“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
Do you know how many times over the past three years in our real estate investing we have been left high and dry when contracts don’t show up? When electricians and plumbers don’t return calls? When we drive to our properties and the work we were told was done wasn’t? I don’t. I’ve lost count. What we HAVE learned is that at the end of the day, we have to be resilient and resourceful. Because of this, we have done things we certainly never thought we would learn how to do. I joke that when I met Michael he was the Fancy single French guy driving a Z4 with the nicest clothes, but could barely change a light bulb. Now he can fix just about anything that goes wrong in any of our properties. When even the plumber said it wasn’t worth his time to change a broken pipe behind one of our units unless we gave him $15k cash up front, Michael figured it out and dug a 6’ deep and 8’x4’ wide hole, by hand with a shovel, and learned out to change an actual sewer line. And he did it successfully. While the learning curve was steep, we have established systems so that now our time is better spent on things that will produce a higher return.
If you’re willing to outwork and outlearn everyone, especially doing things other people don’t want to do, you lay the foundation for success. Nice things are the product of hard work; you can work hard for someone else’s business so they can get those nice things, or work hard for yourself. We chose to work hard for ourselves.
That’s what we had to do at the start of being an ACTIVE investor. That’s being willing to do WHATEVER IT TAKES. That doesn’t sound appealing to a lot of people, so another option to invest while maintaining great returns is to be a PASSIVE investor. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow and how you can do deals WITH us.
