We recently connected with Pete Neubig and have shared our conversation below.

Pete, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

VPM Solutions was created to help businesses increase profitability by hiring remote workers from around the world.

Although VPM is a smaller firm, everyone that works at VPM, works from home and live in a different city or country. We have people in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and the Philippines!

As a CEO one of the bigger challenges of everyone being remote is managing the culture. Having a strong culture where everyone adheres to the company core values is important in any business but even more so in a smaller company. One bad team member can be a large percentage of your workforce depending on how many people you have. A smaller firm simply cannot survive with a high percentage of bad team members. At VPM we operate out of central standard time, everyone in the company (including the team in the philippines) works CST hours. The team meets every day at 10:00am for a daily meeting. We discuss any potential challenges but mostly it is a 15 – 30 minute meeting of team building. Getting to know each other, working together and laughing with each other.

Each month we have a structure company meeting to go over company numbers, accomplishments and goals but mainly I go over our core values. We ask the team to give an example of another team member that has embraced the core values. The team lives by the core values. When we hire new team members we go over the core values and tell the candidate if they do not align with these values they will not be a good fit for our organization.

Another challenge with working remote is that it is hard to manage your team. Some employers are very stringent on making remote workers “clock in” using a software package that records mouse movements. They use this as a way to make sure people are working. I believe this is micro-management and no one would be happy with big brother looking over their shoulder. Others hire remote workers and abdicate instead of delegate. Meaning, they hire someone, tell them all the challenges they have, spend a day or two with them and then leave them to work never to meet with them again. These managers are not micro-managing but they are not managing.

What we do at VPM is spend a lot of time with new hires that are remote through ZOOM. We meet daily for a minimum of one hour and record the session. The team member watches the session and creates their manual. Once training is over we continue to meet with the team member weekly. This meeting occurs every week, same day of the week and the same time. This meeting is also structured. In this meeting we go over the team members key performance indicators (KPIs)

At VPM we manage by availability, escalations and KPIs. We pay people for 40 hours of work regardless if they work 50 or 30 hours in any given week. If a team member is hitting their KPI targets, are available, are in their home office and there are no internal or external escalations than we do not care how many hours they work, they get paid for 40.

The benefits of hiring remote workers whether they are in the U.S. or abroad is that you are able to choose from a much bigger talent pool. For example, I hired my back end developer from Pennsylvania. If I had to hire a developer in Houston, I might still be looking! For hires outside the U.S. the biggest advantage is that the pay rate is much lower than that of someone in the U.S. You would be surprised the level of talent in countries like Mexico, Philippines and Central America. Bi-lingual, college educated and a willingness to work and be part of something bigger than themselves.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Pete Neubig and I started VPM Solutions, a tech firm, at the age of 51. So, I am not your typical tech startup founder.

Originally from New York, I was always told by my parents to go to college and get a good job. My dad was a New York City firefighter and my mom stayed home with me and my sister until we were older and then got an office job doing accounts payables. We lived in the Bronx and were a typical blue collar family. My uncle owned his own business and growing up I realized my cousins did not live in the Bronx but in a much nicer area of New York. They were definitely living a much better lifestyle.

I did end up going to college and worked in the IT industry for 25 years before I started my first business. When I was working, I would always think about my uncle and cousins. I knew I wanted to start my own business but I never felt I was smart enough. I also made the mistake of not using my uncle as a mentor (until many years later).

I started buying and holding real estate in my early 30s thinking that this could be my business. I now realize real estate is a great way to build wealth but not the right vehicle to build a business for cash flow. With a business partner, we bought 31 single family homes and an apartment complex. We bought so many properties that we were unable to manage them. I started looking for a property management company and realized I could build a better mouse trap. In 2012, at age 42, I started my first business. Empire Industries Property Management and Realty Services. I had no idea what I was doing. I hired a business coach even before I had clients. One of the smartest things I ever did.

I quit my safe secure job in December of 2012. That safe secure job, well, the company I worked 12 years for, ended up folding a few years later. My company, Empire, was growing. The lesson, sometimes that W2 job isnt as safe and secure as you think.

We built Empire from 31 properties to 980 single family homes in three markets (Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth) from 2012 to 2019. We sold the business to Mynd Management in 2019. I took a job with Mynd and quickly realized that I was no longer employable! I stayed with Mynd through the pandemic until June of 2021. In February of 2020 I started the ground work for VPM Solutions. VPM went live in June of 2021, practically the same day as my last day with Mynd.

VPM Solutions is an online marketplace that connects the property management and real estate industry with remote workers in over 200 countries. You can search a database of over 35,000 candidates (and growing each day), you can post a job and invite candidates to your job. You can contract with the remote worker, manage, train and pay them all through the platform.

A few lessons I have learned through my journey:

1. Hiring a coach and/or having a mentor is paramount. By the way, my uncle is still running his business today and has become a mentor to me.
2. Dont quit your job before you know what you are going to do next. Work on your business in the evenings and weekends and have a proof of concept. Make sure there is a need for the business you are building.
3. There are other paths than going to college.
4. It is hard to start a business from scratch, see if you can purchase one that already has customers.
5. Your network truly is your net worth. Find like minded people. For me, we found NARPM, the National Association of Residential Property Managers, we became involved in the organization and met incredible people who helped me mold Empire into a sellable asset.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resourcefulness. It is part of our company culture. When we hire, we look for people who are resourceful.

When I first started VPM Solutions, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You know the old saying, If I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldnt have started the business.

We were about a year into VPM Solutions. We had some clients, jobs were filled and we were processing payroll. At the time, we were processing around 60k per week in payroll. Today, we are processing around 300k per week in payroll.

One Friday we start getting a lot of service tickets. People are not getting their payment. Our platform is up and running, no issues there. I call our payment processing provider, Wise to see if there is any issue on their side. Well, Wise tells me that they have purposely stopped processing any payments from VPM. Evidently, they were sending an email for months informing us that we had to fill out paperwork for an audit. The email they were sending it to was an email that was not being monitored.

Although Wise had been processing our payments for almost a year, they would not extend our audit timeline and refused to process any payments. Without processing payments, VPM is basically out of business.

They sent me the paperwork and I filled it out, to my surprise three days later, they decided to fail our audit and were no longer going to process payments. As a matter of fact they were sending VPM back the funds it was going to transfer. It is now Tuesday, people were suppose to get paid Friday and now the funds are coming back to me which will take between 3 – 7 business days. Which means, best case scenario people are not going to be paid for almost two weeks, worst case scenario, three weeks. Not to mention, I had another payroll that was being run that day.

Not sure if you ever tried to contract with a payment processing service but it could take months to go through an approval process. My business partner and I literally stayed up for almost three days straight trying to figure out how to solve this challenge. We found a processing company called VEEM that approved us over night and we were able to start processing payroll again. However, we still had the week that we missed and the current week. I had to come up with 120k and transfer it into the VPM bank account so that we could cover payroll and then get reimbursed by Wise when the money was transferred back and we had to float one week of payroll due to the way that VEEM processed payroll.

We had to re-engineer our back end processing to work with VEEM. We ran with VEEM for a few months while we were looking for another long term partner. Due to the way VEEM processed payroll it was not a good fit long term for VPM. Today, VPM has a strong partnership with Stripe and is still in business!

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

I sold my business, Empire Industries Property Management in October of 2019. I was not planning on selling the business but evidently my partner had other ideas. It all happened very fast. I wish I had more time to prepare for the sale and more importantly I wish I had prepared myself for after the sale.

Here are a few things you should do before the sale:

– Find out what is most important for buyers of your type of business. For example, property management firms were selling at 1.7 time revenue. EBIDA does not matter, meaning profit margin does not matter, they look for top line revenue. By knowing how the company is valued, you can make business decisions that will enhance the price.
– Have your financials in order. Think of it like this, when you buy a property with problems, you get a better sales price than if you purchase a pristine property. Your financials back up the story you are telling the buyer.
– Clean up your debt and your receivables. The new company most likely will not take on any payments owed to you. That means you have to make it right which means it comes off the sales price.
– Make sure you understand if they are buying your entity or just contracts or clients, etc.
– Take less money but take a quicker payout. For example, if they offer 1 million up front or 1.5 million over three years, take the money up front and exit.
– Do not take stock in the new company, especially if it is not public. Most companies do not get to an event, meaning they dont go public or merge with some public company and then your stock gets transferred to real stock. When someone purchases your company they will want you to take a percentage of the sale in stock. Tell them no thank you and take the cash. I promise you, you can make more money investing the cash then keeping it with the company.
– Do not take a job with the new company. You are no longer the boss and no longer the decision maker. They will make decisions that you would not and it will be hard on you as you see the company change, team members become disgruntled and clients no longer treated the way you treated them.
– Most importantly, know what you are going to do next. When I sold my business, I stayed on. I had more money in my bank account than I ever had in my life, I was getting paid more salary than ever before and I was miserable than ever before. I was not employable but I had no plan once I sold my business. Luckily I co-founded VPM Solutions which gave me purpose again.

Here are a few things I would have done after the sale
– Extend your insurance. People can sue you in some cases four years after an incident. I was sued by a resident even though I had closed down the firm. I did not extend my insurance, therefore I was on the hook personally for the 1 million dollar lawsuit. We settled for 20k and I still dont believe they had a case.
– Go take an extended vacation. Even if just two weeks. Celebrate the win. I went right to work for the new firm. I did not spend any money as a celbration as I was too worried about tax obligation. I did purchase 5 rental properties.
– Have a good tax CPA. The funds you earn are from capital gains. You need to know about tax strategies to lower your taxes or at least understand options. If you decide to invest all funds you better outpace your tax obligations.

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