Building your business around your team

Building a Business Around Your Team
The team concept is often missed by investors. Many investors ask, "Why do I need a team when I can do it myself?"

The response is always the same: The 3 most expensive words in the English language are do-it-yourself.

Having a team brings leverage and velocity to investing which leads to better and faster results. This is what businesses do. They build a team with their employees, realtors, title companies, mortgage lenders, partners and so on.

These same principles apply to investing. Investors who create a business of investing and run their investing like a business, enjoy the same results enjoyed by a successful business owner, including bigger profits and bigger growth.

Investor A vs. Investor B : Let's look at an example.

Investor A and Investor B both live in Nevada and both have the goal to invest in real estate in Utah. Both are developing their initial plan to reach their goal.

Investor A will follow the "do-it-yourself" method. He will do everything himself from researching the market, to learning the rules, to analyzing the properties.

Investor B is following the business method. He will form a team and have members on his team who have the market expertise, who know the rules and who can run the numbers for him.

Which investor do you think will reach his goal faster?

An investor like Investor A achieves his goal in 14 months on average. An investor like Investor B achieves his goal in 3 months on average.

Which investor do you think will have higher profits? Many people who follow the "do-it-yourself" method do so because their perception is a team of advisors is too expensive and they can't afford it. They think their profits will be higher if they do it all themselves.

Just like in a business, when done right, building a team for your investing can generate the greatest leverage and velocity which leads to greater profit and greater growth.

The key is building the right team and structuring the compensation for each team member strategically. I like using incentive compensation.

A real estate investing team can find deals that are more profitable than you could find doing it yourself, even after factoring in their compensation (require them to do the analysis this way before you decide to invest),.

Because the profits generated by a team are so much greater than the profits generated by yourself, you are much better off investing with a team.

Think about how you do your investing. Are you running your investing like a business?

Investors who run their investing like a business have:

1. A clear written strategy
2. A mission, vision and values written out
3. Systems in place to make investing fast, efficient and in line with the strategy
4. A team of advisors
5. A system to tell them their net worth or cash flow at any given minute
6. Written agreements with their team members

How does your investing activity stack up? What changes can you make today to run your investing like a business?