“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
This age-old proverb is a brilliant one to remind us of the difference between flying solo and moving forward as a team.
Yes, absolutely, you can do property development on your own, especially smaller scale projects. But when it comes to scaling up, my advice is to partner up.
You’ll often hear me say 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing. If I had to pick one thing that gets in the way of people moving forward with their property development goals it would be procrastination born from trying to go it alone. The same thing happens when we make a resolution to get fit and try to do it solo. It’s hard work hauling ourselves out of bed at 6am in order to get to the gym or boot camp before work, when we’d rather hit the snooze button. It’s hard work going for a jog in the evening when all you really want to do is pour a glass of wine and slump in front of the TV.
On the flipside, if we’ve got a buddy or two to join us on the journey, suddenly your motivation increases. You’re accountable. You’re not only relying on your own self-discipline, you’re able to double down with help from a friend.
Likewise, when it comes to property development, teaming up with one or more partners not only improves your momentum, it also doubles or triples or quadruples the available skill set. Joint venture property development partnerships can dramatically accelerate both growth and learning.
If we’re trying to do it alone we’re ultimately limited by our own resources, which means giving ourselves glass ceilings in terms of how far we can go with our own skills and our own financial resources. If we bring others in, potentially bringing in other skills and financial backing, we broaden the scope of what is physically possible.
Even when you’ve got plenty of your own money there are still plenty of advantages to forming a partnership. If you go into a property investment deal alone, using all your funds in that deal, you’re stuck in that deal until it’s done. That means if another great deal comes along you probably won’t be in a position to jump on it. On the other hand, if you’ve partnered with someone you may be able to run multiple projects in parallel.
Because what I find happens is once you’ve gotten over the mental roadblock of “I can’t find a deal” you’ll suddenly have a whole lot more deals in the pipeline.
This gives you a quality problem: which property development deal to take on?
And that’s what we’re looking for: better quality problems. You can never avoid problems entirely but you can improve the quality of the problem you face.
You start with I don’t have a strategy…
Then you face the problem of where to learn the strategy you choose…the Property Development Formula could be exactly the course you're looking for...
Next you learn where to farm your property development strategy…
Then how to negotiate a deal…
Then how to fund the deal…
Until finally you’ve got the quality problem of what to spend your cash on.
When you get to this point, you can achieve more.
Everyone’s got this perception that no one will invest in me until I’ve done a development. If I haven’t proven myself, no one will want to hand over funding. As a result they never do anything.
Way back in my IT days, I was getting paid a ridiculous hourly rate by the people that were engaging me and in many instances the people that were engaging me knew more about the topic than I did. So I was getting paid crazy dollars an hour to solve these IT problems when the person on the other side of the table was smarter than me. So I was really struggling with imposter syndrome.
But my boss put it very clearly to me: it’s not about whether you know more than them, it’s whether or not you can solve a problem they can’t. So we’ve got to put ourselves in the shoes of our partner and ask: Can I solve a problem they can’t?
Maybe they can’t do a particular property development because they don’t have the time, they don’t have the resources, they don’t have the knowledge. Their money is sitting there idle, it’s doing nothing.
So the problem is how do we get their money to work? If we can build the know, like and trust factor where they actually understand what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, that we’ve done our homework, that we’ve done everything humanly possible to de-risk it, people will back you if you can solve their problem. Everyone has to do deal number one.
We have to stop making it about us, and start making it about them: What’s their problem, how do I solve it? That’s the secret. Successful property developers focus on solving problems for investors, money partners and joint venture partners.
When you run multiple deals at the same time you’re accelerating your growth and you’re accelerating your profit.
Let’s say I can do three deals at a time but it takes me six months to find a deal and the deal takes two years to run.
So I get into a deal today, and six months later I get into another deal so I’m now running two projects, then six months later I get into a third deal. The first deal is half way through. Six months later I’m now getting into my fourth deal and the first deal is about to exit. If I had a 50% profit share in each of those deals I would have four lots of 50% which is much better than one lot of 100%.
Plus you’ve gained all of that experience and you’ve likely stepped up in deal size. Once you’ve got deal number one, you can show investor number two what you’re already doing. It becomes exponentially easier as you’re running more deals to get more investors as you’ve got more to demonstrate even though most of them haven’t finished yet. You’re seeing activity happening on site, all the good stuff, all the wow factor is there.
Our free 7 Step Development FORMULA course is a great starting point if you want to understand how property development partnerships, deal structuring and joint ventures actually work in the real world.
When you partner up, keep in mind you want to find someone who complements your skills. Assess potential partners and figure out their points of weakness so you can step in and fill the gap.
So for me, the bottom line is clear: if you want to scale up your property development, you need to partner up.
I’m going to borrow from Steve Jobs for my closing statement:
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
This age-old proverb is a brilliant one to remind us of the difference between flying solo and moving forward as a team.
Yes, absolutely, you can do property development on your own, especially smaller scale projects. But when it comes to scaling up, my advice is to partner up.
You’ll often hear me say 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing. If I had to pick one thing that gets in the way of people moving forward with their property development goals it would be procrastination born from trying to go it alone. The same thing happens when we make a resolution to get fit and try to do it solo. It’s hard work hauling ourselves out of bed at 6am in order to get to the gym or boot camp before work, when we’d rather hit the snooze button. It’s hard work going for a jog in the evening when all you really want to do is pour a glass of wine and slump in front of the TV.
On the flipside, if we’ve got a buddy or two to join us on the journey, suddenly your motivation increases. You’re accountable. You’re not only relying on your own self-discipline, you’re able to double down with help from a friend.
Likewise, when it comes to property development, teaming up with one or more partners not only improves your momentum, it also doubles or triples or quadruples the available skill set. Joint venture property development partnerships can dramatically accelerate both growth and learning.
If we’re trying to do it alone we’re ultimately limited by our own resources, which means giving ourselves glass ceilings in terms of how far we can go with our own skills and our own financial resources. If we bring others in, potentially bringing in other skills and financial backing, we broaden the scope of what is physically possible.
Even when you’ve got plenty of your own money there are still plenty of advantages to forming a partnership. If you go into a property investment deal alone, using all your funds in that deal, you’re stuck in that deal until it’s done. That means if another great deal comes along you probably won’t be in a position to jump on it. On the other hand, if you’ve partnered with someone you may be able to run multiple projects in parallel.
Because what I find happens is once you’ve gotten over the mental roadblock of “I can’t find a deal” you’ll suddenly have a whole lot more deals in the pipeline.
This gives you a quality problem: which property development deal to take on?
And that’s what we’re looking for: better quality problems. You can never avoid problems entirely but you can improve the quality of the problem you face.
You start with I don’t have a strategy…
Then you face the problem of where to learn the strategy you choose…the Property Development Formula could be exactly the course you're looking for...
Next you learn where to farm your property development strategy…
Then how to negotiate a deal…
Then how to fund the deal…
Until finally you’ve got the quality problem of what to spend your cash on.
When you get to this point, you can achieve more.
Everyone’s got this perception that no one will invest in me until I’ve done a development. If I haven’t proven myself, no one will want to hand over funding. As a result they never do anything.
Way back in my IT days, I was getting paid a ridiculous hourly rate by the people that were engaging me and in many instances the people that were engaging me knew more about the topic than I did. So I was getting paid crazy dollars an hour to solve these IT problems when the person on the other side of the table was smarter than me. So I was really struggling with imposter syndrome.
But my boss put it very clearly to me: it’s not about whether you know more than them, it’s whether or not you can solve a problem they can’t. So we’ve got to put ourselves in the shoes of our partner and ask: Can I solve a problem they can’t?
Maybe they can’t do a particular property development because they don’t have the time, they don’t have the resources, they don’t have the knowledge. Their money is sitting there idle, it’s doing nothing.So the problem is how do we get their money to work? If we can build the know, like and trust factor where they actually understand what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, that we’ve done our homework, that we’ve done everything humanly possible to de-risk it, people will back you if you can solve their problem. Everyone has to do deal number one.
We have to stop making it about us, and start making it about them: What’s their problem, how do I solve it? That’s the secret. Successful property developers focus on solving problems for investors, money partners and joint venture partners.
When you run multiple deals at the same time you’re accelerating your growth and you’re accelerating your profit.
Let’s say I can do three deals at a time but it takes me six months to find a deal and the deal takes two years to run.
So I get into a deal today, and six months later I get into another deal so I’m now running two projects, then six months later I get into a third deal. The first deal is half way through. Six months later I’m now getting into my fourth deal and the first deal is about to exit. If I had a 50% profit share in each of those deals I would have four lots of 50% which is much better than one lot of 100%.
Plus you’ve gained all of that experience and you’ve likely stepped up in deal size. Once you’ve got deal number one, you can show investor number two what you’re already doing. It becomes exponentially easier as you’re running more deals to get more investors as you’ve got more to demonstrate even though most of them haven’t finished yet. You’re seeing activity happening on site, all the good stuff, all the wow factor is there.
Our free 7 Step Development FORMULA course is a great starting point if you want to understand how property development partnerships, deal structuring and joint ventures actually work in the real world.
When you partner up, keep in mind you want to find someone who complements your skills. Assess potential partners and figure out their points of weakness so you can step in and fill the gap.
So for me, the bottom line is clear: if you want to scale up your property development, you need to partner up.
I’m going to borrow from Steve Jobs for my closing statement:
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
