Month: June 2017

Here we are bang on the halfway mark of the year. How have the first six months been for you? How have you grown, what have you learned, what action have you taken?

This week we had our second VIP 1-2-1 (of our second year) with Paul Smith. Chris and I always love these meetings, both the group sharing during the day and the mentor sessions. Working with Paul and Aniko always helps expand our thinking on what is possible and gives us tangible actions to go away and work on.

We’ve also been putting finishing touches to our guest house. Big thanks to James at Fusion for helping with the kit out and for the team at Cleantec who did a brilliant job of cleaning and set up.

Six months ago we started the year with about 17 bed spaces across our SA units and our goal for the year was to be at 120. Here we are at the halfway mark and we are sitting just a few beds shy of 60, so almost half way.

Inspired by the morning message from Darren Hardy, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to share some half time review tips for anyone who’s interested.

How to make the halfway mark and holiday time work for you

1. Take a half time break, rehydrate (both physically and mentally), rest and recover.
2. Review your game plan i.e. what were your goals at the start of the year, where do you stand, what still lies ahead for you to achieve your goals?
3. Assess what you know now that you didn’t know at the start of the year (you’ll be surprised how much you’ve taken on board and how some things that seemed foreign to you in January are becoming part of your norm). Some helpful questions are: Who are you becoming? What are the obstacles that have come up? Where are your weaknesses/areas you can outsource? What are your advantages you need to leverage more?
4. Decide what adjustments do you need to make. How do you need to change your game plan to keep yourself on track for where (and who) you want to be at the end of the year?
5. Figure out specifics on what you need to do to still achieve your big goals and recalibrate your own performance metrics.

Simple! Then crack on with consistently moving the ball forwards each day.

Today marks the beginning of the Scottish school holidays and like many, I’m in the airport with 2 weeks of fun in the sun a few short hours away.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” This quote is completely true. Once you know what you want, you can stop taking advice from just anyone. You can filter out the endless noise and hone in on your truth.

Eventually, you can train your conscious mind to only focus on what you really want in life. Everything else gets outsourced and forgotten by your subconscious.

Decide what you want or someone else will.

You are the designer of your destiny. What will it be?

Many of you might be familiar with the concept of Getting to Yes as it relates to negotiation strategy in business. However for many of us, often the more difficult challenge on a day to day basis is “getting to a no”. In other words, the process of deciding what not to do.

As we each have a finite amount of resources (in particular time and money), we must constantly make decisions on how and where to allocate our precious resources. In the context of our work, or even personal lives, we can regularly fall into the trap of saying yes to every request, assignment or event which would initially please the person who made the request. However, taking this approach usually leaves people over-stressed and inundated with things to do or places to be — a lot of which ends up half-finished or forgotten. So in the long run, no one is happy.

Applying this to the context of property investing, the principle is exactly the same, but with much bigger financial stakes. This week Chris and I had a deadline of a few days to analyse and make a decision on what initially seemed like an exciting off market new build opportunity. I think we cycled through the full rollercoaster of emotions on this one from big excitement at the prospect, then caution and conservatism, through hope and optimism it would stack up, then disappointment it may not, back to measured optimism and a maybe, then deflation again and ultimately being objective and unemotionally attached.

In short, we arrived at a No. Although several hours of work and conversation with various advisors across a few days were put into this, it proved to be a super beneficial exercise. Not just in fine tuning our development analysis and opening up new lending contacts, but more importantly in protecting our future time and money.

I’m sure many in the investment community can relate to similar experiences in some shape or form. Either way, we felt that sharing this story may serve as a helpful reminder that sometimes “Getting to a NO” can be as much of a win for the week as “Getting to a YES”.

Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads in the community.

The freedom and flexibility that a property business can facilitate was greatly felt this week as my wife had to fly back to Northern Ireland at short notice for three days, leaving me in charge of our three young boys. From Tuesday to Friday I juggled ‘hands on daddying’ with an all round fairly productive week (and the house was still in a pretty tidy state when my wife arrived home). I was able to attend two kid’s sports days, move the ball forwards with some guest house things and view a potential development site with Chris.

The only thing I couldn’t do was attend our monthly Development Discovery Mastermind in Sheffield, but thanks to live webinar technology and skype I was able to join in on most of the day.

Here’s a quick summary from the week:

Our Development Project

This week we dissected and discussed revised drawings to optimise our development site. It’s proving to be a phenomenal learning process as we liaise with a new architect on how to increase size and volume of units. We are currently looking at the potential of adding three additional apartments, adding garages and increasing the internal area of each flat. The potential is super exciting and well worth the wait. We just have the small matter of going through a new planning process. As we’ve learned, your existing planning can’t be retracted so we are in a good position to look at optimising the site.

As we were talking through options it hit us that this could be a lucrative little strategy, in itself, to apply to other plots- i.e. secure a site with detailed planning, work closely with a good architect to optimise the site further i.e. more/better units, thus adding significant value to the site. Once you’ve added value to the site you then have more options i.e. build out for greater profit or sell the site on for a profit without having to build. With the greater value of the land, you will also be in a better position from a lending perspective. Our intention for ours is still very much to experience building out and selling.

Our Guest House progress

• appliances ordered and due to arrive on Tuesday
• full list of maintenance jobs outlined and Chris has already started to smash through those
• deep clean and linen hire scheduled for mid-week
• enquiries out for gardener services to clear out a small overgrown back garden (in fact, does anyone have a recommendation for a good value garden service for Midlothian and East Lothian?)
• should be ready to roll by Thursday

That half year mark is fast approaching but we’re feeling grateful about what we’ve accomplished, and ambitious about the months to come.

Today has been one of the best Father’s Day’s I can remember and it also coincided with my middle son’s birthday.

Have a great Sunday evening and a productive start to the week ahead

This Friday simultaneously marked the conclusion to what felt like a marathon property purchase, and the beginning of a new chapter for our serviced accommodation business.

Chris and I were celebrating on Friday as we finally became owners of a five bedroom, 11 bed guest house that we originally secured way back in the third week of February.

Due to a plethora of reasons, which I won’t bore you with, the completion date was delayed numerous times. As we weren’t 100% sure when we were going to complete, Chris was actually away this week taking some much deserved time with his family. In his place I had two sidekicks in the shape of my two youngest boys accompanying me to pick up our new keys.

The interesting thing on this one was that with there being several expected completion dates that were missed, we actually had our furniture delivered and wifi installed weeks ago. This means a good proportion of the work has been done and the finish line is in sight for getting this ready to take guests. A few maintenance jobs and finishing touches but then we’ll be good to go.

Now that we finally own the place we can say a big thanks to James Quinn and his team at Fusion for helping us kit the place out. Huge thanks also to our brilliant solicitor Shaun Mackintosh who helped navigate the conveyancing to a successful conclusion.

Exciting times ahead for the Adaero Serviced Accommodation business.

It feels like we don’t have anything big to report this week. When I sat down to write our weekly post, at first I felt deflated that we don’t have some exciting new achievement to share, then I realised that’s not reality, the journey is made up of hundreds of little steps. The reality is that whilst there have been no big milestones hit or new deals done, Chris and I have been working steadily on our business goals…we’re analysing new build development sites, in discussions about leasing blocks of apartments and continuing to manage operations of a successful SA business.

This feeling of “we’ve got nothing big to share this week” got me thinking that there are likely many other VIPs/investors/entrepreneurs out there feeling like their goals are distant and things aren’t happening fast enough. So I thought I’d write a longer post and share some helpful mental reframes that I’ve learned over the years from a business psychologist mentor. This post is a bit of a deeper dive on understanding the quirks of our mind to help on our way to wealth, freedom and sanity.

An intro to entrepreneur psychology self-diagnosis

There are four ways entrepreneurs typically trip themselves up:

1. Hesitation and self doubt – it’s the #1 form of self sabotage
2. For productive people, they can get the sense of never feeling finished or good enough
3. Getting distracted by new opportunities/what others are doing
4. Questioning your own vision/goals i.e. am I even working towards the right thing?

I’m referencing these because it’s key that we understand our psychology so we don’t get caught out by any of these.

The other common pitfall for ambitious entrepreneurs is to fall into black or white thinking (called “splitting”). In other words we can hold ourselves to impossible standards and when we inevitably fail to meet those, we write ourselves off/mentally beat ourselves up. An example might be pushing yourself in all areas of life but still not feeling like you are winning, like the ultra entrepreneurs you might read about or hear on podcasts.

On a smaller scale it might be as simple as putting in a solid week of action taking towards your goals but not feeling like you’ve achieved enough at the end of the week (I get this a lot, but I’m figuring out how to manage it).

HERE ARE SOME EXERCISES TO HELP COMBAT THIS ALL OR NOTHING THINKING

One big antidote to this is to re-frame our thinking to recognise that incremental progress is the ONLY progress. The reality is that the titans we read about were not overnight success stories.

Splitting (or black and white thinking) happens because we fail to plan for incremental progress. The journey HAS to be rewarding for us to be congruent about our ambition.

If you can relate to any of these mental pitfalls then use the exercises below:

1. Journal and plan out out your goals – figure out what it would be like being in the trenches working towards your goal, with all the in between steps, and brainstorm how you can make the journey itself feel better (i.e. more fulfilling and fun). This kind of thinking helps us prepare for the opposite of black and white thinking, it shows us that realistically there are many steps involved
2. Ask yourself, what would it feel like to be 50% done? What would it feel like to get started? (think- what can I do to make the answers to these questions feel better?)
3. Write out baby steps building towards the much larger projects (this can be straightforward with a refurb or even a new build project)
4. Commit to a specific three actions each week
5. Always set your commitments to the most courageous and important work (i.e. not just the easy stuff you would do anyway)
6. Get used to celebrating incremental (week by week) progress

These exercises will help you understand that getting into the the thick of things and being in the process, rather than at the destination, is the fulfilling thing. For property entrepreneurs, and indeed any entrepreneur for that matter, this is key as big goals aren’t achieved every week.

Ultimately the goal is to be comfortable working towards things. Success is a practice not a destination.

I’ve recently had a number of questions from VIP members at earlier stages in their journey so I hope posts like this serve to help you through the slower periods and encourage you to keep taking meaningful action. It’s not purely about the end destination, it’s about continuous steps in the right direction and reflecting back every few weeks to see how far you’ve come, and feeling good about that.

I hope you can look back on the last seven days as a win for the week and here’s to a great week to come.