Simple, Not Easy
One of my earliest mentors was Dave Bradley – a stocky accountant-turned-property-investor with a brilliant mind for numbers, and a short temper for time-wasters.
Dave and his business partner built a MASSIVE portfolio of properties in a very short period of time. In fact, his business partner Steve McKnight wrote a book on the topic, titled From 0 to 130 Properties in 3.5 Years.
This kind of performance doesn’t go unnoticed.
So Dave and Steve attracted a big following of aspiring investors – all eager to achieve similar results.
Over the five years I spent working with Dave, I’d seen THOUSANDS of people ask to learn how they invested in real estate.
I could count a DOZEN of those students who had built their own substantial portfolios.
But NONE ever achieve anything near what Dave and Steve had achieved themselves.
In a quiet moment in our little 3-person office, I asked Dave what he thought the secret of his success was. Why was Dave so successful – when others who had Dave’s knowledge weren’t?
“Because it’s simple, but not easy.”
Dave and Steve had a simple philosophy for investing: Problem + Solution = Profit
To break this down: You find a problem property; solve the problem that is limiting that property’s potential; and create profit for yourself.
The strategy was simple.
But the mental resistance that you need to overcome in order to cope with the multi-million dollar price-tags, the risk, the “what-ifs”, the high-stakes negotiation against real estate agents, the worry about whether you’ll get financing, the worry about where your next great deal will come from after spending thousands of ours poring over classified ads and real estate listings and finding nothing, the stress it places on your relationships…
…Those bits were the hard bits.
People teach strategy.
People teach mindset, culture, leadership and resilience.
But the way people teach them – it’s almost as if strategy and the tools required for implementing that strategy (mindset, culture, leadership, resilience, structure, support, etc) live in different worlds.
Or perhaps it’s as if all strategies work for all people in all circumstances – irrespective of a person’s strengths and weaknesses.
As a result, strategies that are good in theory are often hit-and-miss in practice.
This is certainly true when we’re focussed on marketing strategies – and the business growth objectives they achieve.
It’s no wonder why people often find “simple” marketing objectives difficult to achieve – and why a strategy might be simple from the outside, but not easy when we’re neck-deep in it.
Because it’s often the “soft” stuff that sinks strategy – not the strategy itself.