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Every year, I set goals and review my goals from the previous year. Not only do I set goals and review them but I publish them here for the world to see! This helps keep me accountable for my actions and keeps the goals fresh in my mind.
When I set goals, my main objective is not to achieve those goals but to do better. Many of my goals I do not achieve and that is okay because I know I did more and better with the goals than if I did not have them.
My previous goals and how I did
It is crazy to think of how much I have accomplished over the years and I know that setting goals helped me do much more than I ever thought possible. I own more than $22 million worth of real estate and have accomplished many of my dreams. I still have a long way to go and I will keep this going as long as I can. Every year I write this article that goes over my previous goals and my future goals. You can see those other goal articles from previous years below:
Things have changed over the years as my business has changed and new things have come into my life. I started a real estate brokerage, started investing in commercial real estate, wrote many books, started brick-and-mortar businesses, and much more.
What were my goals for 2023?
I don’t make the same goals every year because not every goal works. Some goals may seem like great ideas until I realize achieving them was too easy or not impactful on me or my business. Some goals may be too difficult to measure or track and some are just oo boring. These were my goals for 2023
Sell 20 properties
I usually make a goal to flip a certain amount of homes which means I sell a flip. I felt the need to bring a goal like that back since I need to be selling properties fairly quickly to keep my business model sustainable since I am buying new ones and spending a lot on repairs. I did not sell as many properties in 2022 as I usually do. These may be rentals or flips that I sell in 2023. I have sold rentals in the past that were not the best performing and that is my plan now as well. I have had some properties that I had big plans for but those plans fell through for various reasons. I need to sell those and move on to other properties while keeping the good ones.
I believe I only sold 10 properties in 2023! This was way below my goal and a few things made this difficult. For one, I was not able to buy as many flips as I hoped to. Rising interest rates also made it more difficult to sell some of the multifamily flips that I had planned to sell. This was not the end of the world because I am making money on those properties every month but I do have a lot of capital tied up in them that I would like to get out eventually.
Here is one of the properties I sold:
Buy 12 Flips
I think we only bought 6 flips in 2022! That was the fewest number of flips I have bought in many years but that number is also a little deceiving. Some of the flips I bought were multiunit properties that will take more work than a normal flip and some of the properties that I considered to be rental property purchases in 2022 may end up being long-term flips too. I have a few duplexes and triplexes that I was thinking of keeping or selling and I think I may sell them after fixing them up a bit.
I did not buy 12 flips in 2023 either! We only bought 7 flips which was not much better than 2022. The silver lining of this is that most of the flips we bought we in the last half of 2023 so we may see some light at the end of the tunnel for finding more deals. The lack of inventory has made it very hard to find properties that will be a worthwhile flip.
Here is one of the flips I bought:
Buy $2,000,000 worth of rental properties
I have had goals to buy a certain amount of rentals (my goal to purchase 100 rentals) and to buy a certain amount of square footage of rentals (my goal to purchase 1 million square feet of rentals) but this year I am changing it to a dollar amount. I liked both goals but they both had issues. The 100 property goal was for houses I started buying large commercial properties. The 1 million square feet of rentals goal was cool but then I bought some crazy big properties that were mostly money pits. We will see how this goal goes.
I did absolutely horrible with this goal as well! I only bought one rental property and it was a small one and a business too. The small laundromat in Kersey Colorado had an apartment in it and that is the only rental I was able to -purchase for $300k. I did have another property that I almost bought for $1.3 million but the seller backed out at the last second. Even though the market for selling rentals is not very good, there still are not many deals out there to buy either!
Refinance $2 million worth of debt
This is one goal that I have been accomplishing and makes a huge difference in my finances. By refinancing private money into bank money, I free up those private money lenders to lend me more private money and reduce my interest payments while locking in loans for the long term. I have some new lenders to try this year and I can reach out to my old ones as well on a few properties.
Well, this is another goal that I completely missed. I had some ideas to refinance properties but those ideas fell through. I knew it would be tough refinancing properties with traditional bank loans and I was hoping to use some DSCR loans. The issue I ran into with DSCR loans, is that most of them have huge prepayment penalties and it is very hard to find them on commercial or mixed-use properties.
Make $500k in revenue from Investfourmore
I have this same goal again! I have some new things to try and I may really focus on that business this year myself as well. I think there is a lot of opportunity there that I have not been fully tapping into. I would love to have people in my office who work on this business.
Are you getting used to me missing my goals because it happened again! I actually saw a decrease in revenue from investfourmore. Investfourmore is this blog, my YouTube channel, social media, real estate coaching products, and a few other things. One of the big problems with Investfourmore is that real estate is really hard right now and I think many people have lost interest or given up. While my revenue did not go up, I was able to accomplish some great things in 2023 with my brand.
Add 250k social media followers
I think this goal is diable and at the same time challenging as well. The tricky part with social media is you never know what will do well or how your account will do. Some things I think will never do well end up being awesome and some that I think are awesome do horrible! One of the sub-goals in this is to hit 100k subscribers on YouTube. I have 90k now and gained 10k in the last 2 months but without crazy evictions, YouTube stops pushing my channel as much and that crazy run is over for now. Hopefully, I can get more steady and consistent growth without craziness.
Here is a goal that I was much more successful at achieving. I hit 100k Subscribers on YouTube! I did not add 250k social media followers, but I added about 100k through YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Instagram has actually been losing followers because I think Instagram shadow banned me and hates me. I am not sure why.
Raise Revenues at my store from $65k to $95k per month
I bought a liquor store and mini-market in 2022 which was a goal of mine for a while. I have always wanted a brick-and-mortar store for some reason. I got my wish and it has been fun but also challenging. The store makes money even after paying rent to myself who owns the building as well. While it makes money, I think it can do so much better! One big change is we can serve more food options since I just upped our food license to a grocery with a deli which allows us to prepare some foods. We will see how that goes!
This goal I hit in the summer of 2023 and then sales dropped back down again. Sales are seasonal at the store and that was to be expected. While sales were way up, our profits were not as much as they should have been due to some staffing issues and cost problems. Making money is not all about revenue, but the bottom line, or profit as well. The store is going great.
Interesting 2023 accomplishments that weren’t goals
While I did not accomplish many of my goals I was able to do some new things I was not expecting. I have wanted a laundromat for many years and tried to build one from scratch in a small town in Northern Colorado. That did not work out because of the build and utility costs. However, I was able to buy one small laundromat and car wash in June that was already existing and then I took over another laundromat in September! The small laundromat has had many challenges but the larger one is doing pretty well. It was very exciting learning the business and trying to improve sales.
My goals for 2024
As always I am going to change up how I do my goals this year. I am always tweaking and changing things as I said previously. I am going to do something new which maybe I should have done before but for some reason, I did not. I am going to post an income goal. I have always been about investing and revenue in some of my businesses but I have never done a total income goal. Many people think I make way more money than I do.
I want to make one million dollars in taxable income in 2024
I have multiple companies that have made close to or more than one million dollars in revenue a year but taxable income is not revenue! If I am able to make one million dollars in taxable income it will mean that I brought in way more income than that because my rentals and other businesses provide a tremendous amount of writeoffs and deductions. I plan to do this with a mix of online profit, store profit, flip profit, rental property profit, and laundromat profits. I broke down that goal into smaller goals like making $100k profit at the store.
I want to sell 20 properties in 2024
I am repeating this goal again because there are about 5 rentals I would like to sell that are underperforming or have a lot of equity compared to the cash flow coming in. I also have 7 flips that should sell in 2024 and I plan to buy more that will sell in 2024 as well. It is not the end of the world if I do not sell this many but it would be nice and free up capital to buy properties with more potential or value-added possibilities if I can find them!
Here is one of the properties I sold in 2023:
I want to buy at least 12 flips in 2024
I made this goal in 2023 and did not reach it either but I think I can in 2024 or at least come close. It is fun doing flips and I love creating videos and buying more flips allows me to make more videos! I am hoping with interest rates going down (fingers crossed) more inventory will come on the market and I will be able to find more deals.
I want to buy $2 million worth of rentals
I am repeating this goal again too! Rental properties that make money have been in short supply in my market. There have been a few properties that came up for sale that were close to good enough deals for me and other investors jumped on them. I am thinking I may have to try a different market soon but I am not giving up on Colorado yet. I did make a post about the most landlord-friendly states which could help others and myself make a decision if I decide to invest in other markets.
I want to refinance $2 million worth of debt
I am still looking to refinance some of my properties that have private money loans on them. Luckily my lenders are very flexible and are willing to keep taking the interest I am paying them. If interest rates come down a bunch that would be awesome but I am not sure how far down they will go. I would also love to find a DSCR lender that doesn’t have huge prepayment penalties!
Social media and blog goals
I have many goals for social media. I want to continue to grow my YouTube channel and I would love for it to take off and focus my time on it but my other social media channels like Facebook and TikTok drive people to my YouTube channel. I also have not been writing as much on Investfourmore.com because I have been focussing on social media and I think that is one reason I have not been as successful online as I had hoped. I want to write more on my blog and make sure I am taking advantage of the brand I have built over many years!
Here are some of the social media goals:
- 150k YouTube Subscribers
- 400k Facebook followers
- 100k Tiktok followers
- Increase traffic on Investfourmore to 50k users a month
- I still want to hit that $50k a month revenue goal as well!
Conclusion
Setting goals is very important and something I do every year and keep track of all the time. To be honest, I could have kept better track of my goals in 2023. I had them written on a whiteboard and I looked at them but I did not set time away to plan as much as I should have. Another goal of mine is to focus more on my goals in 2024!
To learn more about goals and why I use them check this out.
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