Brant Phillips Show 26: Progress Is More Important Than Perfection
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Welcome my friends to The Brant Phillips Show. Yes, I’m Brant Phillips and yes this is the show dedicated to only one thing my friends, only one thing and I think you know what that is, that is results. Helping you create results in your life and in your investing business.
Today I’m going to talk to you about how important it is just to be making progress each and every day and how much more progress is important than perfection. You see, because in most things in life and real estate, progress is far more important than perfection. Unless you’re trying to become an astronaut or maybe a brain surgeon, then perfection may be required but my friends, flipping houses, purchasing rental properties, analyzing deals, you don’t need to be perfect. If you’re not working on your business each and every day, if you’re not making progress, then perfection doesn’t even matter. Another thing is you’re never going to reach perfection if you’re not doing the little things each and every day to make progress in your business and in your life each and every day.
One thing I’ve seen and I’ve seen this a lot in the real estate world is real estate investors come in trying to hit that homerun. They’re trying to do everything perfect. They’re trying to find the most ideal deal and hit that proverbial homerun, but what I’ve seen is they will inevitably swing and miss and essentially knock themselves out of the game and stop making progress.
One of the things little do they know is that homeruns only come from hitting the little singles each and every day. I’m going to say that again. Homeruns only come by hitting the little singles each and every day, by stepping up into the play and getting those base hits and not striking out. Or just getting to the play, because striking out is part of this game and part of business and we get that. Maybe that’s you, maybe you’ve had a swing and a miss, maybe you’ve taken on some big swings and you’ve missed, maybe in life, maybe in real estate, maybe in some other business but you’ve had a swing and a miss and more importantly you’ve been unable to recover from that swing and a miss.
My friend, let me share this with you. Your ability, your ability or inability to let go of your past is going to be absolutely critical to your future. Your past does not predict your future. What you do today and what you do tomorrow predicts your future. Absolutely nothing from your past will predict your future but your past may cause you to be stagnant in making progress and moving forward in your business.
If that’s the case, I’m going to encourage you. I’m going to encourage you like I did just this weekend. I just wrapped up a three-day live event where I was teaching about all the seven fundamentals of real estate and we had an incredible time, an incredible group of people that were there. Here’s an invitation I made to them at the start of the event. At the start of the event, I encouraged them that every time they walk through the doors, after breaks, each morning they were coming to the event location, the venue, as they walk through those doors, just to psychologically, mentally, whatever you want to do, call it, let go of the past. If there was something that they were bringing into the event this weekend, some type of limiting mindset, some type of unbelief, some type of problem that happened in the past that they couldn’t let go off, I just wanted to create the space for them to let go of the past.
I want to do that to you on this podcast is just there’s something that you can acknowledge, that you can feel, that you can sense that’s preventing you from making progress today because the pain associated with that defeat or that loss or whatever it may be, just give yourself a shot to let it go. During this event and I said this a few times and just made that invitation and I was surprised at how many people would come up to me during the breaks and letting me know how they’ve been beating themselves up for past failures and situations. Sometimes this goes on for not only days but I’ve seen it go on for months and weeks and years. Some people will have a defeat that will literally chase them for their entire life for decades but my friends, your past does not predict your future but it may prevent your progress moving forward.
I want to share a little story with you. I want to share a little story with you about the first real estate flip deal that I ever did. Now, the first time I did a flip, I had quite a bit of experience in real estate. I’d owned about 25 rental properties that I had renovated and managed and owned. I had these properties so I had some experience under my belt but I had never flipped a house before so that was different, it was a little bit different. I’m not going to get into all the details of it but I’ll tell you that I lost money on that first flip deal.
Hey, this is Brant and I hope you’re enjoying today’s show. If you’re in a place in your life or your business where you just feel stuck or you just don’t know what actions to take to help you get unstuck or on to the path to creating the results you truly desire, please take a few minutes and go to my website brantphillips.com. There are some really valuable resources and information that may be able to help you out. If you’re interested in really speeding up results with the help of a coach or mentor and adding true accountability and guidance to your life and business, please reach out to me from my website as well at brantphillips.com or going directly to www.brantphillips.com/coaching. Now, let’s get back to the show.
Some of the details are, I did everything wrong. I didn’t generate enough deal flow or quality deal flow to find a great deal with better margins in it. I didn’t have private money at the time. I didn’t have those resources so I paid a lot of hard money in points and fees. I had to pay extension fees to extend the loan because it took so damn long and just all this kind of stuff. I wasn’t clear about the rehab budget, not the rehab budget but even the rehab and I was changing things midway, midstream to the rehab and costing myself and my contractors time and money and everything, were costing me time and money, not my contractors, they didn’t mind me making changes because it just meant more work for them. I was doing work myself there after work during the day and on the weekends and just doing everything wrong.
When it came time to price the property, I priced it too high, I was trying to get greedy. Whenever I got an offer, I didn’t qualify the buyer good enough and that ended up bursting out about six weeks later. It drag on for six weeks and finally she officially couldn’t get qualified so I had to put the house back on the market and at the end of the day, I took a loss. Believe it or not, it wasn’t a sizeable loss, it was around $4,000 or something like that, but at that time, at that time in my business, that was a substantial loss. It was a substantial loss to me to lose $4,000 but the bigger loss was psychologically. It took a psychological toll on me because this process you see, it didn’t happen over a couple of days or weeks, I mean this flip thing took six, seven, eight months.
It just took a beating on me and I had begun to dream about flipping houses and it really was a part of the business that I’d never done but I watched it on TV. I watched all these how to flip a house shows and started dreaming about that and thinking about that. Psychologically, it beat me down and I gave up there for a little bit and I stopped making progress. I stopped generating deal flow for those types of deals. I stopped looking at those deals. I stopped analyzing them and I’m like, “Let me just stay in my comfort zone, let me just do what I’m doing, buying these rental properties.” There’s nothing wrong with that but I really like the excitement and enjoyment that I believe could come from flipping houses.
I stopped making progress on it my friends until I just dug down, I dug down and looked at everything that I did and I just did that self-analysis and I’m like, I just acknowledged like, “Hey.” Like, “I made some mistakes here, I made a lot of mistakes and I did a lot of things wrong.” Then I extracted that lesson which I’ve encouraged you guys in other podcasts is extract the lesson. When something goes wrong, when something is bad, extract that lesson from it and you have the ability to gain a powerful lesson when things go wrong, so that’s what I did. I begun to consider how things could be different on the next deal if I would apply those lessons, if I would apply those lessons in my business and begin making daily progress once again to moving forward, continually asking myself the question, getting clear about what is it that I wanted and I wanted to flip houses so I continued to be committed about that. I began making progress, taking daily actions, keeping my eye on the price, keeping my eye on the results that I wanted to create, and that’s what can happen to you my friend if you begin just doing that.
The end of that story was I did pick myself up off the ground and the next flip deal that I did, I rolled up my sleeves, signed a contract and believe it or not, I hit a homerun. It doesn’t always work out that way but I did. I bought a deal, bought it, renovated it in 30 days, we had a full price off for the same day that we put it on the market and closed 30 days later. I owned this property exactly 60 days and made $63,000. I made a net to me of $63,000 on that second real estate deal, but it was only because I didn’t care about perfection anymore and I cared more about making progress, about moving for just doing the small little work each and every day, each and every day.
I know there’s a lot of you out there and you’ve got big dreams, you’ve got big goals. Some of you want to make $100,000 this year, some of you want to make a million dollars this year, whatever it is, go out starting today and make that daily progress. Toss perfection out the window. Unless I got any astronauts or brain surgeons out there, toss the perfection out the window, make daily progress each and every day. Hit those singles, do that work each and every day. Moving the ball forward.
My friends, I appreciate you listening to the show. If you enjoyed the podcast, if you received some good value from this, or just some insights and inspiration from this, I’d love if you can hit me up on Facebook, give me a 10 star rating on iTunes, it’d be great. Or maybe go to my website brantphillips.com, send me an email or whatever it may be, just connect. The feedback and responses I receive from you all means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me and I appreciate each and every one of you and so that’s it my friends. It’s time to go out, take action, create results. I thank you for listening to the show and until next time, I look forward to helping you create results in your life and in your business.