Dear reader,
I used to love playing video games and sometimes when I wanted an easier game I would sit there finding cheat codes, this is like that but for real life. So please if you find this blog useful I would greatly appreciate if you shared it and subscribed.
I ask that you please keep in mind that I am still young (28 years old) and will be sharing some hard facts about myself so do as Bruce Lee says "take what is useful and discard what is not".
I believe that no matter what you are going through, there is always a solution to your problems and the only person that is going to save you is you. You can't change your circumstances but you can change yourself.
Accomplishments to date:
I overcame depression, overcame PTSD, Decorated Police Officer giving 5 years' service, owner of £925,000 in property (in 2.5 years), became a skilled Software Engineer (despite having dyslexia), Author, Actor, happily married for 8 years and helped loads of people along the way.
The quality of your life depends on the questions you ask yourself. Instead of saying you can't do something, break the problem down.
I was on a £33,000ish a year salary, working approximately 60-70h a week as a police officer. I knew I wanted to own property all over the world but had no idea how I was going to achieve this. I started studying everything I could get my hands on relating to real estate or personal finance. Did approximately 40h a week of research (whilst still working), spoke to everyone I could that had experience in property, business or was thinking about property.
Before I knew it, I started solving problems for people who were in property and business way longer than I was.
Identifying Opportunity
I had left my job at the police and had just returned from a big holiday. I started applying to everything and started asking my contacts if they knew anyone that was hiring (preferably in tech or property sector). After around 3 months, I managed to land an interview for an estate agent job with the CEO which isn't unusual for smaller companies but for this company size, it was. We planned to meet on a Wednesday, and I was ready to sell my skills in property, even if it meant grafting and starting from scratch.
I then spoke to him about how property was my passion and we had a great chat over our experiences, I told him of the story of how I bought my first two properties whilst on a low salary (link here for how I did this, and for some of the best legal hacks to achieve this).
We then spoke about my stay at the police and my accomplishments there and why I left, as I was going through my experiences, we went off the property track and I told him how I had done a full stack developer course and had resigned from my role at the police as I needed the time for exams and finish projects to add to my portfolio.
He had then asked me what my salary at the police was when I had left, the thing about being in the police is that the longer you are there the better the pay. It’s hard to leave and start from scratch as you won’t get the salary you’re accustomed to. As I knew, he confirmed that to get that salary as an estate agent it would take some time as I will need to build my client base. And this is where I want to show you where networking, and being open minded can get you. As we were speaking, he mentioned a contractor that they had hired 3 years ago, this contractor was a developer, hired to build their in-house systems. This is exactly what I wanted to do, and I wondered how much progress had been made. It turns out, they needed help, as not a lot had been completed.
I told him I will need to look at the code secretly thinking, am I way out of my depth here? He said he is willing to pay me for my time but given my reservations I told him I would do a project deep dive at no cost. Once I had seen the code and spoken with the managing director on what he wants and the time frame he wanted it I started thinking.
I was excited, as even though the project was huge, I had just the contact to get us going.
I went to my friend who is an absolute genius in programming and has a team of 16 developers. I knew that he would be able to completely destroy the European Market in terms of pricing (I may ask him to guest star in a blog post as his business model is amazing), guarantee the best quality of code, in the latest programming languages and do this in an efficient way. I knew of his experience working for huge companies, and I negotiated 10% commission from him on top of the fee I was charging to the Estate Agency. I decided to go to the office one day a week to make sure the flow of information was smooth.
Persistence was key throughout this process, there were many bumps along the road, one of the biggest issues was the negotiation phase between the Estate agency and the software company.
Both sides were very strong-minded people, in different fields and unfortunately have had negative experiences with previous clients. The biggest problem I faced was communication between both parties as they were both extremely busy with minimal time on their hand, I had to make sure that I was able to save them as much time as possible by making the process super easy.
I had to also play a lot on the trust I had built with both parties, to make this deal happen. Luckily, I had read $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi, and took one main thing “make an offer so good they feel stupid saying no”. I proposed to manage the whole thing, liaise with the internal team at the estate agency and the soft ware company, check the code in the evenings and make sure everything runs smoothly, negotiating with the software company and checking comparable prices making sure they also save money aswell as time.
The contract was signed for an initial £10,500 with approximately £120,000 worth of work in the pipeline, giving me an extra £18,000 in the year for 4h/6h work a week.
Strategy you can use:
1. Learn the basics of a skill
2. Make friends with people who are better at that skill or a business, and offer their services (get them clients that they can provide the most value to), work for free and help them provide the service for the client (you will pick up things naturally)
3. Create a company and business account to get the money into it, live on what you are making outside the company
4. Reinvest, outsource and systemise everything so that you are more of a shareholder than a worker
5. Whatever the business is making after 5 years, times that yearly number by 10/15 times and sell it for that number
Disclaimer:
This is not financial advice nor is it the most efficient way of achieving your goals. This is just the solution I found to a problem that I can execute on whilst changing nothing/very little about my lifestyle. Please check with professionals on your own circumstances before executing on any on the information above.
Kind regards,
Mr Cheat Codes
Mashallah. Informative and Inspirational.
God works in mysterious ways, your journey is inspirational!