Real Estate Priorities, Processes, and Paydays!

When was your last payday? You know… a renovation draw, rent check (especially from a newly placed tenant), or perhaps from a sale.

And how hard did you have to work to make it happen?

And if you cut through all of the effort you expended and focused on just those processes that would have resulted directly in your payday, would you have received it sooner and at less expenditure of time and effort?

Great questions all… I think you would agree!

As a departure from my usual market updates and keeping in mind that it is time to put the finishing touches on our business plans for 2011, I have been on a rampage helping my clients to make sure their business plans results in paydays… not just a lot of unproductive work.

Ask yourself this question…

Have you ever completed your day exhausted, feeling like you got as much done as you could, but upon further reflection realized that you were no closer to your payday then the day before? If you are being honest with yourself, I would wager a bet that 90% of you find yourself in that position.

Working your butts off… but never figuring out how to monetize that effort into a payday.

Often times we find ourselves in this position because we are focusing on the wrong tasks (processes). Like the lumber crew I wrote about earlier this year that perfected their processes to the point where no forest was safe. The only problem was that while they were great at cutting and processing trees, many times they found themselves spending days cutting down the wrong forest. Oops!

Can you relate to this situation?

Or, working your butt off without the benefit of deadlines or completion milestones. And all of sudden what started out as a 6 week renovation turns into a 12 week nightmare. Why?

If it wasn’t important enough for you to manage to a hard deadline why would it be important for your contractors?

Deadlines are hard things to define, because they require that you make a commitment and holding yourself accountable to the result. I can assure you that in all my experiences with my clients, making that commitment and being held accountable is a challenge. But, those who do, seem to always be succeeding in getting their paydays – regularly!

A major contributor to this syndrome of mis-placed priorities is that we often times don’t want to do the hard work involved in real estate investing… so we attempt to delude ourselves into thinking we are working hard by completing less challenging tasks.

One quick, yet exaggerated example would be spending time creating your corporate entity structure (and while important it won’t deliver a payday), instead of going door-to-door to see who might be interested in selling their house. In every case the majority of investors would spend time with the entity stuff instead of finding a deal.

Where do you fit into this overall situation? Is your business plan and are the processes and tasks that you execute every single day, focused on paydays or something else? If you haven’t spent some time considering how you prioritize your daily activities or if you have not had a payday in a while… perhaps as you start planning for 2011 you should be certain to focus on your paydays and only those processes and actions that make them happen.

It’s the only way to keep yourself in this business!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.