Customer friction is a huge part of running a biz.

How hard is it to engage a company to work with you?

Data-driven companies obsess over reducing this friction.

Mom-and-pop operators SUCK at this and it’s costing them millions.

Here’s what I’ve learned 👇👇👇

Want to know how to get brokers to bring you deals first?

Want to build a machine that can buy real estate while you play golf?

Have a very professional and organized METHOD for closing on a property.

It's a system. And here's how we do it.

A thread 👇👇👇

The thing is most sellers (that I deal with) have never sold a property before.

They don't know what to expect. They don't know how it works.

So they naturally have unreasonable expectations and there is a lot that can get lost in the shuffle.

And it creates stress.

And most brokers are working several deals at a time. And they aren't at liberty to tell a buyer how to do business.

So their hands are tied.

And for that reason a lot of closings are shit show. They are delayed. They end up with lawyers huddled up on Thursday night at 10pm.

And for that reason its YOUR JOB as the buyer to take charge.

Set the expectations.

Set the timeline.

And be a professional.

Step one:

Get a signed letter of intent that lays out the terms for your attorney to draft a contract with.

Step two (5 minutes after signed LOI)

Send out an email linking all of the parties and outline their role and a timeline.

How you know you've made it:

You get to stop doing business with assholes.

No asshole clients.

No asshole partners.

No asshole investors.

In the early days, when you're hungry, you have to do what you have to do.

Bend over backwards for customers.

Deal with disrespectful partners.

Take investments from folks who don't have the same vision as you do and bend the terms to their liking.

As you build enough experience and wealth this slowly shifts.

And you can start firing the bad customers.

Breaking up with the bad partners.

And buying out the bad investors.

This is different than F U money.

F U money is the next phase...

It happens a few million later when you become one of the assholes.

Tip:

Get F U money but don't become an asshole.

This transformation happens through leverage.

When we start, we have none. Others have it all.

You have no negotiation power because they have everything YOU need and YOU are a commodity.

Entrepreneurship culture in America is all messed up and it’s a shame.

TechCrunch. Product Hunt. Shark Tank.

It’s all about new ideas. Changing the world. Innovation. 0 to 1. Blue ocean. Venture capital and exits and scalability.

And ITS ALL A LIE.

You ask the average american who a real entrepreneur is they’ll say Jobs, Musk or Zuck.

We read their books and idolize them and hang on their every word.

So the brightest among us think they need a moat. A new idea. Something revolutionary.

Were setting them up for FAILURE.

I took an entrepreneurship course at Cornell in 2011. 24 kids with new ideas. Big plans. Pitch decks looking for series As.

I was #25 with a regular old-fashioned business.

When professors asked me what my differentiator was I didn’t have an answer.

I saw a company out there doing sweaty, non scalable work. They were terrible at it.

I started by trading my time for money. Bought a $1500 cargo van. Used the things I had in my life to make some profit.

I wasn’t trying to educate a customer base.

I wasn’t following my passion.

I didn’t need funding or a network.

I wasn’t competing against brilliant folks from Stanford.

I want trying to prove a concept.

I wasn’t emotionally attached to anything except adding value.

On Sep 3rd 2020 we closed on a 120k sf glove factory built in 1890 in a small NY town.

Has 45k sf of self storage inside and had $14k a month of net operating income at closing.

Let's breakdown this deal.

A THREAD on creating $2 million out of thin air in 18 months...

👇👇

First saw the property on Loopnet in mid 2018. I ignored it. Who wants to try to operate a business in an old factory in a dying NY town.

A few months later I reached out. Broker sent me financials. They were good. $24k a month in revenue and $10k in expenses.

So I visited the property. It was old. Needed a new roof. Full time manager. Only accessible to customers 9am-5pm M-S. No autopay. A lot of folks paying 1/2 market rent.

I loved everything about it.

But I knew they were going to have trouble selling this thing no matter the profitability, so on July 1 2018 I made a low offer. $750k + seller pays for new $250k roof + $20k in environmental work.

Countered at asking price + $100k credit towards roof.

I ignored the response.

Broker called me back mid September of 2018. Make another offer, he urged.

I knew it was a good biz so I got more aggressive - $1MM + seller pays for roof / environmental.

Declined. Countered with $1.2MM but they'd give me a new roof and do the environmental.

A small thread to explain the tax implications of dividend of Rs.974 per share declared by #majesco Ltd which is winding up its business🧵👇

1. For starters, Majesco is declaring such huge dividend on account of it selling its US business. But, as an investor, should one think of buying the shares now? Let us find out.

2. The current market price per share of Majesco is Rs.980. This is almost at par with the dividend per share. Now, if you buy shares of Majesco, you will be entitled to dividend of Rs.974 per share.

3. Please keep in mind that dividend income is not exempt in the hands of the shareholders. It will be taxed as per regular slabs.

4. Say you are in highest slab of 30%, you will be taxed at that rate. To simplify you will be getting a net amount of Rs.681 per share (Rs.974- 30% tax).

Over the last week, I've been blocked by various people, including an MSP, for allegedly being a conspiracy theorist, trying to sow division within @theSNP and #indy ranks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I want independence for Scotland, plain and simple.

But I still have the right to challenge people if I think something is wrong, legally or morally, as recent events within the SNP seem to be.

But anyway, I'm not talking about that. Today I'm looking at the @NowScotlandNow logo.

I'm not a fan. Just to be clear, I want Scottish Independence. But the logo for the new organisation, unfortunately, doesn't work as well as the previous YES ones. It's a mix of the colour and the font used, which presumably is referencing Charlies Rennie Mackintosh.

The italics and thin font means it doesn't stand out. Plus, I associate Mackintosh more with Glasgow than Scotland as a whole. So I took some of the elements of the last two and looked at alternative fonts (that are all free BTW)

This font is called ChuckFive. It's big, bold and brash and you can read it a mile off.

It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/

Good news everyone, Jay Hoag gave us the simple 5 point playbook for finding Magical Companies in consumer technology.

1. product offers combo of value, convenience, selection
2. there's tremendous engagement
3. a virtuous cycle
4. tremendous execution
5. kinda crazy leader

Obviously Jay Hoag on ILTB is as self recommending as it gets

The wealthiest person I know prints millions out of thin air in the real estate business.

This is what he does...

A thread.

He finds a distressed retail plaza. Let's say 50% of the space isn't leased.

On a 300,000 sf plaza that might mean 150k square feet is vacant.

If asking rent is $8 per square foot per year, that means the building has a "potential revenue" figure of of $2.4MM.

So in this retail center 50% is leased and 50% is vacant. So the actual revenue, right now, is $1.2MM.

Most retail leases are whats called "Triple Net" or "NNN". This means the tenant pays the taxes, insurance, maintenance and CAM (common area maintenance).

They basically pay all of the landlord's expenses (except debt service on any loans he/she has, of course).

Commercial properties are valued based on something called a "cap rate".

The equation is:

net operating income / (cap rate) = value

The cap rate is a %.

Think about it as the return on your money, annually, as a percentage, you spent to buy a property.