidate sits with the people they’ll actually work alongside, which surfaces things a founder interview never will.

The part most investors skip is the culture disclosure. Kolde tells candidates plainly how the company operates — good or bad, whatever you’re used to, this is our business. The goal is to let people opt out. Forcing a square peg into a round hole doesn’t just cost you a hire; it puts someone in a position where they cannot succeed.

Home Guys also uses the Predictive Index on owners, not just candidates. When they onboarded the Knoxville franchise, all three partners took it, and the questions were: what is your role in the company, what is your superpower, and how do we surround you with people who support that.

One last screening principle, raised by an attendee at an Investor Fuel event and repeated by Kolde: do not expect the hire to work at your pace or do it your way. That’s the point of hiring them. As she puts it, a company full of visionaries would just spin in circles. You want the person in that seat to be more deliberate than you are.

Onboarding and the Communication Cadence That Makes Hires Stick

Home Guys spends roughly a day on onboarding. Not a week of shadowing, not a binder — a day covering what the company looks like, the history, the vision, the mission statement, and how they approach every transaction. Tool training follows, but the context comes first.

What makes the hire stick is the rhythm after day one. Three layers:

• Morning huddles, by department, 15 minutes. They set the day’s priorities and are the channel through which management pushes down any pivot. Not an hour-long meeting.
• Monday all-team meeting. Everybody logs in. What happened last week in the business, what’s happening this week, anything anyone needs to raise. A quick touch base.
• Asana and WhatsApp through the day. Task and project work lives in Asana. WhatsApp carries questions, information sharing, and — deliberately — culture: a shout-out for a signed contract, a birthday, a work anniversary.

Kolde treats the celebration channel as part of the system, not decoration. New hires notice it, and people who’ve been there for years have watched it evolve. Engagement is what keeps a good hire from quietly checking out in month four.

There is a real tradeoff here, and Hambright names it: every tool suffers scope creep, so you end up with Slack that does tasks and Asana that does messaging, and people get the same information three times. Home Guys accepts some redundancy on purpose so nothing gets missed. Small teams should pick their lanes early — one place for tasks, one place for conversation — before the stack outgrows the headcount.

Handoffs: The SOPs That Let the Machine Run Without You

The last piece is department-level standard operating procedures, and they exist to solve one problem: trust at the handoff.

Home Guys documents how the leads team handles a call, how acquisitions handles an appointment, and how the transaction team takes a signed contract to close. Each seat knows the standard for the seat downstream. As Kolde describes it, once there’s a handoff, the person passing it off knows the next step is covered — “I’ve handed it off, I can continue doing my thing, and it’s going to keep moving through the pipeline.”

That is the difference between a team and a machine. Without documented handoffs, every deal needs someone to babysit it across department lines, and that someone is almost always the owner. With them, deals move through the pipeline on their own momentum and the founder only touches exceptions.

Pair the SOPs with extreme ownership — Kolde’s phrase for making sure each person knows the piece of the business they own — and the accountability question answers itself. When a deal stalls, you know which step failed and who owns that step.

The payoff is structural. After almost ten years, Kolde says Minnesota runs like a machine. Paul and Anna have it. That is what allowed James and Jaden to step into the franchise side and open Home Guys locations in Knoxville, San Antonio, and Orlando, without Minnesota’s production depending on either of them being in the building.

The SOPs and job descriptions became the product, too — they are what Home Guys hands new franchisees to build their teams from.

Frequently asked questions

Who should a real estate investor hire first?

Whoever takes the biggest block of low-value work off your calendar — for most acquisitions-driven investors, that is a leads manager. Home Guys made that hire first because one founder was answering the phone at 10 or 11 at night for speed to lead while also booking appointments, running site visits, and doing underwriting and scope of work.

Run the test yourself: list what consumes the most hours in your week, then flag the $10 tasks inside it. Hire against that, not against whatever annoyed you most this month.

How do you know if a candidate is right for the seat before you hire them?

You compare them against a written definition of the seat, then verify with more than one input. Home Guys runs an initial conversation, a Predictive Index assessment early in the process to gauge fit for that specific position, and then meetings with existing team members.

Kolde is clear that the assessment is one tool, not the deciding factor. She also tells candidates exactly how the company operates so anyone who would be a poor fit can self-select out before an offer is on the table.

Should you hire people with real estate experience or train from outside the industry?

Both work, and Home Guys has hired quite a few people from outside real estate. Kolde’s position is that the industry can be taught; what she screens for instead is the ability to connect with people, network, and build relationships, plus adaptability, because the business shifts constantly.

Their top acquisitions agent is the proof — hired seven years ago as a marketing intern straight out of college, moved through multiple departments since.

What meeting cadence keeps a small investing team aligned without wasting hours?

Fifteen-minute morning huddles per department, plus one Monday all-team meeting. The huddles set daily priorities and are how management pushes any change in direction down to the people doing the work. The Monday meeting reviews last week and previews the week ahead.

Between meetings, Home Guys uses Asana for tasks and projects and WhatsApp for questions, information sharing, and celebrating wins and birthdays. The total meeting load is roughly an hour a week per person.

What does onboarding a new hire at a real estate investing company actually look like?

At Home Guys it is about a day, covering the history of the company, the vision, the mission statement, and how the team approaches every transaction. Tool and CRM training comes after that context is set.

Kolde’s point is that it does not have to be elaborate to work. What makes it stick is that the role was already documented before the person was hired, and the ongoing communication rhythm reinforces the same standards every week.

The bottom line

Before you post another job, write the seat: the tasks, the expectations, the numbers, and the standard for how work leaves that desk and reaches the next one. Everything else in the hiring process — the assessment, the team interviews, the onboarding day, the huddles — is only as good as that document, and skipping it is what turns a hire into a cleanup project years later.