Renegade Millionaire Blog

I read a lot. I’m typically reading several books at the same time and often wonder what is the best type of book to read. I’m concerned with productivity and maximizing the output of time invested.
Since reading requires a significant amount time, what books are best to read?

It’s an important question, especially for entrepreneurs. This is because books can, and should, turn into money. If the books you’re reading aren’t turning into money in your bank account, you’re not reading the right books, or you’re not implementing what you’ve learned.

Thinking back through the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that biographies have had the greatest impact on my overall productivity and success. I’ve read biographies on Warren Buffett, Sam Walton, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, John Astor, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Felix Dennis, Walt Disney and many more.

One of the books I’m reading now is titled, “King Larry – The Bizarre Road of a Billionaire.” It’s the biography of Larry Hillblom, who started DHL and used it to fund multiple empires. Hillblom was a strange dude, but the story of his life delivered many valuable lessons. With each biography, we get to peek inside the lives of some wealthiest people in the world. We get to see how they thought, what they did and why they did what they did. This is so incredibly valuable for those of us building one or more businesses.

More importantly, we get to see the various challenges they faced building their businesses. In many cases, these challenges were far greater than anything you or I have experienced in our businesses. Seeing how these wealthy individuals adapted to each challenge is extremely motivating. You walk away from each book with a different perspective and begin to see challenges as opportunity.

Building a business requires “thick skin,” and for most of us experience is what thickens our skin. Here are common experiences we go through that thickens our skin:

Getting audited
Getting sued
Having financial issues/bankruptcy
Losing key employee with no notice
Failed partnerships
Failed businesses
Bad investments
Competitors stealing clients
Employees stealing from you
Regulatory problems

I’m sure you’ve experienced one or more of these skin-thickening events on your journey. Each event we go through makes us a little stronger because you realize it’s not so bad. A close friend of mine just went through bankruptcy and he said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He is no longer afraid of losing money.

Milton Hershey filed for bankruptcy multiple times. Henry Ford, Donald Trump, Walt Disney, P.T. Barnum, H.J. Heinz…all also filed for bankruptcy. Oddly enough, Mr.Larry Hillblom (King Larry) who I’m reading about now, was fascinated by bankruptcy and filed bankruptcy to win a BIG court case against a competitor.

Bankruptcy as a business tool?

I honestly believe we can short cut the “skin-thickening” process by studying people who built large businesses or significant wealth. The reason why is because our skin thickens as we “see” what they went through in their lives.

I’ve often thought about setting a goal to read the top 50 “classics.” These classics would include “Wuthering Heights,” “Moby Dick,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Anna Karenina,” “Ulysses,” etc.
I honestly believe these classics would change my life. However, they may or may not change my business(es), income or wealth. A better option might be to read the biographies of the 50 richest
people throughout history. How about one biography a month for the next 50 months?

How do you think your perspective would change if you read one biography a month for 50 months? Don’t know until you try.

Everyone needs an injection of rocket fuel every once in awhile to make great things happen. So I thought I would share a few of my favorite “tweets” as a way to help get you fired up about life and business. Here they are:

Get the fuck out of bed – your career won’t destroy itself!!! Get your petulant self up and start burning bridges. By @marteeeen

If you give up, someone else will take your place. Someone who won’t give up. By @lisatwight

Talk – Action = Nothing. By @sworntoblack

“You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.” John Mason. Posted by @Martinberkhan

You’re all about correction, baby, I’m all about mistakes. By @marteeeen

He learned to play it safe and he never got noticed by anyone one. By @roamingdruggist

Your life is either a warning or an example – you’ve gotta choose which one yours is going to be. By @tonyrobbins

Share your mistakes so others can leapfrog them. Share your lessons so others can snag them for free. Accelerate learning. By @AmyJoMartin

Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most. By @jeukendrup

You need to prove your worth to anyone you want to work with (not the other way around). Nobody owes you shit. @red_tentacle

Hard work > Bitching. By @red_tentacle

Life will pay whatever you ask of it. By @tonyrobbins

“Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” – Auntie Mame & posted by @lisatwight

Nothing focuses the mind like skin in the game. @mungerisms

Many people who think they have 20 years of experience really don’t – they just have one year of experience repeated 20 times. @farnamstreet

People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book. Malcolm X Posted by @gmdavies84

The 1st step to starting a successfully personally owned business is cutting up every credit card you own: Done. Sustainable autonomy = Future. By @danharm

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.” Malcolm Muggerridge. Posted by @Martinberkhan

“I’ll bring us through this. As always. I’ll carry you – kicking and screaming – and in the end you’ll thank me.” Mission statement? Posted by @gymjones

Procrastination is an unwarranted demand for perfection. Go screw some shit up and learn from it. Posted by @RevBigRing

One of the things I love most about the world is that it’s full of opportunity. The problem is that most people don’t notice the opportunity. By @theRealKiyosaki.

I have many more, but I’ve got to get busy screwing some shit up today! If you liked these, bookmark this page and come back to it when you’re having a bad day. Might help kick things up a notch when you really need it.

Since compounding is the approach I use as an investor, a book titled “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy caught my attention so I downloaded it on my Kindle. Even better, Darren Hardy started
in business as a real estate agent in California, so it’s easy to adopt his ideas for our businesses. Today he is the editor of Success Magazine.

The idea behind his book is that our daily actions can be compounded into an amazing life. However, we have to plan these daily actions and ensure they will lead us where we want to go. We cannot haphazardly go through each day. We have to make specific actions that will compound over time and we have to put a great deal of thought into these daily actions.

This isn’t the case for most people. Most people go through each day following the same routine without thinking about compounding. From the book…

“The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. What’s most interesting about this process to me is that, even though the results are massive, the steps, in the moment, don’t feel significant.”

Think about how an investment compounds overtime if the income is reinvested into new income-producing assets. Imagine what would happen if you applied this compounding strategy to what you
do on a daily basis? Here’s the formula you can use to compound your actions into an amazing life from the book:

“Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE”

Darren wrote about how one small change in your daily routine can have a very large ripple effect throughout your entire life. The cool part is that you can compound this ripple effect by being consistent with the new daily action.

“Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit.”

This means to change our lives we must examine our daily actions under a microscope. The reason why is because these daily actions are compounding whether we realize it or not. Go to Darren’s website and click on the “Free Resources” tab at the top. Now look for a worksheet titled “The Weekly Rhythm Register.” Download this
worksheet and print it out.

I have started using this worksheet and have found it to be extremely helpful. On this worksheet, you can list the new actions you will take on a daily basis. More importantly, you can track each
day throughout the week to monitor if you’ve completed the new action, or not. Remember, the key is to compound these actions by being consistent. You cannot compound your money if you don’t reinvest the income generated on a consistent basis. The same thing applies with your daily actions.

NO CONSISTENCY = NO COMPOUNDING

This little worksheet will help you compound your daily actions because it helps you stay focused. You list the new daily habits you want to form and use this simple worksheet to track your progress. You can list actions you want to take on a daily basis and actions you want to take on a weekly basis. As an example, you can list actions for…

People in your life (parents/spouse/kids)
- have dinner with my family each night
- date night with spouse each week

Your health (exercise/vitamins/nutrition)
- Eat less than 50 grams of net carbohydrates
- 30 minutes of weight training/cardio

Your business (lead generation/conversion)
- Set one new client appointment each day
- Generate 10 new leads each day
- Test new lead-generation advertisement each week
- Test new lead-conversion script each week

Self improvement
- Complete the Weekly Rhythm Register each day
- Read inspirational book – 30 minutes a day
- Journal or summarize ideas/lessons learned – daily

What daily actions do you need to perform in order to achieve your goals?  Work backwards and compound your daily actions into more income. The key is to be very strategic about
what you do on a daily basis. One of the most important sentences from Darren’s book is:

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.”

You won’t double your sales in 2012 if you don’t change something you do every day. You won’t be a better spouse if you don’t change something you do every day. You won’t be a better
parent if you don’t change something you do every day. You won’t lose weight and get in shape if you don’t change something you do every day.

So if you truly want to change your life, you’ve got to take this seriously. Read Darren’s book and print out his “Weekly Rhythm Register” and start using it to compound your daily actions into an awesome life.

A short time ago, I included a chart prepared by Dan Kennedy in one of my Master Marketer reports. Dan included this chart in one of his newsletters and asked the question I used as the title of this post. Well, I thought I would share what I wrote for my Master Marketer members on my blog.

Here is Dan’s chart:

(click on the chart to enlarge)

This chart is for an information marketing business and Dan was asking the reader of his newsletter to compare his or her information marketing business to the one highlighted in this chart. The lesson he was trying to teach was that your business always has more opportunity. In fact, this is what he wrote about this chart…

“Given that a customer is harder and costlier to obtain, optimizing the value of each customer is more critical than ever. One approach to that: the most complete business, with every possible income category covered.”

Well the same lesson applies to every business, including yours. You could easily make a similar chart for your real estate business.

The average agent focuses all of their time and attention on selling more homes. This is fine and dandy, but ignores many very profitable products and services that could be sold to your database of prospects and clients. As an example, I’ve included the chart I used to build my real estate business below:

(Click on the chart to enlarge)

Notice that these products and services were sold to people in my existing database and this is what makes them so profitable. There is minimal advertising expense, because you already have a relationship with the person. You don’t have to run lead generation advertisements for these products and services.

If you study both charts, you’ll see that my chart is basically they same as Dan’s chart. I took many of his ideas and implemented them in my real estate business. The done-for-you services offered were property management and tenant placement services.

For tenant placement, we would simply fill one of our client’s vacancies with a tenant. Once the tenant moved in, our service was complete and the investor managed the home going forward on their own. This service wasn’t super profitable on it’s own, but it did help us sell a lot more homes. The reason why is because some of our investors didn’t want to fill their homes and they also didn’t want to pay for full property management. This service gave them exactly what they wanted and allowed us to increase our home sales and generate additional revenue, both at the same time.

My recommendation for you is to create a similar chart for your business. Obviously my business was engineered for investors and each opportunity we pursued was focused on the investing niche. Your business is different and your chart would also be different. Block some time to make YOUR chart.

Print out your chart and keep it on your desk. Make sure you look at it every day. The reason why is because it’s important to “see” what your building. Otherwise, you’ll get distracted and will never have a complete business. Also in your day-to-day travels keep an eye out for great people that might help you launch one of the new services listed in YOUR chart. You don’t have to be the one doing all of the work. Your job is to have the vision and to find others to help you create your vision!

NOTE: If you do decide to offer new products and services to your database, please discuss your plans with a qualified attorney and make sure that you follow all disclosure requirements mandated by your board and your Division of Real Estate.

 

I have always been fascinated by the mafia and drug dealers. I realize this might sound odd, but I’ll share why in this post. The mafia “dons” and the drug dealer “kingpins” are business people. They have to grow their businesses just like we do. They all of the same problems and challenges we have growing our businesses. These normal challenges include getting new customers, retaining existing customers, getting and maintaining inventory, finding good employees, maintaining cashflow, and making payroll.

In addition to these normal business challenges, they face a few additional challenges too…

1. Getting killed.
2. There employees getting killed.
3. Being stolen from by competitors.
4. Being arrested.
5. Having someone in their business “rollover” to the authorities.
6. Laundering the money made illegally.
7. Plus a few more.

Imagine how challenging it would be to deal with these additional challenges and grow your business at the same time? Thankfully we don’t have to worry about being “whacked” by one of our competitors while showing homes!

I have found many great business lessons from books, movies and TV shows about organized crime. These lessons were all legitimate business lessons that could be applied to any business. I’m currently watching “The Wire”, which is an older HBO Series. It’s a fantastic series and I highly recommend it. You can find earlier episodes on the HBO Go iPad application. Below you’ll find one of the best segments about playing chess and how it relates to the business of drug dealing. Fast forward to around 1:10 for the good stuff. Also be warned this video contains adult language.

 

As I watched this part of the show, I applied the King, Queen and Pawn roles to real estate:

Who is the King?
Who is the Queen?
Who are the Pawns?
Is it possible for Pawns to become Kings in real estate?
Does the King really stay the King in real estate?
What piece of the game are you playing in business: King, Queen or Pawn?

If you enjoyed this, you might also want to read:

What Real Estate Agents Can Learn from Drug Dealers

The Godfather’s Business Secrets & How You Can Use Them to Your Advantage