You want it. More than most people, you crave it.
But you don’t just crave it, you’re willing to go after it, to chase it, to pursue it until it’s yours.
What is “it”?
Freedom. The freedom to do what you want, when you want. The freedom to not worry about how much money you have in your budget. The freedom to go on vacation 5 times a year if you feel like it. The freedom to pursue your hobbies and your passions, without worrying about money.
Already, you own a real estate investing business and you’re working like crazy to grow it. You probably already know that real estate investing creates more new millionaires every year than any other industry in the world. And you’re working to cut your piece of that pie.
Want to know the biggest barrier between you and that financial freedom you’re chasing? It isn’t an unprofitable market, or a poorly performing team, or even a lack of capital. It’s your mind. The way you think and the things you believe, about your own success, the world, and the way it spins.
In fact, here are 4 limiting beliefs that hold most investors back from true financial freedom.
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1. “I must do everything myself if it’s going to be done right.”
It’s tempting to assume that you need to do everything for your business if it’s going to get done right. You’re an entrepreneur, and that means that you’re a go-getter, a hard worker, someone who makes things happen. But that doesn’t mean you need to do everything for your business — in fact, you shouldn’t.
The number one reason that investors (and entrepreneurs, in general) don’t reach their goals of financial and personal freedom is because they try to do everything themselves. Not only is single-handedly trying to dominate your market and grow your business near impossible, but it actively works against your goals of freedom by packing your schedule full of tedious little tasks.
If you’re really chasing freedom, then that means you value your time just as much as your money. And no matter how much you believe that you have to do everything yourself if it’s going to be done right, that simply isn’t the case — it’s just a mindset hurdle you need to jump in order to achieve your goals. Plenty of other real estate investors have built businesses with wonderful employees and freelancers helping them out. You can, too. But you first need to accept that delegating is vital for building a business that gives you more freedom.
2. “The primary way to make more money is to spend more time working.”
You’re conditioned to believe that the time you spend doing something directly correlates to how much money you will or should make. Maybe it was school that taught you to believe in the time-money correlation. Or maybe it was your family. For most of us, it was too much time in a 9-5, W2 job, where our value equated with how many hours we spent at a desk.
As a real estate investor, that’s no longer the case. Working more doesn’t always mean making more money. In fact, there’s very little correlation between how much you work and how much you make. That might be why you got into real estate investing in the first place; you can work for 5 hours and make $10,000, throwing your previous per-hour rate out the window.
The trick is to work on the important, momentum-building, revenue-multiplying tasks rather than the menial stuff. It’s the difference between building your business and working inside your business. At Call Porter, for instance, we manage inbound lead phone calls so that our members can spend more time generating leads and growing their business without worrying about call answering bandwidth.
In other words, you don’t need to work more, you just need to work on the right things.
3. “I don’t need to collaborate with others to succeed.”
If you’re like me, you love the story of the lone wolf who beats the odds and becomes a badass (helllooo, Rocky :D). Nothing is quite as exciting as working hard for something that wasn’t given to you, something that other people didn’t think you could get.
(Financial freedom, for instance)
But that doesn’t mean you have to work to build your business alone. In fact, there are some massive benefits to collaborating with other real estate investors and even agents within your market. You can create mutually beneficial relationships with real estate professionals in your market to send referrals your way and vise versa when a lead isn’t a fit for your (or their) business model. You can even team up with other investors to build a bigger business with more bandwidth and camaraderie.
Whatever the case, your business will benefit from healthy relationships with other experts in your market. Don’t neglect taking the time to get a coffee with people whose relationship could help take you one step closer to financial independence.
4. “Success isn’t guaranteed. My business is just an experiment.”
I understand the tendency to treat business as an experiment. I think that every entrepreneur and real estate investor sets out to build a business because they want to see if it’s possible, because they want to prove to themselves that they can do it (i.e. an experiment).
But many investors take that experiment-minded belief too far. Because once you believe that your business is just an experiment, the moment that something goes wrong becomes the same moment that the experiment has failed and you’re able to quit. Sometimes, believing too much that your business is an experiment gives you permission to quit when the going gets tough (and it always gets tough).
You need a bit more grit than that if you’re going to succeed. Which is why, instead of viewing your business as an experiment, you should simply lay out the evidence that it will work (other people have done it is proof enough), get to work, and set a quitting date for 6 months if things aren’t going as planned. Point is, you must give your business enough time to catch momentum. If you don’t, you’ll fail to build the financial freedom you intended to build. And that would be an unpleasant end to your entrepreneurial journey.