Adaero Property

Many of you might be familiar with the concept of Getting to Yes as it relates to negotiation strategy in business. However for many of us, often the more difficult challenge on a day to day basis is “getting to a no”. In other words, the process of deciding what not to do.

As we each have a finite amount of resources (in particular time and money), we must constantly make decisions on how and where to allocate our precious resources. In the context of our work, or even personal lives, we can regularly fall into the trap of saying yes to every request, assignment or event which would initially please the person who made the request. However, taking this approach usually leaves people over-stressed and inundated with things to do or places to be — a lot of which ends up half-finished or forgotten. So in the long run, no one is happy.

Applying this to the context of property investing, the principle is exactly the same, but with much bigger financial stakes. This week Chris and I had a deadline of a few days to analyse and make a decision on what initially seemed like an exciting off market new build opportunity. I think we cycled through the full rollercoaster of emotions on this one from big excitement at the prospect, then caution and conservatism, through hope and optimism it would stack up, then disappointment it may not, back to measured optimism and a maybe, then deflation again and ultimately being objective and unemotionally attached.

In short, we arrived at a No. Although several hours of work and conversation with various advisors across a few days were put into this, it proved to be a super beneficial exercise. Not just in fine tuning our development analysis and opening up new lending contacts, but more importantly in protecting our future time and money.

I’m sure many in the investment community can relate to similar experiences in some shape or form. Either way, we felt that sharing this story may serve as a helpful reminder that sometimes “Getting to a NO” can be as much of a win for the week as “Getting to a YES”.

Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads in the community.

The freedom and flexibility that a property business can facilitate was greatly felt this week as my wife had to fly back to Northern Ireland at short notice for three days, leaving me in charge of our three young boys. From Tuesday to Friday I juggled ‘hands on daddying’ with an all round fairly productive week (and the house was still in a pretty tidy state when my wife arrived home). I was able to attend two kid’s sports days, move the ball forwards with some guest house things and view a potential development site with Chris.

The only thing I couldn’t do was attend our monthly Development Discovery Mastermind in Sheffield, but thanks to live webinar technology and skype I was able to join in on most of the day.

Here’s a quick summary from the week:

Our Development Project

This week we dissected and discussed revised drawings to optimise our development site. It’s proving to be a phenomenal learning process as we liaise with a new architect on how to increase size and volume of units. We are currently looking at the potential of adding three additional apartments, adding garages and increasing the internal area of each flat. The potential is super exciting and well worth the wait. We just have the small matter of going through a new planning process. As we’ve learned, your existing planning can’t be retracted so we are in a good position to look at optimising the site.

As we were talking through options it hit us that this could be a lucrative little strategy, in itself, to apply to other plots- i.e. secure a site with detailed planning, work closely with a good architect to optimise the site further i.e. more/better units, thus adding significant value to the site. Once you’ve added value to the site you then have more options i.e. build out for greater profit or sell the site on for a profit without having to build. With the greater value of the land, you will also be in a better position from a lending perspective. Our intention for ours is still very much to experience building out and selling.

Our Guest House progress

• appliances ordered and due to arrive on Tuesday
• full list of maintenance jobs outlined and Chris has already started to smash through those
• deep clean and linen hire scheduled for mid-week
• enquiries out for gardener services to clear out a small overgrown back garden (in fact, does anyone have a recommendation for a good value garden service for Midlothian and East Lothian?)
• should be ready to roll by Thursday

That half year mark is fast approaching but we’re feeling grateful about what we’ve accomplished, and ambitious about the months to come.

Today has been one of the best Father’s Day’s I can remember and it also coincided with my middle son’s birthday.

Have a great Sunday evening and a productive start to the week ahead

This Friday simultaneously marked the conclusion to what felt like a marathon property purchase, and the beginning of a new chapter for our serviced accommodation business.

Chris and I were celebrating on Friday as we finally became owners of a five bedroom, 11 bed guest house that we originally secured way back in the third week of February.

Due to a plethora of reasons, which I won’t bore you with, the completion date was delayed numerous times. As we weren’t 100% sure when we were going to complete, Chris was actually away this week taking some much deserved time with his family. In his place I had two sidekicks in the shape of my two youngest boys accompanying me to pick up our new keys.

The interesting thing on this one was that with there being several expected completion dates that were missed, we actually had our furniture delivered and wifi installed weeks ago. This means a good proportion of the work has been done and the finish line is in sight for getting this ready to take guests. A few maintenance jobs and finishing touches but then we’ll be good to go.

Now that we finally own the place we can say a big thanks to James Quinn and his team at Fusion for helping us kit the place out. Huge thanks also to our brilliant solicitor Shaun Mackintosh who helped navigate the conveyancing to a successful conclusion.

Exciting times ahead for the Adaero Serviced Accommodation business.

It feels like we don’t have anything big to report this week. When I sat down to write our weekly post, at first I felt deflated that we don’t have some exciting new achievement to share, then I realised that’s not reality, the journey is made up of hundreds of little steps. The reality is that whilst there have been no big milestones hit or new deals done, Chris and I have been working steadily on our business goals…we’re analysing new build development sites, in discussions about leasing blocks of apartments and continuing to manage operations of a successful SA business.

This feeling of “we’ve got nothing big to share this week” got me thinking that there are likely many other VIPs/investors/entrepreneurs out there feeling like their goals are distant and things aren’t happening fast enough. So I thought I’d write a longer post and share some helpful mental reframes that I’ve learned over the years from a business psychologist mentor. This post is a bit of a deeper dive on understanding the quirks of our mind to help on our way to wealth, freedom and sanity.

An intro to entrepreneur psychology self-diagnosis

There are four ways entrepreneurs typically trip themselves up:

1. Hesitation and self doubt – it’s the #1 form of self sabotage
2. For productive people, they can get the sense of never feeling finished or good enough
3. Getting distracted by new opportunities/what others are doing
4. Questioning your own vision/goals i.e. am I even working towards the right thing?

I’m referencing these because it’s key that we understand our psychology so we don’t get caught out by any of these.

The other common pitfall for ambitious entrepreneurs is to fall into black or white thinking (called “splitting”). In other words we can hold ourselves to impossible standards and when we inevitably fail to meet those, we write ourselves off/mentally beat ourselves up. An example might be pushing yourself in all areas of life but still not feeling like you are winning, like the ultra entrepreneurs you might read about or hear on podcasts.

On a smaller scale it might be as simple as putting in a solid week of action taking towards your goals but not feeling like you’ve achieved enough at the end of the week (I get this a lot, but I’m figuring out how to manage it).

HERE ARE SOME EXERCISES TO HELP COMBAT THIS ALL OR NOTHING THINKING

One big antidote to this is to re-frame our thinking to recognise that incremental progress is the ONLY progress. The reality is that the titans we read about were not overnight success stories.

Splitting (or black and white thinking) happens because we fail to plan for incremental progress. The journey HAS to be rewarding for us to be congruent about our ambition.

If you can relate to any of these mental pitfalls then use the exercises below:

1. Journal and plan out out your goals – figure out what it would be like being in the trenches working towards your goal, with all the in between steps, and brainstorm how you can make the journey itself feel better (i.e. more fulfilling and fun). This kind of thinking helps us prepare for the opposite of black and white thinking, it shows us that realistically there are many steps involved
2. Ask yourself, what would it feel like to be 50% done? What would it feel like to get started? (think- what can I do to make the answers to these questions feel better?)
3. Write out baby steps building towards the much larger projects (this can be straightforward with a refurb or even a new build project)
4. Commit to a specific three actions each week
5. Always set your commitments to the most courageous and important work (i.e. not just the easy stuff you would do anyway)
6. Get used to celebrating incremental (week by week) progress

These exercises will help you understand that getting into the the thick of things and being in the process, rather than at the destination, is the fulfilling thing. For property entrepreneurs, and indeed any entrepreneur for that matter, this is key as big goals aren’t achieved every week.

Ultimately the goal is to be comfortable working towards things. Success is a practice not a destination.

I’ve recently had a number of questions from VIP members at earlier stages in their journey so I hope posts like this serve to help you through the slower periods and encourage you to keep taking meaningful action. It’s not purely about the end destination, it’s about continuous steps in the right direction and reflecting back every few weeks to see how far you’ve come, and feeling good about that.

I hope you can look back on the last seven days as a win for the week and here’s to a great week to come.

Thank you to Peter and Paul for sharing their journeys with us earlier in the week at the monthly VIP meet up. We heard their inspiring stories as they progressed from taking their first uncertain steps in property to scaling up the deals in volume and size. Some common denominators were clear to see, including belief, consistent action taking, education and a solid underlying purpose.

On the SA front Chris and I are starting to explore opportunities to rent blocks of flats and in doing so have made some great learnings (many thanks to conversations with our mentor Paul Smith) that will no doubt benefit others by sharing this.

Some considerations if you are looking at R2R on a block of flats:

• Seek to help the owner claim Capital Allowances- get a desktop survey done in the first instance and if there are significant reliefs then this should be reflected in the rent ie free rent for a period or sufficient discounted rent.
• If you actually lease the flats and the total lease value over the proposed period is greater than the LBTT (Scotland) or SDLT (England) threshold, then you will be required to pay stamp duty (shocker I know, and came as surprise news to us). Scottish calculator https://www.revenue.scot/land-buildings-transaction-tax/tax-calculator/lbtt-lease-transactions-calculator
• As we recently learned, a management agreement does not attract stamp duty.
• Ideally avoid signing full repairing and insuring leases as that would make you fully responsible for all repairs.
• If there will be a rent review, best to agree how much per year when agreeing all other terms.

Happy Sunday.

Today I heard this quote again, for the second time. The first time I wrote it down, but today it really started to sink in with more meaning. More on that in a minute.

How was week #20 for you?

Picking up from last week’s post you may (or may not) recall that Chris and I had been experiencing some delays in getting a couple of SA deals over the line. Unfortunately one of those (a R2R deal) fell through at the start of the week. However, frustrating as that was, it may actually have helped us down the line as we would have been tied to pretty toppy rent.

In the same day we were reflecting on the setback, we opened up conversations on a bigger R2R deal that could involve multiple properties.

So, that is why this quote, that I first heard shared by Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post fame), resonated with me this week. And i’m fairly confident that for many of you reading this it will strike a chord and help you start to see things in a new light.

If you’d like to read further into the meaning behind the quote, here’s a good article I found on it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-kronick/life-is-rigged-in-your-fa_b_8233160.html

I thought these two themes summed up the week for us, let me explain briefly.

Tuesday was spent in York with our brilliant development discovery group working on our project to develop a block of luxury apartments. We are exploring options that may ask for a little more patience on our part and add time to our project, but the potential upside could be well worth the wait (by the way, if you’d like to hear further details of this project and how we could help you get involved, just get in touch with a PM).

Meanwhile, back in Scotland, progress for Chris and I on finalising 2 large properties for SA slowed down a little. We are confident things will cross the line in the coming week or two, but again, we must temper ambition with patience.

This kind of pause has allowed time to reflect on something we know about but was reminded of thanks to Darren Hardy’s daily message yesterday, and that something is the magic factor.

So what is “The Magic Factor”?

It boils down to this – “success is a becoming process”. In other words, to have more, we have to become more.

“Before you have you must do, and before you do, you must become”.

In relation to all of our goals, we can ask ourselves this- Who do I need to become in order to….(you fill in the blanks)? In our case it’s Who do I need to become in order secure and let a portfolio of 120 SA bed spaces by the end of this year?

Our answers to this include things such as staying focused on high value, high pay off actions, becoming masters of systemisation and outsourcing…

And a new one to add to this is exercising patience where it’s required, but using that time to reflect, review and improve.

In reflecting a little this week, the exciting thing is that what seemed alien when we got started in SA last July is now becoming our norm as we speak about it, work on real challenges and break through challenges to see the results. The ‘becoming process” for us has been phenomenal and we continue to grow as property entrepreneurs with the help of mentors like Paul, Aniko, Alan and Pauline.

I’ll borrow Darren Hardy’s words to close for the week to serve as a reminder that,

“our background, experiences, and circumstances might have influenced who you are right now, but you are responsible for who you become.”

Happy Friday!

This past month feels like one of the fastest yet. Chris and I have experienced the challenge of balancing ambition with real life growing pains of taking on and setting up new SA units, but we are become more slick with each one. We are learning a phenomenal amount on this journey and the good things is, learning and personal development is up there as one of our top three values. It’s not just the learning we enjoy however, we recognise the satisfaction that comes from sharing knowledge that may also be of value to others (i.e. the main reason I write these posts each week).  

You’ve probably noticed that I like to inject curated nuggets of wisdom from writers and speakers that I learn from. If what we share helps even just one person then brilliant, even better, let us know.

Who would have thought spending three hours with an accountant would be fun? Well, as the sun shone down on Stirling yesterday, Chris and I spent three hours in a meeting room with our accountant. We both soaked up every minute with enthusiasm because the conversation was engaging and we were learning so many things that will significantly help the growth of our businesses.

As I drove the last leg home yesterday I was listening to the audible version of a brilliant book called, “The Code Of An Extraordinary Mind” (for the second time). The author, Vishen Lakhiani was describing a particular turning point in his success that I thought worth sharing, and the take-away is this-

Happiness cannot be tied to a goal, yes have big goals and celebrate when you achieve them, but be happy before you reach them. In other words, when he (Vishen) stopped living in the future (I’ll be happy when… mindset) and started living in the present, his business success took off and so did the fun he had along the way.

I thought this was a relevant message to share as many of us property investors are so ambitious that we can forget to enjoy the journey.

This short poem penned by one of the world’s richest men sums things up nicely:

“I was early taught to work as well as play,

My life has been one long, happy holiday;

Full of work and full of play-

I dropped the worry on the way-

And God was good to me every day.”

― John D. Rockefeller

Have a great weekend.

April feels like it’s been the fastest month of the year so far. Chris and I have taken on and set up two new SA units this month and doing all that whilst keeping on top of everything else, it has felt like we’ve been non-stop hectic busy!

This week I’ve been studying a webinar on TIME from one of my non-property mentors (Peter Shallard – The Shrink For Entrepreneurs – if you’re curious to know about his work feel free to PM and ask me). The underlying message and actionable hacks are great so I thought I’d share a couple in my end of week post. So, the webinar was explaining how poor performance, stress and unhappiness comes from mismanagement of time.

I’m sure you can all relate to the sentiment that ‘busyness’ is often regarded as a sign of self worth i.e. people believe it establishes them as ‘worthy’ and we tend to use it to brag eg, “oh I did a 15 hour day yesterday”. I admit, I’ve been culprit to this many times, but its not big and it’s not cool. We have to learn to reframe this and develop self awareness around time.

If you’ve taken action on the advice that Rob and Paul give to do an audit of your time and what you get done, then you’ll know the powerful insights that can be had from doing that exercise.

Do you regularly tell yourself you have no time get things done? In the webinar I was studying, business psychologist Peter went on to explain how our brain lies about busyness. In other words there is a difference between how we think we spend time (the story we tell ourselves) versus the reality. That example I gave about the “15 hour work day” is a prime example.

We all have 168 hours in a week, here’s a deeper look at that week timeframe:

168 hours in a week

-50 hours for work = 118 hours left

-56 hours for sleep = 62 hours left

The average person has 62 hours to allocate to what matters!

By doing a thorough time audit, like a ship’s log book, to look at how we spend our time, it gives us power insights and aha’s like the following:

1. Time for “Personal life” is typically under-optimised in terms of not actually doing the things we think we want to do or love doing
2. Task switching, travelling can be super costly to our well being (i.e. our productivity and therefore impacting our emotional health)
3. Four hours of true “in the zone” working per day is outstanding and can be planned for. (If we go into a day thinking we will do eight hours of awesome work we’re probably being unreasonable with ourselves)
4. Most people need less unwinding time than they think (but to have none is a disaster)

Looping back to my super busy April, absorbing this insight on time has been, well very timely. In addition to the aha’s above, I have started to implement the DONE LIST at different points throughout the day. This reality based log serves to help me feel good about what I got done, but also remain realistic about how time has flown past and not beat myself up about it.

Bit of different post this week but this stuff has been helpful for me so I thought be may help some of you out there. If so, then great.

One other thing I learned on efficiency- we should never open and read emails unless we are also committed to responding to them at the same time as well.

This week’s post draws directly on borrowed inspiration from my daily dose of Darren Hardy (yes I’m a huge fan). Darren’s message today really resonated with me because each of the key points he mentions has direct parallels to the journey Chris and I are on within the Progressive Community.

Here are the 3 key principles of how the rich get richer:

Seek the best coaches, advisors and counsel that you possibly can

• I showed some appreciation for mentors and advisors in the community last week and this little video further reinforces our investment in time and resources to be working with some of the best coaches and advisors. Chris and I are hugely grateful to be working with such coaches and we’re excited about the growth journey supported by these people.

Find and immerse yourself in a network of high achieving relationships and associations

• Voila – look no further than these brilliant groups of like minded entrepreneurs creating wealth in property. I worked at growing a property portfolio for years on my own outside of “employed J.O.B time” and it can be very lonely. Working with a great business partner in Chris and within communities like this is massively accelerating the results vs the previous years in isolation.

Learn the specific strategies and systems that power the best in the world in becoming the best in the world

• Since joining VIP our bar of ‘normal’ has been raised significantly. Prior to joining, I  remember reading about successful investors in the pages of YPN – stories of people who were leveraging exciting high cash flow strategies and doing big property deals. I would be reading those stories inspired, but thinking, “how am I going to jump to the next level and accelerate growth from a few BTL’s and HMO’s?” Now, with help of the courses we have selected and the mentorship, Chris and I are implementing strategies and systems that are helping us build a solid property business with multiple revenue streams (i.e. the cashflow of the SA division, and the longer term profit creation from development, conversion and flip opportunities in the pipeline).

Having completed one year of VIP we have grown tremendously and we are eagerly commencing year 2 in the programme. If Chris or I can be of any assistance based on the experience we are building up then feel free to PM either of us and we’ll be happy to help where we can.

Here’s the short video from Darren Hardy as I thought many of you out there might appreciate it too.

http://dd.darrenhardy.com/stop-whining-five

Have a great weekend.