Month: March 2021

Psychologists will tell you that what really makes us happy, what really gives us confidence is seeing the evidence of progress. 

So, let’s not miss the opportunity that comes with an end of quarter review. As property entrepreneurs it’s essential for our sanity and motivation to acknowledge and celebrate our progress. Some of our goals are so big they may take years to achieve, but we CAN make massive progress every 90 days.

Breaking down your goals into 90 day increments is good for focus and motivation. By chunking down your goals into smaller steps you can focus more directly on what’s right in front of you. Not only that, it makes it a whole lot easier to track and measure progress.

You can make tangible progress week over week and then by taking time to reflect on the quarter you can measure that tangible progress to give yourself a sense of movement, satisfaction and from that, momentum. Reflecting on the quarter will also highlight a goldmine of learns that you’ll want to take forwards with you. 

Reviewing each quarter is about investing past experience into future preparation and focus – ie your past decisions, successes, failures, lessons. That’s where the good stuff comes from.

HOW TO REVIEW YOUR LAST 90 DAYS

Here are a selection of questions, I learned from Peter Voogd, that I’ve been using for a few years now to help reflect on the previous quarter and carry momentum into the next. Use these prompt questions to help you reflect and free flow write for 30 mins or so each quarter about the previous 90 days. [By the way, I use the accountability of writing this post to get my own review done and it only takes about 30 mins].

Section #1 – OVERVIEW

• What went well, what didn’t?
• When was I in my zone, when wasn’t I?
• When was I at my emotional energy peak?
• What caused me peace of mind?
• What frustrated me?
• Did I do what I said I was going to do?
• What systems have I put in place?

Section #2 – PSYCHOLOGICAL

• What have been my biggest breakthroughs?
• What have been my biggest frustrations?
• What have been my mind-shifts?
• What have been my biggest disappointments?

Section #3 – TACTICS

This section looks at what were my top 5 wins from last quarter: financial, family, adventure…?

Getting down to business metrics ask yourself:

• Did I hit my business income goal last quarter?
• What were the top three marketing campaigns or sources of income last month?
• What were my top income producing activities?
• What are the biggest ways I’ll be producing income this next month?
• How did I add value to the marketplace, could I have added more? 

These will likely be related to your highest values but only you will know.

• Did I leverage technology?
• Did I maximise my reach?
• What will exponentially grow my reach this next quarter?
• What did I do to stay adventurous and feel fully alive?

To help keep you going with the nitty gritty march of each day it’s important to mix it with the things that energise you. Whilst we can’t have meals out or mini breaks just yet, hopefully that’s not too far away. But in the meantime there are still plenty of things you can access from home or on your doorstep as a fun treat. Whatever it is, choose something and schedule it.   

If you aren’t consciously making a decision to put things in your diary that will keep you alive and vibrant, you will become complacent.

Section #4 – RELATIONSHIPS

I love this one:

• Who did I connect with and reach out to last quarter?
• Did I take care of my current relationships and did I reach out to people who can cut my learning curve in half- i.e. people who I can partner with in some way that’s relevant to your business?
• Did I leverage partnerships?

Section #5 – TEAM

Think about questions that will help with your team review:

• How was my team engagement?
• How was my speed of communication?
• What feedback can I give them?
• What do they need in terms of skill development?
• Am I consistently demonstrating the attributes I want my team to embody?

Section #6 – LEGACY

• What did I work on that was legacy focused? In other words something that you work on now but won’t get paid until long into the future, or something that you don’t reap the benefits for until way later, ie creating things that you value but that you get paid 6 months or more down the road. Note that if you just do this kind of work for the rewards/benefits you will lose steam, it’s important to engage in legacy work for other reasons, for something bigger than you. As a side example, part of my family legacy work the last few years, and ongoing, is taking conscious time with my boys to teach them one key life value each month.

Peter Voogd recommends spending 80% of your time on profit making activity, creating systems etc that makes sure you have the money coming in for you and your family now. Then 20% of your time on legacy focused things. Eventually when you have built the business you want you can switch focus to investing 80% of your time on the legacy side of things. Isn’t that an exciting prospect? To spend 80% of your time on something that helps a cause you believe in or adds value to the world in some way, and not worry whether it pays you or not.

Conclusion

I challenge you to invest 30 mins each quarter to do this. WHY? Firstly, so that you can give yourself the gift of seeing evidence of progress. Secondly, because high achievers always ask better questions, and they are always investing their past mistakes/lessons into their future preparation.

Looking back over the last quarter, what is something that you initiated and achieved, that has made you the proudest?

Serviced accommodation is such a fantastic business to be in, and now that UK travel is set to open up this summer SA operators will be looking forward to big bookings and profits once more. You just need to be sure you are indeed collecting the funds for each booking. If you have SA property available through Airbnb, you need to know this. Don’t panic, you just need to know about it and iron out any exposure. 

Most SA operators don’t expect to have payment issues with Airbnb- surely they collect payment from the guest before arrival, right? What if all this time we’ve had a false sense of security that payment is taken by Airbnb at the time the booking is confirmed?

We recently discovered that operators are actually pretty exposed with Airbnb bookings ie they often don’t attempt to take payment from the guest until 3 nts into the stay, and if payment fails they may not inform hosts until even longer into the stay. If in that time the guest has been and gone the guest can easily get away with a free stay (if they wanted to) and Airbnb takes no liability for non paying guests. 

Can you believe we’ve had listings with Airbnb for nearly 5 years and hadn’t spotted this issue until now? We always believed that airbnb had us covered because they collect payment from guests before arrival. Having discovered that payment is not always taken prior check-in, and if the guest wanted to, they could use your property and leave without paying, I felt duty bound to let more operators know. 

Over the years we’ve had a very low proportion of our bookings from Airbnb since the majority of our business is direct. However this February we had a good month long stay at one of our properties that was booked by contractors working at a local power station. They checked in on 15th Feb and 18 days into their stay we got a message from Airbnb letting us know that they hadn’t been able to collect payment from the guest. 

As you can imagine this came as a huge surprise as we’d never encountered payment issues with Airbnb previously, and we believed that Airbnb collected payment when the booking was confirmed and then released funds to the operator within a day or two of check in. 

18 nights worth of stay and no payment had been collected by Airbnb so in theory the guest could have left at that point and had a free stay. The worst part about it is that Airbnb chose not to inform us when they first failed to collect payment, the guest gets a few notifications first before the host is informed, and that adds more time lag. 

Thankfully when we took this up with our guest we were able to rectify the situation. The point of sharing this little story is to help ensure it doesn’t happen to other operators where you end up losing out. 

There are a few different host forums discussing the same situation which happened to us but here is just one if you wanted to read about it….

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/problem-collecting-payment-from-guest/td-p/660486.

So, what can we learn from this and what can you do to protect your SA revenue?

# Firstly, check your bank account within 1-2 days of an airbnb check in to ensure the money has arrived, and if not you can start to chase it up. 

# You can set your properties up to only allow guests who have provided government ID to Airbnb and are verified to book.  [Whilst the guest being verified by AirBnB will unfortunately not make a difference if the card was declined it does provide a little more comfort as to the validity of the guest].

# If you use a channel manager you can set it up to have all guests complete a digital registration form where they sign to say that any damages can be taken from a credit card which needs to be registered prior to checking in.

The digital registration form can be built into a channel manager so the guest can complete it online and you call them to obtain card details which the channel manager can store and verify using the stripe connection.  You can also pre-auth any deposit which is held for 7 days.

[Note-Make sure you update any airbnb listings with the fact that you’ll ask guests to complete the form and/or take a deposit if you set it up.] 

So, in summary, don’t panic but just be aware that there is a degree of financial exposure when taking bookings from Airbnb. You just need to be aware of this and put suitable measures in place to mitigate the risk and protect the cash flow of your business. 

What constructive lessons have you had from your SA business recently?

May your SA business thrive this year. 😁

I love masterminds! And this week was all about masterminding – over the 4 days working with 23 delegates and their property business plans, helping get from where they are to where they want to be. 

What I love so much about our mastermind sessions is that each individual brings their own unique set of life, business and property experience, perspectives and values,  and when we work together in a small group like this, tapping into that is where the magic happens. 

My role is to facilitate and coach the day from accountability check ins, to creating the agenda, and working through the day’s objectives until everyone has their own bespoke action plan for the month ahead. In doing so we get to draw on the group’s collective intelligence – more often than not, the person you unknowingly need to hear from the most is one of your fellow masterminders. It may be that they have just pushed through figuring out the very thing you are stuck on, there may be an idea shared in one part of their business that you can lift and apply to yours, their recent actions and results may be the social proof you need to inspire your next steps, there may be a power team intro shared, a software tool..or…..it’s an endless source of possibilities.

Observing this all unfold is just magical, and that’s why I love it. What’s clear is that coming to the table with a learner’s open mind means that we have delegates learning from those in front of them as well as from those who may have less property experience. And of course I’m constantly learning and sharpening the saw. 

When I reflect on these mastermind weeks I typically find that common themes and patterns emerge. For those who are curious, here are 4 common themes from this week’s mastermind sessions:

#1: As the CEO of our property businesses we are the ones responsible for making decisions, meaning it’s our responsibility to know what we want and to define the decision making criteria for investments that will inform the search and allow us to say deal or no deal. Without that clarity we can feel lost in a sea of rightmove or in analysis paralysis. 

#2: Whether choosing to be hands on or hands off in the property business, it’s essential to understand the numbers for your chosen strategy- and I mean really understand how the unit economics work and interact with each other. Whilst having a template analyser that someone else has created can help get things started, there is no replacement for creating your own spreadsheet templates to analyse your deals and track your comparables and notes. 

#3: As property entrepreneurs we don’t have all the technical answers, nor do we need to have them, but what is important is figuring out the questions to ask and who to direct them to. 

#4: And finally, to finish with the big overarching theme we finished on this week – creating great deals, service offerings and partnerships is about finding out what people really want and figuring out how to help them get that result. 

So there are some core discussion topics that led to multiple learnings and actions for people this week. To everyone I worked over the last few days, thank you for your engagement, interaction and support for each other –  here’s to a great month ahead.

So what about you reading this, what’s one thing you learned this week that you will implement in the days ahead?

Us humans often need to hear things multiple times before we heed the advice. Just think how many times we’ve heard healthy eating and exercise advice…In many cases we need to hear the same message but packaged in different ways before it sinks in and we action it.

What about in the property investing space- what wisdom or advice did you hear several times before actioning it? Or what about advice you’ve heard but are yet to implement?

There’s a particular time proven business principle that has effectively been applied to start and grow businesses for decades that I feel many property investors are missing out on. By my own admission, I was one of those property investors up until a few short years ago.

Making some mistakes in property, combined with looking back and connecting dots from my past business life is what eventually allowed me to hear and see the wisdom that we applied to completely transform our property business.

Here’s that simple principle now – the fundamental core of an income stream comes down to a CUSTOMER using a MECHANISM of some kind to get a desired end RESULT.

And here’s a simple example:

A beginner guitar player (customer) wants to learn popular songs that will entertain their friends (end result) so they invest in guitar lessons (mechanism).

Here’s a property example from our world in serviced accommodation:

Construction company (customer) wants to deliver a project on time and with decent profit (end result) and a small but critical part of delivering that is to have their own skilled guys who aren’t local to the project, accommodated in a home from home environment near to the site and within a certain budget (mechanism).

In most forms of business, we don’t get to decide what works, our customers do. Some products and services will do ok, others won’t take off at all and others will really fly. When we can pinpoint the thing that really works, that’s where we have to focus and double down.

Going back the fundamental income stream model of CUSTOMER : MECHANISM : RESULT, we can shortcut the offerings that don’t work or just do OK by focusing on the CUSTOMER first.

The majority of property investors are way too focused on the MECHANISM ie they find the property first, and then try to find a customer and a result for that property. This is exactly where we were going wrong a few years ago.

By switching to focus on the CUSTOMER first, we can understand upfront what end result they want and what kind property offering would serve as the best mechanism to deliver that result. Makes total sense, doesn’t it? (Hence the choice of quote from Steve Jobs).

It’s not rocket science and it’s certainly not anything new, successful property people have been applying an approach like this for years, but then so many haven’t. That’s why I chose to write my first book on this simple yet super powerful approach to property investing, it’s called PREDICTABLE PROPERTY PROFITS – 4 Simple Steps to Remove Guesswork and Get More Certainty In Your Property Deals.

GET A COPY OF MY BOOK HERE

If this isn’t your natural approach to property, if you are always starting with the MECHANISM (ie the property) then this is what I’m referring to by ‘training your property entrepreneur brain’. We absolutely can train our minds to flip the script and look at our property investing with a different starting point – the CUSTOMER. Doing this will give you so much more certainty and far better returns.

Just this week, one of the delegates in our group coaching call asked a question related to possibly setting up a serviced office investment for the first time. And you know what, by looking at things through the perspective I’ve just shared, we were able to map out a plan of action and line of questioning that would lead to the answers he needs.

So I’m curious, what will you do this week to apply the late, great Steve Jobs advice in your property business – ‘start with the customer experience and then work backwards?