In this week's episode of WealthTalk, our guest is Ritchie Clapson, the owner of PropertyCEO. Ritchie talks us through the importance of property education and why now is a perfect time to start learning about property development. Make sure you check out Ritchie’s free weekly training session, guiding you through the steps to becoming a successful property developer.
Property is one on the most popular ‘pillars’ within our community. People involved in property essentially become the director of their property business, having a team of professionals who they manage. In most cases, trying to DIY this doesn’t work for individuals looking to build real wealth. In this week's episode of WealthTalk, our guest is Ritchie Clapson, the owner of PropertyCEO. Ritchie talks us through the importance of property education and why now is a perfect time to start learning about property development. Make sure you check out Ritchie’s free weekly training session, guiding you through the steps to becoming a successful property developer.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
>> FREE Property Development Training Session
>> Connect with Ritchie Clapson [LinkedIn]
>> Join the WealthBuilders Academy
>> REGISTER HERE FOR FREE RESOURCES ACCESS
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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.
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Welcome to Episode 146 of wealth talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director of wealth builders. And I'm joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whelan. Hello, Kevin. I Cruz, good to be with you again. Yes, here we are. And we've got Richie claps. And today joining us for a conversation about property development, and specifically, why now is a great time to start learning about property development. And Richie is the co founder of property co so today's episode is really looking at your property business with, you know, more of a kind of bigger picture, SEO type mindset. I like that because there's a parallel with wealth building, you know, when we engage people in our wealth builder program, the academy, one of the very first things we do is get people to think in that bigger picture. Almost what we call the family wealth business, and you become the CEO of for the Managing Director, whatever language works best for you, but CEO, in this case, of your own wealth company, because you can't DIY this, that's the key isn't it with being a CA CEO, if I can keep my teeth in,
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encourage you to to think about dealing and, and building relationships and managing expectations and outputs from a range of people. So it's a skill set, and it demands you thinking about what needs to be done not doing it. Because most people who doing property or they think of the word property or property development, Christi, they think they need to be the doer, when the very opposite is probably the case. Yeah. And we're going to pull those lessons out today. Absolutely. And Richie is going to show us why you don't necessarily need to have, you know, a lot of property experience behind you, if you're looking at this with that CEO mindset because it's about, you know, having a team having professionals, people with that experience, and you're kind of at the top, they're just directing, and leading the way. So yeah, lots to cover. And we know the last couple of years, the government have made changes, Kevin, you know, maybe making it a bit tougher for buy to let investors. So you know, there's people out there who are starting to look at commercial property and development as an alternative now, well, quite rightly, and you'll hear I suppose Richie will make the use of some language, which not everybody's in tune to every piece of language. But when you're building wealth, you're also expanding your wealth vocabulary. So one of the points he makes in that regard, Chris has something called permitted development. I know he goes on to explain it. But in essence, it is the least risky strategy for many, because it allows you to take a building that's already got to use and just change the use. But the very changing of the use forces and appreciation of the asset itself, that means that in simple terms, you know, what's the cost of a piece of commercial property? x pounds per foot? What's the value of a piece of residential property? 2x per foot. So if you can turn something from x to 2x, and all you need to do is spend some time in managing the process of that transformation. And it isn't inordinately expensive. In other words, it's not the whole of 1x to get to two, then of course, you can make a profit and more about that in the debrief. I think he makes some very good points about how to make profit and what to do with that profit. And I think that's business lessons. Definitely worth learning Chris on the debrief. Yeah. And also just making me think back to a few episodes ago, where we had Harriet done. And that was episode 141. Again, just looking at property with a more of an entrepreneurial view, I guess. And she was talking about Title splits in that case, but same with Richie, here. It's looking at a piece of property, and just looking at, you know, what could this be and how can you change? You know, the look and feel of it? And as you say, increase that value? Yeah. So let's dive into that conversation because I'm sure it's going to be a fascinating one. Richie, we're live and welcome to our talk today. Good morning. Good morning. We are live that's good, isn't it? We can poke us we can move around. Definitely live. That's it. We're we're pushing the boundaries. We're streaming actually, as we're recording this. So if you're on social media, then to say hello, Richie. Great to have you on a good friend wealth builders. And for those that haven't perhaps come across and recognize your name before would you like to just give a brief introduction to yourself and your company? Please? I can't believe no one would know me. Absolutely. Because your pleasure to be here. Thanks for Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah,
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A good friend of you folks out there. So that's great to be here. Richard Clapton. I'm a chartered structural engineer by profession. And I've been around this industry for quite a while those that actually can visually see us, rather than just listening to us might guess that just by looking, so I'm not a spring chicken, and I run a company called property Co.
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Yeah, so property CO and the topic of our conversation today, Richie is why now is a really good time to start learning about property development, and property development. You know, I think, in many people's minds, maybe conjures up, you know, quite advanced strategies, you know, you have to have good knowledge already behind you about property, but you're going to, you know, share us with us today that that's not necessarily the case. And that actually, property development is a strategy that, you know, is open to everyone really? I think so I think the first thing I'd say Christian as well, I don't like to talk about strategies, I'd like to say the property development business is an opportunity that is available to lots of people. So business opportunity, right. And let's, let's go into that point, then because you've got your company property CEO. So very intentional there, Richie. I know you've got many, many years of entrepreneurial business background yourself. So So tell us about the nine property see what's behind that? Well, first of all, Christian by you saying many, many years, you're also saying that
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I can take that. What's behind it, let me tell you very quickly how it started. So my co founder partner here in child actually was a student of mine, I used to train students privately I actually a chartered structural, engineer by profession, been involved in lots of high level projects around this country, invited by the government to peer review Olympic Stadium, national quatix, those sort of things in 2012, and part design, the the world of attractive roofs, all sorts of things I've been involved in, I trained in privately over a period of time. And one of the things he asked me the very first question, Chris, he asked me, How will you get me credibility if I want to be a developer? And I said, Well, I can't. And he said that, that's what I want. I said, I don't care what you want, what makes you think you can come into my industry that I've been in took me nine years to get qualified, that you're suddenly going to get credibility. And when I said that, what I can get you as credibility as a property CEO. that's eventually where the name come from. And he said, Tell me more. And I said, Well, look, when you want to come into this business, the problem and the mistake that most people make is they think they're learning a property strategy they come in, and they think they're going to get this instant credibility and know everything about the property strategy. But that's just impossible in development is too big. And the better solution, the right solution to come into any business, particularly if you're transitioning into property, even if you're transitioning from biter nets into property development, it's a big, big change is coming as a business owner come in as a CEO. And the analogy I always like to use question is about a cabinet minister, and let's not get political, whatever you think of the cabinet ministers or the current political parties. But if you've got a minister in charge of defense, they're in charge of tanks and guns and armies, and that sort of things. topcoat them out, of course, sadly. But if they then get moved to health, now they're in charge of doctors and beds and medicines. Well, did they know anything about tanks and guns not being political? Or did they know? Do they now know anything about hospitals? No, they don't? How do they do it? Well, what they have in theory is ministerial skills, they act as a CEO, and they have a bunch of advisors around them. And that's really the principle here is, is that if you come in and you transition into this business, and you want to be successful transition, as a business owner, there's a number of skill sets that you need to do that. And if you have those skills, you can transition in and run a property development business. So that's where the name, when we actually decided to set the business up came from his be a property CEO. Hmm. Okay, so digging a bit further on that then what what are some of those core fundamentals of thinking like an entrepreneur thinking like a business owner, Richie, that you think everyone really needs to, you know, have as their foundation, I think, first of all Foundation, Christian is, is some skill sets, okay? Four skill sets that you need to be the CEO of a company. And there's one, which I think is probably the most important, you need some organizational skills. So you need to organize yourself, you need to organize other people to do different things. Now, a lot of people out there in a senior management position or running a different business, so probably got those, you need some management skills, okay? You need management skills, to manage people, again, manage processes to make sure things happen. You need decision making skills, there's no point being sat on the fence, there's no point being indecisive. It's like these cabinet ministers that I just refer to ultimately, the buck stops with them. People look to them to make a decision, they get all the information, you know, they can ask questions, but then they've got to go right we're gonna go that way or this way. And this is the same you got to have decision making skills, you got to be decisive. And fundamentally, I think, probably the most important you've got to have people skills this is a people business like any other business and the the construction industry and and also ways particularly developed, it's archaic. You
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You know, you've got a whole bunch of people, you know, but hands on people building stuff with 1000s of different components, which is bizarre, and it's all built in, you know, out in the Great British weather. Whereas, you know, we manufacture cars and all sorts of other things. You know, we're robots in confined spaces, yet we build houses with, you know, with hands, and is bizarre in a way. But in huge amount of people involved professionals, right, that we announce all the guys and girls on site. So people skills are absolutely fundamental. I mean, beyond that, you've got to have the ability to think out the box, you've got to be creative. Number one, you've got to be entrepreneurial. Having said that, you see if people say, Well, I'm not sure if I'm entrepreneurial, I'd say probably anyone listening to this podcast, will be entrepreneurial. Because if not, you probably be watching a soap on the telly. You know, if you're listening to this, you probably have an element of entrepreneurship, about you. Yeah, yeah. And so who really, would you say, are the kind of the people that you attract towards property, co Richie, who's the typical kind of client that that you'll find who wants to work with you, they're quite diverse, I would say, we will attract slightly more mature people.
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And no disrespect, we do have, we do have younger people. But on balance, we have an older demographic, and I would say generally about 40. Yeah, we have people younger than that. But a majority of people are between 40 and 60, we attract people that I that I guess, are looking for often for that next stage, or this or realizing, you know, from a future proofing, pension perspective, or however you want to look at it, they just maybe haven't got what they want, you know, so they need to build that wealth around them. And property is one of those, those strategies they're looking at. So we get a lot of people that sort of come around from that side, I guess, in terms of the type of people that we get, they're often, you know, senior middle management at the least in terms of what they've done. So we've attracted restaurant owners, people that run their own restaurant businesses, we've attract police officers, IT consultants, there's a lot of individual, almost entrepreneurial people. But when I talk about police officers, we got institutional type people that's come across, but probably held a fairly senior position. So slightly more senior people in terms of the positions that they've held, they probably touched and had a bit of experience, about maybe being a bit of an entrepreneur.
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But fundamentally, they all have a need, or a want, because we have some people that are just wants, they just want to do this to prove to themselves,
Unknown Speaker 12:47
I guess the majority have a need to actually create some lumps of money. And they perhaps got to a point in life, which often we all have got to at some point where we'd go, you know, we just need some lumps of cash, we just don't have enough money around us. And property development, when people look over the fence question, they look into it, I think they can see that it has the potential if they believe they can get there. And of course, that's the reason they come to us to see if they can, it's got the potential to earn them some significant six figure lump sums of cash.
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Now, leverage is a word that we use often at wealth builders spreadsheet, it's key when it comes to building wealth. And there's different types of leverage, you know, you can obviously leverage Money and Finance, you're leveraging your time as well, and talking about the type of people that you know, the restaurant, these are busy people, right? These are people who are running businesses already. They might be thinking, well, how can I possibly, you know, start thinking about developing property? So, you know, how can property development, you know, allow someone to leverage their time more than perhaps, you know, other areas of property? Well, so difficult to comment too much on other areas, because if there's not areas I'm involved in, I don't really have any interest in vital HMOs. And definitely no interest in service departments. I can't think of anything worse, but each to their own. But that's like running a mini hotel. I mean, those the excel at that a really got some great systems in place. Those that don't, unfortunately, they get they get tied to it. I think in terms of property development, and I love the fact that you picked up on leverage, because we talked about leverage is key. Okay. We have eight pillars that we teach around. And our third pillar is all about leverage, okay, it's all about leverage. And I always say to people as well, just before I answer that question, in terms of how can you do it, is that I always want our students to be rich, okay, I want them to be really rich, but I say to them, I don't mean financially. By default, if you do this, well, you will be rich financially, whatever that means to you. And it means different things to different people, but I want you to be rich and time. Because that's the one thing that you can't get any more of you have what you have whatever you're given, and whenever your time's up, that's it. So you've got to make most of that time. So the great thing about
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