Miy Method

What it is

MIY is Manage It Yourself. You don’t swing hammers — that’s DIY. You don’t hire a general contractor to run the job — that’s the Vacationer. You hire licensed subcontractors directly, hand each a scope of work, pay on a draw schedule, and run the sequencing yourself. You become the GC.

There are four types of real estate investor on the management spectrum. DIY: you do the work yourself, free labor but slow. Foreman: you hire a crew and manage them on-site, fast but fragile. MIY: subs, not employees, you running the schedule. Vacationer: a GC runs the job, you review invoices. Most solo flippers should operate as MIY for the life of their career. I am there. I went Foreman once, hired a whole crew, and it ended with me calling everyone to the job site, handing out final paychecks, and starting over. That’s what pushed me back to MIY.

Why it matters

A general contractor adds 15 to 30 percent markup on top of what their subs charge. On a $60,000 rehab, that’s $9,000 to $24,000 you give away in exchange for not running a schedule. Multiply that across six flips a year and you’ve handed someone else your entire margin.

The second reason is alignment. A GC’s incentive is to finish, collect the last draw, and move to the next client. Your incentive is to finish on time, on budget, with quality that survives a home inspection. Those don’t fully align. When you MIY, the incentives are direct — you pay subs when their work is verified, they come back when you have more work, and nobody is skimming a fee off the top.

The third reason is knowledge. Running subs directly is how you learn the trades well enough to scope a job correctly, spot a fear tax in a bid, and catch a contractor black hole before it swallows your timeline. A flipper who’s only ever used a GC knows deal math and not much else. A flipper who has MIY’d 20 jobs knows deal math, trade sequencing, code requirements, and what a fair bid looks like by trade. That second person is harder to kill.

Now, MIY is not always the right model. If you’re a surgeon doing this on weekends, hire a GC and pay the markup. Your hourly rate is too high to spend coordinating drywallers. But for the solo flipper building a portfolio of three to eight flips a year, MIY is the operating model that makes the math work.

How it shows up

Getting started with MIY legally looks different by state and municipality. Early in my career I found a licensed GC who let me work underneath him — I did all the contracting, brought in my own electricians and plumbers, paid them, and paid him to pull permits and sign off on inspections. Totally legit. Eventually got my own GC license off the experience I’d built. The GC test is not that hard. It’s basically an open-book test where you need to know where to look things up, not memorize the tables.

A clean MIY setup looks like this: a depth chart of subs organized by trade, first-string through third-string. A jobs menu with every job pre-priced and dependencies mapped. A set of phases so the schedule runs linearly. Text-thread contracts confirming scope, pay schedule, and completion date in writing. A pay schedule that protects your position without slowing anyone down. And a lazy pm rhythm that keeps your bandwidth available for the deal side, where the real money is made.

Related

lazy pm, depth chart, jobs menu, phases, general contractor, scope of work, fear tax