Finding your Freedom Formula

It’s always a good time to reset your strategy and make sure that your property business is taking you on the path towards the life that you are dreaming of.

Because ultimately, building a property portfolio isn’t just about deals or numbers. It’s about creating a life that gives you freedom and choice.

And when I talk about freedom, I don’t just mean Financial Freedom.

Don’t get me wrong, financial freedom is great. But being financially free does not automatically equal time freedom. And even once you achieve financial and time freedom… that still doesn’t mean you have TOTAL freedom.

Over the last few years, we discovered there is a third part of the freedom formula that most investors completely overlook:

Emotional Freedom.

The ability to run your business without constant stress, overwhelm, or feeling chained to it.

This blog post will be drawing not only from my experience of having done £16M+ deals, raised over £6M+ in private finance, but also from mentoring over 100 property investors worth collectively over £150M on their strategies – all brought together as monthly insights to inspire you to create the property business that will serve you and your goals.  

I’ve personally gone from the feeling of dread at having to go back to work on Monday at the end of a week of annual leave in 2013, to scraping together the 15% deposit for the first £108,500 property in 2014, to over 100 properties owned & managed and having developed the holiday every 6 weeks life. And right now? We are currently in Thailand on a month-long tour of Asia – including visits to Hong Kong and the Philippines to meet up with clients, friends and even our virtual team (who we’ve never met in real life before!), all whilst continuing to run and grow our businesses back in the UK. 

Sounds great right?  

Yes, BUT! There have been some (actually many!) very painful and challenging times along the way to getting here - it has not been plain sailing. I’ve even considered giving up on multiple occasions.  Which is why I’m sitting here on a sun lounger in Chiang Mai writing this for you - because I wish I’d heard these lessons back in 2014/15. If I’d known the challenges, the honest, no fluff, TRUTH about the road ahead –  it would have made the path much clearer and more joyful.  

So if you are currently working 80+ hours a week, juggling a never-ending to-do list, stuck in the nitty gritty of so many operational tasks... And feeling chained to your investment area because there are so many problems that need you to solve them! This is for you.  

THE PROBLEM WE ALL FACE 

Sourcing. Viewings. Analysis. New opportunities. Social media. Investor meetings. Bookkeeping. Filing accounts. Networking. Emails. Phone calls… gaaaah!!! The to-do list goes on and on and on.  

 Running a property business. It’s all about the ‘passive income,’ right?! Except, you might be thinking… WHAT PART OF THIS IS PASSIVE?!  

Well congratulations! You’ve reached the next phase in this bonkers journey of building a property business… I know it doesn’t feel great right now, but know this… you have to get to this point (even for a short time) in order to be ready to shift gears into the next level.      

Here are 3 things I’ve learnt… 

1. There will always be too much to do. Stop beating yourself up for not completing your list, and just make sure that you are prioritising doing the stuff that actually matters  

2. There’s a load of stuff on your list that you don’t actually need to do! You just can’t see which tasks right now. Getting through the to-do list starts not by ‘ticking off’ more things… but by removing certain tasks entirely.  

3. You think you need to systemise & hire - but that’s not it either. If you try to systemise and hire when you don’t have a clear focused strategy, it will be a huge undertaking that will suck your time and distract you from raising finance and securing deals (the income generating tasks). 

   
GETTING READY FOR THE NEXT STAGE 

So, to get your business ready for this, it’s time to…  

• Streamline what opportunities you focus on and start saying NO more  

• Create more (head)space for your income generating tasks by taking a hatchet to all those ‘seem-important-but-are-actually-just-a-distraction’ tasks  

• Get comfortable living at the border of order and chaos! Where you are laser focused in your approach, but ok with not doing things perfectly 

I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s not an easy stage to be in – but everyone has to go through it. It’s just a question of how fast you can move through it. And there’s a way to speed up this stage so that you minimise the amount of time you spend in it.  

And that is FOCUS!   

Be careful about starting another new thing in order to solve your current challenges (be ever wary of the shiny penny syndrome!). Instead, focus on solving the problem you face with your current property strategy (what I call a business model).  There will never be enough time to do everything you want to do but there is always enough time for what really matters - you just need to make an informed decision about what matters and then ruthlessly PRIORITISE IT.  

In 2020, our first ever Business Coach introduced us to a friend of his as “the clients who bought £7M+ of property in the last 6 years".  The reaction was "Wow, so your Coach is the reason you guys own so much property?!"  I remember it vividly because (weirdly) the answer was "No."  

If we hadn't worked with him, and instead followed the actions and advice of others around us, we’d actually have bought more property in that timeframe! And whilst this may sound like a negative thing... it was actually a HUGELY POSITIVE thing for us... Because yes, we'd have done a load more deals, BUT alongside this we would have been...  

Chained to our desks. Working evenings and weekends. Overwhelmed. Overweight (from all the convenience eating and not prioritising our health). Doing everything ourselves. Not going on holiday! 

Not only that but there would have been LESS MONEY! Because we’d have been making more mistakes by throwing ourselves into the wrong projects that we didn’t have the knowledge/experience to do, and because we would have been much less efficient from an operational and financial perspective.  

We’d have been doing MORE but making LESS.  

I am so grateful that we shifted our focus away from thinking we were ‘just buying property’ to building a property business. And I’m so glad that this in turn ensured our business was always headed towards our north star of freedom to travel the world.  

 That shift in thinking is what put us on the path to creating a Consistent, Replicable, Scalable Process for DOING MORE DEALS, which is most importantly... Not dependent on our constant involvement!     

Which has in turn freed us to work from anywhere, go on lots of holidays (and yes, you read that right… every 6 weeks minimum), and never having to work on evenings or weekends.  

So yes, we "only" did £7M of deals between 2014-2020... But we did it with ruthless efficiency, and a systemised approach (much more time efficient than systemising!) so that we could continue to DO MORE DEALS whilst travelling the world for most of the year. And that in turn laid the foundations for the following 3 years where we did another £9M of deals and more months of travelling than our wildest dreams could have imagined.  

FINDING YOUR FREEDOM FORMULA: QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF 

• Why are YOU investing in property?  

•  Are you focused enough so that you can take the path of least resistance towards freedom?  

•  Are your weekly/monthly priorities for where your time is going aligned with what is REALLY most important?  

What you can expect from me over the months ahead are open, honest insights that you can implement in your property business so that you can move yourself towards the FREEDOM & CHOICE to be not just financially free, but also have total time freedom, complete location freedom… and ultimate emotional freedom.   

To doing more deals and going on holiday every 6 weeks 😉  

Love & sunshine from Thailand, Jackie x