Striving to create a better life for everyone by sustainably solving real estate problems

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Tag Archives: Mindset

Q&A: OPM and Effort

Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.

Mindset plays a big role in business. What you can do is most limited by what you think you can do.

I try to answer your questions openly and honestly. This post originated with a reader question:

Is there a way to buy into the market of homes that are up for auction an or tax liens without using my own money and doing the remodel myself and having a real estate agent do the marketing for it?

There are really three—maybe four—questions expressed here:

  • Can I have a real estate agent do the marketing for me?
  • Can I buy a house at auction or from tax liens without using my own money?
  • Can I renovate a house using other people’s money if I don’t do the renovation work myself?
  • Can I renovate a house myself using other people’s money?

The answer to each of these questions individually is a resounding “Yes!” The answer when you start stacking them becomes increasingly less certain until it finally results in, “Well…maybe?” I don’t like to argue for limitations, but it depends on your reputation and how persuasive you can be. Luck does not play a big role in business. Continue reading →

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I’m Making Them Birds

Lee wearing a Bob Ross T-shirt

While you can’t just paint over all your mistakes or confusion, you can choose how you let them affect your mindset.

Starting with Why: Every day in business, you encounter things that annoy, frustrate, or confuse you. I wanted to talk about how I’ve chosen to accept some of the things I cannot change.

One of the more frustrating points about running a business is that you can either know what it’s really worth or keep accurate books for taxes. And never the twain shall meet.

Businesses are punished on their balance sheets for being good negotiators. At the same time, they are required to take totally fallacious “expenses” while being forbidden from taking real ones. Here’s a few examples:

  • Cost basis
  • Depreciation
  • Capitalized expenses

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We Need a New Elevator Speech

A cute white puppy.

I don’t care what you do unless you first convince me why I should—quickly. Are there treats involved? Remember, I’m a puppy and I have a short attention span.

Here’s another example of why we need to Start with Why.

At Rotary this week, we spent a lot of time talking about how we don’t do a very good job of explaining why anyone would want to be a Rotary member. If members even know why, they tend to focus on some of the things that Rotary International does, not why it does them. That doesn’t necessarily encourage folks to visit or join.

Our district governor said we need a new elevator speech. An elevator speech is a short description of your organization, short enough you can deliver it between floors in an elevator. What he suggested was something like this:

Rotary is 1.2 million people working together to make the world a better place to live.

See why I like Rotary? #mindset

When you push the button, are you ready with YOUR elevator speech?

I realized Hermit Haus also needs a better elevator speech. Like too many businesses, we focus on what we do, trying to cram as much as possible into a few words. But if we focus on why we do what we do, we don’t need so many words, and we make a more effective argument. Here’s what I came up with, just before the DG gave his suggested Rotary elevator speech.

We strive to make a better life for everyone by sustainably solving real estate problems.

Let us know what you think about ours, and share yours if you have one!

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Book Report: Chip Gaines and Choosing to See the Good

OK, so I’m reading the new book by Chip Gaines, called Capital Gaines. That’s right. I’m reading a book by the man who made Waco ridiculously famous. I have reasons (which I will share below).

I like this book more than I thought I would. You might, too.

He spent much of his younger days flipping houses, and during that time, he managed to put together a great team of guys that he kept for years (some still work with him). He even tried to go to Mexico to learn Spanish by immersion so he could communicate better with them, because they shared work ethics and were fun. However, he also ran into some folks in his career that disappointed him, didn’t follow through, etc. He even told a story about some young workers from the less fortunate side of town who were great until one day they just walked out with all the cash in the store.

It’s how Chip reacted to these experiences with people that gave me an aha moment. He’s far more advanced in dealing with disappointments in workers, contractors, and customers than I have been. He talked a lot in the book about how he makes a conscious choice to focus on the good in other people. He chooses to assume that people are going to be ethical and treat him as he treats them. And when the inevitable disappointment occurs, he doesn’t spend a lot of time blaming, name-calling, and seething about it. He acknowledges the issue, but then reminds himself that there are things going on in other people’s lives that he doesn’t know about.

Perhaps the young people who took the cash in the drawer at his store had an emergency come up, and felt the immediate need for money was more important than keeping their job. He said that he’d have given them the money, if they’d have asked, but that probably wasn’t even an option in their minds.

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What Do You See?

Closed Sonic Drive-In

What do you think of when you see something like this? If you’re first thought is, “I wonder how I can use this location to make money,” you may be an entrepreneur.

What do you see when you spot an abandoned building or a closed business?

The trick of being a successful entrepreneur, especially a commercial real estate investor, is to see opportunity where others see failure.

This fact was brought home to me by the recent closing of the Sonic Drive-In in the small town where I spend most of my time these days. This being a Small Town, the closure was a big deal and sent the small town grapevine into overtime. All kinds of reasons for the failure were floated until another business closed for failure to pay sales taxes to the state. (We know this because the state is auctioning off all their assets.)

But the one thing that nobody talked about in either case was: “What’s going to happen to the building?” Okay. Nobody talked about the loss of a handful of sub-minimum-wage jobs, either, and they certainly should have. Finding new jobs in a rural small town is no easy matter.

In kind of a combination of those two thoughts, my initial reaction on seeing the sign at the Sonic (I learned about the other closure much later) was, “I wonder what kind of business could go in that location.” You see, a drive-in is a very special-purpose building. There aren’t a lot of other options for using it. In fact, there are so few options and it is so costly to build that Sonic has a program to repurpose other commercial buildings as drive-ins.

Continue reading →

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