Most real estate investing SOPs fail for one reason: they were written around the person doing the work instead of the seat that work belongs to. When that person leaves, the process leaves with them, and the business takes a hit it shouldn’t have taken.
Trey Chandler and his partner Jordan run My Tennessee Home Solution in the greater Nashville market, doing roughly 200 to 250 deals this year across wholesale, novations and fix and flip, with hard money brokering and other arms bolted on as each one proved out. Their fix is straightforward: build a success profile for the role first, write every process against the role title, and put a person’s name in only to mark who currently owns it.
Below is the full sequence they use — how to know when a process is ready to document, where handoffs between departments actually break, why the transaction coordinator seat is chronically under-resourced, and what to do if you’re the two-deal-a-month operator still holding every process in your head.
Key takeaways
- Write processes against the role title, not the employee. Chandler’s team uses a person’s name only to record who currently owns the role — so if that person leaves, the role and its process points still exist.
- Don’t document too early. The sequence is innovate, get proof of concept and revenue, write it down and assign it, then trim redundant steps quarterly down to the critical elements.
- Every change of hands is a friction point. Role-play a file before it goes live — acquisitions handing the seller to the TC, dispo entering to host the walkthrough, the salesperson re-entering on objections.
- Cross-department ride-alongs build the empathy that makes process compliance stick: when a TC sits in on a walkthrough, notes get filed on time because the cost of not filing them becomes visible.
- Train the transaction coordinator on objection handling and role-play, not just sales. The TC is the seat closing the revenue that funds everything else.
From the Investor Fuel Show
This article draws on an interview with Trey Chandler of My Tennessee Home Solution on the Investor Fuel Show, hosted by Mike Hambright. Watch or listen to the full interview.
Why Investor SOPs Break: Processes Built Around People
Small teams have no redundancy, so roles get shaped around whoever happens to be good at a task. This person is strong at follow-up but weak at title coordination, so title moves to someone else. Six months later you have a role that only one specific human can perform, and no written record of what it actually requires.
Chandler’s team reversed the order. They build a success profile for the role before they hire anyone into it. That profile contains four things:
- The role description
- Its key functions
- Its core responsibilities
- The revenue-generating KPI that role owns and reports to the company
Only then do they hire to it. Every process document is titled against the role, not the individual. The one place a person’s name appears is a single ownership marker — who on the team currently owns this role, and therefore owns these processes.
The test he uses in conversation with the team is blunt: in the next 90 days, if this person is not here, this role still exists. The demands of the role and the process points it requires still have to be met. You just need to get a person in the seat.
Chandler is candid that this was a hindsight lesson. Early on, when volume was low, he set the expectation that a role would be dynamic and would pick up things nobody had discussed at hire. That’s honest and often necessary. But he draws a hard line on it: that’s not an excuse to let it last forever.
The Documentation Sequence: Innovate, Prove, Document, Trim
Documenting a process before it makes money is wasted work. Chandler’s progression runs in four stages, and skipping the first one is as costly as skipping the third.
- Fly by the seat of your pants. Early on you don’t know what’s going to stick or work. Move fast and find out.
- Get proof of concept and revenue. You made money. Now the question is whether you can make it repeatedly.
- Write it down and assign it. This is the painful part, and it’s what makes the thing scalable rather than heroic.
- Trim the fat. At the quarterly level, strip the process back to its critical elements. If a step can come out, take it out. Don’t carry redundancies for no reason.
The stage most operators skip is the fourth. Processes accumulate steps the way a garage accumulates boxes, and nobody ever audits them. Chandler’s team treats quarterly trimming as its own discipline: what are the finite critical elements, and what else could come out?
The other thing worth copying is how they document — continuously, in small increments. No month-long overhaul sessions, no scheduled weeks of “process work.” A little at a time, as things change. That’s what has kept them out of the bulk-update trap where documentation goes stale, people invent workarounds, and the written process quietly stops matching reality.
Chandler frames the end goal plainly: simplify things as far as humanly possible so someone else can come in and run them. They may not do it as well as you at first. That’s the point.
In the next 90 days, if this person is not here, this role still exists. The demands of this role and the process points it requires still have to be met. We just need to get a person in there.
— Trey Chandler, My Tennessee Home Solution
Where Deals Actually Break: Department Handoffs
Any change of hands is where friction shows up. Acquisitions to transaction coordination, TC to dispositions, dispo back to the salesperson when an objection surfaces — those seams are where files stall and sellers get surprised. Chandler attacks them three ways.
Role-play the file before it’s live. Especially with someone new. Walk through it as if it were real: how does the acquisitions person hand this seller off to the transaction coordinator? How does the dispo person enter the transaction to host the walkthrough? How does the TC own primary contact through to closing, and at which objections or issue points does the salesperson need to re-enter? Every deal is different, but the sequence of hands is not.
Run cross-department ride-alongs. Have the TC attend a walkthrough. Have the dispo manager ride with an acquisition agent. Have an acquisition agent sit with the TC for a couple of hours and listen to how calls actually go — what sellers remember, what buyers remember. Chandler also does this with lead managers, since they’re the first voice of the company.
The payoff is empathy that translates into compliance. As Chandler puts it, people realise that if I don’t get my notes in on time, I am hindering my coworker. If I don’t set the right expectations, I’m putting the dispo person into a very awkward situation at the house. Little process steps stop feeling like admin once you’ve watched someone else absorb the cost of skipping them.
His team is now roughly 90% in-person after starting fully virtual out of necessity. If you’re distributed, the ride-along still works — you’re just shadowing calls and screens instead of sharing a truck.
The Transaction Coordinator Is the Most Under-Resourced Seat
Lead generation and dispositions get the process attention because they get the revenue attention. That makes sense when you’re starting out — you have to get deals, train sales and get marketing working. But once proof of concept is in place, the TC seat is usually still running on leftovers, and it is the seat closing the revenue that funds everything else.
What the role actually carries: navigating title complexity, and giving daily and weekly updates to the seller, the buyer, the title company and often the lender. Chandler calls it the backbone of the company. Four things his team does differently there:
- Objection-handling and role-play training for the TC, not just sales. When a seller is upset, the TC should not be encountering that emotion for the first time live on a phone call.
- Scripted expectation-setting that carries across seats. Acquisitions tells the homeowner up front: we may not be the ones to buy the home — are you okay with that? What we’ll do is set up a partner walkthrough with vetted buyers in our network. The TC then says it’s time to set the partner walkthrough so our vetted buyers can walk the property. Dispo arrives saying they’re there to host the partner walkthrough for vetted buyers. Same language, three seats, no surprises.
- Treat every “you weren’t told this?” as a training event. Leadership extrapolates what happened rather than smoothing it over, because the goal is not repeating it.
- Weight deals to find true capacity. Not every file carries the same load. Understanding real capacity is what tells you when to add a second TC or augment with virtual assistant support, rather than discovering it through a blown closing.
Explicit permission matters too. Chandler’s instruction to the TC seat: speak up about what you need from acquisitions, dispositions or operations, and never suffer in silence.
Keeping People Accountable to the Role: One-on-Ones, Huddles and Honest Feedback
Accountability is itself a process, and Chandler runs it on a fixed cadence with three layers.
Weekly one-on-ones with every direct report. If someone reports to you, you owe them a deliberate weekly conversation covering five things: priorities for the week, key numbers for the week, obstacles in the way, guidance needed from you, and where the training gaps are. The leader owns setting this up, not the employee.
A monthly alignment huddle. Carved-out time once a month to align on the bigger picture and cover key items that don’t fit a weekly.
A documented improvement process. Their in-house version of a PIP, under a different name, built to get someone back on the path to green. Its real function is objectivity: without it, you have no defensible way to tell whether a person is performing against the requirements of the role you defined.
Chandler’s warning is that these nest into each other, and skipping one or two pieces produces mismatched expectations. Mismatched expectations produce frustration, and frustration produces quiet quitting or a cold exit.
Then there’s the hard case Hambright raises: the person who can do 80% of the role. Good athlete, good teammate, genuinely struggles with a couple of core responsibilities. It happens most often with internal promotions, where you move someone up because they’re good rather than because they’re trained for the seat. The answer isn’t a comfortable one — it’s fast feedback loops and direct conversation. Name the gap, don’t dress it up, and frame it as a training question. Most people who want to perform will lean into that. Resistance to the conversation is its own answer.
If You’re Still Wearing All the Hats: Getting the First Processes Out of Your Head
At two or three deals a month, you don’t think in departments — you think in tasks, because you’re doing all of them. The barrier to documenting isn’t laziness. It’s that you already know how to do the work, so writing it down feels like pure cost.
Chandler’s first move is the cheapest one available: use AI to get what’s in your head onto paper. Talk through how you do something the same way you’d explain it to a person, let the tool transcribe it, and have it map the steps into a process. You’re describing work you already do daily, so it costs you nothing but the recording.
Three more things he pushes owner-operators toward:
- Discipline as infrastructure. Time blocking and a clear order of operations. Without structure, the operator’s day is dictated by whoever calls.
- Fractional expertise instead of payroll. Plenty of firms want smaller investors to succeed, and using them keeps the expense off payroll where you can cut it if you need to.
- Reframe the assistant hire as ROI, not overhead. An operations, executive or virtual assistant looks like an added expense. The real question is what higher-revenue work you could take on if that person existed. Chandler’s read is that people routinely miss the return on that hire.
Hambright’s closing point is the one to hold onto: scaling isn’t about buying toys. It’s about being able to afford a team that fills the gaps so you’re not sitting in every seat on the org chart.
Frequently asked questions
How do you write an SOP so it survives an employee leaving?
Title the process against the role, not the person. Chandler’s team writes every process document to the role title and includes a person’s name in only one place — an ownership marker showing who currently holds the seat and therefore owns those processes.
The practical test is whether the document still makes sense if you delete that name. If the steps only work because of one person’s particular workarounds, judgment calls or relationships, you’ve documented a person, not a process.
What should be in a role’s success profile before you hire for it?
Four elements: the role description, its key functions, its core responsibilities, and the revenue-generating KPI that role owns and delivers to the company. Chandler’s team builds this before opening the search, then hires against it.
The KPI is the piece most investors skip. Without a number the seat is accountable for, you have a job description rather than a definition of success, and no objective basis for the improvement conversation later.
How often should real estate SOPs be reviewed and trimmed?
Chandler’s team does the trimming pass quarterly — asking what the critical elements actually are and pulling out steps that no longer earn their place. Redundancies added for no reason slow the whole thing down as volume climbs.
Documentation itself, though, should happen continuously in small increments rather than in bulk update sessions. Waiting for a scheduled month-long overhaul is how written processes drift out of sync with how the work is really being done.
What causes most deal fallout between acquisitions, transaction coordination and dispositions?
The handoff itself. Any change of hands is where friction appears, usually as expectations set in one department that the next department has to absorb — a seller who was never told a partner walkthrough was coming, or notes that didn’t get filed before the file moved on.
Two fixes work. Role-play the full handoff sequence before a new person touches a live file, and use consistent scripted language across seats so the seller hears the same thing from acquisitions, the TC and dispo.
How do you know when your transaction coordinator is at capacity?
Count weighted files, not raw file count. Chandler’s point is that deals are not all the same load — title complexity, seller temperament and lender involvement change how much of a TC’s week a single file consumes.
Once you can weight files, you can see the real ceiling and decide whether to add a second transaction coordinator or augment with virtual assistant support. Discovering capacity through a missed closing is the expensive version of this exercise.
The bottom line
Pick the one role in your business that would hurt most if the person in it quit tomorrow, and write its success profile this week — description, key functions, core responsibilities, and the number that seat owns. Everything else in this article builds on having that document, and you cannot document, trim or hold anyone accountable to a role you have not yet defined.
