Last year, I began blogging with one goal in mind. To share knowledge and educate other investors like me. I love to share all of my knowledge and time-proven systems with everyone! One of our most popular series has been our weekly “leadership” series. In 2014, we have posted several groundbreaking series on leadership such as: Who Are You Trying to Fool? Parts 1-2 Conquering the Puzzle – The Struggle is the Purpose Parts 1-2 Building Relationships A Leadership Crisis 8 Steps to Sure Success Parts 1-8 The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership Parts 1-7 All of our past Leadership blog series can be accessed by visiting www.blog.andrewcordle.com The next series that I’m happy to announce will be a multi-part series entitled: Leadership Survival. Over the course of many weeks, I’ll do my best to show you how to survive in today’s cut-throat business world. First and foremost, you must have the ability to maintain an unrelenting focus on the future and a determination to make difficult, sometimes transformational changes. At too many companies there’s not sufficient thought given to the next quarter century because we’re rushed to meet the demands of the next quarter. Companies need to have a strong focus on anticipating change, at all levels. Your company’s anticipating and identifying challenges and opportunities is merely the first step. Then moving-on to address them strategically might involve difficult change, both inside and outside the company. One of the biggest obstacles to this process is something usually considered as a positive virtue and very difficult to overcome: emotional attachment to the status quo. You must refuse to love your product, or mode of production, or whatever your seemingly lasting advantage is, so much that you hinder your ability to make the changes needed to sustain success. Over the course of the next several week’s, I will be providing you many of my secrets to business survival. No special MacGyver knife, tent, or emergency rations are required! This is business survival! Join me next week when we discuss Business Survival lesson #1 – “Pain As a Teacher.” ...
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Real Estate Investing Partnerships – Why They Fail & How You Can Succeed! Lately, I’ve been involved in a lot of one-on-one mentoring with several of my more seasoned students. I was approached recently by one of my students. He was inquiring about his partnering with a friend in business. It reminded me of business partnerships that I’ve had in the past. After our discussion, I thought that it would be a great idea to compose a multi-part series on business partnerships. It includes why they often fail and personal examples in my professional past. There are basically two types of partnerships – new and established. Why do people form partnerships? Well, in my opinion, one of the reasons is because real estate can be a very lonely business. Most people cannot appreciate how much work real estate investing involves. Therefore, they don’t appreciate what you do for a living. Real estate investing can be scary. It can be overwhelming and this is why we form partnerships. So we have someone to ride along with us in our journey. It’s impossible to “know the unknown.” (unless you’re Donald Rumsfeld!) When you’re first starting out, you don’t know the process. But if you have a partner, you can lean on each other, which can remove a lot of the negative feeling associated with the “unknown.” New companies might think that having a partner equates to less risk and better profit. It feels like a partner helps mitigate the high start-up costs. I found myself in a slightly different situation. When I decided to partner-up, my business was already established. I had bought hundreds of houses and had flipped 50-60 homes already. But I wanted to go to the next level so I brought on a partner in an attempt to increase the bottom line. Partnering in business is sometimes referred to as the “golden handcuffs”. With this impending series dealing with partnerships, I don’t just want to discuss the struggles and failures of partnerships; I will also be talking about small business in-general. More specifically, I want to talk about those employees that can make or break your company. If you hire the wrong people, those people have the ability to destroy both your business and you personally if things go sour. Are your employees an asset to your company or are they more like gangrene?! In this series, I’ll elaborate on my personal experiences…obviously without naming names to protect the guilty! But I feel like there are many, many lessons that can be learned the easy way and that’s why I will be sharing my personal experiences with you. I’ve been told that one of the reasons my students are fond of me is because I will always give them the truth. I talk about my failures just as much as I...
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My definition of marketing is, “The management of perception“. As we dive into driving awareness to our businesses, our focus must be on what perception we are creating. Perception: Immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation, as of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities. Insight; intuition; discernment. What a person feels or believes about a product is actually more true than the truth itself. Here are a few ways you should consider making sure your brand is communicated effectively. Thus, making sure that you are in charge of your perception. 1) Create Positive Associations – Never allow your company name or your brand to be placed in conjunction with something that does not represent a positive value. I had a client one time who was convinced that buying bus stop signs was more valuable than billboards. Due to traffic patterns. After thousands were spent and the advertisements were placed, a photo went viral with a vomiting homeless man standing beside the advertisement . This viral photo was seen by millions. This was “poor association” to say the least! 2) First Impressions are the most important and the longest lasting – I know that sounds cliche but it is so true. I can not tell you the amount of times I have done business with someone only once due to the impression that I received. I could quickly rattle off multiple businesses I will never do business with again and they only had one shot at earning me as a customer. The ruined future chances based solely on my initial impression of them! 3) Holding Trust – When a consumer does business with us, we place a commodity in our pocket that has intrinsic value. That commodity is trust. We must guard that item with utmost respect. If we truly value that customer, we will do our very best to keep every promise, and fix every complication that we create! In closing, let me leave you with this simple statement: if you want your company to reach new benchmarks of achievement, you must master the art of communicating your brand! ...
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Surviving Pain as a Teacher Several years ago, I attended the funeral of an infant daughter of a precious young couple who attended our church. At the graveside service, her young mother gave a brief speech. She said that when she attended college, a teacher pointed out four young coeds – she being one of the four – and said, “Statistically, two of you will suffer through a divorce, one of you will lose a child, and one of you will struggle with cancer.” (the teacher herself was dying of ovarian cancer at the time) And then the teacher warned, “You had better understand now that no one goes through life untouched by pain or tragedy. Prepare now so that you can be one of life’s survivors, not one of its victims“. Surviving life is the ultimate challenge for us. We have survived countless, painful tragedies. Many of you reading this have suffered a storm or two in life and have felt pains that were most uncomfortable. We have many goals for which we’re striving. But occasionally, we must be reminded that the journey of our lives is not merely the reaching of a goal, but the striving for it! We become the kind of person more worthy of our dreams while we strive to attain them. It’s not the reaching of a destination, but the journey itself that makes up this thing we call “life.” One of our greatest instructors on these journeys is also one of our most dreaded invaders: PAIN Pain is a gift. Without pain, we would not know any one of hundreds of dangerous and deadly actions that through pain or the dread of it we now have learned to avoid. Pain is a great teacher, however, it is not a kind teacher with a sweet and loving personality. And so, we fight pain, resisting the beautiful lessons that pain is trying to teach us. Pain is often the teacher screaming in my ears so loudly I just want the pain to go away. Pain doesn’t teach in beautiful words that please our ears. It screams and terrorizes us and we must fight just to listen to it. Pain cannot help that it is so unattractive and unwanted; it is only trying to preserve our lives by teaching us. But the pain was so sharp and piercing, that we quickly learned to greatly dislike pain. As we get older, the pain becomes greater. Yet, again, pain is trying to teach us, if we are willing to calm down and listen to what it is saying. If pain has entered your life, try to follow this advice: 1. Can I calm my breathing and my panic to begin thinking and not reacting? 2. Can I engage my brain as well as my heart to work as a team to help...
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