2015 I gave up the day job - which I enjoyed - and entered the world of entrepreneurship and owning business(es) & investing in property.
And it has all been plain sailing since then… I wish! Starting and growing 3 businesses has had its ups and downs over the last 5 years with:
Has it all been worth it, hell yes. In my day job I enjoyed the laid back work style I had perfected through automating and systemising most of my tasks, enjoying coffee and pop master at 10:30 and leaving at 16:45 sharp to get the 17:02 train home. Sounds ideal? It was good but… boring, repetitive and didn’t challenge or push me to be better. Starting business with Catherine was the opposite to this, challenging, courses, mentors, learning, grind, effort, every day different, abnormal hours all to make it work. What made the biggest difference for me in our businesses? Systems. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realise I could use my skills from the day job to create and implement processes and systems in our businesses (probably the same reason it never occurred to me in the day job I could create my own business!). in 2015 we hired our first virtual assistant and since then we have employed a number of virtual assistants. physical staff, part timers, full timers, commission based roles and salary based roles and the common theme again is systems. It is easier to have your team work efficiently with robust systems, output is more easily measured with systems and overall your business is more sellable with systems. So why were we still not as far along as I planned? Leadership & management! This started my thirst for knowledge in leadership and through audio books I believe I have improved over the years. But what I enjoy even more, is… Automation! Speed up work flows, remove human error, reduce reliance on management and leadership and your team and let automation take the hard work out of repetitive tasks. This freed up time, resources and has ultimately lead to a smaller team, focussing on what they are good at with me tweaking automation and processes in the background (leaving the leadership to Catherine). Back in the day job I was building automation into our custom estates and finance management software and now I am doing it for the marketing, sales, finance and admin of our businesses. Automation was the step I missed when starting out in business, opting instead to hire first and this may have slowed down our progress. And this is why I have launched the Finance Systems and Leverage Day, 12th February in Chelmsford, to save you time, money and effort in the admin of your business. Whether you are just starting out or been working on your business for a number of years, if you have not automated and leveraged out the finance function of your business so you can just receive, interpret and act upon financial reports and KPIs then on this day you will learn exactly how to do this for your business. I have 20 spaces, 10 on my interest list and 8 placed already taken. If you want to come to this one off day event, let me know below and I’ll send you the details! 👇 I would love the chance to help you develop, improve and grow! Come and get involved!
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I've always been a fan of Weebly and the ease of creating websites. However, the main shortfall I find is:
IT ISN'T ON ZAPIER - AHHHH This means my automation goals are hindered sometimes, in particular weebly contact forms (that look much better than embedded mailchimp forms) into a crm like mailchimp. Until now... The answer
Simple! All that because I do not like the embedded MailChimp subscriber forms on the website. Next problem… mobile friendly tables!! Do you have any specific automation problems? Let me know in the comments and I will see if I can help (recently I impressed zapier support staff with some of my formula so I usually know a way around things!). Other than it is a legal requirement, here are our main reasons for getting your team members to take longer holiday breaks rather than odd days off:
Better for them Longer breaks give a range of benefits to your team, including more time to:
Better for you With team members off for 7-14 days, this gives you (or their line manager) a chance to:
Better for all We have had first hand experience of scaling too quickly and if we had put the above tests in place, maybe we could have seen the flaws in some of our systems, found improvements to processes, systemised more and freed up more time for staff before overwhelming them with more to do. Now we are over this and looking back, we want to ensure we can share as many tips as possible to save others doing the same. To your success in business, Stephen Turner Turner Invest We are in the final month where tax returns are due and, as I recently helped someone submit their self assessment for their self-employed business, I thought I would leverage my time by sharing my top 3 tips to help all those who have been putting it off:
Have you submitted yours yet? Additionally, for Life Leverage Online Masterclass members, you will see a new training video showing you the step by step process of submitting a self assessment return. So if you have a simple tax return to submit, take the stress out of it and follow the video. Are you making 10% on your savings? No? More like 1%, if you are lucky? Or if you have had a recent letter from your bank just like we have, it's actually gone down to 0.1% per annum! So, if you are serious about making your money work harder for you in 2020, then you are on the right site. This month we are opening up our VIP Investor List and as a visitor of the Turner Invest website, we are giving you access to join. Our investors in our current Essex 3 bed Flip deal are making 10% on their money, and you can too, thanks to our exclusive property investment opportunities. Opportunities like this: 2 Bedroom End of Terrace, Essex Negotiated Purchase Price: £120,000 Refurbishment & Fees: £40,000 GDV: £220,000 4 Bedroom Terraced House, Essex Estimated Purchase Price: £140,000 Refurbishment & Fees: £35,000 GDV: £215,000 3 Bedroom Flat, Essex Estimated Purchase Price: £130,000 Refurbishment & Fees: £65,000 GDV: £250,000 And lots more, like our fully funded deals (see details below) *all numbers are rounded and approximate The opportunity to invest in these deals are usually only sent to our VIP Investor List, however, we are opening up spaces on a first come first serve basis and when our current funding requirements are met, we will be closing access for at least 6 months. Currently, we have a funding requirement of £490,000, once this target is met our VIP Investor List will be closed. If you would like to book in a meeting or call to discuss specific terms, projects and to be part of our VIP Investor Group contact us via the button below. DEAL UPDATE 3 Bed Semi-Detached in Romford All finance has been raised and we are days away from completion which is exciting. We were disappointed not to complete prior to the Christmas break but that is how property is at times. One particular challenge on this one was the vendor's solicitors not even checking whether their client had an EPC! Our business partner Ashley went out of his way for the vendor to get an EPC done over the holiday period. Just a reminder of the figures on this one: Purchase Price: £300,000 Refurbishment & Fees: £56,000 End GDV: £450,000 With our investors earning a very healthy 10% on the money they have invested. We are planning a major modernisation which is needed throughout and will be adding planning for an extension above the garage. Our works will include a brand new kitchen (knocking through to create a kitchen/diner, W.C downstairs, a beautiful new three-piece bathroom suite, decorating to a high specification throughout, including new doors, carpet and painting throughout, plus landscape the background and front driveway. We can't wait to share the before and after photos with you. 1 Bed Flat in Grays All finance was in place for this one but an issue with the lease caused a delay with completion, we have negotiated an extension with the vendor so that we can have our solicitor look into correcting the issue. Just a reminder of the figures on this one: Purchase Price: £95,000 Refurbishment/Fees: £30,000 End GDV: £180,000 We are planning a minor refurbishment mainly to update the kitchen and bathroom. As this property comes with the freehold interest of both maisonettes, we have a contingency in place for any additional legals that are required in correcting the lease and common areas. We will keep you updated on our progress with both these exciting projects and share photos at critical stages. Remember, if you want to join our VIP Investor List and receive exclusive access to our investment property deals, click the link below. We wish you a great weekend ahead.
To your success and a great 2020, Catherine & Steve Turner Invest & Ideal Collective Empowering People to Live the Life of Their Dreams One of the goals we have set here at Turner Invest is to help more people in 2020.
Whether that is through:
We are committed to empowering people to live the life of their dreams. So, to help us help you, what are your goals this year? Feel free to reach out to us here or on social. To your success, Catherine & Steve After a long break (and a push from the other Directors in the business) I’m getting back to writing regular blogs, so if you’re reading this I hope you enjoy it.
This year there have been huge changes and growth across our existing and new businesses, too much to detail out in one blog, which I’ll cover in the coming months. To begin with, I just wanted to let you know what my last week has looked like. For the past 2 days I have been at a sales and closing training event in Birmingham (while testing out staying in our own SA), Wednesday I was in Northampton running our Business and Property Mastermind, helping business owners with their next steps and their overall Business Plans, Tuesday I spent the day with Mylo as Ella was with her nanny, Monday I caught up with the team in the office working on priorities for the week, the weekend was the weekend and last Friday I was head down in spreadsheets (earphones in, hacker mode!). If I could, I’d spend every one of my working days in hacker mode, automating reports and KPIs and improving business data using spreadsheets (SUMIFS, Conditional Formatting, Graphs… lovely). 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems with most business owners rating cashflow as their number 1 risk. So how do you manage cashflow? Data! - live, accurate, automated data in easy to read formats so you can make business decisions quickly to the benefit of your business. Knowing your data is vital within a business as it helps; identify problems, find bottlenecks, highlight poor performance, see unnecessary costs and more. Ultimately to come to the answer of ‘We need to do X to improve Y’. I love spreadsheets. Solving businesses perceived problems of managing business finance and getting real time reports and data (I’ve been doing it from day 1 as an accounting apprentice all those years ago). So many people get stressed by this, ignore it until it becomes a mountain, have no idea where to start and fly their business blind as they don’t know their results. So make sure you spend some time now, setting this up right, setting up your accounting system to give you the right data, automating reports from this data, linking in data from your other systems, and make it easy to analyse so you can focus on making decisions and the high value tasks that you need to be focussing on for your business. What are the biggest challenges you are facing in managing your businesses finance? This week’s tips are ideal for small to medium sized businesses looking to grow their business and step out from the day to day running of the business, and become the Business Owner they set out to be.
“Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week” – Lori Greiner Tip 1: Systemise Within your business you have processes that are normally documented as process documents, these describe how to begin and complete a task within your business. So, a process describes what needs to be done in your business. Business systemisation is the systems that form around these processes, these can either be manual or automated systems in order to complete each process. Systemisation definition from Personal MBA is: A system is a process made explicit and repeatable. Systemization is the act of creating a new system. The primary benefit of creating a System is that you can examine the process and make improvements. Developing Systems helps everyone do what they have to do with minimum misunderstanding. For example; the process document for a business task that aims to get more website subscribers, would be to give value, create blogs/reports, advertise them on social media and then link to the website where people can subscribe. The system around this process would be to manually create and schedule posts on social media, and then automate the subscriber sequence by embedding a form into your website (from Mailchimp for example) and setting up an automated email series. You can then monitor results and KPIs based on this system to make improvements. This is just one example of how to systemise your business and one example of business systemisation software. There are many systems to your business and just as many (if not more) different software out there that could help automate some of these. Tip 2: Outsource After reading the Systemise section, you may feel you need this section the most with the amount of process documents and systems to build in your business. However, outsourcing should only be done when you have a correct and detailed specification – and this usually means processes and systems complete, but could mean just a detailed specification of one task. Some Business process outsourcing examples;
Outsourcing the systemisation of your business can be done, however you should expect to pay a higher price for this as the person or business that can do this for you needs to be very highly skilled and experienced to know how you want to run your business and what systems you need. You will also need to be heavily involved with this task in order to convey your business vision and what you expect from your business so that the right processes and systems are formed. Tip 3: Scale Once you have systemised and outsourced some or all of your business, you should have freed up some of your time as the business owner to work on higher value tasks such as growth. With more time to be working ON the business rather than IN, you have more time to work on the business vision, direction, process improvements, new sales, bigger picture growth in order to scale your business. And then, the great thing about these 3 tips, is that as you scale, the increased sales you make should fall into the systems you have created, be fulfilled by automation or your outsourcers and then create more growth through customer recommendations and reviews from the great service you have provided. Systemise, Outsource & Scale is a cycle within your business that never ends. Improvements to systems will need to be made as new technology or competition emerges and as you scale you will need a bigger team of outsourcers and new processes in place. Business SOS has been created to help small to medium sized business owners, systemise, outsource and scale their business. Through a monthly membership that delivers new training videos each week covering the Business SOS model and how to implement SOS into your business, AND a monthly Live Q&A to have all your business questions answered so there are no blocks in the way of your growth, Business SOS is becoming the go to platform to help your business become sustainable, scalable and profitable (especially due to the low monthly fee of just £9+VAT). We hope you have found these tips useful and are able to use them to improve your business and investments. Don’t miss out on future tips - subscribe to the Turner Invest newsletter at turnerinvest.co.uk and follow us on social media. Having run a Serviced Accommodation business for over 3 years now, I know first-hand how hard it can get at Winter time when bookings slow down, cash flow is tight and you’re doing everything you can think of to profit.
So, apart from the obvious of making more sales (which a lot of people are posting about), as part of the Business Health Check I do for clients, we look into expenses and aim to trim them where possible ensuring no effect on business performance (as money saved is straight into your profits, whereas increased sales come with more costs). As I have recently done this for a SA business I thought I would share some of my top tips to reduce spend over the Winter (& longer term): Below are tips on how to reduce the Cost of Sales expenses for running a SA business:
Those are just some of the tips for savings in a SA business and all the above relate to the Direct Costs of SA income. If people are interested, I can share further tips on the savings to be made from the operating expenses of a SA business? Just let me know. Stephen Turner, Turner Invest Empowering People to Live the Life of Their Dreams
On the back of our recent Serviced Accommodation (SA) business milestones, we had a lot of interest for our set of automated guest messages.
In summary, the timing of our messages are as follows:
To download all of these templates, click here (no email address required - instant download)
I hope you find this useful for your business.
If you need SA management services in Essex and the surrounding areas, get in touch. And if you would like to receive our free report series, subscribe to our mailing list below. All the best in your business success, Stephen |
AuthorsTurner Invest Directors Catherine & Stephen Turner Archives
January 2020
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