Could This Decision 10x Your Results? (It Did For Me)

In today’s episode, I’m breaking down the real role mentorship plays in building a successful HMO business - what it actually does, when it makes sense, and how it can materially change your results if used properly.

Mentorship isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t magically fix a broken strategy or replace hard work. But used at the right time and in the right way, it can dramatically improve decision-making, reduce risk, and accelerate progress. Most costly mistakes in property don’t come from bad intentions - they come from lack of clarity, poor sequencing, and limited experience.

This episode is about perspective and precision. I walk through the five core benefits of mentorship, real-world examples of how the right guidance saves time and money, who mentorship is (and isn’t) for, and how to make a considered choice about who you should learn from.

🎯 What You’ll Learn

• The five core benefits mentorship brings to an HMO business
• How better decisions and risk reduction change long-term outcomes
• When mentorship makes sense and when it’s too early
• How to choose the right mentor and avoid expensive mistakes

If you’re committed to building or scaling an HMO portfolio and want to accelerate results while avoiding unnecessary errors, this episode will give you clarity on whether mentorship should be part of your journey.

And if you’d like my direct input on your current or next project, you can book a complimentary strategy call with me here.

💻 Resources & Mentions

• The HMO Roadmap: Feeling overwhelmed? Access 400+ tools, templates, and lessons to help you start, scale, and systemise your HMO business - all in one place. Join here.
• The HMO Community: Got questions or need support? Come and connect with 10,000+ investors inside our Free Facebook Group here.
• Social: Follow me on Instagram for daily HMO tips, advice, and behind-the-scenes updates here.

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 (00:40.654)

Getting a mentor can completely change the trajectory of your business and your success. And it certainly did for me. And when I look at many, if not most, of the successful people that I know in property and business and beyond, nearly all of them have had a mentor in one shape or another at some point along the way. So in today's episode, I want to get into this. What can you expect from a mentor? How could it materially change your results? Who is it right for? Who is it not right for? When is the right time to get yourself a mentor? And how can you make a considered choice about who you work with if you do decide to get a mentor. My opinion if you want to accelerate your results and achieve more than getting a mentor is certainly one of the ways to help ensure you do that. Let's get into it.

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 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 (02:34.734)

Okay welcome back. So the first thing I want to say today is that mentorship is not a silver bullet. It is not the pill you take to suddenly fix all of your problems and achieve your wildest goals and ambitions. It's not something you bolt on and suddenly everything just works. But from my own experience and from watching a lot of other investors over the years, when it is used properly and done at the right time, it can absolutely and materially change your outcome. 

Now, I want to be very clear from the outset here. I do work with investors and I do offer a mentorship program. Shock horror, you probably knew that, but I'm also really clear that I'm not right for everybody and that's exactly how it should be. And I am certainly not going to try and convince you today to join my mentorship program. That is not what today's episode is about. 

By the end of today's episode, what I want you to have is a much clearer idea on what mentorship can actually do for you. Who it's really for, when the timing makes sense and how to judge and how to make a decision on who you should work with, who's worth spending your time with. Okay. 

Now, in my opinion, there are many benefits to getting a mentor, but there are certainly five core benefits. And I think to understand whether or not mentorship is right for you, to understand when the timing's right and all of that jazz, first of all, you need to understand how it can change your outcome. So I want to start with those five core benefits, if it's okay. 

Now the first one is in my opinion the single most important thing and actually this is often overlooked. Having clarity around your goals and your vision and your strategy is so incredibly important. Now in honesty a lot of investors a lot of business owners they don't have that. They're very busy, they're very active, they're making decisions but they don't have that clear view of what it is they're actually trying to achieve and that lack of clarity leads to drift. Decisions get made in isolation and opportunities get chased because they look good in the moment, but they don't necessarily correlate with the outcome or the objective. 

And over time, those decisions start to compound and you start to drift. You drift off course. And that is why, in honesty, so many people wake up years down the line with a business that they don't really want to be running. It's not what they expected. It's not what they hoped for. It's not what they set out to do. And that business certainly hasn't delivered the life that they wanted to build themselves.

Andy Graham (04:57.928)

So that is why this is so important because your clarity and your strategy and your goals and your vision that is essentially the objective that is the foundation that you set out and You start building from that and if you get this bit wrong, you will almost certainly fail. So why is having a mentor important here because surely you could get your own strategy, right? Well, let me tell you.

In reality, there are so many decisions that you could make, so many ways to go about achieving certain things that the very idea of pulling down a strategy and getting clear on that can be overwhelming. And unless you've done it, unless you've walked the path, it's very difficult to know whether your ideas that you may have heard and listened to on podcasts like this on YouTube videos at courses, it's very difficult to know whether or not that knowledge base can actually be translated into what it is that you want on a very personal level. 

So let me give you a couple of examples here. Location and logistics has a very big influence on what your business may look like at some point in the future. So a lot of people understandably want to try and achieve the very best they can from a financial perspective when it comes to investing in HMOs. But to do that, it may necessitate traveling or investing elsewhere in the country. Now there's nothing wrong with that.

It's certainly not bad. It's not right. It's just dependent on whether or not that is going to suit you. Traveling or the requirement to travel regularly will substantially influence whether or not you enjoy building that business, how easy it is, the results that you can get from it. But without the experience of having done that or without the experience of working with someone who has done that, it's difficult to know just how that could translate into a tangible business. Let me give you another example. 

The way that student HMOs perform versus social HMOs. They are completely different and the business that you build, depending on which strategy you lean into, will be very, very different. One may be more profitable on paper. One may be much more difficult to run in real life. One may enable your capital to stretch much further. One may make that more difficult and more challenging and you might have to lean into different ideas that help you bring about your results. You might end up being forced to raise more private finance because

Andy Graham (07:18.838)

You need more capital and so on and so forth. So being really, really clear on your personal objectives and not trying to copy somebody else or do something that you've seen on Instagram or Facebook. Getting really clear on your goals and your strategy and your vision is essential and a good mentor, somebody with experience, somebody who's walked the path and has got a breadth of experience to share with you can really help you connect that knowledge and those personal aspirations with a very clear strategy and goals and help you deliver that vision that you want to succeed, that you want to see over that long term. So for me, the first of the five core benefits is all about clarity and strategy. Sometimes without a mentor, it can be very, very difficult to get that. 

The second core benefit for me is all about better decision making. Most investors don't make bad decisions because they're careless. They make them because they just don't have the information that they need. They're working on limited experience. You don't always know what questions to ask. You don't always know what you don't know. And the knock-on effects of a decision can surface much further down the line. And at that point, it's far too late. The right guidance, you see, helps fill those gaps. It adds context. It will challenge your assumptions. It'll help you think decisions through properly before you commit. 

And over the time, you're making these decisions with more information, more perspective and a clearer understanding. You are going to get a much greater degree of accuracy on every single component, on every single thing that you do. And of course that washes through as better results, better performance and more enjoyable business, less stress, all of that good stuff. But again, without the knowledge, without the experience, if you are just getting started or if you only have one or two or three or four years experience, you have a fractional amount of the information that you need to make decisions based on very long term outcomes. We invest in property for long term outcomes. Yes, certainly for short term outcomes as well. But if you haven't experienced that life cycle of investing in property, it's very difficult to know what you should expect. And again, unfortunately, a course or a podcast episode or YouTube videos, are not able to give you that same depth, that same degree of understanding.

Andy Graham (09:45.742)

When you work with someone closely, who's got that experience, who's been there, walked that path, made the mistakes, achieved the successes that you want to, that decision-making can immediately be installed into your business. And that is going to instantly improve the degree of accuracy and your results. Okay. So for me, the second core benefit of getting a mentor is better decision-making. 

The third core benefit is risk awareness and mitigation. For me, risk is so important. We essentially buy risk as property investors. That is what we do. Now, most risk in property isn't obvious, actually. It sits in the assumptions that we make, the sequencing of things that we need to do, and decisions that tend, like I said, to become problems later down the line. With the right guidance and understanding where you can come in stock, where these things can crop up further down the line, these risks can be mitigated. And that has a massive impact on what you are able to achieve. Okay. 

Let me give you a couple of examples here. If you don't have a huge amount of experience when it comes to planning, you might have seen some videos about Article Four directions, as Sue Generis. If you don't fundamentally and firsthand have that experience, I can almost guarantee that your first experience of a planning application will be awful. It'll be a roller coaster and it will be an absolute gamble. If you work with someone who's got the experience, you will significantly reduce that risk because there's so much involved in planning that you just would not be able to see from the outset. Okay. The source of delays, the challenges that you are likely to come up against, how you should technically approach a planning application to substantially reduce the chances of getting rejections and issues and tons of tiny lists of subtle detail that you just wouldn't know and be aware of that can have a massive impact on your outcome. All of this stuff can have a huge impact on your ultimate performance as a business owner, as an investor. When it comes to hiring contractors, running projects, the way that you manage monies and investors.

Andy Graham (12:06.782)

All of that stuff and all of the decisions that underpin it are about risk. And if you work with someone who's done it all, who can help you significantly reduce those risks, your chances of success are far, far, far greater. Your objective beyond almost anything else is to identify those risks and then reduce those risks as far as you possibly can and then take action based on that until you've reduced those risks to the lowest possible level, you are not ready to invest. You are not ready to make a decision or commit. And that is even more important if you are using finance that you've maybe taken from a bank or a private lender, because if you get it wrong, you are going to be in an awful lot of trouble. And that is exactly where you do not want to be. But you can avoid all of that by working with someone who's got the experience, someone who's been through it, someone who's seen all of this, experienced all of it, and can help point it all out and reduce those risks.

The fourth component, the fourth big benefit of getting a mentor for me is all about confidence. When you've got the clarity, when you're able to make better decisions, when you know that your risk is reduced, you can start making better decisions that you understand properly and confidence naturally follows on from this. And when you're confident, everything just works better. Decisions get made decisively, execution improves, you don't piss people off because you're going back and forth and procrastinating and holding people up because you're second guessing and do you know what? The whole process becomes much more enjoyable and I'm sure that that won't come as any surprise at all but if you don't have confidence you will hesitate, you will overthink, you will second guess you will get really really stressed about stuff and it will slow your progress down.

Ultimately you'll miss opportunities as a direct result of that. Contractors, good contractors will go somewhere else. Agents will give deals to other people, all that stuff. It will absolutely happen. So getting the confidence and being able to take confidence from somebody else, that other person that you can work with that gives you that confidence because they again, they've walked this path, they've been through it, they've seen it, they've done it. That is invaluable. It can save so much time and so much heartache and it's really, really, really, really useful to have. Now the fifth core benefit I want to talk about today.

Andy Graham (14:29.19)

is all about accountability. We're all different. Okay. But most investors broadly know what they should be doing where most of them struggle is actually doing it consistently. Now without accountability, that decision drift just becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger problem. Your actions are things that you need to do gets delayed. Progress becomes very stop start and results just don't come about, they certainly don't come about as quickly as you want or need them to. And when that's the case, you start to get very frustrated because you're not getting the results and you end up in this vicious circle of failure, which is an awful place to be in. And you start pointing fingers and blaming the market and the timing and it's the agent's fault and it's everybody else's fault other than yours. But the reality is in most cases it is quite simply because you are not doing the key stuff.

You're not taking the right actions consistently enough to get the results that you need. It's very simple. And having a mentor, someone to hold you to account can solve that in an instant. Okay. Everybody's a little bit different. People need this to different degrees. Some people I've worked with need a lot of accountability and they just hold their hands up and they need to be told, they need to almost be shown up.

They don't want to turn up to have a conversation having not done the work or not done what they said they're to do. Some people, they just need a little bit. They just need the bits around the edges. Bit of a push with the things that the hardest. They could do most of the stuff, but they struggle with just a couple of elements. Some people are naturally really good. They can hold themselves to account. There's a lot of self accountability. And I would probably put myself more so in that category, a bit more like a dog with a bone. If I want to do something, I'll push and push and push and push and push and I'll try and try and try and try until I eventually do it, no matter how many mistakes I make. And I'm quite happy to put the work in, the boring work, the grind, but a lot of people don't want to. And also sometimes people just don't know that that is what they should be doing. There's certain things we should all be doing and having someone to point it out and say, do that, do that, do that, do that, come back, let's review it, do that, come back, let's review it, do more of that, do more of that, do less of that, do less of that. Having that sort of accountability and that clarity is really, really, really important. And over time,

Andy Graham (16:49.484)

That will help create momentum so you can start to see results. And it's so important in my experience. Now, let me give you some tangible examples of where mentorship actually does add real value. To make this more concrete, I want to give you a few examples from real life. So I've talked about avoiding planning mistakes. Well planning mistakes, if you get it wrong, they could leave you with a six to easily 18 month delay. Literally just sitting on a property that you've bought, spending money on it for 18 months while you were able to do absolutely nothing just getting wound up by planners by committee meetings. Maybe having to go to appeal spending loads of money on architectural fees, having to redesign and resubmit plans and all sorts of stuff Just because you made one or two wrong assumptions. You could remove that problem entirely if you work with the right person. Identifying unnecessary costs in a refurb. 

Okay. Well if you've never done a refurbishment, If you don't have that experience, then I think it's probably fair to say that if you were to look at a 10% analysis for a project, which is basically a breakdown of all the costs, you probably wouldn't know what looks reasonably priced and what looks overpriced. Well, if you've got the experience of doing it, somebody like me can probably look at a project that might have a budget for about 150 grand and see anywhere in the region of 10 to 15% that you could save on that straight away. Not all the time, not every time, but if it's there, somebody like me with that experience will be able to see it. Whereas somebody that does not have the experience, and if that's you, you won't see it. 

So what that means is you could very easily pay on a 150 grand refurb, 10 to 15,000 pounds more than you really should be doing. If you work with the right person, they could save you that in a 15 minute conversation. Here's the 10 to some analysis, Andy, can you have a look? Let's go through it. What do you think? I think this, this and this are overpriced. You know, I think we could do better. Let's go back, have that conversation. Hey, presto. We've been able to renegotiate a better cost for the same work and we've saved 10 to 15,000 pounds. I honestly couldn't tell you how many clients I have helped save that amount of money in a five minute conversation, genuinely, and much, much more.

Andy Graham (19:06.804)

It's amazing. And if you put that into the context of what investing in a mentor might actually cost, it starts to look like a fractional investment because you can save. I'm not even talking about what you can gain, how you can maximize your investments, just what you can save by following the right advice, by working with someone who's got the experience. Clarity for me, clarity and strategy stops you going around in circles. If you've got that, you're not going to miss the opportunities. You're not going to second guess yourself every time.

If you're doing that, you're wasting loads of time. That time costs lots and lots of money. If you've got money in the bank, are you borrowing money from an investor? That is at the end of the day, going to wash out as a very direct cost. Working with someone, having that clarity and that absolute focus, knowing what to execute on and where and how, that will save you so much time and that will just ultimately find its way to the bottom line of your business. Making sure sequences is right. I did a podcast episode on this recently, my find to fill process. That's one example of a sequence.

If you work with someone who understands the sequences of various things, I could break down lots of different sequences. You can save again, loads of money and loads and loads and loads of time and loads of stress. That is very, very tangible. There is thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds in saved costs. If you just know how to sequence things better. And if you work with someone who's got the experience and knows that stuff, then that will just find its way straight to the bottom line of your business. So look.

They are just a few very, very small examples of how good mentorship can really help change your results. But let's talk about who mentorship is for and who it isn't for, who is right for and who it isn't right for. Now, in my opinion, mentorship is most suitable when you are fully committed to the idea. If you already know that this is what I'm doing, I am so committed, I'm 100% in, but you don't necessarily have the confidence to execute. That's a perfect scenario for someone to kind of get a mentor, right? What you don't want is a mentor to try and convince you that you should invest in anything or do anything. You need to have that very deep down on a really fundamental level. You need to have that commitment because you've got to be prepared to then put the work in. But for me, if you've got that commitment, but you just don't have the confidence to execute, that is exactly when you should be thinking about this sort of thing.

Andy Graham (21:24.012)

It also helps if you're in a position to invest and you've got some resources. So if you've got some time or some capital or a baseline level of knowledge or experience, that's great. Working with a mentor on that basis is going to really help you accelerate things. But if you don't have any of those, if you don't have any time at all, and if you don't have any capital at all, and I mean any, and if you don't even have a baseline knowledge, if you haven't even bothered to read a book to listen to a certain number of podcasts to actually go and learn to join something like the HMO roadmap. You are definitely not ready for mentorship. You need to do more work. You need to find yourself a bit more time or a bit of capital to get started. And you need to go and get yourself a baseline level of knowledge. If you don't have that, you are going to be wasting so much time. You don't want to be working with a mentor to give you the A's and B's and C's of something like HMOs. It's all there. Go and learn it.

Don't waste your time with a mentor doing that. Mentorship should all be about execution and implementation. Mentorship also isn't right if you're looking for quick, rich, kind of get rich, quick shortcuts. If you've got unrealistic expectations about what's achievable and the timeframes that it's achievable within, you are going to struggle with mentorship. It's certainly working with somebody like me. You need to be realistic. Now, mentors are not magicians.

If they’re telling you they are, then that's a red flag. You have to be prepared to put the work in. It's still hard work. Getting a mentor doesn't remove that. Getting a mentor just helps accelerate the process. It helps shortcut, but it's not a free ride. It doesn't take you straight to the finish line. If you've done absolutely no work, no baseline knowledge, if that's where you are, then your next move would just be to go and spend some time back in school. Go and just learn the fundamentals, understand the language, then come back to mentorship when you're ready to start applying that.

Now I could go a lot deeper on this, but I just wanted to give you a pretty good idea of who mentorship is right for and who it's not right for. But ultimately, if you want to accelerate your results, if you want to reduce the mistakes, if you want to get more from the work that you're already doing, then mentorship absolutely makes sense. And just think about the example I gave you. If you think about how much you might save from avoiding certain mistakes or how much you might benefit from, let's say,

Andy Graham (23:44.15)

somebody who can help you optimize the floor plans or somebody who can accelerate a process for you by three to six months. If you think about everything that you could save combined with everything that you could gain just by maximizing each decision. If you compare that to the investment you are going to make or potentially going to make in a mentor, that's a really good way in my opinion to sort of justify it. Do you think you can at least break even or achieve more than the cost of a mentor? Well, if you can, it's an absolute no brainer in my opinion.

If you can't see a way to doing that by working with someone, you are either not working with the right person or you really don't have any idea or enough of an idea about what you are about to embark on. That is a really honest truth. So let's talk about that then. Who is the right person to learn from? This part probably does matter in all honesty, more than anything. You're not looking for a new best friend here. You're looking for someone who's already done what you want to do and can help change your life. 

Experience absolutely matters reputation absolutely matters evidence absolutely matters. You need to look for the proof that they've actually done the thing that they say they have done and that you want to do and just as importantly have done it recently is no good if that experience is five ten fifteen years out of date. Do they have a track record. Do they have the results. Can you see that. Is it demonstrable. It's amazing.

How many people choose to work with people, other people or groups that are not able, in my opinion, to demonstrate that experience or that reputation or that evidence of their own success. What a waste of time. Why would you choose to work with that sort of an outfit when actually there are examples that can give you that demonstrable example of experience and reputation and the evidence of what they've done. And they are very active in the space. I think that that's so important. Have they done 350 podcast episodes? That's a strong indicator that someone is who they say they are. You're not going to sit down with them and find that they're a completely different person. They've somehow been fabricating this alias of personality. Do they genuinely understand their subject? Well, if you can go and read a book that they've written or listen to 350 podcast episodes or they've done a hundred

Andy Graham (26:09.27)

YouTube videos again, that's a really good way to get a gauge on whether or not they genuinely understand their subject. Are they genuinely an expert in their field or do they appear to be at least? Is there enough evidence to make a sensible judgment on that? Sometimes in reality, the medicine doesn't taste good. Okay. The right guidance isn't always comfortable. I say this to everybody I work with. You don't want to pay me to pat you on the back and just to applaud every idea that you've got. You want me to listen to you and what it is that you want to achieve and help you put that clear strategy and vision together and then a plan to execute on it. And then you want me to help you deliver that. 

But if that means telling you that what you're talking about, what you're thinking about, what you're doing is the wrong thing, then I will certainly tell you that I will pull you up on it. You don't want a mentor who will just jump ship at every step when it gets a little bit difficult. And what you really need is someone to say. That's okay. It's meant to be difficult. It's not meant to be easy. You're doing the right thing, but you need to do a bit more of this and a bit more of that, a little bit less of this and you need to give it a bit more time rather than, yeah, let's do service accommodation. Yeah, let's move on to buy to let or yeah, let's move on to rent to rent. That is not what you need. You need a good mentor who holds you to account, who sticks with you, who understands what is actually involved. 

But yeah, sometimes that medicine doesn't taste great, but you need to take it. So guidance doesn't always have to be comfortable. You don't need to look to work with somebody that you think will be the friendliest and challenge you the least. In fact, in my opinion, I look for people who will push me the most, people who will be the toughest on me for the right reasons that for me, I know I'm going to get so much more value from that. So that is certainly something that you should be thinking about when you're thinking about working with somebody. Another thing I just want to point out is that you should be wary of anyone who claims that they are right for anybody or for everybody.

Mentors should be specific. Experiences should be specific. I am very specific in what I am able to help people with and teach and how I can get into people's business and actually change their results. But I'm no use if you want to do something about service accommodation. I'm definitely not the person. I don't have enough experience of doing that. I'm probably going to make your life more difficult, but you want to invest in HMOs then I've been doing it for nearly 20 years and I've invested in

Andy Graham (28:33.416)

several cities across the country. So I've got the life cycle experience of lots and lots of deals I've done and managed thousands of tenants. I've probably done towards a hundred refurbs on projects. I've managed millions and millions of pounds and raised millions and millions of pounds. So I can help people apply all of that stuff to their business. But you ask me about a good system to run a serviced accommodation business on. I don't really know because I've only done a very small amount of it. So make sure that you're working with someone who is specific someone who's got that experience and that success in that particular field that you want. If you go too broad, you're probably going to find that your results just aren't quite good enough. 

So before we wrap up today, let me ask you a big question. Do you need mentorship to succeed? Do we need mentorship to succeed? Well, in my opinion, no, you don't. A lot of people in all of have built really successful businesses for decades without mentors. It is entirely possible to learn and act and to still make mistakes and still succeed to achieve incredible things. But the more relevant question I think is actually how efficiently do you want to learn and at what cost are these mistakes going to be along the way? You are going to make mistakes if you don't have experience, okay? 

So please don't assume that you will be the exception to that rule because you won't be. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to make the mistakes that other people have made time and time again, but you can avoid them. You can reduce them. You can find quicker ways and quicker solutions if you do get yourself a mentor. Property investing isn't that complicated. It isn't rocket science. It's not brain surgery. Now my wife's a vet and the stuff that she does and talks about and it's just mind blowing. That is seriously complicated stuff to know your way around the anatomy of potentially hundreds of species and do surgery and understand everything you need to know to keep a patient alive. That is seriously complicated stuff. Property is not complicated in that sort of context, but it is nuanced. A lot of problems just come down to poor judgment, poor sequencing and lack of experience. And it is so easy to repair that with good mentorship.

Andy Graham (30:55.372)

with the right person by your side in your business, you can advise you who can guide you, who can support you, can motivate you, who can push you, can pull you back when you need it. So for me, you don't need mentorship to succeed. You can still find a way there. Doesn't mean everybody will. You may still get it disastrously wrong. I don't want to beat around the bush or sugarcoat anything here. People do lose their shirts investing in property, but you could get it right. It might just take longer. It might just cost more. 

So guess the question is, is that cost greater than the investment that you might otherwise make in a good mentor. I mean, if you think that you could save five to 10,000 pounds and that's what a good mentorship program costs, then it kind of makes sense, right? If you don't think working with someone could save you that, then it's probably not working with them. If you think that you might save in the region of six figures by working with somebody,

And I think by the way, that in most cases for most people at the early stages of their journey, that is absolutely realistic. Then in my opinion, it's a bit of a no brainer. In fact, it's probably illogical not to get yourself a mentor when you're investing hundreds of thousands of pounds and the risk is hundreds of thousands of pounds to not find a way of getting the experience and support in your business to avoid making mistakes that could lose you four, five, six figures to me that is just illogical. 

But like I said, I'm not going to try and convince you today to go and get yourself a mentor. I just want to share my thoughts on it and give you the honest facts and lot of experience based learning that I've gathered over the years of investing in property. So look, mentorship is not essential, but at the right time with the right expectations and with the right person, in my opinion, at least it absolutely can materially influence how quickly and how well you progress and what you can achieve from your business. 

I think the key is being honest about where you are on your journey, what you're ready for, what kind of support will actually move you forwards and what you need on a very personal level, who is going to be right for you. So I want you to go away and think about all of this today. If you do want to build your property business, if you're already doing it, if you're investing, if you're putting the work in, but perhaps not quite getting the results, you're making mistakes, you think you're spending money on things that you could perhaps avoid.

Andy Graham (33:19.714)

These are all good signs that if you just got yourself some support, brought that into your business, you could probably get far better results. And look, think bigger. Don't just think about all the mistakes you could avoid. Also think about all the incredible things you could potentially do and where you could take things if you worked with someone who's already done it. That for me is the real magic about working with a good mentor. I want to circle right back around to what I said at the beginning of today's episode, working with a mentor completely changed my life. It completely changed my business and the trajectory of everything. And it was one of the most exciting and enjoyable periods of my life. 

And I've done it many times since I've worked with a number of different people, but the first time I did it completely opened my ideas to possibilities and things that I never ever thought were possible. I didn't come from an environment where investing in property was the norm. I didn't come from an environment that applauded work and activities outside of an academic environment. I didn't come from an environment that was familiar with managing risk and dealing with risk. I didn't come from an environment that got excited about making money and changing your life. So for me, working with a mentor gave me all of that stuff and it completely changed my life. And I hand on heart put everything that I've achieved down to the very first decision to get a mentor. It changed my trajectory more than I can even still believe now. 

That is it for today's episode guys. I hope you found it useful. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. I hope I've at the very least got you thinking a little bit more proactively about how to get better results in your business. Now, if you have listened to today's episode and you would like to talk to me about joining my mentorship program, head to the show notes now at the top of there. You'll see a link.

Watch that video. There's more information and you can book yourself your strategy call. Like I said, it's not for everybody. My program is application only. But if you want to have a chat, if you want to find out more, then I'm more than happy to do that with you. If you're just getting started, if you are still at that stage where you need to develop a bit of your knowledge, maybe get some more resource together in the form of time and cash and money to invest, head on over to thehmorodmap.co.uk right now. Get yourself signed up and go and take advantage of everything inside

Andy Graham (35:43.726)

our online platform. It's incredible. It's a huge vault of resources, over 400 different tools, case studies from community members, loads of downloadable resources. We've got the deal stacker. We've got so much more and all of that stuff will help you en route to building a really incredible and really profitable HMO property business. And guess what? It'll cost you less than the price of a cup of coffee every single day. 

Now, when you think about what you're about to spend on property, what you're about to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds, it's fractional and it is an absolute no brainer. That's it guys. Thank you again for tuning in today. And 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.