He Laughed In My Face…
I was sitting in a restaurant in North Charleston, prepping for a meeting with a potential investor.
My yellow pad at the ready, I was excited to talk with him about our investment model and see if he was interested in future projects.
Who am I kidding…I knew he was going to love it!
Amazing returns, quick turn around of capital, huge upside, and long term cash flow.
My partner, Jennings, and I were just weeks away from closing on our second apartment deal, and we were really on fire to talk with people about what we were doing to expand our network of investors.
The details I had down cold in my presentation.
“We pay X% pref payment while we have the investors money, they get it back when we refinance, and they maintain their equity position in perpetuity after that…”
Shazam…as my friend Tim puts it…“A devastatingly attractive offer!”
I talked with Foster and walked through our model.
Background info needed: all sorts of different ways to structure an apartment deal. Equity splits vary, preferred payments are all over the place, etc…
(All of these things I LOVE to talk about, but would only bog down the story…)
The critical point is that our model of structuring a deal was not something that Foster had seen before.
But I was totally confident in what I had, with the self assurance of the network marketer who is “just making the offer” to someone.
When I finished, Foster reached over the table, shook my hand, and asked for my Venmo so he could send me $100k on the spot!
Sorry, got lost in a daydream for a second…where was I?
Right…when I finished, Foster laughed.
“I would never invest in something with that model.”
It felt like the pitcher of ice water had just been dumped on my head.
Here I was, a newbie, pitching to someone I respected as an investor, who already owned multiple properties.
And he had laughed.
The only thing that would have made it worse if he had said, “bless your heart…”
We finished lunch and made the drive back up town to home.
In a haze as I processed what had happened.
In two words…I failed.
I had pitched to an investor and it had gone nowhere.
Worse than that, he had laughed!
It hurt, not gonna lie.
I was excited about our business, and I had hit a brick wall.
Driving home, I realized what went wrong in the conversation with Foster.
Nothing.
Nothing went wrong.
I had shared how our model works, and it had surprised him the breakdown, it wasn’t a fit for him, and that was it.
No personal attack had happened.
No failure had happened.
I had just taken a shot and missed.
Life-1
Yeadon — zero
In fact, the meeting with Foster taught me a really valuable lesson. That it’s ok if meetings don’t go the way you want them to. It’s not a personal attack on me and my business.
On my way home, I re-committed to building my business. To keep reaching out to the next investor. To keep pushing myself to grow and not quit.
Because there will always be the meeting that doesn’t go well. Always the conversation that ends with a no/laugh/bless your heart…
What we do after those conversations is the difference between what will be and what could have been.
Will I keep moving forward, committed to my future?
Or will I toss in the towel because
It’s too hard
I’m too old
It’s too much work
Don’t let a solitary setback define your entire path. Get up, keep moving forward.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. — Wayne Gretzky — Michael Scott
