All Forum Posts by: John Blackman

I wish I could attend, but I will be out of town that day.  This is a challenging topic for builder's in Austin as land prices have become too high to profit in many areas.

Definitely set up an entity to hold your assets, but your best bet will be to avoid litigation unless at least $100,000 is at risk.  Anything under that and you risk paying more in attorney fees and possible damages than you can get from litigating.  If you have to go to court, you've already lost.  Try to find solutions without getting lawyers involved.  In most cases it is going to be less expensive.

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

I would second the E-Myth as well. That one will keep you from building a job and help you to build a business.

@Kenneth Bell Got any listing pictures? The MLS ones hide all of the blood, sweat, and tears.

We've had instances where we keep getting a new inspector, and each time they visit the site for the first time, they will not leave without some sort of list.  So if you get a bad rotation, you can end up with 6 different inspectors, and 6 different lists.  It's all just part of the tax you pay for developing inside the City.

The City of Austin took a three day training this week, so we are scheduled for our first CO inspection today which we are sure to fail.  They never let you pass the first time.

The paint touch up is complete and we're getting all of the appliances installed.  We're onto punch now, but the project overall has been woefully behind schedule.  @Bryan Hancock alluded to this in his post.  I was honestly surprised at how short that tipping point was when a builder goes from N to N+1 projects which incurs significant lags simply because they don't scale their operations and become their own bottleneck.  Growth is hard, which is not an excuse.  We are responsible for the project.  I'm hoping we can finalize it and have it on market in a few weeks.  It looks great, but did take too long.

The City of Austin used to do all of those inspections, but they could not keep up with the demand, so instead of hiring more inspectors they changed their policy to allow certified private framing inspectors to do inspections.  If one of these certified inspectors signs off, then the City will accept that inspection.  I'm glad they did it, as the market has been able to meet inspection demand much better than the city.

This is something I think we all struggle with.  I keep a strict calendar and make every hour count.  I would keep three calendars (Real Estate, Day Job, and Family).  

Google calendar does an ok job at this, but Sunrise allows you to edit multiple calendars instead of just see extras.  I live in that app, but there are plenty others that will probably also work, that is just my favorite.

The key is to prioritize and plan your activity.  You only have so many time slots in the week.  Always ask yourself what would it cost for me to pay someone else to do what I am doing right now.  Look at your annual income from that activity and divide by the number of hours you work on real estate in a year.  Decide if you could pay someone else.   Even if you don't take home as much, you are still making a margin for spending no time on it which is the critical part.  That is what will allow you to grow.

Do the math on *everything*.  Ask yourself how much value you are generating in that hour.

You should get to the point where you can't do everything yourself.  This is actually a good sign.  At that point you should hire an assistant to do the things that suck your time like running to the bank, maintaining your vehicles, laundry, buying groceries, etc.

Almost...  Our builder is definitely over schedule.  We have covered the yard lines and are working on the finish out, but that is the time consuming detail oriented process.  It's at least another month. 

@Todd S.

 That closing is going to feel great and now with three in the pipe you have effectively tripled your business.  Good thing you hired a GC, because now you are scaling and on your way to running a real business.  You will run into new problems, but they are good ones to have.

Focus on your process, what needs to be done to monitor and keep each project moving in a systematic way.  See if you can make it a black box.  Deals go in, money comes out.  Everything in between are the systems you build to make it happen.  Then ask yourself how many you can do and keep your quality?

Congratulations and best of luck in your growth.