Month: June 2021

In the week ahead we will hit the end of quarter 2 and the half year mark. Will you use this marker for strategic reflection? 

In this post I’ll share 6 POWERFUL STEPS TO REVIEW THE MID YEAR POINT IN 30 MINS OR LESS.

 At the beginning of the year Chris  and I always set some Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), both to grow ourselves and our property businesses. Our goals tie together our ambitions across our SA business, our resi and commercial assets, development projects and our training and mentoring. Reflecting on where we are, there has been a great deal of progress in our businesses and growth in ourselves. Whilst it can sometimes feel like taking a 6 month snapshot right now doesn’t equate to half of what we want to achieve in 2021, we recognise the importance of measuring the progress and gains. Measuring progress is such an important part of the property journey, and any endeavour for that matter. Just the other day I heard Tony Robbins say that “Progress equals happiness”, and I can see the psychology behind that. 

That’s why every quarter end I invest 30-60 minutes to review the past 3 months, predominantly focusing on our property business but also reflecting across other key areas of life. 

Whether you set big hairy audacious annual goals, half year goals or 90 day goals, this mid-way point in the year prompts a great opportunity to check in on where we stand with things.

This kind of exercise holds multiple rewards for you and is a goldmine of learning and ideas if you’ll just take the time to do it. Benefits include, taking time to acknowledge your incremental progress, course correcting, checking in on alignment to your highest values, identifying patterns or insights you can learn from….you get the idea.

If you’re up for investing some ‘holiday time’ on yourself, here’s the full 6 phase process I got from entrepreneur Peter Voogd a few years ago and I complete this every quarter.

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 month/quarter; financial, family, adventure…?

Getting down to business metrics ask yourself:

Did I hit my property business income goal last month/quarter?

What were the top three marketing campaigns or sources of income last month/quarter?

What were my top income producing activities?

What are the biggest ways I’ll be producing income this next month/quarter?

How did I add value to the marketplace, could I have added more?

The above 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 month/quarter? [you need to define this for the context of your property business ie for your SA market, or rent to buy market for example]

What did I do to stay adventurous and feel fully alive?

To help keep you from the nitty gritty march of each day it’s important to mix it with the things that energise you. It might be something small ie for me it’s getting in a game of tennis once a week, or maybe you had planned a mini break with your loved one. For those with freedom in their highest values this will be particularly important. Can you mix your passion and profession and link up travel to fun destinations with your work?

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 and procrastinate on the big work needed for your goal.

 

Section #4 – RELATIONSHIPS

I love this one:

Who did I connect with and reach out to last month/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?

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 it can be creating things that you value but that you get paid 6 months or more down the road for. 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.

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.

And there you have it. If you don’t have a review process, I urge you to copy this into a word doc and start now.

Who already has a review process like this, and who will start now having read this post?

Can you relate to the feeling of, ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day”? 

It’s common for property investor entrepreneurs to feel overwhelmed with To-Do’s. You know how it is- it feels like your day is never done, your workload continues to grow and there aren’t enough hours in the day. 

Don’t worry this happens to all of us at some point, and probably several times a year. This is often a discussion topic in the monthly mastermind sessions that we run, and since it’s been brought up recently I thought it would be helpful to share a practical exercise I discovered last summer, and since then I gone through this simple exercise several times a quarter. I find it incredibly helpful for finding focus and prioritising the main thing. Or as we were discussing in a mastermind group the other week, finding the ‘One Thing’ for your property business and prioritising effort on that thing (ref to the book of the same name).

What I’m referring to is a simple technique for helping you find flow and deep focus, and it’s something I’ve been working on for some time now to bake it into my weekly routine. 

Every week going forwards there is an approach you can take to make sure you are finding the time and getting in the right state to really progress the biggest needle moving opportunities and tasks for your context and property business.

TIME TO FIND YOUR LEVERAGE 

This is a visual exercise for helping you get crystal clear about your projects and opportunities.

The aim of this exercise is to draw out clarity on where to allocate priority time for your property business by filling out this 2×2 grid. 

In a word doc or spreadsheet you can make a 2×2 square grid, and label it as follows:

High Impact
Low Impact
	Low Effort	High Effort

Here’s what to do – document every project, opportunity, task and typical weekly things you have to do in relation to your property investing business. Put it on a big white board if you have one, even an A4 piece of paper, but bullet point everything you have going on and allocate it into one of the squares according to filter of impact and effort for each item. 

So as an example, the HIGH IMPACT & relatively LOW EFFORT grid would include things like:

-adding a property under management for our council client

-30 mins daily learning for my personal development

-refinancing properties to release cash

Here are some other examples I have in the other categories:

LOW IMPACT & LOW EFFORT

-email management

-managing paper mail

LOW IMPACT & HIGH EFFORT

-Month end process

-leaving the house/office to deal with operational issues

HIGH IMPACT & HIGH EFFORT

-Sourcing and analysing new mixed use investment opportunities

-Training for Lands End to John O’Groats 😊 (super high effort physically and time wise but massive impact in raising money and awareness for Cancer Research).

THE SECRET to really rebooting your productivity when you’re feeling overwhelmed is to focus on the top left [ie HIGH IMPACT & relatively LOW EFFORT], (and often at the expense of everything else for a bit of time). 

You’re all busy people, many of you have kids, you’re not going to win because you worked the hardest, you’re going to win because you worked on the highest leverage stuff.

This is the mental advantage that successful property entrepreneurs have (and all entrepreneurs for that matter).

Your goal, if you choose to accept it 😁, is to commit to one major piece of work in the top 2 high impacting categories every single week.

When you know your low effort high impact things, you’ve got your key to waking up each day with crystal clarity to get started and be productive. 

By plotting all your projects and tasks on this grid you eliminate the brain fuzz and second guessing that plagues most people. Instead of wondering what to do, you can get straight into it by starting with the low effort high impact and then move clockwise round the grid to finish you day on the low effort low impact. [FYI I will often start my day with the high impact and high effort things as I prefer to ‘eat that frog’ first.]

This is your key to having more productive days, weeks and months. 

Now to lock in laser focus

IF YOU WANT TO LEVERAGE THIS TECHNIQUE, MAP OUT THE TIME IN YOUR DIARY TO REALLY MOVE THE NEEDLE  BY PRIORITISING THE HIGH EFFORT HIGH IMPACT AND LOW EFFORT HIGH IMPACT THINGS.

Will you complete your 2×2 grid this week?

I’ve been asked this question on several occasions, and in several slightly different ways – the question essentially being this, ‘how does someone starting out in property become good at it?’

My answer is always the same- it’s committing yourself to a degree of immersion and taking regular action to ‘practice’ your chosen property strategy. 

The follow up question is often then, ‘well how do I get really good?’ I am a firm believer that to accelerate your speed of learning and skill development, you need to get around others who are practising too, people who are both at the similar level and several steps in front. 

To the point of this post – how do you become unstoppable with your momentum in property? IMHO, that answer is COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY. 

And not just any community, but a community of people with shared values, ambition, drive and direction all learning, taking action, holding each other accountable and growing together. 

This last week was Mastermind week – 2 days in person (for the first time in over 15 months), and 2 days online. 

On each of these days I had the privilege and joy of facilitating group discussions that covered everyone’s key property objectives for the month. 

With each of these days, people from all over the UK (and some from overseas) worked together, supporting and challenging each other’s thinking and drawing on the collective intelligence that comes from good mastermind tables. I absolutely love these small group working sessions. From having not met each other prior to the day, delegates finished each day on a high with not only a clear action plan for the coming month but also new property friends and contact details for follow up exchanged. 

When you’re first stepping out into property investing, it can be a very lonely and uncertain time journey. I know from personal experience that the first 9-10 years of my property journey were incredibly isolated and lonely. Pushing through with grit to figure things out on my own, and not really having anyone to talk to about the rollercoaster that is property investing. 

Now having been part of a community of property investors and mentors for the last 5 years I only wish I could have been part of it from the beginning. 

I have heard a great analogy about being around the right network and community – I may butcher it a little but it was along the following lines. If we imagine that we have an inner thermostat that represents our current level in terms of how we show up, our results, our performance, our confidence etc. Well, if we want to raise that internal thermostat so that our results are better, the key way to do that is to level up our associations and spend more time with those people who’s thermostat is set higher than yours.

What are you doing to raise your internal thermostat this week?