Month: May 2022

Do you know one of the best ways to be your most productive in your property business? Do you work harder, faster, longer…? No. It may sound counterintuitive at first but bear with me on this because I think you’ll like it.

In previous blogs I’ve shared the 4 pillars of productivity as they were taught to me: specificity, measurement, deadlines and accountability. [I’ll share the link to it at the bottom if you missed that post]. Just over a week ago I was massively leveraging a holiday departure deadline to crunch through a list before sinking in to a much deserved break. 

Deadline hit and the holiday began, this is where the 5th pillar (or 5th key ingredient for productivity) comes in. 

It’s one that’s often overlooked or not given enough attention. And here it is, the hidden fifth pillar of productivity is PLAY. What we mean by this is completely disconnecting from the busy world of your property business and letting your inner child just play. It’s crucial for your mental state, your family and your business to make time for this stuff. This is where you may need to challenge your current perspective on productivity to put a greater importance on scheduling time for play (whatever your version of play is).

Psychologists have proven that it’s actually “optimal” to not always be optimised. The latest science has actually proven that Playing – like a child – is a revolutionary brain hack that stimulates your neurological growth (ref to the work of Dr Stuart Brown). It also unleashes powerful focus and motivation.

So you see, taking time out to play and go on a holiday is a necessity for high performance, and the best ingredient for productivity IMHO 😊.

I’ve played full out and been present spending quality time with my wife & kids, parents in-law and some new friends for the entire 7 days. We’ve laughed, learned, discussed goals and dreams, danced, ate, drank, played games, and of course PLAYED on the beach.. We’ve created rich and memorable experiences that are captured in our minds and in the pictures and videos we took. This in itself is crucial to invest time and money to do, as I wrote about in a post titled ‘THE 4 KEY THINGS SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE SPEND THEIR MONEY ON’ – no.4 being that they invest in memorable and inspiring experiences.

So what’s the benefit of all this and why is making time for play so important for productivity?

• Disconnected time away from the business actually makes you hungry to get back into producing mode and working at being the highest leverage version of yourself in moving your business forward. I can honestly say I’m hungry to get back to business. We have lots of exciting things happening in our property business and I’m eager to get back into progressing those. 
• Having let the proverbial ‘inner child’ out to play I can happily put the head down and focus on the hard work for another sprint without feeling frustrated or the higher risk of procrastination had I not taken time out.
• Changing up my environment and routine for a week has removed me from the day to day blinkers and made way for some creative thinking thanks to inspiring sights and new conversations- for example it’s given me headspace to think about a big goal Chris and I have to build a spectacular villa in the sun where we can host mastermind retreats and gift holidays to causes that are close to our hearts – like families dealing with illnesses so they can come away to create wonderful memories.
• I’ve continued to feed the virtuous cycle – ie when we spend money on experiences for loved ones it not only creates wonderful memories but it inspires us at a different level to continue to produce results and create a life we are proud of for our family.

I’d encourage you all to be intentional about scheduling time for PLAY, even better, share with us what play you have planned for the warmer weather.

Link to post on 4 pillars of productivity: http://adaeroproperty.com/week-11-leveraging-the-power-of-deadlines-and-the-3-other-pillars-of-productivity/

Do you ever stop and think to yourself – ‘I thought I’d be further along on my property journey by now’. ? 😔

You’re not all alone. We all do. The cause of our pain as a striver, as an ambitious property entrepreneur, is a feeling of never being satisfied. We can easily fall into the self-talk of ‘I’ll be happy when….I have this, reach that, accomplish this….’ And that’s not serving you. 

Darren Hardy calls this the Staircase Paradox – where no matter how hard you climb, all you see is where you aren’t, and what you aren’t.

So the antidote to this is to understand the proverbial ‘staircase’ in order to reframe your perspective and see things through a healthy, and HAPPY lens. That’s exactly what I wanted to share in this post. 

Here are the two things to understand about the ‘staircase’:

THING #1: The staircase is infinite, there is no final destination to reach. The higher we climb on it, the more the staircase extends.

The key thing to understand is that the point is not to arrive, ie it’s not about the “I’ll be happy when”, because our brains don’t work like that. The only point is to climb and to enjoy the journey. 

So how do I enjoy the journey? – you may be asking. Well, psychologists have proven that what makes us happy is visual evidence of progress. Sounds simple but what’s easy to do is also easy not to do. That’s why I love the weekly power hour calls and monthly masterminds I do- I love helping people reflect on the week or month that was and recognise their incremental progress.

As a property entrepreneur it can be so easy to get caught up staring at the top of the ‘staircase’ thinking ‘I’m not there yet, I don’t have x no. of properties/monthly cash flow/portfolio value etc. And if we’re focusing on where we aren’t, we’re discounting all the little steps we took during the week, like the calls we made, the viewings we did, the spreadsheet we built etc. 

I know many reading this will know this stuff, but sometimes we need to be reminded of it by having it packaged up in a different way. I really like this staircase paradox because for me has reinforced a lesson I learned from Dan Sullivan years ago who said the same thing, just slightly differently – he talked about measuring the gain (ie  the ground covered) vs the gap (ie from where you are to where you aren’t yet but want to be).

THING #2: You can’t assess or measure your success by comparison to others because:

1. You don’t know where their ‘staircase’ started. I’d also add to this that you don’t know where they might be pointing their staircase – ie some people want to list a company on the stock market, and others want to create a property business that delivers a six figure income with minimal stress.

2. You don’t know if others have been given or have found an ‘escalator’. 😊

So, as we reflect on the week that was and think about the one ahead, have this staircase paradox front of mind. 

What step did you climb this week to create visual evidence of progress in your property business…that you can now acknowledge and therefore feel happy about?

We can’t deny that property is all about people, every way you look at it, and this was a phenomenal week for ‘people’. It kicked off with hosting brilliant people round a property mastermind table, while the rest of the week was spent (I should say invested) with one of my all time heroes and virtual mentors – Darren Hardy. 

I’ve been learning from Darren and applying his wisdom since 2009 and this week I finally got to meet him and spend 3 intense days learning from him. Ok, it was meeting him virtually however on the final day he actually picked me out of the sea of 1000 faces on zoom and said a genuine ‘Hi’ to me with a wave. Even though he couldn’t pronounce my name correctly 😂it felt great that he spoke directly to me 😎. 

Anyway, enough hero worshipping. Having come out of his business masterclass with literally hundreds of game changing ideas I thought it would be great to share one of them in this post. The ideas and tactics shared were not specifically being directed to people in property but the beauty of what Darren was teaching is that it can be applied to literally any kind of business, if you take the time to connect the dots. So, I wanted to share just one of the simple ideas to both reinforce it for myself, and so that it may help some others out there. 

A large proportion of my notes came out of the 12 point plan Darren shared for garnering enthusiastic, repeated and consistent referrals. No matter what aspect of property you are in, it will involve people and by virtue of that, wouldn’t you rather have people refer new business to you rather than the heavy legwork of originating cold new business?

To that end, the essence of the first 3 points are:

#1: Deliver baseline expectations

#2: Overdeliver

#3: Create a WOW Culture

There are a handful of different avenues to our property business but to share an example of how I am applying these points to our Serviced Accommodation business, here are some thoughts.

1 – Baseline expectations

Before getting into anything else, the fundamentals of what you offer have to be good. Darren shared an insight from the Ritz Carlton Hotel – they found that if the first 4 points of contact that a customer has are all good then there will virtually be no complaints (ie those first 4 could be the doorman, the receptionist, the concierge and possibly a housekeeping member in a corridor). If however, one of those points of contact go badly, a judgement is made and then a guest will subconsciously be looking for negatives to back up that judgement.

So, knowing that first impressions are so critical it really focused my mind on going back through our SA customer journey to look at where this can be improved. 

How could you improve first impressions by making things faster, simpler, easier and safer in your business?

2) Overdeliver

I noted this distinction from Darren, ‘Customer service is reactive, customer experience is proactive’. He shared some powerful statistics to prove that small increases in customer satisfaction can lead to big improvements in profitability over time. We need to WOW and the ‘WOW is in the relationship, not the product’.

Again, some great examples were shared from the Hotel industry – the Ritz Carlton sending a child’s lost teddy back to him overnight along with a series of photos making it look like the teddy had an extra day on holiday doing fun things at the hotel; then a budget hotel in Hollywood had rave reviews from guests and huge repeat bookings because of how they delighted young kids with unexpected free poolside snacks and ice creams.

3) Creating a WOW – Culture

This is about a shift in mindset, it’s about every team member understanding that first and foremost they are in marketing, branding and customer experience. 

So the practical application for me and the team is to map out all of our customer touchpoints to audit where we stand and define what the baseline expectation needs to be. Literally looking at everything from our messaging, to our invoicing, the check in, the mid-stay check-in, you get the idea. Once all mapped out and audited we can then look at how we can PLUS each touchpoint, in other words add ‘micro’ wows.

In terms of the culture, it’s then about constantly discussing this in our weekly meetings and empowering the team with the tools and budget to offer up wow moments both proactively and reactively. You see, it’s all about people 😊.

Now it’s time for the rubber to meet the road. I have over 100 pages of notes to filter through so I can then organise and prioritise the first three to put into action. 

What will you do to weave some WOW into your property business?

Here’s what got me thinking this week – the concept of asymmetric risk reward and how it might be applied to property.

I was watching an interview with Tony Robbins discussing financial success principles where he was highlighting some common findings having interviewed 50 of the smartest and most successful financial people in the world.

He said, ‘they are all obsessed with this idea of having the least amount of risk with the most amount of return’. That right there caught my attention, that’s what we all want in property too right?

They call it ASYMMETRIC RISK REWARD – Here’s a google definition of it ‘An asymmetric payoff (also called an asymmetric return) is the set of possible results of an investment strategy where the upside potential is greater than the downside risk.’ 

Tony referenced billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones who doesn’t just look for a ‘nice return’, he looks for a risk return ratio of 5:1, in other words if he risks $1 he can make $5. He knows he’s going to be wrong sometimes but he understands that he can risk not making money up to four out of five dollars and still make money overall. 

That thinking and that approach puts you in a very different position to most people.

Another example of asymmetric returns that Tony referenced was the way Richard Branson set up Virgin Atlantic. In those early days he invested a year in negotiating the first 5 Boeing jets so there was no downside. Here’s how- if in the first 3 years he didn’t succeed with his airline, he negotiated a deal to give back the planes with no loss to him. So it was all upside potential and minimal downside.

We may not always be able to find a 5:1 ratio but the main thing is to force ourselves to think differently from the ‘average’ investor.

This quarter Chris and I are working on our strategy for growing our build to rent (BTR) portfolio. We see this as a great way to create the long term rental asset base that we would like to hold.

A conversation with a developer friend at the start of the week reminded me that with BTR, even if your aim is to build a profitable asset base to hold long term, the best outcome may actually be to sell up to 4 out of every 5 developments. Interestingly, this friend comes from a hedge fund background so on reflection I can see how the thinking ties in with this concept of asymmetric risk reward. In other words not, all the BTR opportunities we identify will meet our criteria for holding, but when it meets the criteria for other long term investors then it makes sense to build-to-rent-to sell. So rather than narrowly focusing on the one exit of us holding and passing up on lots of potential deals, if we open our mind to this way of thinking we can increase the upside and minimise the downside.

The key message/reminder for us all in property is to look for ways to engineer asymmetric rewards by maximising the upside and protecting the downside. The simplest way to protect the downside of course is to have multiple exits. Even better is to line up your primary exit with commitment in advance (ie a pre-let agreement, a booking agreement etc) AND give yourselves multiple alternative exits. By doing that we really can create asymmetric risk reward ratios in property.

What are you already doing, or can you do, in your property business to create asymmetric returns?

Does your mind tend to overcomplicate or overthink things? What about when it comes to your property investing business- whether it be starting a new strategy or growing to the next level, does your mind over complicate or over think it? I certainly have done (and occasionally still do 😊). So, if you can relate, I hope this question I’m about to share helps you reframe things. 

Here’s where it came from – One little question buried inside a 16 minute podcast really jumped out and caught my attention this week. I had to pause my gym session, grab my phone and type out a quick few notes. 

I was listening to Pat Flynn talking about how he’s been able to succeed in the endeavours he’s chosen to focus on. In his 5 point summary about that he referenced a question credited to Tim Ferriss and that’s the one that got me thinking about it’s application in property. 

Here’s that brilliant question – “IF THIS WERE EASY, WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE?”

This reframe helps to counter over complication. So when the subconscious mind slips into overcomplicating things making things harder than they need to be, this question helps you to refocus on not just how am i going to get this done, but what are the simple ways or easy methods to do so. 

The reason I love this question is because it reframes the mind to get you thinking about what the minimum things are you can do to get the maximum results. This isn’t to say we’re lazy and looking for the laziest way to get there. In most worthwhile pursuits we’re probably going to have to work really hard but the key here is to direct that hard work at understanding what are the first dominos I should knock over that will push all the other dominoes forward.  

So in the context of starting a property strategy, you could be asking yourself, what are the highest leverage first steps I can take to get this flywheel moving?

By way of a quick practical example, when I think about how ‘IF THIS WERE EASY WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE?” applies to SA, what I see is having the demand piece of the equation sorted in advance. When you have found the end user demand, and you’ve established some commitment for an accommodation solution, then the rest is relatively easy. The rest of the equation can slot into place far more easily than if you were basing decisions on hope and guesswork. When you have validated the guest demand it will inform you exactly where the property needs to be, what price point it needs to be, what kind of spec the property will need and what kind of service offering you’ll need to go with it. 

Without that key piece of the puzzle, SA can feel incredibly difficult to get started without some expensive mistakes. I’m talking from personal painful experience here [and I’ve written about it in detail in my book Predictable Property Profits] – all about how starting with demand made our second SA business far easier than the first one, which was based on guesswork.

So how else could you apply this powerful question to your property business?

If starting and growing a property business were easy, what would it look like? Some of the answers that come up for me are:

-learning how to do the thing from someone who’s already done it and got the results you want

-having regular coaching and accountability to keep you executing on the right things

-using the right power team experts to keep you safe – ie architect, solicitor, accountant, broker etc

-leveraging other people to help you get more done ie team members, VAs, freelancers, agencies

So I’m curious to read what comes up for others (and I hope this prompts some creative thinking and reframed perspectives) – in the context of your property business, ‘IF IT WERE EASY WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE?”