Five months ago I met Jonathan Berliand for the first time and got to hear some of his remarkable journey. I captured what stood out for me as the 8 key lessons from his talk. If you haven’t read that post I’ll add the link at the bottom of this one.
This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan again at the Touchstone 6 Figure Summit. As the eternal student I was scribbling notes at the back of the room so thought, why not follow up the previous post with some more wisdom bombs.
[BTW if you’re interested the quote on the screen reads, “You weren’t born to just pay bills and die”]
LESSON #1: FIND YOUR WHY AND THEN FIGURE OUT THE HOW
‘It all started with a bucket’
Jonathan formed his first business at age 8 because he wanted more pocket money than 50p a week. Why? – he wanted a proper watch, and he was willing to apply himself to find a way. The answer came in the shape of a bucket and sponge and his car washing business was born.
Just to give you a small insight to the savvy of this young lad, this business grew to a turnover that saw him making more at age 12 or 13 than a professional footballer at the time.
LESSON #2: EMBRACE FAILURES
Jonathan shared a major reframe on failing, in fact, he loves failures and has probably had more failures than wins (all be it the wins have far exceeded the losses in value terms). Why does he love failures? – they have massively accelerated the path to the wins and here’s the reframe I really liked – he doesn’t want to reach the end of his life with a load of question marks.
LESSON #3: UP YOUR GAME
Last year Jonathan got stuck in the lift of a high rise building in London for over an hour. However at least he had company. His lift-mate happened to be the author of that well known book ‘10X’, yes it was Grant Cardone. Jonathan described getting his proverbial be-hind kicked by Grant because he’d confessed to hitting a lull in his property investing business ie he wasn’t doing nearly as many deals as he wanted to, or knew he was capable of. Whatever Grant said it certainly lit a fire under Jonathan’s ass because he consciously upped his game and now has over 100 deals on the table, just a few short months later. Wow, just wow! And why not? We can all up our game. To paraphrase Jonathan (and Grant), ‘when you have a good deal/opportunity, jump then worry about how you’ll pay for it. If you don’t jump you’ll always have question marks hanging over you, and you don’t need those in your life.’
LESSON #4: LEARN TO LOVE SELLING AND TAKING MASSIVE ACTION
Can tea towels make you rich? Jonathan has sold many different kinds of products and at one point in his career saw an opportunity to by tea towels wholesale at about 10p each. Confident he could sell them for a good bit more, he placed an order with the European mill for 100,000. On delivery day what arrived was the first 600,000 of a 10million item order! Somewhere along the line the supplier had chosen to add a few zeros. Faced with a mountain like this to climb (ie having to sell this insane amount of stock), many would have given up and thrown the towel in, (that just rolled out naturally, I promise) but not Jonathan. After 2 weeks of daily struggling to sell small volumes and on the verge of giving up, one more cold call led to selling 750,000 units! ‘You discover what you’re made of when your back is against the wall’, he said.
Rather than give up he chose to put in massive and consistent action, it didn’t happen quickly but he eventually found his way to bulk sales orders with large retail outlets and he did indeed shift all those tea towels. For a tidy profit too I might add.
LESSON #5: ASK BETTER QUALITY QUESTIONS
I’ve heard it said before that the quality of your life is directly proportional to the quality of questions that you ask. To this point I have a couple of anecdotes from Jonathan that shows how his mind works when it comes to identifying problems and finding solutions that make money:
- in his car washing business as a kid, when Jonathan found that growth had stopped he challenged himself to think about what else he could be doing. The answers he came up with included, to upgrade the type of car the team were washing ie a more expensive car warranted a more expensive wash. Next he started to upsell the offering by moving the cars to be washed and putting them back for the owner’s convenience – a premium offering for a premium price.
- This next example is a beauty. Jonathan had a river boat and on the internal surfaces like window frames and shelves he noticed increasing amounts of messy black spots appearing. When he asked the boatyard owner what it was he replied, ‘that’s spider poo, no one has found a solution to that, when someone does they’ll be a billionaire.’ Of course Jonathan didn’t just accept this information and move on. He set about finding a solution to a problem that wealthy people would happily pay for to keep their boats pristine. But it’s not just for boat owners, you’ve probably seen these very black spots on your own window sills, if you’re curious, here’s the product to see for yourself
There was an open floor Q&A with Jonathan to close the session, so here are a quick few bonus gems from that:
ON BREXIT – we can’t base our plans on Brexit. Whatever happens people still need to live somewhere and stay somewhere when they travel to the UK. So property rentals and sales will still have to continue. OK it may not be at the rate of previous years, but it will still need to happen at a pretty significant scale to keep things running. In short, ‘you can only deal with what’s in your control and move on. ‘
ON WORK MINDSET – This circles back to Lesson #1 above– you’ve got to find your why and love what you do. Jonathan loves boating, it’s his tonic, but it doesn’t come cheap so he keeps working on his businesses to fund it. The key to point out here is that he also has great fun doing that too. Of course there will be challenges and tough weeks, but finding and making deals is fun.
ON FINANCES AND RISK MANAGEMENT – you’ve got to take control of your own finances, that’s why you need to learn how to invest effectively in property for yourself. When it comes to risk management, you’ve got to do what’s right for you, but Jonathan likes repayment mortgages. Paul recommends stress testing your deals at 12% mortgage interest rates.
The room loved Jonathan’s candid honesty, humour and humility. I can’t share every single anecdote here but if this stuff resonates then get yourself to a 6 Figure Summit where you can hear Jonathan speak first hand.
The first set of lessons from Jonathan http://adaeroproperty.com/8-lessons-from-a-humble-multi-millionaire/