If you want to get the benefits from property through working with someone else and leveraging their time, experience or contacts, this doesn’t really apply to you. However, if you have the time, desire and head space to dedicate to learning, improving and then implementing a particular strategy for yourself, I am a firm believer in there being 3 components of success – all of which are essential:
- Education
- Support/Community
- Mentoring
1. Education – without the tools, you don’t know what to do. In relation to property, depending on your strategy you won’t know how to source discounted property, find and manage tenants, layout your HMO, sign a lease option or raise finance. Education does not have to cost you the earth – it can be learnt through books, networking events, webinars, or events. However, paying to learn through a course where you are given all the tools and the accompanying paperwork, is the easiest and safest way to guarantee you know everything required. This should eliminate the chance of making costly mistakes and will help you achieve a lot more! If you want to attend the property event that opened our eyes to what was possible, please get in touch with me and I will get you some complementary tickets 🙂
There is another side to education though and it’s not just the tools. Since we started being interviewed for national property magazines, and sharing our journey on stage and on webinars, a question we get asked a lot is “How have we done what we have.” We used to just say “We took action” but the more we gave this answer, the more we’ve realized that it wasn’t hugely helpful to people who really are trying to take action… So we really thought about what it is that has enabled us to take the action we have. And we realized that the experience and training we had before property, in 100% commission, direct sales as well as working in the banking, marketing, IT and PR industries, has been a huge part of our success.
These “Secrets to Success” convert the learning into the earning, and must be the foundations of any property/business strategy – without them, the raw tools will be ineffective. This is what we teach on our 1 day seminar, and also forms part of our talk at property events round the country. Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about the course or where we are speaking next!
2. Support/Community
Being your own boss can be lonely. Friends and family can’t always fully relate to you running your own business, and can sometimes rain on your parade without meaning too. They often have your best interests at heart, but have sayings ready to warn you about slow and steady winning the race, now not being a good time to do X, Y or Z, or to be wary of “get rich quick schemes.” They do it for the right reasons, because they care, but too much time listening to these sorts of comments leads to paralysis, and is the surest way of halting you in your tracks.
Finding a community of likeminded, positive, people who are all actively doing what you are trying to do can only be a good thing! Let’s not pretend results happen overnight and without any work. Sorry to burst the bubble here – they can happen very quickly but certainly not without either having a very strong financial backing, and/or a shed load of hard work! This community will rejoice in your successes . Now, this isn’t the American style happy clappy, high five giving, whooping and hollering you might be thinking of … although it can be if that’s your thing, but a genuine pleasure at your success. After all, many will remember exactly how it feels to do your first deal etc 🙂
With hard work over a sustained period comes moments of adulation, as well as moments of despair. When you lose a deal, something goes wrong, your motivation is sapped or you don’t know where to turn – your new friends will be there to support you. This has proved invaluable to us along the roller coaster of life!
If you would like to know more about the community we are in, please get in touch and I would be happy to connect you 🙂
3. Mentoring
It is very straight forward – if you want to achieve a certain result, the quickest way of doing this is by working with someone who has already achieved it.
There is a difference between a mentor and a coach which is often overlooked. A business coach doesn’t have to know your industry, and can help you excel by asking the right questions and by applying their generalized expertise to you which will help systemise and leverage your business. A mentor however has been down that path before, and is able to answer your intricate questions on your particular niche and enable you to do more deals more successfully. They both have their place, however typically the mentor is more important in the early stages and the coach more useful in growing your established business. The mentor will help bridge the gap between the classroom or theoretical learning of a particular strategy, and making a real life success of it. Needless to say, there is only so much that can be taught, with a lot of the learning being hands on. For me, a mentor is essential for anyone wanting significant results, fast.
A good mentor will help work out what motivates you (and that is not just money!), what your goals are, what strategy you are going to follow, in what location, hold you accountable for the road map you have both drawn out, and then be there to guide, support and nudge you depending on the circumstances you encounter. In the Information Age, with so many options and opinions out there, the importance of someone being able to plan a single course of action tailored to your wants and needs, and then guide you back to it when you go off course, and help you along when times get tough, should not be underestimated. Needless to say you can get by without a mentor, however they are worth their weight in gold, and if you take action, they will be pay their wages back almost overnight.
The three things I personally feel a mentor/coach must:
Resonate with you & inspire you – this is a personal thing
Have a genuine desire to assist you
Be actively doing deals – the market changes so they need to be up to date
Yes, Katrina and I mentor others, however to be honest, if money was the main driver, we wouldn’t do it, as we can earn more from doing deals than mentoring. What we love about it, is using our knowledge, and expertise to be a significant part of changing someone’s life – it is incredibly rewarding. We don’t take on many clients at a time, and we only want to work with people who are serious about taking action – if you would like to discuss how mentoring would work, please get in touch!
So there we go, the 3 parts that I feel are essential to success in property, and wider life in general. Ignore them at your peril 🙂
If you would like to get in touch with us about mentoring, our “Secrets to Success” course, or getting some complementary tickets to an introductory event to the modern strategies property investors are employing, please get in touch!