How To Find And Manage Hot BMV Property Deals In Minutes! w/ Guillaume Black | WealthBuilders

Welcome to episode 192 of Wealth Talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director for Wealth Builders. And back with us this week is Mr. Kevin Whelan, our founder. How you doing, Kevin?

I'm doing well, Chris, and it's good to be with you again. And I think you did a great job in your compilations of various podcasts that are themed and I think that was a great idea because I suppose we all live busy lives and we don't want to randomly walk through 192 episodes of podcasts. As good as it as they are, Chris. As good as they are you. It's good to be able to focus, say, hey, I'm interested in property, I'm interested in business, whatever pillar you may be interested in. Then you pointed them in the right direction. Did a great job. So that was great. And that gave me a little bit of time to.

Yeah, yeah.

What else have you been up to in, in that time, Kevin?

I did a little bit of a tour around Scandinavian countries. Just thought it, you know, it'd be a real good thing to do and really enjoyed it and went to Copenhagen and then to Gothenburg and to Stockholm and my wife loves abba. So we went in expecting and we came out dancing. It was great, you know, is it, it was a fun place to do some observations as always. And it's interesting that some observations you make in countries can frame a business, can't they, Chris, as we'll hear from our guest today. But I, I've got some fascinating insights on my Scandinavian trip. And by the way, Chris, you know that I've studied French and I've studied Spanish and my English isn't too bad, but I found my Danish wasn't, wasn't as good. I tried a few words and my, my favorite words in Danish, right, is which means strawberries and cream, right?

Okay.

So, you know, I do try, I do like to give it a go. But you know, in Sweden and in Denmark they teach kids English from the age of seven, so they are just brilliant at it. By the time they get to 18, know everybody speaks English and they don't let you speak any other, any other language. So it's not like the French. You know, you go, go to France, you don't try. They look down their nose at you, certainly in Paris, but they're just a lovely, lovely group of people. I enjoyed my time there very much and I noticed one thing which caught me out. So I got a bit of a wealth building lesson there.

Chris.

Okay, yeah, tell us, please.

So, so I went there thinking, well, you know, I might as well load up on a bit of currency because I hate the banks taking money out of my money just because I, you know, make a transaction. So, so I, I took a healthy amount of both Danish and Swedish krona. I couldn't spend a bloody penny. Couldn't spend a kroner. Could not spend it. Because they're virtually cashless. Yeah, they would. You couldn't get a cup of coffee. They would not let you pay with cash. So I've got, you know, I'm. Do you remember that comedic sketch going back years? Loads of money.

Yes, I do. Harry and Field, eh?

Harry and your Watch out of water crow. Loads of money. Have a coffee. Wouldn't spend a thing.

No.

Anyway, but joke, joking aside, it just sort of made me realize that different countries give you different lessons. And in Denmark and in Sweden, they are brought up to know that there's so few people speak those Germanic languages. I mean, their base is Germanic, that they have to speak English and fair play to them. And as a result of that, you know, they, they can go really wherever they want to, whereas English speaking. So they, they often do that in the same ways Australians and New Zealanders often do that. But the, the thing that on the cashless side was interesting for me was how are the kids in Sweden and Denmark going to get to understand the true value of money, you know, notes and coins? Okay, they're getting less these days, but of course, they're the very foundation on which we learn and make me think more about the Wealth Builders Families program and bring in some tools and lessons to help parents show kids and help do like basic maths. You know, here's some money in a. And a game they can play with your children. And what's the change so that they actually feel and touch money in a way that they don't do in. In other countries. I just don't like the idea that somehow kids can assume literally money is available on tap. And I mean tap, a different kind of tap, obviously. Just, here we go, tap. Here we go, tap. And I think it removes the, the sense of value. And, and I'd like to make sure as part of our resources, Chris, we, we use some coins and notes in our teachings for the younger children so that they get to understand that money is based on notes and coins in circulation. But, you know, fascinating trip and thanks for asking about that. And I think what's interesting in our guests today is the observation that in different countries, while the wealth building principles apply Wherever you live in the world, we won't be translating them into Swedish, I'm sure. So we'll, we'll keep the wealth builder principles alive. However, I think it's important to stress that in some other countries, the way the practical operation of certain rules and legals work can, can make you have to change your, your approach completely. And we saw that with our guest today, who's Guillaume Black, who's a. A French guy who's built a business in the UK now, and I've shared a stage with him on more than one occasion actually now. And I have to say I'm very impressed with Guillaume. I'm always in awe of anybody who creates a business in a country where it's not their first language. Just completely in awe. But done a fantastic job and you did a great job in pulling out the lessons from his experience in building his business, Property Filter here in the uk. And just a quick note before we listen to his interview, just want to congratulate him as well on the birth of his new baby, Elea. What a beautiful name as well. So congrats to him and his partner and congrats to you for looking after the shop while I was Scandinavian about. And hopefully we get some good value from our guest today.

Yeah, yeah, we will indeed. And, and I can say Guillaume also had very, very kind words to say about you too as well, Kevin. So anyway, enough of the platitudes. So let's get to our interview today with Guillaume Black, who is the CEO of Property Filter. And Guillaume's created online software really help property investors find and manage more deals. And especially if you're someone who likes to find motivated sellers, I think you're really going to enjoy the conversation today. So let's head on over to our conversation with Guillaume Black. Guillaume, welcome to Wealth Talk today. How are you?

Very good. Thanks a lot for having me, Chris.

Yeah, no, it's really, really a pleasure to have you here. And I think we're going to be talking about something that our listeners will be very, very interested today. And at the heart of it, it's just about how can we get more deals. So if you're a property investor and you're listening now, stay tuned because Guillaume has come up with something very exciting. So let me hand it over to you just to give a little bit of background about yourself and your company. Guillaume.

Yeah, so I'm Guillaume Black. I'm the CEO and co founder at PropertyFilter, and we help decisive investors excel at finding deals. We built basically an online Platform which is all about finding deals, identifying motivated sellers and a framework for you to convert really hot leads into great deals. And we've built it in a way so that very predictably you can have an endless supply of deals. So if you're in property, you can't not see this because it's where all the deals are. And ultimately the way we are disrupting the market, more and more people are jumping on it. You don't want to miss the boat. Basically it's going to be quite a game changer for you if you want to scale, grow and have a predictable pipeline of good quality leads and deals.

Yeah, we've just used that word predictable, which is a key thing that we talk about at wealth builders is creating predictable streams of recurring income. And whilst we're focusing, I guess primarily on property today, we're also of course looking at the business pillar because you've built a really fantastic business here. But also we can touch on some of the other pillars that you're leveraging as well and show how, you know, all of these converge to help someone build that long term wealth. So let's, before we get into the details of what property filter is and how it helps people, Guillaume, let's look at the run in. How did it come about? What were you doing before you started this business?

Yeah, so for 10 years I was an engineer. I was in charge of multimillion pound construction projects, building world record bridges and things like that. I realized my childhood dream as a career. But then you know, like, you know, be careful what you wish for sometimes and you know, it's the novelty of traveling and things faded away with the lack of work, life balance. And I started to look at things, you know, like the type of content the wealth builders are putting out and things like that. Like that. And surely there was a, there was another way. For me, I've been doing stuff in property since 2012 so I did like bound conversions and some flats in France didn't make a nickel out of them because I had no idea what I was doing. There's no interest, only mortgages, you can't refinance. Basically the refurb that I did cost more than the value of the property at the end. The kind of stuff you do when you don't know what you're in my hometown village and where there's no demand and stuff like that. So did quite a few mistakes in property but still was working. Then I moved to UK in 2016, kept on doing the same work, kept on traveling around the uk, England, Wales and stuff like that. But then really was looking for something outside of my job because surely I couldn't be doing what I was doing in the long run. And I always liked property. It's why I was attracted to it back in 2012 because I'm a very concrete and practical guy. So it's why studying engineering, I went into bridges and, and the construction and adding, you know, seeing and what the reason why I love properties is, the reason why I had this job in the first place is you see progress, you see, I like the refurb, I like managing projects and that's why I got into property in the first place. But the reality is that I was working 60 hours a week for my day job and then on the side of that, you know, I was trying, you know, starting this side hustle of property and you know, it didn't matter how much. I would wake up at 5:00am, you know, to look for properties, book the viewings during the lunchtime and then stack them on the weekends. The reality is that I really struggle to find deals and what we find later on is that it's a, you know, it's the number one skill you need as a property investor. If you can't find deals, you know, I mean it's, it's a non starter, quite frankly, you probably can buy your one property and then you're stuck, you know, so you need really good quality deals for you to keep the momentum going, for you to keep on adding value. And I really struggled because what I was doing was scrolling through the portals, which is the main source of properties, randomly booking viewings based on the pictures, the layout, only to find myself stacking those viewings on the weekend, week after week, speaking with vendors who were not motivated because I could only do four or five viewings a week. And this is not enough to get lucky if you like. So week after week I would just delay my property progress by a week. And it took me 18 months of not achieving anything to, you know, like to think to myself, there's got to be a better way. So we started to build a little. So a friend of mine got on board on the property side and we asked his brother, you know, can you, which is like a techie guy, can you do a bit of thing for us where we just want to see motivated sellers? We just want to go and view properties where they are signed and the seller is going to be motivated. Initially it was a very simple system that would qualify viewings. We will only view properties if the sale have fallen through multiple times. If there were multiple reductions, if it was listed with multiple agents, if it was an indication that there was a problem, basically because it was for sale for less than what it last sold or things like that. At the beginning it was just our own thing for us. And it didn't have a name, no branding or anything. It was low software. And fast forward 18 months or 18 months of me not really achieving anything, despite doing all the right things. And most people put all the efforts, surround themselves with the right people, get the knowledge with the likes of you guys. But then it's really hard to get the initial traction and then 18 months basically of struggling. And then there was a true before and after when we had what is now Property Filter. Fast forward another 18 months and I was full time in property. I left my career and my executive job at this bridge building company that I've been working for for 10 years basically. So yeah, there was a real before and after. It's called Property Filter now, not Property Finder. Because the biggest problem we have is that there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of properties out there, but how do you filter out all the noise? 90% of what's on the market is a waste of time. So how do you go straight with the low, straight to the low hanging fruits, straight to those conversations where the vendor is going to be motivated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fantastic story there of the transition from employed to entrepreneur. And I think the biggest thing is the time, isn't it? And we speak to people every day and when we ask them, you know, what is it that's really driving you to want to build wealth? And almost always it's more time. And you know, it's the one thing we all know that, you know, we can't get any more of. And, and how much time you're saving here for people is just incredible. You've shown me the software, you know, I've seen just how powerful it is and I'm excited actually for, for everyone listening to, you know, be able to get there kind of hands on it as well. And we'll talk towards the end of how people can do that. But okay, so you talked about a problem, right. And this is typical kind of entrepreneur, isn't it? You know, like you experience a problem and you think, right, okay, can't see anyone else who's solving it, what can I do myself? And I guess you really just were bootstrapping in those early days, weren't you?

Yeah, but so it's interesting you use the word entrepreneur because I was nothing but an entrepreneur. You know, like, imagine a French guy who's, you know, socialist state, you know, kind of education and environment and spend 10, you know, I never. I never had an interview, you know, like, I got my first job. I had an interview at that time, but that was it, you know, like you said, for life, you know. You know that I was probably the opposite of what you would describe as an entrepreneur, you know, and I became so specialist in my. In the company I used to work for that basically I was comfortable, you know, and they couldn't sack me because they needed me too much, you know, so I was really, you know, like, really the opposite of what you would think as an entrepreneur. So all of this was also a journey on the side. So property was one of the vehicle that got me into entrepreneurship. But all of this happened a little, you know, me being a business owner of a tech startup right now, you know, it's not something that was running through my veins, you know, like since I was 12, you know. You know, I think I was 30 when I read Bridge that for poor dad, you know, like, it's not, you know, it's not been in my. In my blood and veins since the beginning. So it was quite a learning.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, then we moved into solving a problem for ourselves, really. And then by accident, it happened that because of the traction we got so quickly after that, it attracts so much attention in our property circles. People ask to, oh, can we have a look at it? And then we started to share it with our property friends, friends of friends, people in our network. And then they started to refer people. And at the beginning it was clunky. We just build it for ourselves. And so the feedback we were getting was, okay, this is interesting, there's something. And we realized that there was nothing quite like it. And there was nothing quite like it because a lot of the things we would find there are software that can give you data, but there's nothing that gives you. Excuse me, nothing that gives you a framework, a actionable framework where. Excuse me, a framework where you would know what you need to do today to progress, what's the next step and the way it's been built is all about what action do we need today, the handful of action to take today to progress. And it's just quite unique in that way. And it's why people start to get results other than us, because you always think there's something special about you, but there isn't. So when Other people start to get more result and success than you. Then when the traction started to kick to kick in, you know, really. And we, we now have more case studies of success, of people finding deals, you know, than, you know, any kind of software, you know, around, around property. So we are in a really good, really good positioning with people doing really well from. From it for where we are now.

Yeah, yeah. Well, considering, you know, the, the company is still relatively young and you know, you've only really just soft launched not that long ago. You've got hundreds of use already. You've got fantastic testimonials. We've talked about the amount of time this is saving. What are some of the other features and benefits that perhaps, you know, if someone went to your website, what is, what are some of the key things that, you know, are really helping people?

Yeah, so this is where, you know, we are engineers and we are not really marketers. So people don't get it sometimes because we are not very good at explaining it. So I'll try to do my best. But it's what you said, you know, like about valuing one's time. So really what we've done is we match and merge hundreds of data sources all in one place in one platform and we've built it under an interface, under a platform that people can use. Is quite simple. And the database we've done is really excellent. It's really above anything else. So it's not metering. This I've heard this from. So we've hired people from, you know, you guys must know about Purple Brick. The guys who founded Purple Brick, they then went on to. They wanted to disrupt Rightmove. They raised like 35 million and create booming, which was on for a few years. They were building it and then became flat on their face last year, you know, they couldn't make it because it's really hard to compete with rightmove. So I messaged all these guys, all the tech guys of their team and the most senior of their guys is now working for us, helping us building Property Filter. So he was one of the founding tech guys basically to build Purple Brick, then went on to be the most senior one in booming. And it works for us. And he looked at what we've done and it's okay. I've been around this game for years and years and you know, what you've done is above anything else, you know, like, you know, if we, only if we think about the portal themselves, you know, I'm not even talking about, you know, like property investors tools people have done in their garages, you know, so really it's the excellence of the database that we make available to people. All about finding deals. So it's all about, all about finding deals. So it's very mission focused for property investors to find deals and it's not, you know, it doesn't try to do other things. It's very niche and focused for that. And it's all about identifying motivated sellers, generating leads where you probably want to focus your energy on the top 5%, the top 10% of property that are around and then a framework for you to convert these deals into great deals. And because it's a framework, because it's a step by step process, it makes success very predictable. People build very healthy pipelines and then we with deals. It's funny because it's. People say oh well I'm not looking right now, you know, so I'll come and see you in a bit, you know, but it's a bit like dating, you know, it's when you don't, you know, it's, it's when you don't need it that it's, it's coming to you all the time.

So yeah, it's great. And you know, I think so many people will, will know the updating of the spreadsheet, right. And you've got to keep going back in and checking the links and you know, and then if you go on the site, you know you're seeing the same old properties day to day. But you know this is completely different, right? This is just pulling as you say, pulling any update from absolutely everywhere on the Internet. So all of the, you know, individual agents that are out there as well as all of the sort of aggregated portals and it's all there, right? Exactly as you want it. And as I say just it's so.

Time saving so to, to go into more detail. So basically some of the. Yeah features and benefits. So we find most property full address, you'll have the full postcode, all properties all the time. You'll know when a property. So it's the equivalent of rightmovesupply on the market. Prime location, lots of portals all in one place. So when you're on property filter you don't need to look anywhere else and we match and merge things. So when you go on rightmove the listings will be organized by agent listings. So it's why on page one you'll have one property with one agent. On page four you'll have the same property with another agent and then people are Very proud when they find, you know, they find a match, you know, took them half a day. But so we match on property. So it's all property displayed and then we, we have the different listings layered on top. So a property will have multiple listings from different agents and you can have the history of previous agents listing it and failing to sell. So it's a great way, you know, it's a great, great, great way to find deals because when you see that one agent failed to sell a property, now listing with another agent. And sometimes you've got a chain like this of three or four agents. So you can always speak to agent one or agent two who lost the instruction. And the agents are funny, it's never their fault when they lost an instruction. So they will tell you everything, everything that's wrong about the property, everything. They founded this, the vander that, the property this, the property that. So it really gives you an edge with these things. And there's so many, so many, so many ways with this. So the key thing is identifying signs of motivation and building upon this data that gives you actionable steps. And sometimes people have grown because it's been so hard to find deals. Last year, the vendors, market, etc. Which is now gone. But people have gone a lot more addicted to their right mobile ads and reacting, trying to be the first one to view a property. But the reality is that this is really like observe the masses and do what the masses do when you react to the right move alert. So you've got all this light refurb investor crowd, the homes under the armor crowd just goes and try to look for this property when it hits the market. But if you put yourself in the shoe of a vendor, it's quite common sense really. So they've played with the idea of selling their house for a few months now, then they decide they want to sell their house, they go on the likes of Zoopla and they ask for a valuation. This is actually a lead magnet for an agent. Three to five agents will come and outbid each other to get their business. So it's like, oh, wow, we bought this property in the 90s for 40,000 and we can now sell it for 350,000 plus. Incredible. They never expected that. The value of their property is the reality. And then the best bidder agent basically puts it on the market and then what happens? There's thousands and right move alerts that go out and everybody gets it. So on day one, they get 10, 15, 20 people viewing the property, say, oh my God, the agent Was right. And so the expectation is as high as it could be. And it's probably the opposite of a definition of a motivated seller. So observe the math and do the opposite. Ditch the right move alerts, they pile in your email inbox. It's junk you, it's not good for you. But sometimes the agents are cheeky. So because we draw and we record all the listing history of a property and this could be across multiple listings, multiple agents and sometimes an agent can to recreate and regenerate some interest. What they do, they'll delete one of the listings and they release it as a new id as a new one. And so what it does is within rightmove. It triggers that the emails to be sent out and then we are proud to bring to the market this brand new blah, blah, blah, you know how it is. And so with propsfilter we see all of that, we see it coming on and off for the day and you see them playing this game. So whilst it might look like it's brand new, you can see that it failed to sell three times before that they reduced the price a couple of times. And it's the second agent involved basically.

With that a bit of a BS filter as well going on. Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting and clearly this is aimed for anyone who's investing in property for perhaps like, you know, strategies buy to let HMOs. What about other people? Who is this suited to? Is it suited to commercial investors as well? And what about people doing something like a rent to rent strategy?

Yeah, so it's mainly been built for. So it's been built initially for the, for us, for the resi. So we've got really good, really good data, really good features, really good filters for all the resi space. And then last summer we bought on the commercial portals as well. And we've had people do, I think one of the one guy did three commercial to resi deals found on props filters, putting all the money out on all of them. And then it's a similar kind of system where we match and merge things from different sources, everything's in one place. And then we track in your leads inbox we identify the most motivated ones. There's like a motivated seller banner. And then amongst a hundred property that is listed it tells you okay, if you only do one thing today, go and look at these five ones or these two ones. And it's the same principle with commercial. We have the rental data, but that's more of a byproduct of us looking for Properties, matching properties in our for sale as well as to rent. And we don't really market it for rent to rent people. So it's more of a, we'd like to say it's more of a serious tool for service investors so people are more established in the, in, in buying. And the truth is, the, the truth is that although a property looks great, will stack as a rent to rent, you'll have the agent in the way that has a policy of we don't do corporate lets, so I don't, you know, we've had people find rent to rent deals on Prop Filter, but I don't claim like this is like it's not really, it's how people use it, but it's not really why we built it for.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly covers many, many bases, that's for sure. And you know, like any good business, it's rare that it's just one person. Right. So there's always a team. You've alluded to some of the other people that, that you're working with, some of the other co founders, and this is where it was interesting. We were talking the other day about wealth dynamics. Right. And you know, both taking wealth dynamics and I know you've done some education in the past as well. We'll talk about some of those other people, you know, in the team in terms of coach and mentors and support. But tell us about, you know, the dynamic with the people that you work with and how those wealth dynamics, you know, work so well.

Yeah, so I got into property with my best man few years ago, so I think five years ago in uk and, and I remember his speech at my wedding and he says, with Guillaume's leadership and my sense of organization, we've done this, this, this and that, you know, so we were like, he was organizing the holidays and I was bringing you people basically. And we did so many things throughout uni and all our early professional life and stuff like that. And we never understood why this synergy always worked so well, you know, until we took a wealth dynamic test. I don't know, it was 2018, I think. And then it's like, oh, wow, I'm a Blaze, he's a ste. I'm like, I'm a star. Is more of a lord mechanic. And then it just works really, really well, you know, and, and I, and I would say anybody listening to this, anybody agreeing to entrepreneurship of anywhere, anyone, anybody wanting to understand more about life, you know, like have a greater understanding of people, you know, how people work and interact with Each other. I mean you've got to take the wealth dynamic test just, you know, just to understand yourself as a start and then it will make a lot of sense and then you stop, you know, like swimming against the tide, you know, for certain things on tasks and then you understand the team's dynamics, why people work well with one another. And as a business there is no way, you know, I could do this on my own. I am not concerned of my competition because they are one man band in their garages, you know, building like stuff around data and property. But they don't stand a chance against a team of founder with complementary skill. And so I was off for the last 10 days because I had a baby, we were in neonatal care and things like that. We just came out of it yesterday and the business is just steaming ahead, you know, because I've got other funders, you know, it's not even people on the team, you know, it's people that are not driving. It's just as hard as me while I sleep, you know. And as a business, I mean you are setting yourself for failure if you go on your own and you hire skills and people and deal with turnover of training and entrepreneurs. I've come to observe and learn. We are heading the cloud. We are 100 miles an hour and it's really hard to get people, it's quite hard to get people at our pace and we can be impatient and things like that. So you can, you know, by basically splitting two ways or three ways of business idea, you could go 100 times faster, further. So it's a no brainer, you know, like the size of the pie you get is just so, so huge. And then it's not like the business stops when you stop. It just goes on all the time because there's always someone, someone out there. So find people, understand wealth dynamics for yourself, understand teams, teams dynamics to surround yourself with people. You share value, you've got complementary skills, you share vision and goal and then you, you know, and then it's even emotionally or, you know, like if you think of burnout or tiredness or exhaustion, you know, like you'll have ups and downs and what you want is be with other people who've got ups and downs. But the likelihood is there, nobody's got downs in the same time, you know, so there's always a high. There's always a high because you lose the few of us. And I've seen so many one man band, you know, one person entrepreneurs where everything stops when they burn out or everything Stops when, when they can't do it anymore. Everything stops when finally after two years they want to take a bit of holiday, you know. And so it's really setting yourself for success, teaming up with people. And I know one of the wealth builders, pillars, JVs and things like that. So there's no way we would be where we are without this understanding and there's no way we would be continuing at the pace we are as a business without this understanding and the team. And then it's also being really brutal with your. So we are engineers, we are not marketers. So it's really understanding your strengths and weaknesses so we can build the best product but all we do, how do we bring this to market? You know, so it's where we identified the need that we needed a bit of a mentor with someone to help. And so it's where a year ago we had so because of my network, so Saj introduced me to Hanif, Hanif Khan, who's John, who was our first investor, jumped a year ago and he, his expertise is in property sourcing. So he, you know, sort of 10, 12 years ago he had a company training all the educators basically around property sourcing. We used to source like 600 deals a year. You know, that was back in the days. And so this expertise and this network combined with what he's doing now is scaling startup companies. So he's been helping other founders in the tech world like doing partnerships and stuff like that. So these are like two really strong skills we needed and we find it in one person which, which half an hour drive, you know, 20 minute drive from where I am, you know. So yeah, it's been, we've gone on quite a bit of a journey to find an advisor, you know, like a non exec, you know, like that is really because everybody wants to help you. When people see you've got, you've got traction so you'll have a lot of people reaching out to you and then you think, oh well, they seem like they are an important person, they've got a name and so on and you say, oh wow, you know, such and such wants to jump in. It's great, you know, but the reality is that your association with their name is nobody cares. So what is your advisor going to do for you in your business? And if he's just incredible, you know, like he's working as hard as us, you know, as an investor, you know, so it's really, really, really been great. And yeah, there's no way we'd be where we'd be we are right now if we didn't have a team. So we have three co founders. So me, my best man and his brother. So his brother is the tech guy. And if you go into tech business, if you, if you want to be like a tech startup or something like that, you can do it with non founder, you know, like non tech founders. But it's, it's really, it's really hard, you know, because you are at the mercy of all those, you know, like those developer, you know, companies and stuff that build stuff for you and they send, you know, send you a bill and so on. So we build everything in house. So people thought we were a bit crazy at the beginning because it's not the fastest and so on. And we invested a lot up front in the infrastructure. So we've built it so it didn't make sense what we did basically. So most people with startup, they create a quick MVP that holds on with, you know, what do you call this? Silo, tape and wires and it's dingling away. And it's great because we can bring it to market really quick. But we tested, we had a lot of certainty of what we were building would work because the risk is building something nobody wants. But because it worked for us and it worked for people in our network and we could see the traction people get, we thought, okay, if this gets people results so fast, we are onto something. So we invested a lot and we front loaded the building of the infrastructure which is not common in startups because you can't really afford to do that. But we could because we had. So the other founder did everything for the first few years and we could do it in house. We didn't spend a lot on external companies which puts us now in a very good position where the quality of the database is the best out there. It's scalable, it's not clunky, it works really well, it's fluid and the interface, it's simple and we can add more people very fast into the platform without it breaking basically. Like we've seen others in our space struggling with maintenance or struggling with data being out of date or things like that because very quickly it becomes a monster. So we've built it with the vision where we want it to be, you know, with 10,000 people on it, you know, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now another friend of Wealth Builders that I know you've been working with is Daniel Hill on Property Entrepreneur and Daniel's featured a couple of times on Wealth Talk actually back in episode 155 and 172. So, you know, how did that come about and what kind of support has Daniel been able to give you?

Yeah, so I'm a student of Dan, so I've been on his property entrepreneur course for three years. So, so it's really helped me with this entrepreneur mindset thing. So, so when I, when I met Dan, I went to his blueprint event like three years ago now. I was still in full time, full time, working full time. And I was lying to myself. You know, I was doing the HMOs and stuff, you know, single let's and HMOs, but I was too comfortable in my, in the job. It's really hard to. And then it taught me about journaling and stuff. So I've got, yeah, I've got, so I've got stacks of them, the journals, you know, with me here. And this is where you write things. This is really. I had this big work and introspecting work on myself where I decided, okay, let's go, let's go for it, let's go with prop Tilted. And yeah, he really helped me with that and he's helped me ever since as part of the property entrepreneur things and stuff like that. But for me it was really this rewiring my brain from, from this employee to entrepreneur and you can maybe see behind me. So these are, these are property entrepreneur board, you know, year of board. So this is 2021, the year of going all in, the year of Transforming the Tribe, 2022. And this year is the year of achieving orbit where we launch something into space, but with an idea of a balance between, with my personal life as well, with the baby just coming home yesterday.

So excellent. Everything begins with a plan.

Yeah.

So, you know, we've talked about the, the software, we've talked about the benefits, who it's for and I guess, you know, in terms of your own personal wealth building. Guillon, we've talked about, you know, property is one of your strategies business now as a strategy, you doing joint ventures. You've also been raising funds for the business as well, haven't you? So, you know, maybe just talk about what, what you did there to get some.

Yeah, so, so it started in property for me. So as I said at the beginning, because I like the, I'm a practical guy, I'm a concrete person. I like, I like that in uk I can, I can add value, I can refinance, I can control the error, you know, from the outset. I really like this predictability. So, you know, you make money when you buy, you know, so, you know, I like that. So compared to giving money to a fund or something like that, where maybe you get, maybe this year you get that much, maybe next year you lose, you know, so I, I didn't like that. So I like property for this, the control I have on it.

But you said to me the other day when you came from France, you couldn't believe it in the uk, like how everyone wasn't doing property, right?

Yeah, I mean, I mean in France we don't have interest on the mortgages, we can't add value and refinance. So we can't raise more equity than the debt we have on an asset. So we can only get a loan bought back by another bank basically after it comes with. They are pros and cons as well. So you've got. Most of the mortgages in France are zero deposits, but they are all repayment mortgages. But there is no way someone can get into can replace an income for property in a matter of months or years in France, because all is repayment and there is no way of generating monthly profits from the difference between the cost and the rent. And the way the system works in France is, yes, the interest rate will be lower, they will be fixed for a lot longer, like 20 years, 25 years. We have like buy to get mortgages at 2% for 20 years, but it's all repayment. But the thing is the repayments, sorry, the rents don't cover the repayment. So your.