I attended the Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within seminar, and one of my biggest takeaways was the Ultimate Success Formula. If you reflect on anything you’ve accomplished in your life, no matter how big or small, I can guarantee you that you followed this formula.
What follows is the outline of the five-step formula and how it can be used for finding deals and private money. However, it can also be easily applied to any business, personal, relationship, fitness, or overall lifestyle goal you pursue.
First, know what you want. Clarity is power, so you be as specific and detailed as possible.
As apartment syndicators, our outcome will be a desired annual income. To be as specific as possible, determine the exact amount of money you need to raise to achieve your annual income goal. Let’s say your goal is to make $100,000 this year. One of the primary ways apartment syndicators make money is with an acquisition fee. The standard fee collected at closing is 2% of the purchase price. To get a $100,000 acquisition fee, you’ll need to close on $5 million worth of apartment buildings. Generally, the amount of equity required to close, including the down payment and closing fee, is 30%. 30% of $5 million is $1.5 million. Therefore, to achieve a goal of $100,000, you will need to raise $1.5 million.
With this approach, instead of having a vague goal, you’ll know the exact number of leads and amount of investor money you need to attract and can take massive intelligent action (see step 3) to get there.
Tony Robbins says, “Where focus goes, energy flows.” Once you define your outcome and make it your main point of focus, you will begin to — almost automatically — take the right steps and identify the right opportunities to achieve it.
Jim Rohn says, “‘How’ comes second. ‘Why’ comes first.” Now that you know your outcome, before formulating a plan of action for how you’ll achieve it, you need to know the reasons why you want to achieve it. Human beings can do amazing things when they have a strong enough ‘why.’
What are the reasons behind your outcome? Do you want to leave a legacy? Use your earnings to have a positive impact on the world? Set your children up for success? Whatever the reason is, make sure it is consciously understood and articulated.
After defining the ‘what’ and ‘why,’ the ‘how’ is to take action. Not a little bit of action. Not a lot of random action. And not sporadic action. But massive, intelligent, and consistent action.
Massive intelligent action is consistently taking small steps that, when added together, ultimately lead to the realization of an overall goal and vision.
By defining your overall annual income goal, you can reverse engineer the smaller, day-to-day steps required to achieve it. You’ll know how much money you need to raise, which means you’ll need at least that amount in verbal interest from private investors.
You also know how many deals you need to complete to achieve your goal, which means you can calculate the number of leads you need to generate following the 1[00:30:10]:1 lead process. For every 100 leads, 30 will meet your initial investment criteria (number of units, age, location, etc.), 10 will qualify for an offer, and one will be closed on. So, you’ll need to generate at least 100 leads for every transaction. If you’re using direct mail, for example, how many marketing pieces must you send to receive the number of leads required to close on an apartment community that would result in you achieving your annual income goal?
The goal here is to build habits and routines that become second nature so that you not only take massive intelligent action automatically but even begin to crave it.
As you begin to take action toward your goal, it is important to analyze and track your progress. If you aren’t tracking your results, you won’t know if you’re on the right path.
A powerful Tony Robbins anecdote is about two different boats starting at the same point. One boat continues to the destination while the other veers off by just one degree. A few hours later, the two boats are miles apart. Applied to apartment investing, if you are slightly off-track at the start of your journey, the longer you go without recognizing the error, the more off course you’ll be AND the more effort it will require to get you back on track.
So, you should routinely check in and see if your massive action is getting you closer or farther away from your money-raising and lead-generation goal.
Based on your routine check-ins, you may need to make adjustments to get yourself back on course. Or, you may see great results with a certain approach for a while, but it may begin to taper off and plateau, putting you in a rut. When faced with either one of these situations, celebrate the fact that you had the awareness to identify the error and then change your approach.
Don’t just take my word or Tony’s word for the power of this success formula. Here are four inspirational examples of people who set out to achieve a certain outcome, faced adversity and barriers, changed their approach, and ultimately reached a level of success far above that which they initially set out to achieve.
At 22 years old, Walt Disney was fired from a Missouri newspaper for “not being creative enough.” One of his early entrepreneurial ventures, Laugh-O-Gram studios, went bankrupt after only two years (but Walt did later credit his time at Laugh-O-Gram as the inspiration to create Mickey Mouse). Also, he was denied by 302 banks for a loan to start Disneyland because he “lacked originality.”
But, by the end of his career, he won a record 22 Academy Awards and was in the process of opening his second theme park, Disney World. Today, the Walt Disney Company holds over $92 billion in assets with a market capitalization of roughly $150 million.
Michael Jordan was CUT from his high school basketball team, before going on to win an NCAA championship and six NBA championships and finals MVPs. He once famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan is also a branding wizard. Between his shoes, the highest-grossing basketball film of all time (Space Jam), and his part ownership of the Charlotte Hornets, MJ became the first billionaire NBA player in history, with a current net worth of $1.39 billion.
Stephen King is an uber-successful author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy, selling over 350 million book copies and having many books adapted into featured films, including the number-one ranked movie on IMDB, Shawshank Redemption.
But did you know that when he was 20, his manuscript for Carrie was rejected by 30 publishers? One publisher said, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” He actually threw the manuscript in the trash before it was retrieved by his wife, who convinced him to resubmit it. Once published, the paperback sold over one million copies in its first year; the rest is history.
In 1955, at the age of 65, Harland Sanders, who was a retiree collecting $105 a month in social security, decided to attempt to franchise his secret Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. He traveled the country looking for a restaurant interested in his recipe, often sleeping in the back of his car. After 1,009 rejections, he finally found a taker. By 1964, 600 franchises were selling his chicken recipe, and by 1976, he was ranked as the world’s second most recognizable celebrity. By the time of his death, there were 6,000 KFCs across 48 countries with $2 billion in annual sales.
There isn’t a cookie-cutter strategy for being a successful apartment syndicator. We are all investing in different markets and asset sizes with different investors, and we all have different unique talents, strengths, weaknesses, and skills. You’ll need to find the techniques that are ideal for your particular situation.
Once you’ve defined your outcome, articulated your ‘why,’ and begun taking massive action, analyze your results. Keep doing the things that are working and try out new things for those that aren’t.
About the Author:
Joe Fairless is the co-founder of Ashcroft Capital, a fully integrated multifamily investment firm with more than $2.7 billion in assets under management, and the founder of Best Ever CRE. His podcast, the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show, is the world's longest-running daily real estate podcast with more than 500,000 monthly downloads.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.