Episode Summary
Listen on iTunes
Listen on Spotify
Watch on YouTube
Usually when we embark on something new, we want to be able to see and understand the entire path ahead of us, before we even get started. But entrepreneurship doesn’t always work that way! In this episode, Jeff discusses how we must BELIEVE that the path will appear as we move forward in our real estate endeavors. From the big picture questions like “how will I achieve success as a real estate entrepreneur?” to the deal-by-deal questions of “how will this transaction come together?” we must embrace an attitude of belief that we will figure out the next steps on the journey only by moving forward along that path.
Episode Transcript
You know, anything we are trying to do in life, it’s a lot easier and more comfortable if we can see the entire path laid out in front of us. And we know that we just have to follow that path. But life isn’t always like that. And entrepreneurship definitely is not like that. And even real estate deals on a cart one at a time, aren’t really like that either. So in today’s episode, I want to talk to you about this idea that I’ve had to learn myself, which is that we don’t have to see the whole path laid out in front of us before we get started. And so let’s cue up the theme song, we’re gonna jump right into it. Welcome to racking up rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections, can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans, nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs are just looking for, quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people oriented deal makers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out Win Win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from a thoughtful real estate entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media. This show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio. Hey, thanks for joining me for another episode of racking up rentals. Show Notes for this episode can be found at thoughtful our e.com slash e 117. Please do us a big favor. By hitting that subscribe button and your podcast app, it really helps to tell the platforms that people are listening. And that means that they spread the message to other thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs who are looking for show just like this. Thank you for doing that. Onward with today’s episode. So let’s just do a quick exercise. Just go with me on this now, I want you to close your eyes. Okay, On second thought, if you’re like me, you probably listen to podcasts while you’re driving. So maybe not literally Close your eyes. But visualize, visualize this, I want you to visualize a staircase, the staircase in front of you and you are standing at the bottom of that staircase. And you can see the top. And so the bottom of the staircase where you are right now represents where you are in your business or in your life or in a deal right now. And the top of the staircase represents where you want to go. As you’re visualizing the staircase, I bet you can see the whole staircase, right? I mean, that’s what your mind is showing you because that’s what your mind wants to see. It wants to see the whole staircase. And if you look at the staircase, you’d say, Yeah, I feel comfortable taking the steps climbing this staircase, I can see it all right there. But now visualize that there’s a heavy fog in the room. And the heavy fog has obscured you know, most of the stairs, the only stairs you can see are like the one or two stairs that are right in front of you. Now, you know that the staircase is there, you know that the top is where the top is, but you can’t really see it anymore. So my question to you is, are you still willing to climb those stairs, even though you can only see one? Maybe two steps in front of you right now? And I don’t know what the answer is for you right now. But I know what the answer I want to be for you is and that is yes, I want the answer for you. And for me to be yes. Because we don’t have to be able to see the entire path ahead of us. Before we get started. Now, I think we could probably extrapolate that exact lesson into a million different aspects of life, and whatnot. But of course, we’re going to talk about real estate and I just kind of want to hit on this on two levels. I would call this a macro level and a micro level a macro level for the purpose of this conversation is thinking about your real estate investing real estate entrepreneurship journey as a whole, right? That staircase represents where you are right now, the top of the staircase represents where you want to get in real estate. And the staircase itself represents the journey to get from where you are to where you want to be. But we can also look at this on a micro level. And I would call a micro level in this case, like a particular deal. Because this concept applies on the level of a particular deal as well. So let’s just take a second to break down the macro and the micro and then I really want to focus on the what are the important takeaways that we should leave this conversation with in our minds, so that we can really install these beliefs and internalize these ideas. So let’s just talk for a minute about the macro idea. First, your overall real estate journey, right? So if you are listening to his podcast, it probably means that you want to go higher on the staircase than you are right now, I don’t think you’d be listening. If you were just totally content with exactly where you are right now you’re trying to get better you’re trying to get bigger, or whatever your metric is, that defines the top of the staircase. But you might not know exactly how that will happen. And you might have some questions or concerns about how that journey is going to happen for you. You know, you might be wondering, what cash How am I going to get more loans to buy more properties? How am I going to get more cash to put as down payments or to repair my properties or to have as reserves or whatever it might be? So that I can continue to grow? How the heck am I going to have the time to do this. And so there’s lots and lots and lots of questions that may be like the fog that is obscuring the staircase. And I would argue that it’s not only Okay, that there is fog on your staircase, I would argue that it’s good that it’s that there’s fog on your staircase. You know why? Because if there’s not fog on your staircase, I think that you have been studying and practicing and researching too long without getting started, or your staircase is too small, that maybe you’re not thinking big enough that maybe you’re not having a grand enough vision for what the top of your staircase looks like. And so if you’re thinking big, there should be fog in the way. So let’s just put a pin in that for a quick second. And let’s talk about more of the micro level that deal by deal type of level of how this idea applies. So let’s say you meet a seller. And that is now the deal that which we’re going to be trying to apply this particular type of lesson. So when you start talking to a seller, naturally, of course, you kind of want to be able to see in your mind’s eye how this deal is going to come together. And most investors, if they can’t immediately have an idea in their mind that this is going to come together, that it could come together that it’s likely to come together, they’ll just sort of give up in and walk away because they think it’s a long shot, I think it’s a low probability opportunity. So if you can’t, at the beginning of that conversation, really see in your mind how it all might come together and results in a deal that makes sense for you. And that you can get a win from and profit from in some way you might be, you know, discouraged from proceeding with it. There might be another situation is that there might be too many options in your mind, you know, you might look at this and go, Oh, my gosh, I could take this in a whole bunch of different directions, we could do this, we could do that. It’d be like standing in a hallway with 100 doors like oh, my gosh, the number of doors here is overwhelming, I have no idea which door to choose. And thus you kind of shut down just because there seems to be too many different options. Or maybe there are some seemingly complex moving parts of this potential deals potential opportunity that you’ve never dealt with before. And that that feels a little bit overwhelming or intimidating. I’m working on seller conversation right now, that involves buying a commercial building, but it also might involve buying the business that occupies the commercial building. Well, I’ve never done that before. And so there’s a lot of new things to figure out. And that in itself is a little bit weird and a little bit scary. And I think it would probably turn a lot of other people off. But I’m choosing to have an open mind about that and say, Well, I don’t have to have this all figured out right now. I can have time to figure this out throughout the conversation. Maybe it’s a big development project, maybe the perfect, highest and best opportunity to maximize the potential. And the opportunity vision that you have for this property involves development and types of construction you’ve never been involved with in permitting and land use and talking to the city or the county about conditional use permits or any number of those types of things might seem a little bit complex and overwhelming. And that could be the fog that’s drifted over your staircase when you look at that you’re like I I have no idea what the steps ahead of us look like. So we see that this idea of the staircase and whether there’s fog there or not fog there is something that is metaphor that works for both our overall journey as real estate investors and entrepreneurs and our journey within each individual deal and sell conversation and transaction that we do. So how do we put all this together and have useful takeaways that will help us in both cases, the big picture case and more of the micro case, I want to share with you what my key takeaways have been, as I’ve processed this exact concept over the last many years myself, as I continue to process this exact topic and these exact challenges in my mind, these takeaways, and what I hope will help you because think about it this way, like I said, I believe the fog covering your staircase is a good thing, because it means that you are trying new things that you can’t just, you know, be blindfolded, with one arm tied behind your back and do in your sleep, you’re challenging yourself to new things, right. So even though I have been working on this, myself for years, I’m finding myself on newer, different bigger staircases with new types of fog. So we have to keep working on these lessons. So I want to share with you a few of my takeaways, I hope will be helpful for you as well. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression before that the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. And I think that that is just very, very appropriate and relevant for us here, right? It’s not as if our staircase, we can’t see the next step, we can see the next step. We just can’t see too far beyond that. But that’s okay. Because even if you could see the staircase ahead of you, you all you can do is take the next step Anyway, you know, you can’t skip from the first step to the 30th step. Anyway, you have to take the next step anyway. So the only stair that you need to be able to see anyway, the only one you could possibly take action on even if you wanted to was the next one. So the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first with with one step means we only have to be able to see that single next step. So I think that most of what this comes down to is really belief the word that I’m staring at on my notes right now, as I record this for you is the word belief. And there’s several things next to the word belief. I think first, we have to believe that when we take a step, the next one will appear. Now that’s not like a leap of faith or just praying to the universe. But that as we take a step from where we are on to the next step, we actually understand the situation the context more we we have more information, we have more clarity, and that next step starts to appear. So even though you’re at the bottom of the stairs, now, you kind of wish you could see five stairs ahead of you. But you can only see one, maybe two, that’s okay. Because when you step on to that next step, you’ll start to be able to see the one after that now you can the fog clears for steps number two, maybe step number three, and you say Oh, okay, why didn’t see that before. But now I’m starting to see the fog clear, always one or two steps ahead of me not further, but always at least one or two steps ahead of me. So if we believe that that’s important, we have to believe that we are resourceful enough. To figure it out, when it shows up we are we have to believe that we are resourceful enough that when we step onto the second step, that we have the resourcefulness to figure out how to get to that third step. So there’s a belief that some clarity will emerge about the third step. But that also we will have the resourcefulness and the agility as entrepreneurs to figure out how to get to that next step. Thirdly, I think we need to believe in the concept of what some people would call just in time learning, just in time learning is the idea that you don’t worry about gathering up a whole library of knowledge in your mind. Because you might need to get to it sometime what you really think about is, what knowledge or information do I need next. So it’s actually far more efficient, because you’re not feeling this obligation to go gather, you know, 1000s of reference points and books and podcasts and stuff like that on any topic that you could possibly ever want related to real estate. But instead you say, Okay, here’s the next step on the staircase that I need to achieve, or I need to climb. So what information do I need now. So if you believe in just in time learning, it’s, it’s like the learning version of taking steps as well. It’s trusting that when you take a step, the next one will appear? Well, this is trusting that once you discover what the next thing is that you need to learn that you will indeed be able to learn it. Now maybe it’s more comforting to feel like you already have all of the knowledge you could possibly need in the future already in your brain or in your library in your podcast directory or whatever it might be. But that’s not really realistic. And the truth, of course, is that you could read a book on a certain topic of real estate and sort of technically have that in your repertoire of things. However, those are concepts. And it’s very theoretical and academic until you’re actually in the middle of a real transaction when you’re trying to apply it. So you’re gonna have to go back and revisit it anyway. So believing in the idea of just in time learning, and just getting comfortable with the fact that you will learn what you need to learn when you need to learn it, and that it’s okay that you don’t learn it all in advance. And lastly, I think the fourth thing that we need to believe is that we need, we need to believe that more perspective and more clarity emerges as we take more steps. You know, if you’re in the middle of a seller conversation, and the very first step, you are just struggling to see where this is going. By the second meeting, maybe with the seller, though, that idea is probably starting to at least, roughly and loosely take shape. In your mind, you’ve gathered some more information from the seller a couple more insights, you say, oh, okay, well, it’s still real, you know, vague in my mind. But it’s starting to come together a little bit now. Because I’ve learned a little bit more, you know, when I met the seller at the property for the second meeting, and we walked around, and we were in the basement, and I looked up at the ceiling height, I was like, Oh, my gosh, we could totally finish this basement. Now you just start to have an inkling of an idea. And then the next step after that, you start to realize, well, geez, maybe that basement we finished could be a separate unit. Let me go back and start playing with my spreadsheet a little bit and see what things look like if there’s a second unit, and the picture starts to become slowly, more clear, right? So as you take every step, just every single individual step on that staircase, because that’s as far ahead, as you can see, is that not only does the next step, get clear, but your perspective about what you’re doing starts to get sharper and sharper and sharper, as well. So listen, as we wrap this up, I want to make sure you know, I’m not saying go out and buy properties, and then figure it out later. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I think that that’s a fairly reckless overall. But what I’m saying is, see every conversation that you have with a seller, as a journey in and of itself as a staircase, in and of itself. I mean, most people in sort of the normal real estate investing world, they see it as like a two step staircase, you know, they’re at the bottom. And the first, the first step is like, well figure out what the possibility is figure out what you could pay and make an offer. And they say yes, or they say no, or they counter and I have to decide if I could live with their counter. And, you know, if they say yes, we move forward, it’s like they have to figure out everything before they can even know what to make as an offer. And then once the offer is accepted. That’s it like that’s the whole staircase. But in this case, see, see your conversation with the seller as a multi step staircase. And just because you’re at the beginning of the conversation or the bottom of the staircase, and just because you can’t see the full staircase in front of you trust that as you proceed in that conversation with the seller, your vision will start to slowly develop. And by the time you get to the top of the staircase, which we could say would be closing on this project, then you will definitely have absolute clarity but just don’t feel like you have to have it all 100% perfectly figured out at the start. Because if that is your standard, if that is your requirement for yourself, that you have to have it all perfectly figured out the beginning, you’re not going to get a lot of deals done you’re going to throw away a lot of opportunities because you just didn’t have that clarity at the beginning. You know if you look at every staircase, it’s a little bit foggy and said nope, forget it. I’m moving on to the next staircase, you’re going to be moving on a lot. And instead of climbing a lot of staircases just trust that a deal is a progression of steps from where you are to where you want to be and that the clarity will emerge. The steps will clear the fog as you take those steps if you choose to believe that that that is true Believe in your own resourcefulness believe in the idea of just in time learning etc. So I hope that this has been helpful for you that is it for today’s episode of racking up rental so again Show Notes for this episode can be found at www dot thoughtfull our e.com slash e 117. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button in the podcast app and even better would be rating and reviewing the show that to tell As the platforms that, you know you’re paying attention, you like what you’re hearing and it makes them want to spread the message even more. Did you know that we have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs as well. It’s called a rental portfolio wealth builders. We would love to have you in there. So just look that up on Facebook or just type group thoughtful ar e.com into your browser and it will take you right there. If you liked this episode, and I sure hope you did, please take a screenshot of it. post that to Instagram and tag us We are at thoughtful real estate. Okay, I’ll see in the next episode. Until then, this is Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to racking up rentals where we build long term wealth by being a win win deal makers. Remember, solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
Leave a Reply