Chris & John
- Apr 28, 2020
- 3 min read

Ep 48: Learning Lessons, Managing Teams, and Honing in on a Niche with Billy Alvaro

Success feels great, but it doesn’t teach you much, and the more you have failed before you succeed, the more resilient you’ll be against future failures. Today’s guest has enjoyed many great successes, but his failures are the things that have given him all the wisdom he shares on today’s show. Billy Alvaro is mostly in the wholesaling game, but he does renovations, buy and holds and a little multifamily too. His two companies are Easy Sell Property Solutions and Max Returns Real Estate Investments, which he does purchasing and raising through respectively. We kick things off hearing about Billy’s hugely successful global scale mortgage banking business that crashed in 2008 and left him 14 million dollars in debt! Billy learned an enormous amount from this though, and the many lessons he took away make up the bulk of our conversation, the first one being how to pick up the pieces and move on to the next thing.

Billy’s action mindset and knowledge that failures are inevitable helped him apply what he learned from his previous business to his current real estate one and is doing a lot of good in helping him managing the current crisis too. Billy talks about the value of good systems today and he shares all the ways he is implementing them in his new business, from extensive hiring processes to strategies around staff delegation, forming a company culture, focussing on a niche, training staff, and knowing the best use of his time. Tune in for some great tips on how to run your company!

Key Points From This Episode:

The action mindset and Billy’s transition from mortgage banking to real estate.
Getting past fear and dealing with the pandemic as just another challenge to overcome.
The value of failure for learning lessons; there are no lessons in success.
Creating systems and the importance of having a focused niche to optimize.
Being a slave to your business versus having a life due to teams and systems.
No quick routes; one needs to put in the time to learn the business.
The cost of Billy’s ignorance around hiring, culture, and accountability previously.
Billy’s new vetting process and how he even makes applying challenging.
Outsourcing/hiring well-paid specialists to run systems you created yourself first.
Inspecting delegated tasks to keep quality control up.
How Billy makes the best use of his skill through delegation and final problem-solving.
Letting staff learn things themselves so that the lessons stick.
Pet-peeves about explaining the same thing many times to staff who pretend to understand.

Tweetables:

“People can’t be afraid to fail. You have to fail often, fail frequently, and fail forward.” — @billyalv [0:05:34]

“The biggest thing that I see entrepreneurs do, and I was definitely at fault for this – you want to inspect everything that you expect. So if I am going to delegate something to somebody, I’m not just going to say, ‘Here, run with it,’ and never check up on them.” — @billyalv [0:23:47]

“We’re lean right now, but there’s no person that I could look at on my team that I could say, ‘That’s a weak link.’” — @billyalv [0:30:42]