5 Steps to Accelerate Your Property Investing Success

Number one, you need to gain specialist property investing knowledge. If you want to be a successful investor, you need to learn how to do that. You don't have to work it out yourself. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, which is what I had to do, because none of this training was available when I started. There's a huge amount of information available for you to learn how to do this properly.

This will give you a competitive advantage and the ability to spot deals in your area that other investors might miss.

Obviously, which is what most people do, you can learn for free. Now, this is a great way to start, and I put out a huge amount of free content on this podcast or my YouTube channel. I recommend you go back and listen to past episodes of my podcast. If you do that, you will probably know more than most investors. Check out my YouTube channel as well.

Learning for free is a great way to start. Yet the problem with learning for free is there's not just my information, but lots of other people's information out there. It's very easy to get overwhelmed and get confused and not know where to start.

Whilst there is a lot of information that I put out for free, my paid training will have the step by step processes, for people who haven’t been able to work it out themselves. The reason why people invest in themselves is because it saves time, rather than having to watch a lot of YouTube videos or listen to podcasts. After all, time is your most valuable asset.

I'm always investing in myself. I'm up-skilling what I want to learn more about business or speaking or presenting to make sure I'm better at what I do.

Here's the interesting thing. When you invest in yourself to get training, you become more investable. If someone's going to lend you money or Joint Venture with you, they want to make sure you know what you're doing. The fact that you can show you've educated yourself is a good tick in the box. The other thing is, if you're not prepared to invest in yourself, why on earth should someone else invest in you, back you, if you're not prepared to do it yourself. So gaining specialist knowledge is essential.

I created my accelerator flow charts for my students, because I found when people came onto my Mastermind programme, a lot of people were taking action straight away. But there were some people who weren't taking action for a good few months.

I spoke to them to find out what was going on, did they not enjoy the training? They responded with how they loved the training, but can’t move forward not knowing all the strategies. I thought well, that’s a good point. Some people need to know everything so they can see what is right for them.

So my accelerator flow chart iis a summary of all the strategies. When people want to come and do Mastermind, we put them onto our three-day mastermind accelerator first. They can then be taught all the strategies, work out the most appropriate for them, and then hit the ground running when they start Mastermind.

Make sure you get your specialist knowledge, whether you train with me or someone else. Find someone who has done what you want to do, and they’ve become good at teaching. See if they have lots of great case studies and educate yourself.

The next step, number two, to accelerate your success is to get set up for success. What I mean by that is putting some of your systems and processes in place. You need to get your ducks in a row. So once you know what you're doing, you also need to make sure you can fund your property acquisitions.

Now, depending on what strategy you use, you may or may not need lots of money. There are lots of creative finance strategies, which you can use so you're not using a lot of your own money. Examples of these include, Purchase Lease Options, Vendor Finance, Rent to Rent etc. However, if you actually want to own property, which is always the best thing to do at some point, you're going to need to buy the property.

You can use other people's money, or you can make your own funding available. Let’s say you’ve got equity in your own home, or you’ve inherited a property, or equity in a rental property, I suggest you get that funding ready to go.

Don't wait until you find a good deal, and then think, right, now I'm going to release the equity, because the reality is it will take too long to access that money. You almost want to have the money sitting there in your bank account, burning a hole in your pocket. That will motivate you to get out there and find some good deals. So, funding is always important to set up. Maybe you're going to use money from your pension. A lot of people say they will put together a SAS, which is a small self-administered scheme, and they think, when they find a deal. They don’t raise it takes a long time to set these things up. It’s never too early to ensure your funding is in place.

The next thing is for most people, when investing in property, they're probably going to do it in a business structure. So get your business set up. You need to have your document of Registration and Corporation to be able to set up your business bank account, this takes a bit of time as well. So all these things you need to get going, then you can put some systems in place to save yourself time. You could have a followup system for all the sellers you speak to. You could have a call answering service to make sure you never miss a call. These are simple things you can put in place. They're not expensive, but it will make you far more effective and more professional.

Step number three to accelerating your success is finding a strategy that serves you best. A strategy giving you what you need to achieve. Focus on that strategy. Focusing is so important. It's very easy to become overwhelmed by all the different shiny pages out there. This can happen after listening to a new podcast or video, or reading an article in the YPN magazine. You think, oh I’ll go do that, you get distracted and never really become good at one thing. So find the strategy that works for you. Once you're aware of all the strategies, really focus on and master it. A great abbreviation of a focus is, Follow One Course Until Successful. Now having said this, you want to make sure you're not too blinkered.

For example, I meet people who say, well, I'm just going to do Rent to Rent. They write to landlords and see if they want to rent their property. That's a great way of finding Rent to Rent deals, but what if that landlord wants to sell their property?

If you're saying you just want to rent it, they're not going to come back to you. Whereas if they want to sell, you could do something like a Purchase Lease Option, which is better than Rent or Rent. Or maybe you could actually buy the property using your money or someone else's money. So be careful when you're communicating, don’t be too laser focused where you exclude other potential deals.

If you find other great deals that are maybe not in your strategy, but they're really good deals, you will always be able to get funding for it. If you go to property network meetings, and property events, there are always people there who've got money but they don't know how to find good deals. Or maybe they know, but they don't have the time or energy to find deals themselves. So by networking and building your network, you can fund all the deals you come across.

That leads nicely onto my fourth step to accelerate your success, which is to not do this on your own. Property investing can be a very lonely journey on your own. The more successful you get, the less people you get to speak to who understand what you're doing. I had this back in 2003. I'd left my corporate career a couple of years before. I'd completely replaced my income by 2003. None of my friends were investing. They were all still working. None of my family invested. That's why I set up the property investors network, because I wanted to get like-minded people around me.

You need people who are trying to do what you want to do, and at the same level as you. When you are successful, if you’re just basing your connections on people in your major environment, there will be less people to speak to. That’s why now I'm a member of two different Mastermind groups in America.

Obviously during the pandemic, I’ve been doing everything virtually. But prior to that, and hopefully very soon, I'm going to start going back to America to get in the room with other like-minded successful people. They do say that your net worth is your network. So what can you do? An action from today is, what can you do to start building your network, connecting with people? Some of the best deals I've done are people I've met through networking. Some of the best business growth I've had are people I've met through networking and the Mastermind groups that I'm in. You want to mix with like-minded people.

So that's a little bit about your environment, but also let's think about your team. You don't have to do everything on your own. You can get other people to help you and a great suggestion is maybe get someone part-time. It could be a virtual assistant who can do some of the admin, some of the laborious tasks which need doing. The things you don’t need to do yourself, you could pay someone hourly. It’s freeing up time for you to use for your investing. Time is our most valuable asset, we need to really value it. You need to make sure you are doing the right tasks. That's why, get a team.

One of my mentors is a guy called Brad Sugars, who set up Action Coach, which is an international business coaching franchise. He's got a great saying, which is, "Not employing someone in your business is costing you a fortune." Let me say that again. Not employing someone in your business is costing you a fortune. Most people look at the cost of doing things and they don't look at the value.

Yes, you need to pay someone to come and work with you and your business. But you've got to look at the value you get in terms of the time, that's liberated for you to focus on the real high value activities.

The fifth and final step for accelerating your Property Investing in the UK, is continually working on your mindset. I meet people all the time who kind of know what to do, but they're not taking action because fear is holding them back. Fear of making mistakes, fear of success sometimes. I believe 80% of your success is down to your mindset. When it comes to mindset, I break it down to ABC. A is for attitude, B is for belief and C is for courage. The courage to step outside of your comfort zone to do different things. If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. So if you want to have change in your life, if you want to be more successful, you need to change your life. You need to do things differently.

So I do hope that was useful. In summary, my five steps to accelerate your success are first of all, gain specialist knowledge, number two, set up for success. Get your business and systems in place. Number three is focus. Follow one course until successful. Number four is don't try and do it on your own. Get other like-minded people around you and build your network. Number five is mindset, continually working on your mindset.