How to Get Organized

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One of the things you want to do as a real estate investor is you want to make sure that you are organized. And by organized, I mean not just real estate activities but all activities in your life.

One of the things I recommend is going out and getting a good planner.

I have designed my own planner. And in that planner, what you want to do is you want to lay out all your goals.

Start out with your yearly goals and then you work down. So you have your yearly goals, your 90-day goals, your monthly goals, and then your weekly goals, and then your daily goals. You should have everything laid out and what you are going to do every day.

At the back of the planner, I also have a list of projects that I am working on. Usually, there are three, four, or five projects at a time that I am looking at. In those projects, I have everything from all the mini-goals in the projects and all the activities in the projects. And then I have milestones.

So, whenever I am planning my week, I go to those projects and I look at what I want to accomplish from those projects this week. I write them out and then I take each one of those goals and break them out into tasks and those tasks are the things I perform each day.

Basically, when I wake up in the morning, I have my whole day planned out. I have my whole day organized.

The other thing you want to do is track your contacts.

Especially as a real estate investor, and because you are going to be very active out there talking to people, meeting people. I am interacting with a lot of people and looking at deals. So, you want to get yourself a CRM, a customer relationship management system. We will talk about that a bit in another module.

What a CRM will do is it will help you organize all your activities when you are out there looking for deals. In your CRM, you can start out by putting all of your main contacts like everybody that's on your team, everybody that's on your power team. So, you want to put in people like your lawyer, your realtor, your mortgage broker, and all their contact information.

And then as you are working through deals and you find a motivated seller, you will put that person in the CRM as a seller. The seller may have come from your realtor, for example. So you may link them together on your CRM and then what you do is you would go out and if that motivated seller has a specific property, you would identify that property and you would define that property in your CRM and also linked into that. Another thing you could link in your CRM would be a proposal. So, basically, everything is organized.

Years ago, I used to tell people to go out and get a filing cabinet. Something to keep all the paper files on. Keep your physical files in your filing cabinet and keep all these forms. A lot of the paperwork is automated now, or a lot of it is electronic, even forms. I can do contracts now and I can send them off to people. They can print them off and they can scan them and send them back. Or they have things like DocuSign where you can do electronic signatures.

So, you want to make sure that you're organized and that you get all your tasks, papers, and everything organized.