2019 Biggest Accomplishments /Ah-Ha’s

[Chris Seveney]

For those note investors - Curious what people saw in 2019 as their biggest accomplishments and biggest Ah-Ha moment / lesson learned?

For me, biggest accomplishment was starting a fund - there are a lot of Ah-Ha’s with starting a fund.

But my biggest Ah-Ha is truly seeing how small this business is and how reputation is so important.

The other thing to mention is how much attention investors need to pay to their team. Note investing is not passive by any means and always double check your vendors- they are. It perfect and sometimes drop the ball. This needs to be balanced too as if you hire and fire too many vendors, you will realize there is no one left to go back too.

[Dan Deppen]

My biggest accomplishment was starting a fund as well. But I had a lot of others including a bunch of successful deal exits, starting a podcast, and releasing an online training course that had a lot of signups.

My biggest ah-ha was how when I take back a property the value is always lower than what I expect going in. I thought I was being very conservative already, but I will be adjusting my model for 2020. Borrowers who either sign off on a DIL or ride the ship down in a FC just seem to live very rough, even if the outside of the home looks good.

In 2018 I learned how not-passive note investing really is and how much attention needs to be paid to vendors. To address that in 2019 I brought on an assistant to help with that and it was a huge help. But as I head into 2020 I'm working on completely overhauling my systems and processes to make the business run better and be less of a 'hamster wheel'. 

I agree not to be too quick to fire vendors, or if you do need to fire one do it in such a way that you have the option to return to them later if needed. One thing I have observed is that vendor performance can change over time. Sometimes a vendor goes to crap because there was an internal change or someone left, but then it gets straightened out over time. So vendor performance is not a constant. I think the key is to keep an eye on things and follow up when something isn't right. Just balance making sure things get addressed without being too much of a PITA.