The first hire for a solo wholesaler is almost always an administrative virtual assistant, not an acquisitions rep. That is the order Alex Peransi used building his Wichita, Kansas operation, and the logic behind that wholesaling team structure is simple: the admin work is what is eating your calendar, and it is the cheapest thing to hand off.
What follows is the actual hiring sequence one operator ran over roughly four years, what each role took off his plate, and the deal volume that forced the next hire. It also covers the part nobody warns you about: the leadership problems that only appear once you have people, and the paperwork mistake that cost him a business relationship.
Key takeaways
- Prove the model before you quit. Peransi wholesaled on the side for about 18 months and closed 10 to 15 transactions, with an emergency fund saved, before leaving his corporate job.
- Hire an administrative VA first, at roughly the 12 to 18 month mark. He ran that one-VA model for about two more years before adding anyone else.
- Acquisitions manager comes second, once appointment volume passes what you can personally run. Peransi was maxed at two to three appointments a day solo.
- Transaction coordinator lands around the three to four year mark and often grows into an operations manager role.
- Crossing 60 to 80 transactions a year forced the next layer: lead managers and a dispo manager. His team has since stayed flat at 10 to 12 people.
- Never delegate a role you have not personally run and documented, or you cannot tell whether the person doing it is good at it.
From the Investor Fuel Show
This article draws on an interview with Alex Peransi on the Investor Fuel Show, hosted by Mike Hambright. Watch or listen to the full interview.
Prove the Model Before You Quit, and Before You Hire
Hiring is only affordable if the business already works. Peransi wholesaled and invested on the side for a year and a half while still employed as an analyst before he gave notice. His first deal took about 60 days start to finish. He closed roughly 10 to 15 transactions and built an emergency fund before he went full time.
That is a higher bar than most people set, and it is deliberate. He describes himself as a proof-of-concept guy, and the accounting background shows. The point is not that 15 deals is a magic number. The point is that by the time he quit, he had run every function in the business himself at least a dozen times over, which meant he knew exactly what each job involved before he ever paid someone to do it.
That sequencing matters more than the deal count. If you quit at deal two and immediately hire, you are paying someone to perform a job you cannot evaluate, funded by revenue you have not proven is repeatable. If you quit at deal 12 with cash in the bank, your first hire is a capacity decision instead of a gamble.
Two practical thresholds worth borrowing:
- Repeatability. Enough closed transactions that you can predict roughly how many leads produce a contract at your marketing spend.
- Runway. A saved emergency fund, so a slow 60 days does not force you to fire the person you just hired.
Neither of those requires a specific number. Both require honesty about which one you actually have.
Hire One: The Admin VA That Buys Back Your Calendar
The first hire was an administrative virtual assistant, at roughly the 12 to 18 month mark. Here is the workload it relieved, in Peransi’s own accounting of it: he was the one cold calling, the one entering leads, the one running appointments, the one sending contracts, the one doing transaction coordination, and the one handling dispo. Every department, one person.
An admin VA does not fix all of that. It fixes the part that consumes the most hours and requires the least judgment. Lead entry, CRM hygiene, follow-up sequences, list management, document prep. Those tasks have no ceiling on how much time they will absorb, and they are the reason a solo operator ends the week having made fewer offers than they planned.
The detail worth sitting with is what came next: nothing, for about two years. He ran the one-owner, one-VA model for a good two years before making the second hire. That is a long time by the standards of most team-building advice, and it is probably the most useful thing in this whole sequence.
The reason it worked is that removing admin drag from a single operator restores a lot of capacity. You are not adding a salesperson yet. You are giving the person who already closes deals more hours to close deals in. Most wholesalers who stall out at low volume are not short on talent, they are short on the 15 hours a week that data entry and paperwork quietly consume.
Only when that reclaimed capacity was itself maxed out did the next hire make sense.
You can’t delegate something that you don’t understand. I like to do the activity before I give it to somebody else, and document it.
— Alex Peransi, real estate investor, Wichita, Kansas
Hire Two and Three: Acquisitions Manager, Then Transaction Coordinator
The second hire was an acquisitions manager, and the trigger was appointment volume. With one VA and marketing systems running, Peransi was personally running two to three appointments a day and could not keep up with what was coming in. That is the honest signal for an acquisitions hire: leads are converting to appointments faster than you can physically sit in them, and you are starting to push appointments out three and four days.
Do not hire acquisitions to create appointments. Hire acquisitions when appointments already exist and are going unserved or being run badly because you are rushing. An acquisitions manager added to a thin lead flow just gives you an expensive person with an empty calendar and a resentment problem.
The third hire, at roughly the three to four year mark, was a transaction coordinator. He had been the TC himself the entire time. Once contract volume climbed, coordination became the thing killing deals: title delays nobody chased, buyer follow-up that slipped, inspection periods that expired unnoticed.
What happened to that role is worth noting for anyone hiring one. The transaction coordinator position grew into an office manager and then an operations manager seat. TC work sits at the center of the business and touches acquisitions, dispo, title, and the seller. A strong person in that chair naturally accumulates process ownership. If you hire well, you are not just buying file management, you are auditioning your future operations lead.
Three hires, four years. That is slower than most people expect and faster than most people can actually sustain.
The 60 to 80 Deal Wall: Where Wholesaling Team Structure Adds a Layer
The next break point came at volume. Once the business cleared 60 to 80 transactions a year, Peransi hit another wall and had to add support: lead managers and a dispo manager.
That is one operator’s experience in one market, not a universal ratio. But the shape of it is common enough to use as a reference. Under roughly 60 deals, a small team can function with the owner as the connective tissue between departments. Above it, two specific functions start leaking money:
- Lead management. At high lead volume, speed to lead and follow-up discipline collapse if they are somebody’s second job. A dedicated lead manager exists to make sure no lead sits and no callback is missed.
- Dispo. Once you are contracting five to seven properties a month, dispo stops being a Friday afternoon activity. It requires a real buyer list, active relationship work, and someone accountable for spread.
The other half of this is what he chose not to do. The org has stayed intentionally flat at 10 to 12 people. He describes knowing what he wants out of the business and shifting focus to making things efficient rather than adding headcount.
That is a decision more operators should make consciously instead of by default. Headcount is the easiest response to a bottleneck and frequently the wrong one. Past a certain point, another salary buys you management overhead, not output. The question at 12 people is not who else to hire, it is which existing role is underperforming its cost and what process would fix it.
Do the Job Before You Delegate It, Then Document It
Peransi’s rule is direct: you cannot delegate something you do not understand. He ran each activity himself, documented it, and then handed it off. That is why he was his own TC until year three.
The practical value is evaluation. If you have never run the role, you cannot tell whether the person in it is doing good work, mediocre work, or nothing. You will accept whatever they tell you because you have no baseline. Running it yourself first gives you a standard, and documenting it gives the new hire something better than a verbal brain dump.
The trap sits on the other side of that. When the owner has personally done every job and taught every process, the team learns to bring every problem back to the owner. You end up with people who are excellent at completing tasks and useless at solving problems, because you solved all the problems already. Nobody is improving the process, they are just executing your version of it.
Two fixes, both cheap:
- Push the question back. Peransi’s version: what have you already tried, did it work, give me three options and tell me which one you think is best. It costs you 90 seconds and it trains judgment.
- Kill the always-open door. Hambright replaced constant availability with scheduled office hours twice a week, half an hour each. If someone is genuinely stuck, they bring it then. The gap forces an attempt first.
An open door policy feels generous. In practice it guarantees your strategic work never happens, because you spend the day solving problems that were never on your list.
Buy-In, Accountability and the Paperwork You Skip With Friends
You cannot hold someone accountable if they are not bought in. Peransi credits The Dream Manager with reframing how he runs one-on-ones: find out what each person actually wants out of their career, then hold them to the goals they set for themselves. He compares it to an acquisitions appointment, where the question is whether what you offer moves that person from A to B. If it does not, it is not a fit.
The mechanism he leans on is what he calls authorship is ownership. People follow through on standards they set themselves far more reliably than on standards handed to them. Your job after that is repetition. He describes the CEO as chief reminding officer, constantly restating expectations and holding people to what they said they would do. Clear KPIs give that conversation something to point at.
Then the expensive lesson. One of his early hires, an acquisitions manager, was also a friend. That worked until the business grew and the uncomfortable conversations started, and it was much harder to have them because expectations had never been set properly. Later, a manager who worked for him became a partner in a separate business with almost nothing in writing. It blew up about two years ago.
His takeaway is not to avoid working with friends. It is to draw the boundary before you need it, because closeness pulls emotion into decisions that should not have any. And put it in writing, especially when the relationship feels strong enough that paperwork seems unnecessary. Written terms are what let you hold someone to what they said instead of arguing about what each of you remembers.
Frequently asked questions
What should a solo wholesaler’s first hire be?
An administrative virtual assistant. It is the cheapest hire, it removes the highest-volume low-judgment work, and it gives the owner back hours for the activities that actually produce contracts. Alex Peransi made this hire at roughly the 12 to 18 month mark, when he was still personally cold calling, entering leads, running appointments, sending contracts, coordinating transactions and handling dispo.
Resist starting with an acquisitions hire. Acquisitions is a revenue role, but it only pays for itself when appointment volume already exceeds what you can run yourself.
How many deals should you do before quitting your job to wholesale full time?
There is no universal number, but Peransi’s benchmark is a reasonable one: 10 to 15 completed transactions over about 18 months of part-time work, plus a saved emergency fund. His first deal alone took roughly 60 days from start to finish.
The reason for the volume is not the income, it is the repeatability. You want enough closed deals to know your conversion rate and enough cash to survive a slow quarter without panic-selling a contract.
At what deal volume do you need to add lead managers and a dispo manager?
In Peransi’s business, crossing 60 to 80 transactions a year was the wall that forced both. Below that, the owner and a small team can cover lead follow-up and buyer relationships between other duties. Above it, leads go cold and dispo spread shrinks because nobody owns those functions full time.
Treat that range as one operator’s data point rather than a rule. The real signal is whether leads are sitting unworked and whether contracts are going to your buyer list late.
How do you stop your team from bringing every problem back to you?
Stop answering immediately. When someone brings you a problem, ask what they have already tried, whether it worked, and for three options with their recommendation. That single habit converts task-doers into problem-solvers over a few months.
Also limit access. Mike Hambright replaced an always-open door with scheduled office hours twice a week for 30 minutes. The delay forces people to attempt a solution first, and it protects the strategic work that never gets done when you are interrupted all day.
Should you go into business with someone who already works for you?
It can work, but only with everything in writing. Peransi turned one of his managers into a partner in a separate venture with very little documented, and the arrangement blew up about two years ago. His conclusion was that the hard conversations should happen at the beginning, not after a dispute.
The same applies to hiring friends. The relationship is not the problem; the missing boundary is. Set expectations, define roles and pay, and document the terms while everyone still likes each other.
The bottom line
Pick the single function currently costing you the most hours for the least judgment, run it yourself long enough to write down how it works, and hire that role first. Everything after that is a response to a specific bottleneck, not a step on an org chart.
