Adaero Property

PART 1:  QUICK STRATEGY CHECK-IN

It’s been a while since Chris and I have posted a video so whilst on a property visit this week, we used the time in the car for a strategy meeting and we share some of our thoughts and direction here. The main takeaway for anyone choosing to watch the video is to have you think about your own allocation of focus, we refer to it here as a 70:20:10 split.

PART 2: REFURB WALK ROUND

In part one of this week’s post Chris and I shared a strategy update. Its fast approaching the halfway point in the year so we used the driving time to one of our recent purchases to have a strategy meeting – reviewing key things we have progressed so far this year and discussing our allocation of focus for the second half of the year. 

We touched on our main focus (the 70%) to grow our asset base through build to rent of multiple units at a time; our secondary focus (the 20%) of our mentoring time and creating incredible mastermind retreats that help people set property goals in alignment with their values and then implement their plan; and our 10% focus which is continuing to add single lets for either long term holding or rent to buy. 

As part of that 10% we took half a day to visit one of our recent investments – a 2 bedroom semi detached house that hasn’t been lived in for 7 or 8 years. This video below covers a walk round tour of that house where we aim to highlight a number of issues that may alarm some investors, but in reality they aren’t major issues and Chris talks through how we will refurb the property. 

Reflecting on when Chris and I were first getting started in business together, we know we quickly became overwhelmed and too diluted trying to do four or five different things. The result was doing none of them very well. When we focused in 100% on serviced accommodation we were able to quickly see the results of our efforts and then rapidly push through the learning curve with one thing. 

Over the years we have been able to introduce additional strategies and business activities, but that has only been thanks to the big focus on first getting the foundations in one thing right and then building a team around it. 

Are you clear on your allocation of focus – what’s your sole property focus? or if you’ve been in property a while, what’s your 70:20:10?

What does it take to be successful?

Several years ago I heard part of a speech from Darren Hardy where he was explaining what it really takes to be successful and it really struck a chord so I wrote it down. There were a few paragraphs I’d noted with the last one finishing as follows, 

“Success is not mysterious, success is simple but hard. Success is simply a result of daily disciplines compounded over time. Success is not for those who want it, it is not for those who need it, success is only for those who are relentlessly committed to doing the work for it every day.”

Every time I re-read this and share it with others it reminds me of the principles written about in The Compound Effect book (highly recommend it 😊). The way I see things is that having the compound effect on your side doesn’t have to be painful and difficult. Once you understand the principles of how to progress in your desired area – whether that be in health, in property or in something else – it’s then a case of applying those principles consistently by making them part of your routines, lifestyle and habits. 

So for example, this is why I’m a huge fan of having a morning routine that entails a handful of impactful components, like exercise, a healthy breakfast, meditation and personal development time. 

When it comes to property, I know people who will do certain tasks on set days and times each week i.e. their sourcing time, their agent phone call time etc. Having structure baked into your quarters, months, weeks and days is, in my view, crucial to being successful in your property business. 

For me, I will use 20 minutes on a Friday afternoon (see the routine there? 😊) to review the week’s progress and to decide my top 3 projects for next week, and even get the specific activities scheduled in the diary. These planned sessions are blocked out times in the diary  to focus on working on the right things and towards a specified mini completion point with no distractions like inbound phone calls, emails, texts or social media. For example, one task from this week was building out a big spreadsheet to help me understand and evaluate the pros and cons of 8 different options for lending to finance the purchase of a block of flats and a restaurant. 

It’s this repeated weekly cycle that I’ve found to be the biggest contributor to results I’ve had in the last 8 years. The weekly and daily rhythms are my compound effect. However I’m very conscious that even when we do arrive at a certain level of success at something we need the self awareness not to get complacent (I’ve felt the pain of complacency with our SA business in the past 😊). To borrow more words from Darren, he said – “You never really arrive, you never really own success, you only rent it, and the rent is due everyday. [I think that’s brilliant and poetic.]

My daily rent includes my morning routines and working on one of my proactive needle moving activities for 90 minutes with phone and email off. 

What about you? What ‘success rent’ do you need to be paying each day with your property business in order to start or continue benefiting from the compound effect?

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?”

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?