Happy New Year and welcome to 2018!
I hope you had a good break and are now rested and invigorated to achieve all you want to this year. We chose to use the break in between Christmas and New Year to write down all of our 2018 goals and targets, business and personal, and plan out how we are going to achieve them. Did you? If not, don't worry, here are a few top tips on how to get started, how to get focussed and how to make 2018 your best year yet:
This works great for your financial targets, but how about everything else, as it is not all about the money! So, as part of your 2018 plan, you should also write down:
Again, check back on these as often as you can, have them written down on your mobile so you can read as you wake up and before you go to sleep. Now that you have a vision of who you want to be, what you want to do, what you want to have, how you are going to achieve all these and a financial plan, you may notice there is a lot to do and you only have a finite amount of time to do it in. If this is you, then you need to start leveraging:
And that's just the start of leveraging, if you want to get your time back in 2018 and achieve all that you plan, then look out for the next launch of Life Leverage Online Masterclass later this month. Take a look at what people are already saying about Life Leverage Online Masterclass: "Feeling 'appy' get on board with all the apps - already saving time" "I have started to implement leverage tactics and it's making such a difference already. Thank you!" To register early, email [email protected] now to guarantee yourself a place. I hope these tips help you start 2018 focussed and motivated to achieve all that you want, I'd love to hear from you and what you are all working towards so please comment below. Have a great 2018, Steve p.s. as part of our 2018 plans, we currently have some investment opportunities for the right people, email [email protected] to find out more
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This week's blog serves a slightly selfish purpose .... So the next time we have a little one, I'm more prepared for the birth!!
On Tuesday 19th September I helped deliver my beautiful baby girl Ella Sofia Turner into the world. It was on this day I realised that I didn't quite prepare for my trip to the hospital to help birth little Ella so am noting down all the things I need to remember for next time, along with sharing some experiences from the day. Hopefully any expecting fathers or birthing partners can take something from this and prepare some bits for themselves in advance of being called into action. Linking to the 5 P’s from my previous blog, I definitely lacked some planning for this event, but came fully prepared in the other areas, positivity, persistence, people & products. So, let’s begin:
I loved being such a big part of the birth, and I was full of love and a little teary when I got to deliver Ella from the birthing pool on to Catherine’s chest. I am enjoying being a daddy enormously already and the effort we have put in over the last couple of years to have mobile businesses with teams in place to give us as much time together as a new family we want, makes it all worth while. With a very sleepy baby and wife, I still manage to grab the odd half hour to an hour on the laptop if I want to and even managed to pop to the gym today to get my training back on track. Thanks for reading, I’ll get back on topic next week with a business related blog, especially as during these last couple of weeks, I realised I am a lot closer to the 4 hour work week for all businesses than I thought - it’s surprising how much you can fit in to a short time slot when you need to! If you have any specific areas you’d like me to cover around creating mobile, passive income businesses, let me know in the comments. Have a great weekend, Steve p.s. As a new father and huge fan of everything mobile, the app Baby Tracker is excellent for tracking all the feeds & nappies! Not something I ever searched for before now but am glad it was out there for when we needed it. A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks and I've realised 4 must be the new magic number.
Last Friday we enjoyed our 4th Wedding Anniversary - a truly amazing 4 years of married fun, laughter, adventure and business together. As we're both vegan, the traditional wedding anniversary gift list doesn't work I used good old Google and found there is a Vegan Wedding Anniversary Gift list - and for the 4th year of marriage, juicing! So we now have a mini orange and lemon tree for the house that we can 'harvest' next September ready for juicing. Yesterday, we moved into our lovely new house that will be our family house. This was move number 4 since we sold our home 4 years ago to invest in property. We are so excited to be living in our new 4 bed home and can't wait for our little girl to join us. In the last 4 years of entrepreneurship, we have created 4 main income streams:
Between now and the end of 2018 we're adding 4 more:
How am I managing all of these? A Property Manager and VAs. How many VAs? You guessed it... 4! If you don't know what VAs are or what they can do for you, check out my previous blog or guide to hire your first one. And to top it all off, what is my aim for all of my businesses? To be run passively and only require 4 hours of my time a week. The 4 Hour Work Week. I am already down to 4 hours a week for the property business and now working smart to get the other 2 down to fit within that 4 hours. So that's why 4 is the new magic number. What's your magic number? Have a great week, Steve As some of you might know, last weekend was V festival and along with enjoying some great music on Sunday with Catherine, we enjoyed some great returns on our serviced apartments. While we sat back, relaxed & watched the main stage including Emeli Sandé, Ellie Goulding & Clean Bandit, our systemised and outsourced business created us an income with none of our time. While Jason Derulo played ‘Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle’ and our little one wiggled in Catherine’s belly, we didn’t have a second thought about our business as we knew we had set-up everything for it to run smoothly without us. Our serviced accommodation business currently takes me approximately 4 hours to manage a week, 2 hours meeting with our Property Manager, discussing mainly growth & scaling, and another 2 hours responding to investors/finance companies, analysing the figures and answering a few questions from the team. I’m still working to get this time down so I can manage all three of our businesses in this 4 hours and I am aiming to achieve this in the next couple of weeks. This is what is possible, with focussed work and a clear vision, for anyone who wants it. You just need to choose and commit to doing it. Anyway, getting off my ‘Inspirational Iguana’, my ‘Motivational Monkey’ (I couldn’t think of any better animal alliterations like ‘High Horse’) back to V weekend and what it generated for our business:
In summary a great weekend for our business that required some thorough preparation to ensure it went smoothly. To help those that are running SAs or considering this strategy, here are my Top 7 Tips (DANCERS) when it comes to big events in your area:
So that’s my DANCERS – 7 top tips to having a successful SA business during a big event. As always, I hope you find it useful and you can take some learning to implement in your business. Please ask any questions or share how you get on with big events in your areas. Enjoy your week everyone, Steve This week I had some things go to plan... And some not!
I'll structure this blog in the format that works best when giving feedback, the sh*t sandwich. I'll start with want went right, move on to what didn't go to plan, which was all to do with getting to my 4 hour work week next week, and then end on a positive again! So, at the weekend, I enjoyed the sun, went on an 8 mile run before football training on Sunday and enjoyed some relaxing time with Catherine. Monday we finished our 'baby classes' so now after NCT and Hypnobirthing sessions we're feeling as prepared for the arrival of our little one as we can. And Wednesday I spent time at Columbus School and College helping out look after the special needs children playing football with them. I love the fact that we've created businesses for ourselves that gives us time to give back, and I really enjoyed being able to bring fun to all the kids there. So, what didn't go to plan? Mainly:
What have I learnt? With the management of VAs, if someone goes quiet and it doesn't seem to be working as well as you hope, usually there is an issue that needs addressing. In this case, it was overwhelm. I believe the role the VA was working in does not have too much work to complete in the 40 hours per week, unfortunately though, the tasks involved did not match up with the strengths of the VA. This caused our VA to feel overwhelmed, go in and out of communication until finally resigning. I'm happy to say that she is resigning on good terms and I think this was down to me providing a lot to support to her during her time working for us, especially when she went quiet. In the end, she has resigned and will find more job satisfaction in a new role, I re-advertised and have had over 30 applicants apply that I'll be shortlisting, interviewing and hiring next week. At least this happened now and not a month or two down the line where I could have ended up interviewing applicants in between nappy changes!!! Secondly, I tend to think things will take less time then they actually will, especially when it involves people (which is probably why in a recent dream I had, our baby’s first words were a very formal “Good Morning”). Anyway, I essentially needed to hire my expanded team earlier than I did to get the results I needed now. I knew there would be a learning curve for the team and I produced processes, improved KPIs and detailed team descriptions to help reduce this. However, I didn't do enough to reduce the learning curve and achieve results by now. Although I underestimated this time needed, I can see and acknowledge how much the expanded team are producing within a month of working for me and in the businesses. And lastly, although I planned fully for the 4 hour work week to start next week, I did not plan for the unexpected. This caused tasks to crop up that were important and urgent (for example further improved processes and answering questions - all needed for the new team to work effectively and accurately) which pushed out my important but not urgent tasks (the completion of our online course). What this means is that my 4 hour work week is delayed by about 2 weeks (and has provision for an extra 2 hours per week to stay in communication with new team members). I'm very happy that I committed and planned the 4 hour work week for next week for a number of reasons:
If you read my blog a couple of weeks ago (The 5 P's to a #4HWW), my failure to meet the deadline comes down to:
And to finish on a positive... Our Serviced Accommodation business continues to grow with expansion into Ipswich and London, we provided some great returns for our investors and we have business meetings lined up with more partners to further our growth around Essex, Kent, Suffolk & London. Great work by our Property Manager. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and I really hope you can take some learning away that you can put in to place in your business. Have a great weekend, Steve Before I get in to the nuts and bolts of this weeks blog, I’ll quickly update you on what I’ve been up to over the last 7 days; Marathon training of 13 miles (as you do before 10am on a Saturday!), Antenatal classes (me & the Mrs), fell asleep during the relaxation practice in our hypnobirthing class (clearly I’m well practiced!), continued work towards the 4 hour work week and hit a few stumbles (I’ll get on to this in next weeks blog). Oh, and managed to handstand for 9.5 seconds (the half second is all important).
Now on to the nuts and bolts part. We are often asked why we rent our home instead of buying, especially as we sold our first home that we owned, invested in property, but then moved into rented accommodation. Following a comment on my last blog, plus the many people asking us so often why we rent, I thought I’d answer this question in full in this week’s blog. The main reason of ‘why rent’ over buying is financial, which I’ll detail later, but here are my top 5 reasons for renting:
There are some downsides too, and it depends person to person and what is most important to them whether these downsides outweigh the upsides:
Now on to the financial element of ‘why rent’. I’ll try to keep this simple with rounded figures. So, let’s say you have the choice of whether to buy or rent: Buying your own home 25% deposit of a property (£240K) is £60K Estimate of buying fees and stamp duty, etc £5K The house is ready to move in to so no refurb £0K Total capital outlay £65K Mortgage (on interest only) £600 per month Investing in a buy to let property Ok, so let’s now look at putting that money into an investment property instead. 25% of a house needing work (£200K) is £50K Estimate of buying and stamp duty etc £5K Refurbishment costs £10K Total capital outlay £65K Mortgage (on interest only) £500 per month The type of property will depend on how you can let it out, and the monthly profit can range from £250 to £1000+ after all costs. When we sold our home and invested the money instead, we achieved £1000 profit as we were letting it out as a HMO (house of multiple occupation) and self managed this. Your home living budget is now the £600 (which you were initially going to pay in mortgage payments) plus the £1000 you are making as profit from your investment property. £1600 can then get you a really nice rental property along with a few hundred pounds change each month. What I have not included are property price rises on either your own home or investment property, or the additional profit you make from adding value to the investment property from refurbishing it. These are nice bonuses, but cash is king! The other benefits of investing:
That pretty much sums why we chose to invest in property and rent ourselves. I hope you found this interesting, any questions please ask in the comment box. Thanks again for reading, Steve This past couple of weeks I have made a lot of progress towards my 4 hour work week, which is good as it is planned in my diary to happen in just 2 more full weeks!
So what exactly have I been doing to make it happen? Here are the 5 P’s I’ve been working on: Planning Planning is very important to reach a 4 Hour Work Week (4HWW). If I hadn’t planned the 4HWW out in to exactly what makes up those 4 hours, I would not have known exactly what it needs in order for me to stick to 4 hours. As a reminder, my planned 4 hours are:
By planning this I can visualise what is needed to get me from ‘where I was’ to ‘where I need to be’, and more importantly by actually planning it in to the diary I have a date to achieve it by. To get my weekly meetings with my Property Manger down to 1 hour only on new business, I knew I needed to ensure all systems were in place and running effectively, that he had experienced weeks without my input, to slowly decrease the time of each meeting each week, to focus on not solving problems once as they occur but creating processes that solved it and solved them as they occur in the future. I knew my RAP on a Friday needed to be extremely effective. I need to have all KPI (Key Performance Indicator) data in an easily readable format so I quickly review them, make decisions, ask questions and put plans into place for the following week/month. People To achieve a 4HWW without people would not work! My businesses rely on customers being satisfied which would not be the case if I had an out-of-office email reply and voicemail stating: I am currently out of office, please contact me between 10-10:30AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Emails over 10 lines will be ignored, conversations after 5 minutes will be cut off. Good luck… Not a lasting business model! Therefore, I knew I needed the right team around me and as I do not have an office (nor want one) I needed the majority to be virtual. Over the last few weeks we have hired in a fully qualified accountant to be our Finance Manager for all businesses (and also the person that compiles all the KPI data for me to review on a Friday), a UK based virtual PA to manage emails and oversee the rest of the team and an Online Marketing Manager to keep generating sales for our Amazon based business and the Serviced Apartment business. To ensure I had a team all working towards the same goal I needed to:
Products Products mean a variety of things. The products we sell - I could not reduce my working week if the products we were offering customers were poor quality. I needed to make sure all the products were top quality, as the customer expects (and beyond) and that all my team understood the benefits and features of them all, and why we were selling these. The products we use – this is mainly online technology. Without efficient online tools I would need to be spending more hours in the business. These range from:
A lot have been tried and tested for weeks, months or years and a lot have come from recommendations from our network & team members who were using them. Positivity (& Possibility) Without a positive attitude this would not be possible. If I thought a 4HWW was not realistic, or not possible, and that a virtual team could not be trusted, or that the businesses needed me to survive and the team would not be able to cope – then all of these limiting beliefs and negativity would have lead me to not push myself to where I need to be and it would have stopped me when I needed to commit to expenses. Positivity and the belief that it will all work (along with all I have put into place) drives you on to succeed in your goals. It also rubs off on your team creating a more positive, trusting and committed team. Persistence (& Perseverance) An attitude to keep going no matter what, because you know it’s possible and you will get there is definitely needed. Not everything goes smoothly, our first KPI reporting run was about 50% complete, of that about 10% was incorrect! I did not think “this was not going to work” and take it back and do it myself. Instead I took full responsibility for the result, knew that I needed to further clarify each KPI, where people should be getting the information from, the exact reporting time for them and improved the communication to the team to achieve the desired result next time. There will always be stumbling blocks and things that go wrong, so it is important to stay tuned in to the bigger ‘Why’. Why are you doing all this? Why are you putting the time in to make it this way? And then keep at it until it works, continuously improving processes and the it will happen. Now, there you have it, my 5 P’s of getting to a 4 hour work week. Having recently re-listened to Life Leverage, by Rob Moore, there are 3 ways to use your time. Waste it, Spend it or Invest it. The 5 P’s above are great examples of how I’ve prioritised investing my time to get passive and recurring, long-term benefit. I hope you find this useful, please let me know if it is too general and needs more detail and I will cover it in later blogs. Have a great week and thanks for reading, Steve p.s. As I tried wakeboarding this week for the very first time, here are the 5 P’s in relation to this: Planning – I got told to bring swimwear and a towel! People – I would never have tried this if it wasn’t for the mastermind group I’m part of, 2 of whom regularly wakeboard. Products – We got given a wetsuit and a wakeboard! Positivity – When I fell off straight away, and then again after being lurched from the wakeboard, I didn’t feel down or disappointed, I knew it was part and parcel of this and enjoyed it. Persistence – If I gave up the first time I full on face-planted the water (or even the tenth) I would not have had the satisfaction of going from on my knees, to going round the lake and then finally achieving a length wakeboarding properly and standing up. A big thank you to the mastermind group for arranging a great day. This week I have been enjoying a nice mid-week break at Champneys Forest Mere and I want to tell you about my run on Wednesday (and how it relates to running your own business). As you may (or may not) know, I enjoy running and the odd Marathon (see my first blog) and currently I am training for the Chelmsford Marathon in October. Part of this training is a mix of fast 800m runs and slow 400m runs to complete on Wednesday this week, total run about 3 miles. Even though it was raining, I went out there and thought 3 miles should mean a couple of circles of the ‘lake’ outside and I’ll be back relaxing, with plenty of time before lunch. As it’s raining and a simple run around the lake, no need for my phone or headphones, I’ll enjoy some quite nature time. So, I went out and felt great, bombing it down tiny trail paths through the forest round the lake and then up a hill into some MOD training ground. Running along that trail for a bit more before coming back down hill and looking to turn back around the lake and back to the room. Only, I couldn’t find the lake and ended up in a country estate. No problem, still had plenty of time before lunch, about 90 minutes, so I asked someone in the car park where Forest Mere was. She said “about 6 miles if you follow the road to the end, turn right, through the lights round the roundabout…”. I thought I haven’t done 6 miles to get here, I’ll go the shortcut through the forest so asked what general direction was it. She pointed and off I went. Two and a half miles later I’m now lost in Foley Estate and decide to ask the bin men where to go, they pointed the direction I just came from but to turn right at a junction. I sighed to myself (ok, a lot more then sighed!) and started bounding back the way I came, following the directions they gave, through another forest and I popped out on another road where I saw a runner. I quickly shouted “Hey, are you going to Forest Mere”, she said “I was going to ask you the same, but I think it’s this way”. I thought great, ran alongside her for a bit and then got excited that my run had almost finished so sped ahead to the top of the road so I could get back, showered and ready for lunch. Only, I got to the top of the road, looked left, put my head in my hands and went “I’ve already #*?!#*? been here”. 3 miles later and I had ended up back at the County Estate. First I thought are you kidding me, then thought about where I can get a taxi, or whether I could steal one of the golf buggies. In the end we asked at reception what the best way was and they said the road route, and it wasn’t as long as 6 miles. Admitting failure, I opted to run the road route and almost 5 miles later I was sprint finishing towards Champneys, running 15 minutes late for lunch and ready to apologise to Catherine for getting lost (again!). if you're trying to spot mile 3, it's behind mile 6!!! yep, 3 miles to the same spot. In the end, I loved it, I love getting lost and not knowing where I’m running to. Maybe I would’ve liked to get back a little earlier, but I did enjoy the run and being lost takes your mind off the actual running!
So, what lessons does this teach in relation to business:
Thanks again for reading and if anyone wants to join me in the Chelmsford Marathon on 22nd October, I’ll see you there. Have a great weekend, Steve Last weekend I was in sunny Scotland enjoying a bit of down time, a catch up with family and some handstand practice on a beach. When we were driving back down south I happen to notice quite a few wide-load vehicles transporting houses!
When I thought about it, I didn’t see any on the journey up which made me think that no-one builds houses down south and transports them north, only the other way round. My reasoning was that it’s clearly more expensive in the south, which I’ve experienced when comparing other peoples refurb/buying costs of property compared to the HMOs, flips and serviced apartments we’ve done in Essex. There may be a simpler reason in the fact that the ‘house building factory’ (I’m sure that’s the technical term) is located in the north, and this again would be due to the cheaper commercial property & labour. This got me thinking into the value of money and how readily available it is to spend/invest in places where it is valued more and you can get more for your money. Take for example VAs (Virtual Assistants). I have recently just hired a fully qualified accountant to be our businesses full time Finance Manager. In the UK this would have cost at least £2-3K per month, probably more when you take into account employers NIC, pension contributions, insurance etc. In the Philippines, which is where I hired our Finance Manager from, it costs 35,000PHP per month, £540, which is almost double what they would earn in an office job doing the same work. What does this allow me to do?
Hiring VAs or outsourcing using fiverr is just one way of being part of the world economy and being able to be smarter with your money. It has its limitations (I’m sure I can’t quite get a house built in the Philippines and have it shipped over yet) but for online businesses this is perfect. I hope that you find this useful and start to consider what tasks you could be better off getting done by someone else for cheaper. Thanks again for reading, Steve Ok, maybe not married to, but fully committed to?
What gets you up, out of bed in the morning and motivated to get going? For me today, it was the start of my marathon training (Ok, the 14 week programme officially starts Monday but I thought I’d get a head start and dust off some cobwebs with a run around Gretna Green so come Monday I can hit the ground…err...running!). What I’ve also realised is that I am so committed to learning and continuous improvement that it is without question or hesitation that I listen to an audio book whilst on my run. This morning I started re-listening to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This habit I have formed is great and starting the day with a run and an audio book definitely sets me up for the day. And that’s all this is, a habit that I’ve formed. So what can you start each morning that will set you up to have an effective, productive day that you can form into a habit? What Morning Routine can you form? Apparently, the average amount of days to form a habit is 66 days. I would guess that this varies hugely dependant on the level of commitment and enjoyment of the task. I found it very easy to start and continue to listen to audible and learn. Why? I’d been highly recommended to start listening to audio books (I was enrolled), it was using up no extra time and I enjoyed the first book I listened to. On a side note, I recently started to track my habits using an app called… ‘Habits’! It’s user friendly with widgets you can put on the home screen of your smart phone to easily tick off when you’ve done them. Is anyone using a different app to track habits and how have you found it? Anyway, back to commitment and what are you married to? In business, I found that:
The realisation of the true commitment in what you do and why you do it can help drive you on to reach your goals, and having the commitment in line with your values will make it easier to keep working at it day to day until you get there. Creating businesses, that eventually do not need me in order to run, link to my values of family, freedom and travel – without the businesses needing my constant input gives me the freedom to spend time with my family and travelling. Planning out my 4 hour work week and structuring how I’ll get there, keeps me on track, motivated and in tune with my commitment and goals. So, link your commitments to your values, get “married” to the idea, link those to goals that drive you, create an empowering context around the whole thing, and go out there and achieve it. Thanks again for reading and have a great week, Steve |
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January 2018
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