‘TAKE A BREAK from trading’ – you’ll be surprised I say that to so many individuals that are on my top level mentorship. These are the reasons why:

• You’re on a winning streak and have made more than 30% on your account in a month (it can happen just not every month)
• When you’re on a winning streak, the human emotion of GREED kicks in for everyone, or at least ‘too much confidence’ in trading.
• When you think you’re made from the gods after hitting a winning streak, you’re most likely to have the biggest fall ever in the following months through complacency or ‘taking your eye off the ball’
• You may have recently just had a disruption in your private life which can rock your trading experience if you’re not as strong emotionally.

This is where a mentor like me can optimise your performance because I know first hand the effects of all the above on my trading experience when it started in 2008 till now. I lost £200k in 2 days back around that time  through complacency and EGO based trading. Only when I got myself a mentor and a solid 3 years worth of ‘learning’ (I’ve never stopped since), did I start seeing the results of £9000 turnaround in 2 hours. That is why Fortune Academy offers LIFETIME training since I know for a fact, you can’t master trading in a 12 month mentorship or less, as I’ve seen other people offer.

My reason for teaching students is empowering for me to watch for one, but on a business level I celebrate success since I add capital into my top traders student accounts and split the profits between me and them. The students are ultimately my biggest assets; I will do whatever I can to get them to the top, if of course they have what it takes.

This industry doesn’t take prisoners, and nor do I. Hence I make it so difficult for you to be part ! I’ll show you what I want from my new traders on March 31st in London!

Get your tickets now:(tickets start from FREE)  https://www.fortuneacademy.co.uk

As a multiple business owner, known mainly for my efforts in Fortune Academy in the retail space, I had some useful lessons to share for all CEOs and aspiring business leaders from my experiences (in all my businesses) in the last year 2017:

1. When starting a new business, it is easiest to get noticed through disruption. Nobody pays attention when you’re doing the ‘same thing as everyone else’ and thus as uncomfortable as it is to be different, it is the only thing that works in this self-righteous world where information is at its highest free supply to date.
2. The biggest waste of money you will get are those from the ‘marketing’ sector. 99% of the time I have found they overcharge and under-deliver. They should never be paid up front and a good one is always satisfied through results or targets met. The unfortunate thing with marketers – they are a manipulating species who love to make you feel the guilt for undermining their work. They are all over-rated.
3. Joint ventures work far better than employment. The incentive to have a revenue share is the only thing that worked for me in creating that ‘hard work’ ethic in your partners. You need to remove the employee mentality to get the most out of your business.
4. In a real ‘entrepreneurial’ company, you need to employ staff or ‘partners’ that share that entrepreneurial vision. That means that they will have to be ‘self-managing’ and constantly progressing in their own world. Never let them become too comfortable with the pay structure you give them initially, it will destroy their entrepreneurial spirit, they have to create more, to earn more is the only way I have found them to be most effective.
5. The best sales force in a company have a ‘commission only’ structure. Anyone you try to employ who tries to argue that commission only structure is poor at sales and that should be the end of the conversation. Your commission structure should pay them well so they see an incentive, but strict enough to not allow them to become comfortable.
6. Never look at CVs in an interview. They are all boring and anyone who loves the CV more than their personality has no personality for the job. The only thing that matters are their communication skills and IF they fit the vision of the company.
7. The most valuable decisions are the ‘NO’ decisions. We live in a ‘lets try to please everyone’ society and that makes people average in their ventures as a company. Let go of employees who are a liability or partners that drain the company and add no productivity. Review the company progress every quarter as though it were an end of year report.
8. Employees cannot be good at everything, learn to identify people’s area of skill and place them appropriately. The dyslexia test has proven gold to me in deciding where to place my employees / JV partners. So many people have it and they have no idea. I used to perform this in private eye tests all those years ago as an Optician (about the only thing that I still use from that career).
9. Human behavioural psychology is key to every decision you make in a business meeting. Learn to ‘not be the loudest person in the room’. Often it is ‘what isn’t said’ that holds the most meaning. I always wait for the other person to ‘make decisions’ so I can see where their incentives are. Let them lay the cards on the table before you do. So many people will misinterpret that silence for lack of knowledge…let them stay naive.
10. Lastly, too many people worry far too much ‘what other people think about them’ as an individual, let alone business. That is by far the quickest way to fail: to try and please everyone. No one made history trying to ‘fit in’ so external validation is the weakest tool in the book. Congruency on the other hand is the magic that keeps businesses profitable and companies really making a difference.

I truly believe that when your business and your personality become one in reflection, you have a business that all will see, holds far more value than those created out of the rule book from a Business School degree. Authenticity and real human emotion is all that is needed to give one the feeling of being part of something worthwhile. Whether you are a CEO or an employee that would make all the difference in your everlasting progression.

I created Fortune Academy for the entrepreneurs out there and I selected only entrepreneurs to run the company from top to bottom. There is no employee mentality and because of that, we as a team can truly understand what it means to be successful and only deliver to that standard.

I am very proud and humbled by the efforts of my team, this blog was dedicated to them, the true Fortune Academy Ambassadors!

Fortune Academy is dedicated to creating new entrepreneurs, come and see for yourself at the next event in London: https://www.fortuneacademy.co.uk/

So many people ask me about which one of the two they should do first and why..my answer: lets figure out which personality type you fit into first!

There is a massive difference in the two fields, I should know since I have dedicated my life to Property since 2004 and then Forex\since 2008. I still love and invest occasionally in property deals to this day, but definitely not as actively as I did from 2004 till 2011. I’ve got plenty under my belt – a multi million pound portfolio that helped get me ‘financially free’ by 2007 after which I went crazy (in a good way) and started supplying auction houses with properties. The latter would amount to about 42 properties every month for a good year until 2008 slowed the market down for a few months. This was a blessing in disguise; any workaholic like me knows, you never stop voluntarily. Some external factor, such as a global financial crisis was the only thing that ‘put the brakes’ on my deals. But even then, any good investor knows; all that amounts to, is a change of strategy. And off I was again…but this time into the world of financial trading as my new investment strategy. I still continued the property investing for a solid 3 years on, till 2011, after which I was trading the financial markets as my primary focus.

I get excited hearing a friend, family member or business colleague tell me the figures of a new deal they’re working on, the complexity involved in getting the deal done. Property is all about ‘The Art of Negotiation’ and ‘The love of a deal‘. If you find that you can relate to either or ideally both of those criteria then you have a great probability of doing well in property investment and development.

In my opinion, to do property well, you need to be able to get your head round the following kind of lifestyle:

Wake up early (between 6-8am, so not that early) and the first thing on your mind should be, ‘who have I not rang this week that is either in the estate agent game, or an independent property sourcer, a builder, developer, an auction house etc, so that I can build my rapport with further. In fact, screw the rapport building over the phone, let me call them up and see who I can entertain on lunch and really pick their brains and get those deals out of them!” It’s all about people and your network in property investing. Without that, you’re useless. You need to get yourself to EVERY networking group I was travelling to London, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester every month just to get to know everyone I could possibly find that was a key player in the industry so that I could learn from them. You see in the property industry the information is readily available. It is so easy to learn the theory that no one minds telling you. They know that the great deals come from the power in your network and most importantly HOW good you are at communicating with fellow humans,

You have to be a top car salesmen times twenty in this industry. The biggest challenges in your property investing life will be how to win over a judge when your trying to save your clients house repossession and personal bankruptcy while being faced by men in black suits from KPMG on the other side. Another challenge could be finding out who runs the Asset Management list in a Tier 1 bank (through which mortgages are given), who if you manage to take out on a few lunch dates or evening if needed, will eventually give you first refusal on all the repossessions for a 2 week window when they are released. Then you have the auctioneers, the man/lady who runs the auction house; networking with them enough to realise that a majority of the great deals never make the auction room, and indeed they are offered to private investors 2 weeks before. The auction house was in fact the best place to get rid of all those properties I had secured from the Tier 1 bank lady; the auction was the perfect exit strategy for a property investment.

The above are just some of the scenarios I have been through. Those are the easy parts. I haven’t even gone into giving the estate agent employee (not the owner) brown envelopes with cash ‘to donate to their charity of choice’ on securing that I get the deal off the market. No one buys a deal from ‘rightmove’ or indeed by stepping into the estate agent. Its all about finding the properties before they hit the market.

Then you have tenants. Commercial tenants are great, but no doubt as a property investor you will want to secure some residential properties which means you will have the families, students, and half-human, half-animal occupants who may make your life hell! What do you do with them, especially when they trash your house and decide not to pay the rent. Tenants have more rights than landlords which adds further fuel to the fire. I used to love my first ever student tenants. For the first few years, I used to collect all the rent in cash on my own, sometimes doing collections at 11pm when they were in. I had a great rapport with them and I was very well known in the area so I had no fear in being a sole female collecting rent in a Mercedes sports car, only 23 yrs old and approximately 7k cash in the central compartment of the car every week on collection days. Ignorance was bliss I’m guessing, plus my boyfriend at the time was pretty pathetic and offered no support; he was content playing NBA on the xbox instead.

Then you have the occasional tenants that are professional scam artists; I remember when I accepted them as tenants, my investor friends advised me not to based on their ‘stereotype reputation’ but I refused to listen as always and thought I would be a non-discriminating landlord and allow an equal opportunity for all. But those were the tenants that stopped paying after their first month and then avoided all my contact for 4 months, until I forced my way into the house one day, only to be threatened with a handgun. I remember that night quite clearly, quite an escape when I look back at it, but they were later arrested and I got my professional debt collection guys to remove them as tenants days later when they were out of the cell.

There was another tenant, a retired chemistry teacher who decided to keep explosive material in the garden shed and conveniently tried to blow the kitchen up exactly on my planned arrival to discuss his rent arrears. I was late by 5 minutes, and when I had arrived there were police and fire engines outside and the tenant had been arrested for possession of illegal explosives.

Then there was as student property, which the local police used to visit more often than I did. I would often get calls from the police discussing the whereabouts of the tenants after there were reported ‘stabbings’ in the house and they would often say ‘We seem to know more about your tenants than you do’. I couldn’t argue that fact.

If I told you all the run-ins I had with tenants we would be here forever, but I was still making an absolute fortune collecting rent, buying 3-4 properties a week with 40/50k cash-back each time (pre-2008) negotiating 50%-75% below market value deals and making a minimum of £10-17k on all the properties I put through auction houses each month. I didn’t even bother with the land deals at the time, I had no time to spare from all the other investments I had in the property market. I looked into land and leaseoptions more post 2008 when the property game changed.

Why did I get my hands dirty and walk around looking like someone off a construction site (regardless of the 500bhp sports cars I drove around) most the time? Because I wanted to understand the real property world where you HAVE to be street wise. I could (and still can) talk to any person from any background, tradesmen to professional lawyer, banker etc and I could figure out the process in securing a fantastic property deal which I am sure no one else could. That was my forté. My years as a child growing up watching and learning human behaviour psychology became my greatest asset in negotiating property deals. Everyone I was dealing with had the same human needs; reassurance, security, financial or otherwise, the need to build trust. I was not in the property business, I was in the people business. This industry is all about the people involved in making the deal possible, solicitor to tenant. I was providing housing for people and then solving problems that came along in the process. It was all worth it, all the madness, all the lessons made me impeccable when striking a deal, whether that was with an investor or a tenant.

Too many people see property as a way to make a fortune through just bricks and mortar. That bit is easy, it’s the people part they overlook. You can’t hide behind a computer and online sourcing company all your life. Real property deals come from interacting from human being to human being, not social media, not through a property website. Of course you can outsource most the process now through letting agents and property sourcing companies, but I am a strong believer in only outsourcing something you can say you’ve mastered.

I don’t wish to deter you from property investing, that would be hypocritical since I made my first fortune through it! But my aim is to ensure you’re not in the dark with the real ‘human’ side to it. You need to love people to love the property game. Im not a fan of tenants, but I love the negotiation with people and creating the deal in property. There is indeed a beauty in ‘The Art of the Deal’. Property investors that I qualify as successful are of a certain high calibre, very respected in my eyes and usually very down to earth individuals. Property taught me lessons that nothing else could; it helped me understand the art of negotiation like nothing else and really emphasised the power of your NETWORK. So if you see yourself as a people’s person, loving a challenge in negotiating, loving the creation and completion of a deal, love networking, are eager to speak to anyone and everyone and learn tonnes in the process, then property is just for you!

If however, the thought of all this sends a shiver down your spine, then don’t be disheartened, money can be made in so many alternative ways. All you need to do is re-assess what strengths you have in your personality and find something better suited. This is what the Fortune Academy events are all about. (Register for the next event).