5 Key Metrics to Financial Freedom in Real Estate with Amanda Webster

Mike Hambright (00:04.191)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot over the years as real estate investors is we spend so much time and effort and energy making money and we spend hardly no time figuring out how to keep more of what we actually made. And today that’s what we’re going to talk about. I’ve got my good friend here, Amanda Webster. We’re going to talk about how you can keep more of your money as a real estate investor. And we’re going to talk about just running overall better operations. So before we dive in today, I want to say hi to my good friend, Amanda. How are you?

Amanda Webster (00:33.311)
I’m great Mike, thank you having me!

Mike Hambright (00:35.817)
Yeah, always good to see. I know we had we’re scheduled a little while back and rescheduled, so glad you’re glad you’re here. And before we jump into this, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you before we kind of jump into this topic today?

Amanda Webster (00:39.911)
Yes.

Amanda Webster (00:47.725)
Love it, love it. I always start with my personal because I feel like it’s way more important than anything else. So personally, I identify as a mother of five because I have amazing children. And I’m also a military spouse. My husband’s been in the military for 23 going on 24 years. And I don’t think he’s going to stop anytime soon. He’s driving me crazy. And then we have three wonderful German shepherds to just round out our entire crazy family. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And for the last almost five years, I was the COO of a funding company. And recently I switched roles and I am now the Chief Revenue Officer for a company called Accruity, who what we’re gonna talk a little bit about today is what we specialize in, but really it’s all about keeping as much money as you can and understanding some things. So I’m super excited to make the transition and to further helping entrepreneurs in the real estate sector.

you know, be successful, which was always my goal, you know, for the last five years over at the other company.

Mike Hambright (01:51.315)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I think I talk about this a lot now and I didn’t always because you earlier in my career, I had some of the same short-sightedness where I’m just trying to make more top line revenue. But when you realize when I look back now like ways we were sloppy or whatever without keeping as much of it or didn’t put as much emphasis on tax strategy or didn’t put as much emphasis on building kind of long-term wealth or even you know cash.

Amanda Webster (02:01.29)
Thanks a lot.

Amanda Webster (02:09.739)
I’m going

Mike Hambright (02:20.267)
doing more with cash. Like I wish I’d kept more rentals with cash flowing assets, right? And so hindsight helps you with that, right? And hindsight helps you get to the topic we’re going to talk about today, because at the end of the day, we want everybody to retire rich, right? We want everybody to be happy and financially free. And the reality is, is you just can’t do it if you’re if you’re kind of back office and your financial stuff is a mess. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So for a lot of you, we were telling some horror stories here before we started recording.

For those of listening about friends and for Amanda clients of people that just like, you know, haven’t done their taxes for a couple of years and have a bunch of HUDs and receipts and stuff in boxes and shoe boxes or filing boxes or filing cabinets or whatever to only get through it at some point. you know, that’s what we’re going to talk about today is like how to get your arms around your financials and your KPIs and those things if you don’t feel like you have it right now. So.

If your back office is a mess, hopefully today is going to give you some insights on how to kind of move forward and a little kind of steal our thunder from the back end of the show here is you probably shouldn’t be doing it yourself. Ultimately, if you’re in this situation, you might need to fire the guy or gal doing it now, which probably is you. but maybe share some thoughts. Let’s kind of start off with talking about just some of the important metrics that people should be tracking because a lot of people

If their financials are not buttoned up, they don’t really, I mean, if you think of it like a car, don’t have a very good dashboard, right? As to what’s going on.

Amanda Webster (03:53.984)
Yeah, listen a lot of a lot of investors and I understand it you’re focused on getting that money in the door getting that revenue having everything come in

But what you’re not understanding is where is that going? What is happening with that? Why are you not holding on to more? Why are you not growing? Right? So there’s, I say there’s five financial metrics that every real estate investor, real estate agent, whatever you’re doing in that space should know. You you need to know your gross profit margin. You need to know your net profit margin. Your cashflow is huge, right? Because your cashflow is what’s depicting whether you can do that next deal. What is your ROI as a whole?

from each property, each deal that you’re doing, what is that return that you’re getting, and your EBITDA, right? You always, I always say that you may not think you wanna sell your portfolio or your business, but if you don’t know your EBITDA, you never really know if you could and if it’s profitable, right? You wanna have something that’s gonna have a really good number there. understanding that those are the main things you need to look at, all of them include your revenue. So it’s not like you’re disregarding the money coming in the door. You need to understand

where all that fits in and are you doing a good job with that? Are you really spending the money to help you grow?

Mike Hambright (05:10.527)
Yeah, that’s great. I think the advice is, I think like this now, I didn’t always, is like, I should be ready to sell my business at any time. And I’ve sold businesses and now, mean, it wasn’t really until I sold a business that I realized like, why don’t I think about, so I asked one of my teams this question a while back, a little while back, like six months ago. If somebody were to come buy us right now,

Amanda Webster (05:12.039)
Thanks.

Amanda Webster (05:30.712)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Hambright (05:37.739)
what are like the five or 10 things they would do to double or triple our business, right? And then it’s like, why aren’t we doing that? Like that’s what we need to go do, right? It’s almost like, cause you just get comfortable where you are. And usually if somebody is going to buy, if somebody, let’s be honest, sometimes people buy a business just for cashflow. It’s like operating really well. But for any of us as small entrepreneurs that would sell our business, unless we’re going to stay on as a key employee, it’s probably.

like a value add sale, like they’re, want to buy you because they see you’re mismanaging it. So they’re going to come in and do this, this, and this and double the business. And so we need to think about like, well, what would they do and why the heck aren’t we doing that? Right. And the only way you know, what’s that.

Amanda Webster (06:09.797)
Do you know what the number one thing is? Do you know what the number one thing is they’re gonna do when they come in? Now I call it the Doge effect, right? They’re gonna come in and they’re going to audit your financials. They’re gonna audit.

Mike Hambright (06:27.787)
What’s that?

Mike Hambright (06:34.611)
That’s right.

Amanda Webster (06:35.641)
the money trail to see where it’s going. That’s the literal first thing they’re gonna do before they ever commit to buying a business is what do your financials look like? And that is why auditing internally yourself is super important.

Mike Hambright (06:49.791)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. So but for us, the financials are the scorecard, And it’s not about like, it’s not about, it’s not necessarily about like winning. I mean, we all want to win. I mean, don’t get me wrong. But it’s about you don’t even know the score. Like, how do you even operate your business, right? Then you’re back to and I know some people that do this, especially on the contractor side.

Amanda Webster (07:05.57)
Yeah.

Amanda Webster (07:15.588)
on the practice side. No, because that’s not a real number. That number doesn’t tell you, what do you have outstanding that’s going to come out of that? And what are you investing the part that’s left? And there’s a lot of pieces there.

Mike Hambright (07:16.543)
Like in their mind, their success is based on what’s in their bank account today. I mean, that’s, that’s just not a way to operate. It’s as a real estate investor.

Mike Hambright (07:33.972)
Right.

Amanda Webster (07:40.503)
You know, that’s like me saying my net worth is what’s in my bank account. Well, that’s not true. I got bills due. I got bills due.

Mike Hambright (07:46.027)
You got a bunch of debt, Right. So let’s talk a little bit about, I want to get into kind of how to fix some issues. And I think a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is really how to operate your business with confidence. Because if you don’t have that dashboard, basically you’re driving blind, right? And so for a lot of folks that are listening to this and a lot of folks that run in my circles, they tend to be top hustlers.

hustle, just, need to sell more, I need to sell more, need to sell more, and I need to work harder. There’s a lot of folks that are like that in this industry. We’re gonna talk about how to work smarter today, because you can operate your business so much better if you have the confidence that all the pieces of your puzzle are in place, right? So let’s kind of start with the end in mind. We’re gonna come back to like how to fix some of those issues, but let’s talk about some of the most important KPIs that…

Amanda Webster (08:15.838)
yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:41.917)
entrepreneurs should be looking at in their business just so they have some clarity as to what’s going

Amanda Webster (08:46.816)
I mean, listen, the first thing and you said it earlier was if you’re the entrepreneur and you’re doing your own financials, you need to fire yourself. You should not be spending. Follow the 80-20 rule. Be out there doing the revenue generating things, but don’t do this, right? This requires a skill set.

Mike Hambright (09:19.669)
Hey Amanda, I lost your audio if you can hear me. I don’t know what happened but lost your audio.

Mike Hambright (09:48.073)
Yeah.

Amanda Webster (10:43.578)
where I went. Am I back?

Mike Hambright (10:45.547)
Hey, so yeah, are you able to, how do I get you to leave?

Amanda Webster (10:48.238)
Yeah.

I don’t know, it it completely kicked me out once I tried to get to the settings.

Mike Hambright (10:57.611)
I’m going to try to remove your. Other one here or you do still have it open on your phone. Well, it’s just closed there. It’s gone OK. Yeah, I don’t know what happened right when you said here’s what you basically going to fire yourself and here’s what you got to do and all of a it’s just like muted. So anyway, if you can try to pick up there then we’ll be OK.

Amanda Webster (11:03.578)
I don’t think so, I’m in the app. Okay, I was like, I’m in the app, so I’m like.

Amanda Webster (11:16.714)
Let me do one thing because I think the issue is my phone rang.

So, hold on.

Let me turn myself to do not disturb and then that should turn everything else off. I didn’t do that and so my phone rang, somehow my audio went somewhere. I don’t know where it went, but it went somewhere. Okay, all right, I’m ready.

Mike Hambright (11:33.383)
yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:41.833)
Yeah. OK, so just go ahead and pick it back up where we were. You basically like if you’re still doing this yourself, you need to fire yourself and kind of then you went and then you started. You said something super important, but I couldn’t hear it.

Amanda Webster (11:46.871)
You fire yourself.

Amanda Webster (11:56.441)
All right, we’re good. I’m ready.

Mike Hambright (11:58.443)
All right, do it.

Amanda Webster (12:00.578)
So the first thing I’m gonna tell you is if you as the entrepreneur doing your books and keeping your financials healthy, fire yourself. That is not what you should be doing. Follow the 80-20 rule, go out there and get all the money in, get all the deals done. Don’t be handling this. This requires a skillset, right? This requires somebody who understands numbers, understands books, and can be really good with detail, right? It’s a lot of detail that has to go into numbers.

So whether it’s bringing somebody in house that you train on your model, you train on your industry and they come in and do your bookkeeping and your accounting full time, that’s great. Whether you hire a service, it doesn’t matter, but get someone who actually understands not just financials, but real estate financials. It’s very different to run a real estate business, whether it’s an agency or a real estate investing or running a mom and pop restaurant.

Mike Hambright (12:46.645)
Yeah.

Amanda Webster (12:56.119)
Those are very different things. So don’t settle just because they say they’re accountants or they say this. If they don’t understand how real estate works and all of the things that come with it, I would find the specialist that does that, right? Or hiring somebody in that can do it. And maybe it’s a mixture. Maybe it’s hiring a VA who can do the inputting of the bookkeeping and then having a service that can handle the higher end forecasting models.

You call the dashboard, that’s literally what you need. There’s these dashboards that can be built for you so you can understand where your money is at all times. You can understand your top line revenue, your bottom line revenue. Like everything that goes in between and really digest where you’re spending your money. Because unfortunately, when you’re in the business and you’re just doing the things and being the doer, you’re spending the money sometimes not in the best place, right? Anyone who’s in your group knows there are providers you can get where you can save a ton of money.

by being with the right group, by being in the right place, by having the right vendor for that. So you could be overspending and not even realize it.

Mike Hambright (14:01.503)
And I want to tell you, I’ll use some kind of real estate. I’m going to talk to the folks listening, real estate investor to real estate investor here, right? By the way, and I am a recovering finance guy. used to be a finance guy. My wife is our, we have a CFO, but she was our CFO for 16 years. And she has a finance and accounting background as well. Is that, you know, we sometimes I think as real estate, but probably as entrepreneurs think of like all.

Amanda Webster (14:21.567)
Thank you.

Mike Hambright (14:28.797)
of what’s like a finance or accounting person and they’re all the same is honestly, it’s not that different than saying a plumber can be a roofer, or it can be an electrician, they’re trades, right? And so I would say, like, for example, we have, we have in house teams and some outside folks as well, like all of our tax strategies, stuff and tax prep is handled outside. Internally, we have your bookkeepers, and then we have like accountant, accounting manager, and we have a CFO, but

Amanda Webster (14:47.901)
I think

Mike Hambright (14:58.399)
Could our CFO go do bookkeeping? Yeah, but our bookkeeper can’t do CFO level work because it’s more strategic, right? And so I think sometimes will be, you know, the easiest thing to outsource is bookkeeping type stuff. And then if you want a little more helpless strategy or kind of thinking, you know, analytics, right? Is it like until you have the bookkeeping and the accounting clear, nobody can really analyze it because your books are junk. you can’t really tell what you’re dealing with. And so

Amanda Webster (15:16.592)
Right.

Mike Hambright (15:27.593)
I guess my point in telling you that for those of you that are listening is just because you know somebody that’s done some bookkeeping before doesn’t mean that they can be your accountant, right? They can do some stuff. for a lot of folks that probably listening to this right now, you might not be able to afford a full-time person internally to do all these things. And so sometimes you have like your office admin or whatever you call that person, executive assistant.

is like, yeah, they can help with the books as well. But it’s like, well, what if you could take that off your plate and let them focus on other things that a bookkeeper couldn’t do? you know, their time might be spent hiring a $10 an hour bookkeeper that’s overseas maybe, or a service, to do that for you and have them focus on following up on hot leads and stuff like that that’s going to earn your company way more revenue. It’s just going to repurpose their time. So anyway.

Amanda Webster (16:13.422)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:21.727)
My point in saying that is accountants and bookkeepers and financial folks are are as different as plumbers and electricians and roofers like they have a skill and something they’re good at. And so don’t think don’t assume they’re all the same. You agree with that Amanda?

Amanda Webster (16:35.41)
Absolutely, think it’s general business rule, not even just real estate specific is write people, write seats, right? Whether it’s an in-house W-2 at 1099, a service provider, right? So having the people that are going to be able to affect your revenue streams the most, right? But also thinking about as the visionary person, how are you able to plan? How can you scale? How can you…

And that’s really one of the main bottlenecks is twofold, is people in the right positions, because that will always be an issue. And then system and processes, which includes accounting, right? Accounting is a system process that you need to have set up for your business for success. So when you’re thinking about those things, if you’re wanting to grow, it’s the beginning of 2025, what are you going to do in 2025? How do you answer that question if you don’t understand what’s in that back office, what’s happening back there?

How do you plan, you know, any more, it’s the same in your personal life. How do you budget for vacations if you don’t know how much money is coming in the door and what bills are going out, right? It’s the same philosophy. It’s just in personal, it’s a little bit more, you know, simplistic to do.

Mike Hambright (17:42.303)
Yeah. And really over this last little downturn here, I mean, what I’ve seen is there’s people that are struggling. There’s people that are thriving and the ones that are thriving and doing well, they’re just better operators. They’re buttoned up more than the other folks. And I’ll give you a perfect example that I think people will resonate with that are listening to this, real estate investor friends is they know exactly what they’re, we call it ROAS, return on ad spend, or their ROI, their return on investment on advertising at the channel level. And so a lot of times people

Amanda Webster (18:02.896)
That’s all.

Mike Hambright (18:11.891)
Will like this is what happened during a downturn. A lot of things people cut first is advertising and I am biased, but I believe to the core of my soul that the last thing you should ever cut is advertising because it has a long-term impact on the revenue and profitability of your business. But what tends to happen is people cut their most expensive channel first, which might have the highest return on ad spend. And then they stick with the cheaper channels because they’re cheaper.

Amanda Webster (18:36.699)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:39.775)
but they might have a terrible return on ad spend and you just didn’t know it because you looked at advertising as a whole instead of breaking it out by channel. But unless you have your financials buttoned up and you know, like for every deal I bought, here’s the lead source that came from and here’s exactly what I spend by lead source. This is just one example that you can look at and make much better decisions as an operator because you have that clarity.

Amanda Webster (19:02.444)
Yeah, the marketing arm is a huge piece of that, that a lot of people, know, however you’re marketing your business or marketing, you know, if you’re one that’s flipping and selling, whatever it may be, how do you know what marketing channels are worth investing more, right? Or do you need to pull back from? And the only way to know that is following that trail, right? Even for us, like when I look at the ROI for ads and things like that, I have to look at…

Mike Hambright (19:18.581)
Right.

Amanda Webster (19:30.258)
What am I paying per lead? am I paying for cost per acquisition? What’s happening within that funnel? There’s all these things, right? I know every piece of that data. And so it’s the same aspect when you’re running your business is you need to know all of that data to be able to make the right decisions. Because if you’re running TV ads in a San Diego market and you’re running them in Denver, Colorado and

whatever one’s doing better is the one you put more money into, right? Like you shouldn’t be doing things just based off of, I just like that market or I like this or that. So understanding your back office, yeah, it’s the same thing.

Mike Hambright (20:06.281)
Yeah. And it’s the same thing with exit strategies too, is people assume that their rehabs are way more profitable. But there’s a lot of, I mean, the biggest difference, you know, operationally, I mean, obviously there’s the managing a rehab versus a wholesale deal. But if your books aren’t clean, if you’re not, I mean, for us, we flipped hundreds of houses and every house in QuickBooks has its own class. So every house has its own P &L.

So we can see down to the house level what the profitability was, right? And a lot of people that don’t have their books super clean, they just assume they’re making more money, but you don’t know that for sure, because there’s a lot of noise in there.

Amanda Webster (20:36.3)
house.

Yeah, I mean every property should have a budget, you know sheet that you know exactly and how do you know if your budgeting is on track and then how do you start picking up on trends of okay clearly this you know pack bathroom package is costing me 10 % more now I need to reprice that if you don’t understand those numbers if you’re not

following that in a nice clean pretty way, you’re never gonna actually do it, right? Let’s all be real, if it’s not handed on a nice pretty platter, most people aren’t gonna look at it. But if it’s nice and clean and it tells you exactly what you’re looking for, it’s easy to pick up on those pockets where you need to focus a little bit more time.

Mike Hambright (21:27.435)
Yeah, yeah. It just helps with confidence overall. And I’ll tell you, like, for many, many years, we operated like our financials were perfectly buttoned up, but we didn’t do a great job of forecasting. Like we didn’t really spend a lot of time on forecasting. It was always retroactive. Like here’s reporting. It’s like, here’s what’s happened, right? Which is important. And that’s what we’ve been talking about here. But maybe share your thoughts on the value. And I know it, but on forecasting your business, because a lot of real estate investors and a lot of entrepreneurs, honestly, are kind of living day to day.

But I can tell you, you can operate your business with way more confidence if you have somebody helping you with forecasting that’s like, here’s what’s gonna happen over the next three or even six months.

Amanda Webster (22:07.523)
Yeah, there’s a lot of value in forecasts and projections, right? I always tell people like having a healthy PNL is great. It’s a great thing. I’m not discounting it, but that’s what already happened. That’s the past. You what does your balance sheet look like right now? A lot of people don’t even have a balance sheet. They don’t even know how to do the balance sheet. So what is you, where do you sit currently versus the past? And then going that step further, okay, if we take all the data from this past model,

this current model and then put in some projections, obviously we’re in real estate so we gotta look at different things that’s going on, then you can forecast, you can know, okay, if this property continues at this current rate, it’s gonna be worth X, if I pull money out of this investment, it’s gonna be worth Y, that’ll allow me to purchase over. There’s such a beauty in being able to make really tough decisions, but easy and quick when you actually have the data in front of you.

Mike Hambright (23:04.383)
Yeah.

Amanda Webster (23:04.583)
So it’s, you need the P &L, I’m not discounting it, you need it, it’s a great thing to have, you should have it for every property, you should have it for a business as a whole. You need your balance sheet, like where you’re at today, where is your money sitting today? And then looking at those forecasting models. And let me just tell you, like, I’m not an accountant, I wouldn’t do this myself, my gosh, I would go crazy, I just wouldn’t do it, right? So that’s the whole thing is find somebody who can do it for you, whether it’s that.

W-2 employee, that 1099, that service provider, whatever it is that fits your business right now, find what makes the most sense that’s gonna be efficient, economical, to keep you profitable. But this is actually how you keep more money. Understanding your money and stopping some other spending that you may not even realize is happening is keeping everything in your pocket.

Mike Hambright (23:46.517)
Bye.

Mike Hambright (23:56.299)
Yeah. And you can get out in front of stuff. Like if you know, just hypothetically, like, my overhead is 40 grand a month. Um, and you’re, you know, you’re to pay your office and your staff and to make sure your marketing stays consistent or whatever, just hypothetically. And you know that I’ve got two deals that we’re finishing the rehab on now. And on average it’s taken us 60 days to put them on the market and sell it and come back in. You can anticipate these cashflow. These are the cash flows that are coming in and you just kind of guess as to when the timing is going to be.

Amanda Webster (24:12.646)
I hope.

This is.

Mike Hambright (24:26.187)
Um, conservatively, right? So it’s like, Hey, worst case, I think there are three or four months out, but hopefully they’re two months in, but that way, you know, what you might do is say, it looks like we’re going to, you know, we’re not finished with these projects yet. I was expecting to get a cashflow in from this. I was expecting to get 30 grand in next month. And it’s like, okay, what am I going to do to cover my overhead next month? If you can’t, if you’re not in a position to float it, right. That what am going to do to cover that next month? It’s like, you know what? We’re about to start this rehab, but I think I just need to.

Amanda Webster (24:44.486)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Hambright (24:55.239)
I just need to wholesale that one because I need that money coming in right now. But if you don’t have somebody looking at that kind of cash flow pipeline, which is really a financial projection of a balance sheet, then you’re just winging it. You’re just like throwing some grass up in the air and seeing kind of which direction it blows. And that’s not how you want to operate your business.

Amanda Webster (25:14.782)
That’s not the No, and let’s be real. Real estate is volatile, right? As far as like, it’s never consistent. It’s always up and down. As far as like, you might have a month where you make 100 grand, you might have a month where you make 20 grand, right? It just depends on the deal flow that you have going on. But over time, you can start picking up those trends. But also imagine, if you go into a bank,

which I know is funny for anyone listening, but if you go into a bank and try to get a loan based on your financial statements, you walk in with a book of receipts and they’re not even gonna talk to you, right? So this can also help you become what we call bankable, being able to get real true cashflow light months, having that safety net and be able to get really quality, low cost funding.

is gonna come from having clean financials. You go in there with your P &L and your balance sheet and your projected cash flows and everything else, and you’re telling this story, bankers are people, but they also have these metrics they have to go by. But you could actually go in and get a loan, a business loan on your company, it’s not tied to anything other than your company, and help you through those cash flow problems. But you’re not gonna do that if your back office is a mess, because they’re just never gonna give that to you.

Mike Hambright (26:37.163)
Yeah, they won’t even. Yeah, for sure. That’s the language they speak is the financials financial statements. Yeah, yeah. So for those of you listening, you you could you could you could go find what I here’s what I recommend is these are such important things you should really work with somebody that you know or somebody that somebody is referred right when you find so you could go out and find you know a lot of real estate investors are also cheap. We like try to find cheap houses, cheap labor, do everything on the cheap. This is one of those areas where.

Amanda Webster (26:41.501)
Yeah, yeah, so rainy day fund definitely another need.

Mike Hambright (27:05.969)
It’d be worth spending a little bit more if you have to to find like good people, right? And so it doesn’t have to be a lot more, but you could go find, you know, somebody all on your own direct to a bookkeeper that’s a virtual assistant. The problem is, is if you’re not very going to be very good at training them like you might, that’s going to be a struggle, right? So it might sound cheaper, but it’s like it’s like the blind leading the blind a little bit like you probably shouldn’t be teaching somebody to do that. Of course.

You can hire in-house people and you could go through a headhunting agency to bring in bookkeepers and accountants and where you could use a service. And Amanda runs a service called accruity where you can hire bookkeepers and accountants, fractional, accounting folks to kind of help with that. So what are, what are some of the pros and cons that you see Amanda besides, you know, kind of cost and skill. And I think the big thing is it’s really, you know, just to share some thoughts here on the real estate investors time, like your time is so valuable.

Amanda Webster (27:44.194)
Yeah, I mean, it’s always about.

Mike Hambright (28:01.225)
sure that you guys that are listening to this understand the value of being able to hand this off easily because your time is so valuable.

Amanda Webster (28:10.326)
buying back time, right? So what we all wanna do, we buy back our time, we wanna spend time doing the things we love or the things that are gonna have the most impact, right? So unless you are an accountant and have an accounting background, if you are, then this probably doesn’t apply to you necessarily. But at the same time, we all need to delegate the things that are not within that 80-20 rule of what we should be doing. And like I said earlier, it’s okay if you wanna go find a W-2 full-time employee.

who handles the main part of your back office and that’s great, but there’ll be pieces that they may not be able to help with because unless they’re coming from that real estate background, they may not understand the forecasting models that you need for this specific industry, right? So I 100 % agree, you should always do your research, work with people that you know have already proven their worth, right? They’ve already worked with people you know, and that’s a great way to find any type of.

provider in the real estate anyways, because we all run in really tight circles and we all like to protect ourselves, this is huge things. But I would say you can piece it out too. You can do a hybrid of it where you hire someone to handle the higher end stuff and you have an in-house bookkeeper, because bookkeeping for the most part is the same, just got to learn a couple different nuances for your business. So I think it’s figuring out long-term what’s going to be the best for you and

you know, really, are you happy where you are? Do you want to grow? Do you want to scale? Well, if you want to grow and scale, then you want to provide, you want to find a provider that’s going to be able to do that with you very easily. And that’s going to actually develop a relationship, right? You don’t want to just work with a robot. So making sure that you are enjoying the team that’s there. So I always tell people you should probably start with finding somebody to, you know, do a consult or an audit and really show you what they feel they could do and really talk to you to make sure that

you understand the same language and that they’re there. So that’s our approach that we do at Accruity. We like to do like a, let me look under the hood, let me see what you have going on, let me show you where things are at, let me show you what it would take to clean you up and then to continue working on any level that you want. We have that ability to be flexible, but we work with anywhere from that early stage investor to…

Amanda Webster (30:29.938)
you the person that has, you know, multi-million, you know, dollar, you know, portfolios and hundreds of doors, it doesn’t matter because that’s kind of, that’s our model. That’s what we specialize in. So I think it’s just finding that, right? And making sure you like the people that you work with and you gotta trust them too.

Mike Hambright (30:45.045)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. One of the things I like about services like yours are that if the person doesn’t work out or they get sick or something got hit by a truck or something else is that they can be replaced in a day or two. Typically, like there’s you have somebody to go to to say, help me get this back on track. And when you’ve hired somebody directly and you don’t really know what you’re training, you didn’t create a great training program and they just kind of figured it out like on the job.

Amanda Webster (30:54.11)
It’s fun.

Amanda Webster (31:02.494)
at the last time.

Amanda Webster (31:06.845)
I I could have a chance to work on it. think I’ll probably come back. I think I’ll work on it. That’s a problem I should be able fix. I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll probably come back. I think I’ll come

Mike Hambright (31:12.211)
then the next person is going to have to figure that out too. So if they don’t work out or something happens to them, then you have to get dropped. That’s the problem as an entrepreneur is that you get pulled back into jobs all the time because you didn’t have a backup plan for that person. You didn’t have redundancy. And so if something happens with that one person, either they’re not a fit and you just decide to keep them because you’re so worried about getting pulled back in or they decide to leave or something happens to them.

Amanda Webster (31:35.357)
I’m going to talking about the impact on the lives who need of And I’m going be the impact lives care. And I’m to the impact of on lives who are in care. And the lives of people who are in need care. And

Mike Hambright (31:40.083)
And then you have to get pulled back in and you have to go spend weeks finding that person and training them again and all that. And so when you have a service provider behind it, you know, yeah, sometimes it costs a little bit more, but you’ve got, there’s a layer of kind of management there that’s protecting you from being not only the CEO, but the chief bottle washer as well.

Amanda Webster (32:00.716)
I always like to throw in like the CEO of a Crudie is a real estate investor, right? Funny enough, he’s an accountant turned real estate investor. So it’s such a funny little mix that he naturally created this service, you know, and doing it. But, you know, he understands, he understands the property management world of it. He understands, you know, the construction side of it, because he lives and breathes it in the other, you know, the other part of his life. So it’s always nice to have somebody who

not only understands the accounting, but truly understands the problems that real estate investors have.

Mike Hambright (32:35.957)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Awesome. Well, Amanda, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us today and learning a little bit more about you.

Amanda Webster (32:42.604)
Love it. Thank you for having me.

Mike Hambright (32:44.735)
Yeah, great to see you and everybody. I think at the end of the day, like we just want everybody to be financially free and it’s kind of hard to be free if you’re if your back office is a mess, right? So you gotta at the end of the day if you want financial freedom, your financials have to be clean like you can’t. It just be guessing as to what’s going on there, so you should definitely go check out accruity and learn more about it and follow Amanda. She’s amazing person. There’s a lot of great things going on too, so appreciate all you guys. Thanks again, Amanda.

Amanda Webster (32:59.707)
Thank you.

Mike Hambright (33:12.723)
Yep, and everybody have a great day. We’ll see you on the next show.