Last night I hosted a teleseminar with guest Teresa Luquette.  Teresa taught us many strategies that can help you grow your business to a 7 figure business - that is, one that earns over $1 mil per year.

One of the key strategies was to optimize the highest and best use of your time.  This is so true in real estate investing, and especially true in owning rental properties.  You can so easily get sucked into the world of busy-ness and one day you realize you’re not making a profit because you haven’t been minding your business.

Teresa went on to say that business owners should focus on, and frankly, ONLY spend their time on the 3 Ms:

  • Marketing
  • Management
  • Money

As I apply this to my rental business, I’m doing ok.  My internet business… another story.  But in the rentals at least I can easily say I don’t do anything except the 3 Ms. 

I don’t do a lot with marketing, but we are developing a website right now to enhance our marketing and I do write or at least polish most of the ads that we pay for.  Once we come up with a good ad for a unit we tend to reuse it again in the future.  My managers take care of tweaking the ads for different publications and they create our flyers. 

As for management, I definitely manage managers, which is minimal as well because of the systems we have in place.  I’ve created my own landlord system for each manager and they use it as their training manual and day to day guidebook.  Most of the questions they could ever come up with are answered by the system.

And as for the money - yes I focus on that!  We are constantly evaluating deals, working on repositioning our financing, and watching our cash flow.  We also manage all of the outgoing money for the business.

Teresa shared an hour’s worth of really solid business building advice.  I learned several things that I can apply right now.  I’ve always heard that you should think of your employees as an investment.  I guess I thought it was a trite thing to say, probably because I was the employee when I heard it and my reaction was “ya right.”  The way Teresa presented this concept made a lot of sense.  She said you should “hire forward.”  Think of the salary as an investment in the business, and invest the money to get the help before the business earns enough to support it.  If you have a solid business plan, the investment in the human resource will create the money to pay the salary and then some.  I’ve always contracted for work, but it may be time to think differently.

It seems many powerful concepts are simple, but not easy.  Following proven formulas sometimes requires a leap of faith.  We know exactly what to do but do we have the guts or the will to do it?

If you’d like to hear Teresa’s full talk, I recorded it and the replay is available here.