The Property Voice Podcast - Musings: Fast Forward Your Business…Double or Quits
Attending events outside of your specialised area at times can be a great way to get a different perspective to the normal fare. This weekend I attended a business event called Fast Forward Your Business and I share some of the ‘aha moments’ and ‘distinctions’ that came to me during the event. Want to know what I will now be doubling or quitting going forward…then have a quick listen here?
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Resources mentioned
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’s must do’s
Simple - find out what you are good at (most impactful / transformational) and then double your time on this activity...outsource or systemise the rest!
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Transcription of the show
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Property Voice Podcast, my name is Richard Brown and as always it is a pleasure to have you join me again on the show today.
This weekend I attended the Fast Forward Your Business event in London, run by Roger Hamilton. Whilst there were some property people at the event, there were also attendees from all walks of business life. Plus, the content was not about property as such, but about business instead. Roger Hamilton is very forward looking and so he shared some of his thoughts and research on some of the ‘next waves’ in business as he called them….but there were some other central takeaways that struck me on refection after the event, which I will share with you today…so on with the show and Property Chatter!
Property Chatter
I was mulling over the theme for this week’s show and had a couple of thoughts running through my head, as is often the case. However, confirmation of the topic really came when a regular listener called Sanjay asked if I would share my top tips that came out of the weekend’s event. Sanjay was due to attend himself, however, due to a problem in one of his properties, he could not make it. Now, rather than give a blow by blow account, I did pick up some ‘aha-moments’ and also some ‘distinctions’ over the weekend that I wanted to share with you today. An aha-moment is when you go…’oh really, I never really thought about it that way before’. A distinction is when there is something you inherently knew already, but there was a smaller variation that came up that either reinforced the point or took it forward slightly, as a result of hearing it.
My ‘aha-moment’
My biggest issue and aha-moment was the idea that gave rise to the title to this week’s show: double or quits.
No, not a gambling term…although to some extent it kind of is…as we could be ‘gambling’ with our business and future if we don’t get this right!
To illustrate, one of the next big ‘waves’, as Roger referred to them, is the sharing economy. Uber, Airbnb, alternative financial services like contactless payments from Barclays, peer-to-peer money transfers like the recently standalone PayPal, bank-eliminating foreign currency provider Evolut and similarly crowdfunding in business and property investment for example. These sorts of change-making companies and industries are starting to disrupt and change the status quo and I also referred to some of this when I previously talked about Megatrends a few weeks ago.
One way or another we will all be impacted by these megatrends and disruptive technologies and in some cases, completely new industries such as 3D printing for example.
However, during this part of the event, Roger made a challenging statement:
Know what you are good at and double your time on that, then, outsource or automate the rest!
There are of course three elements to this statement:
- Knowing what you are good at
- Consciously calculating and then allocating the amount of time you spend on an activity
- Letting go to other people and systems to do things for you
I guess some people may struggle with point 1, if not point 2 as well before even getting to point 3. Fortunately, personally speaking, I am now clear on what I am good at, however it has taken me quite a long time to figure that bit out if I think about my entire life and not just my property investing journey.
I must confess that I am less able or proficient when it comes to allocating my time than I would like though. Fortunately, Roger’s profiling tests have helped me to better understand that. As a natural ‘Creator’, as Roger would call me, I am full of ideas, thoughts, plans and visions and less interested or even capable in the minutiae and nitty gritty…but that’s completely OK to be that way too!
So, for me, I believe that I am really good at sharing my knowledge and information with other people to help them grow and develop too. This is part of the reason why I have this podcast, have written a book, host a blog and newsfeed and so on…I love this and I have put myself in a position where this really is where I spend a lot of my time already…property investing allows me the opportunity to do this and property investing has also allowed me to gain specialist knowledge to share with others too.
What I have realised, however, is that some of the ‘information sharing’ activities that I undertake are better than others. I define ‘better’ here as having the biggest impact on other people, leading to transformation in their lives.
Whilst sharing a story through a newsfeed is helpful…is it really transformational? Unless it is a major one, possibly not. However, my book, training and mentoring has the capability to bring about positive transformation to other people’s lives and so that is what I should be spending more of my time doing…that is my aha-moment.
Don’t worry though, I will still be doing this podcast and will actively share what is going on in the world of property through other media too…it’s just that I need to be smarter in how I do that going forward.
My time allocation to the big 3 as I am now going to call them: writing, training & mentoring will now take even more precedence than before…double in fact!
Before I move onto the next point, perhaps you may be thinking…what am I good at and what tasks should I be doubling my time input on? If you don’t know already, I would suggest you read two books and then decide…
Roger Hamilton’s Millionaire Masterplan – mainly, as in addition to identifying your preferred style and approach, it also gives you access to taking his test included in the price of the book 😉
The Values Factor by Dr John Demartini – the book is actually quite long and does repeat some of the points in slightly different ways, however still get it and within the first 3-4 chapters you will start to know where your strengths, passions and ‘values’ will lie as, the author has some key questions and methods to help you to do that.
Ok, so the next step is then to both measure and then allocate our time, so that we know how much double will look like. I may not be the right guy to give you the best advice on this one I have to say. However, I have used a few tools myself recently that did help me:
- Daily log – for one week set an alarm on the hour every waking hour and then record what you did in the last hour and approximately how long for…include social media and tea breaks by the way! At the end of each day, spend 15 minutes reviewing your day ad try to add up the time spent on certain tasks and activities. So, eating & coffee breaks spanned 4 hours, reading 1 hour, writing a presentation 2 hours and so on. It should start to get clear where you are spending your time.
- Take the test from Roger’s book and answer the questions from John’s and then figure out what you are good at
- Then, generate a daily task list of ‘must do’ tasks based on your log and the two books mentioned above and have this as a print out or excel sheet in front of you each day.
- Tick off each task as you do it and also track the time spent on it.
- The 80/20 Rule will mean that you should be spending most of your time on the most important and impactful things but is also means some things will be left behind
Then the next step, figure out what is not getting done and either give those jobs to someone else (paid or unpaid) or find a system to make it easier and less time-intensive to do so.
In my case, I know have a virtual assistant who takes care of a lot of my admin for example…that’s an outsourcing example. Plus, I discovered little tools within Outlook called Quick Steps, where I can file an email into a certain email folder at the click of a mouse to help streamline my email management, or I use Evernote to save articles to read later for research and things like that.
I am also considering switching to a paid-for portfolio management software solution and away from my excel spreadsheets, as much can then be automated there too.
These are of course personal examples and as you can tell, I have more to do if I am to meet my doubling my time approach.
I have of course drifted into the ‘outsource & systemise’ part already here haven’t I, so a little more on that now.
Outsource & systemise
I have heard the principle ‘do-manage-outsource’ before, notably from Rob Moore at Progressive Property and it is a good one to remember here now.
There are some things that we can only do ourselves, or at least should – this really has to be our most impactful tasks and by definition the ones that we need to double our time on, as noted earlier
We can and should then delegate other tasks to other people. Who are these other people? If we have a team or business, think 360 and delegate up, down and sideways…remembering of course that each team member might be adopting a similar strategy and so they should only be taking on the tasks that are most impactful to them.
Other people to delegate to could include: our wives/husbands or life partners, our kids…sometimes dinner and cleaning can be done by other members of the household too you know! We can sometimes ask our friends to help out but that is not really a sustainable business model.
Finally, outsource – this is where we employ someone outside of our business on a salary, a family member on chore duty or friends on favour-watch! It could be a professional to advise us or undertake specific tasks like our tax return, a contractor to undertake a specific project like creating a web page, or a service provider to perform regular tasks on our behalf like a letting agent, deal sourcer, virtual assistant and so on.
The rule being to think more about how and who could we give tasks to in order to remain productive ourselves.
Quits
One more thought here…there may be some things we need to drop altogether. We should always ask ourselves a few key questions:
- Should I be doing this myself?
- Could or should someone be doing it that is better than me?
- Could this be systemised to make it more efficient and less time intensive?
- Finally, should I be doing this at all?
This is where we get the ‘quits’ part of my double or quits point. Quit could mean we ‘quit’ doing something by giving it to someone else, or alternatively by giving it over to a system in whole or in part instead. A great book to read about systemising is the E-Myth from Michael E. Gerber for example.
In conclusion – double or quits to me was such an ‘aha-moment’ not just because I will get a one-time fast forward of my own personal productivity and business growth, but also…to perhaps add a further distinction here…to repeat the process periodically and review the results. I can imagine that what I need to double my time on could be different next year to this, just as this year was different to last year too. Interesting isn’t it?
Quickly now then, give the time taken to get this far…here are some of the distinctions that I also noted:
- Our lives and business will change as a result of technological and other innovations that perhaps we could not even conceive a few years ago. For example, in China they have recently built a 4-storey apartment building using a 3D printer…wow! Distinction: keep an eye out for the next ‘big waves’ to avoid being a Dodo!
- When you open your mind up to different ‘tribes’, then you get new insights, perspectives & contacts too. Distinction: I came away from this event with a bunch of new contacts but also an awareness of completely new business models that people are already implementing successfully today.
- Turning your ‘needs’ into ‘opportunities’ completely changes your energy, focus and thought-process. For example, the ‘I don’t have enough money to invest in property’ could be reframed as ‘I have a property deal where a joint venture finance partner can earn a good return on their money’ totally changes the emphasis around from ‘I want’ to ‘I offer’ and so from ‘I want’ to ‘I give’ at the same time!
There were others, but I just wanted to share a few of them on today’s show. Thanks Sanjay for the encouragement…I hope that it has made up for having to miss the event at least in part!
One after-thought I have had as a result of this topic is this…
When thinking about the concept of ‘double or quit’, this does not only apply to tasks, activities or ‘things’. It can also apply to people too!
That perhaps leads onto a whole other discussion, so for now and as a kind of cliff-hanger, I shall leave it at that. Just remember, as we should focus our time and attention on things that are most impactful, the same could be said about the people we hang out with too…
More on that subject another time perhaps then…
OK, so another week and another musing, the show notes will be over at the website www.thepropertyvoice.net and feel free to drop me a line any time for a chat to podcast@thepropertyvoice.net especially if you were at the FFYB event, or had some ‘aha-moments’ or ‘distinctions’ of your own.
Thank you very much for listening again this week and until next time on The Property Voice Podcast…it’s ciao-ciao