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SET YOUR VISION

My brother, Kent Clothier, tells one of the most powerful stories of vision I’ve ever heard. Let me give you a little background on Kent before telling you the story.

As my older brother, Kent has always been an inspiration, mentor, and, occasionally, a thorn in my side. Like most brothers, we grew up supporting, then fighting, then supporting each other again. No one could mess with his little brother but him. He was always one of the most focused and driven people I have ever been around. Those times when he was a thorn in my side usually revolved around his pushing me to be better, try harder, and become more focused.

Kent has always had the Midas touch, and he joined our dad straight out of high school in the family business. He excelled quickly and was soon helping to build a $50 million annual sales grocery company in the heart of Memphis. He was a natural leader.

Our dad sold that company to a larger firm in the mid-nineties, and Kent had the opportunity of a lifetime. He found himself in South Florida taking over as the vice president of sales at one of the largest privately held companies in the state. This was no ordinary company either. It was doing $800 million annually. The number of people Kent was leading went from 40 to over 200. Kent not only accepted the challenge: as usual, he crushed it. He took that company with $800 million in annual sales and turned it into a $2 billion company in three years.

Then, due to a series of bad decisions and, as Kent will tell you, his own inexperience and youth, Kent and the company parted ways. My brother wasn’t worried. Kent had more than doubled sales at that business, and he thought he was the guy everybody wanted. As he likes to put it, “I thought $800,000 jobs grew on trees.”

He was wrong.

The next two years were the hardest of Kent’s life. Kent relocated to Memphis for a period and worked with a business partner to grow their company into a competitor of his former company. That idea was short-lived, as bad luck seemed to be following him at this point. The man with the Midas touch suddenly found himself unable to right his ship. The man who at one point had over $1 million in the bank now found himself living on the edge of financial ruin.

At his lowest point, Kent packed everything he owned into his Ford Explorer and drove back down to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He managed to bounce back and start a new real estate company from the ground up. He poured himself into building a new business unlike any that he had built in the past. He attended seminars, invested his time and money into marketing, and showed again that he was willing to outwork anyone, but even then, he was just surviving. He had a new house and a new wife, yet no legacy, no retirement, and nothing for his young daughter’s college fund. He knew he had to make a change.

LEARNING TO GET VULNERABLE

We hear it all the time today, “You have to get vulnerable if you want to succeed.” But what does that really mean? In Kent’s case, it meant he had to own up to and then forgive his mistakes. He had to chart a new course forward that didn’t include beating himself up for mistakes. He had to forgive himself for thinking that he was invincible and especially for believing that his gift wasn’t something to be protected. It meant he had to open up and get strong advice from people who had been down the path he wanted to go; from the top to the bottom and back to the top again.

Finally, during one of their talks, a mentor of his gave him an exercise. “You need a vision,” he told Kent. “Try this. Sit down and write out your perfect day. Every detail of it. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t sell yourself short and write a few paragraphs. Really dig in and open up about the sights, the sounds, the smells . . . all of the details you can imagine in your perfect day.”

Kent took the next few days and followed the advice. He wrote in vivid detail about a day where he woke up without an alarm clock. A day where he and his wife enjoyed breakfast and coffee together before waking their daughter up for school. In Kent’s perfect day, he and his wife got into a nice vehicle with their daughter in the backseat and dropped her off at school together. Then they drove to a hotel nearby to pick up clients they loved—people who had come into town to work with them on a mentorship—and took them down the A1A along the Florida coast to Kent’s brand-new offices. There, they would introduce the clients to their team and spend the whole day networking and building a business plan.

Kent wrote that perfect day about a company that didn’t exist, a vehicle that didn’t exist, and clients that didn’t exist. His wife worked for someone else at the time, and they never took their daughter to school together. But he wrote down every word that he could see in his mind’s eye just as his mentor had told him. He spent every day reading his vision without fail, for nine months. He recorded himself reading it and committed every detail to memory. In his mind, he was living his perfect day every day.

Then, one morning, he and his wife were driving down the A1A in South Florida with a couple from Amarillo, Texas, in the backseat of their nice Lincoln Navigator. They were coaching students who were paying Kent to mentor them as real estate investors and had flown into town the night before. Kent and his wife picked them up after dropping their daughter off at school, and they were on their way to Kent’s brand-new office building in Boca Raton that he’d leased four weeks prior.

That was when it hit him. He almost drove off the road.

“What are you doing!” his wife gasped as Kent righted the car. “Do we have a flat tire?”

“No,” Kent told her, “this is my perfect day. I wrote about this nine months ago. I have read this to myself every day. I have listened to it while working out. I dedicated myself to living my perfect day, and I was so close to it that I didn’t realize it was actually happening!”

Kent had taken the time to visualize every detail of how he wanted his life to be. He spent his time working to make it happen. Every day, he told himself that he could do it. Every day, he told himself that his vision was not only possible, it was already real. Realizing the power of vision, Kent didn’t rest on his laurels. He kept reinventing his perfect day again and again, making changes and improvements each time. As his life grew, his vision grew. Today, Kent has two daughters and a son and lives on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. His vision is well beyond simply driving his kids to school and having an office. He designed the ultimate lifestyle through the power of vision.

THE POWER OF VISION

When you create a very specific image of where you’re going, everything else falls into place.

Vision is at the heart of the turnkey revolution. Your vision is your “why” for doing what you do as an investor. You can usually spot your “why” by looking at the things that keep you up at night. “Why am I doing this every day? What is it I’m looking for? Why am I exploring the option of building wealth by investing in real estate?” The answer to those questions is your vision.

For example, maybe you want to provide for your family and put your children through college. Maybe you want to leave a legacy for your grandkids. Maybe you want to buy yourself a retirement that gives you the ability to wake up when you want to wake up, travel where you want to travel, and experience the things you want to experience. Remember, my first house was not just bricks and sticks with an address for me. It represented my sons’ college fund. It represented a very important “why” for me.

Whatever the case, your vision is your inspiration for getting up and doing what you do every day. It keeps you moving forward. Without a clear vision to motivate you, you may never take action in the first place. Or worse, you may go on a crazy binge of investments without knowing what you’re doing and lose everything.

Everybody has a vision inside of him or her. You just have to dig it up, get clear about it, and act on it. Some may be thinking to themselves right about now, “That is the first step in buying turnkey real estate? Create a vision? I thought this was about real estate investing!”

This is all about real estate investing. I have worked with thousands of investors at this point, and more than a small share of those investors have no real vision as to why they are investing in the first place. “To get rich” is not a vision. “Because my friend owns a lot of property” is not a vision. “My boss said real estate is a great investment” is not a vision. And yet, those are just a few of the reasons I have been told time and again from interested real estate investors.

Setting a strong vision is the first step in the Turnkey Safely System. In this chapter, I’ll teach you the difference between vision and goals and show you how to set both of them in a powerful way that will propel you to success.

VISION VERSUS GOALS

A vision is the ultimate picture of what you want to achieve. A vision can be as much about how you feel as it is about where you are or what you have. However, just because you imagine that picture doesn’t mean it’s going to come to life on its own.

That’s where goals come into play.

Your goals are the stepping-stones to your vision. They’re the concrete plan that’s going to take you from point A to point B. While a vision is fairly static, your goals are always changing as you get closer and closer to where you want to be. This is a major mistake that many people make, not just real estate investors. They fail to adapt and change along the way. You have a road map, and at times there will be detours. You still have the same vision. You still have the same ending point that you are trying to get to. Smart investors take stock along the way and adjust their goals to make sure they are always on the correct course.

Your vision and your goals work together to help you reach success. Defining a strong vision gives you the clarity you need to guide your decisions and set goals that will take you where you want to go. Goals, meanwhile, work as milestones of measurement that keep you accountable to your vision. That is the reason for constantly evaluating and adjusting.

On the hard days when you feel like you’re making no headway, your goals can be a powerful reality check. You can look at your track record of hitting those milestones and say, “All right, what have I accomplished so far? Have I hit a few of these milestones yet?” Most of the time, the answer is yes—and your motivation to keep moving forward is renewed. This is a really important point to remember as a turnkey real estate investor because your positive milestones may be far apart. They may not all be measured by the size of a bank account.

So, it is important to be aware of where you are and celebrate every time you win.

CELEBRATE ALL WINS

What does it mean to celebrate all wins, and why is it so important for turnkey investors? Celebrating all wins means giving yourself a little pat on the back—or a big pat on the back for a big win—every time something good happens. Believe me, in real estate, there are plenty of opportunities to wish something had gone differently. A smart investor is the one who understands that this is a long game. A marathon if you will, not a sprint.

These are small celebrations I am talking about, not buying expensive big-face watches or the car of your dreams. There may be time for that at some point in the future, but along the way to creating your vision, it’s also important to keep perspective and not lose focus on the big picture.

Celebrating all wins means treating yourself to a nice dinner at your favorite restaurant when you buy your first property. If your goals include having a portfolio of five properties in certain amount of time, and you hit it, then celebrate by buying that bottle of wine that is a little more expensive or getting out of town for the weekend.

Along the way to realizing your vision, you need to celebrate all wins, including even the small ones. The month when every rent payment is in on time is a good reason to go spend some time with your favorite people. The small wins will one day add up to a really big vision, and you want to make sure to celebrate as you make your way.

HOW TO SET YOUR VISION AND GOALS

With real estate investing, as with most things in life, you need both a strong vision and a strong set of goals to achieve success. So how do you set an effective vision and effective goals?

Set your vision.

Two key things define a strong vision. First, it reflects your “why.” It reflects the strongest part of your reason for wanting to achieve in the first place. Second, it focuses on you.

If you don’t know your “why,” ask yourself this question: What two or three things would you keep if you had to give up everything else? Is it your family—your spouse and your children? Is it your volunteer work at the soup kitchen or local orphanage? Is it your dune buggy, because you live in the desert and your passion in life is racing that vehicle over the sand?

Whatever you choose to hold onto is what you really desire in life. It’s also your reason for investing, because no matter what you want to do or have, you need money for it. It takes money to provide for your family. It takes money to support yourself while you volunteer. It takes money to have a bigger impact in your volunteer work. It takes money to participate in your hobbies. The bigger the hobby, the more money it takes to support your passion. Your decisions as an investor need to support those ideals.

The second key to vision is that it must be about you. If your vision is to volunteer at an orphanage, that’s great—but you have to want it because you get a personal sense of fulfillment from doing that. Never use your vision to convince yourself and the world that you deserve the money and the life you want. It truly has to be your passion. And it’s okay to be completely materialistic about this. If you like nice cars and your dream is to own a completely restored ’69 red Mustang convertible, then that car should be in your vision.

Your vision cannot be vague. It needs to be complete and detailed. To create your vision, you can use the same exercise that Kent’s mentor taught him: What is your perfect day?

When you create your perfect day, be as specific as you can, and don’t leave anything out. Close your eyes. Ask yourself: What do I hear and feel when I wake up in the morning? How long do I lie in bed after I wake up? What do I cook for breakfast, and whom do I cook it for? What does it smell like? What music is on in the background? Describe every part of the experience in detail from start to finish.

Kent challenged me some years ago to go through this exercise myself. He challenged me to spend some time thinking about what my perfect day would look like. He challenged me to be specific and detailed and not to worry if it sounded hokey. It also has to be real. Meaning that, unfortunately, you cannot go back in time. You cannot share a meal with someone from your past who is no longer with you. Those types of experiences, while they may be something that you desperately want, are not going to happen. So, focus on what can happen. Focus on the feelings, the experiences, the sights, sounds, and smells that you can experience. By way of example, here is an excerpt from my personal perfect day:

There it is . . . the familiar sound of the morning tides coming in and crashing on the beach below. I open my eyes as my body begins to awaken. I take a moment to really explore my body with my mind and assess how I am feeling, what I am hearing, what I am smelling. The drapes flow into the room from the strong ocean breeze and let the dim light from the rising sun peek in. I can hear the ocean birds singing among the sounds of the waves. I notice the faint smell of the fresh flowers we have planted on the patio in full bloom, even though their fragrance is mostly overpowered by the salt air. The air is cool, and I smile as I realize my wife has taken the blanket from the bed and rolled it around her, leaving my skin to cool in the morning air. No alarm clocks to wake us, just the sounds and smells of nature and the little feet of our children that climbed into our bed sometime during the night. I pull myself up from the bed and take in the room as I hear the coffee maker with its familiar grind go off downstairs. I am sore from my recent race and feeling a bit stiff, but happy to be competing at my age. I feel strong. I sit on the side of the bed and go through my morning routine of finding three things I am grateful for. I know I will write these in my daily calendar shortly, but right now I concentrate on being thankful that I woke up this morning, thankful that I am in good physical condition and can still run, and thankful for my wonderful, healthy family.

Take this exercise seriously. My perfect day is 12 pages long. I spent an entire day working on it that I set aside just for that purpose, and I’ve been reading it once or twice a month ever since. I have tweaked it several times as I get older and little parts of my perfect day come to fruition. I follow the same advice I gave you earlier and always adjust my goals to fit my vision. The main part of my vision never changes, but as I have gotten older and welcomed five beautiful kids into my world, it has changed a bit. No matter how I have changed it, though, I intend to live that perfect day 365 days a year, and every day I get closer to it.

When you set a clear vision and keep reminding yourself where you want to go, you put yourself on track for success as a real estate investor. Investing in passive real estate as a turnkey investor is your vehicle to building real wealth and allowing yourself to experience your perfect day.

Set your goals.

If your vision answers the question why, then your goals answer the question how. They are your plan for getting from where you are to where you want to go.

You know your vision. Now you just need to ask yourself, “How do I accomplish it?” The difference between the investors who achieve their visions and those who don’t is that the latter group stops right here. You may write a very eloquent perfect day, but unless you follow that up by asking, “How do I get there?” you will never have the means to live the authentic life you want to live.

How do you set strong goals? A great way to do it is to work backward. Take that vision of where you want to go and calculate exactly how much income you need to live your perfect life. That answer will be different for everyone because money may not be the biggest factor in achieving your personal vision. However, it is important that you work backward to measure your goals against your vision.

I’m not talking about vague ideas here. The same way that your vision needs to be detailed, your goals need to be specific and realistic. One of the biggest problems people have with goal setting is that they tend to work with fantasy numbers. Instead of sitting down and figuring out exactly what they need to achieve their vision, they pull a fantasy number out of the air and say, “I want to make a million bucks a year. That sounds good.”

While a million bucks a year does sound good, it also sounds like a fairy tale. Don’t fall into that trap. Fantasy numbers will never take you to your final destination, because they’re not consistent or realistic. Instead, take the time to run the numbers and compare them to your vision. If your vision is to retire, then look at the amount of money you take home after taxes today, and ask yourself, “Do I need more than this when I retire?” Probably not, and you’re probably going to have fewer liabilities when you retire than you do now, because certain things you own will be paid off.

Maybe your vision is to provide a dream wedding for your daughter or pay for your kids’ college tuition. Maybe you want to give each of your kids a home free and clear as a present to help them with their start as adults in the future. Quality of life in retirement and the ability to have a huge impact on your children and their education are incredible visions to have. The great thing is, you do not have to choose between one and the other. A high-quality passive investment portfolio bought through the turnkey process can help make your vision a reality. All you have to do is the math to figure out how much you will need to reach it.

Take that number and scale it up. Figure out how much you really need to retire. Most of the time, you’ll look at that number and say, “That’s all?” Studies show that most people need only $10,000 a month to have the kind of retirement they want. You look at that and you realize, “Wow, I only need to own six properties free and clear to make that happen. I don’t need 20 houses after all.”

From there, each of those six properties becomes one of your goals. You know that you need to buy one house every X number of months to own all six free and clear by the time you retire. You know that you need X number of dollars to buy the house. You know what you need to do to earn that money—and you act on it.

Just like that, you’re on the path to transforming your vision into your reality.

THE FORESIGHT TO SUCCEED

I met a great woman named Karen who flagged me down after a turnkey presentation I made several years ago in South Florida. “I loved your talk,” she said, excited. “I want to liquidate all my other investments and put the money into turnkey properties with you guys. Let’s look at some properties. I’m ready to sign the contracts today.”

“All right, slow down,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”

I needed to slow her down before we could go any further. An excited real estate investor, making decisions based on emotion and excitement, is going to have a hard time asking good questions. An excited investor is not going to make a quality decision. I needed to get her focused and learn as much as I could about her needs and get her onto the right path. I started with a couple of simple questions.

TURNKEY MASTERY TIPS

Look for a partner that takes the time to listen and learn.

If you want to build a portfolio of turnkey properties and do it safely, you want to do business with a trustworthy company, right? Right off the bat, pay attention to how urgent the company’s people are to get you into buying mode. Pay attention to how quickly they are trying to get you warmed up and writing checks for properties. You definitely want to find a company that is going to be your partner. The best thing your partner can do is go slow and spend some time getting to know you as an investor. There is no way a turnkey company can build a portfolio that fits your needs perfectly if they are not taking time to listen and learn!

“What are you trying to achieve with your investments? What’s your vision?”

It turned out that Karen had some ideas. She was ready to retire. In fact, she had already retired and was burning through the retirement funds she had worked so hard to save. She also wanted to leave a legacy for her daughter and granddaughter—but she didn’t have a clear vision, and she didn’t know exactly what it would take to achieve her goals.

Together, we figured out what her vision really was. We got really clear, really quickly. Karen did not want to go back to work, and it was very important to her to spend time with her daughter and granddaughter. When all was said and done, she wanted to leave a legacy.

Next, we looked through her investments. She had spent a lot of time going to investment clubs and had quite an assortment of investments going. Some were making her money, and others were losing her money. She had spent quite a bit of money already on advisors and had very little to show for it other than DIY programs sitting on her shelves.

I advised her to keep the investments that were performing well, and she decided to drop the underperformers in favor of buying turnkey properties with our company. We also looked at how many properties she would need and found that she would have additional investment dollars left over. With that money, Karen was able to make short-term loans to earn interest on her money but also to stay flexible if need be. It was a mix of investments that provided protection for her remaining money, allowed for her to have several different cash flow streams each month, and left her with time to visit her family. She went home and executed her plan immediately. A few short months later, she had a solid plan working for her vision and a new outlook on her future.

From that day on, Karen no longer flew blind with her investments. Instead, she had a concrete path to the life she really wanted.

If you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll never know when you get there. A clear vision and a strong set of goals will take you a long way as an investor. Take the time to create them right, and then move forward. You should always be taking steady, patient action in the direction of your vision. As long as you keep the big picture in view and remain methodical about your decisions, one day you’re going to look up like Kent did and realize, “Wow—I’m here.”

But as important as they are, your vision and goals are only the beginning of the turnkey revolution. Once you have them in place, it’s time to get to the nuts and bolts of investing in turnkey real estate. The first thing we have to do is get our finances and our understanding of the best ways to purchase our properties in order.

I am going to take the next couple of chapters and break down the boring stuff! However, it is super important if we want to build a really good portfolio. After all, what is the point of creating a vision and setting goals if we don’t understand exactly what it takes to get there? We have to understand all of the different ways we can start building our portfolio and the power of strategies using leverage, tax advantages, and even our retirement savings accounts.

So, stay with me. Let’s knock out the basics of financing, taxes, and retirement accounts in the next two chapters, and then we are on to the fun stuff.

Finding Your “Why”

Images What is most important to me? What two or three things would I keep if I had to give up everything else?

Images What does my perfect day look like?

Setting a Path

Images What are the top five investing goals that will take me to my vision?

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TURNKEY MASTERY TIPS

Take steady, patient action in the direction of your vision.

Never confuse simply making changes with making progress. In the case of Karen, she was ready to change everything because she thought that was what she needed to do to move forward and make progress toward her goals. But what she really needed was some clarity to help fine-tune her investments. Change is not necessarily a sign of making progress.

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