Month: April 2022

Whatever sage you’re at with your property endeavours, do you ever stop and think to yourself, I thought I’d be further along the journey to success by now?

I’d make an educated guess that anyone in property reading this will have felt this at some point, or is possibly feeling this now. I know this because I’ve felt it on many occasions and continue to feel it. 

For many, property education goes hand in hand with the results – courses, mentorships, books, podcasts etc. So why can it feel like the reality of success lags behind the rate of learning and education?

I’ve been working through a Darren Hardy leadership course and in the Q&A one of the other delegates asked the following question to him-

Why does it always feel like my success is constantly playing catch up to my learning and development? 

Does this mean I’m overestimating myself or possibly down playing my progress and achievements, or is the problem something else?

If you can relate at all with this question then this post is for you. Darren delivered such a great answer that I had to write it down and share it because I know that others will need to hear this right now. He quotes Jim Rohn for most of his response so I’m going to quote and paraphrase both Darren and Jim Rohn for the rest of this short post.

Jim taught him that,  “There are 2 qualities that can increase your chances of success:

#1 Patience

#2 Persistence

Jim would call patience “learning to handle the passing of time”. Once you have the appetite for success, and you start going for it, now you’ve got to handle the passing of time. Here’s why…IT TAKES TIME. It takes time to build a corporate work of art that impacts the lives of many. It takes time to build a successful life. 

Here’s the ultimate challenge – you’ve got to have patience, first with yourself.

Lack of patience is probably the worst enemy of ambition. While your ambition keeps growing, keeps moving, keeps looking for new ways to succeed, impatience tends to grow frustrated. Impatience won’t allow for persistence. Impatience wants to give up. Impatience calls the temporary discouragement ‘failure’, but your ambition won’t let you give up so easily. Not if you’re persistent. What others might call failure, ambition calls ‘learning, growing and making progress’, a chance to make adjustments along the charted course towards success. 

Ambition knows there’s something else to this. It knows that the longer an achievement is in the coming, the more patience and persistence are required, and because of it, the more valued and valuable the achievement is. 

Here’s the underlying message – Just keep moving through the struggle of persistence and patience. Give your proverbial caterpillar the time it needs to go through the metamorphosis to become the beautiful and amazing butterfly it was intended to be.”

I do hope that these words serve to remind you to keep making that incremental progress, knowing that behind it all the metamorphosis is happening – you are becoming more!

“Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it and spend it rather than invest it.” – Jim Rohn

You would have no doubt read or heard countless quotes and maxims like the one above about time being our most valuable asset. So knowing this, it would be crazy not to measure and manage it right?

The week leading up to Easter weekend was Mastermind week and a priority topic for discussion and coaching on my table each day stemmed directly from this valuable asset – TIME. How to measure it, make decisions on how it’s allocated and how to leverage it. 

In this post I want to share 3 questions that will help liberate any property entrepreneur by identifying what to delegate in order to gain back time that can be allocated to higher value activity. 

Before diving into the delegation fast track questions, you first need to know exactly where your time is currently going. To do this you absolutely need to invest the time over the coming weeks to track and record how your time is spent across a typical week. 

HOW TO MEASURE YOUR TIME

A simple way to do that is to create a spreadsheet with 5 columns with the headings from left to right as follows:

ACTIVITY | No. HOURS | HOURLY RATE | ENJOYMENT RATING (0-10) | DELETE/KEEP/OUTSOURCE?

It’s best to record two typical working weeks, so plan to do that around the holiday weeks. Each day you need to account for each hour – covering everything from self care, domestic chores, commuting, family activities and of course property and work tasks (and be sure to specify the different work/property tasks). You need to rate each entry with an hourly rate (ie how much money it earns you per hour or how much you would earn if being paid by the hour to do it ie to cook and clean)  and by how much you enjoy it on a scale of 1-10. 

So by the end of 2 weeks of tracking you can study the results and make some meaningful decisions relating to what you keep doing, stop doing or delegate 

MAKING DECISIONS THAT WILL RAISE YOUR HOURLY RATE

Only when you have tracked your weeks and have the data in front of you can you make some meaningful decisions. I have done this a couple of times in the last 5 years and it’s amazing how much room for change it highlights. 

My entire Q1 of this year has been focused on reviewing our businesses, processes and time allocation to identify what can be delegated and to who. A large component of this has been to actively study leadership from various masters in their field and, from that, gradually apply some new exercises and tactics to enhance the decisions around time allocation and delegation. 

That’s what I wanted to share here. So, do the time tracking first, and once you have the results in front of you, refer to these 3 questions to help you diagnose what to delegate. 

YOUR DELEGATION CHEAT SHEET: 3 DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

If you’re in the early stages of your property journey and wondering where to begin with delegating, these questions will help you. If you’re a seasoned property business owner growing to new levels, answering these questions 2-4 times a year will help you identify what to move off your plate and onto someone else’s. 

#1: What things are you doing again and again for no money?

• When you take a look at your time tracker, what are the things that you are doing several times a week or month but not getting paid for? That will highlight some immediate things to delegate.

#2: Where do you find yourself HIDING by working on low leverage stuff?

      – you don’t know how to tackle a big proposal so you head to quickbooks to code up expenses. In other words, where do you go to feel ‘BUSY’ when you’re hiding from the tasks that require COURAGE? Those will be tasks to delegate. 

#3: Where can you act as Quality Control rather than Production?

• We don’t need to think of delegating as handing stuff off to someone and never thinking about it again. Many entrepreneurs can multiply their earnings and growth by figuring out how to wear the Quality Control hat and oversee others’ produce while they do the fine tuning or final checks. 

CONCLUSION

I shared a post last week titled, ‘Your Property Business Needs a Who in Q2’ which is all about the tremendous growth opportunities available to us when we understand how to enlist the help of others.

YOUR PROPERTY BUSINESS NEEDS A ‘WHO’ IN Q2

To really help step change the return on our most valuable asset, here’s your call to action

#1 – track your time in a simple spreadsheet for 2 weeks

#2 – make some meaningful decisions using the 3 delegation diagnostic questions to help

#3 – take the action to delegate and train in the areas identified (there’s probably a whole other post in that 😊)

Who’s committed enough to their growth to pledge in the community that you’ll do this? (HINT – Those that do publicly declare their pledge are considerably more likely to stay consistent with their words and therefore reap the benefits 😁)

Sometimes you hear something in a podcast that just grabs your attention and makes you instantly think deeper about it, to the point where you have to stop what you’re doing and make notes (or is that just me?😊)

The thing that grabbed my attention was this idea of the “Failure CV”. Well, as I was listening to an American podcast (the Ed Mylett show) they actually called it a ‘failure resume’, but here in the UK that’s CV (curriculum vitae) to us. I instantly resonated with the concept and started thinking about how powerful this idea is for property entrepreneurs. 

So in this post I wanted to share the idea of a ‘Property Failure CV’ and encourage you to start writing one today. 

WHY on earth is he asking me to write about my failures? You might be asking. Here’s why – learning from mistakes is so important if you want to build a successful property business.

So WHAT exactly is a Failure CV? In generic terms it’s a list of your biggest screw ups – personal, professional, academic, and what you’ve learned from them. Think of it as a living document of what you’ve learned along your journey of life to date, and the key thing is that it’s much more likely you won’t repeat the mistake when you write it down. 

Here’s a great line I noted from Daniel Pink (the author who referenced it in the interview by Ed Mylett) 

– “Failure is just data, but you need to mine it to get the value”. 

I hope that line strikes you like it did for me. In the context of our property journeys there is so much data to mine and get value from, if we invest the time to do it. 

Here’s HOW to mine the value from your mistakes by making your own property failure CV in a clear and structured way:

#1: Draw/create 3 columns on a piece of paper or spreadsheet

#2: Add these headings from left to right- 

Column 1- Setbacks & screw ups

Column 2: Lessons I learned

Column 3: What I’m going to do about it

#3: Make a start and fill the columns for the first property mistake that comes to mind. 

I’ve started mine on a spreadsheet as I intend to keep adding to it and revisiting it. To help get you thinking, here’s my first entry:

1- I jumped into rent-to-rent serviced accommodation with total hope and guesswork –  no understanding of the end user and the unit economics of the business. The result – money draining from our bank account each month and an expensive lesson.

2- I learned that hope and guesswork isn’t a strategy and that if we wanted to make a success out of SA we’d have to take a completely different approach.

3- What we did about it was this- instead of starting by finding a property that someone would rent to us, I started with finding the demand first, and only then crafting the solution to meet that ie what kind of property and where. 

[When I think about it, the book I wrote is kind of like a property failure CV and it goes into specific detail about what happened, what we learned and what we did about it. If you’d like to read all the gory details you’ll find it on amazon, it’s called Predictable Property Profits 😊]

That failure has been so impactful because it has led to the creation of our investment philosophy that steers everything we do in property. 

There are many more failures making it onto my CV, another one is engaging a rogue builder to carry out a refurb without carrying out thorough diligence, I’ve learned a lot from that 😔.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

If the concept of a Property Failure CV is resonating with you, start it now with the first entry. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, it may even be something you didn’t do, a regret perhaps. The key thing is to make a start and then keep it as a living document. 

TIP – I already have a habit of doing quarter end reviews so updating and reviewing my Property Failure CV will become part of that habit, why not do the same?

And if you still need some convincing, here are some more reminders and reasons why doing this is such a powerful exercise:

#1 Writing it down makes you less likely to repeat them.

#2 Examination of mistakes promotes a realistic understanding of what happened and will promote the discovery of new ways of thinking and reacting to the same situation in the future.

#3 Failure promotes resilience, creativity, and growth – by thinking about how things went off track, we are innovating and imagining alternative circumstances, approaches, methods, and how these may result in different outcomes.

#4 Overcome fear of failure – this exercise will empower you to try again and avoid thinking that the activity is just something you can’t do.

#5 It’s a great reminder of where you have been and that you are where you should be.

#6 It demonstrates that the path to success is not a straight one. When your property journey gets you down, review your failure CV to remind yourself what you did to overcome past problems.

#7 By sharing our failure CV with others, we can empower them to continue trying to achieve their goals.

#8 Your Failure CV can help you secure JV partners – venture capitalists in the US actively choose to invest in the startup founders who have already experienced failures and have learned and grown from them. Do you think it’s any different for JV partners deciding on whether to invest in a property entrepreneur? Of course not, so use your failures to help attract partners and investors. 

So, who’s going to start their PROPERTY FAILURE CV today?