You’re Not Scaling — You’re Spinning Plates (Here’s How To Hit £10K Faster)

Are you working harder than ever on your HMO business, but still not seeing the progress you expected?

You’re not alone and this episode is here to help. We’re diving into the reasons so many HMO investors get stuck spinning plates, and the practical steps you can take to finally break through and scale towards that £10k-a-month milestone.

Here’s what we cover:

•  01:36 – The key challenges holding your HMO business back
•  10:35 – Proven strategies to overcome stagnation
•  11:06 – How delegation and outsourcing can drive growth
•  16:10 – Systemising your business for consistent results
•  19:28 – The importance of focus in achieving your goals

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Transcript

Andy Graham (00:02.67)

Hey, I'm Andy and you're listening to the HMO Podcast. Over 10 years ago, I set myself the challenge of building my own property portfolio. And what began as a short-term investment plan soon became a long-term commitment to change the way young people live together. I've now built several successful businesses. I've raised millions of pounds of investment and I've managed thousands of tenants. Join me and some very special guests to discover the tips, tricks and hacks, the ups and the downs, the best practice and everything else you need to know to start, scale and systemise your very own HMO portfolio now.

Andy Graham (00:40.77)

Do you feel like you're working harder than ever in your HMO business, but still not getting the results, not getting ahead. Well, if you do, then today's episode is definitely for you. We're going to dig into why so many investors get stuck spinning plates and what you can finally do to start scaling towards that £10,000 a month mark. Now, before we kick today's episode off, just a little disclaimer. My daughter decided to make her first appearance on the show while I was recording this evening. So you will hear a from time to time in the background of today's episode. I apologize in advance. I left my studio door open ever so slightly and anyone who has got or had a baby themselves will know that they can be incredibly loud. I of course had my headphones on so I was oblivious to all of this, but even though she was quite some way from my studio, she still managed to find her way onto today's recording, but hopefully it's not too disruptive. It is only in a few parts, but I just wanted to let you know in advance. So you weren't surprised by that weird sound in the background. Okay. With that said, let's get stuck into it. Please sit back, relax and enjoy today's episode of the HMO podcast.

Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're going to be getting back to the podcast in just a moment, but before we do, I want to tell you very quickly about the HMO Roadmap. Now, if you're serious about replacing your income, or perhaps you've already got a HMO portfolio that you want to scale up, then the HMO Roadmap really is your one-stop shop. Inside the Roadmap, you'll find a full 60 lesson course delivered by me, teaching you how to find more deals, how to fund more deals and raise private finance, how to refurbish great properties, how to fill them with great tenants that stay for longer, and how to manage your properties and tenants for the future. 

We've also got guest workshops added every single month. We've got new videos added every single week about all sorts of topics. We've got downloadable resources, cheat sheets and swipe files to help you. We've got case studies from guests and community members who are doing incredible projects that you can learn from. And we've also built an application just for you.

Andy Graham (02:35.256)

that allows you to appraise and evaluate your deals, stack them side by side and track the key metrics that are most important to you. To find out more, head to theHMORoadmap.co.uk now and come and join our incredible community of HMO property investors.

Andy Graham (02:56.494)

OK, welcome back gang. Now, let's be honest, there are so many investors out there working flat out on their property business, but they're not getting the results. They're not actually scaling their business up. Sure, they're busy, but being busy does not guarantee growth. In fact, often it does the exact opposite. Well, today I want to shine a light on why this happens, how significant the problem can be. But more importantly, if this is something that's affecting you, what you can do to break out of it and how you can hit that 10,000 a month target much sooner. 

Now, the first thing to say is that if you're feeling frustrated, if you feel extremely busy, but you're not getting the results and if you're wondering why, and if this message resonates with you, then don't worry because you are not alone. This affects so many people. Sometimes getting the first deal done can be a little bit easier because you've only got a first deal to think about and focus on. But doing subsequent deals can become increasingly more difficult. You get busier and you've got more and more to think about and more things go wrong and more stuff breaks. And that makes it very, very difficult to progress. 

And over time, bad habits can eventually creep in. And if this is your first business, then the experience of building a business is in itself quite new. And it can be really easy to make mistakes and not necessarily realize what those mistakes are and why they are so detrimental. And hopefully today's episode just points some of this stuff out.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through some of the things, some of the plate spinning exercises that you're probably doing. if you're doing a lot of this stuff, that is in itself the trap. That's probably why you're finding you're going round and round and round and round without really making any material improvements or material progress in your business. And then what I'm going to do, as promised, is help some solutions in place, help you fix these problems. And the good news is this is all really easy to sort out and solve. Some of it might feel a little bit unnatural against the grain perhaps, but I promise you, if you can do this stuff and I think this is a bit of my business experience talking, having done it and made the mistake myself and practiced and become better at it and helped so many people through this very problem themselves. If you can do it, I guarantee you'll start to see results very, very quickly. So let's get started. Where can it go wrong? This plate spinning exercise, keeping busy. What is it?

Andy Graham (05:11.64)

Well, I've got a number of things that I think really contribute to this idea. And of course, there could be more, but I'm going to pick out what I think are the most important ones. The key issues that I typically see. The first one is a lack of a clear plan. A lot of investors at the earlier stages of business, moving on to the second and third deal, they're very, very reactive. They're often putting out fires, spending a lot of time just making things up as they go. There's no big goal. There's no clear steps in place.

It's all just sort of firefighting. And the trouble with that is it keeps you very, very busy. It's also incredibly stressful and it'll make you age very, very quickly. But that lack of a clear plan means that you're constantly having to react. And because that is where a lot of your attention goes, you're not doing the really proactive stuff. You're not building the foundations, which is so incredibly important. So that's the first big one. Lack of a clear plan. The second biggie.

Is that you're probably trying to do everything yourself. You're trying to be the landlord, the admin assistant, the bookkeeper, the cleaner, the property manager. I bet you're the marketing expert and social media expert as well. Maybe you're convincing yourself that scrolling right move is research. How often do you find yourself in a tube scroll on Right Move? And I'm laughing because I know I have done this myself and I occasionally find myself there as well. Even when I'm not even in the market to buy.

Even when I am not in a position to buy, I find myself aimlessly scrolling through Rightmove because it's a hobby. It's something I enjoy. I bet it's something that you enjoy doing too, but it isn't necessarily productive. Maybe you're going to networking events that don't really help. Maybe you go to the wrong stuff with the wrong people. Maybe you're just spending too much time on social media, scrolling, consuming and not creating. 

It's all busy work but none of it actually moves your business forward. And that's the big problem here. It's really easy to get really, really busy, but a lot of this stuff just keeps us busy for the sake of being busy. I think as inexperienced business owners and property investors, it is really easy to convince ourselves that just having something to do is a good thing and it's definitely not. So that's the second thing. You're probably just trying to do everything yourself and you probably...

Andy Graham (07:35.65)

doing some stuff in there that you really shouldn't be doing. The third big that I see, the big mistake, the kind of the plate spinning exercise is a result of having no systems or processes in your business. Every time you onboard a new tenant, for example, it's like starting from scratch. No checklist, no welcome pack, no standard steps to follow. What you need are standard operating procedures, something that somebody else can follow to avoid getting the job wrong and having to repeat the process from scratch every single time. 

Now, look, I get it. The idea of processes in itself just sounds so boring, so dull. That is not why we're getting into property, is it? But trust me, standard operating procedures or, let's keep it simple, just written procedures. It's almost like an idiot's guide as to how to do something, how to follow a task and deliver it in your business. 

The best time to prepare processes is right now. And as soon as you've done that, you've got something that is repeatable and scalable. You can give it to somebody, you can train them on, you can hold them to account on it. And that is intellectual property of your business. That is really the backbone of every single business. You don't need hundreds of these. You probably just need a few to make a huge improvement. So that's the third biggie. No systems and no processes. The fourth one then, hiring the wrong people for the wrong jobs. I see this so often.

Look, it's not what you pay. It's about what you're paying people to do. You need that right fit. Getting a builder or your cousin to do the fumes because it's the easy thing to do because they're down the corner. Trust me, that is not how to get the results that you want. Might sound handy at first, but trust me, the chances are you'll just end up having to fix their mistakes. Hiring friends and family members because again, it's the easy thing to do because giving them something to do because you trust them as opposed to actually finding someone who's probably going to be quite good at that tasks or somebody that you might find a bit easier to manage and hold accountable. That's what you really need to be doing. But the mistake is just hiring the wrong person for the wrong job. 

And finally, the other biggie, the plate spinning exercise and kind of one of the reasons behind that is you're possibly just chasing yield. I've been talking about this a lot recently because I'm seeing it so often with investors, but location hopping. If you're chasing deals from one location to the next, just trying to find the

Andy Graham (09:55.65)

best numbers on paper, that is going to keep you extremely, extremely busy. And that is not a repeatable model. What you need is a simple, repeatable and scalable model. The more complexity, the more hassle and the further away you'll be from that 10,000 a month mark that you want to hit. You've got something that is predictable, that is repeatable and doing the same thing in the same location, ideally with the same types of tenants, the same types of housing, with the same people that is going to be much easier to deliver and it's going to be much easier to get better at it and it's going to be much easier to grow. 

So there we go. Quick recap. Lack of a clear plan, doing everything yourself, having no systems or processes, hiring the wrong people for the wrong jobs and chasing yields, location hopping. They are the biggies that I see. And that is probably why if you're not getting results and if you're feeling very, very frustrated, there will be something or many things in that list that you are doing. So the big question is how do we fix this? How do we get to 10,000 a month faster? How do we stop spinning the plates? 

Well, here's what actually works. Starting from the top, you need a plan. You need to plan everything big and small. If you're not familiar with business, if you're new to business, if this is your first business, then planning might not be something that you've had to do a whole lot of before.

Having a clear plan is incredibly important. Just zooming out, that 10,000 a month plan, how many rooms is that? What is the rent going to be? What is the cost base? But plan every single detail from site finding through to management. Let me give you an example. It would be really easy to find a deal, wait till you've completed on that deal to then take the plans to your architect or someone who can do a measured survey to then get them drawn up to then go into planning and apply for something, some changes or perhaps change of use. And that can take ages. If you're proactive and you have a plan, what you really should be doing is identifying something quickly, getting an optimisation study from your architects very, very quickly. And if you're committed to buying it, yes, there's a little bit of risk, but during that period of conveyancing, where possible, get your architects to start doing the drawing.

Andy Graham (12:18.21)

build a drawing pack. Actually, you could even build a tender pack that you can then give the contractors. That process in itself, if you can do that before you complete, will save you two to three months. That is a really simple example, but that is what your focus should be on. And it's lack of a clear plan. And sometimes, if I'm quite honest, it's just lack of really knowing what this stuff should be, what you should be doing. That is going to cost you a lot of time it's going to cost you more money because you're probably going to be in a bit of a rush once you do complete to get things done quickly because you don't want to sit on an empty property and you've got council tax to pay, et cetera, et cetera. It's really important to have that plan. So plan at the large scale, high level as a business owner, but plan on a granular level. It is planning that gives you the ability to manage stuff, which you can then measure and that'll help you get better results.

You can also use simple things like Trello and Gantt charts and Google Sheets to do this sort of stuff. Don't plan it all in your head. I've seen people try and do that as well. Whatever it is that's going to help you stay ahead of the process. But that's the key thing here. Stay ahead of the process. So that's the first one. Plan everything big and small. The second thing you need to start doing is delegating. But you need to be smart about this. 

Now, I would recommend that you think about tasks that you can just eliminate things that you're doing, but you don't need to be doing. So if doom scrolling is one of the things that you're doing every evening, this is an example of this is something that one of my mentees was recently doing and I asked them to break down a bit of that time, how they're managing it. A lot of that time every day was spent just on right move. And we weren't even looking to buy anything at the minute. But look, if there's something that you can eliminate either permanently or temporarily, do that.

If there's something that you can simplify, something that you're doing, but it's probably now over complicated, could be simplified, do that. If there's something that you can delegate, then make sure you do that. And what you should really be doing is delegating the low value, non-income generating, repetitive stuff. Things like preparing tenant referencing and preparing ASTs and setting up or managing utilities.

Andy Graham (14:32.023)

coordinating viewings, that sort of stuff. A lot of it is admin, if I'm quite honest, but these sorts of things, they're easy to train, they're easy to check, easy to manage, easy to hold people to account on them. It doesn't need a huge amount of your headspace. And a lot of this stuff done by someone who is committed to the task of, let's say, just admin, it's easy to do and it's not going to take up loads of your headspace and they'll do a really good job and a much better job than you're probably going to be able to do. 

And look, you didn't do this business to be an admin assistant to do all of this extra work? You did it to generate a good income and a scalable model to give you your time back. Well, it starts now. You do have to spend a little bit to make that progress. So outsourcing by hiring the right people for the right tasks is absolutely critical. And don't think that this is something that happens later when you got to a certain level, when you got to three or four properties, it can happen right at the very beginning.

Have a listen to a podcast I did with Jane Scroggs. If you're a member of the HMO roadmap, go and check out some of Jane's master classes inside the HMO roadmap about outsourcing to virtual assistants. As an example, it is a superb way of helping you take your business to that next level. I've got a mentee at the minute who was running a great business, achieved some really good stuff, but just wasn't able to punch through that ceiling and couldn't figure out why. And it was really obvious to me that the real bottleneck was just that he was trying to do too much and we needed to outsource some of that stuff. And that's exactly what we did. And lo and behold, guess what? It has made a monumental and positive impact on his business. Immediately. He's been able to focus on the income generating exercises, relationship building, raising private finance, buying the next deal, managing contractors on site, the really important stuff, not the low value, less important stuff. 

So that's the second biggie. Delegating the smart way. You need to be doing that. Okay. Moving on. The third big thing then is you need to systemize everything that you are repeating in your business. I know systems, process, it does sound a bit boring, but if it's something that you're doing more than once, build a system for it. So there are some systems that you can use some platforms, some service providers. Coho is a great example for property management.

Andy Graham (16:51.551)

Even just with one property, trust me, it is a great thing to have before you've got your first property, get it set up so that when you bring your first property on board, maybe you'll get something like Coho set up through the completion period. You can onboard it onto Coho and as soon as you've got that project live and tenants, you've got your process in play. So that's a great one for property management. Zero for finance. That's something you should do the day you set up your business bank account, because I guarantee as soon as you've got your business bank account and a bit of money in there.

You'll start spending and you need to start recording transactions. If you have got receipts on your desk, if you are faffing around, emailing bits and pieces to your accountant, please stop now. Get Xero set up. It's about 20 quid a month, less than that actually, if you don't need to manage too many transactions and start tracking your finance. Everything from your expenses through to your rent collection, if you want to use it for that, through to preparing for your annual accounts, everything that you need to do from a financial perspective is capable through something like Xero. 

But so many people wait and then they try and onboard something onto something like Xero and it's much more difficult. Just start from the outset. Other task managers like Asana, Trello, Slack, Notion, whatever works for you. But those are great tools, CRM tools, project management tools to help keep your business in that nice tidy box. And it holds you and maybe your team members to account because you can set projects and sub tasks. You can assign things. You can attach information. You can share notes. You can do all sorts of things.

It's a great way. Again, even if it's just you and one property at the minute, this is the time to do it. Trust me, because as you move on to that second and third and fourth and these tasks to start to mount up, that is exactly when you will want to have all of this stuff in place. Templates. I don't even know how many templates we've got for you to download inside the HMO roadmap. So there's absolutely no excuses, but if you are writing your own welcome pack for tenants, for one of your HMOs, you're wasting your time because I've already done it for you.

Go and get the template, add your branding and other contact info on it and use that every single time. Use my template as part of your tenant onboarding process. Inspection, templates and check sheets. It's all there, but if you don't want to use mine, make your own, but make sure that you've got it and every single time you go back to do an inspection, you use the same thing. So you're not just scribbling notes down, going back to your computer, writing it up. There are really simple and very effective ways of building processes into your businesses.

Andy Graham (19:16.831)

that can make a massive, massive impact and very, very quickly. So they are just a few ideas, but it's the concept of the idea that I really want you to take away here. Okay. Now the third thing that I really want you to try and do to help stop you having to spin all of these place is focus. This is a word I've repeated so many times on the podcast. I have said very honestly that I would put this single thing focus to as being kind of the main factor when I look at my mentees who have achieved the most and have been the most successful, they have been able to focus. 

And the idea of focus, it captures a lot. But focus on one area, focus on one property type, focus on one tenant type. For example, six bed professional HMOs in one postcode and ideally you're buying a similar ex local authority house every single time with the same footprint that you can do the same thing to that you can go to the same contractor with the same plan for and you can go to the same bank for and the outcome is going to be very, very predictable. 

Now, of course, that might be a bit of a ideal scenario, but that is a great example. And the closer you can get to that, the easier it is going to be for you to get results. But zooming in a little bit, focus on where you spend your time and how you spend your time. It's so important, but it's so easy to get derailed by trying to do all sorts of things at all sorts of times of the day on all sorts of days of the week. Really, if you're running a business, you want to try and consolidate what you're doing, focus your efforts, compartmentalise everything you possibly can and make sure that when you sit down to tackle something that you need to do in your business, you eat that frog. You do the difficult thing, the big thing, the important thing first.

Don't start with emails. Don't start with social media. Start with that difficult, really boring thing that you really don't want to do. For me, that is always going back and checking legal stuff. The mysicilistas have come back through. I hate reading through really complicated legal documents, but I have to do it all the time. So I just try and do it straight away. I get it done. And that means that mysicilistas can crack on. So anything like that, eat that frog. Do the difficult stuff. Do the big stuff. Do the

Andy Graham (21:34.059)

high value stuff first and let the other stuff wait. You don't have to get to it maybe today or tomorrow even this week. Just be honest about it. A lot of stuff just doesn't even need to be done. A lot of AI is coming out now to help you manage your inbox as well. If you're finally getting loads of emails, try something like fixer. I don't use this personally, but I do use a couple of other things, but you could try something like this to help just keep you ahead, to help keep you focused so that you can deal with the really, really important stuff first.

So let's just summarise the things that you really need to try and do if you're finding that you're not getting results because you're spinning lots and lots plates. The first thing is you need to plan everything in there to have a big plan, a business plan. You need to have a high level plan, but you also need to have a really granular plan for everything that you're doing on a week to week, day to day basis, project basis. You need a plan and you need to be able to stick to a plan and manage a plan and hold yourself accountable or anybody in your team accountable to that plan.

You need to delegate. You need to be smart about it. You need to give the right stuff to the right people. You need to be honest about what needs doing, what doesn't need doing, and who needs to do it. You need to put systems in place. Everything that you're doing more than once needs to be repeatable. So build a system for it. Have a written process. Be able to give it to somebody, hold them to account, move on. That is IP on your business and it'll speed everything up the next time you come to do it. And finally, you need to focus. Focus on methods of scaling. Pick the model.

Stick to it. Tackle the difficult stuff, the stuff that you don't want to do, the really boring stuff, the stuff that isn't as exciting, the stuff that isn't sexy. Deal with that stuff first. Focus on the valuable tasks that need doing in your business and then move on. Quick example. You should be spending a lot of time meeting contractors. If you don't have a contractor that is reliable, that is trustworthy, that is competitively priced, you should be spending months meeting contractors, having conversations, going through a proper tender process to really try and build a relationship and get a good cost base for a project. That is something that everybody tries to do. I've seen so many people just go to that one build or someone that they met at a networking event or bumped into at a viewing or the first person that popped up on Google. Please, please, don't make mistakes like that. That is exactly where you as a business owner need to be super strategic and really heavily investing.

Andy Graham (24:01.225)

your time, what you shouldn't be doing is loads and loads of admin dealing with spare room and chasing utility companies. That is not the stuff that you should be doing as the business owner. So there we go guys. Look, scaling isn't about more place. It's about making sure that the place that you do have to spin as a business owner, as a director, they do it on their own. Take 10 minutes today to write down what your 10,000 a month model looks like and take some time to really think about where, if you're honest,

Things aren't going wrong where you think you're probably wasting time where you're doing things and not getting the results and write down an order of priority. What are you going to do next to actually change this? How are you going to make a difference in your business immediately? I've given you the list. You don't necessarily need to do it all at once, but you definitely should be getting started with it. And I guarantee, I guarantee that if you implement this stuff and if you take them board and hold yourself to account, catch yourself out on this stuff.

I guarantee you will start to see much better results. You'll feel less frustrated. You'll get a much greater bang for your buck in terms of your efforts and time that you're putting into your business. You feel better about your business. That is really important because you've got to be enthusiastic and motivated. If you want to get the results and you're to be able to do that consistently, that's so important. And there's nothing breaks consistency more than frustration. But trust me, take all this on board today, put it all down on paper, hold yourself to account and put it all into place. 

If you've got any questions about anything that I've discussed in today's episode, come on over to the HMO community and let me know. If this is something that you've been struggling with, I would love to hear it. It's great just to hear that honesty from you guys out there in our community. But it's not just me. It's our 10,000 members that are on hand to help you. There's loads of guidance, advice, support to offer in the group. So come and ask questions. And if you need a bit of a helping hand, we are there.

That's the HMO community. It's our free group on Facebook. Of course, if you want the detail, the lessons, the master classes, the examples, the case studies, the tools, the systems, the processes, the downloadable templates, that is all waiting for you inside theHMOroadmap.co.uk. For less than £50 a month, I think you can get all of that stuff from the roadmap and it will save you hours and hours and hours of time trying to do it yourself.

Andy Graham (26:23.359)

As an absolute starting point, go and check that out because it really is a no brainer if you're building a HMO business. That's it guys. I hope you found today's episode useful. I hope you found some stuff there that you can put into action and see some immediate results from. And of course, as always, don't forget that I'll be right back here in the very same place next week. So please join me then for another installment of the HMO podcast.