In this episode of Wealth Talk, Paul Stapleton delves into creative property strategies, sharing his entrepreneurial journey and innovative approaches such as fractional sales and overage sourcing. He also highlights the importance of mindset, networking, and simplifying property training to build recurring income and achieve financial success.
Welcome to another insightful episode of Wealth Talk, where we explore the world of creative property strategies with Paul Stapleton. Paul shares his inspiring journey into entrepreneurship, discussing how he built a property company, launched a training academy, and established event businesses. This episode is packed with actionable insights and innovative strategies for those looking to succeed in the ever-changing property market.
Topics Discussed:
Key Takeaways:
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
Next Steps On Your Wealth Building Journey:
Speaker 1 (00:00.066)
I'm someone that thrives on pressure. So doing the standard vanilla buy to let buy one, make a few hundred pounds, buy another one, make a few hundred pounds. It just didn't fit the bill. So this seemed really, really exciting. Being able to negotiate a deal that's on the market as a standard transaction, one property, one buyer, where we're breaking up the freehold, we're issuing new titles, there's leases being done. In some cases, there might be
garages that we're able to break off and take those on a separate freehold and keep those and sell them. It's such a creative way of doing deals.
Speaker 2 (00:38.958)
Welcome to this week's episode of Wealth Talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the Memship Director for Wealth Builders, joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whelan. Hi, Kevin. Hi, Chris. Good to be with you again. And we've got an action-packed gentleman today who's so full of beans, you can actually hear the cogs turning in his head. He sure can. Talking to you, right? So incredible value. So I think minimal effort from us, maximum output from our guest today, Paul Stapleton.
I definitely want to dive into that pretty quickly. But any news from you? No news, no, no, just enjoying the weather that we've had and booking holidays and location freedom. That's the one that's close to my heart as you know, Kevin. No, that's good. Obviously we got, Mr. Trump is quieting down, but there's turmoil across the world, isn't there? I know we're celebrating 80 years of VA in Europe, VE in Europe. I've got VAs on the brain there. Virtual assistants, no, that's not what I meant.
You know what I mean and interest rates on the low, is good. So we've always got to be responsive and paying attention to what's going on in the world today. And of course, acknowledging things are going on in the world that we can't control. Geopolitically is a bit of a nightmare. There's three wars going on in a minute. So, and not least a trade war. So yeah, we need to be in control of what we're doing. And if you can find ways to get lumpy access to.
As Paul would call it, deals, you know, that gets you lumpy bits of money to safeguard and secure you from these uncertain things. Not a bad thing. So cashflow good, but capital good too. And I think we get good lessons from Paul today on how to do both. Absolutely. Yeah. So Paul Stapleton is a successful entrepreneur, businesses, including property businesses, training businesses, event businesses.
get a real injection of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, hopefully from today's conversation. So let's head on over to our chat with Paul Stapleton.
Speaker 2 (02:44.654)
Paul, welcome to Wealth Talk today. How are you?
I'm really, really good. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's been difficult pinning you down. You've got so much going on at the moment, haven't you?
You sound like my wife.
Yeah, well, we're going to touch on multiple things today. And as a good wealth builder, you are someone who's displaying, you know, the ability to generate income in multiple different areas. And we talk about seven pillars of wealth. And today we're going to touch on property as one of those asset classes, business, IP, events, networking, joint ventures. I think all of it has rolled into what you do, right? And you've got a real passion for entrepreneurship, haven't you? Where did that all begin?
Speaker 1 (03:21.41)
Sounds cheesy and everyone says it, but literally just growing up watching The Apprentice, it was just one of those things that really made me think outside of being employed, rather being your own boss, building something for you. My dad had his own business, it wasn't a success, but I think I learned a lot from being around that and seeing what went wrong. And that business was a restaurant and I used to work there.
And I would see all these business people come in and I would really enjoy at the age of like 17, 18, getting to know them. What is it that they did? Like, how did they get the nice watch, the nice cars? They were wearing nice suits. And I think all of that just together was really the passion to think about, well, it seems like sales is the stem of everything that all these people do. So maybe I need to go out and educate myself on sales.
And was that a professional education? Did you do some degree or training?
I don't think any degree can prepare you for sales in the real world. Sales is that thing where I personally feel you can teach people to a level, but you're either born with it or you're not born with it. And I threw myself in the deep end and did some consultancy work, learned a lot of what not to do, which then allowed me to work out what I should be doing. Went on lots of kind of like seminars, I suppose you'd call them. No formal education, but listened to lots of.
Podcast read lots of books, even did two days with Jordan Belfort, for instance. Probably only took 40 % away, 60 % were bragging rights. But yeah, just became almost obsessed with sales and not just using it in work, but using it outside of work as well to obviously get whatever you needed.
Speaker 2 (05:09.676)
Yeah. So we're going to, we're going to start off talking about some creative property strategies today, Paul, because property is definitely somewhere I know you focused a lot of your time over the last few years, right? But then if there's time, I'd love to then expand into how that's led to creating your own training business and how you're doing things slightly differently. And some of those unique aspects you bring in into that. And then also that's grown into an events business and you've got some events.
coming up really shortly, which I'd love to find out more about. But just to give us a summary right now, tell us a bit about the different companies that you've got.
So we've got our property company, which is called Casita Properties. That's been going for seven, seven and a bit years now. And essentially that was built to service landlords and estate agents that have properties to sell with tenants in situ. I'm always looking at the gaps in the market and the gap that I saw was that most of the stock that was still available online through estate agents were tenanted properties.
What I found out is that they were trying to sell them the same way as they would a residential home. And the motivation is completely different. So wearing my sales hat and thinking about it from that point of view, you can't sell two different products exactly the same way and expect the same result. So I've built the business around providing a solution for landlords, but as a tool or a service to work with estate agents as well. historically, estate agents
didn't want to work with property sources. They saw them as kind of the bottom of the pile, cheap education, low understanding of the real market and just always out for themselves. So thought if we could build a business that essentially is we're a property source, but we're not saying we're a property source, and we just focus on the pain point and the solution, which is we're going to sell that problematic stock for you.
Speaker 1 (07:00.226)
then that would be a great business. And it absolutely took off. We started building a base of landlords looking to buy existing tenancy properties. At the time, there was a big stigma around you shouldn't buy somebody else's tenancy property. You're just inheriting someone else's problem. When, how I saw it is it's much like buying a business. You can buy that house that has a tenant that's been in there for five years. You've got five years worth of clean accounts. They've never missed a payment. You can meet them in person.
be good judge of character. You can also see how they're living, how they're treating the house. I think that's a better investment than buying a vacant one and rolling the dice and putting a new tenant in. So that became our niche and we were known for that niche. And yeah, we built a pretty good brand as being the go-to people for tenanted property.
Yeah, and what year was it that you founded that company?
It would have been six or seven years ago, probably seven years now, seven years ago, I was doing something similar with a previous business partner and then we decided to part ways basically. So we kind of had a difference of stock and stuff like that that we wanted to do. I was more down the tenanted route. They were down the larger scale that I saw was more risk.
stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:12.906)
We'll talk about some of those underused creative property strategies that have been part of that process in just a second, but I mentioned some other businesses. What else have you got?
So we've got the training academy. So training made simple academy that started off as sales training made simple. That's 12, 13 years old now. So that was when I was in sales, I used to go around, I used to train up other businesses and their staff. And then I stopped doing that when I started property eight, nine years ago. And it's only recently that I've realized there's a huge gap in the market for people in property not
being educated in sales, not being able to negotiate the best deals, handle investor objections and stuff like that. So I decided to build out the Training Made Simple Academy, which encompasses sales training, business training, social media and property training. So we have that business and then we also have three different events companies as well. So we have a standalone event company called Property Social Events and we
currently run just one event under that, which is the MCR Property Social, which is based in Manchester. We've got that event happening next week. We've got Peak Performance Events, which is three years old now. Founded that my business partner, that's a London based entrepreneur event. So I was thinking about who is my ideal client for property and they were busy working professional people in the city. I wasn't finding them at my local property networking events.
So I thought if we set up an event that doesn't exist in the city, attracting that ideal client, busy working professionals, we might be in a position to convert them into property, which worked really well. Been running those events now for three years, mixture of big in-person online events, VIP dining experiences, stuff like that. And then more recently, it's not even a year old, which is crazy. And we'd just been nominated for the national property awards as well as best networking event of the year.
Speaker 1 (10:11.864)
Property and Entrepreneur Summit, which is basically the hybrid of both events. And it's where I want to make a platform where people start to understand that property is a business. And with it being a business, there are lots of other hats that you need to wear other than finding deals and selling deals. You need to have your branding and marketing hat on. You need to sell and your objection negotiating hat on. You need
your finance hat on to know how to run that as a business. There's so many different hats within a business you need to wear, but people are only educating themselves on how to find deals, how to do developments, how to do BRRR. And I think that's where a lot of people coming unstuck. So it's a great platform for people to learn about property and also entrepreneurship.
Sounds fantastic. Don't know how you find the hours in the day, but perhaps we'll come onto that later. But let's dive in now to the creative property strategies. And we're going to look at three, aren't we, Paul? And those are assisted sales, fractional sales, and overage sourcing. So tell us a bit about assisted sales.
If I can, I'm going to start with fractional just because that's where my journey started. So going back to when I first entered property, was by chance, I was asked by a property company to come on as a consultant to train what they call property sources in their team. Negotiation skills, sales skills, stuff like that. And the more I learned about what they were doing, the more it kind of really ticked the box of a product that I would like to get involved in.
And essentially what they were doing was what was called fractional sales. So they would find a block of apartments on Rightmove. Block of apartments hasn't sold. Let's say it's 10 flats in Liverpool for a million pounds. And we look at the breakup value. So the breakup value is if we sell these individually on the market, they would be worth 125,000 each. So a GDV of 1.25 million. But because you're buying in bulk, you can have it for a million pound on a single
Speaker 1 (12:12.984)
Freehold. So we would target the stocks that have been around for a while. Obviously being on the market, it hadn't attracted the right buyer. So we would say that we have a base of investors that would be interested in buying the properties individually. So we'd need to sell them off fractionally. So we'd break it up into 10 different transactions. So there'd be worth 125. We might sell those for
115 or 110. So they still offered some form of discount on the market value. And we would make a nice fee in between, which would be the difference between the hundred grand that we had agreed for each property to give them the million pound labor after and the final sale price. So it'd make 10,000 and that's also known as overage. So this kind of combined two different strategies. We would sell the 10 units and on the final unit, we would also complete on the freehold for one pound.
as well. So we would own the freehold for a pound and we would package many of these freeholds up on all these blocks that we did. And we would sell them for circa 30 to 35 times the annual ground rent. So if the annual ground rent was, let's say two and a half thousand pounds, because each property was generating 250 pounds, it would be 30 times two and a half grand. So it would be really, really good commissions. Sorry, really good profit margins.
Sometimes they would be back to back and sometimes they would just be completed. So this was my entry level into property. It wasn't vanilla bite-a-lets. It wasn't like just cut your teeth into something really boring. I kind of came in at the top of the mountain learning some of the most creative strategies from people that were industry leaders. And it really did ignite a passion for me into how else can we make money from property without physically buying the asset and losing all of this money in purchasing costs.
It's interesting because, you know, the common thread of thought is slowly take your first step, do a biter layer, get used to the process and build up from there. Did you intentionally want to jump ahead or did that almost happen by accident?
Speaker 1 (14:20.49)
I'm someone that thrives on pressure. So whether that's financial pressure, whether that's pressure in a business, having a target that seems way out of reach. So doing something straightforward, slow and boring is never going to tick the box for me. So this is what ignited. I mean, I could have probably got involved in standard buy-to-lets a lot longer, a lot sooner rather. But I think where I was training state agencies,
I just saw it as a really boring entry into property. I know I wanted to eventually to get into property, but just doing the standard vanilla buy to let buy one, make a few hundred pounds, buy another one, make a few hundred pounds. It just didn't fit the bill. So this seemed really, really exciting and felt like it also matched my skillset of being able to negotiate a deal that's on the market as a standard transaction, one property, one buyer.
to be able to negotiate this where we're breaking up the freehold, we're issuing new titles, there's leases being done. In some cases, there might be garages that we're able to break off and take those on a separate freehold and keep those and sell them. It's such a creative way of doing deals that, yeah, I just thought this is a bit of me, really.
Yeah, that might sound scary for some people, we've got the famous sort of Henry Ford quote of, long as he doesn't need to know everything right, as long as he's got the people around him that have the answers. Was that sort of similar situation to you? Had a good team around you?
Yeah, I was really fortunate. The team was 72 people in the room and that was a range of sourcing agents. We had the freehold acquisitions person. We had sales progression. We have mortgage brokers in the room. had sales team developers. So bar the solicitor, everyone was in that room. So if ever I found a property, I could go to the mortgage brokers and say,
Speaker 1 (16:22.678)
Are there any potential lending issues here? And they would say, well, actually there's a pub next door. So that's going to present a problem. Or they might say, well, there's too many floors that might present a problem. There's a lift that's going to increase the service charge level. So I would get really quick answers. So my education was sped up and then being sat directly behind sales progression, which typically is where most of the problems arise.
having live updates on my deals that were in legals and the problems that they were facing and wanting to be that sponge and learn from it, again, just accelerated my learning. So what I learned in that first year is probably what most people learn in 10 years if they start at vanilla buy-to-lets and then work their way up.
there's a difference between the knowledge and then the actual mindset and the belief, isn't it? I think this is probably where you incorporate a lot of elements of both into the training that you provide, because you could have all the knowledge and education, but if you don't have the belief and the mindset to actually take action, then you probably never reach those heights.
Yeah. Personal development for me, especially back then was absolutely huge and crucial for me, especially when you're working in a commission based role. You look at the, what I didn't like about the estate agency world was you got an okay-ish wage. So it was a comfortable wage, but the prospect of earning some real money from commissions just wasn't there. The commission level was quite low. Whereas this, it was a very minimal basic, which just about
covered your travel expenses and your lunches basically. So you are in control with how much you could earn and it's uncapped. You're in a higher level of commission and the commission that we were earning was much higher than an estate agent would be taking as a business. So my percentage points were higher. So mindset wise, I think you need to defeat that devil first about, what if I don't bring any money in this month? It needs to be converted into
Speaker 1 (18:30.07)
I have no option. It's not on the cards. This has to work. look, property is one of those where you get lumpy months, right? You get a month where you get 50 grand in, you get three months where there's a drought. So as long as you're managing your money properly and you're not thinking, I've got 50 grand, I'm going to go buy a new car. You're okay. But I've always had quite a strong mindset. And again, I think it stems from being 15 years old, working in a restaurant on minimum wage and having to work for my tips.
The tips were where my money, would double if not treble my wage every night by giving a good superior service so that people gave me a good tip in return. Something which I think has disappeared now in today's world, but that's what it was like back then. So that education has definitely seen me through my career so far.
Are there any other examples of fractional sales? Does that summarize that strategy quite well?
Well, so we've done fractional sales whereby we had a house that was converted into two masonettes and we sold off the two flats individually to retain the freehold, but there were six garages at the back. So the whole thing was about getting planning permission because there was a side access to the garages. So there was already the right of way, the road there, and it was getting planning permission for six flats.
Unfortunately, that deal didn't go through for us. The vendor actually pulled out when they found out what we were doing and did it themselves. So that wasn't great, but that deal would have made us circa £300,000 just for getting the planning game. It was a mega, mega deal. So you can be looking at just small bits of land, some garages that you can just nick out of each deal. If they've got a big plot of land on the side, if you can just title split that.
Speaker 1 (20:19.582)
and buy that for a pound. So there's no leverage on it. You can get your development funding then for that because you own it outright. They're great little wins on some of these deals. But we did so many of these blocks of apartments and also developers that maybe built a row of five, six houses and they've held onto them since they built them five years later. They've realized we're not landlords, we're developers. We need to get the money out of this and go and develop. And they were still under a single freehold.
We would then do fractional sales on that because nobody's going to buy a single freehold for five houses. They're going to want five separate freeholds. So we would do those as well, but lots and lots of very much the same product, just different areas.
So for anyone listening now who's interested, where would you say is the best place for them to start looking for these kind of opportunities?
Definitely. would say still right move. think the difference now to when I did it is one, the leasehold reform that's going to be coming into place. there's going to be your freeholds aren't going to be worth as much. So a lot of our money was made on the freeholds. Secondly, there's more strategies out there now that demand lots of apartments. like social housing, supported living.
And because the rents are guaranteed and everything like that, people are paying a little bit more than the property's worth. Whereas for this strategy to work, you want to be paying under the market value. So you need to find those blocks of apartments that aren't shifting for some reason, but they also need to be turnkey. You don't want to be buying them and doing work. You just want to flip them as they are without purchasing them. But Rightmove is definitely a good place to start.
Speaker 2 (22:03.128)
So how does overage sourcing differ?
So overage, would say typically is going to be on a single dwelling, but we did use it on fractional sales as well. So how overage would work? So I would use a tool on Rightmove. So there's lots of widgets out there that you can use. There's a home finder and stuff like that, where you can see the listed price, the original listed price of a property when it came to market, let's say £120,000. And then you can see
reductions that it's had since been listed. So maybe over three months it's been reduced and it's now a hundred thousand pounds. If I can still value that at hundred and twenty thousand, and I think one of my investors would buy it at market value, I can secure that property on an overage contract at a hundred thousand pounds. And basically what that does is it gives me a commission, which is the difference between that price we've agreed with the vendor. We call that the vendor net.
and the final sale price with the buyer. And I invoice for that on completion. So if we sell that for 110, for instance, there's a £10,000 difference. We invoice on completion to the seller solicitor for £10,000 commission. Whereas typically a Salsa would make three to £4,000 on that. The difference with overage is that it's uncapped and that you're not charging your buyer a buyer's fee. So straight away as a Salsa, you become more attractive to work with because you're de-risking
it for the investor. There's no upfront commitment of a reservation fee, sourcing fee, a buyer's fee, whatever it's packaged as. There's lots of horror stories. I'm sure you've heard of it. People paying money, the deal goes sideways, then they can't get their reservation fees back. So you do find a lot of investors are reluctant to work with sources on that basis. So if you're in a room and you're putting your hands up saying, look, I've got access to off-market deals,
Speaker 1 (24:00.43)
And I'm retained by the sell us, which means we de-risk it for you. We don't have to charge you a sourcing fee. All of a sudden, they'll start to stack a little bit better as well, because you're not adding three, four grand into the mix.
and investors, we think, are always looking for a discount. So if they're paying essentially the market price, you still find they're happy.
So the key for this is one, understanding the investors that you're targeting. So for me, I target retail investors. So I'm not looking for property investors, investors that have been to a course, they're looking for BMV, they've been told you have to buy it BMV. I'm looking for investors that have a target yield. So if they say to me, my target yield is 8%, I would then target areas that at market value can produce 8%.
I'm not having to get 20 % off the price for it to stack at 8%. I'm targeting areas that can give me 8%. So as long as they're happy with the yield and we're within the market rate, we're not saying actually we can add another 5 grand and still get 8 % because it's still got to value on the mortgage valuation, right? So we're selling it at market value or just below. Again, if you've got a 20 grand overage, you've got 20 grand to play with.
If you've got to reduce it by 10 grand to get them to 8%, you've still got 10 grand fee. So it's entirely up to you how you play with that, that margin. That margin is there for you to get it sold and earn your commission.
Speaker 2 (25:29.42)
Yeah, makes sense. And the numbers don't lie, do they? So as you say, if you understand who you're working with and it's a win-win for both sides, then yeah, makes it a lot simpler. Okay, great. And then assisted sales, probably I'd say the more familiar of the three, but explain exactly what an assisted sale is.
I stumbled across this. So I built up really strong relationships with estate agents that fully understood the criteria of what our investors were looking for. So we only have one product that we source for our investors, which makes it easier for us to identify it, easy for state agents to know what we're looking for. But more importantly, it means if we're only onboarding investors that are looking for one product, as soon as we get a product on, I'm not only kind of niching that to two of my investors.
It's every single active investor wants that single product. And that product is properties that are under 150 grand, they're yielding 8 % and they're in what we call a turnkey position. So they're either tenanted yielding 8 % or they're ready to be tenanted and will yield 8 % at market rent. So we started running out of that kind of product with certain agents and they started saying, we've got this, this would be a great property, but it needs a bit of work.
And because of the way we onboarded our investors, weren't investors that wanted to get their hands dirty. They were passive armchair investors. And on one of them, it didn't need a lot of work. I said, well, if you can get another 10 grand knocked off of the price, I'll put the five grand in to get the works done. And essentially I'll sell it to my investor, like an off plan property, if you like. So I'll say to them, X, Y, and Z is currently being done. If you, you reserve it now,
you're going to get it before it goes to market at a price. So I would essentially secure the buyer before I put my own money into it. I'd pay for the works to be carried out. And then I would benefit from the difference, the price we agreed and the increased value once the works were carried out. after that first one, we did really well. We made 26,557 % return on investment. Like insane. was like, okay, why would anyone ever want to buy a property?
Speaker 1 (27:45.07)
when you can earn these figures. And that still stands to be the highest one that I've ever earned. So I was never able to replicate, but it made me go on a course to learn about it. And going on that course made me realize that the way people were doing it, the way people were educated on doing it, wasn't how I wanted to do it. So there were going to be deals that I can win. If everyone's doing it a certain way, there's deals that I can sweep up, the others come. So most people are educated to get
power of attorney, get a charge against the property, register it on the deed, all of that. For Mr. and Mrs. Smith that just want to sell on Rightmove, it's pretty scary and overwhelming. And it's a lot easier to say no than it is to ask questions and understand it. And people want that level of security and rightly so because they're putting tens of, or if not hundreds of thousands of pounds into a property because the people think to do an assisted sale, it almost needs to be like a flip. It needs to be
Back to brick, new kitchen, bathroom, electrics, add mega value. But when I started looking at the figures, it was like you put a hundred in to get a hundred out and most people were earning 50 to a hundred percent ROI, but they were also taught that you have to give 50 % away to the owner for letting you do it. And again, I was sitting there thinking, well, I'm taking all the risk. So why would I give anyone?
profit share. might pay for your legals or something like that, but I'm not going to give you a profit share. And secondly, I've just done one with five grand and made 26. It seems that actually the less money you put in and the less work you do, the higher ROI there is. financially a hundred in, get a hundred out is higher, but then it increases the risk aspect. So if I'm happy to do these small ones where they need three to eight grand in,
And one of them goes wrong because I don't have power of attorney or something. I'm making 500%, even 200 % in reality is just like investing into stocks and shares. If I have 10 stocks and two go wrong and I'm still up at the end of the year, I'm still up. So we just started targeting EPCs, E-rated EPCs. What's the minimum we can do targeting ones where they've been refused high street lending because it was when all the talk of it has to be C-rated.
Speaker 1 (30:07.79)
And all the state agents were doing were just reducing the price thinking that's what's going to sell it. So it'd wait for the bottom reduction. There might be 20 grand difference. We'd spend two, three grand, insulation, a new thermostat, maybe a boiler, whatever it might be. And then we'd make all of that margin just because we were able to make it a saleable product. And we would do the bare minimum from taking it from a D into the C. So we did that. We did boilers. We did just some decoration, but we never did anything like
kitchens, electrics or anything like that. And that works. That's worked well for my risk aspect.
love the way how you explain it so simply and probably no coincidence that you've named your training company, Property Training Made Simple. I guess, give us an idea of your members, your clients. How do you do things differently? How do you get these relatively, probably, they are some complexities to every property strategy, but how do you get it across in a simple way that helps people just take action?
I think for me, I sell on the problems and the mistakes that I've made and what I've learned from that so that they can avoid those rather than just success stories. think whether that's a mentee that wants to come on board or even if that's a new landlord that I'm looking to do an assisted sale, I'm happy to document potential problems that might come up because what people look for in any realm is they want to know
What are problem solving skills like? If it goes sideways, are you going to bury your head? Are you going to run away and not pick up the phone? Am I going to be left holding the baby or do you have in your armory the problem solving skills to attempt or get us through this problem? So I personally feel showing the side of you that expresses this is a deal that went wrong. This is a deal that we lost a hundred grand on and this is why.
Speaker 1 (32:07.33)
This is what we learn and this is what we put into place to ensure it never happens again. Whether it's a mentee wanting me for training or whether it's a landlord that's potentially looking to give me an instruction. feel like that's an attribute people are more interested in than any financial attribute, for instance.
And then just gives an idea of kind of what the learning environment is like and how does that work out in terms of monthly training sessions face to face online.
Kept it simple, like you said in the name, two products. We've got the entry level product, which is the property source in masterclass, 10 weeks, two hours a week with a group of no more than 10 to 15 people. And that's 10 two hour sessions that take them all the way from setting up their business and considering things that they wouldn't have done like the branding, this logo. Have we just taken it from Canva or have we put some thought into this being a business logo that's recognizable in 10 years time?
When we built and scaled the business, it's all about starting as we mean to go on. We focus heavily on compliance, but then the element of how to find deals doesn't come next. It's all about how do you use social media to build your investor database first? Once we do that, how do we use our sales skills, our negotiation skills to draw out the information that we need to close these investors before we go out and find them properties? What systems do we put in place?
to onboard and qualify our investors and then how do we automate it so that we can spend more time doing what we need to be doing rather than admin and paperwork. So we cover like absolutely everything and that's in a nice small group. So they get a lot of my time. And then the second option is that they can just pay for one-to-one mentorship with me, which isn't something I advise if you're just starting out, I feel like pound per hour, you get more out of it. If you have a business that's already built operational,
Speaker 1 (34:03.928)
You've done a few deals, but you want to take it to the next level. That's when I can really come into the business and we can look at what you're doing, why you get those results and how we can take it to the next level, outsource some stuff, stuff like that. So yeah, we do that. And then we do through my property social events company, we started doing education days. So we did one two months ago in Manchester where we covered everything from property sourcing, HMOs, how to raise finance.
personal branding, and we had a couple of panels with mortgage brokers, solicitors, lenders. We've got one coming up next Thursday, which is all about social media, AI and personal branding. And we're just rolling out what we think people are missing, to be fair. It doesn't always have to be how to find more deals, how to do assisted sales. There are tons of other skills that people in property need. So we're building this business around things that we think are missing in the marketplace.
It's interesting because wealth builders, talk about the importance of recurring income, money you can spend every month, but also then those capital sales as well. It sounds really like the property strategies, mostly they're capital events. In terms of your recurring income, does that come more from the business side or is there an element from the properties as well?
Not from the properties. So the recurring income typically will come from the training. So we actually encourage people to pay monthly with us. That's great for us for having that forecast of recurring revenue, but it also helps them. And we do that just on standing order. So there's no credit lines and stuff like that. So for us, we know for the next six months, there's 700 pound per mentee coming in. So it's recurring for us.
Outside of that, we're building some digital courses and some YouTube videos, tutorials to build some online stuff that would be just residual money coming in from sales, but nothing on the property side. I think I mentioned owning a buy-to-let for me, it just doesn't excite me having my money parked there.
Speaker 1 (36:13.58)
earning a few hundred pounds. I know what I can do with that money if I put it into a business. I'm quite happy to make money from property and invest it into business because my return on investment is so much greater.
So let's talk about some of the bigger events now, the peak performance as well. And you've had some big names there, you?
Yeah. So Pete Performance, we've had the likes of Mark Wright, who won, I think, one of the first apprentice seasons. We've had Daniel Priestley, we've had Char Woosman, Rob Moore. So we've had some decent names there. As with the Property and Entrepreneur Summit as well, we always get the big names in. We're quite lucky that we're well networked. And I think what's really nice is when you take some of these big names away from
their events and their education webinars and seminars, you get a very different version of them because the pressures of selling a course and selling something has been taken. So all of our events and no selling events, that's what we want to be known for. So whatever you pay to attend the event is all the money that you'll be spending there. There's no courses, there's no upsells, there's nothing.
Let's say like a Rob Moore or Simon Zucci, a Jamie York, if you typically go to their event, they may sell you something. It's almost like you get an hour's worth of their time, but 30 minutes is value, 30 minutes is selling. But as at our events, you're getting that full hour of them, of just pure value and just a very different version. So we're really kind of priding ourselves on offering a very different experience for our attendees.
Speaker 2 (37:52.15)
And networking and joint ventures is one of our seven pillars of wealth. How important has networking been in your success?
Networking for me is everything. I wouldn't have met half the people I have without networking. I think you're only ever two people away from the person that you want to meet as well. So I'm a true, I'm a true believer in that, but without networking, people aren't going to know who you are, what you do, how you can work together. Um, excuse me. You're going to get people that will want to build trust face to face with you as well. There's only a certain amount of online and social media. Sorry.
So think it's really important to get out there and network and in different locations as well.
Yeah. And for listeners who perhaps are at the beginning of their wealth building journey, Paul, what would be some tips? What are some of the things that you see that hold people back from actually achieving their financial goals?
My top tips for networking. So understand who it is that you want to be finding that that's super important. And then understanding if they're in the rooms that you're going to. When I speak to people about my events, they might say, it sounds great, but it's in Manchester. It's too far. I live in London. I live in London. I'm going to Manchester. You have to stop doing what's convenient for you because what's convenient for you might not be convenient for the target audience that you're looking for. So.
Speaker 1 (39:19.722)
Most of my clients in the training academy live in the Northwest. So there's no point me networking in London. I have to build an event to attract them. So find the event, no matter what location that has your ideal client, other things, what would I suggest? Don't spend too long with one person at an event as well. Get what you need and then take the conversation outside of the event. So maximum.
and the amount of conversations you can have as well.
And I guess you talked earlier about having your investor database. It takes time, doesn't it, to build relationships and build trust. Again, you alluded just there, take small steps, find someone that you resonate with at these events, get their number, exchange details, and then have a coffee, right? And take the process slowly. Whereas perhaps we see some people rushing because they've got a deal, they need to find the money really quickly. And that's often a recipe for disaster.
desperation is really,
attractive. I think where people go wrong is that they talk about what they do and what they can offer too quickly. What you need to do is you need to read the person. So you need to ask them the right questions and the questions you're basically asking them, translating to tell me how to sell to you. Because the answers that they give you, the next meeting that you have, you know what to bring to that meeting. I might think,
Speaker 1 (40:49.624)
from meeting you the first time, this guy is a really good investor, but then from asking you the right questions, we might realize actually he's more of a JV partner and I could have lost you by going down the route of just giving me investment when in reality, if I took the time to get to know how to best approach you and what part of my service would benefit you the most, that increases my chances of working with you.
you.
Speaker 2 (41:12.994)
the skill of asking good questions and listening. Is there one book, is there one seminal book, if you were to recommend something as you turn to your bookshelf behind you there?
If I'm thinking of books that have really made a difference in first book is this one, Do Less, Get More. That's great for your mindset. Wasman, very good friend of mine now. That was a game changer. And I would say Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley. Again, another good friend of mine, all through networking, spoken at our events, same as Shah. Oversubscribe really made me think of just having one product and just being a specialist in that product.
Make my life.
Speaker 3 (41:32.632)
work tomorrow. That's by Shaw.
Speaker 1 (41:52.576)
Not saying I sell pens, highlighters, pencils, pencil cases and rulers. It's we sell pens and only pens. If you need a pen, you come to us. Super, super simple format, massively changed my business. And I read those two books on the same holiday. So I came back from that holiday. Super, super inspired. Oversubscribed made me change my criteria of what I sourced. Let's get more made me up my fees.
from three grand to 10 grand. And I didn't get 10 grand the first time I asked, I got seven, but seven was better than three. So reading a good book or listening to a good book, super, super important. But yeah, do let's get more from Charles Wisman. I've subscribed Daniel Priestley for sure.
Fantastic recommendations. You're hosting the Property Entrepreneur Summit in June. Just give our listeners a little bit of information in case they were interested in attending that.
So Property Entrepreneur Summit is held in Milton Keynes strategically because it's kind of middle England, so it's quite accessible. It's a full day event. It's a full day event, property in the morning, entrepreneurship in the afternoon, four different workshops going on in the afternoon, in the lunch period, breakfast, lunch, all included as well, all for £99. And we've got some of the biggest speakers. We've got Dan Hill.
we've got the property elevator live. That's going to be really, really exciting. So for those that aren't aware, property elevator is the property version of dragons then on sky and Amazon prime. We're giving three people the opportunity to pitch their deal for funding on stage in front of 400 people. So super excited about that. After lunch, we've got Nick James from expert empires doing a talk.
Speaker 1 (43:39.566)
Carly Meyers talking all about AI integration, building a virtual team. And then we've got a personal branding panel as well to finish the day off. So for £99 including all your food and everything, I hope to see some of you there.
So much value.
Speaker 2 (43:54.382)
Yeah, well, we've put all the links in today's show notes. So definitely hit the button now and go and check that out. And Paul, you've been fantastic today. Thank you so much. There's probably loads more we could speak about and hopefully we'll see you returning to Wealth Talk again in the future. Thanks for having
Happy May.
All right. Thanks to Paul there for sharing all of those insights. We can pack up and go home now. What more is to be said? Hey, well, you know, it just shows when you're clear on your outcomes and your goals, you know, that nothing can get in your way. And Paul is very clear that he wants to make a bit of a change to what's traditional property training. He wants to inject a bit more business fundamentals into that because
Being a property investor today does involve a little bit of putting yourself out there and building a brand, understanding how to use social media, attracting investors, all of these tools that we're not taught at school are we, or if we're in a job and suddenly now looking at becoming a property investor, having training and support from someone like Paul is very beneficial. think the concept that he shares has been shared before from a number of our guests, property CEO.
was one, think many others talk about the whole idea of property as an example, being essentially a business where you've got to have business ownership skills, business running skills. So the principles that we teach about business in wealth builders, which is the three pin plug, isn't it? Be outstanding in your niche, have a business that works without you and have a stream of recurring income or indeed
Speaker 2 (45:35.776)
recurring sources of capital. And then if you can do that, your business is going to be more valuable to you. If you keep it, it's more valuable if you ever choose to sell it. So I think Paul displayed that in spades today. And we believe that's true in wealth. when we do workshops and we do, I guess, discussions about wealth, most people see wealth as almost a statement of your value, your net worth, so to speak.
I think the established systems that have borne, I suppose, our paradigm, our mindset around that, which is the school system, the work system, and the financial system, are completely fundamentally flawed for today's environment. And we talked at the beginning about how uncertain the world is. And I think if you can create a business-like approach, a principles-based approach to building
any business, your wealth business, your property business, your trading business. And you can apply those principles. And Paul talked about a number of those in his interview with you, Paul, nice interview it was. And I think if you can apply those business principles, it's going to stand you in good stead. And Daniel Priestley talks about that similarly with becoming a KPI, a key person of influence. And so many of the guests that we've had speak very, very eloquently.
about the principles that have taken them to where they want to get to. But there's a remarkable similarity in so many of them. And of course we have a process which we call the Wheel of Wealth. And so many aspects of the Wheel of Wealth were discussed by Paul today. It always begins with education. You've got to have good support around you, connections, community, some coaching, do you do diligence, all of these things. those. Yeah. And a successful wheel turn results in either capital or cash flow.
And maybe you could signpost an episode of the Wheel of Wealth because I think whenever I see people make mistakes, it's they cheat the wheel as we call it. They try and do something more quickly than they should do. And I also like Paul's principle of seeing yourself as a provider of solutions. You know, how your problem solving skills, you know, was one of the things he raised. And I like that.
Speaker 2 (47:59.906)
He's doing that from a property perspective. We do that from a wealth perspective. And we give people a different paradigm, don't we? say, don't look at value, focus on cashflow. Don't focus on the temporary nature of trading time for money, but build assets that give you permanent, predictable, pass onable income. So all of those things are different. And I think we're willing to almost challenge the financial system, which has demonstrated poor value for money for too many years now.
always shocks me that actually it's 10 years since we had pension freedoms and things have got worse. We're one of the biggest countries in the world from pensions, which is where most people get their wealth from. We're the least well-performing of all the major, what we call the P7, the pension seven, the top. The biggest pension companies are the biggest pension countries in the world, America, Canada, Japan, the UK, Netherlands.
Switzerland, all of those countries, a massive, massive focus on retirement benefits. Yet we're the ones that have transferred all the risk to the next generation, but we haven't given them an education system to be able to embrace it and to be able to apply it. And then that lesson is going to be transferred onto the next generation as well. So I think all of the guests that we get, I've got a lesson to share and much of it is a reflection of our own.
Great interview today. Glad we had the chance to debrief that and I'm sure more guests, great guests to come. Indeed. And we talked about the importance of networking and events when it comes to wealth building and had a quick chat with Paul after the interview and managed to twist his arm. So he talked about his upcoming property entrepreneur summit, which is taking place on the 14th of June in Milton Keynes. And he's actually provided wealth builder listeners, wealth talk listeners with an extra 25%.
off for a ticket. So was only £99 originally, and now you can get 25 % off. So if you click the link in the show notes for today's episode, you can book your ticket. Oh, that's so cool. I'm glad you did that. Congratulations to you for trying to get more value for our listenership. I think, you know, if you can, if you resonate with Paul and some will, some won't, that's life. And you think you'll get value from that. It's not the ticket price that's the issue. It's spending the time.
Speaker 2 (50:25.332)
know, because the real focus is when more often than not, when you, mean, I'm going to a summit tomorrow, in fact, in London. And the whole point about that is even though I don't know what I'm going to get, I'm going to get something. And we talk about the ROI, Chris, your one relationship opportunity or idea from a complete transformation in your wealth. And I will meet somebody tomorrow that gives me an idea that I hadn't thought of and go, well, that's, that's an interesting.
perspective looking at that way. And I go into those meetings looking for them, hungry for them, seeking them out. And usually I come away with something really positive that changes my own thought process as to how to share that with our members and our listenership. So I'm looking forward to that. love doing that. Surround yourself in a room with a hundred people who are all great people, outstanding people, world-class people. You can't help.
but rub off on you. And I'm looking forward to that. And that's one of the aspects of the work that I do for well builders that I enjoy the most. It's going out there, being creative and letting creative energy come to me. Loving that. Paul's going to be there by the way. Enjoy yourself there. Hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you did hit the share button, send it to a friend. Thanks to our guest, Paul Stableton. Kevin, you and I will be back same time, same place next week. We will indeed, my friend. And until then, see ya.
Speaker 1 (51:55.246)
We hope you enjoy today's episode. Don't forget that we are constantly updating our resources inside the WealthBuilders membership site to help you create, build and protect your wealth. Head over to wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership right now for free access. That's wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership.