Voyage Dallas Feature
We are thrilled to have been featured on Voyage Dallas for Beyond Routine Planner! Beyond Routine is a passion project for us and we are thrilled with the success it has had in its first year! We are working hard for the next edition to make it even better for you all in 2019! Take a look at our Voyage Dallas feature below:
Today we’d like to introduce you to Tristan Skiles and Tiffany Haynes.
Tristan and Tiffany, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
We, Tristan Skiles and Tiffany Haynes, are the founders of Beyond Routine, LLC. We run a very successful Real Estate Virtual Assistant Company. The Virtual Assistant company started with one person and has grown to into a full staff, supporting entire real estate teams and brokerages.
Finding a planner that encompassed everything we were responsible for was daunting. Most of the time we found ourselves customizing the planners that we used, as they were designed more for the general busy professional. The planners did not assist with all the different departments you have to manage when running a company. We didn’t have a place to track expenses or to track marketing performances to ensure we didn’t throw money down the drain. The planners didn’t help reverse engineer our long term goals to ensure that our weekly and monthly goals were in alignment. The planners task lists didn’t separate the must do’s of the day with a separate section for the less important.
So, the idea was dreamed up to to design our very own planner and Beyond Routine was born!
We are actively immersed in the Real Estate Industry on a daily basis. There is not an agent that we come in contact with where advice is not given!
Together, we help agents construct their financial goals for the year and discuss how that transcribes to the things you need do every day to ensure you reach those goals. We teach agents that you cannot just focus on buying and selling real estate if you want to be in this for the long haul. You have to think of your business like a company, reviewing every subset of your business and ensuring those tasks are on your radar or strategically delegated to an expert in that field.
The successful Virtual Assistant company, VBS Real Estate is now referral only, we only take clients that are referred by active clients to ensure their quality and reputation is always at a manageable rate. It was without a second thought that we designed a planner just for Real Estate professionals to ensure agents had complete control over their career and lives. It is the objective that the agent was left to begin with the end in mind and had a guide to take with them as they served families but kept their business and well-being a top priority as well.
During the process of designing the Real Estate Edition Planner, we were approached by several entrepreneurs, small business professionals, friends and family who desired the same goal planning and strategy pages that the Real Estate Edition planner had to offer. Being that we were busy professionals ourselves we knew that this was a need that we could meet. Thus, the Entrepreneur Edition was created to help busy professionals and entrepreneurs, like ourselves, manage their daily tasks, strategize, dream and plan.
To say this is a labor of love is an understatement! Hours of planning, designing, strategizing, gathering market research and simply putting ourselves in the seat of the entrepreneur were all done to get this right and to make sure it encompassed everything needed.
To live Beyond Routine is an invitation that we worked hard to be able to offer our customers. We hope that each customer accepts this invitation! If you do, we are committed for a lifetime to evolve year after year with you. Taking in your feedback and providing the most efficient and innovative planner they have ever used!
Has it been a smooth road?
As with any first year of business, there have been some hiccups along the way. We went into this with confidence, a budget and high expectations. Each of which was a bit shaken at one time or another.
Because this was our first year and we were so excited to offer this product to agents, we decided to offer pre-sales of our planners. We had discussed with our printer the turn-around time for production and shipping and were confident that all items would be in stock in time. However, as with any shipment of this nature, delays are common and we had just about every delay possible hit us. This was so frustrating for our customers as-well-as for us! We made a decision not to do pre-sales again and to make sure we are ordering early enough to have all product on hand by the time the customer places their order.
Another thing, we really didn’t know about was the expense of shipping cargo by sea and all of the freight, transportation, loading and miscellaneous other charges that incur. These add up quickly and was something we did not expect.
Lastly, once we received our inventory and began shipping planners out to customers we learned of some printing errors that had taken place. These are common and do happen in mass production in low volumes. However, for us, this was unacceptable and did not meet our standards of the quality that we expected in our product and wanted our customers to receive. We made it a point to make sure that moving forward our high expectations are met and that inventory control is a high priority.
Each of the above instances shook our confidence at one time or another. However, our love of this product and the feedback, compliments and high demand from so many amazing customers have just confirmed what we knew when we began this journey.
Continue reading the rest of the interview here.