April 27, 2025
Building a Remote Workforce: How VPM Solutions Is Revolutionizing Property Management
Pete Neubig takes us on a captivating journey through his remarkable career transformation, from IT professional to property management entrepreneur and back to tech innovator. After 25 years in information technology, Pete's life took an unexpected turn at age 41 when he found himself managing 31 properties and three apartment complexes without the proper systems in place. This necessity birthed Empire Industries Property Management, which he eventually grew to manage nearly 1,000 single-family homes across three Texas markets before selling in 2019.
The entrepreneurial challenges Pete encountered revealed a fundamental problem in service-based businesses: the precarious balance between staffing costs and profitability. "People become your number one expense," he explains, creating a stressful cycle where companies must continuously grow to maintain profit margins while overburdening existing staff. His breakthrough came when he discovered that hiring qualified international remote team members could dramatically reduce payroll costs—from 56% to 34% of revenue—while actually improving service quality.
This revelation sparked the creation of VPM Solutions, a marketplace connecting property management and real estate companies with remote talent across 150+ countries. Pete offers listeners a masterclass in building effective remote teams, sharing frameworks for everything from initial hiring to ongoing management. His approach balances structure with autonomy through clear job descriptions, personality assessments, key performance indicators, and consistent check-ins that focus on solutions rather than micromanagement.
Perhaps most valuable is Pete's candid reflection on selling his business—a process that left him financially secure but surprisingly unhappy. "I had more money than I ever had, making more money than I ever had, and I was the unhappiest I ever was," he reveals. His advice for entrepreneurs considering an exit: know precisely what you'll do next, negotiate for cash upfront even if it means a lower valuation, and recognize when you're "unemployable" as an entrepreneur at heart. For businesses struggling with staffing costs or seeking to scale efficiently, Pete's proven remote workforce model offers a compelling solution that might just transform your operation.
www.vpmsolutions.com
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600
00:00 - Pete's Entrepreneurial Journey
08:32 - The VPM Solutions Marketplace
11:42 - Best Practices for Remote Hiring
22:36 - Effective Remote Team Management
29:40 - Selling a Business: Lessons Learned
35:43 - Current Projects and Final Thoughts
WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball, If you believe you can achieve.
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Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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Where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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Today, I am joined by podcast host and real estate expert, Pete Newbig.
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Pete is the CEO and co-founder of VPM Solutions, an online platform that connects the real estate industry with team members virtually.
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He has won awards and he has sold companies.
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He's very successful in what he does, so we're going to be talking to him and everything that he's up to.
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So, Pete, thank you so much for joining me.
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Curtis, thanks so much for having me Appreciate you.
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Why don't you start off by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself?
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Sure, okay, well, I'm originally from New York City, from the Bronx.
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Why don't you start off by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself?
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Sure, okay, well, I'm originally from New York City, from the Bronx.
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I moved to Houston, texas, as a young adult I am no longer a young adult, curtis, now I am an older adult, in my 50s, and I moved to Houston.
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I said I was going to live here for one year and I was back in 1995 and I'm still here.
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So I, like Texas, I like Houston, took a job opportunity here.
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I didn't start my entrepreneurial journey until I was 41, where I started a property management company.
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I was in IT before that for like 25 years and moved into, went into a completely different field in property management.
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And the reason I started my property management firm was because I was buying properties.
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I was an investor and my partner, steve Rosenberg, and I bought about 31 properties in about 18 months.
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I had all single family.
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I had also purchased in partnerships three apartment complexes, and so I had lots of property and did not know how to manage them.
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So I realized oh man, I better start managing these properties correctly, because I wasn't collecting rent.
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Maintenance was atrocious.
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All the challenges that happen when you don't manage properties.
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So we started a management company.
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The anticipation was that we would just have the management company for our properties and somewhere along the way we started doing what's called third-party managing or managing investment properties for other people, and that was actually profitable.
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So we ended up building that business.
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I quit my full-time job in December of 2012.
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And I started at that point a full-time Empire Industries property management and we ran that property management firm until October 2019.
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So about eight years and we sold it.
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We were in three markets Dallas, houston and Fort Worth and we were at about 984 single family homes managing for over 600 investors.
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And we sold that business, took a job with Mind Management who purchased us and as I was working there, I started building what became VPM Solutions, and I have three partners in VPM Solutions.
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I'm the co-founder and CEO and it's kind of like a full circle.
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I was in IT, went into a bunch of real estate, became a broker, a realtor, investor, property management, and now I'm back in IT and I own a company that is a platform or a marketplace that connects property management and real estate companies with remote team members or virtual assistants in 150 plus countries and that's about 30 years and about six minutes there, Curtis.
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Yeah, you definitely have an impressive career.
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So kind of tell the listeners a little bit more about VPM.
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What does this company do?
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Yeah, so in service-based companies like property management or even like your general contractor or anybody that contractor or you know anybody that's listened to this that that may own a company that is dependent on people, right, people become your number one expense and what happens is like the company doesn't really make a lot of profit margin, so the company has to keep growing to to be able to afford, to be able to get profit right.
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And then what happens is your team gets stressed because you keep growing the company and then you have to hire more people, and then you were profitable.
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When you're profitable, you're stressing your people out, and when you hire people, you're not profitable, and it's this like seesaw that goes back and forth.
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And so back in about 2016, I realized that there are jobs out there that just do not require a lot of experience and a lot of unique skill sets.
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These are kind of like your startup jobs.
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But I couldn't afford hiring people in the us, especially with employer taxes and and the salary that people required and the people that would take the position I found like even though, like I found, I was paying, you know, a higher rate than I really, than what the job role could afford, and I was also getting people who just saw the job as a J-O-B, not as a career, people who had challenges outside the company and would bring it into the company.
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Maybe their car would break down or they had some challenges family issues that they would bring into the business.
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And what we've found is if we can hire people for a fraction of the cost but still have you know, they're bilingual, they're highly educated, they are getting even though they're getting less money here that we're paying, they're making more money than they ever made in their life or they're making really good money compared to where they live in.
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You get people that have a different mindset.
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They don't see it as a J-O-B, they see it as a career, and so you get highly competent people for these kind of lower skilled jobs and then you can hire more of them.
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So anytime you have a company that requires lots of people because there's lots of tasks, obviously the lots of tasks, obviously, the more people you can hire, the more tasks can get done.
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And that was a concept that I had when I said let me create, when I hired the remote team members, more people and my salary went down from 56% of revenue to 34%.
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So a huge change which allowed the company to run profitably, allowed me to pay my people in the US more and allowed me to give bonuses, healthcare, lots of other perks.
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And so when I was thinking about building VPM, I was thinking how can I help other service-based companies, especially the property management industry?
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And so that's where the marketplace was born, and with VPM, we have about 40,000 candidates or people looking for work, and if you're a company in the US, you can create a free profile.
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You can search all those candidates.
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You can then invite them to a job.
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You can post a job.
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We have an algorithm that will connect, that will match people on the platform to your job.
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You can then interview them and then hire them through our platform, all for free.
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The way we make money is, once you hire them, they enter time on the platform and you pay them through our platform.
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So we have time cards and we have reporting, we have training and, of course, we have the database of candidates.
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So we feel like we're kind of all in one.
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You can source, train onboard, manage and pay all in one spot.
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And the way we make money is we charge the candidate, or, in this case, the virtual assistant a percentage.
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It's called a platform fee.
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We charge 10.
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So if you hire somebody at 10 bucks an hour, they're going to bring home nine and vpn will take in one dollar and we're seeing huge success with that.
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People are reducing their payroll costs.
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They're able to hire multiple people.
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We're seeing people get out of poverty in these second and third world countries and we're seeing companies have a much higher profit margin.
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So pretty exciting stuff, absolutely.
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And what I was going to ask?
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What are some best practice tips for somebody who's in your industry?
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You know service-based, wanting to source, train and onboard.
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You know remote people.
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Yeah, so that's a great question.
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There's so much in that.
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One simple question, right?
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Like?
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So the first thing really is you know, are you ready for a remote team member?
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Like, you need to know what that job role is, because the biggest fear that people have with hiring remote is I'm not sure what they can do and how do I know they're working.
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Those are kind of the two big ones.
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So the first thing is how do you know what they can do?
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Well, just do a time study and if you have a bunch of items that you're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that you don't like to do, you literally can just create a job description from those objects.
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The other thing you can do is if you're a bigger company and you have different processes, you can say you know what, I want to hire somebody to handle this process.
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So, for example, in property management, we have like a lease renewal process.
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So I hired somebody to handle just the lease renewals with the annual inspections, and they can own that process.
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Once you have a really good understanding of what you want that job role to be, now you know exactly.
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Okay, that's kind of like the rules of the game.
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Right?
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Those are the instructions to the seat.
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Next thing is okay, I want to make sure I hire the right person in my organization.
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So what are your core values?
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If you do not have core values, your company does have them.
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They're just maybe not the ones that you want, right?
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So core values have to start at the top and get pushed down, so you can't allow your team to create your core values.
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For example, if you have a company and everybody comes in late, well, your core value is that you could come in late.
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That's just like that ends up becoming a value right, and a lot of people they'll create core values and they'll put them on a nice little poster board and put it on the wall to talk about it one time, never to be heard from again.
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You have to live those core values.
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If you are creating core values and you don't really resonate with those values and you're the owner of the company or you're a top, you know a C-sweeter in the company.
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They're never going to get pushed down.
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You have to live those core values.
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They have to be you.
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So once you know your core values, now you know the type of person that you're looking for.
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Your organization this is whether they are going to be in an office next to you or they're going to be in a state, one state, two states over, or if they're going to be 12,000 miles away in the Philippines.
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You need to know the type of person you're looking for.
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Then, with the job description, you need to know what they're supposed to do.
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But, more importantly, they need to know what they're supposed to do.
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That's why the job description is so important what they're supposed to do, that's why the job description is so important.
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Then every job description in your organization should have a personality profile attached to it, and what I mean by that?
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There's a lot of personality assessment programs out there.
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Predictive Index is probably the most famous one.
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I'm a big fan of DISC D-I-S-C, and personality profile tells me this is the type of person that will be the best fit for this role.
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So think of like the person, like the core values, is a ticket to get on the boat right.
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To get on this boat, you need to have these core values.
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You need to be this type of person.
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This is the person I want to be in the foxhole with.
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This is the person that we're going to go to war with.
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Okay, then I need to put the right person in the right seat.
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Well, how do I know what's the right seat?
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I need instructions for the seat.
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That's your job description, now I know.
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Okay, now in this seat, I need, you know, let's say, I need the real skinny guy in the front yelling row, row, row.
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Well, that's going to be a different guy than in the back, the big guy that's going to be, that's going to be the anchor to the, to the rowing of the boat.
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So who's the right person?
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Well, that's the personality profile comes in.
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So now I have the instructions to the seat, the job description.
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I have the personality profile, which is going to be your DISC assessment.
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So now I know the type of person, the personality profile and the job description.
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The last thing I need to know is how they're going to row, and those are key performance indicators.
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So every job role in your organization should have key performance indicators, and if you have like 14, that's too many.
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The less is more.
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Approach should have one to three KPIs, more than three, and then most likely you need to split that job role.
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In my organization today, a VPM, no one has more than three KPIs.
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If we can get it down to one.
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It's one KPI.
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And now the KPI is like your scorecard, right?
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So every like we all went to school, my sister loved getting her scorecard or her report card because it was good.
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I didn't like getting mine that often, but I knew where I stood.
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People like to have an idea where they stand and the key performance indicator allows them to, you know, to try to achieve those goals.
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And then there's a bunch of rules on how to set up the KPI, how often to look at it and all that good stuff.
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But once I have that, now I have a very good understanding of what I'm looking for in a person.
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Now, the only difference between hiring local and hiring remote is when you hire remote, you have to look at their computer, their internet speed and their workspace, and so those are only three different things.
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So when we hire a remote, we actually have a scorecard.
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We have a 10-point scorecard and we score things like responsiveness, computer and internet speed, and and appearance and office.
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Those are a few things that we look at.
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We also look at skill education, english proficiency.
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That's the other one you have to look at is English proficiency, because you are hiring people where English is their second language in most cases.
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But other than that, everything else is very similar.
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And then the next question is okay, so now, pete, I hire this person.
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Well, how do I train them Right?
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So they have the job description and how do I train them?
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And we find it actually easier to train through Zoom and then record the training.
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And so what we do is and I'm not saying this is the best way, curtis, this is a way and it's probably it's worked for us for quite a while.
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But what we do is, anytime you hire somebody new, we spend a lot of time with them up front Every day, hour at least minimum, if not more.
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We train them through Zoom and we'll record it.
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And then they have to watch the Zoom and build their own user manual.
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And the way we do, even if we have our own, we have a user manual or a process manual we want them to build their own, because I made a mistake early on where I built like 110 page maintenance manual and not only did anybody not read it, but they didn't even know how to like how to search through it when questions came up.
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So with these videos we train them.
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You learn by listening, watching, writing down and then kind of training, regurgitating right and letting us know.
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So what we do is we have the video, they then they, they listen, then they have to watch the video, then they have to write it down in a, in a you know, in a process manual and then they have to basically teach you the next day.
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So when you have to teach right, where they say the best way to learn something is is actually teach it, and so we do that.
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Most job roles take between two to four weeks to train.
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Some of them take a little bit longer, but usually within four weeks, usually you can let them move on to the next level and we always say the first, you know, 60 days everything gets escalated.
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You kind of work in conjunction with you and then over time, less and less get escalated to the point where it's only like 10% get escalated.
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And so you kind of you redirect them when they ask a question like hey, how do I?
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You know, hey, how do I do this?
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Well, how would you do this?
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What do you think the answer is?
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So instead of answering like, instead of becoming a superhero, getting in case of superhero-itis and answering every question, you redirect and ask them well, what do you think?
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How would you do this?
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And so that's your training piece.
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And I know that's not easy, I get that, you know.
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But once you do this the first time, then you have your training database, then you have somebody else that can actually train.
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So when you have to hire the next person, the person you trained can train them and or they can go to those videos.
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And if you do the videos and you put them on YouTube and um on, you know, you, you make them, um, private versus public, and tag them, right, they, they can use that.
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And so that's how you train.
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And then the next piece is how do you manage them?
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Right, and people are worried.
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They'll say Pete, I'm worried that you know, this $6 an hour guy that I hired is going to steal time and he's going to go to the bathroom for two hours and he's going to leave early or whatever it is.
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Meanwhile they got a guy in their office next to him, makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, comes in late, takes two smoke breaks, takes a long lunch, leaves early, and they don't care about that.
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That guy's stealing so much time but you don't care about that.
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But you care about the $6 an hour guy that's going to the restroom for an hour.
00:19:00.565 --> 00:19:05.234
So there's three ways to manage people when remote.
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You can manage them through micromanagement, you can manage them through abdication, or you can manage them through delegation, and so the first way, the micromanagement, is basically write everything down that you do.
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I'm going to use the software to screen capture you.
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I want you on video all day.
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No one wants to be micromanaged and it's a great way to burn somebody out really quick.
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Plus, do you actually have all that time to micromanage somebody Like you?
00:19:35.526 --> 00:19:37.153
Hire them to do the work, let them do the work.
00:19:38.790 --> 00:19:51.874
The opposite side of that spectrum is you have somebody that abdicates, and what I mean by that is they hire somebody and they say oh man, I've been so busy, here's all the stuff that I do that you need to do now.
00:19:51.874 --> 00:20:05.549
And then they don't give them any direction, they don't train them, they don't check in and they pat themselves on the back saying man, I'm not a micromanager, yeah, but you're not a manager at all, you're not managing them.
00:20:05.549 --> 00:20:10.247
And what happens there is you don't know what they're supposed to do.
00:20:10.247 --> 00:20:11.310
They don't know what they're supposed to do.
00:20:11.310 --> 00:20:12.173
They've never been trained.
00:20:12.173 --> 00:20:15.428
They get frustrated, you get frustrated and then you say this doesn't work.
00:20:15.428 --> 00:20:21.516
Or worse, they leave and say that guy's crazy, that doesn't work and they go find another job.
00:20:21.516 --> 00:20:25.760
And then the one in the middle is the delegation or the management.
00:20:26.965 --> 00:20:29.251
The way I manage is I look.
00:20:29.251 --> 00:20:31.397
The first thing I'd look for is availability.
00:20:31.397 --> 00:20:40.967
So we create policy in our organization to make sure that we create policy Like if I Slack you or text you, you have 20 minutes to Slack me back, or 30 minutes, I think it is.
00:20:40.967 --> 00:20:43.769
If I email you, you have 20 minutes to slack me back, or 30 minutes, I think it is.
00:20:43.769 --> 00:20:46.171
If I email you, you email back in two hours.
00:20:46.171 --> 00:20:48.031
If I call you to call back in 30 minutes.
00:20:48.031 --> 00:20:55.397
So we create policy because the first line of defense when somebody is remote is availability, all the available.
00:20:55.397 --> 00:21:06.728
If they're not answering emails, phone calls, text messages, then most likely they're not working.
00:21:06.728 --> 00:21:08.671
That's just kind of common sense.
00:21:08.671 --> 00:21:17.749
The second way we look at this and we manage is when you have a meeting, you're on camera and you are in your home office.
00:21:17.749 --> 00:21:21.953
We're not taking meetings from the beach or from, you know, starbucks.
00:21:21.953 --> 00:21:28.582
You're in your home office and you are and you're on camera and you're dressed appropriately.
00:21:28.582 --> 00:21:30.250
So that's the next thing.
00:21:31.326 --> 00:21:34.664
The next thing is I look at escalations, internal and external.
00:21:34.664 --> 00:21:45.532
Am I getting escalations from clients stating that you're not, you're not available, right, different availability, internal versus external.
00:21:45.532 --> 00:21:57.012
Or am I getting escalations from people internally saying, man, every time I ask so-and-so to do work, they don't do the work right?
00:21:57.012 --> 00:22:00.732
So I'm looking at availability and I'm looking at escalations.
00:22:00.732 --> 00:22:02.309
And then the last piece is KPIs.
00:22:02.309 --> 00:22:13.559
If somebody is hitting their KPIs and they're available and I'm not getting escalations, my opinion is I don't care if they're working 40 hours, 60 hours or 20 hours.
00:22:13.559 --> 00:22:28.894
I pay straight 40 in most cases and if you can do your job in 30 hours, I'll pay you for 40, especially if you're hitting your KPIs and you're available and there's no escalations and the work's getting done.
00:22:28.894 --> 00:22:33.273
It doesn't matter to me, but that's the way we do it and the way we manage it is.
00:22:33.334 --> 00:22:37.509
We have a weekly meeting Now on a small team, you might meet your.
00:22:37.509 --> 00:22:47.115
You know, if you have an executive assistant, for example, and you hire somebody in, like Costa Rica, you're probably going to meet with them every day, maybe multiple times a day, and that's great.
00:22:47.115 --> 00:23:01.594
But you should have one day a week, a specific hour at a time where it is a specific agenda, because when you talk to somebody every day, it's just kind of like, you know, task-based, or I need this question answered or I need this thing done.
00:23:01.594 --> 00:23:04.946
What we do is we have a, we have an agenda.
00:23:04.946 --> 00:23:11.730
We meet the same time each week, so the same day, the same time each week, and we we go through.
00:23:11.730 --> 00:23:16.086
We start off with a feel good so tell me something good about your personal or business.
00:23:16.086 --> 00:23:18.390
Then we go through a KPI review.
00:23:18.390 --> 00:23:20.073
Are we hitting our numbers?
00:23:20.073 --> 00:23:22.317
If not, is it?
00:23:22.317 --> 00:23:25.086
Does it need to go on a challenge list or is it?
00:23:25.086 --> 00:23:29.076
You know, like I was out last week, so of course we didn't hit our KPI.
00:23:29.076 --> 00:23:31.425
That makes sense, you know.
00:23:31.425 --> 00:23:36.698
So if there's a reason and it's not a challenge, then we just move forward.
00:23:36.698 --> 00:23:39.813
Then we look at tasks from the last week.
00:23:39.813 --> 00:23:41.531
Did you do the tasks that were done?
00:23:41.531 --> 00:23:43.665
If not, do they have to go on a challenge list?
00:23:43.665 --> 00:23:49.769
And then we get to the challenge list and those first few, those first things, are just five minutes each In a challenge list.
00:23:50.651 --> 00:23:58.288
As the business owner and manager, you're asking the question what can I do to make your life easier?
00:23:58.288 --> 00:24:10.796
Right, so our jobs as business owners and managers are just really to get the tools and the training to our team and then get out of the way.
00:24:10.796 --> 00:24:13.865
So what can I do to make your life easier?
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