📌What failures led to your success❓

[Justin Goodin]

✅Movivated and hungry entrepreneurs take their failures and learn from them.

Most people just quit. 🛑

Anyone brave enough to share a failure or mistake they have made before? 

Would love to hear some stories you have about failures that led to your success 👇

[Erik W.]

My biggest failures are two:

1) I didn't set specific investment targets. This led me to settle for several sub-par properties out of the starting gate. I wasn't making any money and I was pouring all my time into management and maintenance for little return. This led me to set up very stringent criteria. I can and did (and still do) find the 2% Rule effective for SFH and 2-4 unit residential real estate highly effective in terms of ensuring you make enough cash flow to make it worth you while and to cover all expenses realistically. Too often I see folks who barely hit the 1% rule and yet talk about how well their investment is doing. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I would request they share their Schedule E with me so I can verify it.

2) I didn't get around other happy, successful real estate investors soon enough.  I'm something of a loner by nature in that I like to figure things out on my own and I don't expect other people to be the source of my success.  That said, there's power in getting connected with other savvy, energetic, happy real estate investors.  So as cliché as this may sound, build your network as quickly and efficiently as possible, but do not sacrifice quality.  If all you find are naysayers who hate life, or if all you find are the pie-in-the-sky gurus who sell more books than they ever made $ in houses, you'll either end up with the life sucked out of you from negativity, or you'll end up with all your money sucked out of your pockets and nothing to show for it other than piles of courses and hype-material, but no solid plan on what actually works.

You can work on both of these with a group of trustworthy people in the business sector.  Be open to receive help, but be wise not to take everything at face value.  One person's strategy might not work for you.  Another person's strategy may not work at all, regardless of how excited they are about it.  Then again, another person's might be the thing that blows open the doors on your business.

That's my last thought: 3) Run this like a business, because it is.  Make sure to charge appropriately for the service you provide.  Bill tenants for damages.  Insist on timely rent.  "No Pay = No Stay."  Yes, even during Covid.  Value your time properly.  Don't swing a hammer or a paintbrush just to save $20/hour, because as an investor you should be making decisions that will return 10 - 100 x that amount.  It's too easy to buy yourself an unpaid job as a manager or a handyperson to try to save a few bucks while deals worth $10s or $100s of thousands pass you by.  Real estate money isn't made hammering nails or slinging a paint brush.  That's relatively low-compensation labor.  Your brain and creativity will determine how much you make, because that's a skill fewer people are able to tap into.