Every one of you is absolutely different. You have different skills, different assets, different worries, and different goals. You need to decide what you really want to do, how much you really want to make, what you are good at, what you are scared of, and what you feel comfortable with, then start developing a business plan.



Whether you are going to own 1 piece of property or 1,000, you are going to have a business. Every business needs a plan. Every business needs goals. Every business needs to decide who its key people are.

If you go into real estate investing, you want to assign yourself the jobs you are good at, the ones that inspire you.

#1 "Know Thyself"

Maybe you love to talk to people and sell things; you will likely be good at getting tenants, putting deals together, and selling the deals. Perhaps you love detail and finance; you would be excellent at doing mortgages and financing deals, but not good at selling them. If you become irritated when people talk to you, you probably do not want to manage property.

What do you like to do? What kind of people do you like to be around? What kind of deals would fit your personality? What aspects of real estate investing fit you best? Conversely, what do you not like to do? Determine that and partner with someone who does what you hate to do.

#2 Forming Your Team

Whatever aspect of real estate investing you get into, you need a team. You can build your board of directors or your team starting now. To whom do you go when you have finance questions? Legal questions? Contract or repair questions? Whom do you call when you have deals to sell? Start now by asking, "Whom do I want on my team?"

#3 Writing Your Plan

When most real estate investors start out, they have one goal: to get one property. However, they have absolutely no plan. They set out to find that property and, after they buy it, they figure out what to do by accident. When tenants do not pay the rent, for example, they react quickly to evict them without researching alternatives.

Let me save you a lot of time and headache by insisting that you write a plan. Remember the famous study about Yale graduates: It determined that the 3 percent of those graduates who wrote down their goals for the future financially outperformed the other 97 percent three to five times.

#4 Planning Your Perfect Day at Work

Tie your goals into creating a perfect day at work. How would your perfect day go? Would you have a big office, or a little one? Would you work out of your home? Where would it be located in a city, on the beach, or in the mountains?

Beyond the physical setup, determine the nature of your business. What kind of deals would you make? What would your portfolio look like? How much money could you make that day? What would you do to bring in money? Who would you work with?

#5 Planning Your Perfect Day at Play

Be sure to make overall financial goals, personal goals, family goals, and spiritual goals. How much vacation do you want to have? How much time do you want to spend with your loved ones? When you make that first wholesale deal or do a lease option or buy, fix up, and sell a property, reward yourself.

Take a small percentage of your profit and get that perfect day of play under way. Maybe you want to take a balloon ride, go on a picnic, go to the mountains, go to the beach, or go on a cruise ship-whatever it is, first set your goals by writing them down.

If you do not have the energy to write down your goals, I can assure you that you won't have the energy to make your real estate deals happen.

#6 Your Money and Your Credit

My parents, who brought me up well, always said, "Do not ever talk about money, sex, religion, or credit." I love to talk about all of these things because I find them fascinating; most people do not.

However, if you are going to be a successful real estate investor with various income sources, you do need to talk about money and credit. You need to get them under control, or at least get started on them. Most real estate investors who have been supersuccessful have also been superbroke.

#7 Answer the Following Questions

- How much can you borrow (if you need to) to make real estate investments?

- How much access to cash do you have?

- What are your assets?

- What do you own? (Houses? Cars? Investments?)

- What are your liabilities?

- What are your debts? (Mortgages? Credit cards?)

- How much is your life insurance? Your retirement account?

Take the next two days, the next 48 hours, to make a plan. Decide where you are and where you want to be. Write down your goals and share them with others. You are on your way to developing numerous sources of real estate income.