Robert Kiyosaki, Grant Cardone Graham Steffen, Ken McElroy. What are all these guys have in common? Well, they're all real estate investors, and they're all super successful.
I learned from these guys as much as possible and so should you, so I put together some key lessons:
Robert Kiyosaki – Be Do Have
I love Robert Kiyosaki. Obviously, he wrote the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. What I love about him in general, and the book specifically, is that it bends your mind. It develops your mindset and introduces this whole idea about financial freedom and passive income, which influences all of our lives.
I love one of his philosophies that's not directly in his book. It's the idea of Be Do Have. We all know that in order to have something, we have to do something. That's common sense to us. But B comes before those things, meaning that you have to become someone that enables you to do something so that you can have something.
A lot of us just start doing something, but we're not ready for it. Our mindset is not there, our character is not there. So, who do you need to become to become a better investor? Who do you need to become to be more generous? Who do you need to become in order to have a better relationships? Really focus on that, on the being part, which is part of the journey as well as part of preparing your mindset.
I used to discount talk of mindset, but I no longer do. I spent a lot of time creating clarity. That's why I practice the Miracle Morning, Hal book. The Miracle Morning is super powerful and helps you work on that being part and getting very clear about what you want in life and what you don't want in life.
Grant Cardone – Be Aggressive Without Being Stupid
I love Grant Cardone. He is over the top,10x everything. One of the things he says a lot is, The biggest mistake when buying real estate is when you're not buying real estate. He says, Buy real estate, don't be an idiot. If you're not buying right now, it's because you don't know what you're doing. So it's a major cop out to say, Oh, well, market is too hot right now we can't find we can find good deals.
He's not wrong. If you're not buying right now, it means that you don't know what you're doing right now. So, it's just a matter of educating yourself, knowing more about the asset class, knowing the financials, knowing how to analyze deals, having advisors around you, like property managers who can advise you.
There are two reasons that some people get themselves in trouble:
- They overestimate the income and underestimate the expenses.
- They're super conservative and as a result, nothing ever pencils because they're looking to eliminate the risk in real estate, and we're actually not in the risk avoidance business. We're in the risk management business, meaning that we take on risk, we just want to manage that risk. So if you're super conservative, you're never going to lose money, but you're not going to make money either.
So I love that Grant teaches being aggressive without being stupid.
Graham Stephan – Never Fall in Love With An Investment
Graham Stephan is great with personal finance and finance in general. He's also a real estate investor, and he's big about making money when you buy. He says you're either buying a cash flow, or buying equity or better yet, a combination of the two, which of course is perfect for for real estate. He also says, never fall in love with an investment. Sometimes you come across a deal – a house, or an apartment building. You visit and it's in a great neighborhood, the weather's nice, the birds are chirping. You spend little time there and then you start crunching the numbers. You realize the deal is not great, but it's a beautiful property and you started talking yourself into it.
Don't fall in love with a property. Focus on the numbers and make sure cash flows. That's the key. Don't get in a situation thinking you're going to fix up a property and make a cash flow. Make sure the cash flows first, then you can make it flow more.
Ken McElroy – Avoid the Temptation of Fast Money
Ken McElroy says, flipping homes won't make you wealthy. I couldn't agree more. You can make flip money flipping homes, and this is what I've done, but there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. You can make money by flipping houses, but you're not creating wealth.
When I was flipping houses, I made money, but I wasn't creating wealth, because when I wasn't buying, fixing and selling houses, I wasn't making money. When I stopped that the money would stop flowing.
Ken's advice, which I agree with, is focus on the cash flow from the start and ignore the temptation of fast money.
Build Your Platform
So, why is it that Robert Kiyosaki can sell millions of books and Grant Cardone can raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and Graham Stephen has 3.4 million YouTube subscribers?
The last lesson from all these guys is that you need to start paying attention to building a platform. You might think that you are a real estate investor. In fact you are, but you have to start thinking about your online presence, because the big boys play online. That's how you scale your syndication business. That's how you raise more and more money. That's how Grant does it. That's how Ken McElroy does it. That's how we do it.
They all started by paying attention to building their platform.
