Personal – Top 10 Sales for Dec-2021

Keller Williams Realty Bayou Partners Top Ten Sales Production for December 2021.

Just a short article here to let y’all know that I was one of the top ten producers for December 2021 in our Brokerage.

This makes the second time in 2021 that I make that list. More to come in 2022.

Remember, if you have a real estate need, whether buying or selling, give me a call or shoot me an email. It doesn’t matter if you are outside of my area, I can connect you with a Rockstar Real Estate Agent!

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® 985.647.4479

Clint C. Galliano, a native of Lafourche Parish, has lived in the Houma-Thibodaux area for over 34 years and is currently a REALTOR® with Keller Williams Realty Bayou Partners in Houma, La. He has been involved with real estate investing since 2017 and hosts the local Real Estate Investment Association. Real Estate is his passion. Clint previously worked in drilling fluids and drilling fluids automation for 28 years. He lives in Bayou Blue with his wife and two daughters.

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Personal Improvement – ‘New Year, Totally New You’ May Not Be The Most Successful Approach

Another new year!

One of the first trends I noticed for the new year were sarcastic memes about “New Year, New You”…it made me think about why these are popular.

This week we are going to discuss making changes for the new year. Comparing and contrasting the typical approach with what is more likely to be a more successful approach to making changes.

 

A Totally New You for the New Year!

You realize there are things you don’t like in your life. You decide to change them. These thoughts usually seem to occur at the end of one year or the beginning of the next, hence the popularity of New Year’s Resolutions.

The common approach is to decide to change everything at once. This, in turn, sets you up for failure. Because the volume of things to change is large, it can be hard to figure out where to start in addition to being perceived, mentally, as a tedious task. Because of this, we tend to have little follow-through on these resolutions and end up abandoning them early on due to little demonstrable success.

These are some of the reasons why most people don’t keep up with their New Year’s Resolutions.

I once joined the gym, went on a diet, and decided I was going to get up at 06:00 every morning. This was many years ago…back when I was single. I went to the gym once, then never went back because I felt that if I didn’t get up early to go to the gym, there was no point in going. The diet didn’t even last that long. It was too much for me at the time.

There is a way to be successful at it and achieve your goals.

An additional thought on Resolutions – Many political bodies make resolutions all the time. Most are ignored. And we wonder why we have trouble keeping New Year’s Resolutions! Instead, choose Goals. Goals are attainable. #CandyForYourSubconcious

The Incremental Approach

The end of the year is a good time to take stock of your life, but you don’t have to wait until then to decide on changes. You can decide on changes at any point. To paraphrase sage advice “The best time to change was in the past. The second-best time to change is NOW!”

The key to making successful changes is to make them incrementally. You don’t start out an exercise program by running 10 miles, doing 500 push-ups, and 20 suicide sets. Start with a small immediate goal. Get that to become routine, then expand it.

 

By making incremental changes and incorporating them into your routine, they become habit. By becoming habit, they are more likely to turn into permanent changes.

 

So, instead of joining the gym, going on a diet, and quitting smoking, in addition to taking karate, yoga, and crossfit classes, try one at a time. Build it into your routine. Let it become habit. THEN tackle the next goal.

New Year’s Goals

My New Year’s Goals are as follows:

Spend less time commuting – Since 2012, I commuted from Houma, La. To Lafayette, La. Roughly about a 215 mile roundtrip commute. At the end of last year, I proposed that I start working at the company facility in Houma. My supervisor and his supervisor both approved, so that goal is more or less accomplished.

Spend more time with my family – This will be facilitated by having eliminated my commute.

Do more exercise – Now that I have eliminated the commute, I joined the local Planet Fitness so I can get more exercise.

Find my “New Normal” – With all the changes to my health near the end of last year, I have not adjusted my “drive” to match my “bandwidth”. I am still trying get the medications adjusted and wrap my head around my limitations.

What are your Goals for this year?

 

And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments. Ask questions, tell your story.

 

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Personal Improvement – Gratitude: I am Thankful

For those of you in the USA, I would like to wish you a belated Happy Thanksgiving. We celebrated it last week with a quiet day at home, spending time with family and adding final touches to the Christmas display so we could turn it on Thanksgiving Night.

Gratitude

I am going to assume that a combination of it being Thanksgiving in the US and some smart marketing by  @ajjacobs for his new book “Thanks a Thousand – A Gratitude Journey” that made the topic of  gratitude continue to appear in my media consumption. From a podcast of Jacobs talking about his inspiration to write his latest book to memes on Facebook, both expressing gratitude and admonishing for expressing gratitude one day, then scrambling for doodads on Black Friday the next.

 

It got me thinking about how if you truly embrace the idea of gratitude, it helps to relieve stress and anxiety. Where @ajjacobs takes it to the extreme to thank everyone involved in his getting a single cup of coffee in the morning, you don’t have to be that exhaustive.

Be thankful for what you have. Or don’t have. But also remember to not use that as an excuse to stop pursuing your goals.

 

I would like to know more about my readers. If you could spare about 2 minutes of your time, please take a survey to tell me what you like about the blog. Just click here to take the survey.

 

What am I grateful for?

• My Family. Without my family, I would not be who I am or where I am today. Specifically, my wife. She inspired me to strive to be greater. She inspired me.
• My career. I have learned many things that have allowed me to grow outside of my job.
• My health. Yes, I have medical issues, but I am luckier than a lot of people. As a benchmark, as morbid as it is, I have lived longer than my father and plan to live longer than my mother and grandparents did.
• My friends. They make me laugh and encourage me.

 

What are you grateful for?

 

Please comment here on the blog about what you are grateful for. I would  like to know.

 

And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments. Ask questions, tell your story.

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REI – Rehabbing A Property: Flipping VS. Renting

Welcome back to me! I was out for the last few weeks due to a combination of work and getting post-surgery treatment for my thyroid.

Today, I am going to go over some differences and similarities between rehabbing a property to flip it and rehabbing a property to retain as a rental.

 

 

Compare & Contrast

 

What is your “Plan A” for a property in a given situation? That is probably an easy question to answer if you only flip properties or if you only buy and hold them as rentals. Some investors do both.

Ultimately, you should already know what you want to do with your property. Then work on a “Plan B” and “Plan C”, just in case your Plan A doesn’t work out.

 

Compare

 

Whether rehabbing a property as a flip or as a rental, there are a lot of things that you would do the same in either case. Getting the main home systems in working order, such as plumbing, electrical, roof, HVAC, etc. You need these systems in working order and, with the exception of fixtures, don’t need a lot of variation between the two.

Structures should be stable, rooms may need to be added, and/or rearranged.

 

Contrast

 

Rentals

When rehabbing rentals, you want to keep things functional and not too expensive. Depending on the comparable quality of the neighborhood, you may go utilize a higher-end product in a higher-end neighborhood than you would in a lower-end neighborhood.

Especially if you have multiple rentals, you want to go for consistency to normalize your costs. Have a paint scheme, flooring style/type, appliance set, and plumbing & lighting fixtures as a standard so that time will not have to be wasted on trying to decide on colors & styles during rehab and turnovers. Your contractors or turnover specialists should already know what to use.

 

Flips

When flipping, you are attempting to renovate the property to a standard that will make someone want to buy the home to live in. With that in mind, you want to add finishing touches to a flip that you would not consider for a rental. This could include things like upgraded appliances, fancier light fixtures, premium paint schemes, and so on.

All of this assumes that you have the budget to achieve this and still make money on it.

I would like to know more about my readers. If you could spare about 2 minutes of your time, please take a survey to tell me what you like about the blog. Just click here to take the survey.

Plans B and C

I mentioned “Plan B” and “Plan C” above, so I just wanted to touch on that before wrapping things up. You should always have an exit plan. Or two. If you are planning to flip, be ready to rent or owner-finance. If you and planning to rent, be prepared to sell.

This is kind of second nature to me coming from the oil and gas industry. It has a direct physical basis, but can be applied metaphorically to pretty much anything.

Having an exit plan means not being stuck in harm’s way. When working on a drilling rig, this has life or death implications. Never put yourself in a corner where you cannot get out of the way of something.

I learned this the hard way when loading eleven and three-quarter-inch casing onto a boat when I first started out in the industry working as a roustabout.

For those of you who don’t know what casing is, it is the large-diameter pipe used to keep the wellbore pressure in and the formation pressures out when drilling and producing a well. Each forty-foot joint weighs approximately two thousand four hundred pounds.

The crane was set up to pick up four joints of casing at a time. Additionally, we were short-handed, so I would hook up the casing on the dock, then jump to the boat to help position it on the deck of the boat so it would stack properly for the ride out to the rig.

On one of the lifts, by the time I got onto the deck of the boat, the pipe was coming towards me and I did not want to be under ten thousand pounds of steel. I attempted to get outside the range of the swing of the crane, but realized that I had no more deck because we were loading onto the stern now.

I dropped down onto the deck, sitting, so that at least if the load dropped, the railing would help stop it from crushing me. I believe that maneuver startled the crane operator and he stopped the crane rotation, thus setting the load swinging like a pendulum. He immediately noticed this and started to drop the load as it got over the deck, but the casing had started to swing back towards the stern, where I was sitting.

The casing made contact with my left shoulder and chest. Luckily, it was only enough to bring out purple, yellow, and green bruises on me the next day, but no permanent damage.

 

The moral of the story? Have an exit plan that you can execute on.

 

And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments. Ask questions, tell your story.

 

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Business – Optimizing A Process – Order of Operations Related to Surgery:

This week I am touching on the topic of process optimization. This is another topic that came a conversation between Kevin@deliberateconsulting.com and myself when comparing thyroidectomy procedure results and side effects. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had surgery a couple of months prior to my diagnosis.

We compared notes on what was similar and what was different between the two.

(Caveat: There may be some factors that we are not aware of, specific to each of us as individuals, that could have influenced decisions made.)

 

We both had thyroidectomies. Surgery, an overnight stay. A vacuum bulb to drain the incision area. Released the next morning. Then wait to determine if further treatment is necessary to ensure the eradication of cancer. In Kevin’s case, he needed further treatment, in my case, it is too soon to tell.

The doctors started Kevin on hormone replacement therapy almost immediately after surgery, then had to wait for levels to drop to begin the secondary treatment. I am still not on any replacement hormones until they determine if I need the radioactive iodine ablation, thus shortening the cycle time to start. Since the hormones appear to last about 6 weeks, I am good for a while with no replacements and won’t have to wait for levels to deplete if I do need the RAI.

The way my surgeon planned things seems to be the more efficient way to do things. This got me thinking about how an optimized process for business is cheaper and more efficient than just randomly doing things in a haphazard manner.

 

I do this in my real estate investing. When rehabbing a property, I evaluate what needs to be done & plan the order of operations so that there won’t have to be re-work because something had to be undone to do something else.

 

You can look at your business processes and optimize them for efficiency by ensuring the order of operations for each step does not additionally delay some other step.

 

You can think of it like the sandwich-making analogy I used here…if your current process calls for you to put the peanut butter on the plate, then add the bread, then the jelly or jam, you can optimize it by changing the order of operations to bread, peanut butter, jelly, then another slice of bread.

 

What inefficient processes have you identified in your business or workplace? How did you change them?

 

And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments. Ask questions, tell your story.

 

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