Bloody cold today. Luckily I’m not working again today but got woken by my wife who got stuck trying to get to work because the trams weren’t working properly. It was too cold for the overhead lines so ended up having to go collect her to drop her off at an underground station. What is is about public transport in this country, it never quite seems to be the right conditions for it to work properly.
Was supposed to go back to Wyevale Garden Centre today but couldn’t get motivated after yesterday. So spent the day catching up on some paperwork and listening to Rob Moore teach internet marketing traffic generation as part of Daniel Wagners Lead generation system that I haven’t got round to watching yet. I also intend to go through my capital property listing to see if there are any suitable properties to put an offer on.
Had to pay a bill for a plumber to fix my boiler for my tenant in Leeds which I am pleased to say was less than expected, probably due to Paul Galbraith having recommended him to me. (Thanks Paul, if by chance you read this)
Had the day off. Spent the afternoon at Wyvale Garden Centre in Crawley promoting Utility Warehouse with their Win a Mini competition but it was fairly quiet and I didn’t really get anywhere. Handed out a few business cards so you never know something may eventually come from it. Had a long conversation with a retired couple, the husband used to high jump for England and had come from Camberley area which was interesting since I was brought up in Camberley and used to run for them as a teenager.
Met up with my mastermind group in the evening which was good, had a new guy Chris join us who was generating property leads from his website which is excellent. Got me thinking I really need to get my websites and PPC working for me.
I got offered a fre ticket to this event Become a Key Person of Influence on 30 October 2010 which might be of interst to others. You might have heard of this man. His name is Jay Conrad Levinson and that book, which he published in 1984, was called Guerilla Marketing and has since been named one of the 100 best business books ever written, with over 21 million copies of his “Guerrilla Marketing” series sold. And Jay’s guerilla concepts have influenced marketing so much that his books now appear in 62 languages and are required reading in MBA programs worldwide.
http://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/events?access=kpi-event
Time is flying by and what have I got to show for it? Very busy last week but didn’t really achieve anything useful, certainly not something that is going to help pay the bills. Relying to much on others, and being let down. I need to become much more focussed, find my own leads and deals and come up with my own customer base of investors.
Went to an intersting talk by Bradley Sugars last night called Business is booming. He runs action coach a coaching set up for businesses.
The talk revolved around 28 strategies why business was booming. He spoke about how to find customers, and keep them. Making sure you under promise and over deliver.
Thinking about who your target audience are and where to find them in their highest concentration.
What and why they want to buy, putting emotion into it.
And finally, how to communicate that message to them.
He spoke about running a dog food company and giving a weeks worth of pet food for free for every referral. Also, replacing a dog for free if a customers died, but with a big dog, that ate loads.
Having a designer label shop, whose customers used a particular hairdresses on a regular basis and doing a JV with them. He wrote a letter to all their customers saying thank you for having their haircut there and offering them a free designer shawl which they could collect from his boutique down the road, but they’d have to come in and chose it because they weren’t sure what colour they would like. It finished by inviting them back in for a haircut.
The importance of celebration.
Dream x Goal x Plan x Action – What’s the worst that can happen.
Write down a bucketlist of 101 things you want to do, achieve, have, see etc before you die.
Write down and set any that are under 5 years up as goals.
Know your breakeven.
Write down what you are going to do tomorrow the night before.
A business should be a commercially successful enterprise that would work without me. At the end of the day you want to be able to walk away and still get paid, passive income.
Find and surround yourself with great people.
Most importantly for me he said focus on the following things:
Generating leads
Conversions
Transactions
Average Sales
Margins
But be aware of the cash gap, the time gap between expenditure doing the above and income which would massively impact on cashflow.
Ideally, you need 7 – 10 lead generating strategies.
One of the most important lessons of the day was to keep moving forward, and working at things bit by bit, day by day. It takes time and effort to succeed but through regular, small, consistant steps there is nothing to stop you succeeding.
Also, remember that you must really believe in your product and service and be happy to tell everyone about it, because customers are going to buy off someone so why allow them to buy inferior products from a competitor.
Brain frazzled, long week and still nothing to show for it.
Spent morning sending emails, writing property blogs, twitter, facebook and forum entries but no real progress with regards finding investors.
Received a couple of messages from estate agents but haven’t managed to get back to them yet.
What a day! Bloody stressful, and nothing to show for it. I can’t believe it I get handed 200 plus repossessed properties that I can get hold of for 25-30% below market value and I can’t generate even a nibble from a single investor – am I wasting my time here or what?!
I also couldn’t get hold of my mentors to try and get some help / guidance on how to go about it which was doubly frustrating bordering on bloody annoying. Certainly makes me wonder whether I have just kissed £7,000 goodbye.
Having found out late alst night that someone has made an offer on the whole lot and that I might still get to see a little action on a few I desparately need to keep going. As they say baby steps, a little positive action on a daily basis will eventually drive you forward and propel you to where you want to go, well assuming you are aiming in the right direction. We’ll see, but the sooner the better.
Not much interest in the repossesions and struggling to get any advice from anyone on how to proceed anyway. Not sure I am going to see anything from this property deal. I have posted it onto both TMA and Progressive property forums but don’t appear to havve got muchn response.
I have also posted it on twitter and facebook, again without interest.
Having said that Bobby did call to inform me that someone had offered £27.5m for the whole portfolio which they might split and give us a slice of to sell on – we’ll see.
Tried to get hold of Manan from ready made deals both by email and phone call but to no avail. Had a long chat to Brendan and Deep from my TMA mentoring group and a couple of other people.
Called Dan at Progressive who more or less immediately called back and gave me some brief but free advice.
Also spoke to Tony from Glen Armstrong’s office who was very interested and put me in touch with one of his guys who I hope to speak to in the morning.
Day off so spent the day trying to implement some of the stuff I learn at the weekend from my property mentoring event.
Got slightly sidetracked as usual due to the receipt of various properties from Bobby with good discounts that I hoped I could sell on and make some money from. Posted the details out to various email contacts, progressive and tycoons forums and my facebook profile.
Received another one later in the day which was a small portfolio of properties and again looks good on paper, but all of them need a fair cash injection to purchase them with our finders fee and stamp duty, as well as some capital since they are only about 18% below market value.
At about 6.30pm I received a spreadsheet from Bobby with over 250 repossession properties in and around London and South of Birmingham. All of which we can potentially get for 25 – 30% below RICs valuations, but no idea how to go about selling them on. I have emailed Manan from TMA ready made deals for advice.
Got up and went off to instruct a fitness session in Hyde Park.
Decided to pop over to a government auction afterwards hoping to find a bargain, but there were none to be had. They had some great stock but whilst I was there is was all selling for silly prices (or atleast not bargain prices) unless I had a few thousand pounds lying around to buy some very expensive jewellery that was going quite cheap compared to its valuation.
Left there after an hour or so and decided to drop in on the TMA property graduates that were having their get together which Deep had kindly invited us to the day before. Arrived just as they were finishing lunch so managed to eat some carrot cake. Caught up with one or two of them and listened to Richard Shepherd about one or two lease option deals he had done which was quite interesting.
Had to leave early to pick wife up who had been helping her new employer with their pink aerobic event in Hyde park but was now cold and wet which was bit disappointing because I didn’t really catch up with anyone properly and the session was still going.
More anmnoyingly we got caught up in the Chelsea football traffic and it took us over 2 hours to drive less than 10 miles home – grrrrr.
Up early to write update my blogs before rushing off to my second property mentoring day with the TMA members and Parmdeep Vadesha and Hanif Khan.
This time we were all told to take our laptops so that we could look on the internet, carryout some research and hopefully find the odd deal. They rushed us through what sites to look at and what to look for, which I struggled to keep up with. I’m not particularly computer literate and they didn’t really give us a chance to get on the net and download various or log into various programmes before moving on.
Most were a little quicker than me and managed to get going and actually found one or two deals and made some offers over the phone. I ended up just calling some estate agents cold to see if they had any vendors looking for a quick sale due to facing repossession, divorce or a death in the family but didn’t get offered anything.
My table won a prize for making the most calls, and offers but it didn’t really help me understand how to go about it.
We finished the afternoon talking about the market in general, some of the property deals that some of the others had done or were in the process of doing one was looking to buy a small portfolio which was quite exciting.
The day flew past, but I’m not sure how much benefit it was?! I stayed on to network a little but the majority of people seemed to disappear quite quickly which was disappointing.
I managed to speak to Bobby and he informed me he had earnt £7000 last month from his new employer and was looking to set up his own office to sell his leads driect to the public. He also had a lead from Tyrone, a 5 bedroom house in Clapham worth £560k but on offer for £450k rented out at £3,000 per month which is a verey nice cashflow. However, having touched on HMO’s earlier that day it flags up a few issues. Has it been registered as an HMO? Is it up to the safety standards required; fire alarm, fire doors etc? How has it been valued? What tenancy agreements are in place? What does Tyrone want for it?