Why Speed Dominates in Business – And How to Master It

One of the most telling attributes that I’ve seen of a successful entrepreneur. Like, I know nothing else about them, but this one thing, I can pretty accurately predict their likelihood of success. It is their speed of execution. It’s how quickly they can take an idea from inception, from hearing the thing, and then to put it into action. The shorter that timeline, the more likely they are to have success. I tweeted about this a while ago. I can’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like the likelihood of failure increased proportional from the time. What is it? The likelihood of failure increases proportional to the time that elapses between the idea and the execution.

Let me put that more simply. The more time you let elapse between when you have an idea and when you start executing on that idea, the more likely you are to fail. The faster, the shorter that you shorten that timeline between idea and execution, the more likely you are to succeed. And I just want to share an example of how this played out in my own life just yesterday. So I’m at this event, met my buddy Josh Rusin, putting on in Austin, Texas. I was speaking to his mastermind of entrepreneurs and investors. And when I come to these events, a lot of times you hear the same speakers talking about the same things. So I don’t usually spend a lot of time in the conference room listening to other people.

And I just happened to find myself in there yesterday morning before I was scheduled to go on, just so I could get a lay of the room and kind of understand the vibe and try to understand who I was going to be speaking to. And the guy that was on stage is my good buddy, Mikey Terravella. And he said something. He was giving a presentation on operations within real estate portfolio, and he said something in there that caught my eye. He used an example of what not to do, and it’s really obvious in hindsight why you shouldn’t do the thing that he had said. Actually, let me give the. Let me give you the concrete example. So he was showing how when you are investing in real estate, apartment buildings, one of the first things that you want to do is you want to check the location of that building, and then you want to check the comparables within a two to three mile radius, which a comparable is.

What are the other apartment complexes around you? How much revenue are they generating? What are they getting in terms of their rent? And, like, what’s the general build quality of that building? Right. So you want to check, okay, what else am I dealing with here? And that’s going to help influence what you can do when you go into that building in terms of improving it, because that’s what we want to do when we buy apartment buildings is we go in there, we make them better, we can increase the revenue, we can decrease expenses. And a lot of times our ability to drive revenue is dictated by what our neighbors are also doing with their buildings. So we don’t ever want to be at the very top of the market. We don’t want to buy a building that is already renting above and beyond what everybody else in the area is. So it’s one of the first things he does is he pulls up Google maps and he looks at the comparables, what are the other buildings around me? And he pulled up one building in particular as he was looking at this area, and it showed 44 vacancies. And he was on apartments.com, so he, like, clicks on the dot and it shows 44 vacancies. Now, that is a lot of vacancies, regardless of how big the building is, right? Let’s just assume it was a 60 unit building, then it’s like two thirds vacant.

And his point was, that’s a really bad look. Like if you were just scrolling through this and you saw 44 vacancies for one building, your initial reaction would be, oh, there must be something wrong with that. Right? And that caught my eye, because a year and a half ago, we have, we had an apartment building, a 32 unit building that caught fire twice within a four month period. And we ended up having to condemn the building, rebuild the interior. And just recently, last month, we started releasing it. Well, we put all 32 units up for rent immediately. And it was only in that moment, as I was sitting there looking at Mikey’s presentation, and I realized, as a prospective renter, if I saw 32 vacant units in a building, I would assume something’s wrong with the building. And that’s what we were doing.

We’re showing them all. They wouldn’t know the context, which was we had just rebuilt this, and all the units were brand spanking new and awesome. They wouldn’t have that context. They would just go, something’s probably wrong there. So I immediately called, I left the conference hall, immediately called up my guys, and I was like, hey, we need to take down these leasings, and we need to just put up four. Right, the four core units that we have that makes it look like there’s more scarcity rather than a surplus of supply. And so all that’s to say is your ability to take an idea and execute it quickly like that. Is the telltale sign that I’ve seen of successful people.

Not to say that I’m successful and like, toot my own horn, but I’m constantly thinking, when I’m learning something, how can I apply it as quickly as possible? That was just an example that was stood out in stark contrast. I was like, holy crap, that is something that we’re doing. We need to implement that right now. And by the end of the day, we had it implemented. So take that and hopefully that serves you. The other thing to take into note here is that no matter where you are on your journey, how far along you think you are and how awesome, and you’re a badass, you can always learn more. And so that was another humbling lesson is like, I need to spend more time at these events and absorbing information that other people are learning in real time because there’s a lot of learning opportunities there. So never be too proud to learn because, as they say, learners are earners.

And that will do it for me, folks. I’ll catch you guys in the next episode. Until then, stay happy, focused, my friends.