The Property Voice

Helen Pollock from The BizBook Foundry joins me for the last episode this year. We go under cover to discover the book writing and publication process, both in general and specifically around the writing of The Complete Guide to Property Finance; launched on 21st December.

The Complete Guide to Property Finance splits the topic into 3 sections, covering Institutional, Alternative & Creative Finance. With more than 50 different property finance techniques and strategies covered, there really is something in there for every property investor and developer in this readable reference guide. Make sure you get the cheat sheet mentioned, won’t you?

What is property finance to me? Property finance comprises payment over time and/or a financial contribution and/or control without ownership of our property investments and developments. Property finance is therefore the combination of the three levers of money, time and control over property assets.

Helen Pollock reminds us that there are at least 7 different skill sets that go into publishing a book. On reflection, I counted more skills, which include conceptualisation, research, writing, editing, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, cover design, conversion and publishing and marketing of the book. The BizBook Foundry supports non-fiction authors in all of these stages, either as a coach or as a service partner to deliver these steps for you as a hybrid-self-publisher.

There is the purpose of the book to consider, is it to build authority, to educate, to generate book royalties, to add to our product and service offering or to generate connections and business partnership opportunities, amongst others? Whilst the world self-publishing does enable people to do the whole thing from A to Z on a DIY basis; we consider whether or not we really should, as we balance our time and capabilities with the cost and quality of publication.

In this episode there is much to learn, be it more about the wide-range of property finance techniques or the process of writing a book. I hope that you manage to grab yourself a copy of The Complete Guide to Property Finance, which I genuinely believe is the best and most professional of the three books that I have published yet.

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Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

Helen Pollock from The BizBook Foundry joins me for the last episode this year. We go under cover to discover the book writing and publication process, both in general and specifically around the writing of The Complete Guide to Property Finance; launched on 21st December.

The Complete Guide to Property Finance splits the topic into 3 sections, covering Institutional, Alternative & Creative Finance. With more than 50 different property finance techniques and strategies covered, there really is something in there for every property investor and developer in this readable reference guide. Make sure you get the cheat sheet mentioned, won’t you?

What is property finance to me? Property finance comprises payment over time and/or a financial contribution and/or control without ownership of our property investments and developments. Property finance is therefore the combination of the three levers of money, time and control over property assets.

Helen Pollock reminds us that there are at least 7 different skill sets that go into publishing a book. On reflection, I counted more skills, which include conceptualisation, research, writing, editing, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, cover design, conversion and publishing and marketing of the book. The BizBook Foundry supports non-fiction authors in all of these stages, either as a coach or as a service partner to deliver these steps for you as a hybrid-self-publisher.

There is the purpose of the book to consider, is it to build authority, to educate, to generate book royalties, to add to our product and service offering or to generate connections and business partnership opportunities, amongst others? Whilst the world self-publishing does enable people to do the whole thing from A to Z on a DIY basis; we consider whether or not we really should, as we balance our time and capabilities with the cost and quality of publication.

In this episode there is much to learn, be it more about the wide-range of property finance techniques or the process of writing a book. I hope that you manage to grab yourself a copy of The Complete Guide to Property Finance, which I genuinely believe is the best and most professional of the three books that I have published yet.

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing. Get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today. And I’m not alone today, because I’m joined once more by the delightful Helen pollack. Hello, Helen. How are you?

Hello, Richard. Yeah, I’m good. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show again. It’s great,

though, thanks for joining me. I mean, we just literally just let’s share the secrets here. I think we just pinged a couple of messages to one another, about a certain thing that’s going to happen. And for Well, why don’t we just jump and have a chat, because you know, we can talk about this certain thing that’s going to happen from a couple of different angles. And here we are just a day later, and trying to get this recorded before the shopping arrives. So thanks for joining me on short notice.

Well, we’re all about keeping it real. Are we really so yeah. So this is very mysterious. Richard, do you think you should enlighten your listeners

as to the certain thing that’s going to happen a certain thing? Oh, okay. Let’s try and build a little bit more suspense. But I guess we’ll get out the way straightaway. So long story is that you and I and others have collaborated. And there is a nother book coming out of the property voice book, stable, whatever, if there is such a thing. And it’s, it’s due out on Tuesday, the 21st of December, in a variety of different places. And it’s called you better tell you what it’s called. It’s called The Complete Guide to property finance. And the subtitle. Now, I’m going to say something about the subtitle in a second. The subtitle is, it’s a toolbox of 50 plus financing solutions beyond vital and I had to read that for myself. So yeah, the complete guide to property finance, so that I’m really happy about it was a goal for the year. It’s been a goal for the last three years, if I’m honest. And, you know, I think it’s finally happened. And publication will be 2021. And that will be my third book. And the previous books were 2018 and 2015. So we’ve got a nice little three year cycle going on. So there we go. That’s the big announcement. So it’s got it out there.

Indeed. It’s really exciting. And just in time for Christmas, perfect timing, an excellent Christmas gift.

And I’ve discovered that the 21st of December is still before the last postal day first class postage state to get there in time for Christmas.

Perfect.

How about that? I guess if you delay a day or two, you could special delivery or something? I don’t know. But yeah, it’s gonna be there on top. Of course, the Kindle version is instant. So you could order the Kindle version, and maybe follow it up with the paperback later. Who knows. But you know, there’s going to be a launch price specifically on Amazon with the Kindle version. So if people are looking for great value, we’d like to deliver great value. I think it’s 199 launch price on Amazon Kindle. But it’s, as I’ve discovered through this process, working with you and Katherine. There’s more, there’s more to this, you know, book, you know, distribution, world, then Amazon, I’ve realized, so that’s something that’s something. So anyway, it’s available in probably all good bookstores and online places and stuff.

Brilliant. So it’s the complete guide to property finance. What was it that made you want to write a book about that particular subject?

Yeah, so um,

you know, I do remember I do actually remember I was just joking. Several years ago, was wondering, I was a member of the property hub community, you know, the property hub community. And this was the time though, you know, Robin and Rob, who started that they were trying to get people to form like little mastermind groups around, you know, just together. And, you know, if you had an idea around a theme, you could kind of try and start your own mastermind community group. And so I really had this idea about just creative strategies into creative financing that account really wanted to explore, let’s say. So there was a couple of us more than a couple, a few of us who got together in this mastermind group. And we started to kick around creative financing techniques in this mastermind. And then I just said, well, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a purpose beyond just talking about it, and we did talk about it, but it never really went anywhere. That’s the point. There were some mock ups of outlines of some of the techniques that were, you know, kicked around, mostly by coeliac, as I’m going to call her out personally. And myself. And there’s a couple of other contributions, everyone’s name checked in the book. I must admit, I can’t actually remember if Damien was included in our group and gone from my mind completely. So if Damien you’re in the group, thank you for all your contributions. If Damon, you weren’t in the group, where were you? Anyway, so we started there. But I always had this idea of creative financing, because I think in finance, fire, sorry, in property, finance, is this the big it’s the be all and end all, isn’t it? Yeah. Without money, you can’t do anything? Or was that too? Well, so I think we explore that a little bit in the book. Because there’s a couple of different sections. And there’s at least one big section that deals with what you can do without necessarily money. So anyway, there we go. That’s how it came about. But you know, I suppose my so I had an interest. And I guess what, why put it into a book and why put it out there. It’s just so consistent with my own sort of purpose, I suppose. Because I like to share my knowledge. I like to, you know, help other people along the way to learn from what I’m learning, and also my mistakes and things like that. So it’s very consistent with just my personal ethos and approach. I’m a bit of a Gabi, what’s it? So I do end up talking about things and writing about things prolifically sometimes. So that’s how it started. And then it says, well, let’s, let’s actually do this thing. I’m trying to think when that was must have been good. Five years ago, when that idea was conceived, as I was serious, it has been a goal for the last few years running on my goals list at the start of the year to publish this book. I think you might have helped me along with getting that out. Actually. Yes, I

think I did. No, you did.

What did we just talk about? You know, obviously, we’ve got just so people know why you and I are talking? You know, you’ve got a big involvement here. And, you know, a strong connection with book publishing, generally speaking. So just sort of set the scene about what you do generally, and how you’ve helped here a bit. Yes, I

fundamentally, I help people to write great books, mostly. business books, always nonfiction, for now at least. And who knows if that might change in the future. But yeah, so that’s, that’s that. But I also came together with a book Layout Designer, for Katherine Williams, and we set up a new business in full lockdown. April 2020. We talked about, I suggested this idea to Catherine because I so I help people in the writing side of things. And book coach or ghostwriter and an editor. Katherine does the design side, but we both had people coming to us. Who would ask, well, I know you can help with the writing, but how much would it actually cost me to get the book out there? And how would I do that? And so Katherine also had people coming to her who haven’t written their books yet talking to her about designing their book, but they hadn’t written it and they needed some help. So I suggested that we join forces. And so the biz book Foundry was born at the end of June 2020. After initial conversation in April, and the aim of the Facebook Foundry is to help self-publishing business book authors from idea to final file and anywhere in between really, final file upload to to Amazon and as you say, there are other places as well that you can upload your self published book. So that was kind of how the Bismarck family came about. And I think and you know, you know, there was a three time or So Richard, there’s more to self writing and self-publishing a book than people might think.

So for example, if a client comes to us and they have no content whatsoever, they just have an idea, then to get from that point to self publishing their book requires the skill sets of seven people on average. Oh, seven, yeah, yeah. So I would help people with the writing side of things, then the book would go to pass to Catherine to project manage once the final kind of draft, there would be an editor who goes through it, there would be, then the book would be designed by Katherine. And then it will be proof read. Because actually, editing and proofreading are two different skill sets, which, although some people do both, so it’s quite confusing. And then there is indexing, which we always recommend for nonfiction books, because people don’t read them in a linear fashion. And they might want to dip back in and they don’t want to have to read through 200 pages to get to that bit that they remember that they need to see again. So and then there’s ebook conversion. So yeah, there’s actually quite a lot going on there. And cover design is the other thing. cover design.

There’s also I mean, the front end, so you could that could be idea creation, and writing and research. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And then at the backend, there is also so publishing, you know, on the platforms like Amazon or Ingram, spark, and others. And, and marketing and publicity.

Yes. And that’s something so my backgrounds, marketing, and PR, as you know, Richard, and I think that that kind of sets me apart a little bit as someone who helps with that writing process. Because I always insist that my clients think about marketing from the outset, whereas most authors thing, I need to start writing this book, I need to start writing this book. No, before you start writing, we put pen to paper, you need to think how am I going to sell this book? Who is this book for? How does this book fit into my personal and professional goals? And my kind of ecosystem of products and services? And a lot of people don’t do that? No,

I think, well, you touch on this. I mean, so first of all, you beginning with the end in mind, right? But I think, why would people write a book? So there’s lots of reasons why isn’t that? I think if you want to be the next JK Rowling, there aren’t that many who do that? Who know? Right? An actual, like, New York Times bestseller or something?

No, and particularly in terms of, there’s a few things. So the first thing is the vast majority of traditionally published non fiction books are commissioned books. So the publisher will have approached the author to say, Could you write a book about this, for example? So that’s a little bit different. And, you know, I have got clients who have secured traditional publishing deals.

A mutual friend group or,

indeed absolutely right. And we Paul’s book is fantastic from CIA to see. I mean, what a killer title, her book, what are you doing?

You can love her because, you know, it’s good. And it’s work. I think it’d be good. Anyway. I was I haven’t actually really I have pre ordered it.

It’s fab. I can tell you that right now. Just as yours is. But, yeah, so the marketing side of things. It’s, it’s really important to start thinking about who you’re going to sell your book to, right from the beginning. And, you know, what you certainly don’t want is to get to the end of the process, and then think oh, oh, Now I need to sell this book, but you haven’t created an audience, you haven’t built anticipation. And you’re going to need to do that.

And also, you might have found actually, by the time you get to the end, and you think about that question that you might have actually written or positioned it in the wrong way, for that audience,

so that’s, that’s one of the great things about books. So you know, book will help you to build your authority and your credibility. And it will do things like help you to secure higher profile speaking opportunities, if you’re interested in that, obviously, are acts as a, as a good first rung on your value ladder of services so that people can get to know like, and trust you. And then if they, they need further help, they will come to you for that. So you know, there’s a lot to be said for a book. But longevity is I guess, it’s a double edged sword, isn’t it, because your book is going to be around for a long time. And we know that I don’t know, where the stats from, but I’ve heard that, on average, a book is passed around to six different people. And I’m sure that’s not you know, that’s not true for all books, six degrees of

separation for books.

But it just goes to show, if you don’t get the positioning of that book, right. When you before you start writing it, so you know what you want it to do for you, then it’s worth a lot of wasted effort, which it isn’t, it’s

a lot of wasted, it could be a lot of wasted effort. And as you I think your point being if it’s the longevity, how long it’s out there, it’s, you know, you can be discovered and, you know, read for by several people over many years. So, I think it is important to try and get it right. Yes. I think equally, especially in the sort of nonfiction sort of business space, you know, it’s it’s not all it’s not usually about book royalties. It’s, you can make some losses, but you know, I would say just based on my own knowledge, I mean, you can completely DIY, why self published, and then every, you know, pounds you earn in royalties is pretty much a pound in profit, almost. But, you know, obviously, depends on what set you how many sales you make. And in that sense, and, you know, if you don’t tell anybody about it, they might not buy the book. So that’s a bit, but I think it’s, it’s other reasons for writing a book, often for people like myself, for example. So perhaps a bit of profile, perhaps a bit of authority, perhaps it’s a bit of, you know, access to other types of income opportunity, perhaps, is partnership opportunities, I would say that the royalties are very small part of the ecosystem that can come out of publishing a book. And the authority, you know, it’s like a giant calling card, business card, whatever you call it. You know, people think, Oh, you wrote a book. So you must be some sort of orphan. Or you must know what you’re talking about that? Well, some of them, we can get onto that, because it is there is a low barrier to entry. In terms of self publishing, that actually, there’s a bunch of trash out there

as well. Yeah, there. Yeah, there is, there’s no two ways about it. I think, you know, people bad mouths, the Amazon self publishing platform. But, you know, there’s good stuff on there as well. It’s not all bad. And it has, without a doubt, totally democratize publishing. So even, you know, normal people can now publish a book. But yet, there is still an inherent respect for many people about writing a book and someone having written a book that remains. Yeah,

exactly. I mean, it’s like, you know, education, you know, so you go for education, you get certificates at the end of it, whichever level you’re doing, and it’s not, it’s rare in a way that you kind of directly applying what you learn in your everyday life, or work. I mean, some, some qualifications are very vocational, obviously. But, you know, a lot of them they kind of just proof of a certain standard of, you know, learning or brain power or application. And a book is either in a way, you know, it’s like, Well, okay, if you’ve, you know, gone about and set about writing and publishing this book that he says the same thing doesn’t actually mean you can do what’s in the book, you know, bit like an A level certificate or whatever, it doesn’t tell you that you can do whatever it is that you’ve got the certificate in. So I think it’s that part. But I think it’s, it shows a great discipline. Because it means there’s a lot of discipline. You know, and that’s one of the things that I did differently this time. For example, with this book, I eventually put my finger out. And I think it was every weekend Come what may, for about six months, I actually sat down and did something for a couple of hours of morning, Saturdays, and most Saturdays and Sundays for about six months. And it was without doing that, you know, the alternative that I used to default to, would be to go and lock myself away for a week. And try and, you know, bash it out sort of thing. And that’s what I did for the, that’s what I did for the first book property investor toolkit. I actually, literally took myself off for a weekend break a long weekend, and I had the raw material for that, for that book at the time, by not to into a book game was quite a short form book. First one, and but it was like three or four days. And I was I was brain dead literally, at the end of it. That’s how I wrote Courteeners. The toolkit proptech was done a hashtag proptech to give its proper title, it was written very differently. And I had some contributions to that, to help. And the this book, The Complete Guide to property finance was, again, I had some other contributions to it, but I still had personal discipline, you know, for that period of time. So that counts for something, and anyone who’s written a book should know that. And if you’ve read a book, it really makes me of diving into sort of reviews a little bit here, because one of the ways to sift is through reviews. But obviously, you need to be a little bit careful with some of these reviews. But so if there’s like a lot of reviews, and they’re good reviews, and they seem to be genuine, and you know, specific and detailed, then maybe you can put a bit of, you know, content into that. But then, I do sometimes surprise me when people go, Well, you know, I normally have very good reviews, but guess which ones I focus on? So had one reviews, one review at one time say, well, it’s really short, this proptech not promising this token. It’s a really short book, and you know, I’m not sure you know, I pay this, this money for it. Some of them, I don’t know, they just it was just like a bit of a moan. I was like, well, you paid like, I think three quid coffee. You’ve got all this information. I think there was a few broken links or something in the version. But I actually give away the people as a bonus, people can write in and go and get the up to date version. So it’s all up to the AMA. So people are thinking, anyway, I’m drifting because well,

I was thinking because you mentioned the other two book ferreted I wanted to ask you what you see or your third time author. Now. What have you learnt along the way? What if you had to give your top three tips to aspiring authors? What would you say they were?

Yeah, I didn’t think about top three tips before you before I came here. So I think some of it we’ve kind of been speaking about. So what is supposed to what’s the purpose? What’s the point you’re aiming at? So why did you want to write a book and what you want to get out of it? And you know, who do you want to? You know, do you want somebody to do something as a result of Rena reading your book? So Hank, really, really be clear on that. And you kind of made that point really well earlier? You know, beginning with the end in mind marketing the audience and you know, is it royalties? Or is it you know, upsell product? Or is it authority and speaking engagements. So, you know, what is the, what is the outcome? Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? As a result of original? Because, by the way, you don’t know who’s bought your book. Usually, if you, especially if you’re distributing it through a third party, you don’t know who’s bought it. So anyway, so you can if you want them to connect with you, you need to find a way for them to do that. So bonuses, bonuses is a good way to do that. Yeah, so all of my books have booked bonuses. So that’s probably one thing. I think a second thing is probably about what I’ve just outlined is about kind of the process of the writing process. And I think I’ve always kidded myself really, that I need to lock myself away and do it in blast and stuff like that. But it’s not really an effective way to write. So I did do that in the past, but I think it was better doing it bit by bit and regularly we Chi brings me on to spending enough, I had an exchange with somebody else who’s thinking of writing a book. And I said, you know, talking about goals has been talked earlier about three, it was on my goals list for three years. Now, it was a goal to publish, write and publish this book, the last three years running, including this year. But it didn’t happen. So but that was what I call an outcome goal. Follow, not just me, a lot of people will call it an outcome goal to publish the book, that would be the outcome. But it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t address the process. It doesn’t address the writing process, and all the other seven people that you talked about, who get involved. So you also need process goals. So you need an outcome goal or process goal. And I think what made the difference issue is have the process goals. So a process goal would be I’m going to sit down and write every Saturday and Sunday morning for at least two hours. So that would be a process goal. So it didn’t necessarily say when the book will be finished. But just by committing that time, by definition, I’m moving along at micro steps. And lo and behold, here we are talking about the book being complete. Yeah, which you know, but then in the last few years, I didn’t have those process steps in place.

No, it’s funny, I always recommend to clients that they shedule time in for writing, and they stick to it, it needs to, you know, the danger is, and it doesn’t matter if it’s like, you know, you want to get up early, an hour, early, twice a week to work on this book, or it’s a Saturday, every Saturday morning, whatever it is, whatever time slot works for you schedule it in and stick to it, don’t let it be, you know, swept away by a meeting or whatever, you just need to keep that discipline and keep that time set aside for writing. Otherwise, it will just fall off the bottom of the old to do list.

Yeah, serving. And I guess the third one of my top tips would probably be Well, I think recognize usyd. Seven, I think it’s actually more in what the seven was at least seven different roles or functions in, you know, be especially professionally or publishing a book, even if it’s self publishing. So I call you do the hybrid self publishing, because you facilitate all the extra bits around the edges. So self publishing means self, but you know, you can have help. And I think for me, it was to recognize the value and the contribution of those extra roles and resources. I can’t proofread my own stuff. And if I did it, it would, you know, other people would laugh. You know, in fact, they you’ve had enough, you know, too many ellipses, for example, has become my become a comical response. I like to use ellipses, but maybe the reader gets a bit fed up of ellipses. So proofreading, you know, do that properly. You and I a long conversation about indexing, as you just alluded to earlier about nonfiction books, because my this book here, it’s a long book for style. But it’s what I call a readable Reference Guide. Yeah. And so you could try an account now there’s about 16 content chapters of the actual strategies, and 300 pages, and 54 and counting individual strategies in the book. And like, Well, what was this one about bonds? He talked about something our bonds? Where the heck is that one? So I’ve seen the index, you know, so that was a conversation we had and I had the we engaged a professional indexer. And it’s those things, and then there’s the cover design, and then there’s the there is the marketing and in all of those different components, and just recognize I can’t do all of that. Yes, well, I possibly can because it did in the first book. But it wasn’t necessarily the best. And, and even if it was good, it was good enough, let’s put it that way. Was that the best use of my time? And, you know, did I capitalize on all of the different opportunities that those things will bring about? So I think the hybrid model, where you bring in extra people around you, who can professionalize your publication and make it credible and stand out and you know, it’s going to be hard for people to pick holes in it now because of that standard that’s being put in there. I think that’s the that’s been the icing on the cake. So each one has got a little each book has got more professional if I can say that. Then this last one bit in almost perfect.

Well, that was that was always our intention mine and Catherine’s was to enable self publishing authors to publish a book that would sit very comfortably next to traditionally published books on the bookshelf, a book that authors could be proud of. And you wouldn’t be torturing yourself about, you know, loads of glaring typos or, I don’t know, slightly dodgy li design cover or whatever it might be

a read books like that. I’ve read books, and you’ve read books like that. And what’s your reaction? What is the reaction that you have, as I was reading on the other day, and it’s like, you just repeated the word twice in the same sentence, it’s just annoying. And you’re no longer focused on the actual content, you’re focused on how annoyed you are that they put to words and nobody picked it up, put to the words say, hope there’s not two words to say no, but now.

Well, that’s, you know, and then we’ll, we’ll look at that kind of thing. So they’re looking for things like repetition, they’re looking for the flow of the story, because they matter whether it’s a fiction or nonfiction book, there’s all of the stivity telling a story. So yeah, there’s loads of things. They do consistency of language. Have you referred to something using the same term consistently? Or have you thrown in some other term alternate, you know, alternate term, but the reader won’t necessarily know what that means? Those are all things that editors, editors look at. But yeah, I agree with you. And the thing is, if you’ve got the repetition and blaring typos in slightly dodgy cover, that’s going to be around for quite a long time. That’s it,

you know, and you know, especially in the digital world, you know, it’s loose on forever, almost, doesn’t it? So that’s your visual kind of CV is part of your public profile. So you probably do want to get it right. So I think I think that was, it was good to cost some money to do that. And I put out there recently that I actually said how much I spent on a proofreader, as long as as much then as like, well, there’s a lot of work that goes into proofreading. And in fact, I believe the proofreader commented on a LinkedIn post today, that she read the book three times, you know, cover to cover possibly more, if you’ve probably looked at different iterations. But, you know, so you’re gonna read it through that many times, you’re gonna make the corrections. And, you know, take on board or the feedback from the author and the editor and everybody else, so you can’t get that cheap, quality and, you know, price. So that was worth it and the index as well, which is a booger of a job.

That my worst nightmare, I think, apart from three reading, that is,

I think indexing is going to be worse and worse than proofreading. Because you have to go and find the reference, and then cross reference it everywhere.

Yeah, it gives me a headache just thinking about it. Yeah.

So somebody loves that sort of work. And you know, they’re really good at it. And hopefully, we’ve got a really nice index. And there’s artwork, there’s art, whether it goes in the middle in the content is artwork on the cover or cover design. So that, you know, I can’t draw for toffee. So that, you know, had to had to bring people in. So my father, for example, who is a study in design at university and found her on the paper round website, which is a gigging site for students. So she, Miranda Casanova. That’s made sure it’s a real name. Anyway, so there’s a lot. So there’s some of the lessons but I’d say, Well, let me flip the tables a little bit. And this may be a bit unfair, because A, it’s not your book. And B, I didn’t tell you that I was going to ask you this question and give you a chance to prepare. But let’s just leave this. So let’s start a little easier. There’s like three main sections. So what was your what was the section that caught your attention the most would you say? Oh, you can remember the three main sections.

I hope you know, I mean, so I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about property investment. In theoretical terms, at least, I but the book blew my mind. I Well, the thing that blew my mind was using different strategies together in ways that I had never considered, but also just the kind of bonds and stuff that was a completely new world for me, never considered that such like things could be used to, you know, for Property Investment Finance.

Yeah, I think I knew that things like rent to rent. But yes, some of that it’s really hard to say this most of the traditional finance stuff I knew about.

Yeah, so that was just a just a traditional institutional financing was the first section, which is what most people do know about by selling more stuff like that. Yeah. And then the next two sections, one was alternative financing. And the other one was creative. Financing. Financing.

Yeah. I think. Yeah. So using the creative financing solutions are, and but I think, as I said, it’s the layering of different strategies, which is, the other possibilities are incredible. And it hadn’t even Yeah, there were loads of things in there that are just never occurred to me. So when I say, my feeling was when I read the book. So before, before I read it, I kind of assumed it was for novice property investors. Having read it, I now think that, you know, even more experienced property investors will also get a lot from it. And that was a surprise. Yeah.

Thank you. But um, I think, you know, that was some of the one of the objectives, there was something for everyone. So, you know, put, you know, the first section on institutional financing would be where maybe the novices would feel most at home, you know, or some isolate mortgage, what do I need to know about it, you know, what’s bridging finance, what’s development, finance, development, finance, all designed to take you into different, more complex property strategies, but it’s more commonly available that say that, then some of the other ones we get into later. But the alternative, one alternative basically means it’s an offer is usually from an alternative source. So something you might not have thought of, could be banking, Mum and Dad. It could be a peer to peer lender. But it’s still financing. It’s just come from a different place. So so the first bits like traditional marketplaces, and banks and lenders, you know, lenders you can find, often on the high street. And then the alternative is like, well, it’s still kind of financing the same sort of way. But often from different types of sources. That was the point of the alternative financing section, which I noticed it’s got most chapters. And then the third section was the creative financing strategies in my definition of a creative is that it mimics finance, you know, so he uses contractual structures, in the most part to mimic the effects of financing. You said rents or rent earlier. So rent rents a good example of that, where there’s no financing actually in rents or in people that why is that in there, because you’re using a contractual structure, which is a sublease agreement or something similar to control that property for a period of time. So you’re still getting in, you know, the financial benefit over an extended period of time, which for me, is still part of the definition of financing so and then you can, you can layer different types of financing together. But here’s an interesting thing. You can matrix, different types of financing strategy to explode your portfolio. So you could have a bit of rent or rent, you know, going on, as well as some vital act, for example. And so that you know, only you don’t need to, you don’t need a lot of money to do a bit of rent or rent, you need more money, usually in deposits on by select, for example. So you can layer these different ideas to, as you say, but you can also matrix them so you could actually explode your portfolio growth. And so, yes, I think the objective would be to take people on a journey. Yeah. And some people are further down that journey already. I nearly put out a challenge. I sure I would, I’m sure there will be somebody, you know. I’m sure there’ll be somebody but the challenge is going to be something like I bet there’s something in there you didn’t know of directly. We’re 54 Different Finance strategies are better than at least one you never really thought of you might have no if I say for example, grants, people, of course, I know about grants. People have grants, but how could you use them in your financing in a property financing? Business specifically? So you know, it’s like the application or the crossover, I’m getting excited, because I’m talking, I’m getting excited about what the book does and how it conveys that. But there we go. So. So the bonds one, so that’s interesting. So chapter nine, chapter nine ones shares and mezzanine finance. So I, one of the guys who loosely proof read that he actually wrote back to me, and he said, My mind is blown. Yet, promise me it’s one of the most complex chapters. And I even put a little warning at the top of the chapter saying, feel free to come back to this one later. Because it’s, it’s complex, and it’s not for everyone. And you know, for example, you couldn’t launch a property bond, just like that, you know, we might need regulating, you might need to have a high volume of business, you might need to be a big time developer. So if you’re just starting out, scraping down the back of the sofa to raise your deposit, maybe that chapter is not directly relevant today. But you know, if you are further advanced in your, you know, journey, I think more so next stage for me, well, that might be in. Yes. So I was, you know, trying to get you to pick out some individual ones, you kind of mentioned a few there. What I say what I, to answer the question like myself, because my like is, there is something for everyone. So for example, if you are the novice, and you’re thinking about property, investing or developing whatever,

there’s a few ways in which the book outlines how you could get going, you know, with very little, so zero, or very little cash, which some of the creative financing strategies could help with, but it’s also how to raise some of our cash, you know, so you know, you can have a larger, if you’ve got your own home, you could have a gift deposit from a family member, you could use the ISIS with, you know, government help for, you know, to top it up. So there’s, you know, you can actually have a rummage around in your garage real often find some stuff and sell it to help Marino contrary, so there was stuff there for people like that. And a lot of people in the middle who have probably plateaued or are finding it difficult to keep going. And, and then obviously, somebody consider itself a little bit more advanced, you know, that I was still learning stuff, and I was researching and writing the book.

Yeah, that’s, I think there are just, there really is something for everyone. And there are so many strategies, as you say, 54 and counting. But that there really, there is bound to be something that you probably haven’t thought of,

oh, Helen, between you and me, I’ve already fought off what I haven’t thought of. And there’s a couple of there was one I managed to get sucked in just before it went to print, I was like, Oh, that’s a good one. Get that in. And then there’s a couple of CO is kind of one that could split into two, which is, gosh, it’s not in the book. But he will he goes, the book bonuses can capture all that stuff. So hashtag book bonuses.

So let’s do it. Let’s think about sort of wrap up and next steps and you know, whatever about what we can do here. So from your perspective, because so I’m thinking as a as an author who’s published a book, and you’re probably coming at it from a facilitator, you know, who helps people to get to that place? So, we’ve got a common view and objective, but we’re coming from slightly different perspectives. So what do you know, how do you help people and how, you know, what are you doing at the moment to do that? And how can people you know, take advantage of that.

So, I guess, you know, what, what I offer is I help people to get the knowledge that’s in their heads out into a book and into the world. That’s, you know, a very simple but absolutely accurate explanation. So, you know, I can help people to write their book I can coach people to when they write their book, but I support giving support and accountability. I can edit people’s books. If they’ve already got a manuscript, there’s lots of different ways but I it’s that writing helping them to get that book written. That’s my past the process then, you know, Catherine takes care of the design and production this boundary. So I’m actually, I’m going to give you a link to the Facebook foundry website for is it to say what is it? What is the website you’re saying just so we know if this book family.com. So it’s bi Zed, one Zed, book foundry.com. And so check us out there and find out a bit more about what we do. And I’m also running an in person, hopefully. But could the virtual if social distance, yeah.

I’m running this input person worked up somewhere near Milton Keynes, so very central in the UK, on Saturday, the 15th of January nine till 1pm. And the idea is to help people to get ready to write their book. So we’ll be looking at all those things like who’s it for? And what are your personal professional goals, and the outcome should be a draft table of contents at the end of that session. So if anyone’s been thinking, yeah, I really want to write a book, but I’m just stuck. And I don’t know where to start. They could consider coming around to that. Also, I have a brilliant if a decently myself document called, I just don’t know where to start, funnily enough, I’ll give you the link to that’s a bit more tricky. I can’t just reel that link off. But if your listeners want to download, that’s just a PDF, a PDF document. And then that’d be a great, free way to get started on that journey to being an author.

Yeah. And I think you know, can make the difference. I was talking to someone who will remain nameless, who told me earlier today, they’ve got three part written books. Oh, yeah. And I was like, just on the juices. But imagine the effort that has gone into writing three books, partly for start, but not actually finishing them and getting them out there. And so I think, and then there’s other my own father, for example, he always said he had a book in him. We never got out of him, before he passed away. You know, and, you know, kind of chokes me up every summer. I think about that. But it was part of the motivation for me to write, it took me 30 years to get to write my first book. Because I had two goals. When I was 18. I was in ruins to run my own business. And the other one was dry book. It’s I don’t

think I knew that. No, no.

I didn’t run my own business starts 30. He took he took a while to get that one done. And then hours for us, you know, whatever I was, well, there Yes, there you go. That kind of puts it in perspective, it was 30 years to write the book. So that’s a long time. And I think you know, what can be someone like you you can basically help driver process, you can talk about how to do it, you can be the Accountable person that mean nasty when it says What have you done this week and stuff like that? And how just well if you’ve got the content for three books, partly but none of them fully then you know, reorganize reprioritize.

And that we get that all the time. So in fact, we mean, Katherine recently launched what we call the over the line service. But exactly those people who, you know, that is this, so nearly there, but they’ve, you know, ground to a halt. And that this is this is so many people out there with not just one but multiple unfinished books. So let’s get one finished.

Yeah. I mean, it’s the last mile. So I think, you know, but I think going back to we said earlier, the different disciplines that go into it can be overwhelming. You know, so anyway, reach out to Helen for details about the live event details about services and the PDF that she talks about, which will drop a link in the show notes, because it’s going to be one of those complicated ones. I think it is. Yeah. And then from my point of view, basically 21st December onwards, official launch of the complete guide to potty finance. I know it’s 199 launch offer on Amazon Kindle. It’s that that won’t be that price forever, I can assure you and will be available in paperback as well. Somebody asked me the question about audiobook. And you probably know because you’ve seen the book. It’s going to be blooming difficult to put into an audio book because it’s got a lot of tables and figures and stuff like that. But what I am thinking about is an even abridged version, or even a mini Podcast Series, specifically around the books anyway, I haven’t haven’t finalized that yet. But I’m a bit exhausted right now. So I think I’m just want to get the book out. There’s 50 Odd strategies in there, there’s 16 chapters, there’s three main sections, I believe there’s something for everyone. I’ve got a nice little twist called Pay it forward. And so if you buy a copy of the book, dear listener, and decide to gift your copy, which probably is it does a paperback on YouTube, about six people. So if you gift your copy of your book to someone else, I will replace it with admittedly a PDF version, a digital copy. But then at least you both get the book. So there’s sort of a peer Pay It Forward initiative. And I’ll tell you what, Alan, just because right, you know that I was pointing out these teachings I’ve got, yes, you can see us right now, you’ve got a consumer screen, which I’m, nobody else can see. But whatever. So that’s got the 54. Current pharmacy financing strategies and techniques, along with a snapshot summary a while. So it’s a cheat sheet. I’m just writing the right hand, basically. And I’ll just give you a copy of that. And so that’s a bit of a giveaway, just reach out podcast at thepropertyvoice.net for that. But if there’s anything else you want to cover off today, Helen,

yes, there’s one thing. And that is, if anyone is thinking there’s a book about property, investment, finance might be Dell. And I just say, not on Richards watch. So you can expect a, you know, an approachable and engaging read. And there are some, there are some complex strategies in there. But, you know, I’m very easily bored. And I really enjoyed reading the book. So it’s a really important part of property investment. Get in there, get a copy, you won’t regret it.

Oh, that’s really kind of easy to say. Thank you so much. That was the aim. How would you write a book on property finance, without it being, you know, does ditch water? But you know, we’re hopefully, well, I hope so let the reader decide. So thanks for that. So Helen, and Catherine, obviously, thank you so much, and the wider team at the bespoke foundry, I believe I might be one of the first people through the foundry. So you are indeed, probably through that

is big for end to end. But I think there’s a bunch of other people quickly following suit. But reach out to Helen, if you’d like to hear more about that, and how she can help you get unstuck or, you know, get you through that process. But otherwise, rush out, get them out, leave a review. We’d love to hear your views on the book, and whether you believe what Elon said that is a interesting book on finance. Cool. All right, let’s wrap it up. So I’ll do my official outro. So Helen, thanks very much for joining me again. The links that Helen mentioned are gonna be in the show notes, you can find the show notes over at the website, the proxy voice.net. You can reach out to me podcast, thepropertyvoice.net to talk about anything from today’s show. Get an intro to Helen, get it you know, I’ll put you in her direction. But there we’ll put the links to hell and stuff in the show notes as well. It’s going to be the last time I do this outro for a while. So I’m gonna take a break from the podcast. So I think I mentioned with the podcast episode had we Shiggy Podcast Producer, there’s going to be content that is shared on the podcast, but not necessarily me doing this each week. So it’s like a bit of a break. And then to relax a bit when we come back with a slightly different style and format. So I guess all that remains to say right now is have a fantastic festive break. I wish you all the best for 2020 to everybody. If you want to write a book in 2022 If you want to make that a goal, you kind of this episode is hopefully helpful for you. And yeah, thanks very much for listening once again this week on the popsicles podcast. And until next time is John John.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net for more inspirational content and gets updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post The Complete Guide to Property Finance Under Cover appeared first on The Property Voice.

This week is different! I am joined on the podcast by…my podcast editor and producer, Shiggi Pakter!

Obviously, we talk about podcasting from this side of the mic and how people can get involved and make it sustainable. Shiggi also guides people into the world of podcasting and other audio-visual communications. So, if you are considering your own media broadcast, there’s a good reason to listen in itself.

Shiggi and I discuss how we came to meet and, in fact, how we have never met at all and only met virtually quite recently! In that first virtual meeting was a revelation that has since helped me tremendously in better understanding myself. Isn’t it interesting how certain random encounters can lead to making sense of ourselves and our world?

Then, the real reason that I invited Shiggi to join me on this week’s episode…the future direction of The Property Voice Podcast. It’s been almost 7 years since I started the podcast, would you believe? Much has changed since…and I have changed too. So, we have come up with a cunning plan to breathe new life into the podcast, including the vast back-catalogue, for some renewed energy on my part and plans for a new direction emerging soon. Have a little listen to find out more.

Shiggi Pakter Linkedin Website Email

The Property Voice YouTube Channel

The Property Voice Social Media Channels:  Facebook ¦ Linked In ¦ Twitter ¦ Instagram ¦ YouTube

The Property Voice Meetup Page & Eventbrite Page

Property Deal Tips

How to Reach Richard By Telephone

Link to the Podcast feedback survey

TPV Apprentice Programme info HERE

Subscribe to and review the show in iTunes…and while you are at it please help us to spread the word by telling all your friends too!

Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

This week is different! I am joined on the podcast by…my podcast editor and producer, Shiggi Pakter!

Obviously, we talk about podcasting from this side of the mic and how people can get involved and make it sustainable. Shiggi also guides people into the world of podcasting and other audio-visual communications. So, if you are considering your own media broadcast, there’s a good reason to listen in itself.

Shiggi and I discuss how we came to meet and, in fact, how we have never met at all and only met virtually quite recently! In that first virtual meeting was a revelation that has since helped me tremendously in better understanding myself. Isn’t it interesting how certain random encounters can lead to making sense of ourselves and our world?

Then, the real reason that I invited Shiggi to join me on this week’s episode…the future direction of The Property Voice Podcast. It’s been almost 7 years since I started the podcast, would you believe? Much has changed since…and I have changed too. So, we have come up with a cunning plan to breathe new life into the podcast, including the vast back-catalogue, for some renewed energy on my part and plans for a new direction emerging soon. Have a little listen to find out more.

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing. Get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

And welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is always is Richard Brown. And it’s a pleasure to for you to join me today on me to join us today. You see I’m forgetting my intro scripts already. We’re in this sort of kind of mini series, calling it TPV and friends ritual and friends. And with me today is shaggy Pachter, and she thanks so much, first of all, for joining me today. Welcome.

Thank you for having me. It’s a little bit surreal being on the other side.

Yeah, because you are on the other side, literally, and have been for a little while now, just so people don’t know, she does all the sort of production and makes it the podcast sound half reasonable, even when I’m messing it up somehow. And she has to listen to my voice every single week and has done for a couple of years or so now. So that’s who you are. But why don’t you just open and tell us a little bit more about yourself, first of all, so listeners know how to picture you and where you fit in. And we’ll have a little chat. Sure.

So for a, I suppose an audio visual description. I am a woman of color. I’m Dutch Kenyan. So if you can’t place my accent, that’s a beginning of the reason why born and raised in Kenya lived in England for far too long, privately educated up to university didn’t finish a degree in university just decided to start doing my own stuff. Really, because I didn’t like officers are horrible. But I did try my hand at becoming like a fully fledged sound engineer at university because that’s what I was really passionate about. And being in a male dominated space, I just kind of got over it. I was just done with like trying to prove myself all the time. So I took a step back from that, and kept some engineering as a hobby that I just helped people out with, since 2003, was a long time ago. So that’s always been in the back burner. And then this kind of formal, like podcasts editing and audio book editing, and all the editing stuff that I do now. Started about two and a half, three years ago, after an outdoor adventure startup, I was a co partner of kind of went a bit horrible. Like everyone’s got a story. I think anyone who does startups, like you know, big, proper startup, there’s always going to be a story or five of things that failed for various reasons. So I have two of those. Prior to audio fi, and what other interesting stuff is there. I’m trying to like condense a lot of stuff into, like two minutes. I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I’ve done Brazilian jujitsu for years. I’m a rock climbing instructor, as well, I love bouldering I’ve done a martial art from the age of six of some description, and I have a naked cap, or a hairless cap, I think that’s more appropriate. So I have a sphinx cap. And I live in London. The end.

And, you know, it’s great, to be honest, because you probably don’t fit the profile of many of the guests I’ve had over the last couple of years. But I think you’re absolutely integral to you know, what’s been going on over the last couple of years. And I think, you know, one of the things I wanted to do was just sort of just elaborate a little bit about, you know, you know, from my point of view, I’ve got, you know, the points original point in the podcast, which has changed, the original point of the podcast was to sort of share knowledge, particularly for, you know, entry level people in the property space, but it’s about building an authority and building an audience and, you know, following a medium that you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable, you know, operating in, you know, by the way, I probably won’t show the video because I’m better on audio than I am on video. I like the written word as well. So there’ll be some show notes and stuff like that, which gets translated. So I think, you know, you enable that to happen, you know, because I definitely didn’t want to do all that techy stuff. A lot of a lot of people get involved in, whether it be audio production, video production, audio visual, they kind of double up done, they try and do it themselves. And you know, I don’t know what your views on that are.

Well, I can share that because I’m right now I’m kind of in the midst of trying to create solutions. problems I’m seeing. Because there are there are some people like like with everything. I mean, you get the same property, there are insanely effective, efficient self starters who, you know, they get three points of like a three point action plan, and they’re off. Like, that’s it, you won’t see them for a while, and then they come back and like, Oh, I’m at this level now and you’re like, wow, okay, cool. Like, that’s amazing. But they’re always the outlier. Like the average kind of sum of people tend to be those who foot in podcasting, at least. They’re not really as technically savvy as they think they are, or they want to be, you know, people who can, I don’t know, work their way around an Android phone and an iPhone. It’s all well and good. But can you deal with the time suck, like a lot of people forget how much time it takes to edit stuff. And then if you’re not comfortable listening to your own voice, that’s a whole other issue. Because you record for 20 minutes, your actual editing time is probably going to be 40 minutes to an hour, if you’re really quick. If you’re not really quick, then you’re probably looking at two hours, because you don’t know where the thing is to do the thing to, you know, get rid of the dog barking in the background, which you can’t do, by the way, on basic stuff, basic editing stuff ever, like, Oh, can you get rid of this Sparrow squeaking in the background? It’s like, No, I can’t, I actually can’t, unless you pay me a stupid amount of money to like slice into the audio. And that that will take me six hours, I’ll probably take you 12. So yeah, so I find a lot of people have the incentive, the drive the idea, the initial kind of like dopamine rush to like do a podcast. And then they get thwarted by the realization that the amount of time they have to spend they have to schedule it in. And they might do it begrudgingly for the first six or seven episodes, but then after a while that, like there’s so many podcasts that are part of like the podcast debris out there. If you imagine like girls roadkill? Exactly, exactly, they got roadkill, you got driftwood like all of those kinds of things. And then there’s obviously the financial kind of background that people don’t take an account of like even a basic account, you know, on Libsyn, say, for example, is I think $7, which is about five pounds or something. So I’m going to say five pounds, because my maths is terrible. So five by 1260. So you already have 60 pounds, as an out there already, even if you didn’t do anything to your podcast for, you know, forever after doing one season, you still need to pay 60 pounds a month, or 60 pounds a year. Sorry, to keep your podcast up and running. So lots of variables that people don’t take into account. Absolutely.

I was always clear from the beginning that I didn’t really want to be the guy who did the techie stuff. You know, I mean, somebody when I, when I first started, there was Matthew, and there was Collin from who, you know, not doing it anymore. And they were always doing that. And they they use the phrase, well, you were the tech and you’re the talent. But I never I never really thought of myself as talent, but, and maybe the Gobi one just talking a lot. But yeah, it was for me, it was always a case of that. And it’s interesting, because, over the years, people have come to me and said, Oh, we really, I’d really like to pick your brains about starting a podcast. Inevitably, they would ask me questions like, you know, what technology, you know, what equipment, you know, and then what software and, you know, editing production stuff, you know, I’m no clue, you know, really, because that’s not me, I’ve never gone that way. I just speak a lot I try and you know, do the that part. And that’s that was deliberate. I always did that. But what was interesting is how we came to me, because I know you wanting to chat about that a little bit. Because I was struggling at the time. So Colin and Matthew, who were helping me in the early years, what they didn’t tell me is that they no longer did it anymore. And then one day, they said, Oh, we don’t do this anymore. And you’re our last client who we ever did it for and you might want to try and find someone else to take over. And I was like, What I didn’t know, I was just busy memory leeches kind of pumping, you know, recordings, and they were doing it and then it just got to you know, anyway, so they then had a technology. I don’t know if I should mention it. I think it’s called How to you mentioned earlier Yeah, and I then had a go because it was supposed to be very user friendly. That even I could do and I was doing for a while the podcast that way myself. And it, you know, it was sort of fairly intuitive and I could do basic stuff like stitching intros, outros and music, bumpers and stuff like that, but I couldn’t really do a lot of you know, definitely couldn’t remove dog barking or sparrows, but there we go. So I was doing that for a while. And then will you pick it up from there? Because how from your perspective did we meet? Because I think we have a common friend?

Yes, we do. So it was it was quite interesting. At the time, I think it was the tail end of 2018. Because that was when my previous business startup was kind of just falling apart. And I had to kind of just take a step away, proactive step away before it kind of blew up in my face. And our mutual friend is Damian Fogg, a brilliant, bright spark of just human. And he had recorded an audiobook for his book. But he recorded I think, in Thailand or somewhere and just wanted someone to make it audible friendly. You know, and I didn’t realize that this was a skill set I’ve been sitting on for ages, that was actually a value. So he posted, it’s like, I’ve got these audio files I need. I need someone to fix them. And everyone was going, Oh, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. And I’m just like, give me these files. What is this thing? Like, let me do it for free? What the hell? Like literally, I was just like, No, this, this is too easy. Like, for me, it was like walking into a candy store taking like the most expensive candy and then walking out. Right? And he did and I edited it. And I was just so is that it? And he’s just so yeah, like, you should make it a business. I’m like, okay, and that’s literally how old you are, if I started. Formerly, instead of me just helping people out. And his book went out. And he really enjoyed it. And you know, it’s still out there. And I’m going to show is that the money shot? The money shot? Yeah, so the audio version of the money shot is what I edited. It was my first formal actual proper, like a business audiobook that I edited. And formally, I have now have a studio quote, quote, unquote, on a CX, which is the back end of audible Slyke. I think Kindle has KDP, which is this back end for publishing. And then a CX is the backend for Audible. Just in case people have ever wondered, how do I get my stuff up on Audible? acs.com? Go have a look. And then come have a chat with me.

I’d rather just have a chat with you.

Base. I mean, that that’s this is a thing, like looking at all the tech and stuff. Like you said earlier, people get confused about technology and stuff. And my very flippant response when people ask how do I start a podcast? And like would your phone and then they’re just like, No, really? How do I start a podcast? Oh, really? What your phone. But I digress. So Daymond was really super chuffed with what I did. And I just said, Hey, can you just tell people and like, refer people to me. Because from my personal training days, I never really liked kind of cold calling side of things. Because it’s just, it’s really soul sucking. And then like, you know, some people just don’t care. And then sometimes you get people who just jump in out of desperation. And I really hated it. So I just kind of went down to do a good job and make sure everybody knows about it type of thing. So every time I did a good job with someone, I was just like, can you go tell at least five people, please? I didn’t tell Damien, any of that. And just like you did tell other people, okay, and then just, I just got these referrals coming in. So he did an intro between you and me about podcasting. Just like my friend Richard has a podcast, he’s looking for a new editor. Go have a chat with him. And I was like, okay, and that. That’s basically how it started. So we started chatting. And I realized that you just needed like, kind of just basic editing, you didn’t need the flashy, like, go create a jingle from scratch. You know, go and look at your podcast website and kind of sleuth around to create perfect show notes. And, you know, all those kinds of things that a lot of people don’t realize takes a lot of time. But podcast management. But you had like, for me, you had 80% done, I just had to do 20%, which was take your audio files, get the audio to a nice decent level if the audio is quiet bump up. So it’s louder. You know, if people have weird background noises, try and edit that as best as I can. dropouts, all that kind of stuff for me was like easy, which I know for you was not easy. So yeah, so that was literally it. We had a conversation on Facebook. And I was like, Cool. Let’s do it. And that was 20 beginning of 2019, I think probably sounds about right. I shot a picture the time so it was almost three years, basically.

I mean that the lockdown kind of messes like time up really badly because it just like a year went by and it’s 2021 it’s almost 2022 like that. No, it happened though.

Yeah, so that’s how we met. It’s pretty much it as well. There’s a bit you’re not going to mention this easy. And yeah, it’s been cool and what I’ve really appreciated, frankly and it’s just sort of put it out there because you know just you and me chatting and maybe a couple of people listening in, is you just work a perfect fit for me. And we’ll get into maybe why that’s the case, actually, I’m sure in this conversation, but you were really a perfect fit for me. Because whenever I went to like production houses or whatever want to call, you know, sound engineer or firm’s business, you know, it’s like, well, this is kind of what I need, and I know doesn’t work that way you what you need to do is batch process stuff and send it x weeks in advance and stuff like that. And I know that to be fair, that I can understand why that is a good practice and a good discipline of how to do things. But it just wasn’t how I worked. And, you know, I was kind of trying to find someone who could work with me the way that I ideally wanted them to work within reason, and you are an absolutely amazing fit. And we’ll get into it. But you know, and I tried not to take advantage of that. But at the same time, you know, now and again, there’s been the old glitch, you know, between us, because sometimes a little bit last minute, you know, not from your perspective, necessarily remind. And so, we’ve had this, and I think we had this sort of Facebook chat relationship for a large part of that time. And it was only relatively recently that we thought maybe we should kind of properly meet. And we did, didn’t we so?

God, yeah, that’s right. We never actually spoke like, you know, face to face on Zoom. It was just writing. Oh,

it’s funny. There’s so many relationships, I’ve had relationships that you know, whatever, encounter business relationships I’ve had, where I haven’t actually met someone. But you know, now with this zoom and video conferencing and stuff like that, that’s become more rugged, especially through lockdown. But I think that was a key point as well, when we did actually have that meetup. And we’ll probably talk about that. But maybe before they are so big. What do you do? Apart from the 20%, you say is easier what I do? And you do in terms of podcasting and audio visual? How could you help other people who might be listening to this.

So if we, if we go into like the bigger scale of things, I actually now have a little team, which I’m proud to say, you know, like, I’ve grown up into a team. So I have editors who actually do the work for me and what you say about other production houses needing more time in advance, I actually do have that now. But that’s for them, not with me. Because like, I think you and maybe one other person, just because of the way our brains work, they kind of work better that way. So at least with you, like my brain kind of goes, hmm, we should be getting a file in the next eight hours. So mentally, just like a little block of my brain is just like, we should be getting a message on like, what 2828 to 30 hours before the episodes due to go live, I should be getting a thing of some sort. And I think the time zones kind of actually help with that. Because you’ll send it like at, you know, do you mind me saying this out loud for people to know. Alright. So like, cuz at a time difference, I usually get a message from you on like, Tuesday morning. So Monday evening, Tuesday morning at about, like 130, maybe 2am. Right, which is fine. Because I’m a night owl. I work between 11pm and 3am. Most days, sometimes I don’t, because sometimes I’m tired. So when you send the message, I’m just like, Oh, cool. And I download the files, and then I’ll go to sleep, I have to have a normal Tuesday. And then Tuesday evening for me is when I edit your episode, I’ve tried to change it. I think for a week, I managed to do like mornings and you’re just like, Oh, what is this and I’m just like, I’m trying to be a new person. And then it failed miserably and just went back to my old ways. So I sent it to you probably almost the same time sometimes, like so from the Monday it’ll be like a full 24 hours later that you’ll get the file to go up and it goes live in like five, six hours after that. That’s not normal people listening that is not normal. Do not call me and asked me to do that I will not okay. Like I don’t have the capacity. I only have the capacity like for two, maybe three people to do that for. But basically what I do is help people figure out how to record their podcasts initially. So if they only have a phone if you only have an iPhone or you only have an Android phone or some description, you can actually record really decent podcasts off of that. Whether you have a lav mic or you want to get a better mic that connects via your USB or lightning bolt connection to your phone. You can use that and there are platforms I don’t like anchor I will never like anchor I’m putting it out there because I felt burned so badly by them.

I lost no anchor,

no anchor is bad. No if you want something that’s free that you can upgrade into okay, because the problem with anchor is it’s permanently free. Anchor doesn’t currently have any paid options, right which is a problem because if there are no pain At options, you are constantly the product, which means as and when they decide to change how they work. So anchor got bought out by Spotify, if people don’t know about this. And as a result, yes, you can use music from Spotify, but it’s only half, it’s half a minute. So it’s 30 seconds. If you’re not a member, if you don’t have a paid Spotify account, you only listen to 30 seconds of a song, which is silly. If you’re a member, then he listened to the whole song. But that’s how they generate revenue. That’s how they kind of pull people into their revenue stream. And also, you don’t have any control of any ads that they decide to put into your show. Right? So if you’re talking about something pretty dark, and you know, despairing and they put some really like bad ad in there, you have no control over that. And you could lose listeners who are just like,

Who do we go to that is not cool.

So pod bean is probably my first place of choice. If you want something that’s free, that you can trial. There are some restrictions on pod bean. But I like that pod. Bean also has an app editor as well. So like you mentioned earlier, too, which is meant to be this like you know, all friendly kind of encompassing thing. Pod bean has that. And I liked Ankur because it had that initially where you could just be in a web browser and do the same thing. Pod bean has exactly the same thing. But you can grow into it. So you can go from free into you know, a basic plan, which is $5. And then a more professional plan. And you can keep your analytics. Right. I’m a scorned banker because I had to delete my entire podcast as I shuffled it over because Spotify were like, we don’t have your RSS feed and anchor like it’s Spotify. And they were just going backwards and forwards even though they’re the same company. And I was just like, well, what can I do? And I just say, well, it’s not our problem. So we don’t know. And I’m just like, thanks. So I had to delete everything. And but I knew that was gonna happen. So one to have your own copy of everything. And then go to pod bean because it’s better. But then if you want something a little bit further on from that, where like Richard, he has the talent, right? He does the talk in you are, you are come on now. Because you just have the conversations, you don’t have to worry so much about anything other than is my microphone working? Am I doing an interview style? Or am I doing a solo style? So that’s something that I help people with because not everybody is Joe Rogan. And not everybody should be Joe Rogan. I personally don’t think Joe Rogan should be Joe Rogan sometimes. But you know or Jocko, I actually prefer Jocko willing so far as like listening to really long podcasts. So you got Joe Rogan Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, Joe Rogan does solo stuff. Now he does interview and stuff sorry, a lot of the time he doesn’t really do solo stuff. Jordan Peterson used to do kind of solo stuff, but he’s gone into the interview route. And Jocko is always a duo with an interview. Because there’s Jocko and echo Charles, and then whoever else he decides to interview at that point. So I show people what style they want to do. If you want to do solo, that’s great, but you will have moments where you don’t want to do it. How do you manage that when you don’t want to do a solo podcast? Richard, I think that’s that’s something you’ve, you’ve got some insight on.

Is it a question you actually want me to answer? Yeah,

go on. Yeah,

I mean, well, there’s two sides to it. One is I basically force myself. So I often get to that Monday. So I had in my head when we were working Monday, midnight. As the deadline by the way, it should have been UK, midnight, not Brazil, midnight. But it kind of always inevitably shifts and drifts. But I was looking for inspiration. Knowing that I made a commitment, really, to my audience, I would always I do this every week, but typically take August and December off for large chunks of it. That was a way to stay motivated, by the way. But I made a sort of a promise or commitment to do it. And then just look for the inspiration. And sometimes inspiration hit me right at the 11th hour, literally, and go and record, I’d always have a notebook or something with ideas that I would try and jot down as they came along. And then the other thing is do a series format. The series format was easier for me because I knew the general topic and some of the earliest series of just me and in more recent series have had guests on, but bringing guests on brings its own, you know challenges too, because you need to do all the admin the coordination, the setup, you know, you’re profiling people and saying yes to someone no to others. So I think, you know, you said I was unusual for one of your for a podcast or one of your clients because I’m probably unusual for several reasons, but I was unusual because he’s been going for so long. Mm hmm. We will talk about that, you know, hopefully, but anyway, yeah, it was hard to motivate myself but normally a glass of red would help you know Let’s just say that my audience, sometimes would, the occasional person if I met in person would bring me a bottle of red wine. Maybe I mentioned it more than once on the podcast, who knows? Okay, back to you, you do the podcasting, you’ll help people, you know, shape their direction, if you like scope was what sort of format and kind of I should do it.

Yeah, exactly. So I mentioned like Joe Rogan, and Jocko willing and all those kinds because having just that perpetual, just constant grind, you know, works for some people, if they schedule it, and then just like, you know, like, like you every Monday or record for it to be out every Wednesday. Cool. And then I do take time off, some people forget that time off is necessary. I like dogs are gonna keep on going. It’s just like, Alright, okay, let’s see you in Christmas, the Christmas time, like what it’s like, you’re not going to do an episode over Christmas. Like, I know, this isn’t gonna happen like that, what’s gonna happen? Oh, I’m away with family, of course you are. So you know, getting people to understand maybe seasons is better. I’m actually pushing pretty much everybody into the season format now, because there’s just too many podcasts dying unnecessarily. So I do that I help people figure out how to set up the websites to add a podcast feed into their blog, if they want, I typically encourage people to have individual posts for each episode, just because if you want some easy search engine optimization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that works really well. And also, for guests, if you have an individual page, and you have a fairly prolific guests name on there, that individual page will rank higher with that guests name as well. So cheat codes. So I do all of this stuff for people, I do the editing, or one of my editors do the editing. Because I’ve created this kind of like template for everyone to use, they use the same, exactly the same software, like we use three bits of fairly expensive kit. And all of us use exactly the same stuff more or less exactly the same version, so I don’t have to worry about that. And sometimes if they want it, I’ll do audio, Graham’s said a little animated kind of squares with like the fancy waveforms and subtitle texts that people want it. I am expanding into YouTube podcast videos, where you don’t have to be seen. So it’s just the entire episode is up there as an audio only thing, but with subtitles, because I’m a huge fan of accessibility. So I’m just like, how do we make it more accessible? You have a visual podcast, and that’s free. I think that’s pretty much everything for podcasting.

I was gonna say for podcasting because you also do audiobooks as well, right?

Yes, I do i prime while the entire focus now because I used to try and expand and think oh, maybe I’ll open a studio one day I don’t want to open a studio. So my whole focus is actually coaching people how to record their audio books at home without the need to create a like 5000 pound booth for recording if Matthew McConaughey can record his audio book, have you? I don’t think you’ve seen this. He recorded his audiobook from home if you look on his Instagram, right and he go back quite a bit now because he launched it he launched his book green lights, free plugging for him. It’s crazy, but I watched him create not literally but I watched him how he created his audiobook and I saw the room he was in okay. It was terrible. From a sound engineers point of view. He clearly had a really thick rug on the floor but beyond that he had not far from you know this like my this microphone that I’m showing that you’re not going to see but I have a Samsung cue to you in a really basic thing. He had just a fairly basic buy microphone standards microphone, I think was an Audio Technica thing. And it was connected via XLR so it was more advanced. Don’t worry about the jargon. But he just used that and just spoken to it at his table. And that was it and I listened to the audiobook and because he was so charismatic you don’t really care about the fact that you can hear room reflections. And for me that’s like perfect inaction is better than perfect. Imperfect Action sorry. Imperfect Action is better than perfect inaction right because he could have gone to a studio during lockdown like he’s not poor like he could have gone and done it but he chose to make it really authentic and I’m just sat here going yeah, look this Texan can do it. So suck so that’s that’s my whole thing with audio books. So after

some time, let me just clarify so you can help people avoid necessarily going to be expensive studio because studios can be expensive. With all the kitten the soundproofing and the other people on you know the side twisting dials and stuff. You can actually get people to kind of record from there. Pro environment or Yes, and let me just clarify. It could involve do vase, is that right?

It could potentially involve two vase. It really depends on your home. So I tend to do live zooms with people. And I just again coached them through like, well, basically, I get them to sit in the room sit in the space that they will potentially be recording. And because I have 400, of a better phrase, hypersonic hearing, when I’m listening to someone in a Zoom meeting, I can really pick up what their room sounds like. So for example, Richard your room right now, people probably aren’t going to hear this because I actually tend to edit out your room. Maybe for this episode, I won’t do it. Maybe I’ll leave it. And you know, people can understand what the differences. But your room has a little bit of echo in it. My room has a bit of echo in it. But I’ve got like wall to wall carpets, which kills off most of the sound because my ceiling is actually really high. It’s a Victorian conversion. So it’s about, I think three and a half meters from floor to ceiling, which is huge. But you can’t hear that I can hear the space in your room. Because I imagine you have hard floors. I do have so I can hear that. Because the bass reflects off of the hard floors and then the treble,

one rug apart from you know, but then I’ve got wooden floors. Yeah,

yeah. So that’s the stuff typically you want to edit out because of ear fatigue. So I help people with that. I clarify, you know, if they have if they tell me their budget, I will tell them what microphone to get. Possibly, if they need to get a filter or a shield of some description to pop shield is like 99% always needed. I have this weird After looking thing on my microphone, which basically turns my microphone into a studio. So it’s like 5000 pounds worth of studio and a 200 pound afro. Which if you want you can get it’s not necessary. And then yeah, teaching people how to talk properly with the audio book, how to do retakes that make my life easier, because some people are trying to retake halfway through a sentence. And I’m like, No,

you want me to do that.

I can’t like you know, when you mess the word up, you kind of sped through that word and then sped into the next word. And if I edit two retakes together like that, it’s gonna sound terrible. So force people, to redo sentences, even if the last word is fluffed up, you have to do the whole sentence again, just because of flow and time. And I don’t get people to edit. Because the more you edit, as a person who’s not technical, the more affects your speech. So I do all of that. And then they give it to me, they give their recordings, I give them software to use, which is just audacity, which is free. It’s a great bit of kit, I do the editing, and then depending on how hands on they one, I will hold their hands on a CX, so literally log into a CX, set everything up, attached it to their ebook that they need to have for sex to work. And then if there’s errors, like a CX will send a technical email back, which looks like Mandarin to most people, they’re just like, I don’t understand what our lifts and what is this? What is the DBS dah, dah, dah, dah, and it’s like, just give me the email. Let me read what the problems are, then I fix it. So I do all of that. And I haven’t jumped on to the marketing and promotion sides of it yet, cuz

I’m not interested. Okay. But I think equally to flip it around the other way. So, you know, so you can compliment you can give the scoping and the guidance, the technical know-how, you know, what kit to get, how to start and how to make it sort of future proof and get that good old SEO and all that kind of stuff, whether it’s podcasts, whether it’s audio book, I think, from where I’m thinking right now is what so what, you know, what, because you want to build authority, perhaps you want to put content out there on a different platform, the audio, I mean, it’s growing massively basically, podcasting, generally, audio, media, is growing video media is also growing, but, you know, it’s this is, this is our space right now. So if you have a passion for sharing knowledge, if you want to write books, if you want to reach, you know, different audiences, then, you know, that’s why you might consider doing it. And there’s a way to do it, you know, perhaps you’ve alluded to on a, on a budget or on a more accessible level. So, you know, I was told, you know, I’ve published a couple of books, I was told, it’s 10k to publish a book, you know, to do an audio book, you already thrown a figure out there, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, probably the same again, all in

about 7k. Yeah, if you’re gonna do it with a publisher or whatever, it be five to 7k.

And then, you know, so that, I think, if you’ve got that as interest as a passion, then you can actually help make that happen and be a good partner. So just wanted to get that out there and equally with Moving into what else we’re gonna talk about, we’ve got a couple of things. So I do think it’s important. We speak about that polyphony moment you’ve helped me with. And I think you can help the audience may be, to you know where I’m going with this idea. Yeah, yeah. Okay. It’s just checking. So we, when we had that first Facebook, so we moved off Facebook, and we had a Zoom meeting, that was an in-person meeting, which was great, by the way, good to have that. But you said something to me that I wasn’t expecting. You remember?

Well, I reckon that you were neurodivergent. Or like, you probably have ADHD, like me.

So, you know, and it was like, we were having this conversation. And you said, Ah, you know, I have this condition. And I think maybe you could, too. So just, first of all, let’s get it out there. What is it? What is the condition we’re talking about?

Yeah, so So we’re talking about attention deficit disorder, or attention deficit hyperactive disorder. It’s, it’s weird. Some people say like, ADHD is the term or add is a term and I still feel they’re kind of interchangeable, really, but it is literally just the sense that one person, a person’s brain, one’s brain does not fire or run in a neurotypical fashion. So and that that can kind of show up in so many, so many different ways for various people. I know with me, I have squirrels in my brain for want of a better phrase. And I have constant diverging conversations happening all the time. Like even right now, mentally, at the back of my head, I’m thinking about my cat and what he’s doing. I’m thinking about what’s going on in the kitchen. And I’m thinking about maybe doing jiu jitsu later on. I’m thinking about why my fridge is making a weird noise even though it isn’t. But it was making a weird noise last night, like so there’s a constant hum of things going on. And like we’re quite reward driven. So quite dopamine driven, which everyone is like, no, no, no, no, no. There are some moments where if something really, really has zero kind of benefits, you mentioned the so one thing, which I think is really quite a good way of helping people understand how brains work is our so what is over 11? Like it’s it’s dialed up so high with every single situation that we can do something. Yeah, we can do something midterm. Yeah, if the long term is like super delicious, then fine. We’ll keep on going. Because the so while we’ll keep on being like because of that, and that’s a shiny cookie, that’s the shiny us cookie ball. And we want that shiny cookie fine. If the SOA is like, get a box of crumpets, and are just like, No, and then that’s it. Like, once the brain goes, no, then it’s really, really hard to kind of push over. So that’s my understanding of my experience of ADHD. But I also find people who I’ve, I vibe with really well tend to have a similar kind of functioning, or I start to see things I’m just like, Oh, these things are happening. And I know that this is part of this. So with you, when we were talking face to face, I was just I, I had my hypotheses. But I’ve been collecting over time, just kind of like, okay, these are things that are happening. And I kind of have a feeling that this is this. And I wasn’t gonna mention it, because it’s not my place to but when we had that face to face, it’s just like, I think we’re comfortable enough to just have that conversation. And we were Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I think I’m really grateful that you did, I mean, so I’m 55 We always put it out there again, every time I talk about it, so 55 and was 55 when we had that conversation, so it was fairly recent. And the point about mentioning my age is that I’ve gone through my entire life and not knowing that and then you said it very kindly, and you said it in a way that you thought could help me which by the way is helpful just for anyone who might you know, just not be so aware. And I had no clues, no diagnoses, no suggestions? No Nothing ever although my life had sometimes you know, warranted you know, someone to look into those sort of things as you can probably imagine, because when you start to have these types of thoughts or you know, what the component parts of a DD or ADHD are, you know, it kind of shows up in your life in your relationships and things like in your work, so I’m never had I but then I went away, did some research as well, but about 20 web pages as you might expect, and then I want to spoke to someone who knows a lot about it, who specializes in the area and he’s Yeah, You can’t do as like, Okay, this is a new world now, in fact, wasn’t a new world because it’s still the same world. But what I was a missing piece of the puzzle, because I clearly knew there was something, you know, why do I do what I do? Why did I get in the same place again? And all this sort of stuff? Never really had the answer. So it gave me the start of an answer as a massive relief. And so now I’m going through, you know, this discovery, learning more about the condition, how I can manage it, how I can cope with it, you know, what tools can I use, what other support is there available, and by the way, recognizing that I had my own preconceived ideas, and stereotypes, and, you know, unfair labels, actually, about what this condition meant, and others, which are related, let’s say, autism could be another one that, you know, is just got a common gene, I understand. So, you know, dyslexia similarly, so, you know, common roots, which can diverge off into these conditions. And it’s not, you know, seems to be more common than people think, because now I can undo what you do. And I’m going to be talking, cocking that behavior. You know, maybe they’ve got something too, but I haven’t quite got the guts to, you know, do what you do with it anyway. So I’m really grateful that you said that, and then B, it’s made such a difference to my life. Now, because it made sense of it. I forgiven myself for, you know, this condition, by the way, it has its advantages, it’s not necessarily a negative thing. But it is helpful to know, and then, you know, it is a spectrum. You know, not everybody has all of the different component components. And so, you know, I have less hyperactivity, for example, that you might be surprised by me rambling on. Anyway, so I just think it’s good to get it out there. I’ve since discovered some initial self tests that you can undertake. I mentioned that on a previous conversation, which you I know, you would have listened to when we put it out just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, we put the link in the show notes that if you’ve got any suggestions,

there’s, there’s a mag or a virtual e mag, I think called attitude. And its attitude as an add it to instead of attitude is attitude. And there’s a it’s a great resource and reference space just for everybody. So it’s like adults with a DD parent with children who have a DD. And that’s the main thing that I have like a lot of friends from the jujitsu space, who are parents who come and roll and then they have, you know, their younger kids or teenage kids or young adult kids, you know, because I don’t, I won’t shut up about it sometimes. Because if I have a moment where I just go completely sparkle, Brandon’s like, oh, okay, this is not usual, but I’m really hyperactive at the moment. And I’m sorry, if I’m coming on, like, very strong and very weird. And you’re just like, No, it’s fine. So I’m gonna add, and it’s like, I just literally say it. So by the by, and then they’re just like, oh, and then after class, they’ll will start having a conversation and like, Oh, my kids got it. Or I recently got diagnosed, bla bla, bla, bla bla, so attitude mag is great. And a YouTube that I love watching in short spurts is called How to ADHD, which is led by a woman who has ADHD and a few other things. And I like that, because women with ADHD, don’t quite, you know, get as much coverage as, you know, men with ADHD. So those are the two places. But I’m gonna segue in because I’m aware of time, too. We’ve been speaking about like systems and ways to manage like the podcast, because you’ve been doing this for six years. You know, it’s, it’s been a long, long time. And I feel and we both spoke about this that, like, the current structure and energy of it is just not quite sitting very well with who you are and where you’re going. almost literally, in a way. I can say that because you mentioned that today. So time other way, don’t worry.

Yeah. So So you know, I think, again, I mentioned like I’m trying to push people into seasons because it gives especially neurodivergent types, more space to kind of breathe and to work within clusters of hyperfocus because that’s what we excel at when we like something that’s it the blinkers are on and we’re just it’s go time which is really beneficial. Like I think that’s one of the superpowers we have. So trying to kind of like ring that into your podcasting and kind of, instead of the structure being a constant, every, you know, Wednesday, ad nauseum, I suggested and I think we are going to look into turning it into a season No kind of thing. So going forwards in the new year, each season is probably going to have four to eight episodes or so. And like he spoke about the series that you’ve been doing, and I feel, I don’t know if any of the listeners feel that when you do a season or a series, or you do a series, like the focus and the drive, and kind of just the general vibe of it is just like, yeah, all right, you’ve got this thing where you jump into it. And then you have this expectation and understanding that like, this is going to happen. Next episode is going to be this next step, but it’s going to do this, like, you know, you can keep on going, and then you’re just like, Ooh, that was a nice house, nice round off. Finish. So that’s, that’s part of the new stuff that’s gonna be coming in. But the old stuff, we’re going to revamp and turn into them their own seasons, because sometimes, you know, when you do your solo episodes, and you have your moments of inspiration, we’re going to put those moments of inspiration to their own little seasons of highlights topics. So what does this mean for the listener? So what who cares? Listen there. Why is this important? It’s important because I’ve got a lot of work to do. But it’s, it’s a lot, and it’s fine. But it also means as a result, the podcast is going to have a breather, it’s going to have a break for a while for a few months. Actually. I don’t know, Richard, if you want to jump into why cuz like you’re having quite a big old shift yourself, aren’t you?

Yeah, sure. I mean, that’s it, I think, where I started with a podcast, and so it’d be almost seven years, by the way. Now, you know, I was still learning, I was kind of learning myself as I went and sharing a lot of what I learned with the audience and trying to give out good content and trying to make it a little bit more at the sort of beginner level. Whereas my own business and has expanded and mushroomed and exploded into lots of different directions. And I’m so far removed from that today, you know, I’m, you know, all being well alone, you know, four businesses this year, which are out, you know, that some of them are property-related, not all of them. I’m in mergers and acquisitions on moving into blocks and portfolio type of transactions from a property point of view. It’s, you know, I’m in such a different place. And obviously, from a self-growth, development point of view, that’s also changing. And I think, you know, there’s, there’s now a disconnect between where I started and what I intended and where I am now. So I’m talking about almost, I wanted to be real, it’s always wanting to be real, but my reality has changed. And so I think I kind of want it to be a sort of a real-life, expose a what I mean, involved in, you know, kind of now. And so it’s gonna be a pivot from where it was to where it will be, there’ll be a bit of a bridge, I believe were shaky, you’re going to help, you know, to maybe repurpose or reassimilate, whatever you want to repackage to some of the existing content, I think I might have the odd word now and again, but otherwise, I’m going to take a break and recharge, get my energy back. And then when we get back, we’ll probably this mix, Max, mix, and match between some of the, you know, older stuff, and then some of the newer stuff and a more seasoned space. I think that’s how I understand it. But I know it’s a bit of a guinea pig idea that you kind of want to test out on me to some extent, exactly.

At the moment, but let’s see how it goes. Be well looked after,

obviously. But you know, with all of that, like there’s, there’s the kind of cause you are, you have shifted quite successfully and moved on to kind of, I suppose, more height, like niche interests, you know, within the property space. There’s also this opportunity, and this, this idea of maybe having like a co-host, or someone kind of just leading a little bit more, as well. So there’s a lot of changes afoot, but it doesn’t mean that the information is going to be diluted. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. Right? Where you know, past content is going to be completely concentrated into specific themes. And when you come in to have a chat, you know, there’ll be interviewing with different people, or maybe the same people, but from a very, very different perspective, which is going to be refreshing for everybody. And yeah, there’ll be newfound energy and a presence with the property voice in a new fashion, which will help with I suppose, having a neurodivergent kind of brain because you’re juggling so many different things rather than just completely dropping the ball and letting a seven-year-old podcast turn into a big old dead oak tree floating in an eternal ocean. What a few you know, just having it still keep on going and still kind of people reaping the rewards from that, I think is what we’re focusing on, still adding value.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you’re gonna play a key part in that. And that, again, has really helped me extend that, into that, into that space. So I think that this really interesting segue period, this bridge, then I think there’ll be some, you know, a blend of different types of content that comes forward. So, I guess that just sort of sets it up in a way about what you can expect, dear listener, about, you know, what, the podcast, I think we’re still reading, there’ll be content coming out, even if I’m perhaps in the background, and taking a bit of a rest and working out what I’m going to say and do next. So I wanted Shiggy, to come along, so that she could share, you know, from her perspective, you know, how this is going to be, and also for you listen, if you’re listening, you know, you know, what’s going on behind the scenes, you know, Why to hang around, you know, though, you’ll, you’ll still get all the old stuff, and which, you know, my heart and soul went into, but you’re going to get a lot of new stuff going forward to. And I think we experiment with the style and the way in which the podcast goes forward. So just grow with me, I think to grow with us, is the answer. So it’s what we wanted to how we wanted to position things.

That’s it. That’s definitely it. I think, you know, I’d imagine with your listeners and the various level of listeners, not everyone will have been here from day one. So you know, for a lot of people getting some kind of past content that they maybe have never listened to. Because it’s a lot. Seven years is a lot. I don’t know how many Wednesdays that is, but it’s a lot of Wednesdays. So yeah, it’s gonna be refreshing for everyone, you’re always going to have something to learn. And then the new stuff is going to be super exciting.

Zoe row got a couple of questions. So maybe people can think about this in the meantime. So should it still be called the property voice? Given, you know, different direction? Who knows? But there are just a few things, a few ideas. So and you can still make me say some things? And when again, is that right? Of course. Okay,

I’m not gonna have the human in there a little bit.

All right. And this is going to go out roundabout end of November ish, maybe early December, would we have a break for Christmas, and then something happens in January, he’s a

pretty Yeah. So so there’s gonna be some stuff starting I’m I don’t celebrate Christmas. So I will be working very, very, very hard to get the first cluster of things out. So probably the second or third week of January, is when the kind of bridging happens like the bridging event will start happening. And yeah, just got to keep your ear to the ground. Maybe, maybe join an email list of descriptions. Maybe if you’re not on the email list, maybe jump onto it, because that’s where the first kind of sniff of everything is gonna come from. And then it will obviously be up on a website on the website and various other places.

So there’s anything else you wanted to say before we finish today issue?

No. Thank you for being an amazing client. Richard, honesty, you know, you’ve been one of the founding, the founding five, you’ve been part of the founding five of audio fi and one of my longest serving clients, and you’ve been an absolute dream to work with, even though the style that we work together is very, very freaking unique. And again, I can’t reiterate this, no one else contact me for this style of like working because there’s a limit and my limit is three and I’m on two out of three. And I don’t really want to get three out of three because I will be completely burnt out. But yeah, Richard, thank you so much for being an amazing client. I really appreciate it.

That’s really kind of you to say and it’s been amazing to work with you as well because you really as I say fitted around me you know, it’s been wonderful you’ve given good you know, really good ideas and content he has saved my bacon so many times, by the way. So how do people reach out to you how do they find you?

If you want to find me? My website is audio fi dot M E. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on there just click the Contact or hit the little live question chat the live chat there’s there’s a thing there you can contact me through there. If you want to email me contact at audio fi dot m e is good. If you’re on Instagram at audio fi me altogether. So AUD IOFYME as on Instagram, I’m on LinkedIn at audio fi.me Just is everywhere. Yeah, so just just reach out say hey, listen to the podcast with Richard and I have questions and we can go

I’m glad you spelt it because I knew spelt differently perhaps to help people might be in matching. So we’ll put those links in the show notes as well. So I’ll take that. So should you thanks for coming on. Thanks for by the way in, you know more than one way, helping me understand myself a bit better. Now, that fateful call we talked about, also to keep the podcast alive, because basically, I was probably thinking of stopping altogether. So you’ve helped re-energize it and find a new focus, looking forward to seeing how that shapes. But I guess I’m going to do the outro. Now, which is basically, if the show notes for this particular episode are going to be over the website, the proxy voice.net. If you wanted to talk about anything from today’s show, or anything, or get on that email list that she talked about, then perhaps email podcast at tthepropertyvoice.net And I’ll send it through to Karen who’s actually admin at thepropertyvoice.net . So that’s confused, you know, so send an email or email to one of us and you’ll get on that list. Equally, I can direct to Shiggy if you didn’t take a note of her contact details or you’re driving or you’re in the gym or something like that. So we can do that. But I guess all the remains to say is thanks very much for listening. Who knows what the future will hold for us. And until next time on The foxy ghost podcast.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Soundbite:Friends of TPV with Shiggi Pakter appeared first on The Property Voice.

“Sometimes, no matter what you do, you won’t get anything right; and other times, no matter what you do, everything you touch will turn to gold.” Yogendra Patel

Today, I am joined once again by one of my buddies, Rupal Patel. Rupal is her own words ‘living the dream’ as a writer, professional speaker and advisor to founders, leaders and corporate teams. But it hasn’t always been that way, which we kind of unpick in our meandering conversation.

I’d also like to share a quote that Rupal’s father, Yogendra Patel, shared with her when she was younger: “Sometimes, no matter what you do, you won’t get anything right; and other times, no matter what you do, everything you touch will turn to gold.”. This is so true of life in general and of the entrepreneur, investor and all-round striving-for-success-person, as I’m sure you’d agree.

We talk about a range of topics, unplanned and unscripted, as is usually the case when we get together. Do we get a software plugin that enables us to suddenly smash through those glass ceilings or be self-compassionate when we let our focus and priorities slip? Do we become an overnight success or is there perhaps a journey of personal growth, trial and error the odd means to an end route we take along the way?

I guess we kind of delve into philosophical and spiritual contemplation, as we discuss our purpose, including how it can be discovered and change over time, being in balance both personally and universally, being wholly human and the merit of measuring both return on both time and return on energy, in addition to return on investment. Oh…we also speak of being humble, grateful, having choices, still facing first-world problems, manifestation coupled with disciplined action…and so much more!

I must also not forget to mention the fact that Rupal received a proper book-publishing deal earlier this year. Her book will be published in May 22 but is available to pre-order from Amazon, which I have already done. It’s called From CIA to CEO, unconventional life lessons for thinking bigger, leading better and being bolder. The struggle of how she came to write this book is worth listening to and I know it’s going to be a great read, for sure.

I think we also mention property, occasionally!

Pre-order Rupal book here

Rupal Patel’s email address [email protected] Blue Infinity Property Group website

The Property Voice YouTube Channel

The Property Voice Social Media Channels:  Facebook ¦ Linked In ¦ Twitter ¦ Instagram ¦ YouTube

The Property Voice Meetup Page & Eventbrite Page

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Link to the Podcast feedback survey

TPV Apprentice Programme info HERE

Subscribe to and review the show in iTunes…and while you are at it please help us to spread the word by telling all your friends too!

Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

Today, I am joined once again by one of my buddies, Rupal Patel. Rupal is her own words ‘living the dream’ as a writer, professional speaker and advisor to founders, leaders and corporate teams. But it hasn’t always been that way, which we kind of unpick in our meandering conversation.

I’d also like to share a quote that Rupal’s father, Yogendra Patel, shared with her when she was younger: “Sometimes, no matter what you do, you won’t get anything right; and other times, no matter what you do, everything you touch will turn to gold.”. This is so true of life in general and of the entrepreneur, investor and all-round striving-for-success-person, as I’m sure you’d agree.

We talk about a range of topics, unplanned and unscripted, as is usually the case when we get together. Do we get a software plugin that enables us to suddenly smash through those glass ceilings or be self-compassionate when we let our focus and priorities slip? Do we become an overnight success or is there perhaps a journey of personal growth, trial and error the odd means to an end route we take along the way?

I guess we kind of delve into philosophical and spiritual contemplation, as we discuss our purpose, including how it can be discovered and change over time, being in balance both personally and universally, being wholly human and the merit of measuring both return on both time and return on energy, in addition to return on investment. Oh…we also speak of being humble, grateful, having choices, still facing first-world problems, manifestation coupled with disciplined action…and so much more!

I must also not forget to mention the fact that Rupal received a proper book-publishing deal earlier this year. Her book will be published in May 22 but is available to pre-order from Amazon, which I have already done. It’s called From CIA to CEO, unconventional life lessons for thinking bigger, leading better and being bolder. The struggle of how she came to write this book is worth listening to and I know it’s going to be a great read, for sure.

I think we also mention property, occasionally!

Hello, and welcome once again to another episode on the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me, but not just me on the show again today. We’re in the middle of this conversational mini series with a few more buddies, basically. And it’s been great fun so far. And I am delighted to be looking forward to this next conversation because we always have a good old chat and RuPaul Patel, welcome to the property boys podcast once again. How are you?

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Richard, I’m doing really, really, really well.

You are indeed, we just had a very quick catch up before we hit record. And already I could hear some of the great things I’m sure we’re gonna get into that. But we’ll come back, I always love our conversations are stimulating the wide ranging, not often short, and you know, just really good fun. So it’s great, great for you to be here. So um, I think, you know, just, I will be useful, you probably gone through this again, but just set the scene about where you’re at right now and what you’re doing a little bit, just what I know, You’ve changed a bit, since you first came to talk with my audience, but just sort of a bit of a recap. And then we may be able to plug those gaps and see what how that happened.

That sounds great. To put it very simply, I’m effectively living my dream. So for a long time now, I knew and tried to find ways to do a lot more writing professionally, as well as doing a lot more speaking professionally and to bigger audiences. And for least the past two years, I’ve been able to do a lot more writing and speaking and the main focus of my work now are those two things. So writing, I’ve got a book coming out in a few months time. And then yeah, it’s exciting. And then also the speaking, I’ve been really just doing some wonderful speaking engagements for corporates, for large companies, big conferences, but also small teams and that kind of thing. And so those are two of the big three pillars of what I’m doing at the moment. So there’s the speaking, there’s the writing, and then also, I’m doing a lot of advisory and leadership work. So that’s working with founders leaders. You know, sometimes it’s corporate teams, sometimes it’s just individuals. But really, the fundamental thread in that work is just helping people unlock their potential and get out of their own way.

Yep. And you know, we’ve had lots of conversations, I can vouch for you being able to help people get out of their own way, when you’ve helped me sometimes get out of my own way. So it’s, I’m sure you’ve got that, but the writing of the speaking this just go back there. And by the way, because people will be going, hang on a minute. Didn’t you have a report on the women in property? Series not too long ago, and I didn’t hear the word property. Yeah. The three pillar? Yeah. So if you want to pick that,

yeah, sure. I mean, for me, and this may have come up in one of our many conversations, Richard, but for me property was often what it was very, very concretely, for me a means to an end in the sense that I knew when I first got started in property, that one of the things I wanted to get out of it, in addition to creating beautiful homes, providing, you know, really high standard accommodation, and homes and all that great stuff. I knew it would, or I wanted it to help me buy back my own time, because I knew I was going to be one of those portfolio career people or, you know, someone who had a lot of different strings to their bow. And I just didn’t know what the next thing was, but I knew there was going to be a next thing. And so I still am very actively involved in my property business or our property business. But it’s no longer the bulk of where I’m focusing and investing my time in my efforts. It’s something that we’ve systemized operationalized in a lot of ways to require a lot less day to day input from me. And while going on that journey of building and scaling our property business, I started to gravitate more and more towards the things that people were asking me to do informally. So I got so many requests for, you know, mentorship where people would ask me questions or send me emails and I found that I loved helping other people with the expertise that was property specific that I was gaining, and always increasing but also with some of the bigger picture mindset related things that are true across the board, in business and in life. And as I did more and more of that work, I started to see well actually I love seeing the transformation I can help achieve another They’re people. And I want to find a way to do that with more of my time. And so that’s sort of how that shift started to happen. It happened very organically through my property work, but then I consciously chose to focus more and more on it, and then not just work with people in property, but work with founders work with other leaders. And now it’s, you know, literally companies and people with within organisations across all sectors and properties, just one small part of it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks for, you know, filling in the pieces there or joining those dots. Yeah, I think, you know, I think so, a lot of people think, you know, they have, they have to love probably, to get involved in property. And it’s, you just said kind of it was a means to an end, right? It was the ROI, which let you get to an R O T, you know, so your time, so from return investment, to return on time, a lot of people talk about financial freedom, which property is an obvious, you know, one of the obvious ways, not the only one that you can realise that achieve that. But you talked, you talked about time freedom. Yeah. And I think so many, a lot of people I’m speaking to as well, I talked about that time freedom, and more that it’s a means to an end. And the end is the time freedom, so they can do what they want with that time. Yeah, and in your case, speaking, writing, you know, corporate advisory or individual leadership advisory has become you know, the thing you want to do with your time by the sound of it, so

thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, it’s all very exciting. And I think, you know, everything we do can serve a purpose. And that’s one of the things that I think often trips people up is that they think that their career or their marriage, or their hobbies have to have a specific and all consuming meaning. But sometimes it’s just one thing, you know, your career can be the defining thing about you, or it can just be a thing that you do, that then enables you to fund what defines you or what you want to define yourself. And so, property can be many things for some people, you know, it is the end of itself, they love property, they love, you know, everything about it. For others, it is a means to a different end. And for others, it’s some something in between. And I think, fair enough, you know, as long as you’re acting with integrity, and with high standards and good values, then it’s okay, that it isn’t what one thing doesn’t become the be all end all of your existence, or your you know, self worth or your self identity or anything like that. And it can just play a part in the bigger picture of your life.

Yeah, there’s a couple of images coming into my mind as you’re talking and I’m hearing you, the patchwork quilt is sort of definitely, you know, that one that springs to mind. And I think, you know, we were multi dimensional, we’ve, you know, hopefully got a little bit more interest or, or interests about as then, you know, being you know, just about this or that the other. And I think sometimes if we peg ourselves to a certain outcome, what happens when we get that outcome? You know, we can find ourselves, you know, a little bit floundering. Maybe I had someone come talk to me or we, we bought a business recently. So that’s part of my migration. And yeah, I was kind of nudged along to talk about my wider purpose. You’re going this, this episode will follow the one I did with Kami, by the way. And so it was Kim even kind of pushed me and said, right, then rigid what that plan can share your personal vision. I kind of wasn’t, you know, wasn’t kind of ready for it. Anyway, I did. And it was obviously from the heart because I hadn’t scripted anything. Yeah. And someone came, a couple of people came up afterwards. And they said some nice things, which is great. But one of them actually said to me, I’m looking to find my purpose or refined, Rediscover, I think, rediscover my purpose, because I thought my purpose was my kids. Yeah. They’ve all grown up and left home now. Yeah. And I realised that, you know, I, you know, that was what I was living for. They were living for specifically. And now, they’re kind of they’re okay, they’re on their own. They don’t, they don’t really need me, you know. So what do I do with my life? Yeah, so I think and then, obviously, going through it, I gave her a couple of pointers, I should have points or your direction by itself. I know that I gave her a couple of pointers about how to perhaps rediscover that or reconnect with it, because I think it’s within all of us, but it takes some digging out and it can shift over time. 100% What do you think about that?

Yeah, no, it’s funny because, um, it’s something that I am also very conscious of, and, you know, have had conversations with others about and I think again, we can sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves to find our one purpose, maybe we have multiple purposes. And I, the key thing for me has always been to live a very open minded and experimental or have an experimental approach to life. And so, you know, for people like that woman who was asking you about, you know, how does she refine her purpose or find a new purpose? One of the things that I do, and I can say, from my own experience, but also from others, who I’ve sort of, you know, worked with on this is, just keep your eyes open, you know, if there’s a small little thing that strikes your fancy, try it out, you know, if all of a sudden, you know, some people, I don’t know, I’m making this totally up on the fly. But like, if you love watching Strictly Come Dancing, and you think, designate be fun, take a ballroom dancing class, right? I mean, there’s so many endless possibilities that we can all pursue, but we so often stop ourselves from exploring or experimenting, because we think, Oh, but you know, I’m too old, or it’s too late, or I’m going to SOC, or I don’t know where this is going. And that’s the whole point, you don’t know where it’s going. And sometimes it’s just worth going on the ride, to see where it goes. And I think a really poignant example, on this sort of idea of, of just going, where to go and where it goes, is years ago, when you and I talked, after one of our many conversations, you planted the seed to me about, Hey, have you ever considered doing a podcast, and I thought, Oh, I hadn’t until that second. But I thought, let me give it a go. It sounds like an interesting idea. I love having conversations with smart people and different people and folks from totally different backgrounds and industries, etc. Maybe it’ll be a fun thing. I didn’t then put all this pressure on myself to say, oh, but it has to be a number one best selling or, you know, highly rated podcast, and I need to get millions of downloads, and I need to find sponsors and monetize it. I just went on the ride, I started asking around, I came up with an idea for what the podcast would be generally about. But you know, I just had interesting conversations with interesting people and just took the ride for its own sake. And to this day, you know, some people listen to it. So a lot of people don’t, there’s been some really, really wonderful relationships, I’ve developed through it, some friendships that have come from it. And again, it hasn’t been anything that I’ve ever tried to force into being more than it is, I just let it be what it is. And so if at some point, it becomes something I can monetize, great, but if not, I’m still gonna have fun having these conversations and meeting these interesting people. And I think it’s similar in the bigger picture for others who are looking to find a purpose or something that excites them, I think it doesn’t even have to be your life’s purpose. It can just be something that keeps your life interesting. And just explore for the sake of exploring try things do things, if you’ve got the luxury to do it, then by all means, just go where the ride takes you.

Absolutely. By the way, bravo, I think I’m going to send this recording to the lady. She connects with you, but I maybe I don’t want to be too revealing. In the conversation that we had briefly. She, she’s, she’s that the environment in his office is really warm. And one of the reasons why it’s warm is that there’s a lot of cake. Okay, so and this particular lady is responsible for quite a lot of that cake, you know, and baking it. I mean, you know, stuff like that. And so that was one element, you know. And then the second element was she revealed to me that she’s involved in her local community. I call might be a little bit wrong about this, but I think it was more elderly, in local community. And I just, I just sort of said to her, I said, maybe there’s something in that cake and maybe, you know, just go with it, as you see. Maybe she’s working, she has a job. But the purpose could be outside of that, of course, doesn’t have to be her day job. But you know, of course, making cakes, which is you know, I think she obviously puts her love. Yeah, yeah. And then the, you know, the community element. You know, obviously, who’s gonna who’s gonna criticise that? Yeah. So I don’t know. I’m gonna have to recap, catch up with it, because I do remember. And it did plan to go back circle back and just go has that thought process going. But you started this by saying like little seeds, wasn’t it? Yeah. You said I sewed that little seed and then yes, you know, I don’t want to take too much credit for that. But you know, you

should you can

get you watered it Yeah. Etc. Yeah, that was that. The other thing I was gonna say just as a bit of a random thought. heard the other day. I think I’m right in saying this. You might know Rod Stewart. I’m not saying you might know Rod Stewart. Yeah, maybe do. But Rod Stewart apparently he’s got a hobby with model trains.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And the great thing about it is that sorry, I’m stealing your thunder, go for it. Richard, tell me where you’re going with this? Oh, no, I’m so sorry. I swear, I think the context in which I heard it was about how he’s also just really mediocre. He hasn’t tried to make it, this thing that he perfects, or that has taken over his life, it’s just something that he does for its own sake, and for his love of doing it. And, and, and, and I guess, connecting that to sort of the question that we started sort of answering together. Sometimes that’s okay. I think, again, this idea that everything has to lead somewhere, a hobby has to turn into a career or a career has to turn into a purpose, or, you know, a purpose has to turn into our life’s meaning and legacy. It can, but it doesn’t have to. And the great thing about as you said earlier, all of us human beings being multi dimensional and multifaceted and multi interested, is that we can tell we can be mediocre and happy at lots of different things. And, you know, Rod Stewart also played semi professional or maybe not even semi pro football, you know, he didn’t turn that turn it into this desperate thing of like, oh, but now I have to, you know, be you know, become a Rangers starting, you know, starting captain or whatever. He’s like, That’s just something I did, because I enjoy doing it. And so, the model, the model trains thing, I think, Gosh, I wish I remembered now why?

I know where it came. Now. We know why we I know why we both know it. Because you tip me off. You’ve tipped me off on a couple of books recently. And the most recent one is 4000 weeks.

Yes. That’s exactly where we’re getting it from. Yeah, yeah, I

was. I couldn’t remember what it was in the newspaper.

Yeah, thank you for remembering that. That’s exactly what it was. Yeah.

No, exactly. Right. And if I actually that’s a really good book, thank you for the recommendation, my pleasures, they flips the whole idea of like time hacking and productivity on its head, and it really talks about what is important. Yeah. And you’ve just summarise it. So well, I don’t need to really reiterate, it doesn’t have to be a big deal. Yes. Your deal?

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And to give yourself the luxury to also change, what’s the big deal, or what’s a little deal in your life, and that’s okay, you know, again, like maybe going full circle, like, one thing doesn’t have to be everything, you know, you can get emotional satisfaction from one thing, physical, you know, and sort of, well being satisfaction from something else, professional and intellectual self satisfaction for others, like, we can create these hodgepodge as of, of where we’re getting our sensitive filament, and it’s okay to do it that way.

Yeah, that reminds me of John, Dr. John Demartini. There, because he always talks about, we’re always in balance with challenging support, in particular, he was talking about, but we’re always in balance. And he went on to say, so is it there’s always an equilibrium, otherwise saying balance on it, or whatever. And if you feeling you know, you, you’ve got a particular relationship or scenario or situation where you’re a bit too stretched, and you haven’t quite got the support? Well, he’s basically saying in your wider life, you will get compensated with support, perhaps elsewhere. So you don’t always look for equilibrium or balance in one place, or the one relationship. And I think that’s really important. That’s one thing I wanted to bring up. And the second thing, you know, you’ll have a lot of wisdom to add to this. The second thing is about change. And so funnily enough, there’s somebody recently who, there was a recent acquisition and the role that they had was already starting to change. And then we identified it probably needs to change a bit more. And there was there was struggling, and they couldn’t initially cope with that. And actually, though, after a lot of wrestling and struggle, and possibly thinking it was an external issue, that person turned around and said, actually, it’s internal. I realise now that I was going on that path, but isn’t my path. Yeah. And so what they actually said is, I’m going to quit, but we have a really nice conversation literally today. And we talked about change, and this change the choose, and this change is chosen for us. And then sometimes we have to respond, especially sort of change that, you know, thrust upon us. Yeah. And that’s what that person has now done. And now they’re a piece of it, actually a piece so they haven’t Quit in a temper. And they haven’t quit going, I hate you I hate this place. It’s actually really nice. And they’re going to find their new path. Yeah, which might bring maybe take them back to a place they were before that. And that’s absolutely cool. And realistic to think that you’re going to have 40 year service and a gold watch and things like that, in the modern era. So anyway, I said, that’s just a couple of anecdotes. So I bet you’ve got something to come back on report.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think sort of. So that first point of things, being in a universal balance, but it is an individual imbalance is so so true. And it’s one of the things that it’s just a fact of life, but where we make it harder for ourselves and where the world tells us we have how the world makes it harder for us is this idea of, and I hate the phrase so much, because it’s just total bullshit is work life balance. First of all, there’s no separation between work and life, work is part of your life and your life you bring into your work, so there’s no separation at all. So even the idea of having balance between the two suggests that there is a separation, which there isn’t. But secondly, this idea that balance is the goal is also just unrealistic. Life is all about managing the sort of teetering and tottering of what it means to be human. But in the bigger picture, where there’s been a skew over time, that will rebalance itself. It’s just not in any one instance. So for example, I know that I have certain things that I care about fundamentally and I value and big picture, its health, like my personal physical and physical and nutritional health, it’s family, and it’s my work because my work helps me make an impact, positive impact. Now, at any given moment, I’m doing pretty well on one, and okay on another and really shit a third. And I know that that’s just how it is because I am one person with a finite amount of time, energy, you know, resources, headspace, all that kind of stuff. And if I told myself, I had to balance it all perfectly, I drive myself crazy, I’d get really frustrated, I put unrealistic demands on myself, and it just wouldn’t work. And what I do very consciously, instead is say, you know, what, I know, this is the one thing that I’m going to let slide for now. So in the present moment, where I am much more focused on my family, because I’ve got a one year old daughter and a four year old and you know, there’s a lot of, there’s just a lot I don’t want to miss, excuse me, and a lot that I thank you and a lot that I want to be present for. And also in my work, you know, there’s been some really wonderful momentum that’s building that I don’t want to stop. And so my physical fitness I have consciously chosen to put on the backburner. Of course, I make sensible choices. In the interim anyway, it’s not like I’ve turned from, you know, eating salads to eating crisps and nothing else. But you know, it’s again, consciously choosing that that is not going to get the best of me at the moment. And that’s okay. And then when the tables are a little bit different, when my kids are a little bit older, maybe less, or whatever else it is, then maybe I can dial it up on my sort of refocusing on my health, and never, ever letting any one of those things totally go. But choosing which one is going to get less of my priorities. And it really is just about making those choices very consciously, instead of forcing ourselves to try to unrealistically perfect them, because that’s what people always are talking about, when they talk about balance, they’re never talking about actual balance, they’re talking about perfection about whatever standard they’ve created for themselves, or that has been foisted on them. And to get it all right, well, I’m sorry, that’s just not going to happen. So take that as a fact of life, because it is, and then make your choices very, very specifically and very consciously about what you’re going to let slip and what you’re going to focus on. I think that, you know, is a really big part of it. And then it also ties into this idea that you raised about change. Again, it’s that inevitability that things will change. And as you said, so well, sometimes it’s changed that we choose, sometimes it’s changed that is foisted upon us, but we have to choose how we are going to respond to that change. And we all have that choice. We can choose to, you know, the example you raised earlier, we can choose to be gracious about it and see it as an opportunity for growth or reflection or introspection. Or we can throw our toys out of the pram and say no, this is you know, I’m going to sort of scream into the wind and fight this, even though it’s the fight, I can’t win. And so again, being conscious about the battles we’re choosing, being thoughtful about the choices we’re making, is all we can ever do. And it’s that’s part of what it is to be a grown up and to be a human being. And so it’s you know, it’s it’s nice to talk about these things in very sort of profound big picture ways. But at the end of the day, we are all Making choices. And the difference between, you know, those of us who are having these kinds of conversations is that we’re doing them consciously instead of letting them be made for us.

Very good. Very points well made, I could come back on so many of you said it so eloquently. I don’t need to I don’t think so. But one thing I do think I would like to dwell on a little bit there is the idea you’re saying about, you know, we’re, we’re whole person. So how can you split and be imbalanced? And things like that? So I totally get that. Absolutely. And then you talk about, you know, making choices, and then conscious choices to either let that sort of physical exercise thing go because you’ve got other priorities now, and that’s cool. But just Roopa? Let me ask you this question. Yeah. Were you born with that way of thinking? Did you get some top software plugin, waking up one day with an epiphany? And how did you realise that, you know, that it just,

it’s so no, I definitely did not wake up with any sort of download that, that others weren’t given. For me, it’s been an evolution and, and, you know, I’m, I’m a nerd apart. So I love to learn, I love having conversations with people, I love drawing on random sources for inspiration and information. And, you know, I’m an avid reader, but I’m also an avid thinker. And so, I would say, all of these, perhaps, you know, maybe more introspective and reflective, and maybe even philosophical points that we’ve just discussed, and things that I’ve started to realise, I’ve only really been thinking about for the better part of the past 10 years. So I spent the first, you know, three fourths of my life to aid yourself.

I just did, but I don’t think anyone’s going to do the math for you know, effectively for the first you know, three or four years of my life just being, you know, sort of, I wouldn’t say a typical human, but doing the thing of like, you know, not really, not really being, too. How can I say it, I guess not being conscious of a lot of the things that I’m now conscious of. So I’ve always, I’ve always been enabled, gays are part of what being a nerd looks like, for me is that I’ve always been somewhat introspective, and somewhat sort of what does it all mean? And, and that’s part of what has fueled my, my, my passion for just learning and drawing on different sources. But actually taking that knowledge, and then using it and filtering it and finding ways to make it applicable to my life, I haven’t really done a good job of, until the past 10 years or so. And so, yeah, as I said, it’s an evolution, it’s, it’s been something that again, sort of like what we were talking about earlier, I’ve just sort of followed the leads and followed the interesting trails, or I’ve had a conversation with someone who’s recommended a book, and then I’ve read another book, you know, it’s again, it’s been, it’s that open mindedness and, and that creativity, or not creative curiosity, both about the world, but also about myself, and how I operate, and then trying to understand how can I, you know, sort of operate at my best, how can I, you know, tap or tap into more of my potential or even test to see what it is and that kind of thing. And so, yeah, it’s been a slow, but I guess, steady process, but really very focused and conscious. Yeah, for only for about the past decade or so.

Yeah, brilliant, I think so many things again, come out of that. And I was just reflecting because, you know, you’re, I would call I’m a lifelong learner, I, you know, whatever language you use, you know, your, your, you use the word curious. And I think that’s such an important word. Because if you’re curious, then you will just follow those little breadcrumb trails. And then it’s amazing what you can discover. And if you’ve got that philosophy, or that attitude of lifelong learning, or personal growth, that’s what can get you to these places that we’re talking about. But I was trying to illustrate the point that it wasn’t, it isn’t, you know, use the whole software download. Because it isn’t like that. And, Raj, when you talk about evolution, and evolution is not necessarily a straight line. Now. First of all, it’s not necessarily without its struggles, either. So I think, you know, that’s just me reflecting back a little bit on that, just to say that, you know, I’m not gonna reveal any of our, you know, deeper conversations, but you know, it hasn’t always been plain sailing. It hasn’t. We’re all about stuff. So, I think having that consciousness having, making a deliberate choice, not what’s important, I think, is the key takeaway there and change will happen whether we wanted or,

exactly. And Richard, I mean, to be honest, for me, there are two fundamental things that I that always sort of, that I always keep in the forefront. First and foremost is I am really freakin lucky. So yes, you know, you and I have had lots of conversations offline about very specific challenges and obstacles and difficult periods. And all, you know, my life has not been, as you said, plain sailing, and most people’s aren’t right, we all face challenges and obstacles and difficult periods and downtimes in different degrees and in different ways. And so that is a very, again, human experience. And it’s not something that I have somehow managed to float above. But I know that, fundamentally, I am a lucky human being, because I have my health, I have people I love and who love me. And in the grand scheme of things, I have a really damn good life, I don’t have you know, I have food on the table, I have a warm, you know, warm shelter, and, and people who love me. And so that reality is something that we always take for granted. And it’s something that I have chosen to not take for granted, and to see for what it is, which is the biggest blessing ever, you know, and it’s not something to take lightly. And it is something that is just, you know, helps me keep perspective on any of those times when I am feeling down or low or worried or anxious or going through a tough spot. Yes, the challenges are there, they’re always going to be there. But fundamentally, my life is really, really good. And it’s, it’s safe. And it’s and it’s comfortable. You know, I hate to take things back to like the global political sort of arena. But like, you know, we don’t live in Afghanistan. We don’t live in Syria, we don’t live in hundreds of other countries around the world where just day-to-day living is a struggle. And so fundamentally, we’re all really damn lucky. If you can have time and the luxury to be able to listen to a podcast, then you’re doing pretty well, you know, pretty well for yourself. So that’s one thing. And then the second thing is, in a non depressing way, I’m also very conscious of how damn short life is. And that book 4000 weeks? Well, we were Yeah, exactly 4000 weeks on average. And at this point in my life, I’ve effectively cut through half of them, right. So I’m very aware that time is running out. But it’s, you know, my time on this planet is finite. And I want to make sure that I don’t waste it to the, to the extent that I can, I don’t want to waste it in any capacity, I don’t want to waste it, you know, being unhappy, I don’t want to waste it, not doing things that I can do or not experimenting, I don’t want to waste it, just doing the same thing over and over again. And so for me, curiosity, creativity and engagement are really, really important. And so again, anytime there is this sense of like, oh, this is a tough patch, or you know, this is really hard at the moment, or whatever, I always force myself to remember like, this is your one shot, what are you going to do to get through this so that you can then meet the next challenge, and you can then have another story to tell and you can then you know, keep going. But you know, those two things being really lucky, which we all are all of your listeners are in some really fundamentally important ways. But also not wasting the time that we’ve got obsessing over the problems, obsessing over the negatives, and just getting shit done and doing our thing and getting it effectively sort of getting out of our own way to do it. Because time will be will be gone before we know it.

Yeah, and as humans, you know, the whole Maslow’s needs hierarchy, basic, you know, food, shelter, security, etc. that you’ve just highlighted. So well, there’s lots of places in the world that don’t have, you know, those bases you’re living in, you know, and I think, you know, first world problems, right, we were listening to, we’re talking on the podcast, you know, laptops and phones all around us and stuff. And, you know, my Skype went off earlier in the call, and I was like, a little bit irritating. But it’s a first world problem is going off on my laptop when I’m recording a podcast with my buddy. So I’m not worried about a bullet in my back. Or, you know, something like that, or, you know, it could be a tennis player in China or something.

I know. Well, and look, first of all problems are still problems, right? So there’s the thing like, yes, it’s important to have perspective, but also your realities, your reality. So of course, it’s going to feel more important and bigger and, and more meaningful and whatever else. And that’s always going to be true, and that’s fine. But my point is then to flip that on its head and say, Look, this is a first world problem. I live in a quick, you know, quote, unquote, the first world like, I have no excuse to not make whatever it is out of my life that I wanted to be so I have, you know, no excuse not to learn all the things, do all the things be all the things that I think I want to be or at least explore, because I have that luxury, you know, if we don’t take advantage of our privilege and not advantage in an extractive a negative way, but If we don’t, you know, use our privilege for everything that has given us to live the self-actualized lives or whatever you want to call it, then what a waste. You know, why don’t we’re just throwing it out the window, these first-world conditions that we find ourselves in, we’re really lucky, we have no excuse to not make the most of our lives.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, we talked about the opportunity side of you know, where we are, and even if you happen to be listening to this in a developing country, or something that, hopefully, because you’re listening to this, you have certain opportunities, as well. And I think the other side of it, you did actually touch on, I don’t know, if we’ve got a deputy still with me, Rupert, by the way, is, yeah, just checking this. First of all problem with the other side of you, he did touch on it, which, which was being grateful for what we do, and just recognizing that, and you will sort of mentioned about just sort of being in the moment and enjoying that. Because by the way, which you did say on average, 4000 weeks, everybody knows 4000 weeks, you know, so that’s another thing to keep in mind, a sense of perspective. So, you know, live, live the day, seize the day, etc. It doesn’t mean we necessarily have to go, go, go, go, go-go, because, but, you know, just make the most of what we have, and enjoy the journey and the ride. Yeah,

and also knowledge, the little things that, you know, the luxuries, we have to be annoyed at Skype or zoom or whatever. And, and, you know, this is perhaps maybe too personal and insight, but I often get so irritated at my husband for leaving soapsuds on the dishes, when before he you know, before he puts them on the drying rack, and it annoys me to no end. And I always remind myself, be thankful that you have a husband to be irritated at right? Be thankful that he is a healthy partner in my life, who’s willing to do that, you know, all of these little things that we get irritated that it comes up in that 4000 weeks book, actually, at one point where, you know, this, this, one of the people cited in the book is talking about how they lost a friend suddenly to cancer. And anytime that person is that in traffic, they’re like, You know what, this friend who passed away from cancer wouldn’t give to be stuck in traffic. You know, it’s like the little irritations that we experience in our lives. Again, we’re lucky enough to be alive to experience them. So at least be thankful for that.

Certainly, it’s funny, I happened to be looking at Facebook earlier. And I hasten to add, I don’t spend a lot of time these days, thankfully. But it was it was my niece’s birthday. So thank you, Facebook, for reminding me about my niece’s birthday. So that’s one of the useful things that Facebook, I’d send her a little message obviously stimulated by that notification. And now I kind of was in you know, there was a scrolling little thing that’s just for a few minutes report, I’m sure you won’t judge too much. To her there was a must, must follow this page, you’ve got a nice full power positivity or something, or maybe somebody shared it from that page. And so it’s called The Power of positivity. But the the little banner or quote or question that they pose was, what is a non-negotiable are not acceptable in a partner or something to that effect. Which, by the way, didn’t think was very positive. Yeah, but I just had a little scuffle this, I just wonder what people are writing. And it was like, Oh, my Goodness me. You know, how did anybody ever choose me? You know, I mean, you know, to be a partner. I mean, I probably leave soapsuds on the dishes. But I’m quite pleased, because the I think one of the two things that seem to pop up a lot were bad hygiene. Yeah. Yeah. And, and being unkind. Yeah. to people and animals actually falling out. So I think I’ll pass those two tests most. So, you know, that’s probably what you know, my wife sees me, I’m sure. If we do lose the sense of perspective, some people have lists, this can’t be that can’t be the other. I’m like, and then for somebody if somebody had a list, and they finished it, oh, now I realise why I’m single. always drawn into it. Then I caught myself because obviously, I knew the algo was kind of work. Could have been sucked in and I bet you know, I’m gonna see a load of power positivity. Yeah, you are gonna feed you know. Anyway, thanks, Facebook, but I’ll leave it there. So, I think I really wanted to get into a little bit of you, you just dropped it in in the beginning, because you said I like to speak a lot and I like to write a lot, you know, and I know you’re also doing some work with mentor coaching, you know, that sort of thing. If I got the three, kind of Yeah. So just, you just dropped a bomb on me before we went Live? Yeah. You told me about your book. Can I just say, I just want you to talk about it a little bit? Yeah. It’s a blatant plug. Well, yeah, maybe it is. But whatever I don’t want us to talk about, well, first of all, tell us what it is and when. And let’s just talk about the process and how that came about and everything.

So the book is called from CIA to CEO, unconventional life lessons for thinking bigger, leading better and being bolder. And it is going to be published with a big UK publisher in a few months time, it’s already available for pre order on Amazon. So anyone shameless plug here, please go check it out and preorder it. But the book is effectively that you know, the subtitle about thinking bigger, leading better and being bolder, it’s a distillation of all of the things that I’ve learned that I’ve developed, that I’ve come up with, for myself and for others, around those three, three sort of topics. And it is another perfect example of sort of, following the leads, tuning into your intuition and just being open minded and willing to explore. So way back when I mean, literally way back, when, from the ages of when I was maybe five or six years old, I’ve always loved to write, I’ve always written I’ve always enjoyed the process of perfectly capturing an idea or, or a setting or, or anything, I just love the intellectual stimulation and the power of words. So I’ve always written. And it’s always been a lifelong goal for me to write a book, and to publish a book, not just write one. And so again, sort of in the, I would say, past 10 or so years now, I started to finally get serious about it. I’ve always written in some capacity personally, and always in some capacity through my profession. But finally starting to get serious about it. So back in 2013, I think I wrote a fiction book. And it was a fictionalised account of my time in the intelligence services, and was effectively an homage to, to my career at the CIA, to the people and the friendships that I developed there. And it was, I wrote it right after I had left the agency and was transitioning into this private sector business world. And it felt like the right time. And so I thought that was my book, that was the one that was going to be published. And so I did all the things, I reached out to agents, and I wanted to publish it traditionally. And then, you know, whether you believe in the sort of metaphysics of it or not, effectively the Muse just last week, and I had gotten it to the point where I had two different agents, who were potentially interested in representing me and this book, but they wanted me to make some edits. And I just, I didn’t have it in me. And it wasn’t the work that was required. It was this again, I’ll say metaphysical because I don’t know what else it can be. It just, it felt like the muse, the passion, the story wasn’t there anymore. And it was there physically, there was a book, but it wasn’t in me anymore. So that just collected dust. And it’s still there collecting sort of published, it’s not been published. And so, so that would, but again, it served a purpose, I guess, going again, full circle, it served a purpose. And that it, you know, it was a tribute to my friends who I made while I was there was a tribute to my career to the work that I did, and to the experiences that I had. And it served that purpose, but not necessarily or at least not to date, the one of publishing anyway, so you know, but I kept writing and I did follow the leads, didn’t know where it was gonna go, I, you know, started writing a blog that nobody read, because I didn’t tell anybody about it, started writing a blog that I did tell people about, and they started reading it and you know, I get feedback and all this great stuff. And then I started writing magazine articles and, and, and so it was just being open to the opportunity to write for its own sake, because I loved doing it because I thought I had useful ideas and value to share with others. And then probably it all started to crescendo, again, maybe two to three years ago where I felt like okay, I’ve got a book, I’ve got a book, I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got a book and again, following the breadcrumb trail, you know, being open all that great stuff. And then finally, it got so that that sort of feeling or that momentum, so almost physically painful that I was like, Okay, I have to make this happen. And it wasn’t anything that I again sort of preordained and was like, This is what it’s going to be about and this is where it’s going blah, blah, blah. It was an evolution, you know, and it was a bit meandering. But I sat down and then finally started to take it seriously, just take this project to take the book and what it could be and what?

yeah. So yeah. So finally, it got to a point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It was that that energy was almost physically bursting forth. And, and so I, you know, I started to think about, well, what is one of the messages I want to put out there. And I realized that a lot of the work that I was doing one on one with leaders or founders or just unofficially, as a mentor, or, you know, in conversations I was having with friends, and it was these three, big three topics, you know, getting people to develop a bigger mindset, thinking bigger, leadership comes up a lot, obviously, in business settings, and how you can be a better leader and in a nontraditional sense, be a better leader. And then this idea of being bolder in all aspects of our lives, because that was one of the journeys that I went on was, you know, going from being, I guess, much more limited in what I thought I would achieve, not what I could achieve, but what I would achieve. And to finally realising Well, actually, I can, pretty much we all can make pretty much anything happen, if we just try and use it, there’s not it’s not that simple. But you know, there’s, there’s a way to do it. And so, so that’s what I started doing is, you know, I sat down and I did all the structured stuff, I you know, I worked with some really wonderful people to help me make the ideas coherent, and give them a structure. And, and then again, it was one of those beautiful things of it just all started to fall into place. So one of the people that I was working with, who’s a common contact of ours, Richard, she introduced me to someone who then introduced me to my now literary agent, and my literary agent was the one who then went around and shopped my book around to various publishers. And we had in the end, five offers actually five author offers from big publishing companies. And we went with, you know, the, the one we went with now, which is Bonnie a UK. And it was, you know, in many ways, it was just, the momentum had finally built, and the stars were starting to align. And it was, of course, I did the work, I laid the foundation, all that great stuff. But, you know, it’s that idea that you make your own luck. And if I hadn’t done any of those things, you know, the outcome would have potentially been totally different. But I was willing to just ride the ride, and then jump on the opportunities as they presented themselves. And, and so now we have a book that’s available on Amazon, and it’s gonna be published in a few months.

I’m really pleased you just shared so much of that story. And I know it isn’t the full story. But even now, but I think I’m so pleased that you did because it takes us through a cycle and a journey. I didn’t actually know you’d written that first book or didn’t remember me, you had told me and I couldn’t remember. But, by the way, when we’re talking about publishing a book, I mean, I’m just about to launch my third book. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully not too far away. But I’m self publishing. Okay. And you’ve got like a full on big dog, you know, publishing deal. And I think money change hands and things like that. So yeah. And I remember when we were first connecting, you were talking about your book, idea and project and it was, you know, it was a vision, a goal. A dream. Yeah. Passion. Yeah. I don’t believe you had any words on paper at that point. Now, it didn’t.

You know, it’s interesting, Richard, because I think so many of us do this thing of wishing for stuff. We say, Oh, I wish I could do this. Or I wish I could do that. And, and again, as can do as I am, I found myself doing that with my book. And I’d often say, oh, gosh, you know, I want to write a book. And it was, you and a few other people who asked the very obvious question, well, what’s it about? And when are you going to start writing it? And it sounds so obvious because it is, but too often we do this right? We take these big dreams and big ambitions or small dreams and small ambitions that we just keep them very theoretical and amorphous. And we say, Oh, I wish and then we think that’s enough where we leave it at that, but everything again, is eminently doable and eminently possible, but you just have to start doing it. And so it was that question of well, what’s it about? You know, what, when are you going to start writing it that finally gave me that nudge? To say, okay, yes, I need some accountability here, I’m not going to just do it on my own, because I haven’t done it to a point. And I need someone to help me with the structure. I know generally what it’s going to be about. But, you know, I know where my sort of weak points are in the creative process, and it’s in the structure and it’s in the accountability. And so, I work with someone who gave me both of those things, you know, gave me homework, gave me deadlines gave me all of that great stuff to get the ball rolling. Again, I did all of the work, but I had someone helped me along the way, a wonderful person who just got me going, and, and if that hadn’t happened, then the book wouldn’t have happened, right? It’s not that I’m all of a sudden, somehow more capable and more, you know, a more qualified author. You know, because I have a book deal. No, I’m the same person. It’s just I actually did the work to make the book a reality. And so you know, it’s some it is sometimes we are again, the our own worst enemies by keeping these goals and these ambitions to theoretical when sometimes all we need is a kick up the backside by some very, very kind and very supportive friends, but then also the actual practical, you know, support coaching, whatever it is of someone to just get us to get shit done and get it out there.

Yeah, so much good stuff that I’m going to just read something to you that I read on social media this morning fessing up, this isn’t this is now on LinkedIn. So I’ve been on Facebook and LinkedIn already today. So I better watch out. But this one’s probably a little bit more, I think more valuable than the power prosumer or whatever it was positivity one that I referred to earlier. Do you recognize it? So I’m just going to read it. Do you recognise? It says affirmation without discipline is the beginning of illusion.

Yes, or should I put that out there? It’s not mine. It’s Jim Rohn. But it’s, yeah, I shared that at a LinkedIn post. Whatever it was, yeah.

But the point about so affirmation, you know, manifestation and vision, visioning. And you know, all that stuff, wanting something and wanting outcome. But the obviously this, the other side of that coin, is the one you were kind of alluding to, and that’s what reminded me. Discipline, and discipline can come from within, and if you maybe don’t quite have enough of it, but maybe it can also come from without

100% 100%. You know, I think, you know, again, going back to this bigger picture stuff, but also so yeah, so I worked with a book coach, because she gave me the homework, the deadlines, the accountability, the structure, all of that great stuff. And, you know, similarly, you and I offline, were talking about, you know, Jessica Ennis Hill, she didn’t become an Olympic heptathlete on her own Yes, for capability was always there. Yes, she did all the work in the training, but she worked with some damn good coaches to help her get out of her own way to give her the structure, the accountability, the tips, the tweaks, all that great stuff. And it’s that combination of innate ability that is then, you know, sort of just helped along the way. Again, nobody else is doing the work for you. But it’s helping it out making it that much better making the tweaks providing, you know, the various external things, whether it is, you know, discipline or structure or whatever that some of us might need help getting and that’s fine. You still did the work right. Just Hill isn’t any less of a heptathlete because she has a coach that if she tried to do it on her own, if anything, she is a heptathlete because she did have a coach and did have both so so yeah, we often overcomplicate it when the answers are, are sometimes really obvious. And the support is really easily available. And we just make it harder than it needs to be. So yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, Richard, that combination of the affirmation, yes, have the self belief, have the vision have the goal, but you need to pair that with the discipline of action of a very targeted and specific action and just keep on doing it.

You got to do the work. I mean, you get things done really well for you right now, for example, and you’re blessed when grateful and humble with it, too. I know you are. But we were sort of speculating how many years it was before you became an overnight success. You know, we didn’t settle on the exact timeline, but you know, people see all of that necessarily just see oh, you know, okay, big, big deal. She’s a big shot. She’s got a book deal, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it was just Russell’s a struggle. I think that’s almost a because you said was it 2013 When you wrote the first book, which we’ll never see,

maybe who knows. I don’t know. My editor and my agent are sort of keen to at least even the manuscript in its current sort of unfinished state because No, maybe there is something in it. Who knows? There might be there might not be but at the end of the day, yeah, it’s there. So, you know, like I said it served a purpose, it might end up serving a different or additional purpose as well.

Everything has its time and its place. But there was another thing I just couldn’t help. Going back to this. There’s two things I want to say. The first is you come early, we’re talking about return on investment. And then we talked, I alluded to return on time, but flip to the time freedom that we had way back now. And but the other one, I’m looking at my whiteboard, because I’m going to do some writing about Yes, I’ve written down ROI, R O T. And the third is aro E. And you’ve probably guessed is energy. Energy. Absolutely. Well done for Chewning. return on energy, and I think, you know, so we sometimes we running low energy, or it’s not that we’re not placing in the right direction, and things happen, you know, you kind of illustrate that pretty well with the contrast, perhaps between the two books. So people should draw on that. The other thing I just want to say, and I hope I can keep it together as I say this, because I’m reminded actually, that, you know, there’s a saying that everybody’s got a book in them. Yeah. My father said that about himself. He passed away before he wrote his and, and you know, funnily enough, Dan Hill, who was also on the podcast couple of weeks ago, referred to another quotation, which I also love, which is don’t die. Don’t die with a music suicide of you. Yeah. Something to that effect. Yeah. And so, you know, it was a small tribute to my father, when I wrote my first little book, because he didn’t manage to get his out. And in fact, you know, he, he could see the incoming, I won’t go into too much detail, but he could see the time. And then he was even going to start and, you know, he was there, he had a little notebook, and he was gonna start doing it. And it’s just it was an unfinished manuscript. So I don’t know if that was, you know, I don’t know, for he didn’t publish it. And he didn’t write it. And I think, you know, I just want to tell you, I’ve taken that as a as a life lesson. Yeah. If you if you feel it’s right, and it’s inside of you. Love you have a good go.

Yeah, definitely.

It’s not criticism of my father. No, no. Inspiration, in many ways. So yeah, and,

you know, as you said, you know, everyone has a book in them. But sometimes that book might be a song, or that book might be a business, or that book might be a legacy of a different kind, you know, it doesn’t have to be an actual book, it just, it’s that thing of, you know, what is inside of you, you know, if you ever stopped the running around, and the putting out fires to tune into yourself what it is that wants to come out. Or it might even just be an inkling of something that wants to come out. And then again, you sort of follow the lead, and you see where it goes and ride that ride. But it’s, um, yeah, we all have something, you know, and it doesn’t have to be on a grand scale, it doesn’t have to be on any scale, it just has to be meaningful for you. And for you to feel like you brought something of yourself from within yourself into the world in some capacity. And for some people that might be their children. For some people, like I said, that might be a physical song, or a physical book, or some other way of bringing something out from within. But yeah, I mean, we all do, human beings are nothing if not creative, just by our very nature. And creative doesn’t mean you know, artistic or literary or any of those things. It’s we create things we create on a daily basis. We create ideas, we create stuff, we create relationships, and so it’s whatever that quote unquote, book looks like for you bring it out.

Yeah, well bring it out. Absolutely. So I think So yours is coming out. I think you can pre order as you say, is it?

Yeah, so yeah, so it’s coming out in May of 2022. But yeah, you can pre order it now. If you’re willing to wait a few months for it.

I’m gonna try. I’m gonna do that, by the way. Wonderful. Thank you, by the way, I think authors need to get, you know, the credit and you know, for their work, so I always buy books, you know, and sometimes somebody sometimes some people do send them to me or give to me, but I don’t ask, but I will buy it. I will link in the show notes. And I’m sure, by the way, you know, he can probably tell just by listening to report, the show, the book is going to be amazing, right? Your your thought processes, the depth and the breadth of your knowledge, your vocabulary, your sensitivity to different things, you know, it’s gonna be a really good read. I wouldn’t have any hesitation. I’m not just picking it up because you’re there on the other side. conversation. I can’t actually see you right now because obviously you turn the video Hello. Yeah, maybe I’ve made you blush a little bit No, no, I’m probably I think, just to keep keep the book theme a little bit. So yes, the next chapter Rupo what’s the next chapter? Not literally?

Yeah. You know, I think there are more books actually in me. They’re speaking of tributes. Um, there’s a way that I would haven’t figured out what it’s going to look like yet, but I would love in some capacity to. And I hope I hold it together now. To pay tribute to my, my family and, and my lineage. And, you know, I said earlier about how I am so fundamentally lucky. And I know I hit the jackpot of life being born into my family. And, and I learned such an incredible amount from my parents, first and foremost, but my grandparents who I was lucky enough to have lived with us for most of my life. I mean, I all four of my grandparents were with me until I was in my 20s. And one grandparent is now she’s in her 90s. And she’s still here. And so I had such a, again, a breadth and a wealth of wisdom, that I just grew up around passively. And so much of who I’ve become a, you know, upon reflection, has, of course, been moulded and shaped by my experience, and my family, as you know, it is for all of us. But there’s, there’s so much more than that, that is universal, that I’d love to share with the world and in some capacity. So I think, you know, it’s not just gonna be a tribute to my family, and like, this is how amazing everyone is. And as with all families, we’ve had, you know, we’ve got our quirks that are maybe darker side. But yeah, to encapsulate it somehow I think there’s, there’s definitely something there. So yeah, I think that’s one of the projects that I’m you know, I’m really excited about thinking through, and I’m lucky again now to have, you know, the support from a publisher and an agent who will help me make something really wonderful from, you know, some of the various book ideas I’ve got. So, yeah, I’m actually on the hook to have an initial chat about what the next book is going to be like. So that’s exciting. Yeah. Um, and then Richard, I don’t know what, you know, I would love to just keep doing more of what I’m doing. But I also know that, you know, the world is an interesting and ever changing place. And so I’m happy to just see where things go, you know, I don’t like to plan or, or make definitive statements about anything other than, you know, I know, fundamentally, that whatever I do is going to have a large element of giving back of helping other people of indulging my curiosity and my creativity. And, and let’s just see how it goes and where it goes from here.

Fantastic. Well, I mean, you still got a podcast, right? Do you?

Yeah, it’s on hold at the moment, I’m not doing any more live, or not doing any more new episodes until after the book is launched, just because that’s that is taking up quite a lot of my creative energy. But it but it’s still there that the back catalogue, has some fantastic people on it. It’s really, really wonderful conversations. And then yeah, I’m planning on sort of relaunching it in a few months.

Are you doing something to keep the momentum going in while you’re taking a break? From

the podcast? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, I’m just reminding people that it’s there.

Okay, well, maybe, maybe not for now. But if you listen in maybe next week, because yeah, Shiggy, who does my podcast production? And he’s absolutely amazing. And kind of a bit bonkers at times. But we had a really good conversation about that. And this is all the reason why these chats have come about is it’s a bridge between the old podcast and new podcast, and she’s got some ideas about how the bridge can be built and extended. The podcast can still be there, even though I’m not necessarily there on hardware that share that with you offline. But I just wanted to go back to the family quickly, because I know we’re with a time element. But I can’t leave this conversation about something you said. You said your father, what do you say your father said?

Yeah, he’s well, yeah, he’s he’s given me lots of pearls that, you know, I didn’t register at the time and only now with some sort of reflection and wisdom of age, I guess. But when I think I was in college, so you know, late teens, early 20s, when he said to me, and I cannot remember the context, but he’s like Ruby, you know, there will be times in your life where no matter what you do, everything will go wrong. And there will be times in your life where no matter what you do, everything you touch will turn to gold. And that has been such a strangely reassuring And true sort of prediction to the extent that he meant it to be. But what I find so liberating about it in some counterintuitive ways that no matter what you do part, so sometimes, actually, all the times, we cannot control the outcome, we just do what we do, and we try our best, and we give it a go and all that great stuff. But regardless, sometimes we’ll fall flat on our faces or the world will shut us down or shut us out or, or other times, we’ll do the same thing. And it’ll all of a sudden, you know, turn into this beautiful, amazing thing. But there is an element of just real reassurance in that, you know, it just yeah, like I said, just focus on doing you doing what you do doing it with integrity, with honesty, with your values as a compass, all that, you know, wonderful sort of stuff. And then just in a, I guess, almost like a Zen slash Buddhist way, you know, let go of the obsession of knowing what the outcome is going to be and trying to force it because it’s not, you know, sometimes again, no matter what you do,

yeah, it’s a kind of, what’s your father’s name? I want to give him credit, cuz I’m going to use that quotation

and just go for it. His name is Yogendra. Oh, okay. Yeah,

I might need to, just to check the spelling. Yeah, of course. I would love to give him the credit for that. Yeah. And I think it’s a really fitting way, I was going to come back with a couple of other bits, but we’re, we’ve clocked the time group, or would you be surprised? Yeah, we’ve kind of maybe done slightly a little bit more. What a shock with you. And I, I could, I could literally keep talking. And maybe we will after after we start. This is a good time maybe to draw a line anything. And that quotation that you saying, you know, and you’re in a good phase right now where, you know, most whatever you’re doing is going well, then, you know, you’re grateful for it. And it’s, and it’s well deserved. And after a lot, a lot, a lot of hard work and creative energy. So, you know, don’t underestimate what it takes to get to the place. But equally, if there were times where it was maybe dark, it wasn’t so good. You know that’s, you know, that’s going to happen, but that it will pass as well. So, exactly. Thank you so much report. I mean, I really enjoyed our conversation. We didn’t know where it was going to go. Exactly. Yeah. We, we just have a lot of fun. I have a lot of fun. Me too. Okay, good. Well, I didn’t want to make any assumptions. And hopefully, the audience has got a lot out of it. And if they want to connect with you recall, what would be the easiest way right now?

Yeah, just go to my website. It’s ripple y patel.com. Easy enough. And I, you know, contact me through that I always respond. And yeah, I’d always, you know, be I’m always open to connecting with folks.

And you’re well worth connecting to. So thanks again. I’m just going to do the quick outro. And really, you know, thanks so much for coming, joining me in the sort of internet or Rianne. During conversations. I didn’t know what they were going to lead to my pleasure, common threads, which I might reflect on, by the way. Cool. Yeah. But anyway, that’s sort of see how it all goes. So here we go. Thanks very much for listening once again this week to the proxy wars podcast with my guest, Rupert Patel. And the show notes are going to be over the website, the property voice.net If you want to connect with me or talk about anything from today’s show, or you can’t remember Rupert’s email address. So website, you can connect with me podcasts at the bottom voice.net and I pass it on to you. There’s going to be some links in the show notes. Guess what, they’ll be a book link probably. And that website and you know the I’m going to credit your father with that beautiful quotation there. So thanks very much for listening once again this week, and until next time on the property boys podcast, just catch up

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Today I am joined on the show by Kemi Egan, who is a property investor, author and entrepreneur.

She should be familiar to our audience having joined me on other episodes over the years, including during the Women in Property series a while ago.

Kemi and I have been friends for some time. We became increasingly aware that we also shared a similar vision to support causes beyond ourselves, common values and also aligned business interests. It was therefore no surprise that we would find a way to collaborate as business partners in some way or another.

That’s the essence of this episode in a way; how we came to business partners, what we decided to do in business and then the crazy year that we have seen this year in business together as a result.

We speak about how we set out first goal for the year, which we labelled as ‘1X’. Then, what triggered us to reset that goal to ‘3X’, which at the time was quite random and truly without foundation. Then, assuming the ‘in flight’ deals land in time, how we may well land at ‘7X’, all being well.

This takes us on a journey through selecting business partners, looking beyond roles and capital contributions. How to take care of one another in business, goal-setting, business development and business execution strategies to some extent too.

It’s been quite a year; some would say a game changing one. So, have a little listen and see what nuggets you can take away and apply into your own business; property or otherwise…

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Today I am joined on the show by Kemi Egan, who is a property investor, author and entrepreneur.

She should be familiar to our audience having joined me on other episodes over the years, including during the Women in Property series a while ago.

Kemi and I have been friends for some time. We became increasingly aware that we also shared a similar vision to support causes beyond ourselves, common values and also aligned business interests. It was therefore no surprise that we would find a way to collaborate as business partners in some way or another.

That’s the essence of this episode in a way; how we came to business partners, what we decided to do in business and then the crazy year that we have seen this year in business together as a result.

We speak about how we set out first goal for the year, which we labelled as ‘1X’. Then, what triggered us to reset that goal to ‘3X’, which at the time was quite random and truly without foundation. Then, assuming the ‘in flight’ deals land in time, how we may well land at ‘7X’, all being well.

This takes us on a journey through selecting business partners, looking beyond roles and capital contributions. How to take care of one another in business, goal-setting, business development and business execution strategies to some extent too.

It’s been quite a year; some would say a game changing one. So, have a little listen and see what nuggets you can take away and apply into your own business; property or otherwise…

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing. Get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me on the show today. Well, I’m in this sort of interesting in between period with the podcast at the moment, I’m just having conversations with some of my buddies, business and property buddies. It’s a select group, a small handful. And today I’m delighted to welcome Kim Egan to join me in conversation. Hi, Carrie, how you doing? Hey,

Richard, I’m good. Thank you. Thanks for the invite, and making me make the final cut of the tight group.

We were always going to be making the final you’re always going to do that. And you know that standard some consultation on a raised by sea.

Good to hear. I don’t know if you are not expecting an answer yes to this. But if you’ve heard of any other conversations, it’s been quite interesting. So far, meandering topics. It’s all unscripted. There’s no question. No pre-prepared questions or anything like that. We’ve gone off in different directions. Some of them have been quite amusing. Some of them have been quite ephemeral. Is that a word? Yes. Yeah. Kind of what word it means, but it means that sounds like a good word. Yeah, so let’s see where our conversation goes. Because I’ve got no idea.

All right, what could go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong? So I think what would be really useful is probably just the set the same with the listeners that they’ve heard us, you and I speak actually a few times, because you’ve been a guest on the podcast before. So about what be great is just to dial back a bit, because people ask us this question. We don’t always know the answer, do we? But how on earth did we get here? Where did it all begin? You probably got a better recollection anyway, that I have.

I mean, I don’t know that I do. I have a vague recollection of about seven years ago, must be now. I keep saying five. But I’ve said five for a few years. So it was about seven. And somehow we connected. And I think we had some conversations, I guess. And then quite liked what we had to say. And we, we then invite each other on our podcasts at the time, we think. And the conversation is never really stopped since then. We’re just on enough caught up. And sometimes it’s been longer periods of time and shorter periods. But every time we did catch up, it felt like nothing. It had been no distance I’ve in no time. And we were talking about whatever was going on at the time, the good, the bad, the somewhere in between. Think through that and just a really organic friendship through. That is 21. I tell quite funny, because on the face of it, we’re quite different people and in lots of ways we are different people. But we just have a thread that is the same. I think our core is the same. And how we go about things and do things are sometimes different. But yeah, I think that’s my reaction. I’m not sure how

much that be honest. I think so. Yeah, we did. Yeah, no, I think that’s pretty much it. I didn’t know it was a seven year itch by the way.

The next one now, we get the seven year itch in, you know, making it more committed. If you like, then what the traditional Seven Year Itch does? Yeah, no, I remember. I think we, I think we became friends. I think that first and foremost, you know, over that time, we share common values. And I think you talk about we’re different people and you know, our personalities can be different and how we do things, but our values are very much aligned. And I think that was what, that’s what always drew us together. I think ultimately, yeah, it was almost like yeah, I feel the same way about that too. And yeah, you know, let’s put the world to rights and things like that.

And sometimes particularly in our industries, you can feel quite lonely in that world. If you see things slightly differently or you don’t subscribe to the way things are discussed or talked about it can feel kind of that you’re out on an island by yourself. So when you find some like minded person you kind of hang on for dear life.

Well, thanks for hanging on buddy. Mike. I’m hanging on to so that’s cool. So and then I think I do remember, we thought, at one point, then you can maybe refresh my memory. We said, Okay, we’re, we’re becoming buddies or friends or whatever, we see the world the similar way. We’re both entrepreneurial in spirits, you know, seeking opportunities. And it’s like, Well, should we do something about this? You know, and we had a few conversations like that, didn’t we? And we had a couple of ideas, but didn’t kind of get off the ground big time. And then all of a sudden, it did.

I think that’s exactly it, isn’t it? We had some conversations, and I definitely didn’t go into those conversations looking for a way for us to work together, we were just chatting. And it’s all living or doing this or something or doing that. And, and it was kind of vice versa. And then we said all, you know, shall we do something together? And let’s see what comes out of it. And we had those initial conversations. And I think what’s really interesting is, but at the time, I think we knew they didn’t feel right. Because we could have run with them, we could have gotten them off the ground, but we both knew exactly how to do it. And that would work. And it would likely be a success. But something wasn’t aligned with at least where we were going, if not where we’ve been. And so we just kind of paused and talked a bit more, drank a bit more wine. So we had our kind of lightbulb moment that just from the off felt. Felt right.

Yeah. See, right. I think there’s there’s a point about flow there. Right. You know, is does it feel right? So there’s something that, you know, we can we are we could do this, and we probably could execute quite well. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t feeling right. And therefore, the energy wasn’t there, and therefore, the execution didn’t follow through or whatever. But what about this lightbulb moment, then what was? What was that lightbulb moment? Maybe I had too much wine? I can’t remember.

I don’t, I can’t entirely remember. I, so we talked about the things of being loved. I think we went back to the beginning was, you know, what is it love? What is it that gets us going? What? What excites us what interests us, and we kind of built out this picture of driven deals of, you know, negotiating of adding value of taking something ugly to something pretty have generational wealth of giving back, and our foundations. And some that I think we were founded at a price that we both previously had, and or deliberately or accidentally kind of flipped was isn’t turned around. And that was really fun, and challenging and tiring and frustrating, but fun. And it felt right. And I did differently. And I don’t know which one of us kind of went first. Then I who did the arm round the shoulders in the cinema moment. But I think we like to do want to does this. How does it sound? From memory? We were all over that from day one.

Yeah, just to clarify what that is, is that we’re talking about on a business acquisitions. Trail. Yeah. And m&a? Yeah. We also talked about certain types of property assets, or what we are larger scale property assets, like blocks and portfolios. So they were the two big ideas. I think that they did emerge at the beginning of this year one went better than the other one. In terms of, you know, actually, deliverables, although we’re still very much in it together. I think. So yeah. I don’t remember who’s around whose shoulder but you know, who made that first move. But yeah, it just felt right. And what’s happened since I mean, because that was kind of one we said, okay, let’s actually do something about this. Now. We stopped talking about it. Let’s get on with it. And that was probably from my memory round about the beginning of the year. Yes, yeah. Around about January, even February.

I want to say early Feb. Yeah. Yeah.

I’m feeling it’s probably more early Feb, because something else happened in February, didn’t it? Your fault, my fault. Okay. What, what was it? What happened? And I can elaborate, but what was your recollection? I just wanna make sure I get the right story, by the way.

Okay. So we, we had this idea and we were chatting about mergers and acquisitions and buying some businesses and turn them around and some of it as an adjunct to you know, current activities that would be useful to have this business it’d be useful to have that and some of it just plain fun. My background was healthcare and have one of the adult or adult allied health care professional profession. You know, some other things we just went for, how about we go When we can find a business that we like the look of that excite us, and we’ll turn them around and see if we can exit and get a capital event. And one evening, I was sat on the sofa, and I got a message from Richard saying, You need to listen to this, this thing from Darren Hardy. Do I though? Like, I don’t necessarily love everything. He’s got to say so cool. Okay. I think I was doing something else. I was like, Yeah, whatever. I’ll check it out with a couple of days. A couple days later, and rich get back to me said if you listen to the thing yet. And I had that moment we like, what could just say Yeah, buddy, no, no, hang on. It’s only three minutes, I think it was. So it’s fine. Or listen to this message. And it’s something he does there and does his daily dose of something, motivation, whatever. And he shared the story about how he started in a job, set a goal. And I think he spoke to a mentor, and it might have been his dad or someone in the business or something. And they said, you know, three extra goals. What why that goal? Why not bigger? Why not bigger than that? Why not anything? And, you know, in the story, he shared that he hit whatever his 10x target was, I think in the end. Was it just 3x? Yeah, it was. Yeah, so he said, this target, and then he 3x 3x the target, and then he hit that. So then he said, you know, some of the challenge with what people achieve is not that they don’t achieve this out to achieve, what they set out to achieve was too small. So whatever you got was three exit. Now, we only just kind of stopped having conversations in this. And we had very loose target kind of said, Okay, well, that’s okay, let’s give this a go. And at the time, it felt quite big, because we didn’t really have a strategy at that point, weren’t quite sure of a pipeline of a pipeline weren’t quite sure where or how we were going to do this. We’re quite busy. But it felt right. So we threw ourselves into it. So we threw at the goal that day, I think from memory, and I wrote it down, and I’ve still got it on a post it note on the inside of my notebook. And that became the foundation for what we marched off to do this year.

Absolutely. I think it’s Grant Cardone, isn’t it? Who does the techniques? Yeah, so maybe we should attend XSplit? Well, Freeletics has been pretty well, as well, here. It wasn’t actually free X in the end. We’ll get to that. But yeah, just wanted to that 10x 3x thing. So it was Darren Hardy specs. And then just to put it in perspective, we all we’ve done at that stage is let’s go and buy some businesses with agreed on that. Yeah, we didn’t really have a strong strategy, we didn’t weren’t really doing that much at that point to make it happen. Like I said, we didn’t have a pipeline. No. And then we suddenly three weeks ago, in middle of February or something, something like that. And just because and by the way, I’m looking at because on my whiteboard here, I’ve got another phrase from that video, which has been there since. And it’s sort of keep knocking out the words, it’s impossible unless question mark. And so that went hand in hand with the Okay, so you’re free as you go? Fine. But then accompanied by that phrase, it’s impossible unless makes you start thinking about the house. So he said, going home going over there. And by the way, it’s going to be a three times bigger mountain, when you go it’s impossible unless I get a helicopter to go to the top. Instead of climbing. It makes me think in a different way. But the two things together.

Let’s start off with having like a narrow minded set of I can’t do it because and in that moment, that’s true. Unless you add the on this in that moment, that’s true. You don’t have the time, the resources, the network, the best of that the whatever you want to tell yourself. But when you reposition that, I can’t do it. Unless so Okay, well, then I need to get the network. Okay, well, that’s impossible. Well, it’s impossible unless, and you take yourself down this tree, that kind of cascades and you can follow it all the way through to the end at some really specific and seemingly quite distant goals from your big goal. That if you do the do will get you there. That was a really interesting point, I thought,

yeah, and let’s be honest, really, really honest for a sec. Did you believe the 3x goal would happen when we said that? No Me too, right? We set it with no foundation, no structure, no strategy direction, no pipelines I mentioned. And then I think it’s the impossible unless came in. It’s like, okay, we’ve said in, we kind of don’t really believe it right now. Because why would you when you like six to eight weeks into the year and zero, and you’ve suddenly just three extra goal? boy crazy. We’ve never actually worked together at that point. Yeah. And we’re doing something, you know, you certainly knew. I mean, we both been involved in m&a, you know, or growing businesses, you know, to some greater or lesser extent. And it was just gonna throw our heart and soul into this. So there was that doubt. And I think it’s, it’s important to say that, yeah, absolutely. What made us push through that, from your point of view? What made it happen? What made the difference? I think for me, it was I wanted to do it. And

I’m pretty stubborn. And if I want to do something, it’s happening. So I don’t know,

by the way, everybody I can vouch for Kenny. And if he wants, if it’s gonna get done, and she wants to do it, it’s gonna happen, right?

Yeah. And it’s like I didn’t, you know, we didn’t know. But I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing as well. So I don’t know how it’s gonna happen. Didn’t really need to buy, I grew up in sport, that was kind of my, my background, and you just do the work, you do the work, and you turn up. And then on game day, if you’ve done most of the work, and you got a bit of talent, you’re probably going to win. So just did the work when we found some support. And we’re then some stuff and we surrounded ourselves with people that have the same goals. So I was like, Okay, we’re just gonna do that. And I don’t like losing either. So if you’re surrounded with people that are kind of setting targets and hitting it, then yeah, it just annoys me so so well, we’ve got a good quality that’s now because I’m not being the loser in the group.

And equally, I’m, I’m quite competitive. I mean, we It’s famous in our household, we have weekly backgammon games. I know that sounds really thrilling. But we I mean, my wife, we have a kind of a mini tournament every weekend. And honestly, it’s it’s, it’s, you know, it’s more between, she’s very competitive. She’s actually promoting ex professional sports player, as well. And I’m just bloody competitive. And so you know, we have these little rivalries, and we’re literally robbing the winner runs around the garden and celebrates and stuff like that. It’s, it’s that sights that. So I’m with you on that one. And it’s like, well, and equally, I think that you touched on earlier about our bigger vision and our internal visions, and, you know, the foundations, and not to mention that a couple of previous episodes here. So we’ve got something bigger than ourselves here as well. That’s a steak. I think that drives us. It certainly drives me. Yeah. So yeah, I think that, you know, that from my point of view, I was like, I, by the way, I really love it. I’m kind of addicted to doing deals, I suppose, getting to Daniel Hill would be last week, I think. And this goes out. And we were just saying that, you know, we swap messages all sorts of crazy times now. And it’s like, well, I said, I initially started by saying, I think I’m addicted to work. And he when I’m addicted to doing deals, and I said no, that’s actually better. I’m addicted to doing deals. Yeah. I love speaking to owners, whether it’s property owners or business owners, I love it. I could do loads of it. So that’s what I do. Because you find your best selves. And I think that we can talk about how we’ve evolved as the years go on, but just I don’t lose sight of this. So can take a lot of time. But how we got to start and set the goal and maybe how we got through it. But just from first point from that point where we three weeks ago, when did we complete our first deal? I think you knew to the day or something

I knew from when we first spoke to that person that we completed and that was 86 days I think and I think that was probably three or four weeks later than we spoke

Yeah, so we walked through the door in that business literally walked through the door when I had the key is on the first of June. Yeah. So and I think we’d 3x By the end of Feb. Yeah. So and we didn’t we weren’t speaking to that person when we three ext No. So that puts that in perspective. And by the way, we almost 3x that pointed me it is the

We were we have now we’ve when we took it over the historic results would be slightly less than 3x. But I think probably counting down to you as much as anything. The results are in excess of 3x already. Yeah. That first acquisition,

which is amazing. And it’s in and of itself. I mean, talk about kind of confirmation that you’re doing the right thing, and you’re on the right path, and you set the right goals. This thing came up in it certainly wasn’t an easy acquisition process. And I could absolutely live without that again. But we stuck with it. And again, when we started, so we’re finished now and then that stubborn nature and the competitiveness comes in. And yeah, we got over the line, and it almost exactly hit the 3x target that we tell ourselves.

Yeah. And just discard skip forward to kind of where we hope it’s going to land because this is middle of November. You know, I think there was one that fell away. So I think the final result is I think we’re on target for around about 7x by year end at the moment. Is that about right?

I think so. Yeah. Yeah,

I know, we’re talking in random terms, because we’re not disclosing what the target was, but doesn’t matter in a way whatever, whatever it was, was one. Yeah. And then we three exit and now we’re probably going to land hopefully touching wood, whatever. Around about 7x And that would be technically five, five acquisitions. Is that right? Yes. Including the tiller 12345 Yes, five, five completions in about seven hours initial goal. And so what a pace what a journey what a ride

in life in less than nine months, five completions. I mean, if you do have a first I think if you’d have told us about that to start with we’d have last year out of the room but we’ve absolutely been hand off someone said you can do this then it’s been believable. So much fun

has been I mean it’s been fun but it’s been I mean let’s not underestimate you know what there’s always a price to pay Okay, for the results there’s always a price to pay there’s a trade off and people sometimes what the upside but they’re not prepared to put the investment in all the payoff in so let’s just be honest about it. You know, it is great 7x And five acquisitions and been a fantastic ride but it’s been challenging at times, right? Yes,

absolutely. I am hanging watching the clock come down you know, I’m not one I don’t like to wind down to Christmas I think a lot of people do and that leaves the market open and these opportunities there whatever analysis or gerloff Eating mince pies we’ve talked I don’t eat mince pies those multitask so I don’t think to wind down and I was supposed to go away in November and just kind of said that I just don’t think we’ve got the time with what we’ve got going on just can’t do this so yeah, it’s been an in a long intense eight months probably have pretty relentless you know, and if we’re being honest I think our families have I want to say suffered because they benefit from what we’re doing but there’s a price to pay and that pay off at the moment is not always getting the time or the quality time with me like it’s been stressful at times. There are bits while we’re both doing things that we on the whole enjoy their bits that have sunk so yeah. Yeah, being entirely kind of runnable and transparent is the has been tough. But when I look at things in my life that have been tough, just kind of doesn’t cut it. This is like it’s hard work and a bit tired. Okay, lots of people are tired and work hard, and they won’t get the results that this will generate. So that’s okay, you can be tired and work hard because you’re doing something that you hate that doesn’t provide your family the way that you want or you can do something that’s hard that you aren’t how enjoy and we’ll pay of dividends.

Yeah, yeah, and put it in perspective. Obviously, I was watching my wife 40 Children in Need video clip. Yesterday, was probably doing the same as you were we might be look at this three minute Darren, Darren, Darren Hardy thing. Yeah, go to everyone to watch that video I did. And the clip was about, like, like a children’s play center or data center. In whole. And long story short, they did a snow, they built them a nice outdoor playground and facilities and stuff like that. And you kind of know how it’s going to go. So good deeds, and that was all fantastic. But then they were interviewing the one of the operators. And they were saying, basically, what difference does this place make to the local community, it’s fairly deprived area of whole I know how they, you know, from old, there are some pretty, you know, deprived as elements. And she said, Some people were this is a lifeline, you know, they, they can’t afford daycare, and they’ve got three jobs to survive single mothers, things like that, you know, they’ve got three jobs, and this is how they can do that. Yeah. And they’re working bloody hard. And, you know, and this is a little bit of respite support that they get. And the reward is minimum wage probably, or something like that. Yeah. We’re talking about something different. And we can’t overlook the fact that we’re privileged, you know, in insofar as the outcomes will be below the minimum wage. Yeah. But, you know, we, you know, we try and apply ourselves into something we’re in an equally let’s also face it, we’re not both doing this just so we can be have mansions and flashy cars, and, you know, all that stuff. We’re doing this for a wider and bigger cause, ultimately, now. So, you know, that’s, that’s one of the things that you why we work together, because we see the world that way. But it’s just about that. I think sometimes people look into your life, I’ve actually had someone comment on my life recently. And like, that’s interesting. Then they just made all these assumptions about my lifestyle and who I was, as a result of all this, I’m like, How can you make that conclusion don’t even know me? And we don’t know the detail. Yeah. And it’s, you know, you’re looking from an outsider’s point of view, but they didn’t look at the investment, the input, the sacrifice, you know, the bloody pressure. And all that stuff, you probably add to the list that goes with it. So we know that we’re probably going to be on for we joked about it every three to five years, or something like this. Maybe put our feet up. But we probably both know that ain’t gonna happen.

No chance. But it’s nice to think about it at the moment.

Well, when I say it’s going to happen, it probably will happen. But we just we can’t help ourselves, we’ll probably find the next level or the next big thing or whatever. Yeah, I don’t know this, but. And I think the other thing that I think is worth highlighting is, you know, how we kind of fit in together over the last six or eight months, nine months, whatever. Because that’s that painting, it’s worth sharing a little bit about that, maybe?

Yeah, it’s been really interesting, isn’t it? 20 people come together that are ultimately used to doing their own thing. It’s fitness to be kind of butting of heads and an ego war and everyone wants to be in charge. And it hasn’t been like that. There’s been some challenges, were sometimes seeing things differently. And our view of risk is different, or our view of people is sometimes different. But or not. Because our values, and core is so aligned, that you can always bring it back, you can bring it back to friendship, you can bring it back to what matters, you can bring it back to what’s important. And none of that shit is it just doesn’t matter. And so we found this groove, were largely your is FD.

From what? Sorry? FD? Oh, FD okay. Yeah, that’d be a finance guy type of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And then I’m kind of on the opposite side. Man, it’s just working really well. And we, I think the militia some conversations about what we liked, and what we’re good at, and what we thought we can bring, when we kind of pick those bits out, and then you’re left with this melee of stuff in the middle. Okay, all of that bit, and you can, and we worked our way through the rest of it. So again, you know, to be completely transparent, there are bits that we’re both looking forward to handing off sooner rather than later, but we were prepared to do what it took to get us there in the first place. So that’s kind of how we, we divide the roles at the moment and it’s, again, it’s given while it’s nice, it’s always simple, but it’s effective at least. And I think with every month that goes by and every deal that goes by we communicate better. We figure out how to work together better. We figure out what is did they mean? And then there’s hope because now we work together misspeak day in day out you’re like No, even though that’s what that said that isn’t how it would have been meant because I know the person. And it’s Yeah, I think I feel like I’m just repeating myself. But this friendship cornice values core just keeps us on the straight and narrow. And the answer the question to kind of almost anything challenging is what’s the right thing. Maybe had a situation recently, a team member has decided to come on the journey with us. And according to the contract, when we bought this business, they shouldn’t be able to go and work in certain other places. But we had a chat and just said that you think it’s right, that we will let them do this. And we kind of negate that bit of the contracts. We think it’s right. And it’s fair. Either there isn’t a business risk. Let’s just do the right thing. And that has stood us in good sensors in good stead. I think.

I agree. And I think just to summarize, I think what we’ve kind of learned and we thought we made this promise to each other that we are at one key point, you don’t know what I’m going to say. We will always put our friendship above a deal, though. And I think he got fraught in that first deal at times, because he’s stressed and we didn’t know in doing at the time, you know, and it was it was difficult. It was a difficult negotiation. It was complex, and the advisors weren’t necessarily helping and things like that. There was some pressure points, and we won’t go into too much. But basically, it was, you know, stressful at times, we were working with pulling weekenders, you know, Easter weekend was gone. And remember, we do diligence and things like that. And you know, we’re probably getting a bit each year each other and stuff. And I think there were times where I recognized for example, I was very drew deal driven and not as much on relationship, you know. And afterwards, we kind of had the little we got the deal. We celebrated a bunch of champagne. And then about a few weeks later we then we had like debrief and then we just had a real chat about you know, what happened at this point? And how can we learn from that? And how can we do things differently, and just really hearing one another. And we made a promise that we would always put our friendship above any deal. And so that’s and the friendship comes with that shared values? So do you see every single thing? That’s exactly the same way? No, not no. But do we are we very closely aligned or most of the stuff? Yeah. And you know, I think it’s mutual respect, as well, and understanding and where to learn to give up things. You know, you’re you’re an entrepreneur, and I’m busy. I’m an entrepreneur, whatever language want to use, but you know, running businesses running around shows, we used to be in the king or queen, what are you going to call it? And then we have to give some of that up. And then that’s his ego. And there’s all that stuff that gets in the way. So I thought that was really interesting how we learnt fit together. And then you know, obviously, as you say, it’s getting better and better each deal or week, as you say goes by.

I remember that bank holiday weekend detail because that was we’re already quite a long way in. Some bits hadn’t quite gone, the way we would have liked when we received some information late I think from memory, we just had to get through this by a deadline. Now, those moments when I don’t I don’t know that I’ve even asked you, but I’m sure it was the same. You’re you have to get your family on board. I’ve got a young family, Easter weekend should have been full of fun and frolics and whatever else. And I was I just I can’t do it. And it wasn’t, you know, I need to do an hour in the morning. It was doing this for probably 18 hours for the next four days. So I’m sorry, and amuse yourselves. And you know, it doesn’t always go down very well. Or it goes down very, very, very badly. And again, you’ve got to try and manage that relationship and have a conversation with yourself that is this worth it. Is it the right thing? Is it right for my family even if it’s right for me? Should I be doing this? And those horrible internal chats you have to have with yourself. And I think in hindsight, I’m glad I’m very, very glad we did to do but I think we both agreed that we just wouldn’t, wouldn’t let it be like that again. And that took some learnings from that project to set our own expectations and push back on some things. And actually, no, you can’t wait a period of time get something than think we’re going to drop everything as we’re prepared to do what it takes, but not whatever it takes. Because there are other people in our lives and other things that are just as important. And we can’t do anything if we’re burnt out and sick and broken. Which we weren’t miles away from the transaction.

Absolutely. Yeah, I remember one. You know, one, Sunday, it was in the middle of that bank holiday weekend. Now she’s in the office, just dawn till dusk, you know, and just cracking out things. There’s something that I realized is like, what is everybody want to deliver the information to you on a Friday? There’s notice that right, they always deliver your stuff on a Friday. So over to you now. Yeah, we have an answer on Monday or something stupid. But they probably don’t quite say that way. But I think we learned need to buy at least a week, you know, turn around, and we’re not necessarily going to touch this the weekend. And there’s, there’s a very good reason. Yeah. So that was another learning. So we have learned some things. And here’s the thing as well, I want to talk about, you know, and by the way, if you want to talk about any other bits are missing. But I also want to talk about celebrating the wins, the little wins. So got anything to say about that.

Yeah, so turns out rich got real drinking problem many times. And it’s not even that he can have a drink. I just, we, we knew what we’re getting ourselves into. And we knew quite what it would take. And we also knew ourselves because we are so target driven and goal driven and success driven. In whatever mean, six by success means to individually, it doesn’t, it’s not necessarily a fixed definition. But we don’t often or ever stop and celebrate what we’ve done and what we’ve achieved in how far you came. Because it’s like, well, you know, we did this, but what if that happens, or what if this happens, but we haven’t done that yet. And you can’t operate like that, you have to celebrate the wins, you’ve got to give yourself a pat on the back. And you’ve got to reward yourself for what you did in the meantime. So yeah, we set ourselves some little, little times that we’d win, celebrate your wins. So we celebrate the honor for exempted, celebrate, if we got heads of term signed, we’d celebrate if we completed, we’d celebrate if we completed and managed to not get divorced. We do all of these things that we just have a little well done, very well done. That was a shift. That was you know, a lot of work. And we did it so well done. And they really good points to kind of decompress and give yourself a little and just reflect right how far you came how many bits you didn’t necessarily know. But you know, enough people bid on these businesses, you know that there was enough interest. So even if you get your offer accepted, that all falls over later. You did the right stuff there. And that should be celebrated.

Oh, totally. I mean, you know, I think it’s about you know, it’s a cliche to say it’s about the journey, not the destination. And you stop off at different points along the way. Menu, you’re trying to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. So I think it’s something we’ve tried to breed just because alcohol is involved. Sometimes it’s you know, it makes it maybe it colors, our view a little bit of those stop off points. But I do remember sometimes, you know, I’ve been we’ve been talking, I can’t even remember which milestone we’ve been celebrating. But for literally just being I’ve been sat in the garden and the sun’s gone down, it’s gone pitch black and hours has passed and we’ve just been chatting away. You think I want to patient a whole bottle of champagne did go down by the way. So I’m probably wasn’t making a lot of sense at the end of the conversation. So thanks for sticking with me.

Obviously, oh, he was stone cold sober, say that’s not something I would ever do.

It is kind of legendary, though, that I am the lightweight and kameez. You know, I’m not going to say too much but not as lightweight as being a professional, professionally.

So it comes back from being the athlete. Yeah. I think celebrating those wins is important. And doing the right thing as you say. You know, recently I was always very reluctant to talk about, for example, my foundation and where I go, I’m talking about a bit more now and I’m a little still a little bit hesitant. Maybe you actually pushed me Do you remember when we went out to Nottingham, and I kind of touched on it? And you went, you basically pushed me off the edge of the plank and said do you want to share a little bit more about that Richard? In front of a roomful of people. So that kind of got me Thanks, Carrie. Just talk A little bit about Of course, it was I wasn’t prepared. It wasn’t scripted. It just came from the heart. And people that I know you’ve had the same. And people came up, bless you to both of us, didn’t they? Because you did you also shared, it made me go first, but you also shared, and people cannot just go and that was so inspiring. Or Thank you for saying that, or this really gives meaning to what we’re doing and new sorts of things. And it really made me realize, actually, maybe it was a personal, each of us have this personal vision, but actually people can buy into that, and want to be part of that journey. So yeah, that was pretty good. That’s pretty cool. It’s really a sin as

an expert, I think it feeds back into what you said earlier about people will make assumptions about who you are, or how you are and how you do business. And in most cases, I think if people spoke to either of us for any length of time, they were realized, actually, were possibly, possibly completely different to their expectations. Because the industries or the things we talked about are one thing, but actually, what drives us both or gets us out of bed, what matters is a completely different. But I know for sure that I’m not necessarily the most comfortable with sharing kind of runnable stuff and things and I’m not a huge crowds person. So a lot of time it takes a one to one conversation or the right environment to have this stuff. And then you see people go, Oh, and kind of something changes in their mind. And they become really excited to come on the journey with you because it’s about more than x y Zed. It’s about this thing and what Mark You can believe what difference you can make. And that will forever be forever be amazing to me. True. Great. Yeah, by the way, you wearing a boot protective boot. So remember you you’re having to sit down most of the time because you couldn’t put weights could you on your on your ankle. As I was stood up, you were there when you’re on this wheelchair thing, it was quite as quite a sight to behold. You know, all those brothers come on chuckle brothers.

Yeah, probably. So that that probably creates a different expectation. If you’ve ever been to these corporate sort of vision day thing is, didn’t

we, ourselves, right? We were true possible sort of ganache is it? It’s um, what am I going to authentically go. But we just asked. So we really want y’all to buy into this. And it, it matters to us that you know why it matters to us. I’m always really interested in I thought was that it created a bit of a divide. There were some people that had no interest in buying into anything. And then some people that were all over it, and then of course, I’m in the middle. Yeah, the, the ones that didn’t want to come along on that journey that didn’t want to see the bigger picture didn’t stick around for very long in that session.

That’s true. It does become divisive. We talked about vision values and culture. You know, and not just what our values and culture were but what you know already existed, of course, and trying to merge and a new curve a way forward that were blended all of those elements. And yeah, I don’t think everybody saw it the same way. So I think you know, that’s okay. It’s absolutely okay. Yeah, no, no no needs to fall out about a dirty crate or war. Sometimes tribalism you know, whatever you call it. There’s a lot of opposition these days social media fuels etc but doesn’t have to be that way. So okay, I’m this is how we see the world when I see it differently. Okay, I wish you all the best with your way. Yeah, we’re still going away

some of those images isn’t you know, you have like the old ladies and the candlesticks or you have a rabbit and a fox or something. And so what do you see? I see to our ladies, what do you see? I see a candlestick. Both people are right, but both see something very different.

Sorry, I thought you’re gonna talk about an ink block test or something?

No. I think the world in the media particularly would do well to remember that it isn’t black or white names perfectly great. We can all feel a bit. Not everything has to be angry.

You know, we can coexist even if we see the world different. Right. So, yeah, we’re on a different journey. Yeah, that’s good. Now, we talked a bit about the beginning, at the beginning about the 1x 3x. landing at 7x. Hopefully, yeah. The year end we’ll have you’re gonna have a busy month of December by the look of it. Yeah, start starting now. Started a few weeks ago, actually. But So assuming that all goes, Well, what did we say? We’re going to do next year? Who remember? I know you remember. These? Remember?

Now I see it the goal? 3x? Again? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we got a 3x. Again,

we’re gonna 3x where we land?

No, no, no problem.

No worries. But um, so just to put them in, we’re talking in arbitrary terms, so 1x 3x 7x, but it doesn’t matter what the goal was 1,000,010 million, you know, just multiply by the x. So if we land at 7x, what we’ve said is, wherever we land, we’re going to three exit for 2022, which would therefore be 21x. By the end of 2022. Now, just cast your mind back to the conversation we had in February, where we were breaking it about what eggs? Yeah. So and, you know, are we any different? I mean, we are that’s, that’s actually, yeah, but we

were the same people. But I think we have both grown I think we’re both better at some things. It’s I think it’s added kind of skill sets to our armory is added different elements to us. I think we’re probably more.

Yeah. Well, well rounded or

further rounded. Because we just had to learn some stuff, we have to go on these journeys. So I think we are different, but fundamentally with the same.

Yeah, I think our personalities and our characters are the same. You know, we change our lifestyle. I match either, no, but I think we’ve grown. Definitely. And we’re having conversations now. I mean, just before I came on this call not that half an hour before I came on this call, I’m having a conversation with someone who could potentially help us set up a 14 million pound fund, and how that can work. And I was like, Well, when we want x, it wasn’t 14 million, by the way. So we’re like that was not really in in concept. It wasn’t relevant. It wasn’t. Why would you even talk about something like that, but today, it’s extremely relevant. And, you know, possibly necessary

when a fetus is impossible, unless doesn’t it? There you go. 21x is going to take a bigger game plan and playing a bigger game.

Yeah, I think that’s it, you know, thinking bigger, breaking through the glass ceilings, stretching the boundaries. Obviously, if you don’t overstretching snap, that’s no promise we’ve made to one another is which one watch out for one another, and, you know, you will kind of go, Richie, okay, I’m not getting the right vibes today or this week, or whatever. And I’ll do the same with you and just look out for one another. So we’ve got to take care. I think I said recently, take care of the vessel. Yeah, you know, take care of each other. And that, you know, there’s the self compassion and self care part of it. And then there’s the growth, you know, part of it and the mindset shift again, another paradigm shift another level. Yeah. You said you can’t go on another level, there isn’t another level. And then

I think two things were really important about what you just said, First up, is that self care thing and because we’ve kind of both come from normal working class backgrounds, right? If you said to people in your family or needs prioritize self care, they might feel like the room only sought me out the room they decide I’ve gone to Gwyneth Paltrow on them or something. I lost my mind. But it’s not an it’s not an option. It’s not a choice. It’s absolutely necessary to keep playing the higher game to keep pushing to keep delivering. You have to take care of yourself. Otherwise you haven’t got anything to get fits. You know the goose and the golden egg thing, isn’t it? You just you can’t part at some point you just you just run out of energy. You’re not steam you run out something and then again from a completely isolate is a bit of a rough one for me. One had a rubbish night say everyone had a rubbish night. It’s been a bit Is he 10 days or so I’m going to finish this call, probably gonna lie down for a little bit, just have a minute and then go again this evening. So I thought was really interesting, and how you change when you change your environment in your circle when you’ve got a mindset change, which feeds into the other thing about our focus what we’re trying to do, and we had a chat might have been yesterday, I hope you don’t mind me saying this. But we both had some opportunities in the last few days or week to get involved in some projects. And we said no, because they weren’t aligned with what we’re trying to achieve. The net gain wasn’t enough to take our attention or focus away. And it was just a real kind of a moment when we clocked that, again, something has shifted, they’ve been another growth another layer, that we were playing a bigger game. That was really interesting. I thought,

yeah, no, no, don’t want you saying it. And you know, very well said too. And, you know, thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I mean, probably a year ago, we were both presented with some opportunity, then I had some say dollar signs, pound signs, whatever attached to it. And we probably got some of that. Today, I’m not I don’t want to make it sound wrong, but we’re just on a different Dziedzic Cergy actory, flying off from a different flight path. And, you know, he isn’t necessarily feeding that and, you know, looks about you know, what is the value of our time now, it’s different. It’s not, we’re not being snobbery, snobs or anything like that. It’s just, if you’re talking about potentially a 21x, you know, you’ve kind of ratcheted up and you just have to see a difference. Yeah, you write about the self care things? Probably not, you know, and, you know, a guy talking about self care. Yeah. You know, it’s a little bit you know, it’s not, it’s not a typical stereotype, self compassion, self care, but we need to be good to ourselves. I didn’t put handles on in the bath and stuff like that. But you know,

you should get it going, I highly recommend

secretly of Mrs. Put something on her might be there, you know, having a little wear for something, but maybe that doesn’t sound good. Maybe rephrase that, whatever images in your head, but I have my stuff, you know, I don’t, you know, I’ll have my Friday night, put some beats on and, you know, I’ll have an IPA or something, or five, and just chill getting to, you know, have been known to actually put some moves, you know, that’s all coming out now, people is really different. So, you know, that’s kind of one way I’ve lost some steam. And, you know, forget it. I think it was last night, or yesterday was a really busy day. I started working at 6am by 8pm. I still go in until I was done. I had there’s always something else to do, by the way. But I just said, That’s it. I’m done. I went downstairs and just chilled. came into my head are probably should have done that bit. But now, I’m definitely switching off now. Self Compassion and self care. Maybe not textbook because I’ve done a 14 hour day.

Because a few months back, you might have just kept going.

Oh, probably. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there’s some good learnings. So I guess, you know, what about just thinking about maybe towards the end of our conversation that we’re sharing here? You know, there’s anything else you want to talk about? Or ask or whatever, before we finish and share with the audience as we’re being so intimate and vulnerable? Reel? That’s a good question. Um, I do want to know why. You’d like to know why I didn’t do the extra task that you needed yesterday.

Yeah. And that’s made my day really quite difficult. So if you could want to know why we, from your perspective, when you made this decision, and you said, You know what, we’re going to do this for Kim. Why

did I make that decision from my point of view? I mean, the short answer is it felt right. It felt right. So I mean, an elaborate but it just felt right. You know, and like you said, we talked about things, and it didn’t feel right, you know, about a couple of things we could potentially do together and we have known each other for a reasonable period of time. The ironic thing is we’ve not actually met in person until fairly recently. It was kind of that was on a crazy one. So we just kind of built this sounds like a bloody episode of catfish or something. I don’t know. You know, whatever. I don’t know what else is out there. But I do actually, my daughter got me into some of this reality TV recently, so I can’t

want you blame on your daughter?

I am definitely it would I wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t interested at all. I was just literally doing it to bond with my daughter, of course, because but no, I think it just felt right. And but if you dig deeper, why did it feel right? You know, I can answer that, you know, we do have the shared values, we do have common vision. I recognize I can’t do everything on my own. And I think you possibly recognize you either didn’t want to even if you could do on your own times, we just knew we could do it. Even though we didn’t believe we could baby three exit or anything like that. We just knew we could do it when you were fairly capable. And when you were where this could take us because you probably I had that burning desire in my stomach, he wouldn’t want to leave me alone for about two decades. This foundation idea whatever it’s called, won’t leave me alone. That’s a good sign that it’s part of your purpose. Yeah, just felt right to do it. Do it with you. And I think you know, I don’t I don’t think I’ll give a better answer than that. Maybe when I hear your answer, maybe I’ll go Oh, yeah. You know?

What’s your nice? My answer is? Yeah, the same. It’s fairly non eventful. It just, it just felt right. We’d spoken about lots of things. And we’ve spoken about families and friends and kids and the weather and anything and everything in between. And there aren’t many times in your life you meet someone, you can just say, in their balls this up. And Huff Yeah, I needed him to, or, and it won’t be kind of thrown back at you or whatever. Or you can just say, you know, I’m struggling, this is happening and I and I can’t fix it. And even if they want me to fix it, I’ll try. I just want to be able to say this is tough. And I could do that. I said, you know she had to orange thing, that’s probably not the place to go into it. But we have some mental health challenges in my family, and sometimes they’ve flare up and things like that. And I think we have one call. And that’s probably a couple of hours of me just saying, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do. I think I’ve done the best I can. I’ve done everything I know. And it hasn’t worked. So why have you got? Have you got anything? Or can you just listen to me for a bit. And you were kind of generous and thoughtful, and you kept the confidence in you. You were just a good a good man. And if I was going to do this journey with anyone, that’s tick box number one.

So much better answers online for a start button. Thank you for that. And you know, it goes both ways to be honest, you know, not just coming back at you because it’s a return of a compliment and whatever. But just this week, I think it was Monday, you have a Mondays are just Mondays. Right? We just we’ve been notorious now for us, when you have a heavy schedule. And I do remember, you know, I was probably flipping around that you should talking about. And you know, I kind of just was needed to blow some steam or talk about something and some of it was personal family related. And you were just there and I realized that we were on the phone for about an hour and 15 minutes during the day on a busy Monday. And I just turned into us at all, I’m just conscious you probably might be putting some people office don’t worry about it. I’ve just been doing it in the background and in literally putting off one to one calls meetings and you’re just there, you know, listening to me. And you know, that is day’s worth more than any deal basically. Because more than anything because you mostly just listening sometimes offering you know, sensible important for give me a slap around the chops or something like that, but and you know, an hour 15 minutes on a busy Monday you made the time. And so I think it just goes to show that we can you know we do that for one another, but that’s a really good basis. So if anyone’s thinking about working with someone, you know, can you have those conversations? Do you share values? Can you figure out when those friction moments come? Can you like go into the directions Just stick together. And you care for one another really, fundamentally that so much so that you’ll put that relationship or head off the thing? Yeah. Yeah, so Good point, better answer the main

questions for me.

I should have thought that before thinking that you’re going to bring it back to me. And questions for you. I’ve asked, no summers have been going along. I’m Phil, I should have one now. But I guess it Yeah. Okay. I’ll put it this way. If you could have changed anything, what would you have changed this year? I left it vague. So you could choose

to change anything? What will?

Okay, maybe that’s making it to Vegas, you’re gonna say, Oh, I could have been a queen or something, you know, where you are. But this year, let’s say and what we’ve been through and whatever.

Changes are not the same. All right, change. The real, it’s a cliche answer. And it’s gonna sound like nonsense, but it’s nothing. And it’s because not because everything was perfect. And I really enjoyed every minute. I think we established that it’s not true. But I think I learned this year,

what

what I was prepared to do and what I wasn’t and what was important. And sometimes those lines have to get blurred. They do mean you have to go, crap. Okay, I’m sorry, we’ll do something nice tomorrow. And I know that I said, I’d be half an hour and I’m an hour and I’m in the doghouse and all of those things. But I’ve, I’ve learned that I have this goal. It’s a huge, huge, big goal. But it doesn’t have a number on it. Because I kind of want to see how far I can go. Don’t know it’s big. But I also know that if that takes me an extra five years, that’s okay. If I haven’t burned everything, and everyone along the way, I get to where I want to go, I want it with the people I love when my friends and everyone else around me. And so one prepared to do what it takes. I’m not prepared to do whatever. And I think that’s why I wouldn’t change anything. But that’s my biggest learning of this year.

Pre empting you may be asking me the same question. Of course. Yeah. Okay, thought so, I was waiting to see if you would, yeah, similarly, you know, it because you, you know, we go through what we go through for a reason, and we grow as a result of it. And even if the experience isn’t the best team, if we messed up, you know, we, if we wished it would be different. We did it, you know, perfectly first time we wouldn’t actually learn and grow. So what you, I wouldn’t change it for that reason. But I guess, probably for me, because, you know, I’m a different age to you, which we joke about now. And again. And, you know, I just kind of wish I’d have realized some of these things sooner. And, you know, started my journey sooner. Overall, I mean, honestly, I’ve gotten back a bit there. But I think that’s bringing it back to this year. Specifically, I said, the next level, there’s multiple levels. There’s multiple levels, and are kind of, you know, breaking through one at a time, perhaps, and I’m reading a book I’ve read just finished a book called The Big Leap. And that’s about jumping levels. It’s not about you know, this was just one step at a time type of thing. It’s like, he’s taken the helicopter to the top of the mountain type of thing. So that’s one thing. And I think the other thing on a real personal level. So I’ve got the idea of this foundation, whether it’s actually a foundation, I haven’t decided yet, but just keep it that for now. And then thinking about, I really want my kids involved. Ideally, they may not want to be let so that’s up to them. So certainly talking to them. And it talks about what the foundation kind of stood for. And, and then they started offering other things. And I hadn’t had that conversation with them before then. And they started offering other things. And I’m thinking it’s not just about me and what I want, you know, especially talk about multi generational, and this is giving back into society, communities, wherever, and why shouldn’t it be about things they’re interested in and passionate about and care about as much as things I care about? And that was a real game changing moment, because I was calling it my working title for the foundations to help foundation and helps, you know, helps me remember what what is you know, but all of a sudden, I had this sort of alphabet soup of causes. Why couldn’t it also, I mean, you hear what I say what I add Animals, environment, culture. Were some of the things that came out from those conversations moving. Well, they weren’t they on the list in the first place. Yeah, you can’t necessarily fix everything. But why not? And you know, and I think that could be a great way to engage my kids in this thing. And instead of our we’re buying a dad’s vision, it’s, this is our vision, our shared vision. So again, it’s more of a learning. You know, if I could have wished I would have realized that sooner. But you know, that’s something that I would say, I’m learning to forgive myself a bit more. You know, kind of mess up sometimes sometimes made some mistakes, could have done some things differently. Everybody does. Yeah. Just forgive yourself. Learn the lesson. Move on. Yeah. That was my awesome.

That’s very cool. Thanks for sharing that. I’ve got one more question, then I’ll stop grilling. It’s on your big leap book. Given the 7x, our original goal, decided to 3x. Again, is three it’s actually an appropriate goal.

You know, the answer. I think I’m gonna leave on a cliffhanger. So watch this space. Someone yesterday, we’re running an accountability group, as someone on the call flashed up their pipeline. And I, you know, obviously, these are the 15 deals, I’m working on Erman sort of thing. And I just did a quick bit of mental arithmetic. There wasn’t a total, but there was well over 100 million on his pipeline. I’m thinking okay, why not? Ace impossible on this? Yeah. So I’m going to leave it that’s my answer. It’s impossible a lesson. Maybe we’ll have a proper board meeting where we actually set that but what would you say?

The same? Unless, I think it’s possible unless, but we’re making the unless moves already. So we’ll see.

Carrie, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for joining me and just having a conversation in front of a lot of people, which fortunately for you can’t see because I know you prefer not crowds, which is talking to me and sharing some of what we’re sharing. Hopefully, that’s helpful to our listeners. I’ll do the outro unless there’s anything you wanted to say beforehand.

No, thank you for the invite. Thanks for having me. It’s always good to get a conversation with you with everything we’ve got going on. We don’t necessarily waste a lot of conversations. So I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you. Oh, good to have

a love to have conversations with business owners. So very, includes you. Anyway, it’s been great. Thank you. So thanks, everybody for listening once again this week to the property boys podcast, the show notes going to be over the website the property voice.net Don’t talk to me, you can reach out or perhaps even if you want introduction to Kenny podcast, the property boys dotnet. And the I think that’s about it for now. Thanks for listening. Speak to and

thank you for listening today. Now head over to theproperty voice.net. For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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“Don’t die with the music still inside of you.”

That’s a quote attributed to Dr Wayne Dwyer and/or his wife, Serena Dwyer. However, as reminded tu us here by Daniel Hill, its origins actually stem from ancient wisdom rooted in Chinese philosophy.

Indeed, we go on a bit of a tour, considering philosophy, psychology and spirituality, as we contemplate our life’s meaning and purpose.

We also debate the differences between being an entrepreneur and a businessperson influenced by the roles of nature and nurture.

Then, there’s the idea of better understanding people, starting with a better understanding of ourselves. We discuss personality profiles with the Wealth Dynamics one in particular, along with the bizarrely accurate Human Design spiritual practice and test and even the Five Love Languages, would you believe?

Daniel Hill is someone that I have known for some time, although mostly from a distance. However, during the course of this year we have connected more, done several business deals together and realised that we share a lot of common values. This is why I invited him to join me in this mini-series with some of the friends of TPV, bridging the old to the new direction of the podcast.

I think you’ll find much of the conversation interesting, stimulating and at times possibly even deep and meaningful. When you come to think of it, that’s quite a profound idea for two blokes chatting on a podcast…

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“Don’t die with the music still inside of you.”

That’s a quote attributed to Dr Wayne Dwyer and/or his wife, Serena Dwyer. However, as reminded tu us here by Daniel Hill, its origins actually stem from ancient wisdom rooted in Chinese philosophy.

Indeed, we go on a bit of a tour, considering philosophy, psychology and spirituality, as we contemplate our life’s meaning and purpose.

We also debate the differences between being an entrepreneur and a businessperson influenced by the roles of nature and nurture.

Then, there’s the idea of better understanding people, starting with a better understanding of ourselves. We discuss personality profiles with the Wealth Dynamics one in particular, along with the bizarrely accurate Human Design spiritual practice and test and even the Five Love Languages, would you believe?

Daniel Hill is someone that I have known for some time, although mostly from a distance. However, during the course of this year we have connected more, done several business deals together and realised that we share a lot of common values. This is why I invited him to join me in this mini-series with some of the friends of TPV, bridging the old to the new direction of the podcast.

I think you’ll find much of the conversation interesting, stimulating and at times possibly even deep and meaningful. When you come to think of it, that’s quite a profound idea for two blokes chatting on a podcast…

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing, get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today. Now it’s just doing this little interlude mini-series was just a couple of like my property and business friends really, and some have been friends for a long time. And some of being friends and contacts have come into my life more recently, but I’ve had a profound effect. And today’s guest is Mr. Daniel Hill, who is in that latter category. I’ve been watching you down. But from a distance, by the way, for a long, long time. But obviously we’ve kind of had quite a lot of crossovers in recent times. And it’s a pleasure to have you joined me on my podcast, and maybe I’ll be put out on your podcast, who knows? See what how that goes. But welcome to the property voice podcast. Thanks, Max. Pleasure. No, great. So we got no idea how this is gonna go. We did maybe have a few thoughts. But I think it’s just to guys having a chat, really. And I think, you know, there’s, as I mentioned, you know, we’ve kind of got to know each other quite well, you know, recent times, especially. But and I think we can talk about some of that and why it happened. I don’t know which bits we can talk about which we can’t because some of it might be under NDA. But I think would be really useful, particularly for my audiences, would you mind giving us a helicopter view of yourself and your own background so they can picture? You know who you are, where you come from what you do type of thing, if you wouldn’t mind? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Daniel Hill. And I’ve been in business all my life started life as an entrepreneur about three years old. And several decades later, for whatever reason, I’m still doing that. And started in business as at my first full-time business at 15. And start an events company, then started a self-employed construction business. And then pretty quickly realized, I didn’t want to be the person shoveling in the sand every day along with the person build houses, so should probably figure out what business is all about. So it’s university degree in Strategic entrepreneurship, which is all about looking at markets and industries and curves. And waves are trying to find those little high-value sweet spots where you can get in. And during my placement year, which was year three, I had an employee job for the first time in my life. And after about 12 weeks, I was actually facing the sack of disciplines, I got reprimanded, and then they’re actually gonna fire me. And the area, the area manager came in and said, I don’t know what you’ve done, we’ve doubled sales to 2.4 million pounds, we want to promote you and give you an award. And I thought this has taught me two things. One is, I never want to work for anyone ever again. And also if you can look outside the box and do things that are different to the things he got sacked for. And the results can be quite good. So know when to bend the rules just don’t know when not to break them. And then do a little trading group started locally scaled it nationally, and then sold back in 2011 2012 went into property because the market plateaued. And that was always my plan. And then started a trading group called PPN. UK. And one of the UK needed proxy groups. Now the focus on investment, we used to do management, we didn’t train and we do development. And I’ve been doing that for the last 10 years. So that’s what I focus on now. Very good. I mean, it’s quite a lot we could pick up there by the way. Wherever you want. You Was that your first and only job by the way. Obviously now you did. Yeah. Was that your first nanny job the one you did in your placement year. At the university, I sort of did like that set, self-employed building and stuff like that, but it’s my job my full time. 40-hour week job. Yeah, so you’re basically a businessman, entrepreneur, whatever language you want to use through really I was born with that, but more of an entrepreneur, I used to be more of an entrepreneur and a businessman. I think I’ve learned the skills of business and actually when you can be an entrepreneur or a business that actually adds a lot of value. I think was born an entrepreneur probably learn how to be a businessman. Yeah, it’s interesting distinction, not draw on that. But I just can’t help it pit have picked up what you said about when you  said you were in business from three years old?

Is that right? Well, it’s sort of like when people talk about entrepreneurs born, or you know, is it a job that you learn? My earliest memories was being about three years old family Christmas day, while everyone else was playing with their toys, I’ve managed to get one of the cardboard boxes, and I’ve cut a little hole in it, I was taking money off the adults and giving them sweets. But that was not my first thing of constantly focusing on value exchange revenue, like, you know, and then it just seemed like what I was interested in, and now it’s now it’s what I do for a living say, Oh, now that’s what I enjoyed it. So yeah, that’s, that’s intriguing. And so there’s this discussion sometimes between nature and nurture. You know, are you born a bit, you know, entrepreneur? Can you be grown into one? And you talked about perhaps a distinction between entrepreneurship and being a business person? You know, what’s your view generally on that? Well, nature, nurture is really interesting, because I actually heard that terminology a few years ago, and it’s a great question. What do you think about entrepreneurs specifically, do you think your learn doing is a learned behavior? I think is a born trait. I mean, yeah, yeah, I think the thing, there’s a natural tendency to be an entrepreneur, I think, you know, normally, and there’s some clues that we can pick up. Some people just know, like, when you’re three years old, you probably just don’t know if you’re conscious of it. But you know, you it was sort of part of you, and various parts of your life pointed to it. But I think I actually went into business a little bit later. So I spent a bit of time in corporate land, as I call it, nearly getting fired. You know, quite a lot, actually, normally for saying too much speak, you know, speak it out, that’s a load of rubbish, what you want to do that for, I was kind of known for that kind of, you know, insightful, helpful feedback to senior leadership. But I think, you know, there were always clues. And Steve Jobs says you can only join the dots looking back, but I think I was likened it to, you know, going with the grain, or going against the grain. And it just feels right now, if you dropped silt down, you know, the wrong direction on wood, it will either stick or flow nicely, right. And I think it’s an inner feeling. And that’s what I sense. So as an entrepreneur, you, just feel you sense, you’re either in the right place or in the wrong place. And I’ve definitely had, you know, decent, you know, despite telling my bosses, they didn’t know what they’re doing. But I’m at a decent, successful corporate career, to a degree to an extent. But I was kind of it just didn’t feel right. I just didn’t feel I was in the right environment. And I do actually, remember, I set two goals when I was in my late teens, I’ll come back to you in a sec, by the way, do get on a roll. But I set two goals in my late teens. One was to run my own business. And the second was to write a book. And now, I didn’t do either. Until, you know, much later, really, I did start my own business when I was, I think I was 30. So I was 30. When I start my first business, and I wrote my first book. Gosh, well, it was 2015. It was published. That doesn’t actually help you, because you don’t know how necessarily hold on. But I was like it was it was 3035 years in the making the book. Anyway, back to you. So you asked me but what about you? What’s your thoughts? On other? No, I think it’s the nature and nurture. I think there’s lots of bits to it. I think. If you’re wanting to well, sort of more scientific, academic, there’s sort of some people are left brain thinkers, some people are right brain, some people are more creative and intuitive. Some people are more analytical, some people or do some more visual, I think that element is probably born. I think it’s just the way your brain works. You know, some people have long legs, some people have short legs, some people have creative brains, some people have analytical brains, I think that part’s quite boring. So then obviously, that puts you into one of four categories, I would probably fall into the I think I would probably fall into the dynamic, creative, sort of space. And whereas I think perhaps, from my experience doing business with you, you probably have the creative dynamic side, but also have the analytical data driven side, which is actually probably one of the best positions to be in, especially for business ownership, and then also believe you’ve got to develop anything, so you’re born, and you can choose how far you want to progress and I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. So obviously it’s been quite a narrow experience, but I’ve got really deep so I do think I am really good at that one thing. So I’ve got really deep with that. Those I believe in other things about things like

spirituality, I believe things about the soul, even that the woowoo stuff like astrology and human design, when you believe in that sort of stuff, it’s, you know, you’re here for a purpose and actually also believe you’re here to do something. And I don’t know the answer to the question, but I believe we have more control over everything than we think. But we also have a lot less control over what we say. So the sort of a bit of an academic answer and a bit of a woowoo answer for her? Well, I think that I mean, it’s fascinating. To be fair, I think, humor design, by the way, it’s a really fascinating topic, to my model, and for those of you listeners who’ve never heard, it’s given me it basically, given the date, and the place you were born and the time, and they’ll give you a reading, and it tells you exactly who you are. And every person I’ve recommended it to, has done that, and they don’t even know your name, or your email address or your IP, whatever you call it. It’s like, yeah, it’s mind-boggling. It is, I’ve actually had a reading, it is mind-boggling. And I do like the fact of design. Pardon? What Human Design profile? Oh, my gosh, I forgot. I’ll have to look it up now. I don’t know don’t ask me difficult questions. That’s one thing in my in for me is, I do forget things. So I have to document things as I go. I’ll look it up as I go along. But I tell you, what, we are whole whole beings. Alright. And I think no matter if people think well, because we started talking about this bit when we talk about differences in entrepreneurship and being like a business, man or person. And I think, you know, possibly business person is like skills or competencies driven. Whereas been more entrepreneurial, excuse me, I need to drink some water to being more entrepreneurial is more of a natural tendency. And I think you can put the two together. So if your two skills, ie competency, modularly, you know, you can lose people, and potentially, but if you’re too entrepreneurial idea here, idea, their head in the clouds. Next Big Thing, you might not, you know, have the foundations and the grounding to have a successful business potentially. So there’s a bit of a being in any entrepreneur or business. Well, I think my natural tendency is entrepreneurial, but I’ve got learned behaviors. And so when you talk about your observation, and B, for example, you said I’ll perhaps got a bit of analytical in you. And that’s, that’s kind of a learned behavior. So I was, you know, accountancy trained. When I left uni, I didn’t have a brain for numbers. But you know, when I was accountancy training, so it was a discipline that I learned, you know, can read a balance sheet and stuff like that. But I tried to be an accountant for a while. I hated it. absolutely hated it. But that’s really one of the most dynamics with wealth dynamics. Yeah. So I’m create a primary profile. Yes, you’re the creative mechanic in that top left corner, which in my opinion, is it probably conflicts of interest because on the side, but that is definitely the best. If you’re creating mechanic on well on human design, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re a manifesting generator. So manifesting. I think that rings a bell now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, manifesting means you can manifest, you know, you create dynamic, you can see you in your garden, you’ve got that foresight and vision, but generators, it’s Duracell bunny, you can actually go out and make things happen. You’re not. You know, you’re not you don’t just talk a good game, but lots of people. Yeah, I’m trying to look it up. It’s not very good for a podcast made looking something up. But most of what my profile is. Come on, tell me. Oh, yeah, I am. That’s what I am manifesting. Very interesting. We literally the same wealth dynamics profile. And the same manifesting generalized, I don’t know, the same human desire. I don’t know if I spoke to anybody else who is the same on both of those. So they go. I did have a sneaky feeling. To be fair, I think you use obviously, study that in maybe observing other people and try and read other people. I imagine that their toys use it or study. Well, yeah. Do you mean you were like commenting on me? And you are wondering if you’re this or you’re that do you actually utilize it in that way? So think about who you’re engaging with and maybe what would get the best sort of response

out of them. The absolute problems now we teach advanced communication, which is basically  Why do some people think other people are weird? Why do some people think other people acquire why don’t why? Other people think other people are allowed. And it’s about understanding the different dyeing the different profiles and how to communicate and whether you’re doing deals, or you’re just having a chance to have a decent conversation your business partner is, is understanding how to communicate in their language, because most people don’t communicate, which annoys other people. Yeah, exactly. And a few taken us a little bit of tangent. But if you look at sort of relationships, I mean, romantic relationships and things like, you know, The Five Love Languages, or what am I? Oh, no. I’m, what am I? So there’s five of them. So I’m sure well, come on, you tell me you’re supposed to not read might remember my own. So for those who’ve never heard of the languages allow, it’s basically in the same way that introverted people are really quiet and reserved an extra day people are really loud, if you’re allowed to acquire this, and they get overwhelmed as you call it allow person they get bored. It’s understanding what language the other person uses to communicate when you use that in relationship school, the love languages, and there’s five of them. And it’s basically a really good understanding how to make your partner happy, but also how to not judge your partner by your own standards. Because if what’s important to you, is not important to them. And they don’t know where they’re never going to meet your expectations because they’re not tuned into it. The five are acts of service. So you love it. When somebody does something for you. Somebody does an act of service that really makes you feel good. And touch. So the sensitive touch being intimate, being delicate, being affectionate touches the second gifts to third one is people buying new things and buy new sentiment buying new gift bringing you flowers or aftershave. The fourth is a domain words of endearment or they call a Elbert words of endearment, encouragement, saying nice things compliments. What’s the fair? Oh, no, I’m trying to think now. Quality Time. Ironically, that’s my partner’s languages are quality time. And this is quality time of mine is service. So she does saying for me this morning, when out of all the dogs, because I had a board meeting at like 6:30am. I was like, I just love that and like she’s got up and taking the dogs out, which is my job like that is really important to me. Whereas if I did to her would be wouldn’t be that important. Whereas if I carve out, she calls out 90 minutes for me in an evening to spend some time together. I’m like, that’s okay. But I’d prefer an act of service as well as avoiding that for her. That makes her feel special. So that’s mine and hers. What’s yours? Yeah, so. So I think I had two and I can’t remember which way round it was your primary one and your secondary one. So I think it’s the physical touch. And words of endearment for me. And I just like I say, I can’t remember, but I think probably his words. So words are really important to me. And you know, it, you know, it can like build you up, you can pull you down in my case. And now there’s just an interesting spin on this. I happen to be married twice, I still am married for the second time. And my first wife and I, we had opposite. Love Languages. And, and my current wife, current wife, my wife, she’s still going to be my wife, maybe not as she is. But anyway, we have very similar love languages. So it does make it a bit easier if you similar. You have to work at it. If if you’re different. And I think the transition, you know, maybe and this is we’re talking about romantic relationships, which is great. But it’s similar principles can apply in other types of relationship to I mean, obviously, don’t go around kissing people in a business meeting. But you know, you know, we can apply principles, you know, someone who likes a little touch on the shoulder, for example, but you need to get that right. But, you know, if they like that, then you know, you can make them feel uplifted. So absolutely. It’s always think about having either night vision goggles, or you know, you go to the optician and they put the different lenses in, of course, think the more of these things you can learn. It just gives you more when you communicate with somebody, you’re not just it just gives you a high level of awareness. And obviously, not necessarily talking about taking advantage of the situation or manipulating or anything like that, but more understanding how we will want to go from point A to point B and when we’re doing deals and here and are done number of deals together. The most important thing the only important thing is that you’ve got a number of people involved in the deal. And you’ve got to find that  win-win where everybody’s happy when you can’t understand how to rather than do a deal where people just think about one of my big managers his relationships over transactions is I’ll only ever take 80% of the deal. But I could get another 100 grand here, but another half a million there, if it means I’m going to squeeze the pips out of somebody else, that’s not in check for interest in a buy, I’ve made more money. That’s not how we play the game, it’s relationships over transactions, when you can start to learn that sort of business is real. It’s communicating with different people and understanding how they work. And all you need to do is really develop a huge self-awareness of what is everybody trying to achieve? And what are they thinking? Without saying, that’s when you can really start to operate a very mature or sustainable, lucrative level effect? Because it’s a skill set that not many people have. Yeah, I totally agree. I think so talking about being holistic, I kind of reinvented the wheel, you know, the wheel of life? Yeah. So I’ve developed a built on that, obviously, I didn’t invent it, I just built on it. Mine’s a bit more complicated. It’s got more spokes and more pieces. But basically, it’s kind of holistic planning, you know, self reflection tool. And, you know, you score yourself in each of these different areas, you know, and our whole being, so it’s not just about work and business, or even just your romantic life. There’s other things too. So that’s one example. Another one is that, you know, there’s people are, I like to say, people are icebergs, you know, you’ve only got so much above the surface, and the rest is all beneath the surface. And, you know, we just have to figure out if we can, what’s beneath the surface, because often people, people stated reasons for doing something, saying something behaving a certain way, or taking a decision are not actually reflective of their real true inner motives. So it’s trying to figure that out. So I’m with you about relationships and with you about trying to figure people out, you know, they say the best, best sort of communicators, they want to can sort of make you feel heard in a room. I don’t know if you can hear what’s going on outside my thing here, but I think there’s a helicopter doing circling, hopefully not looking for me. But anyway, so yeah, the whole being Are you right? It’s it’s a skill set softer skills. But I think these softer skills are what differentiates a lot of successful people from not so successful people, whether it’s business people, or just people in any any walk of life, and they are skilled. So there’s very few people who are born with that, because we’ve got adopters or you’ve got understand all the different profiles. There’s some people who are naturally people, people might Blaze profiles, or people who are more sensory, you know, they’re more connected to certain things. But that doesn’t always facilitate a good business ability. And yeah, business. This is like the biggest cliche ever, and I’ve never said it before. But business is is a people thing, isn’t it? It’s like, at a board meeting today, we were doing a national expansion, one of these, one of the companies I’ve invested in, but we’re saying what I said, So what do you think the biggest challenge you’re gonna come up against is going to be on this journey? And what do you think they said? numbers of people because they absolutely, yeah. The team? Is the strategy solid, the business model is solid, the funds are there and the markets perfect. What’s the biggest challenge we’re gonna have? It’s gonna be how do we get a team of people to collaborate, move in the same direction? It’s the hardest? I think it’s the hardest thing? I think it probably is the hardest thing in business at scale, when you get into the CERT teams of like, 3040 50. I think there it really is. Yeah, and I think that’s probably is That danger zone in the middle, when you’re on less than 10? It’s easy, because your mates, when you’re over 100 It’s easy, because you’ve got a seven finger board or six finger executives, when you’re in that scale up space, that’s where I think it gets tough because you are reliant on lots of people culture structure, it’s tough.

Yeah, I agree. It’s tough. And I think, you know, it’s, it’s a complex situation then because, you know, you can have the best plans and strategies, you know, be well funded, have the right product marketing, etc, just to like general business principles, but who’s delivering it, you know, and you know, and you know, you can have a boss who’s just down on the, you know, all their staff and that’s just completely demotivated, start sabotaging things and leaving and all that sort of stuff. And you know, it doesn’t get executed well. And, and a lot of it is about, you know, ego gets in the way of all of us, actually. So I think it all starts with self-awareness actually all starts with self awareness. So if we start with self awareness, we’re aware of ourselves. And then we start to flip it and go, well, obviously that’s looking in the mirror Self Awareness looking in the mirror, but then we can start to look outside through the lens or whatever you want to call it, and other people with a greater understanding of ourselves and then recognizing actually, you know what, they’ve also got that those things going on those motivators, those differentiators those characteristics. And recognizing that they’re different. But, you know, it’s funny enough, I mean, look at just off topic, literally, I think today, they’ve got the Climate Summit, haven’t we been going on these last few days? You know, there’s going to be classic examples there of different, you know, personalities and cultures, and, you know, just personal interests, which are going to get away. If you want to look at a space where a guy is top of the mile. I mean, I listen to seven hours of the House of Commons last week with a budget just to hit all the opposing thoughts. And it’s just embarrassing. You think a war point was singing chants and shaking a new life path? You know, we’re not. We’re not in ancient Rome now. And the Colosseum, it’s 2021 we’re talking about recovery, we sort of are going to global Britain. And we’ve got a group of people buying their chest and shaking newspapers. It’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we’re still Neanderthal. I mean, we, we, you know, that’s one of the things to always remember, we still got animal instincts, you know, fight-flight, freeze, fawn, you know, type of responses. And, you know, the Chimp Paradox and all that stuff. We, we are instinctive creatures at heart. And whilst we have advanced clearly, you know, we’ve knowledge education, etc. If fundamentally, that’s that, and that’s why sometimes we will get pissed off with one another, you know, because the animal comes to the surface, we get triggered. And you know, we can respond. So that’s something I’m really interested in from personal development, self-development point of view. I love psychology, but I’m not a psychologist if that makes sense. My wife is so that, you know, I’ve got no chance in my house. Basically, I’m busted for everything. So she’s a she’s very good double degree psychologist and a senior HR vice president. So I’ve just, you know, I’ve just done basically leads you got someone to ask the advanced economic, economic, academic questions to on sort of the onboarding of philosophy. So I look more of the why. Well, I don’t know if it’s the why What the hell but it’s like, one of the things that fat fascinates me obsess me, and drives me mental is this whole thing of like why I’m calling tonight? Last month on problems now I’ve taught everyone about the sole purpose. This is the concept of viewing things like whether it’s like religious or Buddhist or like dharmas, or eco guys, and it’s this, this idea that we’re here to do something this why, why? I’ll pose the question to you, I’m sure you consider that is, why are you here? Why did you do what you do? Why, what why? What, Why, why? Why me? Okay. I think it’s, again, it’s one of those voyages of discovery, right. And I think in my case, it’s, um, it’s dual purpose, if that makes sense. But I think it ultimately is probably the same route. So I think I’m here to share my knowledge. But equally, I think I’m here to, you know, give into the next generation. So, you know, everything I do kind of always comes back to that, you know, so what I’m doing now, for example, is, you know, we kind of sorted financially wealth, you know, okay, as a family and the kids are going to be okay, so we’ve kind of hit all those goals. And, you know, next stage really is I’m trying to build a foundation. And so, you know, above a certain level of net worth, is all going to go into this foundation. And I’ve had that it’s been burning inside of me for a couple of decades. And it kind of won’t let me go, it just keeps coming back. And even though I go Do you know what, I just want to sit on a beach and sip cocktails, and do nothing for a while and we talked about that before we go on and how actually exciting that is after a while. But, you know, it’s I think the foundation is really on what I’m building towards. It’s just, it’s my legacy, but and it’s sharing is still sharing, but why sharing knowledge along the way and the other one is, is maybe giving back in a different way when I leave this which we will will so I think that’s for me my purpose, what about you? But I just asked a question that don’t take this long way. This is this is a reflection of me not so nice that I’ve always wanted to do a foundation and then started looking at it and thought there’s why those events a charity, that sort of stuff. So for me Years ago, I started a thing called gap and get back, which is basically an initiative we run every year to promote mental and physical well being in entrepreneurs. Because one of the biggest things that gets in our way is ourselves, we get fat, we get lazy, we get sly, just at the heart of people’s mental and physical world, whereas entrepreneurs that also raise money for charity, we’ve raised about a quarter-million pounds so far over the last three or four years. And on my way of life, Vivier bat, was on a scale to a point where I was donating half million pounds a year. And as I’ve got more self aware, over the last few years about my ego, one of the questions I can’t now get away from is, am I actually doing that? Because I feel like I’m given and I am given that, or is it another thing of my ego of, I feel like I should be I feel like I want to visibly be given, because the very it comes with the territory, philanthropies isn’t that you made money, you get into a good position, and then you start giving back. And I thought, is that just my ego? Or is that actually fundamentally something that I want to do? And it’s like, Have you ever asked yourself that question?

No, absolutely. I think, you know, it’s a good way to test yourself, you know, if you, you know what, I mean, I was reluctant to say, excuse me, because I think once you start articulating that it can sound like a bit of a humblebrag, you know, it can be flipped and used as a PR exercise. So I was trying not to say too much. But interestingly, I was talking to your former team, and we might get onto that. And I was prompted to share my personal vision. And I just, I just touched on it very loosely, like I kind of did that. And I was prompted to share in a bit more detail. And I was a bit uncomfortable, because I you know, I don’t know if you know how far to go with this. But I did. And then of course, it just, it was from the heart. And I had people coming up to me afterwards saying that was so inspiring, you know, and thanks for sharing that. And, you know, things like that. And so I’m trying to be wearing them not sounded, you know, like some big thing or whatever. And equally, I don’t want it I didn’t I didn’t actually personally subscribe to the point that it just goes with the territory. The philanthropy doesn’t always, by the way. But I think, although you look at some of the giving pledge, you know, and I think perhaps is, I mean, that’s a great thing, by the way, the giving pledge to give back into society, but it can be used in, you know, inappropriately, sometimes. But I think what my vision is, So yours is great. I think you’re giving money today, and it’s making a difference today, with your charitable giving. What I’m really trying to do is build like almost a wealth fund. So whether it’s a foundation, a charity, nonprofit, whatever it is, I don’t actually know yet. But I’m hoping it’s going to last for several generations. And, you know, we’ll we’ll, you know, live that live on a bit longer than I could have done. So I think that’s where I really have the vision for it, then the causes that I, you know, want to support. The very close to my heart is financially because they’ve been expanded recently, because my kids have helped me to see a wider, bigger picture, because they’ll see a different generation. And they’ve got, you know, wouldn’t say they’ve got different interest, because when I mentioned what theirs are as LIBOR, of course, you should have that as an interest. But you also have to be can’t do everything for everybody. So yes, I’ve asked myself that question. I’m trying to avoid it being an ego trip, in all honesty, and that’s why in a way I keep the whole he keeps coming back to me, you know, thing is, is really important. And I think it’s a good test of whether it’s your purpose, if it won’t leave you alone, if you feel it just keeps rising up inside of your bloody I’ve got to do something about that. That’s a clue that it is really your core purpose, I think. Yeah. As you’re talking, I think, obviously, in the wider question of the why sort of thing. But being productive, it’s just in my blood, being productive and being creative and problem-solving. And, again, you got we were sound cliche, but same way is easy, but it’s helping people, whether it’s been in my businesses where I’ve taken team members and created cultures where everyone feels invested in and trying to drive them forward. Or if somebody comes to me wants to sell their business or somebody that got an owner money that just sold their company and actually now you know, they used to make in half million pounds a year now they’ve got a couple of million quid they got no, no cash flow. It’s I understand what their problems are. And then one of my skills I think is making things happen is if I say I’m going to get involved in something, I normally if it kills me, I’ll normally execute on that because I made the decision whether I can do it before I go into it. That’s probably my one of my skill sets. I think my reason why. Yeah, then I will this not one of the deepest questions we talked about property entrepreneurs spend three months every year looking at it. And there’s the tangible bit. So my reason why I initially was I came from very humble beginnings, single parent household, and we didn’t have money. So my first thing was, I wanted to get money to give money to my mom, and I wanted to get money to make my dad proud. That was my first thing. And then I got to a point where hopefully, I made my dad proud. And I realized my mom didn’t actually want my money. So she, she basically just said that you’re wasting your time, but by then it was too late. And then I wanted financial independence myself. So I wanted to build my own sort of like financial fortress and have financial independence. So we did that. And then as an owner, then I’ve just been the sole search and re I tried time off couple of years ago, I tried like December off and put my feet up, and I end up fat hungover and we’ve sunstroke sitting on the beach, we ginger hair.

And the other day, and I think one thing that’s come to me recently, which I’m reading some really old scripts, old stuff at the minute, some movies and stuff on a script called the DAT Tao de Ching by Lao Tzu that I’ve ever heard of. It’s like, turn. Yeah, I heard of it. But I haven’t read it. Yet. It’s about 10,000 years old. Anyway, so at four chapters, it’s like an encyclopedia, oh, boy over there. But one of the things they said in there is, don’t die with your music and psychology. And it’s like, that’s something that’s really landed me recently as i What is my music, and I thought, probably entrepreneurs been going for seven or eight years now. And every year, I’ve never tried to scan that I’ve never, every year, it just gets more expensive and more people joy. Because it’s just this blueprint of what I’ve used to get to where I am. And over the last 10 years, I’ve just created a new thing, and then passed it back to other people. And I thought actually, there’s one thing I could leave the world it would be that blueprint finished, done and dusted. So actually, when I’m long gone, I mean, the guys deliver it without me at the minute, but it’s only about 70%. That would be my gift, I think would be that say? I don’t know, I don’t know, the answer to my question was that I was gonna say, You’re fascinating, because, you know, obviously, you spent I know, a lot of time, you know, contemplating purpose and soul, you know, that you mentioned, and you’re still searching yourself. But I mean, to be fair, you know, you’ve got younger than me. And so I think not that need to be a certain age. But because I have been wrestling with that soaping for probably longer, many more years, maybe, you know, starting to appear, maybe, I think the things that we talked about when we’re young, and our aspirations and our outcome goals, you know, like financial independence, get house get married, blah, blah, blah, you know, stuff like that. There, they’re like, everybody’s sorts of milestones in life, there’s no real difference, you know, we still want to be in a relationship in a nice home and, you know, feel that we were fulfilled in our work and things like that, and pretty much everyone’s same. I think the distinguishing part is the bit that it’s not an outcome, actually, it’s a way of life. And this includes you already telling me, I don’t want to be pop psychologist or anything, but there’s a lot of clues in the way you talk and the way that you go about things. And I think, you know, something around the helping people sounds to me, you know, certainly parts of it. And, you know, you’ve got the skills to execute on that. And I’ve seen it firsthand, by the way, you know, you know, when you’ve been working alongside us and supported us, and just the way you talk, you know, you studied and you apply that. And then you’ve got a heart, you want to help the other person to get what they want. You talk about a win, you know, as outcomes, and you will leave money on the table for the sake of relationships. You know, that’s, that’s pointing to slightly different direction, I think. And I think there’s something there. Need to explore? Because that is my big question. When I’m not busy. And I am in my little meditation room on got time to myself, in my head. I’m always thinking like, what is this all about? Anything, any last words of wisdom you could hand out to me to explore that? You know, you’re very fun. The conversations we’ve had one of the things that I’ve credited with is how well rounded and how much like life experience you’ve got both in business but also the softer side of things. You know, when you’re talking about people and appraising situations, you clearly know what and even just like you just spoke about that, you know what he’s talking about? How would you encourage me? You’ve obviously developed to understand and further than I have in this spirit with what What would you encourage me to explore? Or questions? So, I’m not an expert, by the way, I think, you know, maybe I talk a good game. I’m not an expert. So I think for me, you know, it’s been that. So the music inside, right, you said your own quote. So don’t die with the music inside. So you kind of need to tune in literally. So listen, listen to yourself, in different situations, and what keeps recurring, even though you’re in different situations, different events happening with different people, you know, is the Steve Jobs quote, looking back and see if you can join those dots. But on a more practical level, I don’t know if you’ve read a URL well read. So you may well have come across these publications, by the way, the ancient publications are really good. Marcus Aurelius and, you know, the Stoics, all that stuff. And this morning, he read every morning, it’s one of things I believe, from a soul by carried on pay off the practical. What I was gonna say was, maybe a couple of books, you’ve probably come across them. One is the values factor by Dr. John Demartini. Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah. And that’s, you know if you really dig into values, you know, that’s how you do things, what’s important to you, in? Putting your values up? Yeah, yeah. You know, he had to constantly share. Yeah, I mean, some of them, I think, you know, you know, trust, respect, integrity, integrity is really big for me, you know, actually, you know, that mutual respect, and, you know, giving is another part of it. So, there’s, there’s a couple of them, that are very, very important. So, like, we talked about the love languages, so when respect, you know, and so if the wrong words come out, then that’s not good. They can do from my lips, as well as other people’s integrity, you know, be a person of your word, be trustworthy, deliver on what you say, you know, it’s really important to me, but I also judge other people by the same value, by definition, but isn’t necessarily the value. So sometimes bit unfair, you know, so there’s a big lost in tech, she is the leader and a business owner and investor and a manager when, yeah, judging other people by your own standards, especially when you’re a perfectionist and a high performer, it’s very exhausting place to be as a senior person. I mean, I’ve had some therapy around, you know, dropping expectations and stuff like that, you know, so you know, that, that, as you rightly say it, you set your own bar quite high, and then you will end up judging people by the same bar, but perhaps even a higher bar, and that’s going to get you in a lot of trouble. So anyway, I think it’s not fair on anyone else, even if, yeah, if you are gardener by Marian standards, it’s like, we’re very different people with very different aspirations in life.

The only one is, there’s another book called What matters most. So when people talk about purpose, that’s my go to recommendation. People talk about Simon Sinek, you know, start with why, but I prefer what matters most, because it’s very practical at helping you uncover you know, your purpose, but there’s a load the load of other things that we could dive into, but there’s just a couple, but I just think listening. So for example, I spent a lot of soul searching times I’ve been through several phases of Korea, you know, corporate land consultancy, business ownership investor, and possibly rotating them again, and, and the different and like, I see, will that work? That didn’t work. I like that. I didn’t like that, you know, this thing keeps recurring. Why? Why is that? Why is this thing? So I don’t know. It is a case of listening. And if you’re not so good, I’m not always so good at listening to myself, you know, tuning in, it’s great to have someone you can talk at and, you know, they can play that foil. I wasn’t joking about having therapy. I think I was talking to know Stephen Schwarzman sportsman. That’s right. Isn’t it? Blackstone, his biography he talks about he’s seen a psychologist for like decades. And I was surprised to hear him say that in his autobiography. But I think lots of people should, it shouldn’t be a taboo subject. And you know, not doesn’t mean you need, you know, whatever fixing or whatever. But it should be helpful to talk to someone who, especially someone who’s skilled, can uncover and dig into certain things that you maybe don’t even realize you’re revealing. Definitely. I mean, for those who listen, as you might think, you know, the all these things sound quite extreme. If you want to go to the extreme and you want to see what you’re capable of. You also need to understand who you are. I’ve had therapy I’ve had hypnotherapy was hypnotized last year, and it was one of the most life changing things I’ve ever done. I want you to understand Why my work ethic was so high, because I couldn’t figure out why I still, you know, build the businesses, then the sole some companies then made some model or made some money. And I can understand why I kept wanting to go at the same pace. And all these nothing changes. Anyway, it took me back to my childhood, and found two reasons why. And he answered it for me, and it changed my life. And then I pay for all of our board members to have life coach at the same life coach design path for like, three, four years. And it’s just, every time every, every phone call, it’s only half an hour a month, but it’s always life changing. And it’s, if you spin at the bottom rung of the ladder, and hit the top of the ladder at the bottom, that’s one of them. I’ve got a couple of questions for you. Oh, have you heard Okay, okay, cool, different. You can think of me as quick or they can be quick ones. When we’re talking about productivity and being busy, so you and I are both busy people, you know, I think we like for whatever reason, we like that lifestyle, that pace of life. And obviously, sometimes it’s sometimes it doesn’t always, sometimes it can be at our own cost. And it can overcook us a little bit. Why do you think why that? Oh, why? Why did you? Do it’s hard for me to, you know, call it for you. But I might have a suspicion but I don’t know. Well, okay, this is Whoa, okay. I’m a very honest person. And it’s hard for me not to say something when there’s some. There’s an honest revelation there. Sometimes it gets me in trouble, by the way. But recently, I did discover I had a condition, which clearly I’ve had for many a decade. And I didn’t know, I had a certain condition until it was recently diagnosed. And it comes with the condition. Sorry, I understand. And now I’m like, Okay, now it makes sense. It’s actually a release, it’s likely to release. And now it’s a joke, right? Oh, it’s because of my condition. And, you know, blah, blah. And, you know, and I am wired, you know, I am always on the go, I’m, you know, I’m always, you know, moving towards new things, as well. So it’s all kind of characteristic with that. And it kind of, it’s a piece of the puzzle that I didn’t have. I mean, if I’m 55 I’m 55. And I didn’t know, I just did not know, I mean, God forbid, you know, people around me who survived around me for however many decades, you know, and I’m thinking back to the moments going, okay, yeah, that wasn’t so great. That wasn’t great. And I can pinpoint it to this common thread, so don’t really want to spill it, spill it all out right now.

But we’re not astounded. I mean, that’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if, obviously, there’s all sorts of spectrums. And I won’t be surprised if I appear on some or many of them in different capacity. I mean, my partner’s convinced I’ve got OCD convinced I’ve got some sort of ADHD, I’m just constantly like, my brain is a million miles out past that shut up with a woman who wake up at one in the morning. You can’t put me back to bed. It’s like, I’ll just lay here for five hours. Do you see that? Say that? So that’s it because of your condition and you’ve gone into that space? Do you ever challenge it regard yourself and think I shouldn’t be doing this, I shouldn’t be sitting on a beach. I shouldn’t be chilled out I should be doing a 10 two, three or 95? Are you quite contented and happy going on guns razor? I think I used to challenge it and question it and think why me? Why am I doing this? Why can’t I just chill out and you know, I’ll you know, even I took a three week vacation, I had a business partner times back in the 90s. And I could not stop checking in with a business. And you know, we who’s the Chairman, my business partner, just he basically went around one by one shutting people down talking to me. And it was the most stressful thing you can imagine. For me. I was on a bloody beach trying to relax. But I was actually stressed because I couldn’t have the direct communication. And even if there was a problem, I would feel more relaxed knowing about it than just not knowing so I think but now I have the answer to that. And now I’m more chilled with it. And I kind of go with it. And I can’t forgive myself. You know, and I’m more accepting of myself. Because now I know which characteristic of me to fix because other people will be listening to this either thinking where we sound are absolutely nuts or fits thinking, wow, that’s exactly how it worth it. One concept that came to me a couple of years ago, which I think is really interesting. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts since you got work-life balance that everybody talks about, which is when to start weekends off or weeks holiday And then this thing called Work-Life blend, which is more like, actually, there is no black and white, it’s just gray. And it’s like you could be on holiday, but you might do an hour work in the morning, because that’s how you actually, if I’d rather go for three days, or four days off the grid, long weekend holiday, don’t do any work, or seven days with two hours work in the morning just to dip in. And it’s not really work. It’s checking into work, I feel like, you know, I’m looking after the kids or whatever something you want. I’m assuming your work-life blends and your work-life balance. No doubt. One extreme example just doesn’t make you feel good. Now, you know, I really struggle with that. And sometimes people around me struggle with it too, because maybe they want to switch off. And you know, I’m on the go. And like, it’s really funny, because you just said something along the lines of it doesn’t feel like work or isn’t really work or something like that. And that’s how I feel. Sometimes I’ve got, I’ve got my laptop on my lap, obviously, in the lounge, I’m always there. And we’re going to there’s something in the background on TV, and I’m kind of tapping away. And she said, Are you working on like, no. But I think what’s the definition? I think probably I am. Yeah, I’m working on an article, for example, that’s still kind of build in my knowledge. And you know, maybe I’m doing it because I want to translate that into someone else. So yeah, I don’t get busted every time. Like I say, so. Definitely. What about you? Exactly the same. I mean, I work with entrepreneurs all day long, whether they’re in companies I invest in, or people that we train other board members who are on the same boards as way and we’re all the same. It’s like it’s not, it does not work. It’s, in fact, we sent it to one of my fellow board members every day, and was he was saying about going to a wedding. And they say, I seen How late did you stay silent or whether now that weekend and left at 7pm. So nothing good is gonna happen after 7pm I’m gonna end up in Tahoe going up drunk or drinking next day is going to be a little bit foggy. I’d rather go to the web and have a great time enjoy everyone’s company. And when people start shouting at you and saying the same thing twice, we’ll leave and we’re saying actually, sometimes. And this is not, if my friends and family listen to this, this doesn’t apply to them. But sometimes going to a social environment, or somewhere where you’ve fought forced to make small talk, can feel far more laborious to me than going and sit in the office for a day. I could say on a Saturday or Sunday, doing deals or sending WhatsApp or whatever, and find it far more enjoyable. So I’m definitely more of a blend, don’t get up, bang out two hours and then go off to the beach or go out to lunch. Keep it moving. We have to be a little bit careful. I think Elon Musk said in his autobiography. But there was a question he raised his 11 hours a week enough for a girlfriend.

I don’t know if you ask many girls that question. I’m not sure that they’re gonna agree with it. So definitely part of it is you’ve got to if somebody is you’ve got to want to be in relation with an entrepreneur. There’s no, you can’t, you can’t compromise it. He’s lovely. But he’s an entrepreneur. That’s never gonna work. It’s like he’s lovely, because he’s an entrepreneur. Exactly. So what was your second question? And did you want to dive more into that one? Because that was kind of big. Right. I think it I think it’s Yeah, I think it’s fascinating. I think it’s there is? Yeah. So out it so it is ADHD in my case. I have less of the age, if that makes sense. There’s a few there’s a spectrum, basically, like, you find out you’ve had it because I literally my family have been saying instances about six. What now is so funny, no one ever suggested it ever, for any reason, even though they’re probably quite a lot of clues through our lots of experiences and encounters, but I’ll tell you what it was and it’s the lady who does my podcast actually has me saying this. She and we had had a call. And she said, Yeah, I think she’s out about her condition. She said she has ADHD. And she said, I suspect you might have to. And this was fairly recent this year. All right. I was like, Oh, really, you know, I mean, I don’t take any offense by anyone who’s saying anything like that I’d take on board, you know, feedback. And I was like, Okay, I’ll do some background research. And of course, you know, looked up about 50 Google articles, you know, Google 50 articles popped up. I was like, I don’t see I don’t associate it with the age the hyperactivity bit. And that was my preconceived idea of the condition as well. You know, someone just can’t control themselves bounce off the walls type of thing. And, you know, I think I can relatively but not it all the time, obviously. But I associated with a lot of stuff. I was like, oh, okay, it could be something in this. And then I basically took it. I told you I actually speak to a psychologist every week. And I took it into her and she went out because there’s a few tests in fact, sorry. Go ahead. Now Oh, yeah, you got tests. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of entrepreneurs have those sort of traits, you know, active more. Elon Musk says he, when he was a kid, he thought he was insane. He thought he actually thought he was insane. Because his brains would stop. And I thought I can No, yeah, it would never stop. You know, Elon Musk has got Asperger’s. Right. Yeah. Well, that. I mean, that was quite new thing. So I don’t know whether it’s the new thing. He’s probably had it forever. But I know he’s only just recently sort of, now’s I’ll send I’ll put a link in the show notes as a test that some funniness someone and another group shared, which has got a lot of different tests. So, tests for autism test for ADHD and a couple of similar sorts of conditions. And it’s kind of you know, it’s obviously a self scoring test, you could influence it if you wanted it to wanted to, but what would be the point, and then it just gives you, you might have a tendency to, and maybe you want to look into that type of thing? If you share that with me, and what’s amazing. Also, I’ve got a soul test, which tells you how old your soul is, do you think, do you think your soul we think about the soul is like, your body is just the physical life and hopefully the end of this the soul carries on and we get reincarnated or whatever. Would you say you’re an old soul, young soul? Oh, what were you put into in terms of the universe? And you know that we could be reincarnated? It’s going to be hard to answer that. I feel like I’m young at heart. Definitely. But I do feel that. I said, No, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that one. But so I’ll take the test, I’ll take the test. And be interested, say, I feel like I’m young at heart. But equally, I do feel that I seek wisdom. And I you know, try and impart wisdom. I mean, that’s maybe self a humble brag. And I don’t mean it sound like that. But, you know, I search it out. And I try and impart it to other people, if I hear you know, good stuff, but not what’s your soul age? Did you do

off the scale, and he lies owners, they have not been here before. Not interested in the cars and the jewelry and the small talk, I’m on a mission out the way. Big things that be things to solve. They’re like, yeah, don’t sweat the small stuff. And be I’ve always known, I’ve known that for a long time anyway. Seek wisdom overwhelmed, you know, all these sort of things are interested in a second question. And so one of the things I’ve said quite flippantly in an interview last year, which has actually stuck with me, and I keep sense checking in with people who I think, have got the whole spectrum of experience. And when I thought about coming up next with you, you definitely fall into that category. One of the things that I’ve come up with in the last couple of years, which I’m still challenging as to whether it’s correct, and you let me know, your thoughts, is entrepreneurs are the best people to start businesses. Investors are the best people to scale businesses. managers and executives are the best people to run businesses. And accountants and Finance Directors are actually the best people to own the businesses. But James, okay. Obviously, if someone heard it that way, I think there’s a lot of truth in the loss of that. I think entrepreneurs starters for sure, they definitely need the execs and the managers. This is kind of the business skills and entrepreneur thing we had, you know, start the conversation. Maybe just need to better understand what you mean by the investor role and the accountant role before I can give a view back on that, that. So the investors you said to scale, those who agreed or go out start businesses, and probably 95% of them never actually make any money. Now they get that a well paid job. Now maybe they’re a bar or a butcher or a bricklayer. You have great lifestyle, but they’re self-employed, not really build business investors, the one those of us that go in and look at a business and say, right, this is one of those needle in the haystack businesses that’s crystal wave. It’s strong margin. It’s highly scalable, highly tradable. An investor goes in and looks at the numbers and says right now you’re operating at 10,000 units. The next sweet spot is 500,000. knew that we’re going to forward funder that half a million quid in, drive through the debt. And then we’re going to come out, I’ll put this up at this level, I think it’s the investors that really know how to go through that they’re not necessarily the entrepreneur, and then the accountant. So then the managers and executives run it, no point an entrepreneur sitting in the MD or the COC. And then the accountants, I don’t know, I just, the more time I spent with finance people I just seen, they seem to be the ones that run the most lucrative businesses, just because they’re not interested in the softer side of their, you think about venture capitalists, or maybe not venture capitalists, because there’s a bit of a negative connotation, but the people who actually own the businesses, big businesses, really, they want to be really have a really good understanding of like financial engineering structure and mechanics, fundraising, balance sheets, floats, all that sort of stuff, we’re just seeing that that top level is actually perhaps best run by finance people owned by finance people by investing. I see what you’re saying. So I think some of it is the reason I was hesitant is because we’re, there’s a difference between role and skill. So sometimes you can be investor with an entrepreneurial mindset, and you know, things like that. So I definitely think you need to be a strategist to scale. You know, so if that often comes with being an investor, for a start, but it could also sit with some of the other categories, you know, particularly, and I think when I’ve observed fairly well run businesses, or a reasonable scale, there’s usually a strong head of sales slash marketing slash business development, and a strong accounts and, and they work as a pair. And so that would be my read, I think, if we’re looking at, you know, the way we’re running our business at the moment, you know that we’re paired with fairly complementary to one another, you know, in the way we go about things. And that’s sometimes create some friction and tension, because you know, it’s natural. But we get a better result when we come out at the end of it. So I don’t think there’s necessarily a one a one in each area. But I definitely think there’s something in what you’re saying, for sure.

I suppose what I’m trying to do is, at a very broad brush level, manage people’s expectations that if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not going to be the one that takes it through the whole hockey stick. You know, there’s a number of phases. One thing that you just said, there is always absolutely bound money is about having somebody to turn on the taps, BDM, marketing, acquisitions, whatever, somebody turned on the taps, and then somebody else keeping the water in the bucket by the finance, stuff like that, it’s very rare that you find those partnerships. And also, but sort of that advanced communication, those two profiles are often the ones that conflict. So it’s very, very rare, as well as one two people that can collaborate like that, because normally, the normal role between a dynamo or Blaze and an A steel profile is actually conflict. Because once had in the cloud, no one’s petting the spreadsheet. Yeah, and, you know, Bojana, she loved this conversation, we are over running, but I’m actually loving. Four minutes. And that’s all. Now that’s fine, we’ll do that. But I think in my case, for example, I know I need someone with a mop and a bucket going behind me making sure everything’s like, swept up, and it’s a bit of an in joke now. So, you know, Kenny, I’ll do a lot of work with, you know, she just knows that she knows I’m a great starter, I’m a great, you know, set us off down a certain course, but there’s gonna be a whole load of debris falling out in the back, which she will go and you know, pick up and put in the right place. That’s not doing a disservice to her because she’s also very strategic in her outlook, but we slotted into some roles. And you know, you know, I’ll do my thing, she’ll do her thing we can cross over, I can count the beans, I can do the process. I used to do quality assurance manuals and stuff like that, but I absolutely hate it. So I can do it. Anyway, digression. But before you go there, if you’ve got literally like two or three minutes, I did want to say the reason why I’ve invited you can I kind of just wanted to put out there because rarely, I’ve mentioned that some of the people I’ve invited in this very is just like four or five people. I’m invited in this sort of mean, it’s not like a series just a couple of conversations. And we didn’t really know where this conversation was going to go. And you know, we only recently kind of got connected this year. I’ve been aware of you, you might not be aware of me, but I was aware of you for some years before and did hear good things by the way from a distance and observe things from a distance. But we’ve you know, worked together in a couple of guises. We’ve bought and sold businesses, you know, we helped each other in that sense. So just to put it out there, full disclosure, but the way you go about things, you know really stands out You know, and I’m just been massively impressed. And so I really wanted you to be presented to my audience as a kind of role model. You know, certainly, from what I’ve seen so far, I mean, God has his own skeletons in closets or anything, you know, waiting for surprise, but I’d be really woodshop I’d be shocked if it was, but you just go about things in a really, really good way. And he talks about being holistic, he talks about values, principles, you know, Soul stuff, which has nothing to do with money and business and stuff like that, and relationships. And I just wanted to put it out there on the record that I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed, you know, getting to know you better over these last months or so. And, you know, long may that continue, we’ve had a little banter with between us over WhatsApp in particular. But I just put it out there. And so anyone who wants to know more about you, you can say how to find you. But I suggest if you’re not plugged into Daniel Herland, PPN, that you are you should be, because I think there’s some good things going on. And he’s a good guy. I think.

Yeah. I mean, well, I again, bother. Yeah, so really appreciate that. Thank you. I can assure you, I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and my name’s written on everything that I do. So it doesn’t always go right. But it’s not always a behave when it goes, right. It’s how you behave when it goes wrong. So any, any bumps in the road, we’ve had been more than amicably? Fellas, initially, there’s no skeletons in the closet you’re gonna come across. And I really appreciate you taking the time to time to share that. And in the mantra of relationships over transactions is one of the most undervalued things people in business could get understand, because both played the long game, which meant, and this is what I’d recommend for everybody, is I’ll always leave stuff on the table for the long day, you don’t need to squeeze the pips. But when you deal with 80% of people in business, they’re just looking for what can they get on this one deal? And how can they screw their way out of this one contract? And on this one project that’s going over budget, how can they protect their itself and run for the hills, whereas proud say, for the last 2030 years, total 20 years, we’ve never done that, in any of our sites, any of our projects, any of our deals, it’s very rare to find other people like that. And I think not returning a compliment, because you’ll have one for me. But I’ve said to you in private, when you’ve offered me thanks for the way that I’ve facilitated deals and helped everyone get what they want, is one of the reasons I do it is I’ve got a very small network of very high value clients. And they all match the same values that I have. I think that’s why we’ve had good deals together. Because we just understand, it’s about a lot more than, you know, pounds and pennies. So yeah, it’s been a it’s been a whirlwind relationship. We’ve done a lot of deals in a reasonably short amount of time. And I’ve got no, no doubt that won’t continue into the future and share the sentiment. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. And yeah, long may it continue. Me too. Thanks, Dan. I’m gonna just do the wrap-up because of the time but I really appreciate you joining us or joining me today didn’t know where the conversation was gonna go really enjoyed it. But the show notes gonna be over at the website, the proxy voice.net. You can reach out to me podcasts at theproperty voice.net if you want to connect with Dan Daniel Hill, what’s the best way to reach you, Daniel? Yeah, if you follow me on Facebook, just search Daniel hill at Instagram is property entrepreneur, underscore. And probably the best way for you guys to hear this podcast as well is as subscribed to the property entrepreneur, the official property entrepreneur podcast. We do one podcast a week every Tuesday. And it’s just me talking about various topics for like 1520 minutes. This week’s one is about three simple stress solutions how to live an easy life in a very chaotic world. So yeah, join it tune into those you genuinely think we’re audience will enjoy listening to I think then enjoy listening to us. Perfect, thanks a lot and remains to be said for me is thanks very much for listening once again this week. Until next time on the property boys podcast is John

John. Thank you for listening today. Now head over to theproperty voice.net. For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Soundbite: Friends of TPV with Daniel Hill appeared first on The Property Voice.

I’m sharing a small handful of conversations with some of my property and business buddies over the next few weeks as a bridge between the old and the new podcast.

This week, my old buddy, Damien Fogg, joins me to talk a kind of ‘nonsense all sense’, if that makes any sense?

We cover a lot of ground from book writing and best-seller champagne-fuelled Thursdays to endowments, foundations and trust funds to tree planting and even Postman Pat gets a mention, would you believe?

Yes, it’s unscripted, rather random and at times, quite the hangover antidote to property investment.

My favourite quote is ‘property development is a bit of a pain in the arse’, just so you know what to expect!

Damien is always good value, but catch him whilst he’s sober, after celebrating another best-seller author credit…even if he has to share that with Anna Clare Harper (author name) – he’s gonna hate me for that one!

You meet people in this business that perhaps you wouldn’t otherwise, merely because of the shared interest In property. Well, Damien is such a rare breed, as you can’t help but love him despite the fact that he’s got a foul mouth and could literally scoop your heart out with a spoon.

You can probably tell this is all said with a deep sense of warmth and respect for one of the good guys in property and investment. Cheers buddy!

Listen in…if you dare!

Damien Fogg Facebook Linked In

The Property Voice YouTube Channel

The Property Voice Social Media Channels:  Facebook ¦ Linked In ¦ Twitter ¦ Instagram ¦ YouTube

The Property Voice Meetup Page & Eventbrite Page

Property Deal Tips

How to Reach Richard By Telephone

Link to the Podcast feedback survey

TPV Apprentice Programme info HERE

Subscribe to and review the show in iTunes…and while you are at it please help us to spread the word by telling all your friends too!

Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

I’m sharing a small handful of conversations with some of my property and business buddies over the next few weeks as a bridge between the old and the new podcast.

This week, my old buddy, Damien Fogg, joins me to talk a kind of ‘nonsense all sense’, if that makes any sense?

We cover a lot of ground from book writing and best-seller champagne-fuelled Thursdays to endowments, foundations and trust funds to tree planting and even Postman Pat gets a mention, would you believe?

Yes, it’s unscripted, rather random and at times, quite the hangover antidote to property investment.

My favourite quote is ‘property development is a bit of a pain in the arse’, just so you know what to expect!

Damien is always good value, but catch him whilst he’s sober, after celebrating another best-seller author credit…even if he has to share that with Anna Clare Harper (author name) – he’s gonna hate me for that one!

You meet people in this business that perhaps you wouldn’t otherwise, merely because of the shared interest In property. Well, Damien is such a rare breed, as you can’t help but love him despite the fact that he’s got a foul mouth and could literally scoop your heart out with a spoon.

You can probably tell this is all said with a deep sense of warmth and respect for one of the good guys in property and investment. Cheers buddy!

Listen in…if you dare!

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing, get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. As always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today. And these mini Insio conversations I’m going to be having with some of my buddies and business buddies and property buddies, it’s just a few of them over the next couple of weeks, he’s going to be a kind of a transition, because it’s going to be a bit of a change in how the podcast is going to look at some point in the future. So what I thought I’d do is invite a few of my friends to just join me in a conversation or two, as a bit of a segue to that. And the very first guest actually that I’ve invited where you go. He certainly gave me a fork. So Damon Hi, how are you doing?

I’m alright, Fred.

Good man. Well, we’ve been having a chat before the chat. But let’s go into I think, you know, it’s kind of relatively unscripted. Just wanted to talk about what you’re doing what I’m doing, hopefully make it relevant for some people listening.

Almost nothing.

I know. It’s just having a chat. Really. You’re you are one of the friends that are probably voice of course. And

not only like I’ve been on this before, yeah,

once or twice, once or twice. So anyway, what’s happening in your world these days?

What’s been going on? I have no idea when you’re releasing this. But yesterday, the 28th of October, I released another book, my second book and got best seller in it yesterday. So that was good. Yay. For me. I did that with Allah. So we’ve worked together in SBI, capital, residential property consulting company. So I’m doing that. I’m still doing my own bits and bobs and EP investor, which I can’t remember how I was doing last time we spoke, probably still doing that playing around with crypto every now and then just generally trying to keep out of trouble, but still just investing full time playing around with money.

And, and you’ve moved.

I have. So I move what did I do? I moved to New York, just before lockdown and COVID and then got trapped in your upper I knew absolutely nobody. So that was a bit rubbish. And so I’ve moved back down to Cambridge there. So I’m living back down in Cambridge and probably going to buy somewhere in the next year or so. I reckon. Speaking of moving, but you’re too rigid.

I’m moving to Damien. phonation. Early? Yeah, actually, no, that

was six cents. Yeah.

I’m moving to sometime in the next year.

We’re not moving in together. Everybody just putting?

Yeah, that’s true. It’s funny. Actually, I might be heading the direction you’ve just come from maybe. But it does depend. There’s a few moving targets. Our airlines are not necessarily straightforward. Are they? There’s like,

be boring if they weren’t. It would be. But yeah, moving once prompted the move. Because how long have you been in Brazil?

So on and off? Obviously, seven, seven years? Should have been two or three. So it’s been a lot longer than Yeah, certainly imagined. And what’s prompted, it basically is, so the main reason we’re in Brazil is because my wife is sensible got a job career. And you know, she was an HR professional basically. Or is, is and she’s going to complete her current role. And we’ve just decided we’d like to be more focused, you know, full time in the UK. And she’s going to switch to doing things more digitally. You know, being you know, delivering sort of HR consulting mentoring and training programs. This digitally forget to say it.

You’re not doing the advertising for them.

Now, well, you know, I’ve got just to put it in context. I’ve got about 600 followers on Instagram, which is and she’s got about 14,000 Probably. Yeah, well, she’s so she’s good at it and she’s working at it. Yeah. So she just When, when, when, when she first started venturing to this world, I felt all you know, I could tell you a little bit about some of this stuff, not necessarily Instagram, because honestly, that’s not very good. But I do have quite a large following in other areas. And I can tell you all about this and, you know, it’s kind of true learning and stuff. And I felt like I was, you know, king for a day or whatever. But now, obviously,

it literally lasted the day didn’t it before she was better than all the new.

She’s definitely better than me. So that’s really exciting to be fair, and she just launched her mentoring program, she sold out four times, something like that, you know, but it’s still a little bit unproven as to how sustainable it’s going to be long run, because she needs to do, you know, resale, and she needs to have like, more just like, what do you call it? downloadable programs?

Continuity stuff. Yeah,

exactly. That can be doesn’t necessarily rely on personal delivery all the time. So we had a little bit of an experiment a while ago. So in that

way, you know, the places in Brazil keep them long term or

run out or not keep. We didn’t actually have that many here. But basically, we’ll always have a home in Brazil. So we’ll still have that in Rio. So we’ll come back and hopefully enjoy carnival and stuff like that see family? And then I think both are even free if we did sell one. And then I think our daughter’s gonna live another one. So

I’ll go work out in the end. Yeah. So

it was never a massive market for me, because I didn’t understand. I didn’t speak the language. And there’s a few

and how long did you say you’d been there for? Seven, seven minutes. Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s fun.

Yeah, it’s, it’s,

he was just stereotypical English about the whole thing. We’re here.

No, yes or no. I mean, look at me. You can’t tell because the background but I work in my own home. Speak to people in the UK in English, nearly all day. So there, I’m not exactly immersed. And when I did get immersed, you know, it’s usually around food and drink. And so I can order anything here or was on the menu. But yeah, but not so good on reading title deeds. For in Portuguese, so yeah. So it was never a major market. But anyway, that’s that. So that’s cool.

And what spurred the decision to move back to the UK.

So, well, there’s probably a number of things that come together at the same time, I think.

Tell me two of them. Two, okay. And tell me the third one first.

house in the mountains. Cool. Okay, so, which we could scare or people could snowboard out?

If they’re cool.

Yeah, I remember when I tried to snowboard I did take out a block of five-year-old girl who did look at me like why did you do that? Stupid. Oh, man. That was the extent of my snowboarding skills. Maybe I should have had a good instructor though.

I think you should have saw at least American Association of Super Sports instructors qualified.

Do you know anyone like that? Of course you are close. You are actually I wanted to get back to that because you did say you were celebrating. And forgot. Did you actually say how many bottles of champagne were involved?

There was five or six. No one starts counting. After three clicks be honest. That’s true.

I don’t know if you’re on your own. No, no,

I was with other people. Otherwise, I definitely wouldn’t be here for this. That’s true. So yeah, I feel a little bit delicate today.

So I’m basically segwaying into what you wrote in I think it was the introduction in the book that you just talked about. So first of all, what is the name of the book

building a legacy

be sure yes,

building up shit actually the day in front of me it’s called Building A not for resale a Legacy A Practical Guide to UK property investing. I’m not entirely sure that not for resale but is in the normal title.

Yeah, I don’t think not for resale sparked the title though. Okay,

then it’s just called building a legacy. A Practical Guide to UK property investing.

Yeah. So the, the reason so there I mean, Amazon Best Seller or best seller and several bottles of champagne celebrating so well done. I believe that’s your second best seller. Is that right? It is yeah. Okay. She’s good. Are you If he called me now. Yeah, but maybe I’ll have to release another book and

you always got a book about to be coming out that avenue.

Pretty much.

I’m going to update one of them. Have you done that recently?

Probably not going to do the update. Now

on that, like the tech one or something.

So the tech nine is in Korean language, if that’s any use here.

Not much to me. Well, I did like squid game, so

maybe I wouldn’t. So I had someone approached me said they want to translate it into Korean. So I said, Yeah, go for it. I think I think they’ve sold more copies in Korea than I’ve sold in English, actually. So that’s cool. And that one I that was a project that was a prop tech book. And that was that was 2018 project. And I thought, funnily enough, I was into myself and another podcast, podcast, whatever you say, about the future of real estate. And they were read, they were talking about that book. And I had to reread it to remind myself what I said three years ago. Anyway, that was a project for a season. And the first one is called property investor Toolkit, which I couldn’t refresh, but pretty much. The next, the latest one is called The Complete Guide to property finance.

And one of the making, when’s that coming out?

There will be out either end of November, beginning of

December, who we best get five bottles of champagne and a button. Yeah,

I think it will get you on a zoom and, you know, celebrate again,

for your hammered. Yeah. Why not? I mean,

going back to you then. So in the book, he talks about one of your relevant qualifications, being a snowboard instructor? And of course, you know, I know you’re being facetious about that. All those are? Not really, you have this long list of stuff that you do. But what I was intrigued about was the angle you come about from the book, actually. It’s just,

if you don’t want to say,

well, I don’t know what you’re gonna say. So go on, what is

the, you know, angle that you’re coming out with the book? Because you said, yeah,

the overarching theme of it is you’re trying to build a legacy. It’s generational wealth, but doing it in a sustainable, and I guess, sustainable in lots of different definitions of the word, way. So it’s sustainable from an energy performance EPC sorts of ratings, but also from who you rent into why you renting how you manage in the portfolio. strategic portfolio management is like the whole top to bottom of how you can invest in a way that isn’t anything new is what people have been doing for hundreds of years. But sometimes people kind of lose sight of that. So it’s how you can invest in a way that will keep your kids grandkids, great grandkids, reasonably well off or wealthy.

Yeah, and I think the other thing is, it’s not how to put it, you come at it from a point of view that you should have a bit of money behind you to get going. Rather than a getting rich, quick type of

God yet definitely not one of those properties quite expensive, it turns out, so if you haven’t got any money, probably don’t bother buying the book.

So yeah, I think that’s, that’s positioned did quite well in the market. So got a few quid behind you. And, and, you know, you’ve got this sort of legacy view long term. In other words, and I think the sustainability thing is really interesting, as well. And as you say, you come at it from different perspectives. So different stakeholder interests, you want to be sustainable form. So

yeah, like, so we do different things with different types of clients, depending on what the, I guess biggest things are. But we work with quite a few of them who are interested in like key worker housing, and specifically targeting, whether it’s NHS staff or delivery drivers wherever it might be, but people that are genuinely playing a good active role in an economy in the UK, that’s where we tend to focus. But from a commercial perspective, as well, look at the likes of lockdown and COVID, all that good stuff. Key workers were the solid bet if they were your tenant type, because they weren’t impacted by redundancies, pay codes, all that sorts of stuff. So although there’s a philanthropic leaning to it, there’s also economic and commercial reason for it as well. And the sorts of people that we’re working with are, they’re not desperately trying to chase every single penny that you can make from a returns point of view. They’ve got a decent chunk of cash. And so they’re now looking at well, it’s more wealth preservation, but I’ve made a shitload of money doing something. So now I want to see it grow. Obviously above inflation rates, but it doesn’t have to be absolutely the hardest this money could work ever. So they’re not really trying to sweat their assets that much. They’re trying to actually give a decent level of accommodation to people who are key workers, stuff like that. So just depends on the investor type and how, what buttons they want ticking really

going on and off mute, because I’ve got someone blowing a gale blowing the leaves outside. So I don’t know if it comes over to you. But as a back again, he’s back again. So hopefully, it’s not too disturbing. So that’s interesting angle. What you also talk about there. Interesting. You said you’re working with people. And of course, that’s not with the book specifically. But this was presumably led to writing the book. Just notes about you know, who you’re working with, and in what way and I think you’ve got you working with Anna right? You’re basically in some

way. Yeah. So Anna Harper, who she’d been on your podcast at some point? Thanks.

Yeah, she was on the women in property series that I did. There we go.

Well, she’s still a woman stolen property. So that doesn’t change. So yeah, me and her working together. And yet, we work with high net worths. And they’re all sorts of those bike partners in law firms, there’s some equity managers who run pretty big funds. There’s a whole raft of people at different scale, but they tend to generally have basketballs of a million pound plus to be investing in property in some way, shape, or form. And to be fair, not all of them want to use leverage, some of them want to use a small amount of leverage other people looking to still leverage up to the hilt a little bit depends on what their goals are, and all that good stuff. But we effectively are an outsourced family office, residential department for these people. So they set up their own company, and we advise on, okay, this is what you should do, this is how you should set it up. This is the things you can buy, these are the options you’ve got. So we just as I say, We’re outsourced helpers for them, and let them achieve their goals, whatever their goals might be. And as ever, because it’s me, if anybody turns up with unrealistic goals, they get told off and told, Don’t be stupid, you never going to make that much money. You

can’t imagine you saying that to anyone. Damien part mean,

I’ll demo it for you if you want.

This is one of the reasons anyone who follows Damien on any sort of social media, you know, what you’re getting? You know, it’s very straightforward. And talking about the book, actually, I remember seeing an email that came out, and it was basically taken a lever, you know, you know, very straightforward, straight talking so, but realistic,

can’t be asked, doing all like the fake sales stuff, and trying to convince people to buy things that might not be right for them. So kinda, as you say, comes across in pretty much everything I do have been, I can’t, I don’t really need to be working with people. So if I do something, it’s going to be good. And it’s going to be genuinely helpful for someone, but only for the right sort of person. So there’s no point me trying to sell myself to someone who’s going to read it. And like, where they did use a swear word at once or twice, like, Yeah, I’m absolutely gonna do that. So if you don’t like it, fuck off. So at least they know what they’re getting. But the front end? Yeah.

Well, it works for you as well, doesn’t it? It’s about you know, people talk about being genuine. And the word is authentic, isn’t it? You are you.

So nobody else wants to be mixer for you.

Yeah, and you know, you but equally, I think you’re, you’re successful as you. That’s the point. So thank you. Are you doing right? And then, you know, I think we’re drift into some of the ways in which you’re doing all right, because, you know, you talked about you still got the heat the investor, for example, and you kind of you just alluded to the fact you’re dabbling in crypto and stuff like that. But from what I understand, that’s going pretty well for you as well.

Yeah, I mean, it’s quite hard to not be doing pretty well in crypto at the moment. But yeah, that’s been good. All right, been helping some people get started with it. And it kind of all came about, because it’s a bit of a dodgy asset class, not many people touch it. Not many people from an advisory point of view can talk about it. And so having been a financial advisor, I know that restraint that they have, and by the constraints they have, rather, of what they can and can’t talk about in the way in which they can talk about it. So I figured it kind of makes sense to have someone who knows what should be said. And then educating people on what they need to know about it. Rather than I, you know, I’m going to horse in the race. I don’t care if you invest in crypto or not, but I can tell you the pros and cons of it, and then you decide for yourself. That kind of works. And yeah, as you say, crypto at the moment is doing very well for everybody. So there’s a whole bunch of different ways of getting involved in it. And I’m just sticking my fingers in a whole bunch of pies and see what happens with all of them.

Did you do a course.

I attended gosh, oh, I made my own So sorry, was that like a really good way of me suddenly plugging my course instead of fucking up and saying, oh, no, I’m bologna courses? Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah, I did a course on that. Go and do it.

Is it still available?

It is, I put the price up when I eventually Pull my finger out and add some more videos to it. So people should hurry up and go under?

And where would they go? to hurry up and go?

The E P investor.com. Forward slash something. It’ll be around there somewhere.

So find Damian bb investor.com Before we find out about the crypto course. But it’s not just crypto, is it? Because you cover a lot of different asset classes in your sort of general investing in your knowledge sharing and obviously your personal, you know, investing journey as well. Yeah,

I mean, I’ve kind of done them all now. So after, I think it might have been for the book, where to write how long we’ve been doing stuff. It’s been over 20 years since I’ve been investing. Doesn’t sound I mean, I know you’re old as balls. But I don’t feel like I’ve been around long enough to be doing anything for 20 years yet.

Yeah, I?

How old? Do you still think you are in your head? And ask a question.

I in my head, I realistically 32 for a dish.

Yeah, I feel like having kids instantly ages you by a decade. But anyways, by meant more from just like a mental perspective.

You know, obviously, my kids. How long did you say you’ve been investing

21 as a 21 years now?

Yeah, my kids are older than how long you’ve been investing. So you know, even the youngest one is 22. So you know that it does change your perspective, it changes your outlook considerably. And you kind of have to grow up a little bit. So when you asked me about in my head, I was thinking my which head because, you know, when I’ve got my dad head on, you know, for some all grown up and stuff. But when I haven’t got my dad head on by 30, something or whatever, you know. So I still feel I got a lot of energy and a lot to give. I think someone the other day said to me something along the lines of because we’re buying some businesses, which we can maybe have a chat about at some point. And there was one of the potential candidates to be the MD in one of the businesses where we’re acquiring. And he’s 55. And an investor, who we’re working with said, Well, he’s 55, you know, I’m not done right off the old dodge just yet. He’s feeling

defensive of old folk.

Yeah, I’m 55. You know, so obviously,

I’m thinking, look a day over 54 months.

Oh, yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, so I think age is a state of mind. So I’m glad you asked me how old I think I am in my head. For sure.

Sounds a good question. I came up with that. Yeah. What else do you want to talk about?

Well, we have just taken me down the angle of we didn’t deliberately. But you know what, what we’ve both been up to so you’ve been doing a bit of crypto meddling and financial stuff. You’ve written a book, you’ve got this sort of crazy family office type of fund? Who is it? By the way, you should say who it is? I don’t think you said it.

SBI, capital

SBI capital. And funnily enough, at the start of this year, I set a few goals. And by the way, I’ve got a long term goal about opening a fund so we can maybe drift into that. But the thing, the first were the two main goals for this year were to buy businesses. That was one of the other one was to acquire blocks and portfolios. Cool. So I’ll be migrating my interests a little bit. And funnily enough, that’s going to be maybe what the future direction of the podcast might look like. When when I take off to come back from a bit of a break.

So going out,

second, sorry, when is this episode going out? It’ll be going out in early November.

Okay. So it’s not like this is the start of the thing that will be in six months time. No. Okay. Cool.

Yeah. So this is the it’ll be something that happens in between, don’t worry. So I’m taking a break. But you know, my Podcast Producer, we both know, she is said I need to record a few words here and there, but and she’s going to take care of the rest. So

I mean, you should definitely take that literally and just record random words and send them to her like they go. You said you could make a podcast out of that good luck.

sort of thing you do. Yeah, like what you said No, don’t say, again, what you said at the start. So otherwise, we’ll have to do another edit. Anyway, so buy businesses has gone better than buying blocks for the year, but if I just say we had a goal of, we set a goal of 1x, at the beginning of the year, without going to the numbers, but 1x If and all being well, that goes according to plan, which might not, then it could land at 8x was set at the beginning of the year. So that’s been kind of fun.

Good work. And there’s probably been more the business side of it, rather than the block side of things.

Yeah, we had, on the block side of things, we had some near misses in terms of acquisitions. You know, like a couple of vendors pulled out, for example, or we, you know, we just got out late, a couple of those sort of things happen. So we didn’t manage to get anything we actually got anyway. But that’s, that is something that we’re still keen to do, and move more away from developing into, you know, still going at scale, because a block or portfolio by definition is multiple units, but just eliminate that development risk. So,

proper painting, the answer is,

yes, for me anyway. And I don’t think it is for everyone. Possible is really short

is for everyone. Just nobody likes to talk about it.

Yeah, it’s actually interesting, because there’s a few people who I’ve been speaking to off the record, who’ve been developers at reasonable scale, who admitted, it’s been hard. They’ve suffered. And, you know, maybe all that’s presented isn’t quite the reality, I

think that would be a polite way of saying it.

So, you know, it hasn’t always gone swimmingly well, for me, as development. And so I think the actual there’s plenty of risk and stuff like that, and that’s fine. But unless you’re heavily dependent on the outcome, but the I think thing for me is just dealing with the construction train the building train, that’s been challenging. So

so the businesses you buy, not in property sector them.

So the businesses we’re buying, so enough, I think if we if we conclude everything that’s in the in flight at the moment, and once we’ve already done five or six are in the property sector, but they’re more agency, rather than building. So

sectors, the sixth one completely different.

So it hasn’t completed. So I’ve got to be a bit vague.

Until we when we hang up. Yeah,

well hang up, I’ll tell you that. Basically. We bought that one, because it’s a really well run business. It’s profitable. And we don’t actually have to manage it on a day to day basis. Caught so. But yeah, I’m trying to talk to business owners. And so it isn’t specifically property. But obviously, we know more about property.

Yeah, it’s easy to carry out the due diligence on stuff you understand and know,

when is the due diligence. And obviously, if we need to be more operationally involved, we can do that, you know, we’ve found background, whereas the sixth one I’ve just told you about is or didn’t really tell you about when, you know, we’re gonna put people in who know more than us about operating that business. Cool. Hopefully, we’re gonna do diligence, right. And you’ll have a brand new fish and chip shop.

I laugh I got that right.

Look like every food. Yeah, no, there’s there’s no food involved. So that’s, yeah, it’s in the sort of, it’s a niche in the transport sector.

Cool.

Now, are you thinking of buying a caravan or something?

I don’t know. For some reason I was thinking nuclear waste disposal.

Okay, fair enough.

But for some reasons, that was the first thing that went through my mind.

I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

You’re not supposed to at least that’s a good job. You’re not getting into that one. Maybe you turn them with barge calls.

And what’s interesting, so, you know, maybe we know the developments, or sorry, well, divineness blocks or portfolio side hasn’t, you know, being wonderful about the business acquisitions possibly has. But what I was thinking is, so why am I doing it? We’re doing it because it’s part of legacy again. So going back to what you’re saying. So you say properties and asset classes. which can go be handed down through the generations. A business can also be an asset class or a form of asset, which has a value and can be handed down through the generations. And obviously, it could be more tradable depending on how whether it’s a private business or listed business. And from my point of view, what I’m it’s all building towards my foundation,

built this foundation. You mentioned it before, but it kept me on tenterhooks to not tell me what to watch about it. So Kaufman’s

tells me it’s been, I’ve been trying to keep it relatively quiet. And then, ironically, I was sort of forced to talk about it more openly with one of the businesses with the staff of one of the businesses that we acquired. Basically, my business partner said, Do you want to elaborate Richard? No, not really. I don’t. Yeah, so I kind of did. And so and it went down quite well. So a blog where she talked about it?

Well, you should start talking about it and start talking about it. Thank you. So it’s got the working title of help Foundation. And when we put that in the end, there’s probably a lot of shit name. Yeah. And there’s, there’s one called anyway, I think, well, if you’re listening, your foundation is a shit name Foundation.

And I only came up with that one, because it had the word help spelt out the areas I was interested in.

But housing, employment, low energy, lightbulbs, and property.

Kinda but not quite. So. Housing, entrepreneurship, learning and poverty. And I know some of those plays on words. So I can make it fit help. But yeah, you do like an acronym? I do. But it’s going to become a little bit more complicated, it seems because I want my kids to be involved. Talking about kids. And I mentioned, so I mentioned this to my youngest daughter, and she said, What about the environment?

You have an extra eon nurse.

So we could be helping you or Hey, you, whatever. So? And then. And then she said, What about animals? And then my, one of my other daughters is into art and culture. So it’s going to be a crazy acronym by the time we finished. Okay. But the long story short is, and that read that iOS video, that actually really motivated me even more, because I think the idea is it will do good things after I’ve departed this earth, which might be before you do based on

status. So given the age difference, no offense.

Yeah, I have something. But at least the kids could, you know, maybe I don’t know if they want to, but you know, I’d like the really great if they could. So one way to encourage them to be more involved is to obviously support interested they’re interested in. So now. Anyway, that’s it. And so that’s why I do act like a 30 odd year old, even mid 50s. Because I’m trying to build this foundation. And what I do now is towards that foundation, really?

So what is it that you’re doing towards the foundation in the present day? Because it were you acquiring assets on its behalf? So you can generate an income that you can use the income to help different things? Or are you just seeking donations for stuff? Or what’s the process, there’s going to be a charity is going to be set up as a registered charity, or how’s it gonna work? They don’t even bother thinking about all that stuff yet? Or is it still just,

you know, some of it’s still I haven’t got that far with, I mean, it will be either a charity or not for profits, I just need to look at the legal structure having formed it yet. The I do probably need to be planning it a little bit more than I am because, you know, I’m acquiring assets, but they’re not going into the thing. So when I’m buying these assets, whether it’s a business or whether it’s property through other legal vehicles right now, but they will effectively at some point, above a certain figure will be transferred into whatever the foundation actually is. So at the moment, I’m just acquiring a boatload of stuff. And, you know, but it’s not, you know, as I say, above this threshold figure, which is not like crazy stuff is all gonna go in the foundation. Cool. I don’t want my kids to be how to put it ruined. Yeah. But by having loads of money handed down to them, so that, you know, you know how it goes. But there’ll be provided for, but hopefully not spoke too much. The rest will go into the foundation. Cool. Sounds good. But what about you because you know, you’ve got an interest, not necessarily in the same things, but I know you’ve got an interest in areas of something beyond yourself. Yeah,

so I’m still just obsessed with it. So, I pretty much every year will allocate a decent chunk of my own money. And then any company profits and stuff like that into a bunch of different tree charities. All I want my friends works for the UN in the Conservation Department. And she tells all about mangroves. They’re one of the more efficient carbon sequestering things, which I’m not gonna lie, I have to go and Google what that meant. But so look at stuff like that, I quite like the environmental side of things and helping them that from a work perspective, SPI capital tends to do exclusively focuses on key workers and key worker housing and stuff like that. So there’s a little bit of philanthropy going on, throughout. One of the things I kind of want to do that still very early days, and it’s very much just a thought at this point that I’ve not really putting too much effort into is effectively setting up like an endowment fund management for smaller charities. So a bit like you’ve just said, with the foundation, it’s smaller charities, not the big ones, because they can afford to do it all themselves, but smaller ones be like, Look, you’re raising money every year, and then going and spending on whatever it is that you want to do gooders are doing. So if you at least invest some of that, and start generating an income stream for yourself, at some point, you either reach the stage where you don’t have to stick your hand out on raise money anymore, but you become self funding. And that gives you a lot more options as a charity, or you just double the amount of money you’ve got to spend each year because you continue doing your charitable donation drives all that good stuff, but you’ve got assets behind you. So a bit like the big institutions, the universities, having downwind funds, helping smaller charities get access to that sort of stuff. But as probably nicely segues into the whole fun side of things, just a bit of a nightmare, isn’t it?

Yeah, but before we go to the fun bit, because I do want to, but I think what you just said is really interesting, because

like I said it

just nothing changes. So about the endowment type of policy. And if you think about foundations, charities, you know, things, you know, things are linked to university, stuff like that. They, if you’re constantly collecting money and paying it out, you’re always paying out everything that you collect in, then, you know, you have to keep spinning, though you need keep pedaling. But if you can convert it into assets, income generating in particular, then, you know, arguably, you can do the job. Well, so once and then you know, it’s the gift that keeps giving.

I think it’s Harvard, just released the numbers for their fund. And I think it was something like, you know, within the hundreds of billions that they’ve got under management may even have gone over a trillion that might have been why the article came out. But it basically said, because they take money from this fund that they’ve got the actual running costs of the university that is funded by student tuition is like 16%. So obviously, they don’t need the students to be there, they’re making so much money from their investments, they can pretty much fun the whole thing through investment returns. Now, obviously, Harvard has been around for quite some time. But I think that to your point about the whole legacy thing, when you’re looking at an investment of that sort of scale and timeframe, you do start thinking in terms of I remember speaking someone in Cambridge, one of their investment advisor thing, they think in terms of centuries. So it’s like, will it be a decent payback in the next 6070 years? Because we will keep this for the next four or 500 years? Because some of them may go like 900 years now, think 1100. So that was one of the earliest colleges can’t remember, but stupid old. So they’re the sorts of timeframes that they think in from investment and just thinking like that changes your perspective on investments in a massive

way, I think. Totally. Totally. And that’s, you know, that’s how my foundation that’s that’s the vision for my foundation, and so, maybe not thinking four or 500 years, but maybe it should, yeah, why not? Yeah, well, you’ve just helped me probably reframe my thinking, but I was thinking of a couple of generations.

500 quid Thank you. Consulting.

Nothing changes. Cheap for you.

It is really shit. There’s a charity though.

And just before we go to the fun thing, I mean, talking about setting up a foundation or a charity, I mean, how much the cost?

Anything pound 50.

cost more than 18 pounds? Probably. Yeah,

I don’t know. To be fair, one of my mates did it over in America. I can put you in touch if you want. I suspect it’s quite different over there, though. But she set it up. And it wasn’t mega money. But yeah, it’s not that cheap to do, but it’s quite a it’s a small scale on that. She said initially, I don’t know how much it’s scaled up now. But yeah, it’s doable by individuals. Like still?

Yeah, I guess it depends on the legal structure, right? If it’s trust, or it’s a foundation or it’s a charity, there’ll be different implications to that. And if you’re setting up an endowment fund, or something similar, then the sky keeps trying to put into my, into my computer. I don’t know how to stop that. But

feeling left out. Nobody likes feeling left out.

Now. I should sort out my tech at some point.

You wrote a book on tech? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, now as I said, I was a property guy who was interested in technology rather than being anything to do with any good with technology, massively caveat it. That was in fact, when I was interviewed there without the podcast that I was just talking about. So don’t ask me anything to do with actual technology, where I’m talking about the uses and the benefits rather than how to do stuff.

Did you ask them to like, fax you the script beforehand?

No. But they may have offered that they might fund right. So it’s easy to set up a fund, isn’t it?

I mean, yeah. Can you do it? I mean, are

you in prison? Yeah, I’m talking to. I’m talking to some guys in Switzerland. So maybe if I carry on at that rate, I was in prison, who knows? But no, they I’m talking to some people who do the compliance side of fund management. And when I saw their like, kind of org chart, about all of the different things that they do in the roles and stuff like that, I was like, I’m really glad I’m not doing that.

Yeah, and it very much depends on the jurisdiction, you set yourself up in lots of people go to Luxembourg setup. I think that’s one of the easier ones to do. But depends on where you are, where you want your customers to be based to invest with you what type of customer you going for how you’re planning on marketing to those customers, that dictates the people that you need, on your note staff effectively for the compliance stuff, I know, you can outsource an awful lot of it. But there was some changes, not this year, beginning last year, that kind of closed off some of the loopholes of just get, we’ll just outsource all of the back office stuff. So compliance got a little bit more complicated in 2020, which is a bit of a pain. But it kind of, it seems like it’s a hassle. But when I suppose when you think about it logically like, No, this is quite good, because aI don’t want just a bunch of random deck set number fun taking money off people and then run away with it. So I want it to be seven people who have to work there. And they’ve all got these qualifications. And this is the experience, they’ve gotten all that sort of stuff. So it kind of is reassuring to an extent. But then having said that, you look at some of the actual funds that are out there. And they’re run by idiots. But that’s by the by.

And, of course, I mean, if you were looking to do one on this endowment basis, but you know, what, what are the options that you’ll be looking at?

I suppose I haven’t. To be fair, I haven’t looked into it. For this particular thing, I haven’t looked into that much. So it’s very much. That would be a good because I don’t intend to have any kids. That would be a good legacy thing. For me, I think, if you could set up something that invested on behalf of charities, and whether it was a bit like SPI with, it’s not a fund. It’s an outsourced fund management thing, a fund, they tend to be referred to as alternative investment management. If it’s something like that, where you just say, Look, you are the charity, you’ve raised your own money, you keep it, but we’re now going to help you with the investment side of things, you just become effectively an investment advisor, that might be the route to go because then they keep complete control over it. Rather than go in the collective investment side of things where you do need all the regulations, to be able to say, Yeah, charity, just chuck money into the pot. And we’ll go and invest it on a global scale across all of them, and give you returns dividends wherever it might be on the back of that. Yeah. There’s options are not really figured out which one’s the best one or at what point I’m going to do it because although I’ve got a decent number of the qualification for financial advisory stuff, it’s not really that relevant for the investment advisory world.

You know, there’s different set of rules and compliance. I mean, we’ve been quoted, you know, if we wanted to get on the fund route, we’ve been quoted quite a lot of money just to set up. I mean, six figures. So

yeah, we were getting sort of told anywhere when we’re looking at property because it wasn’t that regulated. But the numbers were like, Yeah, it’ll be five grand a month, up to it’ll be 25 grand a month. And you don’t get to make any of your own decisions because you have to outsource effectively to an investment committee. So all you can say is at the front end, this is what our criteria is going to be. You then have to present deals to them. that meet that criteria? Because they’re the ones that say yes or no to the deal. Even though you’re the fund manager that doing all the work, you have to outsource the yes or no to somebody else. Yeah. So, so just more 14 for all that.

Yeah. And so skew thoughts there? I’m not sure it sounds like you’ve you’re thinking about it. And I’m obviously thinking about it,  I wasn’t necessary thinking about it for my own foundation purposes. I was thinking about it insofar as to just leverage a boatload of money, and then that would ultimately from my side of it for into my foundation. So they’re kind of linked, but not directly. You know, and, you know, for example, on the blocks and portfolio stuff I talked about, we’ve been offered blocks of 16 million, for example. And, you know, you, even if you’re leveraging any kind of need five to 7 million to take a deal like that down, and I didn’t have the spare five to 7 million, so I couldn’t take it down. So

bad times.

Bad times. So you know, so I was thinking about it from that point of view. Who knows? It’s it was more of a vision than an absolute goal. So we’ll see how that evolves.

Yeah, I think mine’s one of those. It’s not really realistically in the next five year plan. But it’s something that’s just chugging along in the background. So if it’s on my radar, hopefully I can pick up on things as the as and when that might be relevant for it, but it’s probably late 40s job for me, I think,

are just just just a few weeks away, and I

am not even 40 Yet still.

I do remember a birthday thing. If I remember your birth month, because close enough. Yeah, well, the reason is apparently not apparently. But I remember you said you celebrate the whole month.

Yes, I do. As much as it might be the quarter given this my 40.

Yeah, a few glasses of champagne might be hard occasionally. With some fruit ciders and stuff.

A budget means they’re going to be cheaper as well. So.

Exactly, exactly. So Everyone’s a winner. Exactly. But the thing I thought we were going to chat about because this is part of my just segwayed on the podcast about changing direction. And I know you’ve got some podcast chatter that you wanted to talk about. Yeah, so I

obviously had the the money shot podcast. And it was just me doing the education piece stuff for two seasons, which was alright. But my best mate in Cambridge was like, Oh, I’ve always wanted to be on a podcast, or like, alright, just come online, I’ve got one. And so me and him just started talking very drunkenly about business stuff. And so I mean, Raj has got an MBA from Cambridge. So he knows his stuff about business. But it was just the two of us drunkenly shouting at each other. And so we’ve done that for I think we’ve got 42 episodes of it now. Just me and him. To be fair, what we’ve been doing is, what is it, looking what’s happened in the news, deconstructing the strategy behind it, and then seeing how you can apply it to a smaller business that was kind of the model. And we did that for like, 4050 episodes or something. But now that we’re through the courting period, we’ve decided we’re going to set up our own podcast. And so we’re doing that at the moment. We haven’t actually released any episode yet. But it’s going to be called the authority indicator. Because we’re taking the piss. Right. So yeah, we’re gonna do that. And we’re gonna kind of do similar things like what’s been going on the news, and how does the business will impact on everybody else. But we’re also going to do one of those stupid that. And this is the reason why we’re doing the podcast, we have zero listeners. So at the moment, it’s just so Roger, weirdly, and probably narcissistically listens to our own episodes back when he goes to sleep at night, and then giggles away to himself and how funny we are. So that’s the level of audience so far, I think there’s like three people we know that listen to it. So it’s not exactly Joe Rogan. But the plan is to kind of document the whole journey of Ghana, we’ve got, somehow we sort of start, we have one listener, could you email us in or, you know, give us a ring, you could be on the podcast if you want, because it’s basically me and Roger talking to whoever you are. And so we’re gonna kind of do that whole. Let’s keep it very open and talk to people about, you know, what, forget what do you want us to talk about next? If you are a business owner, have you got any issues going on? Send us your question. And we’ll kind of do that way. So that could be entertaining.

Cool. When’s it gonna be launched? Or is it launched?

It’s not launched yet. We were supposed to record the first episode on Wednesday. But we forgot because we drank too much. Probably next Wednesday, we’ll record the first episode. And then it’ll probably get released at some point after that, but we’re gonna try and be a bit more consistent than I certainly have been with the money shot stuff. Good luck with that.

Yeah. All right. Let me just fact check something, then you say last night involve copious amounts of champagne? Yes. And that was Thursday. It was Thursday. Just checking, right? We don’t need to go any further than that.

Let’s not do a check. Now.

42, drunken episodes weren’t asked over what timescale? I think there’s a consistent theme building it

was released during COVID.

Yeah, but I tell you what, I, I didn’t realize you had that sort of methodology of lying, sight, you know, finding a story, deconstructing it and then applying it to business. So

we are not saying nothing has changed. I’m still God awful itself marketing. So but the actual, some of the episodes that we’ve done, are actually quite good. I generally tend to listen to them, make sure just before they get released and make sure we don’t say anything too stupid. There’s a lot of stupid stuff that is said. So it’s it’s not much of a filtering process for listening back to something like x. That’s quite a good point. That is a thing people should probably apply in their own business. So if anyone wants to listen to that go nuts.

And that’s currently on the money shot podcast. Is it? Yeah.

So it’s just third season, I think.

And then to get involved in the authority indicator. So right, yeah. Yeah. Well, if Did you say someone can actually get on the podcast? Did you say that?

Or if somebody wants to

know how, how would they do that? Have no idea. Okay, that’s you, like you said about self marketing? Yeah. Haven’t got contact? Damian?

Basically, yeah, get in touch. Now, I think we’ll obviously at some point, we’ll release it on all those places, you released podcasts? We’ll probably have a website at some point. I imagine. Maybe, I don’t know. You’re gonna be able to track me down. It’s not like I’m hiding. So if you ever listen to the podcast and think that’s fun, I want to get on it just sent me an email.

Just as a bit of a by the way, your money shot audiobook is hilarious.

I was at the one that I just get bored of my own book and just go completely off tangent. Yeah, you’re

literally just this isn’t in the book. But I kind of felt like say anyway, or something along those lines. Yeah. And of course, you’ve got I know that you’ve got a few kind of funny anecdotes and stuff like that in the book anyway. Here you are actually relaying them in your own voices. It was pretty funny.

She can help me with that audio editing as well. So she had a lot of winching about I did a lot of the recording in Thailand. And you can just hear like bullfrogs in the background, and some of them. She’s like, I’ve done as good a job as I can editing this one, but it still sounds like you’re in the middle of a jungle recording something. So good luck.

That’s not a bad thing.

I mean, I was okay with it.

Yeah. So you’re doing an audio version of your current book on

Governor Wellborn.

I mean, it’s the book.

Yeah. It’s a proper grown up book rather than my first book, which was useful, but wrapped in Damien.

And I’m thinking I’m going to do the thing and we’ll do the audio book version of my property finance book. Yeah, I think I am. But other if you want. What am I how she kept in Pugwash jokes a

logical Postman Pat after you’ve retired.

Gone.

One of the reviews I got was like a two star review is I wouldn’t review the higher but that postman pack joke was awful. Like maybe that was the highlight. Shut up.

Yeah. So yeah, the only thing with the property finance book, it turned into a bit of a beast isn’t 80,000 words.

We just got time to read that. Is it good?

Yes. Brilliant. Okay, cool. Yeah,

probably make time to read it.

Yeah, it’s, I’ve read it about three times or four times. I’ve read it a lot. Every time it gets proof read and stuff, I have to go back and reread it but it’s kind of presented as more like a reference kind of book. So you could dip in and out of it. And so you can read the whole lot end to end, but it’s in different sections and there’s different cap, you know, chapters within each section,

you know, pick what’s relevant for you and then read up on that but

yeah, so for example, you know, in the more alternative financing, it just talks about bonds and shares as an asset To raise money for developers or something like that, unless you’re a developer, you might, you know, may not actually be interested in that. So you could skip that chapter. But you might focus on the vital at bridging. And, you know, that’s those sort of chapters, you know, especially if you’re starting out.

Who’s the target audience for it?

Anyone involved in property? Because it is very broad? Probably, if you need some kind of financing and your property, I suppose. That’s a good start. Yeah, but that’ll probably be most people. And he got, like I say, got a bit out of control, because I just kept adding to it and attending to this beast. But you know, probably people read it. Go, you missed one. Sure, they will. But there’ll be addition to, well, there’s already over 50 different individual types of property finance in books. So

wasn’t the face way back? When was the first reason we got talking to each other? Yeah. But it’s funny how things go full circle after 10 years?

And I’ll tell you why we don’t you said, I think I’ve been on this podcast before. Do you remember we did want to on our tendency, or creative types of financing, remember? Vaguely when one of us or both of us are in America? I think maybe both of us are an American.

We didn’t record a podcast when we were in Florida buying stuff. Yeah. You want the little zoom microphone thing? We use that on the table? Yeah.

That was I think we covered 10 alternative way or creative ways to do for anybody remember, you started with adverse possession? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s in the book.

So why won’t 20% Commission?

Well, you know, you know where to find me. Actually, now, fair enough. So yeah, that’s, that’s the book anyway. But the and I was going so might do an audio version, but as an owner, I mean, that’s, that’s quite a long audio book, isn’t it? It’s also

a pretty boring topic. Why would you ever, as you say, it’s a reference thing, like, oh, shit, I’ve got a problem, or I want to finance a place like this. I’ll go read that bit that I need to do rather than I’ll listen to someone breed presumably, about numbers. I don’t know. I’m sure that listening to books anyway, cuz I get distracted. And then don’t pay attention. By feel like anything. I’ve read a few books more or like the investing side of things. Soon as they start talking numbers and graphs and stuff like that. This is completely meaningless to me now. So I don’t know what the hell you’ve just said to me.

No, you’re right, I’ll table you know, or figure X says this. And here’s an eye chart. 33%. And

I’m not sure if it lends itself to the audio work for that sort of thing.

Good. So that’s that decision made?

The welcome.

I think what I might then do, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m gonna do it. But yeah, so. But then the podcast that probably voice podcast is gonna rename it.

I don’t know, because we’re gonna start talking about property so much. Well, you know,

I’m kind of still the property voice. But yeah, maybe eventually, I’ll just call it the voice. Is that been

done? Like, that’s probably been done.

Okay. Maybe something else? But yeah, so it’s going to be, I think, go more to because it’s been more education in various forms, and it’s going to be more reality. Generally. So I think that’s the direction I’d like to take it. But my reality these days is quite broad, general business as well as property investments, funds, foundations. And there’s quite a lot of different elements to it. So I’m going to think

perfectly if you ask your listeners to send in suggestions. There we go. I think you just did. That was my intention.

Well, you know, the only thing with listeners sending in suggestions is you know, what,

do you hate your listeners? Why are they all? Yeah.

Don’t hate my listeners. And they’re not all dickheads No. No, apart from the guy who really spoke to me, basically, told me everything I’ve ever said over the seven years I’ve been doing the podcast, you know, over a lunch one day I felt quite, you know, stalled. Strange, Stuart. Yeah, that’s stoked. That was a bit weird. For the most absolute brilliant. Let me know. Anyway, that’s our thing. We’re rambling now. So is there anything else you wanted to chat about or we haven’t spoken about?

Yeah, your ability to control Skype on your computer?

System. Somebody’s very persistent and I think I know why.

The gleif lower pay and he wants to bring you on Skype.

Oh, actually, no, I thought I had another meeting to go to and I’ve just checked. There isn’t that but that that has been known that I’ve missed a meeting slot because I got engrossed in something else.

I am engrossing, if nothing else.

So that no, I think I should draw a line. And I’d say there’s no nothing else unless you want to add something. But somehow or other if you’re interested in the authority indicator, or all the other stuff that you mentioned earlier, find him.

Yeah, I feel like that’s the first test if you can’t be asked, trying to find me, then. You know if I can get it anyway.

And anyway, thanks for joining me in the handful of people who are going to do this sort of bridge between the old podcast and the podcast.

I’m sure on the best of all of them.

Without that was definitely the best one so far.

Wow. Thank you. Thank you.

Have a good day. I’ll catch you soon. In about oh, I need to finish the actual recording. Sorry. No, don’t go. Oh, thanks very much for listening to podcasts. I know what I’m gonna say. The show notes on the website, thepropertyvoice.net contact me podcast at Bob’s voice like man. I don’t know what else to say. But Ciao, ciao. Thanks a lot. Bye.

Bye. Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net . For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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We switch gears a little after our last series. Let’s start us off with a conversation I had with Matt Baker, who wrote the book Next Level Landlord. He is also a business founder, trainer, developer and potential most impressively, also a musician, with a penchant for South American music.

Matt and his co-hosts, Niall and Jo, over at The Property Jam Podcast were kind enough to extend an invitation for me to join them recently. This time it was my turn to play host and pose the questions to Matt.

Listen as we dig into what it takes to get into the top 5% of rental properties and shared living properties in particular.

We will touch on space, community and service as the Big 3 elements to focus in on.

If you listen very carefully, he will tell you how you can your mitts on a copy of his book for free, so what’s not to like?

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Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

We switch gears a little after our last series. Let’s start us off with a conversation I had with Matt Baker, who wrote the book Next Level Landlord. He is also a business founder, trainer, developer and potential most impressively, also a musician, with a penchant for South American music.

Matt and his co-hosts, Niall and Jo, over at The Property Jam Podcast were kind enough to extend an invitation for me to join them recently. This time it was my turn to play host and pose the questions to Matt.

Listen as we dig into what it takes to get into the top 5% of rental properties and shared living properties in particular.

We will touch on space, community and service as the Big 3 elements to focus in on.

If you listen very carefully, he will tell you how you can your mitts on a copy of his book for free, so what’s not to like?

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing. Get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice, a voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me on the show today. Well, I’m gonna do something a little bit different now. I’ve got Matt Baker with me, Matt. Hi, first of all, how are you?

I’m very well, thank you, Richard, thanks for having me

on. You’re more than welcome. And we’re gonna do a little bit of a Tables turn sort of thing here because Matt and your colleagues from the property jam podcast actually invited me to speak on your podcast. We’ll talk about that in a second. So that’s how we got to know each other. And I thought I’d return the compliment a little bit in by inviting you to talk to our audience. So a little bit of audience crossover. And but maybe before we get too far into that, maybe if you wouldn’t mind, just a quick intro about yourself. Quick, you know, elevator pitch, if you like about some of the things you get into, and maybe we’ll just pick up the link of how we got to know each other, and then we’ll have a conversation after that.

It’s okay. Yeah, sounds like a plan. So my name is Matt Baker. I wear three hats. Generally, one, I’m a developer. First and foremost, under Scott Baker properties, we develop generally HMOs and CO living spaces. And, but we also do things like commercial versions to flats that also hold some commercial property as well. My second hat is as a mentor, trainer, coach mastermind host, we have the business called virtual platform, which is designed to be a professional services, but also somewhere where people are inspired to then go and deliver HMOs and CO living spaces for themselves. So and that’s working really well today. Over the last couple of years, we’ve done over the last year, we’ve done almost 12 million pounds worth of deals, or close to almost 12 million pounds worth of deals, which is awesome in a pandemic. And then our third hat is or whether that is as the managing agent as well, which are they something which you’re very, very heavily into now. And so yeah, CO home is our sort of CO living kind of management agency, which is very kind of early days started this year. And the idea behind that was we wanted to manage our own portfolio well, and now is looking at that now we’re working with some other landlords as well to deliver co-living in a few different places throughout the UK.

Thanks very much for that intro, a man of many hats, and a bit like myself, to be fair, and there’s one you didn’t mention. And these you know, I think we’re fellow knowledge shares, as well. That that probably takes us back at least to talking about your, your podcast, and the audience can’t see this, but I can behind you is also a publication which we should talk about. So if you want to just sort of talk a little bit maybe about how we got to meet and what, you know, what, what the outputs of that is to start us off with property jam. And then you know, maybe what’s behind you, it’d be really interesting.

Yes, so we, I host a podcast called property jam with my business partner. Now Scotland’s got like properties, and also one of our really good friends Jay life. It’s who we all kind of started property at the same time, about six years ago. And we all did the same property education course. So we all met on that and became friends in Ireland, I started working together, Joe and I used to host a networking event together in London. So we become really good friends. And the podcast was really great way of us coming together. And just talking about what we used to talk about, which is the human side of property. And so essentially, we used to get together and say, Oh, this has happened. So this is going on and have a bit of a celebration, a bit of a moan, and generally every bottle of wine, so then we decided, let’s put a microphone in front of it, and have a good time. And then the pandemic kit and we thought, well, we can’t meet a person. So let’s start recording over zoom. And let’s get some guests in let’s start broadening the conversation and say, you know, we should you checked out the property voice podcasts are rich, it’d be great to invite on and thankfully you said yes. So we met and we had that conversation a week or so ago. And that episode will be out on the eighth of November. So I believe in a few days after this one gets released.

Perfect and I actually really, really enjoyed that conversation. It was a lot of fun. You know, you’d have different personalities and character and you know, that came over you know very much in our in our conversation. So thanks for inviting me on and we appreciate it. And

yeah, maybe linked to the podcasts that’s coming out on Monday and vice versa.

Yep. Yeah, no, we’ll do that as shownotes. We’ll probably have to do after your vet effect. I don’t know, I can’t get my words out. We’ll probably have to do it at the end. Yeah, we’ll put links to the various podcasts in the show notes. I’m sure. We will have my end sounds like you probably want it you’re in. But that’d be great. And cross fertilization between the audiences. So the human side of prophecy, I really enjoyed the conversation. I think it’s really good concept. So any property voice listeners out there, if you haven’t found it already, you know, go and check out property jam. It was very good, because some interesting little spins as well literally spins, by the way. I think one of them was, you know, some little audit and guest participation and, you know, different kind of gamifying podcasting to some extent.

Yeah, I think the idea is, well, our tagline is that this podcast is not meant to be informative or educational, and has the potential to be completely irrelevant. So the whole idea of that is, we’re aiming to, to, to educate, through story through, we’re not well, we’re not aiming to educate, we are aiming to educate in the same way. So it’s through stories and people having you know, real experiences and hearing from real people about what it’s really like to be an investor to be a landlord to get into property. Yeah. And our listenership, it ranges from people who are just getting into it to people who are highly experienced, and then they’re just kind of nodding along going. Yep. Yeah. And they say, it is good fun.

No, no. So eight to November and check out that that’s me on the other side of the mic. It’s good fun. So thanks for that. And good luck, obviously, with the ongoing podcast. So I think you’re a couple years old already. So that’s,

we are we just had our second anniversary a few weeks ago. So in fact, we had our highest listens, that relationship ever, on our second-anniversary episode, which was great. So it’s really exciting to see that things are going well on that front as well.

Good. All right. So check it out. And then I can’t help but notice you’ve got something behind you.

Yes, you mentioned the book. So those of you, you can’t see this, as Richard said, but I’ve got my own little kind of mini studio setup at home, which kind of the Zoom studio. And I have, I do have a few books, just to remind people that they can go and get one. But essentially, this is called next level landlord. And the whole idea behind this was when we started to think about how we could grow as a developer, and what we were trying to achieve as a developer, it was to create great quality shared homes and CO living homes, because no maybe come on to what I mean by caregiving a bit later. But when you go and create co-living style accommodation, it becomes a lot easier to manage, you get you have less issues with it. And people stay a lot longer in these types of properties. So it makes commercial sense, and also is a much better experience, the living experience for those that are moving to move into those style properties. So the whole idea of getting more of this into the marketplace was, I think, because the market deserved it. And because HMOs generally have a really bad rap. And that’s probably quite right, because a lot of them off was pretty bad. So it’s about having a kind of a bit of a criticism, some momentum of change in the marketplace. We can’t do it alone. So we thought, well, how are we going to get other people to do that we need to share knowledge about how we’re doing it. So we started the actual platform to help others to get into that market. But also, we also thought, well actually, let’s refine the methodologies that we use, and put it into an easy, succinct way. So I created our tenant first methodology, and then wrote it down in a book, which is called next level landlord, which is that aspiration that I think every person who wants to be a landlord should aspire to. So that’s it. And then the book focuses on how to create HMOs anchor living spaces that get you into that top 5% of your marketplace, and which is where if you can get your top 5% And stay in the top 5% Then you will have a business which will last the test of time.

Really interesting. Well, thanks for the explanation on the book. And how’s it going? The book sales in the weather is going well.

Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, it’s good. I’m getting loads, loads, feedback, literally good feedback, should I say? And it was a number one bestseller on Amazon when we launched it back in March 21. And yeah, I just yeah, we. Yes, available through Amazon and other booksellers. But also, I’m very happy to send a copy in the pace to anyone, any of you For listeners that want to get in touch, because I think it’s important to get the knowledge out there. It’s not necessarily about book sales. For me, it’s more about getting the book into the hands of as many people that can have an influence in this market as, as we can.

So that’s very generous of you, you probably going to get a few people reaching out to you, as a result of that. So well done. And my I’m also an author, you probably spotted a couple of books, which were also Amazon bestsellers. But the third one, negotiations do. But the third one, which is imminent, is the complete guide to property finance, and blood blood blood. What I decided to do there was pay it forward. So people in my case, if you bought the book, if you buy that book, rather, if you decide to donate it to someone else, I will then replace it with a at least a PDF version. So similar role, I’m trying to say doing it a different way, but similar values, insofar as getting the word out and trying to share knowledge, and you know, perhaps, up the standards a bit. So if that’s my interpretation of that, yeah, visually, definitely. So I should ask you now then, if people want the book, how would they best connect with you to ask for it.

So the best way is to actually we could do is go in ahead into our Facebook community. It’s called Let’s Talk HMOs. So if you had to face which type, and let’s talk HMOs, and then request to join, and then once you’re in there, you can send me a message, or one of our team and message and then we can just pop it in the post. Sounds great. Well, very generous as the same. So look out for that. Let’s, let’s talk X HMOs. Let’s talk HMOs.

Gosh, got it. Right. Cool. All right. So that’s the book. But I think equally, and you said a couple of times now before we came on. And now you also talked about getting into the top 5%. And, you know, we’re talking predominately shared living, have some description here, right? Because I was talking about getting sub 25%, the top quartile, but you’re actually putting it right into the top 5%. So I mean, three intrigued as to what might make the difference between, say, top 25% In my world and top 5% in your world. So what do you think needs to happen to get into the top 5% Generally speaking?

Well, when you kind of get the book, you’ll see there’s a there’s a graph which we’ve created, which essentially shows where the kind of the magic happens in profitability. And a really good analogy, which I was talking about in the book is about the difference between personal computers and, and the evolution of the iMac. So if we go back to 1998, around that time, all computers were made equal, you had all these manufacturers like Hewlett Packard, Dell, these guys making a personal computer, which all look the same, it was the kind of the beige box of computers. And they’ll quite complicated you have to use like MS DOS to code in them. And because all these computers do exactly the same thing, then the only point of difference was the price. So the price will come down, down, down and profit margins are just being squeezed. And then outcomes Steve Jobs in 1998 with something very, very different, which is the iMac G three. And the iMac G three was the first kind of major kind of breakthrough products, which starts to separate apple from the rest of the marketplace. And in the computer, which is all in one box. It’s colorful, it was colorful, that kind of that that that’s that’s kind of colorful perspex see through case. And it turned on and had a really easy to use graphical user interface. So and because of that, it was different. It wasn’t called a computer anymore. It was called an iMac, it was called a it was a brand in its own right. So they created their own marketplace. And because of that, then sales of those into English skyrocketed and their profit margins were up beyond 20%. So essentially be the top 5% is to be the iMac of your who marketplace and that’s essentially where the coliving HMO or what we call the next level HMO sits. And there are three key parts to that. Because some people get really confused. I think co-living is just a really nice looking HMI. It’s not good. That’s just a really nice looking HMI code. Everything happens when you have a group of people who get on well living in a property and is in order to get that you need to deliver a good with generally needs deliver a good level of service to the property. So from our perspective, Next Level HMO gets you into the top 5% of design the top 5% of space and the top 5% of service. So and you can probably get away with without The design as long as you’ve got some space and some service, and you probably still going to rent really, really well, the design is actually the icing on the cake, which really captivates and gets people into your house. Because design fades over time design can be of the of the time today can be a trend could be on trend in five years time, the whole place needs redoing, because you didn’t think about I want this house for 20 years, not just for two years. So that really great rent you get now you have to spend reinvest, and probably do a lot more work than you would if you just designed it for for the long term. So that’s essentially what I mean by top 5%. Space design service.

Yeah, and we haven’t even got into sort of CO living full review that we’ve had, you know, that’s next level, and I guess co living is another level, again, presumably,

with CO living is that this is kind of my definition of CO living is the space design on the surface. So co living is how would you deliver that service, I would say that, actually, I’ll start that again. So the confusion between HMOs and kind of incomes, because people think they just have that they’re only thinking about the asset itself, that they’ve got the property. And CO living can only happen when you’ve got people living in the property. So it can only really happen through the management of the property. Reality. So the CO living is sort of the HMO is the thing, the CO living is that the wrapper that goes around it that makes it work really, really well. And so from our perspective, like coliving, you’re helping them to form those relationships through putting on maybe some events or helping them to put on events, you have community facilitation, you’re, it’s not just about somebody moving in, you help them move in with a really nice that I did a really nice slick process, they apply for a room, they take the room and they move in. And that’s the agent’s job done. That’s not coding, as a coder of an operator, you’re thinking about every single touch point, from the moment they first see your business to the moment they move out of your business. So when they move out, you want them to be shouting about what you’re doing, essentially finding one of their mates to move in. And that’s, that’s where you want to be going as a cutting operator. And that’s what we do at Kohane, which is the one of the hats that I wear. And those are the types of things we implement in the properties that we manage. So So yeah, I think co living is about how we can form meaningful relationships within properties.

Yeah, so meaningful relationships, or the community element is definitely one of the distinguishing elements of CO living versus, but basic shared living HMOs, I think, and that probably partly, partly explains my 25% and your 5%. Because I think you can still have a really good shared living experience in the top 25%, which doesn’t necessarily have that, you know, manager LED or operator led community experience, that some houses naturally do it. Right, they made the club together, and, you know, get house, for example, or students, you know, and, you know, we know what goes on there. And, you know, so I think it can be, you know, led by the meant by the occupants or residents, attendants, the members, were maybe talking about that distinction in your service piece. But I think in terms of community, you know, if you you’re facilitating that, that would differentiate between, you know, an everyday shared living, you know, house, let’s say, or accommodation, and maybe co living? That’s,

yeah, no, definitely, I think so. And I think it’s as you get, like, further up that percentage, so that percentile to recall that five to 10%. And I think that 5% is it’s, you know, when you when you’re 5%, because you’re even just let like that, yeah, and added premium, presumably, and that’s a premium. That a 5%, I think is expanding to be called five to 10%. And I would say, but there’s still not enough of that of this type of combination the marketplace to really warrant it. So the five percents good place to be right now, because we are getting a bit of a premium. And when you start to slip down to the day of 75%, below 75%, that’s when you get into that highly commoditized marketplace, where as an HMO landlord, you’re always going to be fighting on price. So your price is only ever going to go, it’s going to be is going to remain a lot more static or go down as the quality of your HMO goes down in the grand scheme of the market. So the only way to retain that is to continue to reinvest in the property. So doing things like proactive maintenance to make sure that the properties stay in a really good neck. And to do some of these things like community facilitation, say that people actually love living in one of your properties.

And I want to extend it into the service Angular second, probably should talk about space as well. But I think what really just to go back to your analogy with the, with the, with the Apple analogy, of course, you know, we’re moving from a commodity to an ish, you know, with a premium and, you know, differentiating on a number of different levels, and that you perfectly painted that picture. And I think if you look now, I mean, Apple are a trillion dollar company. And I think yesterday, I heard that Tesla made that list as well. But I think that six of them five or six of them, that doesn’t include Dell doesn’t include Hewlett Packard, doesn’t include the box, you know, manufacturers that you kind of alluded to. So that in itself, you know, demonstrates the value potentially, of getting up into that upper, you know, 5%, as you call it, five to 10%, maybe of the market. So, think just reference that point, if anybody ever wanted evidence. And, of course, the other thing is, you know, probably is it wanting 10? I don’t know what it is, is it wanting 10, you know, people buy a Mac versus a PC. So it’s still, you know, 10% range versus the mass market. But pretty much everyone who owns a Mac have raving fans. And, you know, they really tell you how fantastic it is. Sometimes not that sickening, how a raving fan like they are, but is that sort of where you’re headed with this type of, you know, ethos and thinking,

Well, if you’re thinking about the tenant in mind, our methodology is tenant first, and I’m using that term tenant, because it’s the it’s the term that the majority of the market now, it’s not the term that we use in our business, but the tenant first methodology, if you put the tenant first, then you’ve got a business model, that surely is going to work. Because in any other business, you find a problem. And then you solve that problem, and you charge a fee to solve that problem. Then think about housing is it everybody needs housing, so everyone’s got that problem. But which means that you can do it badly or do it well, and you can still get paid for it. So I think it’s about knowing that we are providing a service. People say things like, Oh, the actual market is saturated. It’s really hard. It’s really difficult. It’s like, okay, yeah, people can have that view if they want. But actually, the Deutsche Mark has got so much potential. As a growing market, there’s so much evidence just in the last year that’s come out to show that it’s a growing market that’s got so much potential that yeah, the marketplace for good quality is growing. People are more discerning a lot of data showed that we do an annual survey called the shared living survey, we did one in the middle of lockdown. And the results coming out shortly that shows that people are looking for more of what have more kind of CO living style accommodation.

Your question was, well, you’ve answered it. What is the market serving? And you know, is the discerning and I’m going to ask you, by the way, what do you call a tenant in your business? What do you call a tenant in your business?

Is that the question? Yeah, it’s, we call them housemates.

housemates. Yeah. So it wasn’t the question, but it was a question. And so your housemates there, you know, the top five 10% are more discerning. And they’re more selective. And they, you know, they want to have certain different expectations, but equally, they’re prepared to pay for it. In the most part.

So interesting. Interesting on that point. Now, the average salary I think, is what about 30,000 pounds now. And if you think about what, as a landlord, and someone who would maybe reference customers, tenants, you’re looking at maybe like a 40%, two of what they spend on housing is probably about a, you wouldn’t want to spend any more than that, because they don’t have any cash left over, it’s about 40%. And below is where you want to be. So if you look at the average salary being 30,000 pounds, and you know, the average age of CO living tenants now is going up about 28. Which means that they’re more likely to be on average salaries, close to 30,000 pounds, which means actually, if you break that down, a co living room, on average, can quite easily get to about 800 pounds per month. As long as it’s and that’s, that’s nationwide, because that’s the national average. So, obviously, there will be nuances. And, you know, I think there are some markets where it’s difficult to breach that 500 That is difficult to breach that 600 And you start to see it happening with these types of properties. But I think, while the average is around about 30,000 pounds, I reckon 800 pounds a month for a room is where it could quite easily get to.

Yeah, well, we’ve got a business in London called capital living, which is a flavor of CO living. And room rents are above 1000 pounds, you know, some of them above 1200 You know, and there’s some above average salary there as well. So evidence, your, your point as well, in reality, I think, but let’s just sort of dwell on a second. So the other bit is service. Right? So what are these discerning housemates expect? And what do they get, you know, in the next level landlord type of service.

So there’s a method that I’ve kind of put together to kind of make it easy to kind of follow a color coding approach. And because there’s eight kind of elements to it, and say, for example, one of them would be about how we nurture relationships. And that’s all about how we communicate with our customers. So you want to you don’t want to be just moving them in and then not talking to them for six months. It’s about providing them with information about what’s going on. And, you know, asking them how they’re doing. Say there’s nurturing relationships, and also listening to feedback, because any other business, a good business will always ask for feedback, how’s it going? And they would it by listening to feedback, you can grow, you can evolve. And you might find that the poker night that you put on the other night was just a dead flop, if you pardon the pun. And so I just came to me. So it was a flop. And then you go, Okay, that didn’t work. Why don’t you suggest? So you can ask them? What types of events do you like to do? Would you like to be put on, you know, we have a budget. And you can spend that budget, however you want to, and you can run events yourselves or we can put something on foot, you say, asking those kinds of questions. And actually, that’s the other one is G, G, for gatherings, co living approach spells, co living, funnily enough, G for gatherings is all about how to form meaningful relationships, because you do that through people meeting. And we’re the best way to actually over food. So a really simple tip for anyone who manages HMOs, or got even got an HMO manager in place, just tell your manager, the next time someone moves in, please just send them, you know, five, six pizzas, and tell them all to go and eat together and meet their new housemate. So as a landlord, you can just do that no skin off your nose. And if that means that the new person is feels welcomed into the house, and they actually get on with the future housemates, which hopefully that would have had you that would have been thought about by the person letting the room is getting people to you know, housemate compatibility is a really important thing that should hopefully we should have been thought about. By putting those people together, if that means a friendship starts to form, that person, instead of moving out after six months, then moves out after nine months or after 12 months because of those relationships, then you’ve just saved yourself a lot of money, and avoid in relating fees in, in maybe having to repaint the room or get it redirected ready for letting say that 30 quid that you spend on some pizzas, I think is a gesture of goodwill. Plus, it gets them on gets them on side for if anything goes wrong, then you need to and to fix something. But also means that they’re more likely to stay longer.

Sounds good. It’s gonna ask you about technology, but maybe not now. Because I think I just want to get your quick view on space, because I’m also worried about our timings. So, you know, space, just quickly, what does that mean in your model?

So space is about not going barely that say you might have, for example, take a property and thinking about maybe an HMO landlord doing their first few properties. And they might go, okay, I can get six rooms out of this. But they’re all going to be six and half, seven square meters. I’ll go okay, I’ve questioned that logic and go right, so you can get a 16 ounce bit but really, do you really want to so you might be looking at those rent to go yeah, she that’s really nice number. Okay, so how many voids you’re gonna have in a six bed HMO way, you’ve got the bare minimum of space and amenity in there? Would it be better to do an epic five bed habit full most of the time, and provide a much better service to five people rather than a maybe less of a service for six. And pretty much nine times out of 10. When you run the numbers long term, that epic five bed always wins out profitability wise over the compromised six bit. So space is about maximizing what you can do in a building, which is what HMOs essentially are. But doing it in a way which doesn’t compromise the quality of products. And also that you don’t have to redo it in three years when you suddenly realize actually, I should have just done five, not six, and in fact five there’s really worked really well that six bedroom just gets turned into something else now. I’m gonna have to make it into a study room. It becomes an afterthought say think about with a longer view, and it’s something I’m seeing quite a lot at the moment is that a lot of people are just not investing. They’re wanting to invest, but they’re not investing because they’re saying, it’s just too expensive. I’m putting this together and get all the return, I’m only getting no money hitting like a 14 15% return where I want a 25% return so and it’s just not doing deals. And the people saying I’m going to invest when the market corrects itself, because we’re in a bubble, and we’re going to correct yourself. If you look at the evidence, we’re not in a bubble, we’re actually where we’re supposed to be. And in fact, we’re going up quite quickly at the moment. And unless there’s some outside force, which is going to bring us down for a bit, the pressure dramatically is up, because we’ve massively below that moving average. So what you think is quite expensive today, next year, you’re going to be saying, I wish I bought it at 250. Because I have to buy 303 50. Now, these property prices are moving at quite a gallop. So it’s something that I’m seeing quite a lot of people not taking action, not buying property for stuff. Whereas actually, you could get into the market now and go okay, I’m happy with my 14 15% return today. Because Mark is moving into three years time I can refinance that, and I have a 50% return. So my average return is more than I was going for on day one. So it comes back to this idea of taking the longer view rather than just that short term. Because it is better to get into the market and have some assets, desire appreciating right now in value and get the cash flow.

Well, you know, you’re a lot of things I can say that I mean, basically. So it’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? Because you know, you the logic says the obvious logic says six basic no more than five beds, for example, that in your example, but if you’re getting 800 a month on your five bed versus say 600 on your five bed, sorry, wrong way round. 885 Bed versus 686 bed, you probably find those numbers work out, you know, pretty compellingly in your favor. So that’s one exam. Do you ever worry about taking action? You know, everyone who’s been doing forecasts and predictions over the last few years has pretty much got it wrong. That’s why I don’t do forecasts and predictions by the way. But literally today read the Zoopla report. And they’re saying we predict this is super, we predict 3% house price growth on average next year. This is the back of 6.6% in the last year. And one of the lines in their report says our forecast was wrong last year, by the way. So but the point is, it’s still as you say the prices are going up. So if you don’t get on that ladder, it’s going to be difficult to get on late. It’s like an escalator and even if it eases off, and there’s a there are black swan events, it’s been proven in history, but timing those and waiting for them, you could miss out on a whole load of rental income in the meantime. So

yeah, I actually did some I did this in a webinar recently. And just by waiting one year, if you waited a year ago, today, you’d be down about 45,000 pounds, which is capital appreciation plus rent for the year. Say, It’s anyone’s thinking, Oh, my criteria is not quite right, I can’t find these deals. Maybe just have a rethink, tweak the model, and maybe look at buying some existing stock, which is cash flowing today and go, Okay, I’ll take a 12% return as long as I have to work to it for two years. And that will work for me now. And then I can I can start that asset later. So by existing HMOs is a potential really great thing to do right now. Because demand is through the roof, and then you can turn them into next-level HMOs. Later, you know, as long as you can hit that you get the good service. And then I think I think it’s good for anything with buying using HMOs that you end up with a tenants that you haven’t necessarily vetted yourself to. There’s always a learning curve there. But this potentially good strategy.

Well take the long view again, as you said, so you know, maybe you’ve got a six to 12 months to churn that existing tenant tenancy occupation level. Certainly things we could talk about a little bit conscious of our time together. We booked can’t help but mention fielding financial because I think Am I right, I think is that where you three, yourself nine and Joe all kind of met if you like,

correct? Yeah, we did. So we did the training with building financial back in 2015. And that was kind of the spark that got us going because before that I was a musician as a piano player. And freelance piano player and piano teacher how to add a music school. Now I was in financial services. Joe’s work in the university sector, higher education. So we’re all massively different backgrounds and then we all kind of came together and we met through that training. And I think when you that the people that are listening to this, or in the property industry know that the industry is actually quite a supportive one. Everyone gets on, it’s quite quiet. You can pretty much have a chat with anyone and people are very, very helpful as a rule and That’s what we found through doing filming financially kind of, as in Gilfillan words kind of lit our spark for property. And then we kind of went and kind of grew from, from that point on, and it’s just that got us started, did some other work with some other coaches, like Andy and Lloyd from whitebox, worked with them quite a bit, and some others, some good ones, but also some ones, which I won’t mention now, which were not particularly great. So when we set up the HMO platform as our kind of niche, next HMO, coaching and training business, we knew exactly what we wanted it not to be. So which is why we can pretty much say we’ve got the next 100, almost 100% success rate with with with our clients on getting deals and the year they spend with us, which is amazing. I was so proud of the guys.

Sounds good. I couldn’t help but mention that a job as a former guests on this podcast, really enjoyed talking to her. She’s fascinating story, I think, tried a couple of times to connect with her training. So that’s why I mentioned it got real soft spot for her like her. So if you come through that stable, then I think you’re still participating in that stable then.

Yeah, no, I’m still still part of that network. Because there’s a really, really great people that can come through there in jail, I think is like the mother of property education anyway, she kind of started it back in the 90s or 2000s. Say? Yeah, she’s very much been there, done that and kind of has seen weathered all the storms. So yeah, so having led from the very beginning, I think was very, very valuable.

Great stuff. Well, I could talk to you for a lot longer a lot more actually, Matt, but I know we’ve restricted on size. So if it’s possible to get to some questions, right? Fairly, hopefully, fairly easy. You can ask them in whichever order you want. One of them is going to be and I think you possibly answered earlier, but where can people find you connections, that sort of thing. So just think about that signposting person to learn more about you and you know, your colleagues, for example. And then the maybe the first question is, what be a parting thought, you know, to our guests, right? That you might have, I’m trying to extend the converse the question, so you can think about the answer. The know, what, what did you wish you knew? What regret did you have? Or what you know, what sort of piece of advice might you depart? leave us with today? That would be really cool. And you can answer whichever question you want. First, if you need more time to think about one of them,

okay, well, well, I’ve got the answer to both. So if people want to reach out and connect with me, I’m on social media, my handles clearly Matt Baker. And, or they can join our community online, which is Facebook, let’s talk HMOs is our community, on their alternative, you can head over to a website’s HR platform located at UK would be probably the main one. And then, in terms of my parting thoughts, we’ve talked a lot about HMOs and income strategies. And we work a lot with investors. And the one thing that I would have told myself at the beginning, if I were starting again, is start flipping properties sooner. Because working with other people’s money, you’re looking at, we talked about some of these returns, at the moment having to be between 12 and 15%, potentially 20%. On deals, and maybe having to squeeze what you’re doing, you still want to get into the marketplace. So if you’re working with investors, you’ve got capital in there. So how do you release it? So when you’re having to get in there? How do you release it? Do you have a five year view of one year view or a 10 year view? So we’ve been investing for six years, and one thing I would have said to myself earlier is start flipping earlier, because it brings lump sums of capital, which are really, really helpful, really helpful at times when, when cash can be life. So that would be one piece of advice going come first. But don’t wait for those capital projects. You know, say I’d probably say a couple of years of income related project because a great place to start and then start bringing in flips, because that can start paying off investors or people you’ve got in your business joint venture partners. When some of those deals maybe don’t hit or the cash you want out of them? Or maybe they’re not designed to say well, yeah, just think about that as well. Capital is great, especially in the market right now. Great to do capital projects, because you’re gonna appreciate the projects appreciate from the moment you buy them, maybe get your offer accepted, etc, essentially,

the so called capital event, you know, you can release capital on the way and you know, allow you know, it’s just not income forever, I think is Lisa on another guest of the show. She was just purely rental rental rental rental buy and hold, you know, that was her vision her but she changed things on the way and she had someone like you probably suggest to her that maybe she could release some capital from some of these. She never really considered it and then she started doing some of that necessarily all of them. But you know, Stein’s releasing capital saying that’s a really really good piece of advice. So Take Take some capital along the way, take the wins and builds up the war chest or you know the walls defensive line you want, and also allows you to be more opportunistic and in certain situations, so that’s my take on it. I share your view. Man, I’d love to talk to you more. I really appreciate you joining me today. No, we’ve got a time limit. So I’m just going to say thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast. Thank you.

you for having me. You’re more than welcome.

And I’ll just do my quick wrap up and then we’ll close so thanks, everyone, for listening. Once again, this week on the property voice podcast, you can find the show notes over at the website, the property voice.net. And we’ll put those links in we talked about some of the social media tags as long as I can remember them. And if you want to talk to me podcast thepropertyvoice.net If you want to talk to Matt, you’ve got his contact details or I can introduce you if you want to reach out for me. And but I guess all that remains to be said is thanks very much for listening once again this week. And until next time on the property boys podcast is Jojo.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net. For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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We have come to the end of our latest series looking at the 10 property core skills.

However, just as these core property skills will keep you safe, there’s more of you are looking to grow and scale.

This week, I share the BIG two property skills that provide the link between these foundational property skills and going big.

These are the secret sauce or missing ingredients needed if we have bigger aspirations and lofty goals in property.

What are these two BIG bonus property skills? Well, you will have to listen to find out, won’t you?

Join me, and my glass of Malbec, as I summarise the previous 20 episodes of the Property Core Skills series with the revelation of a couple of gems that will take you higher, further and faster in your property journey. I know this to be true, so will you when you hear what they are.

Let’s see this series off in style…but what will come next..?

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Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

We have come to the end of our latest series looking at the 10 property core skills.

However, just as these core property skills will keep you safe, there’s more of you are looking to grow and scale.

This week, I share the BIG two property skills that provide the link between these foundational property skills and going big.

These are the secret sauce or missing ingredients needed if we have bigger aspirations and lofty goals in property.

What are these two BIG bonus property skills? Well, you will have to listen to find out, won’t you?

Join me, and my glass of Malbec, as I summarise the previous 20 episodes of the Property Core Skills series with the revelation of a couple of gems that will take you higher, further and faster in your property journey. I know this to be true, so will you when you hear what they are.

Let’s see this series off in style…but what will come next..?

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing, get the lowdown and updates, insights, and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice or voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show. Well, here we are, it’s the final episode in the series of property core skills. And I was just thinking back because obviously, I was preparing to talk to you today. And we started the series back on the second of June. And this will be the 21st episode. So obviously, we’ve been running for what 2021 weeks now, we’ve been combining content with a panel discussion, as we’ve been going on, we’ve covered across the across the weeks 10 of the property, core skills or core competencies. And I should do a quick summary should know. So we looked at finding deals, funding deals or funding money, managing the projects, managing portfolios, and properties, properties, and our portfolios. Managing and understanding people managing our cash flow and budgets, research and analysis or due diligence, investment criteria and deal analysis, systems and processes, and marketing, which we concluded last week. So we’ve covered quite a lot of ground. And I call these the core skills, because these are the foundations that we really need to get good at, to kind of have an enduring, you know, successful time in property. Generally speaking, now, we can’t necessarily know all of them all at once. So you know, we need to develop them in some way may be stronger and more naturally than others. So hopefully, that has given you something of a foundation, particularly if you’re fairly new early stage in property. And that was part of the purpose of this particular series, a little bit of a revisit, actually, to the one of the first series I did on the broadcast, which was, I think maybe about six, seven years ago now. So quite a while.

Now, I was just thinking to myself, what can I share with you today cuz I’m not really scripting this, I’m kind of going off-piste a little bit. And one of the things I can say is to accompany the series, I’ve been writing a series of articles for YPN magazine. So all of the 10 core property skills are going to be serialized in magazine articles with YPN magazine. So if you’re already subscribed to YPN magazine, you may have seen them, or at least now you can know to go and look for them. So they’re appearing. And obviously, it’s one a month, so it’s going to take 10 months in total, for that to fully unfold. However, if you don’t subscribe to IBM magazine, and by the way, why not is good, it’s a good magazine, so why not? It’s pretty good value. And there’s a lot of good content in there. But if you don’t, but you still like to see the magazine articles, then you can actually subscribe to my specific articles. All you need to do is drop an email to Karen, who’s my assistant admin at the property voice.net. If you drop her No, and just say, hey, how do I get these YPN articles that Richard was talking about on the podcast, she will add you to the list, there’s a kind of a password link that you can get in behind the curtain. And then you can download, in fact, all of the back catalog of all of the YPN magazine articles I’ve ever written actually. And I think there’s five or six years worth there. So there’s quite a lot of content there. And that’s freely available, by the way. So just to clarify, that’s just my articles. But if you want to subscribe to the entire magazine, your property network, just look it up and you can subscribe. I should have an affiliate link somewhere that, hey, you know, whatever. No big deal. So that’s something you can do. And obviously, you’ve got all of the content from the series. My first book, a property investor toolkit, is this quite a good complement for this particular type of content? So yes, he was published in a few years ago now, but it’s still very relevant today. So by all means, grab yourself a copy of that. I think it’s you know, the price of a cup of coffee, something like that. So that should help as well. And if you really want to sort of look at this topic from a different dimension, why don’t you go back to the very first series? I think it’s called foundations in property. or something like that. I wish I could remember, I think it’s called something like that. So it’s the very first series that was that I released on the property voice podcast. So if you want to come at it from a different point of view, by all means, have a listen to that. And that might help you, particularly if you’re fairly new to the podcast, and you haven’t been with me from the start. They might be you know, and you’re kind of enjoyed this content. If you go back to that, that will probably help you or come at things from a slightly different perspective at that time, which was in 2015, to how I do today, but it’s still relevant. I think some of the principles that I’m sharing a relatively timeless, obviously, the way in which we do certain things, and the tools and the systems and the apps and the legislation has changed, yes, but the principles are very much consistent. So there we go, I suggest a bit of signposting there for you. Hopefully, that will help you to get bedded into the topic. Now, in my own case, I’ve moved on quite a lot actually, was actually preparing? Well, I’m doing quite a lot of things and acquiring businesses and growing blocks and portfolios and talking about setting up a fund potentially. And so when I contrast where I am today, to where I started back in, well, back in the day, 2009 was my first sort of serious foray into property. And I can see the idea, I think, about four years before that, so would it be in 2005. So a lots happened in 15 years, to be honest with you. And one of the most significant things is, is really the ability to grow and scale. So this series is predominantly focused on what I call foundational skills or core skills, hence the series title. But if you really want to take your property journey somewhere, then you probably going to have to scale or want to scale at some point in time. And I think this is the bit that I kinda was leaving in, I think I may have tantalized, you know, there may be a bonus core skill that comes at the end, when I started recording back in June, I’ll probably tantalize you with that promise that I will come back with a bonus or bonus or two actually, towards the end. And I always had in mind, I would talk about what I’m going to talk about right now. And so these bits really, if you want to go on to the next level. So if you just want to buy a couple of bytes or less, then or maybe just a small portfolio, kind of have it run tidally, then the property core skills, you know, is enough, pretty much, that’s enough. And if you want to get really good at that, yes, have a look at the property investor toolkit. But yes, read, some have read, listen to the first series that are recorded back in 2015 foundations in property, and you’re going to have a really good grounding, by all means subscribe to the magazine articles, and you’re going to have a really good basis, a really good grounding, to get started and have your early stage in property. And it being you know, principles led fairly safe, fairly secure, fairly comprehensive summary of what you need to know. However, if you’ve got aspirations for going a bit bigger, or you’ve got big goals, or you know, anything like that, which is, you know, taking it on to the next level. And I’d say not just in property to some extent here, this is maybe any kind of business, then there’s a couple of extra things you’re going to need, I’m going to try and keep it simple, because I suppose you could say there’s a lot of extra things you might need. But I’m going to try and keep it simple and in context. So I don’t overwhelm and overload you with a bunch of stuff on this episode. And the two, there are actually two big things as I talk, I might think of another one. But right now, there are two big things that are in my mind. And I very usually called them the secret sauce. And so these are the extra ingredients that make the cake taste better. Okay, this is what makes the cake grow. This is all about scaling and going large and you know, really sort of taking your business, property business, maybe any business to the next level. And I think there are two main things and hopefully by now you’re dying to know what they are say, Richard, just spit it out. Why don’t you? Okay? I’m going to spit it out. They are basically and collectively number one mindset. And number two, leverage. Okay, you’re probably thinking, well, they weren’t the first two that were in my mind, but trust me, they are. The obviously there’s all disciplines. There’s a lot of other things we can do to grow and scale our property business or indeed any business. But I would say without these two, you know at the heart that’s the only These are the links. So we talked about foundations. So the topics of the last few weeks, these are the links to grow and take it to the next level. Yes, there’s going to be additional things that go beyond these two points of mindset and leverage. Of course there is. But these two are the links or the bridge, or the springboard that will take you from, you know, relatively safe, secure and ordinary, into the realm of extraordinary, large scaled property, business or indeed other businesses. So let’s just dwell on them a little bit. Because you’re probably thinking, Well, I kind of know what that’s all about mindset leverage. But let’s just dwell on it a little bit longer, shall we? So, and by the way, I just cannot help this because I have to refer back to one of my favorite quotations of all time, literally is and mainly because of the name of the person who coined this quotation or this phrase? Is any of you, you’ve heard me say before? I’m sorry about that? If you’re a regular listener, you’re gonna hear me say it again. But it comes from Charlie, tremendous Jones. Yes, Charlie, tremendous Jones. And he says, You will be the same person in five years, as you are today, except for the people that you meet. And the books that you read. Now, I’m seeing seeing that to me and people that you meet is your network. And the books that you read is your knowledge. Okay? And in a kind of fine way, those two elements extrapolate into mindset and leverage, or leverage and mindset, actually, to be more specific. Because the people that you meet, is what we’re part of, we’re going to talk about leveraging. And the books that you read is part of knowledge acquisition, which is part of mindset. So it’s not all of it, because Charlie probably didn’t have this podcast episode in mind when he coined that quotation, but I really love it. And it’s something that, you know, we can reference. So let’s just start with mindset for a minute. So there’s a couple of elements to this, this concept of mindset, there is literally the way we think. And if we want to grow and scale, there’s a couple of things that we need to have in mind, if we want to be successful growing and scaling property business. And one of them there’s three main ones, really, there’s the what I call the glass ceilings and the comfort zone. Okay, glass ceilings, and comfort zone. So these are restrictions, they’re barriers, they’re limits that we placed upon ourselves. What is the start with a comfort zone, once you get comfortable with being able to run a deal, manage your property, negotiate with a seller, etc, do the financing, you get comfortable at that. And there’s a tendency to kind of stick with it. And I did that for the first eight years of my property journey. I did proximately. On average, I did three deals a year. It sometimes it was two, sometimes it was four. And obviously, sometimes it’s three, the average. And it was submitted to in turn four deals a year, mainly added value types of deals. So there’s usually some kind of project involved in it. I wasn’t just doing by to let I have some sort of project with it. And I was pedaling along. And I got eight years in and I had 25 properties. Okay, so that’s pretty good. Most people would be happy with that. And I’m not saying I was dissatisfied with that. I was just saying, I was just thinking to myself, well,

you know, is this it? I’m doing pretty well. But is this it? And one of the other things I’ve talked about is one of my other phrases is fixed and flex. So we’ve fixed a direction, but things happen in life. And then we flex to adjust. So it’s like pivoting right if you’re aware of The Lean Startup book, for example, you start with the minimum viable product, you take in feedback, you test things, you get market research, and you pivot to a different, you know, direction, depending on the feedback that you get given, will fix and flexes like pivoting. And the thing with this with it goes hand in hand with mindset. So as you get better, you start to think differently. As you advance and make progress. You have a different perspective, a different outlook, you may have achieved your initial goals, and then you start to think well, now what, there’s where the flex comes in, fix the goal, my first goal was to plug a hole in my pension. I did it with my first deal. So then I had to think about something else. So then therefore I had to flex. So in order to scale, which is really what I’m talking about here, we need to break out of our comfort zone. Really, if we want to scale on a more exponential basis rather than us have an organic or progressive basis. So three deals a year, obviously, if I kept going at that rate, I’m going to do okay, I’m gonna end up with a decent portfolio, you know, it’s one of 30 deal. So 30 properties every 10 years, do 20 years, I’ve got 60 properties. So you know, that would be probably enough for most people. And but I wanted to get to where I needed to quicker. And the reason I wanted to get there quicker is what I don’t know if I want to do this forever, first of all, and second of all, I want to start, the reason I’m accelerating, is I want to start putting to use the, the outcome of where I’m going, I’ve got a goal to have a foundation, and I want to get there sooner rather than it, you know, literally being my my last breath that I go, here’s my foundation, I’m 99 years old, hopefully. And you know, when I turn 100, that will be it. Last breath, and here’s my foundation, I’d like to get there a bit sooner, and start to make a difference in other people’s lives the way I want to through the foundation sooner, and while I’m younger and able to, you know, participate and enjoy that. Anyway, I digress. But in order to do that, I need to break out my comfort zone. Now the thing with a comfort zone is very comfortable. Okay, and so to break out of your comfort zone, by definition is uncomfortable. And but equally, we want to be careful that we don’t overstretch to breaking point. So there is this, you know, tennis natural tension that exists. So, you know, people will say Go big or go home, I think I even said it myself. In fact, I know as I said it myself go big or go home. Well, if you overreach and you over expand and you over trade, well that can cause problems. So you’ve got to find this middle ground between staying, you know, in the groove. And some people might describe a groove as a rut, but you can stay in the groove. And or you could go big or go home sort of thing. And if you go big and go home, you might overstretch and you might, you know, create a crisis, you might, you know, create stress points for the business and also for ourselves and our family. So we have to find this sort of middle ground is outside of the comfort zone, but it’s before breaking zone. Okay, so we need to break out the comfort zone. That’s the first point about mindset. The second one is glass ceilings. So a glass ceiling is an artificial limit that we put on our capabilities. You know, we believe that we can wait, we only believe we can do certain things. That’s putting a limit on ourselves an artificial limit. But if we if we recognize it’s a glass ceiling, and if we look through the glass ceiling upwards, we can see above we can see to the sky. No, we can’t, we can see to the stars. No, we can’t, we can see to the Galaxy, you get my point. So you know, we can break through the glass ceiling, as well, which is all about mindset. Now, there’s lots of other things about mindset we could talk about, you know, being solution orientated, being positive, being creative, you know, putting yourself in other people’s shoes, lots of different things. We could talk about psychology, mindset, etc. But I wanted to focus on those two points, breaking through glass ceilings and stretching out of comfort zones, if we want to grow and scale. The second thing to consider is this. Nothing comes easy.

Nothing comes easy. And there are upsides. And there are downsides. There are good times and there are bad times there are trade offs to be to be made. Right. So there is you know, John Demartini talks about challenge and support. And if you read his book, The values factor, he talks about challenges and support are always Yes, always in equilibrium. And you think how can that be? I’m going for a good moment, I’m going for a bad moment. How can it be in equilibrium when it oscillates? Perhaps but overall, we’re in equilibrium. And if we’re overly challenged, we’re going to get support. And if we’re going to get too much support, well guess what’s coming a little bit of challenge. So there’s upside and downside. There’s trade-offs to be made. And we could put it as sacrifices to be made. So just be prepared if you do want to grow and scale, but there could be a price to pay. You just need to choose the price and be conscious of paying the price. Because there is always a price to pay. So that’s the second element. And then the third element is what you know, I could call an attitude of lifelong learning, or growth mindset. And if you look up, gosh, now, Carol Dweck, isn’t it the professor Carol Dweck, who wrote the book growth mindset. Now, if you have a growth mindset, then things like learning things like failure, don’t faze you. So, you know, have a growth mindset. Equally, don’t stand still have an attitude of lifelong learning of personal growth and development as well. And I could take us into a direction of, you know, looking after our biggest asset here which is ourselves. And, you know, starting to get into the holistic sort of space here, we’ve got, we’ve got a mind, we’ve got a body, we’ve got a soul, you know, we’ve got emotions, we need to nurture all of ourselves. So that’s part of personal growth, because we want to be around for our 99th Slash 100th birthday, to realize the fruits of what we’re talking about. As you can tell, I’m a little bit passionate about this topic. And I’m going to share a little bit more in a subsequent episode. But I’m also kind of living this right now. So I’ll come back to that. So just let’s get back on topic, Richard. Now, the other thing to consider with mindset is the influences that we have. And that’s really, that really comes from our environment. So just consider carefully the environment that you’re in, who the people that are surrounding you, or you surround yourself with, that’s a choice, by the way, and what places do you hang out? Are they supportive? Are they conducive to where you want to be, you need to be in the places and you need to be surrounded by the people of where you want to be not where you are. Okay, so this is about growth and scale, remember, so if you want to get to point B, you need to be in a surrounded by people who are already at point B, not so much a point A. And similarly, the places that they hang out the things that they do, the books that they read, literally thanks, Charlie, tremendous Jones, again, what are they doing? What are their habits, generally speaking, and you need to mimic them, and you can rub off from them? And you know, hopefully, get pulled up and pulled along by them. So be very, very mindful of your environment, and your influences. And choose consciously choose carefully and wisely. What influences you accept in your life. That doesn’t mean you need to throw everybody out who you know, you think is doesn’t belong at point B, it just means you need to spend more time with those people, perhaps who will get you to that place. So don’t diss the family members. And you know, all together, please don’t do that. You know, we want to be embracing and inclusive and holistic in our approach. But if you want to get to point B, hang out more with people in point B, at point B, there we go. So that I think covers what I wanted to say about mindset, pretty much. So what else did I want to cover, I wanted to cover leverage. Now we all know about leverage, because you know, if we’ve all got a buy to let mortgage that is leverage, we take our 25% deposit, we add it to a 75% loan, and we leveraged all of that money up into 100%, you know, purchase price of a buy to let property, we’re leveraging our 25% by a multiple of well for essentially to buy a property that’s leveraged Well, that’s only one type of leverage. And it’s only one dimension of one type of leverage as well, for that matter. And, in fact, I’m also going to talk to you in a future episode about my forthcoming book, yes, I’ve got a book coming out slightly delayed, but it’s not far off. Now promise you it’s not far off. And that’s the complete guide to property finance. And in the complete guide to property finance, there are 50 different ways to finance in property, okay, in that book, so you’re gonna have to get it just to have it on your shelf, and know about the 50 ways to not leave your lover, but you know, to finance your property investments. And so a buy to let mortgage is one of them. Okay, but there’s another 49. So leveraging financially is definitely one form of leverage. And, you know, a bit of a plug, obviously, for the book. But there’s another 49 there, that we could learn just purely in financial leverage terms. But there’s other ways in which we can leverage as well. Now, leverage just means really, to utilize resources that are not 100% our own. That’s kind of another that’s a perfect definition. But that’s my definition. So using somebody else’s finance is a form of leverage, as in what we’ve just been speaking about. But we can also leverage other people. We can leverage systems, we can leverage our network, we can leverage kind of a whole host of different things in our property business. I wrote an article some years ago about leveraging the eight forms of capital. So you know, financial capital is only one of the eight forms of capital. There’s a bunch of other ones like knowledge, capital, emotional capital, social capital systems, capital, human capital. There’s a whole bunch of them there. So leverage is really utilizing other people’s resources for our property business good. So that’s how we grow and scale, we multiply our efforts. And we multiply. And indeed, we magnify. So there’s two scales there, we multiply, and we magnify our own efforts, our own resources, we’ve utilization of other people’s resources to get a bigger return on our own resources. That’s the key. So ROI, you can, you can leverage your font your your money, using a buy to let mortgage to improve your ROI, your return on investment. And this is the same, so your ROI, return on time investment, return on systems, capital return on your network, all all of it, just apply that concept through leverage. And so that’s how we can grow and scale. So some people are really good at systems, some people are really good at talking to people, some people are good with money, you know, and some people are, you know, just, they’re just thought of social butterflies and great as social media and things like that, as we spoke about last week with a couple of guys, by the way, Ryan, big shout out to you with whatever it was over 40,000 He was following us on Instagram. So we all felt, you know, pretty inadequate when we were talking about following. But yeah, so Ryan’s done that he’s leveraged his social media network, and that will pay off actually at some point, but you have to put the work in before you get the results out. So if you want the fruits, you’ve got to tend to the roots, as they say. So there we go. Um, I think that that’s it really, I kind of wanted to say those things, the missing ingredients, or the secret sauce, is all about mindset, and leverage. And this is the link between, you know, doing okay, and having great foundations, and fundamentals and core skills in property, and going to the next level. Now, there’s a lot of other stuff as well that we need to learn, you know, it’s a never ending journey talks about, you know, continuous learning, continuous, you know, professional personal development. So it’s a never ending journey. And, you know, get used to the idea that you never stand still. And we’re always growing and have that growth mindset. But hopefully, that has been useful. I wanted to spend less time looking back and more time on this particular element, as we sort of wrap up the series. So yes, that’s that.

So what’s next? Well, that’s a really good question. So I’ve been having quite a lot of thoughts, quite a lot of conversations with other people about what’s happening next with the podcast. So I’m going to have a bit of a bridge, with maybe some conversations with some people, if I could persuade them to come and join me. In the next few weeks, I do believe I want to share with you some of my plans for the future, which I’ll save, maybe for another time. And I also want to talk a little bit about the complete guide to property finance, to coincide really and celebrate the launch of the book. So there’s going to be a couple of things that are earmarked over the next few weeks. And then I’ve got something else planned, really for the podcast, but all will be revealed in the fullness of time. So I think for now, I just wanted to sort of set that up for the future. There’s a lot being going on in my world, this year. So far. I also want to talk about that, by the way, just kind of give you a bit of an update, bit of an insight into that I’ve been quiet in some respects. And the reason for being quiet in some respects is I’ve been incredibly busy with a few other things, but I want to talk about that. share that with you if you’re interested. That would be great. But anyway, here we go is the wrap-up of the series, property core skills, the 10 plus the two bonuses. You can find the show notes for today’s show over the website, the property voice.net You can talk to me by emailing podcast at thepropertyvoice.net as well, I’d love to hear from you. And check back through the previous show notes. There’s a lot of people who joined the panel discussion. Sorry, the panel discussions. Thank you everybody who joined me and you know, we just had a good old property chatter property natter about some of these property core skills, too many to mention all at once. There was some almost ever presence all of a sudden certainly consistent voices that you would have heard and there was some you know, one time visitors or two-time visitors to but every single one of my guests I really appreciated joining me over the over the last few weeks. And it was a little bit like herding cats at times but you know, hopefully, you got some real value out of that. Hopefully, you enjoyed the format or the mixture of the content we can discussion week. But you know, maybe I ran out a little bit of energy towards the end but you know, it’s 21 weeks I started in June. So hope you forgive me for that. But um, hopefully, you can also tell that my energies back up again, even though my voice isn’t at the end of this particular show. So I mentioned where the show notes are going to be, how to get in touch with me. And I guess, come back soon because I’ve got more to tell. But in the meantime, thank you once again for listening to the prophecy promises force podcast again this week. And until next time.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net . For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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We have Anthony Boyce, Paul Million, Craig Mitchell, Ryan King and myself to bring a balanced and at times forthright perspective to the topic of marketing in our property businesses.

What is marketing? Where do we tend to hang out? What are you currently doing and is it working? Some top tips and wise words too.

Join us as we delve into the topic of property marketing and hear what the panelists have to say…just one takeaway will make you glad you did!

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Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series

We have Anthony Boyce, Paul Million, Craig Mitchell, Ryan King and myself to bring a balanced and at times forthright perspective to the topic of marketing in our property businesses.

What is marketing? Where do we tend to hang out? What are you currently doing and is it working? Some top tips and wise words too.

Join us as we delve into the topic of property marketing and hear what the panelists have to say…just one takeaway will make you glad you did!

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing, get the lowdown and updates, insights, and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, the property voice or voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name is Richard Brown. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today. It’s always a kind of a weird one when I’m doing these panel discussions because it got for people looking at me going there’s x guy doing his intro live, and What a weirdo. But there we go. It’s great to have you on the show again today. This series is all about property core skills. And today we’re going to be talking about marketing. And so I’ve got some great panelists joining me today. We got Anthony Boyce, Paul million, Craig Miller, and Ryan King. So hey, James, how are you doing? Thank you. As we normally do, we normally kick off with a quick introduction and just go around the room, so to speak. And Anthony, if you just like to lead us off? Who are you and what you’re about in property?

Sure. So I’m Anthony. I am an architectural design business owner by trade. I invest in vital acts HMOs commercial to residential developments. conversions. A little bit very thing I also co-host networking events in the northeast of England. Yeah, so pretty much property for free. Really.

Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate that. And Paul,

I love that. So I’m Paul Millie and also from Darlington, I run the property thing network with the Anthony vise. And I also run the property developers network northeast, which is a white box thing. And yes, I’ve been a landlord for 30 years. And yeah, I’ve got a portfolio of single let’s HMOs light industrial. And yeah, we’re going forward with some commercial conversions apart-hotels, that kind of thing. So thanks for having me tonight.

more than welcome. Good to see you again. Paul. Craig.

David. Yeah, I’m not Craig Miller. Yeah, I’m 20 years property. My mind always goes blank when it comes to this 20 years property.

Building now building houses of a portfolio of HTML single last commercial. We specialize in commercial to resident refurbs I’ve got a lettings agency. various bits and bobs everything within property. Really? Yeah. keep enjoying and doing what? Yeah.

Sounds good. And

if I’m not mistaken, you’ve got a certain name or handle on Instagram. Is that right?

Yorkshire property investor. Yeah. Yorkshire property

investor. I’m sure we come to that. So thanks crazy. Because they’re not good. Anyway, thanks for joining us today. We appreciate it. And Ryan, let’s bring you in. How are you doing?

Yeah, even Richard, thank you for having me here. Unlike everyone else that is not a property investor. Yeah, unfortunately. I’m 24 currently an accountant living in Hertfordshire but I do have a financial education platform called making money simple across all different social media YouTube, tik tok,  Instagram. Part of that is some sort of property education. Yeah, so no properties Yep. Hopefully, I can sort of come in from a different angle on this marketing chat tonight.

Absolutely. Well welcome everybody I think different angles are probably what we’re talking about. Right? So you know, I’m poor for example, you started speaking when I was talking to you about this episode. You know, we were talking about what is marketing and I’m not going to answer the same question that you answered but you know, what is marketing is this you know, for just going around the table what is people’s definition of what marketing is? And particularly from, let’s say a property perspective, what would you say?

So marketing is living your values and putting your product across whatever that may be. But I think there are lots of different angles of it. You know, as we spoke about the other day, it’s not just about putting your own personal brand out there it’s about putting your own product out there and that of sometimes other people’s products Yeah, just think it’s actually quite surprised to be asked on to a marketing chapter there, Richard, because don’t do write a lot of it if I’m honest with you, but I suppose the reason why you may have asked me on is that I do have a bit of a personal brand. You know, we’ve been part of the property thing with Anthony as well. And we’ve become fairly popular in the networking world. But, you know, we haven’t got hundreds of 1000s of followers or anything like that. Not like, you know, Craig, I’m not sure about Ryan, he sounds like one of those young whippersnappers, with a lot of followings. But, again, we’re just pretty organic, can’t we? Anthony, the way that we set up ourselves across them, we get lots and lots of people to our, our meetings. And I think it is about being organic. I mean, that’s why I craved a smile on Instagram because it is just, it’s just 100% organic, and you can just see that he’s just a genuine fella missing out on diggers and stuff. And that’s what people like to see building houses etc. Being actually I suppose, with a bit of a laugh and laugh on the joke as well.

I mean, the market inside I mean to me is is I suppose it is a knee, deep thing, really, when you think about him, I just post what I do. And if people get enjoyment from that, the Latins, obviously the market within Latins is I don’t have anything to do with it. But obviously, you’ve got to be out there and keep your name on what you are. But it’s Yeah, for me personally, it’s just that took off. No intention for it. So I just post what I do every day and put my spin on it and just be straight and upfront, and honest and no bullshit. Really, it’s, that’s all I do with that. And that seems to work better than anything.

Yeah, I’m saving it all up just waiting for you to respond and get the question answered. And then, you know, perhaps a little bit of a summary. But there’s some really good stuff already coming out.

Yeah, I would just say marketing is ultimately matching buyers and sellers. But people really bind to people so I’m going to sell a book through my Instagram. People buy more because of me and because they support me and follow the journey over the years Rob Simmons, Craig, Sam, really, rather than necessarily by just because, like they want to they buy into you, they trust you and what you sort of spread and your values. So I’d say a lot of you can do organically, it’s probably easier rather than spending, I guess, loads of money on ads, paid ads, Facebook ads, and going down that route. But I say ultimately, yeah, it’s just essentially matching buyers and sellers.

Come on over to me and say, Do I need to chip in? Yeah, well, it’s attracting people to either yourself or a service or a product that you’re, you’re offering, isn’t it? I think just to echo what Paul has said, I mean, I don’t see myself as a terrific marketer. A bit like Craig you know, myself and Paul, we just go about property day to day is to property buffoons, you know, we kind of what is it? I won’t say the full title years, but BFA is eight, basically, we just crack on have a laugh. And sort of people seems to like what we do really. So sort of, as Ryan was saying there as well, it’s, it’s kind of organic growth, rather than paying for clicks and that kind of thing. I think that’s the best way of promoting yourself personally, I think,

without being bigoted, as far as Anthony and I are concerned, and as well, it’s like, we’ll, we’ll stop to help other people being time. And I think, I think it’s not that we’re out there to get what’s it called? No, no, like, and trust, it’s not that we necessarily are desperate to get known, liked, and trusted. Apart from in our own sort of little circle of people, I mean, you know, we get, we get 100 people to our networking events, and we do a group and circle of death, which means everyone’s got to save 20 seconds about themselves. Like if we get any more people in the room. We, you know, we’re going to struggle with that it’s going to be ended up taking an hour. So we’re now looking for ways of, well, how can we help more people. And we’ve got 2000 people, I think, on our Facebook page, which we’ve actually kept to a bit of a minimum, we haven’t just left all and sundry in there, you know, we didn’t necessarily want to be one of these massive property pages, with, you know, 36,000 people on there or anything like that, there’s no need for that we’d rather just have a smaller bunch of people and just be a bit more organic like that. I mean, the opportunity that comes from that is, is more than we’d ever need Anyway, you know, so I don’t see there’s a point in thrashing our market in left, right and Chelsea for the sake of what you know, just creating ourselves another job. We just exist nicely in our ecosystem. No.

Yeah, a few people have mentioned the word organic already. But you know, it’s interesting because when I’m listening to you talk about being organic, and I guess the translation of that would be probably just being more human and connecting with other humans. So you’ve kind of got some sort of relationship almost right? rather than putting a bot out there is doing ads and then just getting a bunch of clicks and followers in, you know, something robotic? You know, that’s not very human is it? So if you’re talking about having relatively speaking small group to 1000s, quite a lot to remember all their names, by the way, as I can vouch for, you know, yeah, exactly. So I think the other thing is, you know, it’s an exchange that Ryan talks about, isn’t it, somebody buys something, somebody sells something. So you have this an exchange. And marketing is a way that makes that exchange work makes it possible, you know, you tell someone, hey, I’ve got something. And then the other person says, Hey, I need something. And then you put the two together, but I think I’m picked up basically, and you are ahead by design. Because you’re not, from what I can understand that I don’t know, everybody’s exact approach, but you’re very human, in the way you go about things. And, you know, I think it’s kind of it’s very relatable. So there’s a lot of people who’ve been in property, they’re not just starting out, for example, and they’re probably thinking, well, I can’t go and commission an ad agency, you know, to spend 10,000 pounds on you know, whatever I look, for example, looks like half in Apple and you know, it’s about putting yourself out there isn’t it and just being human and you know, starting to build a relationship with other people. And out of that relationship, things could come. So I think, you know, is that that’s is that right about the organic thing? Is that what you mean is it I think,

I think from my point of view, personally, is that I just, I like to help people anyway, it gives me validation, what I don’t want to do is for everyone who comes into my view or onto my page or to our networking events, we’re not trying to sell anyone anything, we Anthony and I only set up the property thing because of the fact that other PP ends and pins are closed down in the northeast and all of a sudden No, we were enjoying that work and then it didn’t happen anymore. So we set up our own group which has ended up being really popular and we don’t try and you know, apart from taking 20 people 20 quid off people to come to the networking event and 40 quid for a sidewalk round which is about a fifth of the cost of other people’s sidewalk rounds which goes into the overhead projects fund. Whether made by ourselves some sausage finger capable technology or also the tech Buffon’s we yeah we don’t look to make money out of people like that but we do get good opportunity for it you know we’re not saying we don’t lookout for a bit of opportunity but we help tons and tons and tons of people and if we get to ask the universe for people to help us when we need like a QSR Can someone help us with this problem I can even someone help that person with that problem. You know, it’s just been a bit of an again organic happy family really and because of that we ended up coming into contact with people a great you know, I could say Craig Craig Can you call and do a chat next week or yourself Richard you can do a great chat shaker does that. But yeah, I mean, to be able to call upon people and the power of the network it’s been fantastic I mean, some of the stuff that we’ve shared Richard in the past like little hints and tips if you’re off down now just seeing your post go-to songs or songs or while you’re there, I’ll get that book I listened to this. It’s just all part of a real sort of wider brain network which I know is getting off-market in a little bit, but it is all about the organics 100%

I’m glad you’re organic. So in order to get back onto the marketing and because you know, I’ve got this quote, right, Robert Louis Stevenson I think that’s how you say his name properly. Everybody lives by selling something. What do you think of that?

Yeah, sort of like echoed a little bit like a really good book called never split the difference, and that book sort of says that everyone you like everything is a negotiation whether you’re like trying to cross the road or get a girlfriend or get a job or whether you’re trying to do you’re always trying to negotiate something and I guess a similar really similar quote saying everyone’s trying to sell something always got to try and sell yourself to get in a position you need to be ultimately got to market yourself mark your business model for your new product market, your property investment group wherever it is. You’ve got to make work people want to come for some reason and probably even if they pay a dividend for free, you got to sort of market it and sell it in some way that people don’t want to turn up and come and support you.

Yeah, I think you know, this is probably going to split opinion isn’t it because there’s probably a lot of people don’t like the idea of selling you know, think of it maybe as a bit of a dirty word or something. But you know, I put that quote out there deliberately because it a bit provocative. You know what he what the rest of you guys think Ryan you obviously buy into a bit of never split the diff Prince What about the rescue guys? Everybody lives by selling something

I mean for me I think the art of selling is to not sell so I mean going back to what Paul was mentioning before and you know when certain people are out to sell something might be eye members and things like that you know they’re very you know why people are recommending people and things like that I guess why people come to people like Craig and Paul it’s you know, people just like them were saying about organic and being human I guess that’s probably the best flow in my eyes anyway the best way of marketing yourself if you haven’t got something to sell you don’t feel like you’re being sold to you kind of gravitate towards them I think that’s my

guy I’ve ever sold anything it’s when people I’ve seen people fishing for investors and stuff and that’s what they’re constantly pushing. I think over the I think it’s about four or five years since I mainly pushed Instagram I’ve left Facebook just because there’s too much noise too much. I don’t say probably negativity just I don’t know what it is people just jump on people’s back and it’s bullshit whereas Instagram for me it’s been a bit more gradual but I’ve not oversold it and I’ve had I’ve never asked for an investor I did recently just to try it with a friend so this is how easy it can be but it takes this long to build it oh I’ve had people come to me say I’ve got this amount of money can you do anything with it? I’ve seen your project and that’s just been consistent with posting what I do I’ve never once asked for it. I mean think of minute mo about probably about 1.5 million in with investors crazy absolutely crazy but I said to a friend watch operate out and 800,000 over a term of whatever it was over a return and watch and we found delight all over the next couple of days I’ve got probably 1010 messages with more info when it’s it’s that it’s a gradual thing and I think people just assume in our game it’s an instant thing and it hasn’t been for me anyway and it’s never been something I’ve set out for the artist thing for me I think is

it’s powerful isn’t it a big following you and I had a conversation one day Craig we did a bit of an experiment I think where you tagged me in something and I tagged doing something and like yeah, I’ve only got 700 followers on Instagram. But you know I’ve got like 100 followers overnight just tagging you in and that’s what it’s about isn’t it coming if you want to increase your following its consistency and posting again people have been following other people I will

I will lay down the poll in Cyprus from your wife and I think I followed 180 400 polls and I said to him I say what I’m going to try this and just post what I do when gradually it’s I mean it’s your shots and 1000s I mean our my people follow me I don’t know it’s I mean I put content I like to put by your by always try and be me and I’ve never wants to ask for anything it’s just sitting in a coffee shop or and that’s I’m going to be selling but I’m gonna be selling cake and sausage sandwiches and stuff like that where hopefully that again they sell themselves but it’s yeah it’s happened with with a marketing I just think oh god I’ve never done it I’ve bought one year old me oh I do it every day on a on a different way I mean banners are everywhere in the local area make sure if there’s a fence I go and speak to owner constant and banner Oh can I get this Can I advertise that speak to everybody and make it my business to note in my area and all the businesses are owned businesses and and again that’s probably on Mac it’s putting yourself out there and that’s

It not like no interest though isn’t it but obviously please don’t forget to mention your Robin’s

not running at the moment she’s had a bad winter and never got it going summer

it’s been some of our managing castles it definitely the ecosystem

it’s a cracking little market I mean it turns out it’s I’ve just set a few more labs on so I’m shooting for the vehicle so I need to get that going and I’m quite happily driving around in a robin Reliant and you’ve got to have a cordless drill with you because the gearbox drops out so you’ve got to be able to screw it on screw it when you’re a traffic light.

Is that a Trotter

straight black and sticking it out with Jim key it’s got an old wooden ladder and old rusty rule for step ladder on it and very light people some very light found it. But the idea is it breaks down everywhere just gets packed off. It’s Yeah, it’s just one of them. We’re up hooked made probably cost me a couple of grand but it’s wherever I park it somewhere I’ll roll it over it’s but it gets people talking so just a bit

just to go I mean we’re kind of the Robin or the Instagram or things like that as you know what I call marketing channels where you say stuff or communicate but I think before that we were sort of talking about you know just tell people what you do or show people how you live or just be natural right? So is that what pretty much most people here do or is there a slightly different take on it from different people?

I prefer the first book to insert I think one of the girls I think you nail Instagram of Africa I always said that. I think we walk the amount you do what you do I think you’re I think you’ve nailed that I think you’re born you’re born maybe you out above me with your knowledge and your content Have you been over 10 years on me and I’ve always said it sorted you and as soon as I saw you’re on it you just seem to dip in and out.

I do dip in and out I like to write what I’m thinking like with MC you don’t get that much room to

think it’s the picture of pulling it in and then it’s the content you put with it and I think you get a lot of engagement certain post I’ve done I mean I know what pitchers work on what doesn’t is where does is a pitcher of an hour’s work better than a picture of me. pitcher Madog stuff the certain stuff that takes and gets people engaged but yeah, getting your word in and how you word and how you go off in a fairy tale is how do you find

the correct for getting employees and stuff like that I’ve had some really good employees and business partners from I get

a lot of people constantly asking for work and if we haven’t met yet, I mean that is I don’t want to I don’t really get welds that way. But I do get a lot of people basically buttering me up to train if there’s any work we’re not going to think of them and stuff like that. Right? I think we’ve had this conversation before we get a lot of newbies How did it start with it and it’s hard I mean if you put a post on about um you might get 2030 messages and then to sit and go through them with a young family and it’s hard sometimes to get back to everybody so occasionally I’ll put a post I’m not ignoring your stat and I’ve been said to for that identity or to be I think we said before but we felt as though we’re getting melt constantly far as knowledge in no we don’t get anything product in minutes I don’t mind the odd bit it’s hard sometimes just to throw you need to throw hours and hours elbow in and you’ve done the great thing we’ve set a group I just haven’t got time to spend our time really we what I’ve got on

the last you know there’s some interesting things coming out here because we’re starting to talk about the channels and there was a debate Paul you’d be really good at instead I’m not sure what we’re good at because I like writing but we’re going to call it you know that is about the channel and picking the right channel that works for you. So you know Instagram is known as you know very much a visual channel isn’t it’s not a graphics a lot of photos or visual videos stuff like that. And Paul’s just said that I like writing and he can probably do both but you know maybe there are other platforms where writing you know is better suited you know I’m more of a writer myself for example. So you know I tend to

refer to because I don’t she says very big talk I think everybody a lot of it is visual in it and this

is picked up the account

Yeah, I’ve tried but I’m

having tape so it’s probably the real estate if you want to sort of go viral or get a lot of reach and engagement TED Talk is the best platform by like a million compared to the other ones because you can post something and then overnight it can literally get hundreds of 1000s of views 1000s of shares particularly if it’s all like a funny spin on it maybe like Tron make a bit quirky a bit unique it then just gets shared around like mad

because I know a lot of property people have been talking a lot of time at it but it’s again it’s

I suppose like stalking again and I just probably like you Paul, we just think you’ve nailed Facebook I’m happy in that place there. I’m happy on Instagram and then venture over but I know of the change the reels and everything on Instagram. So it’s similar to Tick Tok. Yeah,

well that I mean that’s one thing you could do. You could make an Instagram rule and then just repost it to tick tok and then you’ve already made of Instagram so you can sort of crossbreed and use it for social media platforms.

Yeah. And he’s telling what you do, telling people what you do as well. I’m actually on the lookout at the moment well, as well as for a project manager. I’m on the lookout for a screen editor, you know, like social media kind of wizard cool, just kind of look after everything from start to finish because I’ve been told that I’m very good at mincing and doing silly things on videos for properly and in that respect, I’d probably do all right on Tick tok, well, I mean, you know, I don’t mind making a bit of a sausage of myself every now and again, but not totally fast. I think I think I think a lot of people do it in a kind of completely fast manner. You know, just in order to get that those laughs You know, you can sort of do that in a bit of a more natural way. And especially I think you bring in loans to people I think that’s what this organic thing is about. It’s about not just sort of telling people what you do necessarily, but if there’s an education in there if there’s a sound bite of education in there for everyone that the content with them and, you know, fair play, so we’ll have to set each other a challenge Won’t we will have to, we’ll have to get some of us on Tick Tok and what are we reporting in a week? See what see how we’ve got a digger or something?

Let’s bring Ryan into it again, because well, I know Ryan, you said you don’t actually invest in a property right now. But you’re from what I can understand you’re monetizing the platform you’re what you’re making money simple. And eventually, I think you’ll probably be able to strip out money to put to invest in your properties along with your other activities. But what I like about what you do is you do have these you mentioned quirky sorts of snippets and stuff like that. Remember, famously watching the ones where you got the dogs running around the kitchen and they’re like doing handbrake turns if you can imagine running around the kitchen counter and stuff like that. So is that something you deliberately do you try and find quirky or funny types of things to include in your messaging?

Yeah, so one constant is fairly sort of like simple straightforward financial education invest in the sort of pieces trying to get people to invest but what you’re referring to there is when I post means so I obviously use Twitter and Social Media just personally, whenever I see sort of a funny video or funny picture I want to try and think about how I can then be like a funny invest in or personal finance spin on it, then if I can, oh, then yeah, share that on Instagram tik tok wherever it is, and that’s sort of one way I guess with like different social media channels. You’re really just almost trying to get people to sort of get onto your page but then once they’re on your page, then they can sort of see what you’re about what you’re sharing. So they find me for a meme then see my tic Tock or Instagram and realize I’m just sort of trying to I’m just sharing what I invest into how much fun that’s per month what platforms I use what pension is how what did how different types of viruses work I guess I’m still using them to like quirky bits and then like memes and sort of funny videos then sort of bring people into almost help them be like Paul Sam really just help them get started invest them at the moment Yeah, it’s in the stock market but hopefully over time as I monetize it more I can then yeah, start making some money and use that for property investing.

Yeah, and just a quick shower when you and don’t really embarrass you or anything but you know, what’s your sort of follower count at the moment on I know insert is one big one but I think total as well perhaps it puts to shame

Instagram is 40,000 share that literally yesterday and then sex ops about 35,000

amazing yeah amazing and that’s you know, you know, I know you’ve been focusing on that What about a year or two max something

a bit similar to what Craig was saying that’s all been years in the making. I mean, Instagram has been two and a half years well pretty much been uploading daily. I’ve got about 700 posts now Instagram, tik tok been around for about 18 months have uploaded hundreds and hundreds of videos on signal you can do this thing as well where people leave a comment you’re going to reply directly to their comment answering their questions which a lot of them sort of videos while they get any views but we’re making hundreds of videos and sort of over time, just like anything really the compound effect is sort of slowly built up to where now I’ve got some decent numbers but yeah, it’s still sort of very much in its infancy and just trying to grow and build up the platform over time.

Now coming back to Craig I think you know, you were saying Craig that it’s not easy he takes time takes time to reply to everyone and it takes time to you know, put stuff online and you’ve got to be fairly consistent about it is that fair to say?

mean that I got some time when I try and post every day. But I think since I’ve started this bleeding newbuild My mind is fried and I’ve been struggling with I may have a lot of content because I do take a lot of pictures just to document just to give me a bit of a boost every now and when I feel resigned on anything. But it’s Yeah, the consistency of it is I tried twice a day but you tend to make yourself a job then trying to win Make sure you’re keeping stuff in from. Yeah, it’s kind of definitely consistency. And just

I think a good thing about the social channels similar to what Craig was saying earlier on, as well as once you sort of have them for a few years and build up a following, you can just leverage them. So you’re sort of giving out loads of content for free. And it goes to Craig was saying he’s got investors and people want to work for him with me. It’s not at that point at the moment, but I’m able to sort of like put up a story if anyone can’t design my ebook my new ebook cover if anyone knows any accounts and I’m looking for specific sort of questions someone a friend’s got a question I know the answer I can post on my story and I’ll get loads of responses and sort of leverage that and people also want to give back because you’ve helped them over the years in any form leverage that following didn’t help out yourself or sort of people have questions that need answers from and you can use your following to do that.

When it comes to your property journey me with 40,000 followers you probably get some pretty cheeky crowdfunding going on that hopefully, you can get there’s a lot of people in there that would be you know, maybe willing to JV you know,

do you manage them yourself then or as you know, like Craig was saying that you know, it can become even for me, I’ve got just under 200 and free followers on Instagram so be that boys. But yeah, making content it does seem like a chore sometimes. So if you’ve got that many followers, you know, do you outsource it? Did you film it yourself? You know, what, what do you do? How do you kind of get into that routine of posting?

Yeah, I do for myself at the moment, I sort of don’t I think ideally, if I was able to make enough money from it, I would then outsource it and free up some more of my time. And I think one thing I mentioned earlier on I do quite a lot, it’s all like cross like sort of breed the different pieces of content so I tweet something, I can screenshot that tweet and put it on Instagram, I can then make like a 32nd-second talk explaining that tweet in more detail is something more complicated like a setting up a workplace pension, I can make like a five or 10 minute YouTube video on it. So I sort of try and sort of like yeah, use the same bit of topic for several pieces of content. But I think yeah, it’s all one of the things where you sort of got put in a big shift in the evenings after work between like seven and many of you go to bed and it was quite as easy to over lockdown doing that when we couldn’t do anything it’s a bit harder now that things have reopened again, but I think we just saw called find the time to do it and I think if you’re interested in it like I’m interested in investing in the stock market are you guys interested in the property while your host events then you sort of find the time to do it and then over time, build that following and then over time sort of extends different social networks to try and reach more and more people

so Anthony, come on we didn’t mean embarrass you by you admitting that you only got 207 or whatever it was followers on Instagram I know you’ve got more on other channels so I’ve seen you quite a lot on LinkedIn for example. With your cheeky videos in your children you’re extending poll thinking actually that sounds wrong and then she’s explaining what your extended impulse thingy is all about follow up I have a selfie stick Richard that’s probably why I’ve only got 250 followers on Instagram because I’ve seen my selfie stick you do post I’ve seen your post and you do like your latest project sort of thing and this is what we’re going to do you do the walk around. And then you’ll share a design you know, you talk about I’ve seen you talk about different ways in which you’ve structured deals, you know, do sort of land jayvees and you know, planning uplift types of gain see I’m paying attention. But the most I’ve seen you’re mostly on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, I think so but maybe you’re posting every everywhere but I just happen to see you on LinkedIn. So wherever you’re posting and what sort of things you’re doing.

I think it must be my only follow up and that’s probably why you’re seeing me but I guess I mean, this internal struggle you know, as Craig mentioned, with Facebook, you kind of go well I go through cycles of sometimes the negativity and things kind of get on top of you. I need to I guess do what Ryan’s doing. So I and Paul are guilty of maybe putting outposts that are too long for cross-pollination between social media so when we do a Facebook post and it’s a long article, it’s a long post-LinkedIn kind of stifles your ability to copy and paste which is frustrating and it needs rewriting. I mean, I guess one of the last videos I did on YouTube was a good 30 minutes long so it’s, I guess it’s probably me trying to get my head around how I can carve this up to put it on different platforms which would be beneficial, but I mean for me as well. Another thing I always wonder about is I mean, I haven’t got as big a following as some of them on here, but how much work do you want. I’m already quite busy with the smartphone and I’ve got so I don’t really want to push it out too much because I don’t want to be dealing with 25 people a day in messages and that kind of thing so I don’t know you guys I put it to you guys that you’re not too scared of getting too big I mean I’m already getting JV investors and attracting investment and that kind of thing with minimal content I’m putting out are you guys flooded with offers you’re too busy replying to people I know Paul is Craig’s mentioned as well.

I sometimes think why the hell am I doing it? Because I don’t need any money I don’t need any work I don’t need we’re self-efficient we do his own stuff now it’s and I do sometimes when I feel as I’ve got up on my Why am I doing it yeah it’s bizarre sometimes but when

do you not think one day though Craig you might you know if you could make a pound a month out of each one of those people that are on your you know if you had a YouTube channel that was subscribed to or something like that that you would get good content you know, like proper learning content the facts and figures sharing the facts and figures

everybody does on the property and I’m probably gonna sound a bit daft here but I’ve never done this for money I’ve never done property and when I asked yeah no no he

wasn’t I think that’s what people find the attraction is there you know you’re not out to prove anything I mean you just you know you just be

an obvious turned into something that I never ever thought it would do.

Yeah. I do something called Real Property people on a Tuesday night it’s just a free zoom there’s no you know, I don’t record it what what goes on in real property people stays in real property people and it’s just Yeah, but you know, sometimes we’ll have a special guest on we’ll talk about suspensions or we’ll talk about pain points in property you know, I’ll talk about the other week I talked about some guy that’s much my house and to himself out the front window on a pile of furniture that he created and you know, in 30 years of being a landlord that was my worst experience but it’s it’s good you know, think people ask me at the end you know, stay on for 10 minutes so they’re probably problems and it’s up till just good provenance for when I need to ask them about something you know, the might be sort of a cross pollination of skills you know, it’s just the opportunity that it’s like building your Power Team if you like from all of my employees of the tools all of my office stuff have come from networking meetings, my network you know, social media that kind of thing because you just get to ask a massive audience that’s where it’s been really powerful for me

I mean all the property friends I’ve got like you guys here now it’s all been proven social media. Yes. It’s brilliant that I’ve met so many really good friends where you can ask a daft question now rose years and years ago I can find anything out now and we all this technology and stuff I used to have a b&q buck back and revamp how to do stuff, you know, different it’s bizarre how it’s come about. But one of the main things I think that social media is is the friends as created and the journeys you get to see them go through is really good. So that’s probably another good point where I could never dip away from it because I like to see what people are doing. And yeah, well when I can, and I do a lot still do random walkthroughs in the area, and if I feel some real need in an I mean, you know, Sarah, Sarah Juba. Yeah, well, she’s, she was annoying me in social media and texting, as long as I hang up in time, just come to my office, sit in the office and follow maybe a shadow. And she did that for a year. And she’s doing really well for me. It’s, you don’t get stuff from it.

It’s a given again, you know, and I think one of the best ways to get is to give you know so you know, I think nearly all of you are very big givers. And I think you know, if you get something back in return, are you thoroughly deserved and answers just want to come back? You know, you’re talking about the whole use of cross-pollination, which is interesting, but I mean repurposing content, which Ryan was talking about, we’ve taken a slur, taking a tweet to Insta to tick tok and all that stuff. I’ve got Gary Vee, you’ve heard of Gary Vee. Gary Vee, you know, he’s, he’s a master of this, right? And he talks about is it 14 pieces of content a day or something. But he doesn’t literally produce 14 different pieces of content a day. He normally has one big piece, and then he slices it up, and then he distributes it out to the different platforms, and he’s now got a team of people to help him do that. Because this is it’s an awful lot of work but that whole repurposing thing but so you can go broad and go across different platforms and repurpose your content on those different platforms. But I think to start with is probably more advisable to stick with you you know stay in your lane sort of thing stick with what you know what you’re comfortable with. You know when Paul you said earlier like writing well stay with writing for now and then you can expand you know, into other forms of media later on perhaps So anyway, I just thought I mentioned that, and if you want the I’ve got a deck that he produced. If you’re interested. Antony, I’ll gladly share it with you. Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks. Yeah, no worries. So we’ve got why do we do it? So sometimes we’re questioning ourselves Where do we do it and we’re not talking about dogging and you know, I think equally you know, it’s like well you know, what’s it all for and you know, what, what what’s working for people right now and you know, in terms of marketing but a lot of us are talking about social media I’ve noticed that but the people doing other things besides social media and getting you to know, clients or investors or tenants or things like that, what are people doing is working right now.

Great.

I show my area with every type of thing I can do. boards, banners, roundabouts. I just do that in the area I don’t we don’t do any any paper for tenants and stuff is just utilizing banners and areas on good roadsides and just keeping the name in the area that if the thinking the NIDA room is so janky I’m changing I have been doing a lot of advertising for landlords which have now stopped and we’re focusing more on now finding houses we buy houses and then they can be passed to landlords it just it’s more lucrative that way bringing a landlord in properties 300 pound a month as an animal whereas if we saw so good property we don’t do many but if we do one a month two round and we sign it up so it’s 2300 so the my main focus now is is we buy commercial land and stuff like that and we get a lot from from that I mean I put free signs up on my site and we’ve got about I think it’s a shot of four acres of land we’ve got in a pipeline where locals have said I’ve got this bit of land and stuff just people coming in and passing and seeing it so yeah I’ve overdone the banners and then I suppose in a way the free is free cheap easy changes whatever the banner is they’ve been really good direct vendor letters we do a lot of that through members going through clicking through members seeing what companies on what and just log in whatever else is and spending money on sending letters out yeah and that’s that’s pretty much all you do really within within that little world

well that that’s pretty good answer to be honest with you but just one quick one before you ask the other people about what they’re doing that’s working you know your letters do do you personalize them? Do you handwrite them Do you do anything unique all

along written I mean I try and get stuff to make sure to try and send 10 hours a week and then briefs because with a tenancy is the attempt to know when they’ve been signed up and a rough idea when the camera running out so it’s just a file later one later on do you need to be every six month name or even a nice Christmas won’t tell him what we’re doing we just try and be a bit more rich building that database of all rents and what in this area so I want to know every listing agent what’s talking about in my area and just find out what are to let so you can be a bit more active with them then because you know you know every single I know pretty much every single HMO in area so yeah it’s it’s what active on that for not on a massive scale just again just barely away just drip feed the bike today the details I think three or four quid in a one on registry so I just said della Gil’s do so many we can log it all so that we do call it envelope we’re an unwritten, no bullets. There’s always you always have paper and pen in a van or a car that helps staff if they see something, write it and post it. They work really well then we just well install what good stuff

well, what about everything else? What’s working at the moment? That’s a really good answer, Craig thanks.

I mean, I’ve just re rebranded I guess, just changed the logo and the colors and a couple of times, people have just come to me just due to that so that seems to work What have I done I mean I’ve just just put a board out on the local football team Darlington FC here so I’ll see what comes through that that was literally a week or two ago I’m gonna get a leased car and get that stick it up well so that done yeah but I’ve had two people come say to me just saying I really liked the brand or the logo I like I like your crack basically as well just through the networking so I wouldn’t say I’m as aggressive as maybe Craig is with with marketing but it’s just I suppose getting your your brand or your colors or just awareness out there I think a lot of my stuff does come from obviously my association with the property thing and Polo people get to know me from what you say the minimum content I do put out and meet him in person I guess that’s probably how I do a lot of my marketing it’s just face to face with appointing me hands and having a chat really

yeah I think it’s quality rather than quantity and I know what you mean by not being as aggressive as Craig because you haven’t actually told us what you’ve run does Anthony rocket

yeah terrible actually promote

high quality I think God I’m going even further down to the way I think the best market now do is just by doing even site walkarounds for 20 people because you get into impart your intrinsic and in-depth knowledge if I do say so myself into because I’ve been doing research for 30 years and being able to take someone through that process from absolute start to finish you know Antonio pick three of our current projects in going and tech 20 on people around them talking about the planning implications you know the refurb implication structural movement absolutely everything from start to finish to get four hours of excellent content and I found that that I wasn’t expecting it necessarily today I knew it was a good good thing to you know to recycle and put out there on social media but actually from the people in the room if you like on the walk around the amount of feedback that you like oh you know, could you give us 100 of this would you recommend someone for that? You know, would you mentor me kind of thing I mean we don’t do memberships but I suppose what we are doing is just creating a kind of an ethos and a brand and that that trust when we do need to you know maybe we will do a mentorship program in the future if ever we’re mad enough to do so you know, but but but at least if we do we’ll have that provenance already of know what we’re all about, or we think we do anyway. Yeah,

exactly. I think and I think you do and I think you found you know walk those walkarounds those one to one conversations for both of you just mentioned I’m sure it’s the same with yours, as well. Great, you know, showing people your real-life and you know, your knowledge and the projects that you’re working on. So I think that’s yours I’m looking at this side of the screen, Ryan’s got no idea that he’s not on that side of the screen because I’m coming back to you Ryan, by the way. And you’ve got Anthony, you know, Paul and Cray, who kind of showing properties and you know, literally, these stories about you calling for Windows Paul and stuff like that, and just talking about the guts of property and stuff like that. So I’m just being real and just been connected in that way. But Ryan, I’m gonna bring you back as well what’s working for you at the moment, because I know you’re coming from slightly different angles, so maybe then we can learn some new things from the angle.

Yeah, I was gonna say probably a lot of the stuff that I sort of do is probably covered in how social media channels things. That’s what I mainly do at the moment. But I think one thing, two things that came to mind, the first thing was probably similar thought really pause then, but meeting up with other people, not people who buy stuff from me, but other people who like make content also on investing in personal finance. So if you end up collaborating with a person who also has 1000s of followers, then collab posts or Instagram or Tiktok actually do a lot better than me just posting something that I usually post so I’ve been like collaborating or partnering up with other content creators and then posting on social media and then gets more like reach more engagement gets the post out there more and more people see it. And then the second thing, which I’ve started doing more recently, I know is quite big on particularly Twitter-based affiliate marketing. Quite a few people who have actually started their own light invest in Instagram accounts because of my accent require them to start now they essentially do like affiliate marketing to me so they’ve essentially bought my products in the past and now they then promote them to their own followers. And then if they are to make a sale and then they get a kickback hasn’t really actually produced very many sales at the moment but it’s one of the things where for the future if I keep growing more people like the products more people want to sort of sell products for me, that could provide some fruits going forward and the

signs break up at the end at least at my end Ryan so I think it’s some really good stuff that you came out there with the influencer collabs and must get it right you influencer collabs and the affiliate marketing, we are just maybe I think I’m going to go around the limit and ask for some top tips or maybe things to avoid, you know, from a marketing point of view. So you want to put your thinking cap on. for that. I’ll be back to you shortly. But maybe just on my side, I think there’s what I think was beautiful about marketing is this, you know, there’s space for everyone, any type of person to kind of market if you wish, in any kind of way. And so what might work for you know, Craig, or Paul, or Ryan, or Anthony might not work for me and might not work for you listening. So I think you can use just find your niche, find your space, find where you’re comfortable. Her, for example, I’m a writer as well. And you know, what, what’s worked for me, for example, is my writing. So I’ve got a couple of books out there, there’s one about to come. But one, a complete guide to property finance is coming soon. And it’s like, it’s late, it’s late, but it’s coming very, very soon. But you know, the books, the first book was published in 2015. So it’s six years old now. But I still get people responding to me from that book. I’ve got 60, you know, YPN math articles. I’ve got 400,000 downloads of a podcast over seven years. And it’s a back catalog. That’s what I’m actually saying. So people can go and find that and it’s there. It’s a little bit different with a tick tok, right? Tick Tok is still there. But it’s sort of at the moment, isn’t it? Certain tweets definitely are. So I think, you know, the, so for me, it’s like a write a lot. But there’s less out there, but it stays there longer. So the thing you can find your space, that’s what I’m really trying to say. So I think that works for me, you know, less is more, I can’t maintain the consistency of publishing, or posting several times a day, that’s quite crazy for me. So I think to find your space. And maybe I’ll start off with my top tip, then, to cue you guys up. So my top tip is really a book. And I’ll get him there in case anybody else mentioned that as well. But you know, the book I’d recommend is a book called known. And Akasha needs to think of the author’s name, I’ll think of it before I wrap up. But it’s called known. And that talks about actually what I’ve just said, is find your space and do it your way. For some people it’s the Gary Vee methods set of 14 pieces of content a day. Thank you. It’s Mark Shea, what’s the middle initial Mark? RW Schaefer ? Yeah, but what Thanks, Ryan for getting me the book. And, but there are other people who post like long-form blog posts once a month. So and everything in between, and RW Schaefer is a book called man. So it’s a really good case study in that there’s My top tip anyway, I was here, what are your top tips? And as before we close?

I guess I mean, maybe why I prefer the in-person kind of meetings. I guess it makes your online brand consistent with what you are in real life so that people aren’t disappointed when they meet you. I guess that’s a big one for me. Be authentic online and be yourself. You don’t need to pretend to be someone else in order to gain followers. Yeah, I guess that’s my biggest one anyway. The big one.

Be so mine would be to challenge other people aren’t Well, actually to tangle. The people like Craig and they’ve got tons of followers if you want to get more followers, but all sorts of challenges. People like Ryan and say, Well, actually, Ryan, maybe you should post on the property thing saying that you’re interested in a property thing group and not say that you’re interested in getting into property? And what newbies can give you tips into doing so and what strategies have worked for them. And you can tag us and then we’ll tag you in and help you out. And, you know, maybe we could do a bit of an interview or something like that. If you want, you know, you can ask me in Boise, a lot of questions. I’ll leave it in Craig and Richard, whatever, you know, we could do

them Facebook Lives where people are interviewing each other across. So there’s, there’s I think for your guy, there’s certain points wherewith his following of the accounting side of the scene, this is a property investor, these are what they invest in, you try different things. And it’s

Yeah, I think if Ryan was to come on-site or one of these sidewalk rounds, I mean, if we just did a, you know, if we did an exclusive one, and you could just ask us a lot of stuff to do with how we’ve pulled the property to pieces and put it back together again, and then that will get your followers knowing that you’re interested in the property, and therefore, you know, they might want to jump home with you and something you know, it’s just not provenance out there, isn’t it?

As a good idea, actually, that’d be great collateral. There you go.

Really, your tip was the collaboration idea, I think, from what I’ve just picked up collaboration.

Yeah, that’d be quality, like, essentially go in. And I’ve seen people do that where they go on YouTube and they sort of speak to someone who’s experienced, whether it’s like their accountant or their solicitor, they start, like almost what you were saying, quizzed them as you’re sort of walking around the property or sitting in the office, asking them those beginner questions that I won’t know the answer to. But you do. And then it’s sort of, yeah, as you mentioned, my audience knows I’m interested in the property, they know you’re knowledgeable on property. So that then sort of follows both of us. Well, they

can chuck a load of questions on as well, while we’re going around if it’s alive and questions. Yeah, I mean, probably is pretty scary when, you know, when you put them into pieces and put them back together, so you can see them on the operating table.

So what’s your top tip, then Ryan?

So mine, so I guess for me personally, because I’m younger, I’m not particularly wealthy, haven’t got like a massive portfolio, or like loads of promises, or whatever. It’s really just about being transparent. And I sort of Anthony was saying, being authentic and just sort of sharing my story. So even years ago, when I was only investing, like a couple of 100 pounds a month, I would share what I was investing into how much, and it’s all being transparent, honest, and open about what I’m doing. And I think that’s essentially what allowed me to then like build my following people sort of trust because I’m sort of doing what I’m saying, I’m doing more trying to sell them. So like get rich quick scheme or get rich, quick course. So So yeah, so what we touched on really right at the start, but being authentic, being transparent, and being honest, some people sort of following you for you.

Greg, we’re about here is here. We didn’t get your top tip. Do we?

Yeah, I mean, probably make sure everybody every cell is consistent. And that expected overnight is slow and steady. Is what I find to be right. Just Yeah, Bo. consistent. Yeah.

Fantastic. All right, guys. Well, it’s been a blast, man. I think there’s probably loads we could still talk about, but you know, we want to sort of spare the listeners a little bit. So we’ll sort of draw it to a close. So Anthony, Paul, Craig. And Ryan, thanks very much for joining me this week. This is gonna be the last panel discussion in this series, probably the penultimate in the whole series. And after finding out what’s going to happen next. I guess I’m just going to do the wrap-up. Thanks very much for listening once again this week, to the property voice podcast, you can find the show notes over the website, thepropertyvoice.net. But if you’d like to connect with me and talk about anything from today’s show, or NDB referred on to, or have a collab with any of our panelists today, you can email me podcast at thepropertyvoice.net. And I will be putting in, by the way, social media links to all of the panelists so could you just make sure I’ve got them, guys, if I haven’t already, just share them with me. And we’ll tag you into those social media posts and you know what the best thing about that is, don’t just like it, comment and share, share the love and that will actually boost us all. So there we go just in passing. So thanks again. And until next time on the property voice podcast is Josh.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net. For more inspirational content and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Series 8: Property Core Skills-Marketing Panel Discussion appeared first on The Property Voice.

We are getting close to the end of this series covering property core skills now. This week, our panelists of Jeff Unsworth, Nana Piesie, Carl Gilbert and Dominick Hardy discuss systems and processes with me.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it, as the old song goes. This discussion looks at how we organise ourselves and our philosophy towards property management, along with the tech that we use.

For a bit of fun and light-hearted banter, we also have ‘platform wars’, where the panelists express their preference for Microsoft, Apple or Google – who will win that battle?

As well as sharing what sort of technology and applications the panelists use to manage their properties and portfolios, we also have a couple of fun sections. This includes tech we can’t live without and tech we love to hate too.

Why not join in with these fun questions as you listen to the panelists reveal their approach to systems and processes in their property business.

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We are getting close to the end of this series covering property core skills now. This week, our panelists of Jeff Unsworth, Nana Piesie, Carl Gilbert and Dominick Hardy discuss systems and processes with me.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it, as the old song goes. This discussion looks at how we organise ourselves and our philosophy towards property management, along with the tech that we use.

For a bit of fun and light-hearted banter, we also have ‘platform wars’, where the panelists express their preference for Microsoft, Apple or Google – who will win that battle?

As well as sharing what sort of technology and applications the panelists use to manage their properties and portfolios, we also have a couple of fun sections. This includes tech we can’t live without and tech we love to hate too.

Why not join in with these fun questions as you listen to the panelists reveal their approach to systems and processes in their property business.

Welcome to the property voice podcast helping you to navigate safely through the world of property investing, get the lowdown and updates, insights and outcomes on all matters property with a splash of entertainment along the way, for property, voice or voice to trust among the crowd. Now, let’s get started with your host, Richard Brown.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the property voice podcast. My name, of course, is Richard Brown. And it’s a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today. Well, it’s another week, and it’s another episode in the property core skills series, we’re getting quite close to the end. So only a couple of more episodes really to cover this one-off. Today, we’ve got a panel discussion, and the topic is systems and processes that we might use in our property, business, and property investments. So I’m joined, thankfully, by some now-familiar voices, and if I was gonna say if you could see some familiar faces, but it’s a podcast, so you can’t. So some familiar voices, I’m just gonna go around the room and ask each one of us just to give a quick intro, in case people haven’t heard it before, just to sort of 62nd view of who you are, where you come from. And that will help people you know, put a bit of a frame of reference when you start talking the conversation, for sure. So I’m gonna go around in terms of Jeff, Nana, calm and onyx. So Jeff wanted to kick us off.

My name is Jeff Unsworth. I’m a part-time IT consultant working for a large multinational. I spend my time looking after my properties on my day off. I’ve been in the property game for about 10 years now. But over the last five years, I’ve really run my business moving forward. Thanks, Jeff.

My name is Nana. I’m part-time on dad leave and part-time working at Volvo. At the moment, me and my fiance are trying to escape the rat race. And that’s why we purchasing properties and doing some rent to rents at the same time.

Welcome back, Nana.

Banks are insured.

I am on hold. I have been investing in property for about 10 years now before that. I was a software developer. And as part of my interest being here tonight is I suppose it’s my interest to talk about these things. But the mechanic trade-in time dynamics. So this kind of stuff is quite interesting for me.

You were genuinely excited about this episode. Well, yeah, I

really wanted to join Yeah, you were kind enough to reschedule the recording,

we wouldn’t have had it without You’re so welcome. Great stuff. And Don,

Hi, I’m Dominic. I’m an IT contractor in the finance industry, that’s my day job. But I am also a property investor started as an accidental landlord back in I think 2012 when I moved residential properties and rented it, keep the first one, so rented that out. And then my partner moved me some time after that. So we rented hers out as well. So we had two properties and our kids done quite well maybe we should think about this a bit more seriously, and invest in property, which we did in 2017. So it’s only been about four years, four years, five years, since we’ve been investing in property. And we’ve built a small portion of portfolio in that time, but how holiday and we are looking to to grow that portfolio with the aim of being able to quit the day job and work in property full time.

Sounds good. Thanks, Dominic. No, no, you and I are the only no not at contractors software developer types here. So you know, we’re gonna have to, you know, try and keep these guys in check. In case it gets a bit gobbly goo key in terms of the discussion, so hopefully with me on that one. So systems and processes we probably work out as we go through this series, that alone within certain topics is is quite a lot of overlap and crossover. Sometimes you can’t really talk about one element without talking about some of the elements and that’s the same with you know, anything if you think about it, any business, you know, there’s a lot of crossover or the things that affect the other elements of the operation or the structure. And so inevitably, we probably touched on you know management systems, seeing early episodes, but we’re going to focus in on a little bit more in terms of processes. processes is how we do things. Really, that’s my definition, at least, how we go about things, how we do things, how we organize ourselves. Maybe we’re going to mostly I suspect, we might touch a little bit of technology and apps with the audience with the panelists that we’ve got around us. Maybe. And, and then I think the other thing is more of a philosophy. You know, I call it a management systems, but what’s our philosophy to how we organize ourselves in terms of managing properties and portfolios? That could be things like we’re doing ourselves or using an agent just very simplistically. So one way to do is just to get people’s view on this, maybe start things off with the philosophy, you know, who’s who’s the DIY or the? Do It Yourself landlord type? And who is the agent type? And is there another model that we’ve got around the panel here? So bring bring you back in Jeff, why don’t you kick us off? What kind of system or philosophy Do you attach to your property management, first of all, so my main philosophy is to do it yourself. So I keep it in house. So I live down in the southeast, I buy most of my properties up in the Northwest. I keep it in the family. So for example, my dad looks, goes out and does all my viewings and looks at it. He’s a retired plumber. So he’s got a good background in that industry. My sister, owns a cleaning firm up in the northwest, she goes out and does viewing sitters, maintenance tasks, and things like that for me, and she knows people who can get things done. So I do that I pay them didn’t pay me down. So quite well, that kind of assistance of being my managing agent. So that’s one thing I do. I like to do all my own books, mostly got accountants to cover that area. But yeah, that’s how I like to keep it.

It’s interesting, because you said DIY, but actually, you’re not doing much yourself, bear it, because you, you’re dishing a lot of those jobs out to family. So

I collect the money, then take them on. Yeah.

So that that would be sort of a contract out type of model. But most of the people who are contracting are family members, that your your father might be having a chat with the living wage people maybe I don’t know,

possibly.

Anyway, great. Thanks for sharing that. Now.

If you want to. So basically, I’m, I’m forced to make you. I’m forced to make a bit. Use remote, obviously, to use people. Because I live in Sweden, as you’re aware of. So we use from sourcing agents to letting agents to business partners to friends. So yeah, basically the only thing that we do not meet but Emily is using the zero well, because he’s a accountant by train. So he does that. But yeah, we still need to sign it off with the accountant, obviously.

So pretty much passive arm’s length using aging sin, you know, and similar.

Yeah. Sounds good.

Carl, what about you?

Sometimes my portfolio, that’s mostly arm’s length. But in terms of my main business, I am quite hands-on as probably by yourself, which I struggled to delegate. So always taking things on myself. So that’s probably my biggest challenge. Yeah, we’ve got a few challenges that I wanted to talk about this evening. You know, try and try and use systems and technologies to support me as well in making things a bit easier.

Yeah. It’s interesting, because you made a distinction between managing a portfolio and certainly the managing projects, and it could be different could be different approaches across each one. So that was interesting. And thanks for the coaching. Yes, maybe I need to delegate. And Dominic, what about you.

So the properties that I owned day to day management is mostly with agents because often around the country, so I have agents looking out for those. The holiday that I have probably has a bit more involvement. There’s not an agent of such an offer that we do have obviously cleaners, and it’s advertised on one of the big sites. But there are issues with myself my business plan on that one too, but you have to dive in denbo find someone to fix it for that requires a bit more work. But then I think maybe cause touching on this is all in the portfolio. So the portfolio I do, try and keep on top of and make sure that everything’s managed there too. So things like the gas certificates and NPCs, all that stuff. So I have all that tract as well. So whilst the agent should obviously take care of all that, I do like to get on top of that insurance and all that stuff, obviously, that’s kind of my responsibility. So I track all that my stuff, all that stuff myself, as well, in some of the systems I use to control that attachment. And

I’m sure we will to well, managing the manager, I should add my own approach, maybe just to provide a bit of distinction, because like I was saying, this kind of, could be a hybrid, depending on what you’re doing. But I think when I started, I almost use exclusively like agents, you know, as a more arm’s length, passive more utilizing other people, contractors, agents. As my portfolio grew, they got to a certain point, you know, size really, where it made sense to me, so to insource. So it’s kind of a bit like what you’re doing, Jeff, to be fair. I’m not, you know, employing my sister and my father. But basically, I employ someone who have worked for my what is effectively my own letting agency. And so I have my own small agency, which looks after my own rental properties, obviously, developments and things like that completely different things, you need to have a different approaches to that. As it happens, I’ve been buying rating agencies and property management companies recently, so that might change the game and might actually outsource to my own agency, we don’t maybe the person is managing my agency might be listening right now. So I don’t know that decision is not being major. So there we go. That’s me, my philosophy, my approach, along with everybody else’s. So I kind of just sort of frame this up last week, when I set the scene a bit, that we might talk about processes and systems. I don’t know if we can separate them, but our processes, how we might do something. And you know, whether we have policies and procedures, where we are, how we organize our time, things like that. And then the system would be like something a tool, possibly technology, which can help us to do things more efficiently, or reminders and that sort of thing. So now I think we’re going crossing over. So I was thinking of breaking the topic down into those two separate areas. But um, you know, perhaps to drill on a little bit of how we started, you know, how do you organize yourselves? What sort of approached you tend to take, insofar as, how do you go about things, and maybe what sort of tools you might use to help you with that. To come back to you, Jeff, perhaps to start us off in that direction.

Yeah, that’s fine. Time management is a key thing when it comes to property. One thing I, it obviously needs to come under a good calendar. Obviously, all the big companies use them. I use the Google Calendar link to my phone. I use an application called Asana, which schedules schedules and all my tasks. So for example, epics, gas certificates, data Commissioner GDPR, stuff like that, make sure everything’s in my calendar. I don’t go can’t go anywhere without actually viewing my calendar because my phone goes everywhere. With me. Something that I ensure I always do. My methods working on that I always make sure that key things, when before anything is due at least a week before. So for example, one of my processes is a month before the guest gets to his contract, the best supplier gets better. Make sure he’s booked in and lined up to do the task. Milton, once you have those dates lined up their attendance, so it’s all written down as a process, a checklist of things to do. I have a portfolio management list that I go through. And again, that links to my calendar that links to Asana, and that actually points out to where when tax tasks are due and when things should be done.

I think my wife was drowning in the cats. So I was on mute for a moment. That’s really interesting, because you talk about you know, perhaps taking things around with you on your mobile phone. You know, it’s a lot of apps and technology that we can now literally have on a mobile device. So I thought that was quite interesting. What about other people’s to bring you back in now what do you do in terms of organizing yourself?

So I Do a hybrid. So I do, I have a journal that I, I always write down what I want to do when I wake up before I start my reading and all of this, and then I put in the tasks that I want to complete. But besides that, I use this app or website called calendly. So if someone wants to book in schedule, a call or something investor call or whatever, I just linked the code to them, and then it simultaneously connect with my calendar, Google Calendar, so it block off the time and you can choose what time you’re blocked. And Besides that, we also use Asana, Trello. And we use mark to Microsoft Teams, to have our conversation with our VA. So we schedule and see where, where they’re, what they’re doing, and what they’re supposed to do. And yeah, giving feedback and then giving feedback to us as well. So yeah, those are the main stuff that we use and to do as well, that Richard introduced us to very good. Reminding to Google task, obviously to keep up to date with stuff that may be coming in the, in the future.

Interesting that you’re using. So I think there’s not there’s often a debate about certain platforms or apps within a certain category. So you know, people might prefer Apple technology versus Microsoft technology versus Google technology, for example. And then, you know, people be raging fans of different elements. So I think we might get into that maybe, but I was interested in and when you say you use both Asana and Trello because they’re very similar in a way Are they Asana is like a task management tool and Trello is project management, but still kind of does that task management do. Is there a reason you used to

Yeah, so I totally agree, to be honest, I like Asana more but the VA like the trailer more so I’m like, whatever suits them best for the platform and as long as they get the work done and we’re happy that that’s good, but I feel that like you mentioned it’s easier to I think the visual is better on Asana nine is much easier to track back to see what happened while on Trello you just like drag and drag. Yeah, he did. I think it’s just tasty.

I was gonna say a little bit its taste and personal preference. You know, I didn’t really get Machado for example, but I use base camp for a lot of people hate Basecamp but they like Asana, you know, so, but they’re all in the same category. So as a sort of a task management tool. So I think you know, there’s plenty out there. So don’t really have a little play around and see which one you like the best but kind of curious and interesting that you kind of have to flex a little bit that’s a that’s an interesting point. Because sometimes when you’re working with third parties, they have a preference right? And then it’s like well, you insist they use your tool or do you bend and adapt to their tool so that’s, that’s an interesting but thanks for that. Nana. And Carl

I can’t wait for this

I could easily talk about these different systems till the cows come home. But I won’t know when we quit when I saw the discussion of processes there’s what it reminds me of was this book I read last probably a year ago called traction by Gino Wickman. And it’s a really good book if you’re trying to establish your business but you don’t really have any this the processes and the ways of working in place. So it starts off really high level and talks about kind of the vision and the goals, the values of the business, and then you gradually break it down from those big, big visions down into what he termed quarterly rocks. So this first quarter, each person in the organization has two or three rocks and it’s their responsibility to focus on this. And then from then a large proportion portion of the book is based around forming the ceremonies to go through all of this, and to repeatedly go through it week by week. And this is under supported by what he calls a scorecard. So every week, everybody reports than their number, and it goes into the scorecard. That’s quite good for, for tracking kind of how you’re trending or not towards your overall goal, your quarterly rocks, that, for me, that was a really good way to break down a target click will go into process go process targets. And I find that really, really interesting the attraction by Gina Whitman.

So just elaborate on that it’s a really good point. Because, you know, we, you know, a lot of people talk about having a goal. It’s a good idea. And there’s what you call outcome goals.

I couldn’t think of the word outcome. Well, I

mean, we could give a different name. But you know, the outcome goal is like a specific number on a specific date. Let’s say, that would be an example, in one year, I want to have X 1000 pounds of income, whatever, something like that. That would be an outcome goal. But what I think you’re trying to outline in that with this approach from the attraction book, is that you can break that down into steps, which then become individual steps along the process, which will eventually get you to that outcome.

That’s pretty much it. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

So you have a way of working. You also mentioned the scorecard. I thought that was interesting as well because a scorecard is like tracking your progress or tracking the measurements along the way. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we simply use a spreadsheet that allows you to do pretty, pretty charts as well. So

yeah, he’s kind of gamified it a bit as well, because if everyone’s going to a number, you can kind of hit try to hit that. And so that adds accountability in there as well.

So it’s an overarching sort of view about how to organize yourself in and set up processes within your business, rather than diving into the granularity of specific tech and apps that you’re using? Which

Yeah, we’ll come back to,

I think,

with you no doubt. Yeah. Thanks, Carl.

So what about you, Dominic.

So I’ve used various tools. Over the years, I guess, the ones that have stuck, and the ones that I use now, the three main ones I think, are air table, landlord, and motion, so they’re the three that I am using. So I mean, obviously, having an IT background, kind of like a table emotion, because I can, I can build that myself, whenever I want. customize it, you know exactly how I want the landlord kinda like as well. Although there is some overlap between, I think landlord and some of the others. So air table, I use to, I guess, tracking my, my portfolio there attract the kind of income and everyone metrics for that. So I find it quite good for that notion I use or for managing my portfolio. So again, a notion I really like it, kind of like a notetaking application that you can customize and build out pretty much however you want and add lots to it. So I have like Canva and boards in there for my tasks that kind of have that property filter, however, I want to see what it’s doing what’s in progress, all that kind of stuff. Really, really customizable. So did like that. And then yeah, I also had like dates in motion as well. So I use that I know Jeff was mentioning about having a calendar. So I did I did use my phone calendar for tracking lots of stuff. But obviously, I found that just kind of gets very bogged down then so now I use the notion to track all the dates as well. So you can put things in there set reminders up off of those dates, so it’ll ping you obviously when those dates coming up to make you aware that you have tasks and connection. They’re kind of the three main tools that I use.

Great, and I think just maybe two Thanks, Tom. I think the current kind of draw some conclusions from some of that is that we’ve got I would say, personal management, you know, task and project management. And there may be property in portfolio management as some categories. I don’t know if that’s what We’ll have them. But you know, just looking at me, come on, Jeff. I’ve got all three, I’ve got the right three classic categories.

Yes, definitely. One of the things, obviously, when Carl was mentioning about goals, setting goals and being I mentioned organizing a calendar, one of the objectives of my current job is to see what’s what have I got to do in the next week, month, four months to 12 weeks usually. And the thing I’m always looking for is, what needs to be done. And what else can I do it all being being proactive about what needs to be done in my particular houses maintenance, what needs to be done, when was the last time it was painted, is a reason why I can get someone to look at the clean the gutters for three houses instead of one to reduce the costs and things like that I have all listed as tasks I need to do on a by year basis, for example, cleaning the gutters, paintings on a three year basis. And I always tried to tie those together and try and use a process list basically. And how to accomplish that list is a sorry, my case, but it can be any means. And always have an overview of all those tasks which are not essential, not essential to be done because the tenants gain, I’ve got a leaky tap or my toilets broken or things like that. But all those things that when something does happen, for example, a boiler breaks, I can go to the diplomat to say right, can you fix the boiler while you’re there? Actually, there’s Can you look at this, for example, I made a stopcock which broke in one house which needed fixing. So I didn’t call it a phone route. At that point, it’s but I knew a plumber would be in that property within the next three months because they needed to do some work on the boiler to service it. So I incorporate all those things, all those things into a particular task. But that property.

So as well organized, I think I was thinking through, you know, some of these technologies or systems, we can give fancy names to and use fancy technology. But I think hard, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got date-related stuff, which can be in a calendar, or paper diary. You’ve got tasks to dues, which could literally be a to-do list. You know, you could be a journal, it could be an app that you put things in. And then you’ve got, you know, talked about property management systems, that can be finite, as gives me like a lever arch file or, you know, something like that could be paper-based files. It could be a system, I think landlord was probably the only one we’ve mentioned so far in terms of property management system would correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s just interesting how we can sort of maybe overcomplicating it by talking about some of the technologies and some of the personal preferences. But at heart, it boils down to some dates and to-do’s and then how we collect stuff together in one place and file it and then have some sort of reminder system. So maybe some people are thinking about this listening and thinking, Well, I’m I’m a first time landlord, I’m not even a landlord. Actually, this is all a bit overwhelming. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be and guess what, what are people’s views, then people just dive in and try and get like, world-class technology processes, checklists galore? Or is there a different way that maybe you could start and then evolve? What do people think about that?

And it’s definitely an argument, to keep it simple from now. And you can easily get caught up with technology in different systems. And I think you always need to do like a cost-benefit analysis. Both the financial costs and time costs. I think sometimes people overlook the simplicity of a spreadsheet, this kind of putting stuff into a spreadsheet and kind of getting carried away with these fancy CRM systems, which I love using, but sometimes you need to just step back and think, how, what are you trying to achieve? You’re trying to build a fancy system that doesn’t listen does that or you’re actually trying to do business?

what’s the objective there?

And sometimes, I feel like this is probably might have felt like it. It’s the tail wagging the dog. So you end up being driven by this system. So what’s the next Podio tasks I need to look at? What’s the next email? Okay, email is a very simple, simple system, but sometimes it drives us. Okay, we’ll get a refresh my inbox again to see if I need to do anything.

I think

the fixes both I think yeah, it’s important I think just to start going to start the perfect system to begin with as long as you think about a system because if you plan to grow and manage a portfolio you will need a system but it can be just discretion as Carl mentioned to begin with or just a folder on your desktop with important documents whatever but yeah, just think about having a system in place and as you grow this you can build on that system and find what works for you. I think as we’ve all talked here, we’ve all got different kinds of systems we use similar ideas process at the end of the day. the system itself maybe is not as important as just having a process to manage and track it.

But you know, what’s your view?

I totally agree on cuz, like I mentioned, we have teams we have Podio Yeah, all of them I mentioned before and to be honest, I like it when we just go into Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft Teams, because they just put everything in a team and then we can just go in there but then obviously we need to go outside some different programs and that’s where it gets a bit of blurry sometimes. So it would be nice if we were just one but the downside of only a spreadsheet is that you don’t get any notifications. Otherwise, that will be like the best but who knows that may come soon. Well

I’m wondering if anyone’s going to tell me the solution to having notifications off the back end of a spreadsheet

spreadsheet and raising it presently if it finds a date

for Say that again cuz I’ve talked over you What can you do,

you could probably get some sort of tool to scan the spreadsheet raise a message if it finds a date but then that’s really complicated solution

you might as well just go and get an off-the-shelf does the same thing right? Because there’s the remake there’s a couple of good points you just made that I think all of you is like you know start with something simple don’t over-engineer from the beginning. But I think equally you have the end in mind. So if you bind to grow and scale What can your system grow and scale or if you’ve got to do some sort of migration, you know, some point to use the fancy word switch from one system to another, and then you’ve got to load it up. I think another thing that really came out is about the fact that you were saying that you’re using wireless technology and I don’t know what it’s like for you guys but my phone is like blowing up half the time you know 24 seven, so you know where do you what’s driving What does tails wagging? Dogs was mentioned you know, sometimes it’s hard to switch off and maybe that’s not so good for our mental health so I’ll maybe just touch on that see if anybody else to pick up on that point.

And I think the other thing is there’s a case of but there isn’t an insurance system No one said, by the way, there is one system that does everything we need no one said that you have a and I don’t know if there is so inevitably we end up layering systems or putting them you know, along with next to one another even if they’re not actually interlinked to one another. So we end up with this complex system. But it’s the one system there’s only really got a one-system solution, definitely some research over the last few days instantly with a little bit of googling around I found 14 property management tools found 11 accountancy systems which plug into those tools are found eight inventory tools, five maintenance tools then 27 other tools which I find useful in my day to day and which would integrate into those things so definitely not there’s too much choice there’s not only an industry-leading body at the moment then maybe that’s a

good thing is that all of these systems integrate so easily and so well these days. And product would be pretty unwell, pretty poorly received, and integrated into other systems. But the problem then that arises I suppose the good thing is that it allows the system to become the best it can be. In particular in a small area, rather than trying to be everything to all men, but then yes, you can start to integrate things and it does it is easy to integrate. But for me, that cost just adds up. Because you add you’ve got your your CRM, you’ve got your, your cloud system and you click on but that’s that’s one of the areas where I think they get you. Okay you pay $10 a month on this one system, but then you’ve got multiply that by five or six with Debbie Downer on tonight, I don’t know why

could we chase a car instead? steady?

No. Systems bashings?

Well, and what about just this? We kind of touched about there’s no one system. But what about multiple system? Do people link systems together? And if so, how do they do it? How do you guys do it?

alone. So, uh, so I really I know that you reached you have just dropped box. But we have the OneDrive. And then we have Google Drive that we started with. So we need to, like move everything from Google Drive to OneDrive, you know, and then at the same time we are in, we’re using Apple, and they have their system that they wanted to use while we still using OneDrive. So yeah, it’s it’s, it seems like we’re forced to use several. But as long as he know where stuff is, you should be alright.

Yeah, I love the data storage people I am now and again, I’ll get, I’ll get an email or an alert on my phone saying you need more storage, you know, can we charge you more money? And you know, and then when I think about it, I’m thinking, well, I’ve got like four devices, of course, I need more storage of duplicated everything across every single device, and it’s saved in the cloud. So you know, of course, I’m going to need terabytes worth of data storage. But actually, I don’t do I because I don’t necessarily need everything saved on every device and duplicated across devices. So there’s many signals that Debbie downers point about, you know, having multiple

subscriptions.

Yeah. The only thing that I can say is that it’s good in a way that you have several cars, because look at one dry when they got hacked, people lost their pictures and everything, you know, so maybe, and I mean, look at Facebook now. Or when was it? 123 days ago, everything was down Facebook Messenger WhatsApp. And I was like, wow, I cannot contact anyone. Right now, if I don’t like to call them but let’s say if you just have their Facebook or something. So it’s so important to like, have everything like email there, like ever. So you can get hold of them.

I think people will keep on sending. The world keeps on turning even though you can contact people 10 o’clock at night?

Yeah, I know. But if they live like Richard, it’s not 10 o’clock in the night. It’s It’s in the morning, right?

I didn’t know what to do with myself. Because you know, I don’t it’s not necessarily Facebook or Instagram, but WhatsApp. I mean, I live on WhatsApp. So when WhatsApp was down, I was like, Oh, yeah, there are alternatives, of course. But it was like, I just, I was addicted to WhatsApp. I was like, what’s the one we’re gonna do for the next six hours or whatever it was down. The harsh you have to call somebody on a telephone.

Nice. You think how it used to work?

Yeah. The other thing that comes I think that isn’t that called resiliency, the IT guys resiliency having some sort of backup.

Yeah. Is that what it is? replication resilience.

You can really leverage all the platforms. So yes to turbo, you have lots of data, but think about what data you actually need. So with properties, you need to back up the spreadsheets you need to there are a few things you need your your certificates online. So why don’t you copy them to each platform and leverage them because a lot of them are free to start with? So you can have many different backups of the same data on different platforms. So Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. Do you have any preferences? Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I don’t. As simple as I Hands up, I work for Microsoft. So yeah, but I leverage Google, I leverage Dropbox, I leverage Microsoft. I’m here to use technology. I’m a person who wants to get things for free. And I love every nice bit of free software. And all these companies do offer you something free, eventually, at the end of the day you end up paying because I copy everything to all those platforms and photographs, videos, etc. Yeah, it’s one of those things where utilize what’s there. Obviously, there can be too much, but just stop and think about what you need. Like, for example, Whatsapp is down for several hours will will happen, what would happen if you lost all your contacts, and they were, you couldn’t retrieve them? Have a think about that. And then make your backups,

Good idea. So have it saved in different clouds systems so that you’ve got, you know, if one goes down, you still got another one. have a backup from your device, you know, your laptop or whatever your phone so that if you lose it or breaks, then you’ve got you can retrieve your data. So that’s these are all good sort of practices, aren’t they? And actually, I want to go back to the whole I’m going to call it a tech wars thing, or app was that kind of brought you in Jeff because I thought you might have a sort of leaning you kind of copped out a bit by saying I use all of them. But we’re going to I’m going to put you down as a Microsoft man. Now but so what about everybody else? Are you Microsoft, Google apple? Come on, what are you What? What’s your tech of choice?

For myself example? So yeah, fully, fully embedded in Apple, Windows. And I do use Google, Google Sheets and Google Docs or the online tools, I use those. But otherwise, yeah, for my laptop and my phone, apple, and I have iCloud as well. So it’s very, very good. handy. I can just put a label on my iCloud. Obviously access from all my devices, my local copy of my laptop as well. So when you talk about if iCloud goes down in the cloud, won’t matter, because I’ve got a copy on my desktop.

So we’ve got we’ve got a vote for Microsoft, we’ve got a vote for Apple predominantly. And I know everybody uses everything, but we’re just putting scores on the doors here with the tech wars. And Carl, you piped up with something I didn’t quite hear though.

Well, Windows, Microsoft, Android. I’m no big fan of apple. I tried it before, but it’s to

to bought into it.

Rising here you can see the passions don’t.

I thought you were okay. Carl must have shown.

Nana Come on, well, you need to get your vote. what’s the platform of choice who’s going to entertain tech wars view? So

the platform of choice is actually Google. But my fiancee doesn’t like Google. So that’s why we have one bride. So yeah, she falls Microsoft. I think that’s because that’s what they work with utter danger. While I like Google, Gmail, everything Google. But I do understand that when it comes to the Google calculate calculating or spreadsheet that it’s quite different comparing to Microsoft Excel. But besides that, I think Google is much better. I like Google. That’s why I have a Google

got a couple of split votes. We got a couple of Microsoft, we’ve got a Google we’ve got an apple. Actually, we’ll if we encounter Emily as well, we got another Microsoft. Sorry about this done. But I’m also predominantly Microsoft. We’re not exclusively on my phones or Apple. But funny enough, it starts to create issues because I like the Apple phone. I love the Apple phone, the iPhone. But I don’t really like the Apple computers. But then I start to get you know, do they kind of work seamlessly together that not that I also like to believe you could you can have a lot of personal productivity on either Apple or Google, for example. And they both work quite well. But if you start to mix those different platforms that don’t work so well do they? Perhaps not.

That’s what I like about Apple is that you have to buy into their whole ecosystem or not to that if you try and make them then it doesn’t really work. I don’t know maybe people out there management

pro and con I would say it’s great obviously if you’ve got all Apple devices and everything can just work seamlessly handoff between each other and like I said, put stuff in iCloud or somewhere else, whatever. But if you have different devices, different providers, Microsoft phone, and an Apple MacBook then obviously it’s hard to get them to integrate.

Yeah, I mean Where Emily just got a new phone last. I know, this is a bit off-topic, but she got a Samsung phone. And it came with the new Chromebook. So it’s Google’s own device. And it was like being on an Android phone, but yet not signed. It’s like, Mac mac book with Apple. It’s all integrated. So very good. But then downside is that there’s hardly no progress on the desktop. So it’s a bit like, what should I do with it?

I think just bring forward, I mean, I made a bit lighter about tech wars and platforms, stuff like that. But I think you know, you probably need to pick a side, in the most part, and pick a side that suits you. I mean, Dom’s sat there with his eyes, his air pods in as he’s talking to us, so we can’t know what side he’s off. But if Apple works for you, then you can work with it, go for it. If you’re a Microsoft man, or lady, or you’re a Google person, you know, you can make any of them work. So I wanted to put that up there as the big platforms. But then contrast that with smaller technologies, like, you know, startups or smaller companies, what do you have you got any good examples of sort of the smaller companies have some good stuff they’re doing? Is the first question. And then the follow-up question is, what do you think about those smaller apps or technologies versus those big platforms? You know, what are your considerations when you’re thinking about using those smaller, you know, startups or not-so-established technologies.

Generally, the smaller companies are looking at the niche products, where the tech giants are being industry business, they’re looking for the million-dollar contracts, which are supportability, enabling technology company and enabling projects to be delivered. And all of those big things were, especially in property, you’re looking that these companies are starting up, and they’re looking at those little nice things like managing your portfolio, it’s not a huge task, we can do it in Excel, you can do it in Google Sheets, or wherever you want. But they just put that gloss on it. And they now have their cloud applications, whichever linking as you’re in AWS, and they’re storing your data in the cloud, which is something you’ve got to consider, and they give you such usability for most of the time for a free trial of the basic functionality is free. And then the fish will continue and get all the cash out by subscribing you to something.

So for me, I think like the small ones. Sabbir I think is really, really good. I don’t know how big door but they seem quite small compared to the other companies that were mentioned. And that’s a way to connect all of your other apps, our programs and make it very smooth. So I I really think they’re good, but they will basically be get snapped up of one of the big trees, I think is just a matter of time.

Yeah, I think I guess, touch on that depends on where you draw the line. When I was a big company, I guess when Google’s your Microsoft Graph was Yeah, that was massive. But then, as Nana mentioned about Zapier said, I use that table and notion of illusionists for a few years now. I guess they weren’t massive when I started using them. But I mean, I think there’s still quite big and quite well. Maybe not well known as such outsider kind of industry, but they are well used. I think even some big companies use them. I guess one concern touching back on a point you mentioned before about these smaller companies is how long they’re going to be around for too heavily embedded in like a pilot in notion if that goes undergoes bust or even if it’s bought out for somebody else and they decide to try to change the platform and monetize it further. And that’s obviously a risk. You have to bear in mind and maybe not worry about it as such but in the back of your mind, you might need to get the data at our port or somewhere else.

We are fine Some of these smaller companies, you get a better, better service from them. Find normally that you need to look at kind of how active a company is, but normally find they’re a bit more nimble and bit more responsive to raising, resolving issues or introducing new features, to see companies like polio, for example, there are ways of modifying or proxy data as a website where they’re always adding more stuff. And it’s quite kind of clear to see where the companies that invest in kind of building the building their service versus those who just kind of come up with an idea and then just let it fester for a few years. I kind of got the maybe it’s a bit harsh, I kind of got the impression with Arthur online that that doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere for a long time that looked at previous data.

Was this big enough for some tech men so you know, what, uh, one of the good techs out there, which are very useful, probably good value and, you know, making progress to take your lead their car. So what are people’s favorite technologies using that current criterion?

I think I’ve already mentioned mine, notion on-air table.

So coming from a techie background, I’ve been able to customize those and just build what I want. So have my systems exactly how I want them to be if people, if that’s kind of people’s preference, then obviously, you can use those to build your tools. But if you want something already made and enough to go with, like a prebuilt management tool like landlord insurance, I was just gonna

say landlord is probably one of the examples that Carl was talking about that they are I think I’ve noticed from a distance, at least I don’t use them directly, but I’ve noticed they invest quite a lot. And they’re great. Yes,

yes, they do. And you can track a lot with them, you can, this kind of thing, probably on the only things it doesn’t track now is about your accounting. I think you can put in your, like your monthly rental expenses, all that kind of stuff. I don’t actually use it. I think it’s a bit cumbersome. And I do have an accounting package as well to track everything. But I think you can track your property accounting, income and expenses. So not additional business expenses, but you know, property-related expenses.

So what else who else is thinking who’s going to pick up the technology then?

Well, I use landlord as well. It’s something that I’ve been using, it’s really good for tracking rents. Just giving you an overview of your profit how your profit is performing. We talked about reviewing our portfolio as a key points Well, I don’t need to anymore, I’ve got all my key, I get a weekly email measuring exactly how my portfolio is doing every week. It’s great. it automates that. And I don’t have to think about it. Yes, it lacks on the accountancy side, it does do banking. So you do get notifications when payments do commend, which is great. But it doesn’t link to an accountancy software or Excel or anything like that, which then can give to your accountant. So it’s not great with that, but everything else it’s coming on leaps and bounds and I’ve had really good experience with them with them where I’ve seen something which is not correct or hasn’t function properly. Startup the chat with them. They look at an issue and then the following day, the issue is fixed. So it’s great that landlords great often mentioned the sauna that links very well to Google via my Zapier, I use that a lot, and then the good old Excel then the key pieces of software I use and that manages my entire portfolio may not be good enough in the future. But at the moment, I’ve got a fair few properties and it’s doing really well. So if

you haven’t already, I was gonna say you haven’t fully managed as well do as well as using landlord isn’t

essential. I didn’t know I time manage them complete. Okay. So yeah. And buyer Asana as well. So I have Asana tasks, which I brought through that works very well.

Let’s just quickly touch on a point that you mentioned jack about firing off query to landlord support to second that I had a question for them or an issue a few months ago now. Send them a chat message and respond to almost instant payments, then fix that. quickly so that also touches on thinking you said Richard about larger this smaller companies that I guess approve them or smaller companies were perhaps a bit more responsive and quicker customer service or you try and message Facebook never get response try and message Facebook that was running cool I don’t have Carlo nano want to big up any tech now alright so I’m kind of thinking about drawing a conclusion and so maybe two things to think about make it a bit techie because that’s the topic so tech you love to hate then just be as random as you want with that tech you love to hate just quickly I hate this really bugs me and then he’s a tech you love to hate and then the second question would be texting Chris could not live without and you can’t not allowed to mention something you’ve already mentioned. Okay, so I don’t know if anyone’s ready to go with that. That core I could leave with it if you want a couple of more seconds to think about it

well I can’t live without and that’s my iPad

your Apple iPod Is that right? Yeah,

Apple iPad.

Okay, don’t you can’t live without your Apple iPad. Anything you’d love to hate in technology?

I think Let me think about it. Yeah.

So let’s stick with them can’t live without them for now. He’s got to can’t live without

can’t live without teams. I generally love teams that’s one of the applications there community a lot with your forcement to use zoom at the moment which is disaster but yeah. To change laptops and everything, but yeah, it’s it’s something that as none As stated before, it’s something that combines everything and puts everything together.

I think technically both of you have just mentioned stuff you mentioned before By the way, but that’s okay. Because it’s Apple based and Microsoft based but that’s okay.

Like I mentioned teams tonight that’s the first time I mentioned teams who makes teams karumba

Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.

Yeah, I’m not I’m not a massive hater of Apple but anyway can’t live without spreadsheets i think i think saying on the light data analysis he couldn’t do the analysis that I do without especially pen and paper maybe but it’s Yeah, current good.

I’m gonna be very I can’t live without Microsoft

Office. 365 you’ve just

lost a friend and Dominic. Okay, and one I can’t live with this live without one can’t live without right. So one for me Can’t live without his LastPass Password Manager. I don’t know how many passwords I’ve got on there but I couldn’t possibly possibly remember them all. Especially all the complex things you need to do these days with passwords so that’s my cart live without and then take you love to hate or I’ve gone

Lotus Notes if you use the internet exist Yes, Lotus Notes still exists. I didn’t know some businesses use it now.

day job referenced by any chance.

Now another minute. Previous jobs. Yes. I’d

love to Hey,

the biggest gripe for me is not a particular tech but when apps have just really poor design. It’s just really frustrating. There are so many great apps out there. Just learn from others just learn from others.

Get your design right.

Carlin notifications on my phone in general apps.

I’m just gonna send you a message now. I know stations on the phone and love to hate

and there’s so many I don’t want to stock but mainly am sorry Dom Apple products.

If I’m not having again,

I love I love my Mac but like the integrate is really bad. Like Carl says.

You might want to get the book How to Win Friends and Influence People

now by the way. I read that they read

it. You need to read it again. But You can get it on your mobile device so there you go. Alright so thanks guys it was a bit of fun towards the end there. What I love to hate is one time passwords they go just hate one time passwords just drives me bonkers and also by the way, just slightly off topic but why do some banks and credit card companies put blocks on nearly every transaction when that you can’t actually pay for something when you need to pay for something because they’re trying to protect you? Oh, it’s because they’re trying to protect you okay. But yeah, that just that winds me up because just want convenience right? And I suppose as somebody cleans my bank accounts out, I’ll probably complaint and

maybe it’s what you spend the money on.

Maybe I should rethink them. All those sort of dodgy websites Alright guys, well, thanks for joining the funnel and try and make it a little bit light in a topic that could be sometimes they’re dry. And if it’s only got two final thoughts, but otherwise, I’ll probably do my wrap-up. So I guess Thanks. Thanks to our panelists, Jeff, Nana, Dominic, and Carl you move position on my screen somehow. But there you go. Really appreciate you joining us today got a lot of good insights from from the conversation. The show notes will be over the website, the property voice.net if you’d like to talk to me, right even in one of the panelists about anything we’ve covered today, you can reach me podcast as property voice dotnet. Invariably, we try and tag the panelists in the social media shares, you might have noticed. And so if you want to reach out to any of the panelists at all, you can probably find them on our various social media shares. And I guess all that remains to say is thanks once again for listening, this time on the proxy boys podcast. And until next time.

Thank you for listening today. Now head over to thepropertyvoice.net. For more inspirational content, and get updates through our mailing list. Join us next time on the property voice podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate us on iTunes.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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