Are you an entrepreneur, independent sales rep, or anyone whose income isn’t the function of a consistent salary?  If so, you’ve got the makings of a great investor… and there are some things about you that could doom you to failure.  Today you get the knowledge you need to succeed BIG TIME as an investor.  I’m Bryan Ellis.  This is Episode #183.

----

Hello SDI Nation!  Welcome to the podcast of record for savvy self-directed investors like you!  Get ready for another dose of PREDICTABLY PROFITABLE thinking!

We’re at the end of the first week of the new year.  How’d you do?  Is your year off to a great start?

I’m feeling pretty good.  My private equity firm bought two more houses this week – both EXCELLENT deals – and I signed the closing papers on a resale we did just yesterday.  Made about 28% on that one in 22 days, so it was a slam dunk!  In fact, I’ll likely give a case study of that deal this coming Tuesday on the next edition of Self Directed Investor Success Stories, the sister show to this one.  But the private equity firm is off to a roaring start, and that’s really gratifying.

Hey a quick note – this coming Monday night, I’m the featured speaker for the Georgia Real Estate Investor Association.  This is pretty rare.  I don’t do a lot of public speaking these days, so if you’d like to meet me, stop by, because I’d love to meet you too!  I’ll be talking about how individual investors and affluent investors can work together to fund and finish deals in a way that’s very safe and profitable for both.  If you have a goal of doing more deals this year… either as a real estate entrepreneur or as a passive investor and you’re in the Atlanta area, come on by.  This is a topic I know well, both from having done it very, very effectively and also very, very badly in the past.  This meeting officially starts at 6:30, I’m on at 7:30, but I’d not risk waiting until 7:30 to arrive.  There’s a $25 fee to come to the meeting but later today I’m going to send an email to the private SDI email list with a code to get in for free.  To be sure you’re on that list, text the word SDIRADIO to 33444 with no spaces or periods.  And when you come, please be sure to stop by and introduce yourself to me as an SDI Radio listener… I’d love to meet you.  Again, text SDIRADIO to 33444 to be sure you get that code.

So my friends… are you an entrepreneur, independent sales person or anyone who doesn’t have the luxury of a salary to depend upon?  Hey, note – this isn’t a slam against those of you who are salaried employees.  Not at all.  This is a recognition of the different type of personality, the different type of person – not better or worse, just different – that it takes to live the entrepreneur’s life.

Here’s the thing:  There’s a lot about the entrepreneurial nature that means you already have some of the best and most important traits for success as an investor.

For example:  Entrepreneurs have an innate sense of the distinction between “price” and “value”.  They’re not the same thing, but are easy to confuse.  As an entrepreneur, you live or die by this distinction, because your price must always be equal to or below the value of your offer to your customer, otherwise there will be no sale.  You know that, you get it, it’s obvious to you.  And that thinking transfers well to investing.  For example:  Yesterday, Apple traded from a high of $100 per share down to a little above $96 per share.  That was it’s PRICE.  But what’s it’s VALUE?  You may not think that $4 swing is much… but that accounts for a $22 BILLION drop in value for that company.  Not trivial.

Similarly, in real estate… there’s a difference between price and value.  Great example:  Yesterday, my private equity firm bought a house for $178,000.  Why’d we do that?  We know that after spending a max of $20,000 to fix it, we can sell it for $270,000… I expect we’ll profit by about $50,000 on that deal in a very, very short time frame.  So, value here is $270K… price was only $178K.  A clear opportunity.

Entrepreneurs also tend to have an innate sense of the nature of risk – and an ability to be comfortable with calculated risk.  This is key in successful investing.  Related to that is the ability to make decisions, another key entrepreneurial requirement.  Not a small thing, either.  Not everybody can make a decision and stick with it.  Entrepreneurs must… and that plays well as an investor.

One other highly compatible trait among entrepreneurs with great investors… Great entrepreneurs have, by necessity, a broader understanding of their businesses and industries than is true for most non-business owners.  And let me tell you… there’s HUGE value in being able to see the big picture as an investor because investments are not successful in a vacuum.  Everything effects everything else.  I’ve currently go my eye on how market turmoil in the Chinese stock market is going to affect the success of the technology industry in America… because that connects to the health of certain real estate markets in which I have great interest.  Everything is connected, and entrepreneurs have an innate ability to perceive and understand those connections.

But my entrepreneurial friends, there are some things about you – about us, since I’m one of you – that can hold you back that may be less of a challenge for others in a more structured profession.  Really, it all comes down to time and delegation.  Time, because for entrepreneurs, their business isn’t just their means of income, it’s their life meaning.  And because of that, it takes a lot of time… time that doesn’t leave an opportunity for them to do the study and research it can take to be a great investor, time that they don’t have to learn the language of investing, which is a totally separate world unto itself.  For entrepreneurs, the work week doesn’t end at 40 or 50 hours… and there’s just not a lot of time to become proficient as an investor.

And thus the second challenge:  Delegation.  The lack of time will make you more inclined to delegate your investments to conventional financial professionals, because they are in very large supply.  That, of course, relegates you to a portfolio of mutual funds, the occasional individual stock and more insurance than you ever dreamed possible.  Hey, look… maybe there’s a place for stock investing.  I know some people have done well with it.  But that kind of investing is wholly antithetical to entrepreneurs because it DEMANDS that you give up control.  Your only influence as a stock investor is to decide when to buy or sell.  That’s it.  So as a result of the BUSY-ness, entrepreneurs frequently do what they should be good at and delegate their investments… but rather than using the non-conventional thinking that brought them success as an entrepreneur to begin with, they take their entrepreneurial profits and pour them into the most plain-jane, uncontrollable and conventional investments that exist today:  Mutual funds.  Blah.

Hey, entrepreneurs… your capital is the fruit of your labor.  Respect it.  Give that capital the chance to flourish in investment assets that may be different than what your financial advisor might consider… but different because they’re BETTER.  Does your financial advisor have a way for you to generate a 10% return that’s incredibly safe and is so simple that you immediately understand it?  No, they don’t.  But it can be done, and I’d be happy to tell you about it.

So for you entrepreneurs… and for any of you who simply have idle or underperforming investment capital, but you lack either the time or the experience to work some magic with that capital yourself, let’s talk.  Go over to SDIRadio.com/consultation to set up an appointment with me, and let’s talk through some options for you.  As an entrepreneur myself, I can give you the perspective of an entrepreneurial investor, because that is my life.  And if I do say so myself, I’m pretty darn good at it!

One final time my friends… be sure to join me at the Georgia REIA meeting this coming Monday night.  In the mean time…

Invest wisely today, and live well forever!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.