David Explains the Process and Obstacles in the process of building a business

The big learn happened. You know, the big learn was like growing a business too quick without any systems or team in place, and it come crashing down pretty quick and left me in a bit of a sour situation. And I was like, look, do I want to be sitting behind a desk managing people, or do I want to be using my strengths and doing what I enjoy and going out there, networking, meeting people, doing deals and building relationships? From that point, I got involved in property and I started to attend like a few courses. I think we've all probably done some training here and there. And during that process, I learned how to, I spoke a gap in the market, should we call it, where people were looking to do these big deals. Investing time and energy in doing deals, but didn't know how to raise the funds for the deals. So I spent work with a mentor who I met along the way. He taught me like a hell of a lot about how to raise finance but build relationships. And we spent a couple of years connecting the two together. So finding investors and finding developers and linking them together.

What was the, how long did it take? What was the process? What was the, what was the obstacles that came up in that time and what can you recommend to people that are watching who are pretty much where you were? You know, September 2016, I tell everyone.

The first deal was your hardest deal. You know, you don't know what to say to agents. You don't know how to position yourself. You don't know, you don't really feel very confident in what you're doing because you don't know what you're doing or how it really works. You're just trying to sort of share your vision, I guess. So we spent a lot of time sort of door knocking, learning that process. And I always say to my clients, look, whatever you do, whoever you speak to, document it, learn from it, and next time you go back, handle that objection and turn it into a positive and how it benefits them. So that was going on for two or three months. And the first significant mistake, should we call it, or learn, was that we found a private landlord, he had 30 properties, was like, he didn't really care about his properties. And we were like, look, you know, we can turn this two bedroom flat, I mean, we walked in there and then he went through the floorboards, you know, them places where you just like, we're dying for a deal. Do you know what I mean? So we were like, we can make this work. So my business partner, Matt Ward, is a surveyor, went away, schedule of works come back, you know, Nine grand was the schedule of works. And we sat down with him and he just literally looked at us and he went, I'm not going to swear. But he swore and he was just like, what the f are you going to spend that kind of money on this place for? What's wrong with you? And he'd done us a massive, massive favor because at the time we were like, you know, we're up for it. You know, we were up for it. And he said no. And what that meant was that we left that relationship there, went and met an agent and got our first deal. And I mean, I want to transition into how that deal come about because even down to like getting a deal, the agent didn't, you know, they wasn't really sure still what we were doing. But they gave us like this upmarket one bed, which I'll talk about later on as to why we changed our strategy. But, you know, it was probably a little bit too expensive, but we got there, we made it happen. And then we used that expensive high end one bed apartment to become our show home. And that enabled us to build our business.

So instead of going for the first thing that came along, which I assume that so many people when they get into this world will do, you sort of took a step back, you know, thankfully, and instead of going for tons at once, you just went for the one big one and built it up from there.