Chris Prefontaine breaks down five excuses that stop real estate investors from acting: cost, doubt it'll work, waiting for the right time, thinking it's too hard, and not having time. He reframes each one with personal stories and shows how resourcefulness, reaching out to experts, and cutting low-value tasks actually remove these blocks.
Chapters
How about you do something differently in 2026 or whenever it is that you're seeing this, and that is strip away all the real or perceived— most of them are perceived— objections to you doing what you know you'd love to do and you know would change your life, but you just haven't done it yet for a myriad of reasons. Hey, it's Chris Prefontaine. Welcome to this week's Motivational Monday. You know, we were going over some things at our last boot camp, and I thought it'd be worthy of a Motivational Monday because I don't care if you're talking about these points I'm about to share with you inside of our SMART community, or I actually— I don't even care if it's in real estate in general. I'm going to suggest that there are many of us that have things that we know with absolute certainty if we did it, it would change our lives. And we know with absolute certainty if we did it, it would change our family's lives. And we know with absolute certainty if we did it, We'd be happier because of it. But there are things that hold us back. I listed here like, I don't know, 5 or 6 things in no particular order that I know are holding people back. So it's kind of like thinking about a fresh start. See if any of these has ever in your lifetime with respect to a decision hit you between the eyes. Okay. So number one, the cost of something, right? Think about this. What if Instead of thinking cost, you thought return on investment because the cost is irrelevant. If you think about it, think about this for 1 second. If I said to you, hey, I'm going to— I've done this in audiences all the time at our events. I say, okay, I got a $100 bill here or I got 2 $100 bills here. If somebody can come up with a $100 bill right now, I'll give you $200. That's a guaranteed 100% return on your money, right? People rush to the stage. Literally, I've seen some crazy things. Why? Because they knew with certainty that their return on investment was double. Well, in so many coaching programs with the right alignment, and in our case, I'm biased, I think we have the great alignment for a lot of you there. Double is an understatement. It's insane. There's infinite value available. We have a gentleman, for example, that tied up 8 properties on lease purchase with $10 each written in our contracts and created 3 paydays worth $838,000. Will you think about that for just half a second? It's infinite return. It's not even— you can't even put a number on it because half the time he wasn't even putting the $10 deposit down on the lease purchase. So my point is, flip your thinking when you look at something. So yeah, but the cost— instead think, what's my return on investment ultimately? And if that's the case and I know with certainty, or if I make believe it's with certainty until I get help to make that happen, then I'm going to just find a way to do it and get resourceful. Like when I was broke, and I wanted to join a mastermind. This was after the crash and I wanted to join a mastermind group. I called around, I'm like, I can crush this, but I need someone to pay for it so that I then can do some deals and I can return that 100%, 100% return. That's what I did. I got resourceful. Okay, so that's just number one. Number 2, we get in our way with, well, it might not work for me. It worked for so-and-so, but it might not work for me or it might not work in my area. Guys, nobody's luckier. Nobody's better. Nobody's got a higher skill set that you can't learn. Nobody. So the won't work thing is that is a perceived one. Okay. Number 3. And again, these aren't in any particular order. I can wait. This one cripples people. I can wait. Like when I get this done. I listed on a whiteboard once— I'm pointing to the room at one of our other Trenches boot camps, which, by the way, you should definitely attend. Inthetrenchesbootcamp.com. I listed on the board by day 3 all the things I heard in the room. I'm going to do it when I get this done. I'm going to do it when my kids are done school. I'm going to do it when my kids start school. I'm going to do it when I get done my roof. I'm going to do it. And I listed them all out. I said, this is crazy, guys. You're always going to have things that you think are in the way so that you can wait. And as you wait, you're drifting backwards because progress is so fast now in every shape, form, or fashion. You're drifting backwards while others are excelling. So the I can wait thing is costing you Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars. I can tell you, coming out of the crash, I waited in my brain because I was beating myself up from February of '08 to February of '12. And that waiting cost me millions of dollars. Millions. So you got to take that right off the table. That's a real inner perceived— okay, in my opinion, I think I'm on number 4. Too difficult comes up a lot. Well, too difficult relative to what? You can learn the skill set. All you got to do is reach out to someone that has done it. I said on a recent Motivation Monday, I had Rod Cleef on my show recently on the Smart Real Estate Coach podcast. By the way, you can subscribe to that on any of your podcast platforms. Smartrealestatecoachpodcast.com is where it lives. But I had Rod on the show and we were talking about this and we talked about the fact that he's got, you know, 40-something years in commercial. I've got 35 years in what I do in a mix of real estate. And we thought this— we both were saying a lot on the, on the, on the episode. You can listen to it. It came out on April 1st. We were saying, man, why don't people just like, no matter where they are in life, reach out to someone that's a specialty in that area, right? In that profession, that niche, in that whatever. I don't care if you can open a restaurant and then learn from them. It's not too difficult. It was too difficult for them at one point. There are people that have the decades of experience that we do that you can just reach out to. So it's not too difficult unless you make it. Okay. Time. This is the last one. I'll leave you with this one. Time is a biggie because we all have the same 24 hours, right? Yet, well, I hear people all the time. We do strategy calls. Our sales team and our strategy team does calls and be like, they'll put notes in the CRM saying, oh, so-and-so got all these things going on. I said, let me talk to them. I get it. I had creditors chasing me and during the coming out of that crash of '08, I had IRS, I had repossessions, I had all that going on. I couldn't say, well, I was too busy because your, your, your life and your family and your creditors don't care. What they care about is the end result. We can make time. What we might want to all reconsider with this, with this Motivational Monday ending in a second here is why don't we Look at what we can remove from our schedule. If you're saying you don't have time, what can you stop doing? Not sure where to get started? Go to smartrealestatecoach.com/getgoing for free books, strategy calls, and a whole bunch more. We're going to help you get going the wicked smart way. We've been after this for over a decade doing exactly that. Like, let's add this, let's add this discipline, let's add this new habit. Great. What can you take away? What can you— my wife calls— my wife Kim calls it, what can you subtract? She talked to one of our high 6 associates recently and helped her out with some things. And when I get home, she said, I asked her to think about what she can subtract from her life. Is that a cool thought? Because we're always trying to add. Subtract. You'll open yourself to attract more. You'll open yourself up to stop saying you don't have time, and you open yourself up to bigger, better, more productive, more fun, more profitable opportunities. I hope that helps you guys. There's nothing, nothing, nothing that should stop you from having absolute breakthrough levels in real estate. And it's your choice. And if you want to talk with me personally, let me just put my personal email out there. My company email. Yes, I'll answer it. Chris, Chris@SmartRealEstateCoach.com. I just stripped 5, 4 or 5 things from perceived blocks. Let's now you and I get together, talk about where you are, Talk about ideally where you'd like to be if you could wave a wand and nobody's stopping you. You don't have any of these perceived blocks. And then let you and I talk about these things in the middle that might still be there. I just gave you 4 or 5. I hope I stripped them. But how about let's talk about what other blocks you think are in the way to you having huge success so that in 3 years, which will be just like that, right? It's a blink. I think we'll all agree that the last 3 years flew by. And I don't think we'd all be excited if we're at the same exact spot we are now in 3 years. So let's have that conversation. You and I email me, chris@smartrealestatecoach.com. In the subject line, said, you said to contact you and let's get on the phone. Look forward to it. Let's see who's committed to get that done.
