What Are You Doing Differently Next Year...

plan Editor’s Note: Dennis Fassett is a former corporate finance executive turned real estate investing “Cash Flow Mercenary.” Dennis specializes in single-family and multi-family cash flow properties and thoroughly enjoys assisting his fellow investors with their own strategies, including how to buy your first apartment building.

As an ongoing contributor to Mogul’s “Market News Updates,” Mr. Fassett provides us with his own unique, lively, and thought-provoking commentary on the timely industry news and events of today that are impacting our industry. And be sure to check out his other super-helpful Market News Updates. For now, enjoy...

From Dennis Fassett, Cash Flow Mercenary...

So – how has 2017 treated you? Good? Bad? Ugly?

You know what?

It doesn’t matter. Because thankfully, what has happened in the past isn’t necessarily a good predictor of the future.

And that goes for good times AND bad times.

So either way, that means you need to look ahead and figure out a game plan.

That’s something that I do every year around this time.

I find mid-December to be the best time to get this done, because my day job mellows out, I have to take a bunch of vacation days, and things slow down just a little in my REI business.

And that gives me a chance to sit down and focus on what I want to happen and where I want to be 12 months from now.

But don’t get me wrong – planning should never be isolated to a particular time of the year, or based on some arbitrary date like the year’s end.

The truth is, when circumstances change, you need to change with them, no matter what the calendar says.

The What vs. The How

Many people I know get all hung up on the “what” versus the “how” when they do their planning, because they don’t realize that both are required if you want to accomplish your goals.

awesome But they’re inextricably linked, and you really can’t have one without the other.

Think about it…

Let’s say your “what” is to make $1 million next year. I use that example because my son has had that goal since he was 7 years old.

It’s meaningless.

But let’s change it up to include a what and a how: I’m going to make $1 million next year through wholesaling real estate contracts.

Look what happens - you end up with a specific goal, and the high-level roadmap as to how you can accomplish your goal.

Which means you can take action! And accomplishing goals starts with execution.

The next thing that folks get caught up in is the planning process itself. And that makes sense, because if you’ve never worked somewhere where they had a planning process then it would make sense for it to be a foreign concept.

The good news is that the process is pretty straightforward. Let me run through the steps for a simple planning process:

Prioritize

Prioritization involves gathering up your goals, which should be combinations of “whats” and “hows”- and then ranking them in order of importance to you.

Identify Constraints

Quite simply, constraints are limits on what you can do. The 2 biggest constraints are time and money. But there are others. So it’s important to identify pretty much everything in your life or business that would get in the way of completing your goals.

Drill Down on the “Hows”

Drilling down is the process of creating a high-level action plan for accomplishing the accompanying “what.” So if you want to make $1 million by wholesaling contracts, the first step in my action plan would be to determine how many deals I would need to do in a year to make the million… and so on.

Draw a Line

Your list of goals is probably going to be long. Mine is. So it’s important to be reasonable in determining what you’re going to accomplish going forward. For example, if you have a day job and want to do real estate in your off hours, it doesn’t make sense to schedule yourself for 8 hours of real estate work each day. It just wouldn’t be rational. Not that you couldn’t work on that pace for a while, but it’s not realistic to think it can be done for an extended period of time. So this step is fitting your goals into your constraints.

Execute!

The worst thing you could do is leave the results of your planning process sitting on the shelf or in a drawer gathering dust. So once you get through the first 4 steps, it’s time to execute – take action!

And that’s it.

So set aside a couple of hours this month and run through these steps. It will be worth it.

Got any goal-setting tips or advice on taking action? Share below.