What not to wear

February 07

Over the last few years, since I have been speaking on the Property Circuit, I have been asked many, many things.

One of the most bizarre questions I was ever asked, however, was

• what should I wear when viewing property?

I pick on it today because it is a great example of the kind of issues that new investors / new entrepreneurs face.

You see, there are two completely different ways I could have gone with answering the question:

• Why are you asking me this? It does not matter.
• I am glad you asked - it is terribly important.

... and the problem I have is that both answers are equally valid.

When you are in a job, there are certain social norms - most people dress broadly the same as their peer group.

Architects seem to like pastel-coloured blazers. City traders wear suit trousers and striped shirts. Bankers wear ties. It support people wear polo shirts and chinos... and so on.

When you become an entrepeneur, however, one of the things you LOSE can be that sense of group identity, and this is the real issue for this newsletter.

When you set up in business for yourself, you have to come up with the answers - there are no longer a bunch of people who surround you who think, act, (and yes, dress) in a way similar to you.

Suddenly, you have to find a routine, a place, a way of working that works for you. The good news is that YOU can make these decisions. The bad news is that YOU have to make these decisions.

And, in my experience, it is these types of questions that cause most startups to run into problems, not the headline-grabbing issues of business strategy, or client attraction, but the boring basic stuff of setting up a system that works for you.

This, by the way, is why franchises have much lower failure rates than from-nothing startups. A franchise makes many of these decisions for you, and provides almost a half-way house between a job and a business that you design from the ground upwards.

In Property Investment, however, the franchise opportunities tend to be limited to the service roles - estate agencies, letting agencies, IFAs and the like - not to the core business of actually building property portfolios.

Which brings me back to one of the mantras I have been repeating for several years. Property Investment is A BUSINESS - it is not, in the early years, passive income in any meaningful sense of the word passive. Instead, there is a whole lot of work to do, people to call, streets to pound, meetings (viewings) to hold, offers to make, teams to build, and big decisions about money to commit to.

So, while it would be easy to dismiss the question of what to wear as irrelevant, it does provide a good example of the problem - that if you are going to make it in property, you need to be able to come up with answers to ANY question you might face.

All that I can ever do is provide some insight into what has worked for me. (chinos, smart shirt, no tie for viewings / meetings with estate agents or vendors.... Suit and tie for meetings with the bank... Jeans and rugby shirts for stuff at the (home) office.)

That answer works for me - it may not work for you.

The reason that it may not work is that our minds associate particular clothes with particular ways of acting. If you are used to putting on a suit and tie to work, and only put on jeans to slob around the house, then put on a suit and tie to work on your property business. If you only wear suits to family weddings, then by all means wear jeans to the bank...

... and as for the questions of what time you should get up in the morning, whether you should have a free-phone, lo-call or geographical phone number for your business, whether you should answer that phone in your name or the name of your business, what colour your business cards should be...

... my best advice is to not get hung up about it. To realise that there may be a MARGINAL advantage in, say, red cards over pink ones, but the REAL choice is between getting out there and getting the cards printed, and having no business cards because you still have to come off the fence about colour.

This is just the feature article from the February 07 newsletter. Subscribe for market comment, forthcoming events, and more.

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