At WealthBuilders, we teach our clients to build wealth through assets, by generating predictable recurring income. In this week’s episode, our guest is Ant Lyons – founder of ‘Your Property Network Magazine’. Tune in to hear some great wealth tips from Ant and find out how he has been able to create recurring income from three different businesses to allow him more time to enjoy the things most important to him.
At WealthBuilders, we teach our clients to build wealth through assets, by generating predictable recurring income. In this week’s episode, our guest is Ant Lyons – founder of ‘Your Property Network Magazine’. Tune in to hear some great wealth tips from Ant and find out how he has been able to create recurring income from three different businesses to allow him more time to enjoy the things most important to him.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
>> WealthTalk Episode 7: The 7 Pillars of Wealth
>> Subscribe to ‘Your Property Network’ [Free Trial]
>> Join the WealthBuilders Academy
>> REGISTER HERE FOR FREE RESOURCES ACCESS
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Unknown Speaker 0:01
The purpose of wealth talk is to educate, inform, and hopefully entertain you on the subject of building your wealth. Wealth builders recommends you should always take independent financial tax or legal advice before making any decisions around your finances.
Unknown Speaker 0:19
Well, welcome to episode 147 of wealth talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director of wealth builders. I'm joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whelan. Hi, Kevin.
Unknown Speaker 0:28
Hi, Chris. Great to be with you again.
Unknown Speaker 0:30
Yeah, we are continuing today on now sort of theme that we've been talking about for the last few weeks, which is all about recurring income, creating a business. And then obviously, your recent presentation at the biz X event was around this topic as well, Kevin?
Unknown Speaker 0:47
Yeah, sounds like you're live in London somewhere. A relief company uploading your message? Actually, Chris, is somebody applauding your message out there? I think it's time for us. When we get a moment to ask people to tell us how we're doing. Because it's been a while since we reached out into the listenership and said, like, are we on the right track? Are you enjoying what we're doing? Maybe it's worthwhile just asking that question. So instead of reading a review, suspend a review, you normally have Chris today. And let's let's just ask for a favor. So let me do that. Now. Chris, and I work our little cotton socks off every week, to try and bring you something interesting and interesting guest some education, something that will inspire or help you and take some actionable steps to help you build your wealth? Could you let us know we're on the right track? Like one minute of your time? Could you give us 30 seconds of your time, just to like what we're doing subscribe to what we're doing. Post a tiny review just to say keep it up guys. Loving the podcast, just something as light as that, just so we know, we're getting some feedback. From an audience, I have to say, Chris, it was fantastic to get live feedback. From an audience of physics, you know, you get the feeling of that interaction with people instead of just talking to a screen. And I would just like our audience, if they're willing to do that, to give us 30 seconds of their time. For the 150 or so episodes. We've given them that sound fair enough? I'm not being too cheeky.
Unknown Speaker 2:29
I don't think so once in a while. No, we always appreciate the feedback we get and obviously reading out our reviews every week. But yeah, if you have enjoyed listening, and you continue to do so, why not head to wealth builders.co.uk forward slash reviews. And you can either head to Google reviews, or Trustpilot. And just let us know how we're doing. And if you've got some feedback, if you want to actually, you know, give us some suggestions and ideas or ask a question, then drop us an email at Hello at wealth builders.co.uk
Unknown Speaker 2:59
Or even somebody make a great guest because we love people who have demonstrated strated some success in building recurring income. And this today, we've got online in some way, who's demonstrated that success in so many ways, Chris in property and business and IP and jayvees lots of lessons for you to listen to the interview, and see if you can spot those things for yourself. But as usual, we'll do our usual wealth build a debrief to pull out one or two of the additional points that we think our guest makes today?
Unknown Speaker 3:33
Absolutely, yes. So antlions familiar, probably to some people who are in the property world. So Linda UK at the networking events, and is the owner of the your property network magazine, YPN. And Ann's gonna share with us not only how he's generated a recurring income from the magazine, but also three other ways as well and some capital mixed up in there for good measure. So let's hear from Anne now. And then Kevin will be back with the debrief afterwards. And welcome to wealth talk today.
Unknown Speaker 4:06
Thank you for having me. Yeah, really, really good to have you on with us.
Unknown Speaker 4:09
And and today we're talking about a can create a recurring income business. And you've certainly worked on this, to give yourself a lifestyle that you know, I know you enjoy, and that is important to you, and the freedom that everybody wants, right and I'm sure you'll touch on some of those points as well. So I think a good place to start is just a very brief introduction on who you are and what you do.
Unknown Speaker 4:33
Okay, so some of your listeners may read our magazine, which is your property network magazine, which I set up with my amazing business partner Mike in 2008. So we are 14 years into doing that which I can barely remember life before it. In addition to that, I'm a landlord and investor landlord myself. So I have I have a portfolio of properties of the rental properties of HMOs and single s. And I do some property development projects as well, so to build and undertake the works and sell. And then in addition to that the bit that most people don't know about is I also have a sort of interest in a gym business where we own three gyms at the moment three gyms plans to expand over the next year or so.
Unknown Speaker 5:26
Yeah, fantastic. So can you take us back then, and to to a point where maybe there was a catalyst for you, maybe there was an aha moment where you kind of stop thinking about trading time for money, and you realize the power of, you know, building assets, building businesses, whatever it might be, that could actually generate income for you and create that recurring income
Unknown Speaker 5:48
lifestyle. Okay, so for me, it kind of I was working in a business that my now business partner owned at the time, and this is sort of pre credit crunch, social 2006 2007. And we were buying property in a certain format using many of your members may be aware of this the kind of same day where you mortgage where we could buy, we're bridging finance one day, and we mortgage the same day to sort of leave no money in and create an ongoing income stream and in equity from day one. And that seemed like a smart model, actually, you know, to to create equity, to create what is a relatively passive income as a landlord, who uses letting agents. So I was just running that business. But everyone around me was, you know, doing it, they were out there buying multiple properties, and some of them 2030 4050 a year. And I could see how they were doing it had I not been in that business, and I just was told, all these people are buying 50 properties a year, I would have imagined that they just had bucket loads of money to begin with, I just didn't know how it worked. So that became kind of an obvious thing to be doing to, to create relatively passive income and ongoing income and income that it wasn't working for. And then, and then that's stopped buying PMS buy property in that format, stopped, you know, in the credit crunch. And so we had to reinvent that business stopped. And so I had to reinvent very quickly and create an income. And then we came up with the idea of the magazine, your property network magazine, to showcase how successful people in property, were continuing to make money, what they were doing, the strategies they were using, so I could learn from them. And other people could as well. And the idea was, again, with recurring income streams. And many, many years ago, when I saw most previous life, I worked in recruitment. And I had a sort of contracts desk. So I had whatever 50 People working out working there, and I got paid for business got paid every month from their work. Whereas someone on the other side of that business worked in this permanent desk, and every, every month, they'd have to place new people in work and get a one off payment. And then they start again that month. And you know, that seemed like really, really hard work. So I'd rather you know, keep topping up the bucket a little bit, but getting paid forever. So that's a very long answer to that question. Apologies.
Unknown Speaker 8:27
No, that's good. And so, you know, I'd love to kind of know what those those first years were like setting up the magazine. And, you know, obviously, 14 years ago, it was physical copies, as you know, not certainly not the digital revolution that we've seen since then. And, you know, was it always clear to you that, you know, subscriptions, were going to be key, you know, you obviously get a customer and you know, you want to lock them in and you want them to be a lifetime customer there? And how was that in the early days building that up? And what kind of methods did you use to market yourself?
Unknown Speaker 9:01
Well, it was very, very difficult. So we we launched the magazine as a free magazine. Because we wanted to get the readership out there. We wanted to get support of people who were in the property industry to get eyeballs on what they were doing. And, you know, we I, I had spent a long time networking and we you know, as we all know, your it's a cliche, your network is your network, but it really is true, you know, without any contacts you go nowhere. So we launched it as a free magazine. And then we had this sort of painful bit where we had to turn people from free readers into paying readers, which, you know, was not easy. I probably wouldn't do that. If I were starting again from scratch. Although it did work, you know, we've got a wide audience and then we kind of convince them that you know, this is a great product. It's only a few pounds a month you may learn something that makes your saves you 20 30,000 pounds, so Well, yeah, that that was the job for for a long time.
Unknown Speaker 10:03
Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure, as you said, many of our listeners will be very familiar will be readers and, you know, it's, you know, industry standard now publication. And so, you know, it's obviously been a wild ride and how are things evolved in terms of that business and, you know, just give us an idea of kind of where you're at in terms of size and volume now?
Unknown Speaker 10:26
Yeah, so we have around about 8000 paying subscribers that get the magazine each month, the vast majority of whom get a hard copy of the magazine, we kind of switched things around a little while ago to give people the option of hardcopy magazine plus digital access to the to the app, or to choose from just a slightly lower price point, just just sort of digital access to the app. And overwhelmingly, 90% of our sort of new customers opt for a hardcopy magazine, they like a physical product, you know, 60% of them, I think, actually access and read the material and watch the videos on the app. And the app doesn't have the same constraints as a physical magazine. So we can add, you know, more multimedia content to it. But people like to buy a physical product. And I think that is interesting, because I had assumed that people would opt for purely digital, but that's not been the case.
Unknown Speaker 11:27
Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure there's a there's a whole team behind the, you know, the production of the magazine.
Unknown Speaker 11:35
Let's talk about them, because they're amazing, you know, they really are very, very strong editorial team. So in the early days, in the first days, it was Mike and myself, and Heather, who was working with a standard still, we worked with us now sat in a room, and Mike was trying to figure out how to sell the magazine. And I was trying to figure out how to write it, and going up and interviewing people. And fortunately, now we've got an amazing editorial team that create brilliant content, and they don't have the same spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in my early early articles for absolutely littered with.
Unknown Speaker 12:14
Yeah, yeah. So you know, congratulations, obviously, you know, 1000s of subscribers to that magazine every month. So, you know, obviously a fantastic example, there of recurring income using a subscription model there. And so that's obviously one strand of what you do. And, and, you
Unknown Speaker 12:31
know, that's my day job. That's, you know, yeah, most of my focus, I would say,
Unknown Speaker 12:38
yeah, and, you know, in terms of the wealth building seven pillars, you know, that sits firmly into obviously, a business there. So that's pillar number five, and our other entrepreneurial pillars and our, you know, building a property portfolio to create recurring income, generating IP, which I guess the, you know, the magazine obviously, sort of straddles between business and IP, certainly, you know, creating the app there as well. And, and, and I know, there's more IP, which, which we can come onto as well. And then joint ventures as well is pillar number seven. So, you know, maybe if we're sort of going in order looking at property and what you're doing in property yourself there.
Unknown Speaker 13:16
Okay, so it's almost worth sort of rewinding a little bit now to say, sort of, because anything like it pre credit crunch, it's completely, you know, it doesn't really count anymore, it's not possible anymore. Anyway, so. So when the credit crunch hit, I was determined to continue building this portfolio of properties that made money each month and turning one deposit into multiple properties. And I know you're based in the in the southeast, only Christian so the numbers that I've talked to are going to be kind of different. So to back then, sort of, let's say 2010, probably I was buying flats for maybe 50,000 pounds there or there abouts stuff that sort of pre credit crunch might have been worth 90 100, something like that. And they haven't dropped by 50% You know, they dropped a lot, but also, there were problems with them, you know, all of the properties required at least a refurb. And some of them had other issues with them. I could go into some of those so so one of them was house that had been part converted into two flats and the guy who owned it had run out of money and had poor health and will be the shoes and I was able to buy it with planning permission. Finish the works split the title, so to create two leasehold entities, thereby and in addition to that, sort of, you know, adding value to the refurb and splitting the title, I could force the appreciation of the asset, refinance, getting my money back out, end up with a property with maybe you know, an individual flat might have 20 30,000 pounds worth of equity in it, and it would make comfortably two Making 300 pounds a month. As I say, relatively passive income, back then I was kind of self managing some properties, I definitely don't do that anymore was definitely not my strength. You know, there are people who are much better at doing that than me so so that that was it, you know. And then I did a few with my amazing friend Chrissy who will probably be listening to this. And then we kind of which we'll talk about in a minute, I guess, moved into some development side of things. But the building the portfolio back then was pretty risk averse. So, you know, I was very sure and what these properties were going to be worth once sorted out, once any complications have been sorted out and the works have been done, I got very close to what the build numbers book cost was going to be in terms of the refurb, you know, could put simply, I couldn't really afford to get it wrong at that point. So it was a good discipline to make sure that, you know, if I bought a flat for 50,000, then it was spending 10 or 12 on it, it was going to be worth 7580 At the time, and I could refinance and get back most of that money and go again. So that that was the that was the strategy.
Unknown Speaker 16:10
Okay, great. And now in terms of the cash flow that you've generated from the properties, you know, you talked about widely and magazine being more the day job there, right. So that's kind of, you know, what you're enjoying day to day, you're being part of the team and making sure that it's all running, how much time that the properties, you know, involve for you now, and you know, we talk about passive income, but you know, does it come close to that?
Unknown Speaker 16:36
Yeah, it's funny, because a lot of people I think, you know, probably people who self manage or put on property, Facebook groups, it's anything but passive. It's definitely not passive. Well, I work with letting agents some of whom are amazing, some of whom are not quite brilliant. But it probably takes me a couple of hours a month, on average, to to oversee that portfolio. And I'm going to be completely honest, and most of that is checking the bank statement to make sure the money's come in some checking bank account, checking the rental statements, Mary with that, filing those online, and then agreeing if I get an email through saying, oh, you know, you need an EPC done. Do you want us to carry that out or whatever. Just liaising with the the agents, I mean, sometimes gets a bit more hands on. But that's, that's, that's what we're aiming for. And by and large, that's what I have achieved with mine. We get the occasional hiccup I've got a property at the moment where first one ever first one in wherever it is 60 or 70 years, I'm having to evict somebody, just not that pleasant. I'm not doing it the agents doing it. But but that's pretty rare. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 17:50
So So would you say really, you're you know, you're leveraging relationships there. You're leveraging people either letting agent to take care of most of that for you?
Unknown Speaker 18:00
Yeah, absolutely. And it's a, it's a trade off, because, you know, I pay them to do that. But, you know, they are better placed to do that job, they'll do a better job of it than I can do myself. My most of my properties are 120 110 miles from where I live. Some of them, some of which I haven't been back to since the day the refurb was finished. Because that's not my job. That's their job. So yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely trying to leverage that.
Unknown Speaker 18:31
Excellent. So that obviously gives you gives you more of your time back. And which perhaps moves us into the third kind of area of interest for you, and which is the gyms. So could you tell us a bit more about what you're doing there?
Unknown Speaker 18:45
Yeah, so I, the gym that I go to, is owned by a really good friend of mine. It's a CrossFit gym, if anybody knows what that is it sort of functional fitness, fairly sort of high intensity and a mixture of sort of gymnastics and strength and whatever. And like, definitely don't go anywhere near as often as I should. And so, my friend that owns the gym that I was going to wanted to expand, he wanted to do another gym on a bigger scale, in a sort of a better location. And he talked me through it, and myself and Mike, Mike, my business partner in the magazine business and other stuff we do. Put in a chunk of money, and we've got a couple of other friends to invest in it as well. And that was in November 2019, the doors opened on that, you know, we'd spent three months and physically working in it. I definitely wasn't leveraging that. I was unpacking rowing machines and bolting them together and, you know, that kind of thing. But that's fun. You know, that's, you know, that's the exciting bit as well. And so we opened in November 2019. And the plan was to kind of hit breakeven in around about April 2020. tickets. We pre sold a lot of memberships, which was great. And then march 2020 came around and Coronavirus hit. And then we were shot for pretty much a year, which was not, you know, not an easy time at all. So
Unknown Speaker 20:18
let's, yeah, just want to kind of talk about that and because, you know, easy to talk about when things are going good, not so easy to talk about when things go bad, right. And obviously, that came out of the blue. I guess there was still rental to be paid on the premises. And, you know, how did you go about managing that situation?
Unknown Speaker 20:39
Yeah, so to be totally honest, you know, those kind of early days of lockdown were pretty scary from a business perspective. So, you know, with the magazine business, we go to 50 to 60 events a month to promote the magazine, and they all stopped. The the doors to the gym work were shut. And as you say, we still have rent and, and other bills to pay. So I think on the same day, we were, we had a situation where there were sort of announcing that tenants may not need to pay the rent. And so you know, at that point, I was thinking all three of my kind of Pillars of Wealth and business are all I could see the ball disappearing. And that was pretty scary, you know, be honest with you. So as you said, it's easy to talk about when things are going good, but maybe we learn the most and things are going not so well.
Unknown Speaker 21:26
Yeah. So you'll be managed to ride out that period. And the gym opens and kind of where where are you? Where are you placed now in terms of, you know, looking forwards and expanding things? Perhaps?
Unknown Speaker 21:39
Yes, so the we have three gyms. So I kind of bought into the existing one that I used to go to. And then we open the second one, which is in North Bristol. And then the we opened the third one literally six weeks ago. So that one is very, very new. The mean, there were lots of CrossFit gyms around you know, and they're brilliant. They're absolutely brilliant, but they are run in the main by people who are amazing athletes and great across it and not business people really. So we were looking at it as an opportunity say, well, we can do this, but kind of improve the processes, get the right kind of management team in place to oversee, it makes sure that all the accounts happen as they should happen. And which is where Mike is amazing. You know, he's brilliant in that side of things. So the plan going forwards is where can we get to 10 or 20 of these? And then can that become a sort of passive income for me? Can I from each individual gym, and just be involved in the kind of management once or twice a week sort of consulting on it really. So we're a little away from that. And we're just putting putting together some some ideas to sort of fund the expansion of the next kind of 10 or 15 gyms really?
Unknown Speaker 22:58
Yeah, excellent. So approximately how many members have you got across the three gyms at the moment? And
Unknown Speaker 23:03
yes, of course, it's a really interesting one. So you know, people listening to this might go to, like the big name gyms, and they might have 3000 members, and the vast majority, those people just never go, we have the opposite problem. So and I must say, actually, during the time that the gyms were closed, you know, the very dark days really in the lockdown, the community were amazing. And the vast majority of people kept paying their membership fees, because they knew that if they didn't, we wouldn't be there at the end of it. And for most of those people, the gym is not just the gym, it's actually their entire social life, they you know, they socialize together. It's a it's a genuine community. And actually, it's one of the things that from a business point of view is amazing, because they're very, very loyal customers. So for a CrossFit gym might have three, two to 300 members. And at that point, it's at capacity, because people go three or four times a week, it's all class based, so people aren't coming in today and kind of doing their own training. 99% of them are coming in and joining a class. So you have a capacity issue. And most people want to train at the same time today. So because of that, it's a lot more expensive, you know, the kind of pure gym offerings out there might be 10 pounds a month or whatever they charge. If you join ours, and you want to come as often as you want to come and join and do as many classes it's 90 pounds a month. So it's a it's a very different offering.
Unknown Speaker 24:45
Yeah, so it's interesting looking at the different I guess price points and margins there and with the magazine lower price point, you know, much higher price point there for the gym on the membership model, but you know, how, how do you take into account this sort of the different margins
Unknown Speaker 24:59
so we I really believe in value for money, okay, and that the customer, whatever the price point is, should have a really good experience, you know, they're not overpaying for anything. So, with the magazine, it's probably a little bit more expensive than going in buying a magazine, off the shelf in the shop, probably, but then we think we deliver a lot more. You know, it's, it's genuine advice for people who are in property and want to move forward. So for instance, my, my tax accountant writes in the magazine, my planning consultant writes in the magazine, our solicitors right in the magazine is genuine advice from the people that we use, and we think that has a really good value to it. And so for what works out, you know, less than 100 pounds a year, we think it's really good value, and it's a bit of a no brainer for people to buy into. So, you know, that kind of ticks that box, and it's a volume business, you know, our although our print costs might go up, our you know, the the fixed costs in business don't change, if we print another, if we have taken another 1000 customers, the, the gym side of things is is different, you know, most people will come three or four times a week, probably. And so if we break it down, it probably works out at around about seven pounds per session that they attend maybe six or seven pounds, which we think is really good value for money they get, they get genuine coaching, you know, you push pretty hard in it, you know, the coaches are not there to let you slack off, they want you to try harder, and achieve more. And, and so we think is is good value. And there are some economic elements of that as well, we kind of because we're kept in terms of the numbers that we can cope with, we have to charge more for the business to make money because we have rent and rates and we have to pay the coaches and so forth. So they have that business as an overhead. So we almost have to fix the price point. At a point where we know we can we can turn a profit at top capacity figure.
Unknown Speaker 27:08
Yeah, no, that's good. And so far, we've talked about kind of recurring income businesses with the magazine subscription model with property obviously, you know, a rental income every month coming in, and then with the gym as a membership model, and you've touched on developments and so I'm interested to hear you know, is there any recurring income element to the developments or is this more of a kind of capital strategy?
Unknown Speaker 27:33
Yeah, so, up to now it's been the sort of capital strategy of you know, buy undertake the works and sell for a profit and you know, book put the money in the bank or put it to good use and whatever, you know, reinvest it and I did this great deal of premium probably sort of three years ago I guess with my friend Chrissy you know my partner and a lot of our property stuff and we bought a it was four flats for really grotty one bed flats in Plymouth. I think we paid about 260,000 for the building and we spent roughly 80,000 pounds turning them from four gra grotty one beds to four quite nicely presented to bed apartments by very simply taking what was the kitchen turn that into a second bedroom and moving the kitchen into the lounge area to create a sort of lounge dining room which we've done on some individual flats before but this was for a time and it went pretty smoothly. So from end to end, I think it was from the day we bought it to the day we sold the last lap was about nine months and we made 97,000 pounds profit between the two of us and it was relatively passive, you know, we were doing twice weekly meetings with the with the contractors and you know, a little bit more than that during some parts of it but it was we were relatively hands off. And so that was great. And then we stepped up and did a so it was it was a listed building if you can picture like I saw Georgian terrorists it was two neighboring buildings which were each five storeys including the basement, commercial, you know, commercial property which wasn't really working anymore. Some of the tenants had moved out it was a bit grotty. They've moved into sort of purpose built a common purpose for offices. So we let me think about this, so we mitigated the risk by exchanging subject to planning. So we you know, we weren't gonna buy it unless we actually got planning, got a planning to turn it into 10 luxury apartments and then undertake the work and the work you know, the build work is very, very different scale is very different moving up into That kind of project you're working with, you know, architects and planning consultants and Quantity Surveyors on the other side of things, you seem absolutely adamant that it's going to cost as much money as humanly possible. And so it's really different. So we did that one, and then at the level a bit of an overlap, then we've got a care home, again, a great two listed, former convalescent home, which we turned two into 10, genuinely luxury apartments. So they're really, really probably some of the nicest on the market. And that was about a year and a half build.