Kevin Green - Wealth Coach

Full transcript: Kevin Green on London Real

7:58 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Kevin Green, who is the largest private sector property landlord in the UK. In 1988, you were homeless, then you became a dairy farmer, and today you have a net worth of 50 million pounds. You are also a social entrepreneur and have been featured on Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire and are actively involved with the Homeless Charity Shelter and the Wallace Charity.

8:32 In the past year, you have traveled the world, spoken alongside Sir Richard Branson, one of your mentors, Lord Alan Sugar and Bill Clinton. Kevin, welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. It’s great to have you here. You know, before we jump into your story, which is fascinating, your view on real estate, I want to know what does the next four weeks of Kevin Green’s life look like?

8:53 I know you’re on a plane going to Singapore. I know you’ve been speaking the last few days, but what is it really like to be Kevin Green? It’s a bit busy at the moment, Brian. I just spoke on 11 different stages in eight different countries, and that side of things has taken over a little bit. The old voice has taken a bit of a hammering as well.

9:11 Post the Singapore talk, I’m coming back with family again. Just through Christmas, I cherish the time with my kids. They’re older now, but I think that’s important, and I’ve always been like business, business, business at the beginning, and realized more and more that family are the number one. So I like spending time with my family and my pet donkeys. I’ve got 24 pet donkeys.

9:32 Wow. A little bit different, maybe. Okay, and those are in Wales. You’ve got the donkeys. Yeah, yeah.

9:37 Okay, my grandpa is from Arizona, and he was a mule man. We had mules, and they would pull his carts around and things like that. Why donkeys? Don’t mark. Yeah, it was a mistake, really, how I got the first one.

9:49 I used to be a dairy farmer, so I bought this cow from a farm, and the farmer said, if you don’t buy the donkey with that cow, they both pine away for each other because they’re best friends, and the name of the town where I bought this cow was Bethlehem, and it was all a bit ironic, and then I go around the corner, and in this old shed where the window should be, this old stone shed, there’s a shaft of sunlight shining through on the back of this donkey. I couldn’t buy it. Unbeknownst to me, that donkey was in full, and my kids named her Victoria after the Spice Girls, and then she had a foal called Emma after the Spice Girls again, because the numbers grew from there.

10:28 I never expected the donkey story. That’s pretty incredible. When you go for the next four weeks, are you a keynote speaker? Are you teaching your own things? Will you look at property as well for your portfolio?

10:41 Yes. What’s going on? There’s three things, really. I’m a keynote on four different stages over the next month, and I enjoy doing that. I love the buzz of that, the quick in and out for half an hour and hour, firing people up and getting them to really reach their potential.

10:58 Part of what I do is training as well. We share the steps that we do or we’ve done and continue to learn, and people following those footsteps to create businesses. I suppose everybody knows me for property. We’ve got 927 units that we rent out at the moment in single ownership, and that’s really where that claim on the intro came from, where we are the single ownership largest number person in the whole of UK. But we also got 26 other businesses, and they range from trading in metal and car parts right up to coaching people on marriage guidance counselling.

11:37 So it’s quite an interesting splatter of things that we do really, so I’d be very busy on all that. Okay, now the coaching makes sense because you’ve gone through these things yourself, but are the other businesses real estate related or you just said not all of them? No, I would say 90% are not real estate. There’s only three big ones that are real estate connected, and I think it’s good on the business side of things to have your hat in two different stables, one in an asset building business like real estate, and something which is more of a service business as well.

12:08 And that’s what we’ve always tried to get the equilibrium in place to get the balance, and it’s a bit of fun doing both as well. Do you think, and I want to get into this more later, but do you think good business, you’ve said before that good energy creates good business, and do you think you’re diversified across lots of different sectors? So it’s not like I know residential real estate well, and I’m going to teach you this. Is it really, really a mindset?

12:31 Is it really about getting your brain to another level that really allows you to achieve success? I think it’s more getting your heart in gear than your brain. I’ve come to learn that the head sends you all sorts of places. You get tons of thoughts, tons of crazy ideas, and if you follow your head in thinking, it’s a bit like a stick in plaster. It probably doesn’t last too long, that idea.

12:51 But if you come from in here, your heart and guts and soul, where the true feeling is for something, that’s what I followed through to get the success. Your heart never lies, and I come from heart first and send that to the head. And then it tells the head what to do, rather than the other way around. How do you get a direct line to your heart? Because that’s a tricky thing, and some people do it through meditation, some people do it through training and hard exercise, some people do it through psychedelics, but it’s very hard to get that direct line to your heart, especially in today’s world, you know, in the Twitter sphere, in the internet sphere.

13:23 How do you do that? Yeah, I think initially it was really difficult to identify it. And I met a lady called Sandy, who was a soul clearer, and she made me very aware of a few things about energy and spirit. And that opened a whole new set of doors for me in realizing that we’ve got the answers inside us, you know. I think sometimes it takes somebody to knock on your door and say, look, there’s this alternative for you, it’s the same as what you guys do here, and maybe make you aware of some things for those possibilities.

13:52 And that was the beginning for me. It made me realize that, yeah, you know, I can do these things, the answers are inside me. And I was lucky enough as well to win a scholarship to interview high achievers in 1999. And I interviewed Sir Richard Branson, sorry, and Bill Gates, and a few other people. And what I realized, they’re quite normal people, you know, before I put them on a pedestal.

14:15 And I was just an ex-homeless dairy farmer at that stage, and I hadn’t achieved anything great in my life. And yet I’m interviewing these big high achievers, and I’m thinking, wow, you know, actually they’re not that different to me. You know, so there’s two things, really, which made me open my heart. One was realizing that, you know, any one of us can do what these guys are doing. It’s just they pushed the button and got off their backside, basically.

14:39 And all the time through the scholarship, they kept relating to feelings and passion and energy. And I heard it so many times that I started waking up to that, you know, Brian? Is that something Sir Richard Branson talks a lot about when you’re with him? Heck of a lot. So he’s listening to that heart feeling in him and making decisions based on that.

14:56 Yeah, he makes decisions based on feelings. And when I first started business, I always used to imagine that Richard was next to me and imagine what he would say about something, you know, because he’s coming from that feeling. And it’s almost like he was there. It was a great help to me, you know? And I started taking that on board and realizing what my own passions were in life, and really all the businesses I do and all the things I do.

15:19 I’m really busy. I don’t have to be, but I choose to be. You know, all those things come from here. The passion inside the wheel and not even doing this, you know? I love what you guys do.

15:30 And you said to come here. I was like, oh, that feels right. Let’s just do it. I go on instinct as well, you know? That’s fascinating.

15:36 No, thank you for that. You said that when you went on this scholarship and you went around the world and interviewed people, you came back with kind of four themes that you learned about these successful people. You hadn’t yet put them into practice yourself, but you saw them. I was wondering if you could tell me what those are. Yeah, for sure.

15:54 I went with a pretty open mind. And really, just if I go back slightly, the reason for that was I met a guy called Roger Lovell. And Roger Lovell was based in Oxford, and he was a personal advisor to Margaret Thatcher, you know, and lover or hater. You know, he was behind a lot of her success. And he got me to quantify the study in a list of questions.

16:16 And I think anybody that wants to do this, I love, you know, the University of Life and Travel. They should have a set of proforma questions so they can get measurement into their study. And these questions led to the four main outcome answers. You know, are entrepreneurs born or can they be made? What’s the first question?

16:34 You know, people are like, oh, okay, is it genetics or environment that shapes entrepreneurs? Second question. You know, so really out of the culmination of these type of questions, then I was getting some common answers and common results. And what I can tell you is to put it in one, because I like making things short and simple, to put it in one context, self-awareness, knowing ourselves, what we’re good at, what we’re bad at, and what we enjoy doing, what we don’t enjoy, self-awareness is the number one master key to success.

17:04 That’s by far the biggest of the four key points. Fascinating, because most people are thinking it’s the product, it’s the idea, it’s the financing, it’s the connections. No, self-awareness. It’s self-awareness. I don’t care what anybody does.

17:17 They do what they’re destined to do in their heart, guts, and soul. You know, that’s their thing. They’re in the flow. We’ve all heard that term. We try and chase money.

17:26 Money will run away from us. You know, I tried it in the early days. I tried multilevel marketing, because I wanted to make money. I wanted to get up with dairy farming, you know. It wasn’t for me.

17:35 It didn’t feel right. And looking back, I should never really have done that. But you learn things perhaps you shouldn’t do. Nothing wrong with multilevel marketing. It just wasn’t for me at that time, you know.

17:44 I’m an asset builder. I’m a control freak. I’m an entrepreneur, you know. I’ve come to realize what my strengths and weaknesses are. And control can be a strength and a weakness.

17:54 But what I like in business is owning the business rather than working for somebody else. And it took me a while to realize that, you know. Wow. So that’s the first one, self-awareness. What were some of the others?

18:05 Okay. The second one is attitude. You know, your attitude determines everything. You heard the saying, your attitude is your altitude in life. If you respect other people through that attitude, it goes a long way.

18:18 Even if you disagree with them, everybody’s got a right to do what they do. And I’ve met some interesting people. I’m 52 now. And, you know, I’ve kind of arguably over halfway through my life. And I’m making the most of it, you know, Brian.

18:32 And some people have gone the wrong path, as some see it. But there’s a reason for that in the background, you know. I work a lot with the Prince’s Trust, helping the disadvantaged young people to set up businesses. And you hear of their back stories where they’ve been sexually abused by the stepfather or something terrible like that. And that’s what set them off the rails, you know.

18:51 So I believe the attitude is that everybody deserves a chance, you know, and let them prove otherwise. Once somebody is doing me a disservice, mind you, you know, and they’re intentionally trying to pull the wool over your eyes, I do look at that, you know, in a sad way as well. And I don’t tolerate that. I just move on. I give people a chance or two, and then I move on.

19:13 So I believe your attitude, the way that you deal with life, and in particular, life’s all about people. The way you deal with people is important. Okay, and self-belief comes in that as well? Yeah, I think self-belief’s a separate part of it, really. Okay.

19:27 And self-belief and confidence would be another one of the key points, the key four points. And self-belief and confidence has to be built. I was an introvert, still am. I was the shyest person in school. And, you know, you often find that.

19:41 We had this discussion privately earlier on. A lot of our guests are introverts. I’m an introvert, people don’t believe that. Yeah, and people, you know, when I’m on stage, I go mad, crazy, I do things like the wealth dance and empowerment and people think, oh, this guy’s really out there. I’m not, you know, I’m not the person who’s at the front of the crowd normally.

19:57 I’m the person who stands behind and watches everybody else and then determines where to go. I’m like the pussycat, you know, waiting and checking first and then going. And I’ve always been that way. And I think, you know, it’s a natural trait. There’s nothing wrong with it.

20:11 But it can hold us back if we hold things in too much. You know, you’ve heard the term, let your light shine. And what the speaking has done for me, and I never intended to be speaking originally, is let my light shine and share some ideas with other people. You know, obviously, you’re going to get the haters of people that don’t like it because it puts pressure on the people that want to change but don’t know how. But then you’ve got the people that pick up on it, and they absolutely love it and run with it.

20:36 I think you’ve got to shout your message out to the world, whatever it might be. Right, so it was self-awareness, self-belief, attitude. What were a couple of the other ones you saw? Okay, I think keeping grounded. Grounded was something which came through time and time again.

20:49 If we take Sir Richard, a classic example, he’s managed to keep his feet on the ground and really look, like he said to me, always become the observer. He’s mentored me a lot, Richard. And he said always step back from business. And look at the people and the structure. Put yourself up in a helicopter, if you like, and imagine yourself sitting there looking down on your life and your business, you know, what do you need to do next?

21:12 What do you need to tweak? What do you need to change? Because we’re always continually improving. You know, in this life, we’ve only got one chance and we’ve got to make the best of it. I think some people get it wrong.

21:22 They get ego and they get, you know, detached from Mother Earth, if you like, and everything’s fantastic. Then they hit the drugs and everything else, and then it all goes to pot. You see success can be a terrible thing for some people. Yeah, I’m sure you mix with people that are, you know, successful, like you, and then some people are grounded and can handle it, and some people I’m sure you don’t want to have lunch with. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting and a very, very true point.

21:50 I often say to myself, if I’m going to business with somebody, would I like to have a drink with that person tonight? And if the answer is no, the gut feel is no. You know, I certainly won’t set up a joint venture. And it is. We resonate to certain people, don’t we?

22:03 Yeah, we used to have a test when I worked on Wall Street when I first got out of college, and I went there, and we used to interview people coming in to work in the investment bank, and they’d be like, oh, do you think I got a guy? Yeah, I think he’s good. Would you sit next to him? So we have these big trading desks. Every day you’ve got to come in and be next to him.

22:18 I don’t know. Well, that’s your answer. Yeah. That’s a good point. Would you have a drink with them tonight?

22:23 And that means, well, do you like them, is what that kind of means, right? Yeah, yeah. And if you don’t, stay away. I think it’s important to mix with people that you like in all sectors. There’s got to be times where you’ve got to put up with a certain donut, let’s call it, who is the crazy person who really gets under your skin or you don’t like for some reason.

22:41 But there’s other people that do like that person. You know, it’s important for us to know what we want and mix with the people that we want to mix with at the end of the day and do business with the people we want to do business with and let everybody else do their own thing, you know? We can’t be all things and all sizes to all people. That’s what I’ve learned. A few more nuggets of gold from your tour of the world interviewing people.

23:02 Anything else to add? I heard you say zest for life is important and persistent, so are those some of the others? Yeah, I mean, they go together, really, zest for life and persistence. When you get up in the morning, you know, you decide what you want to do that day and decisions are down to us. And I do something crazy when I get up in the morning.

23:19 I’m usually naked, but I don’t want people to picture that too much. You sleep naked? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Is that a Welsh thing?

23:26 I think it’s the only natural way to do it. Unless you’re on a plane, of course, it’s a bit different then. Or in public areas. But coming back to when I get up in the morning, you know, I just shout three big yeses, you know, while I’m thrusting my right hand in the air. And you might think it’s a bit crazy or a bit volcanic.

23:45 But I’m really happy to be alive, you know? My sister didn’t have that choice. Her life was taken away at a young age. And we’re going to make the most of those seconds that we’ve got in every day. We’ve all got the same time.

23:57 So I get up in the morning and I go, yes, yes, yes. And I don’t get ill, you know? I’m a bit knackered at the moment because I’ve had a really heavy tour. But I know I’m fine. And I know I’ll always be fine.

24:08 That’s my mantra. So I purposefully do something crazy first thing in the morning. And I teach people sometimes that you can do that too. Get up in the morning and just, you know, it’s called an anchor. You know, it’s from Anthony Robbins, you know, the big life coach.

24:22 Yeah. And he’s a great guy. And that bit of it really works for me. Making that decision. And when I go on stage, you know, just before I go on, I’ll do something crazy like that to get my energy up.

24:33 Because if your energy’s up, you know, everybody else is happy and their energy comes up too. And that happens in life. Is the wealth dance like that as well? Yeah. Can you just give me a quick insight what the wealth dance is like?

24:44 The wealth dance is something really a little bit crazy. It involves some bunny hops, some press ups, some star jumps. Okay. And the idea came from the film, The Full Monty. Oh, yeah.

24:54 Although we don’t do any stripping, obviously. You know, they’re standing in the dole queue waiting for the dole and they start then shuffling their buns, you know. That’s the start of the wealth dance. And I suppose I’ve been on my own in certain locations around the world waiting to go on stages and have this me time, you know, where you think about, what am I going to do? Oh, let’s think about doing a wealth dance, you know.

25:15 And put all these moves together. I enjoy dancing anyway. And sometimes I just hit the stage and do the wealth dance, you know, depends on the audience. And sometimes people will join me and people have done it before. And they go, you know, why is a multi-millionaire doing that?

25:29 We don’t see that very often. Well, why not, you know? I love it. It’s kind of like a wealth haka, right? Yeah, it is.

25:35 It’s probably what it’s like. We had a guest on him, Elliot Hulse, here a few months ago. And he’s a fascinating American from Florida. And he has something that he calls active meditation, but it includes him screaming out every emotion he has, breathing heavy, grounding himself in the ground. And it looks a lot like a haka crossed with some other, you know, Native American dance.

25:56 And it’s amazing the energy you have trapped in you. And it’s amazing what you can get through physical expression. But in England and the UK, maybe Wales, will kind of encourage not to do that to a certain extent. Oh, for sure. So it can be very powering, right?

26:11 Yeah, I mean, I’ve got to be careful what stage I do that on. If I do that in Excel Center in London, they think, uh-oh, you know, this bloke’s barking. He’s lost his marbles. It doesn’t appear to some people. You have to select the audiences and do it, you know, where you know it’s going to work.

26:25 Certain crowds, like your crowd would be fine, I’m sure. You know, and certain business crowds send a group of bankers, you know, they don’t want to do it. You know what I mean? They’ve never done it before. So, you know, you have to be a little bit selective on the way, when you’re speaking, the way that you approach the audience, suit that audience and hit their buttons, you know?

26:43 Right. Let me finish up with persistence and zest for life. Yeah. You were saying you do that in the morning. How does that then lead on to persistence and zest?

26:50 I think it helps the ingredient, the base, you know, when you’re baking a cake, you’ve got the ingredients there. And then when you go forward, you’ve always got to look back at that mantra, I’ll always be fine. Whatever happens, because, you know, excuse the term, shit comes, it’s going to come. And if you’re going to hit stuff hard and grow big and successful, you’ve got to deal with that part of it as well. It’s not all good and fantastic.

27:14 Becoming a multi-millionaire is not easy, you know? So it’s having the persistence to break through that when somebody doesn’t deliver on time and it’s annoying. When somebody hasn’t done what they said they’re going to do, you know, that really is annoying, isn’t it? And you’ve got to say, right, okay, now how do we solve that? What are we going to do and make this happen?

27:31 When somebody says no, no, no to you, and I was going for interviews on a scholarship, nobody knew who I was. I’m just a homeless dairy farmer who wants to interview these high and big names. And I was persistent. I was tenacious. I kept looking at different ways to get that interview with Bill Gates, a long backstory to that one.

27:48 But I got it, you know? And I believe that’s the ingredient for success. You must do whatever it takes. And that was damn hard as well. A couple of nights with no sleep to get that one, you know?

27:59 And that’s followed through into what I do in business as well. And that’s the persistence. And you think that and Zest for Life are go hand in hand. I’ve never heard that, but it makes sense. I believe they do.

28:09 I believe they’re totally linked. And I suppose, you know, some people have asked, why have you got this? Why have I particularly got it? And that’s easily answered. It’s because of the death of my sister.

28:19 It made me wake up, you know? She was 22. You were 20 at the time? I was 22. She was 20.

28:25 Same birthday you have. Yeah. Okay. And what happened? How did it make you feel?

28:30 Well, it made me appreciate what I’ve got, you know? Because her life, she was fine. She was always the academic, kind of, you know, I’m stupid academically. And I’ve got dyslexia. So you say.

28:40 Yeah. I’ve got dyslexia. I am, I am. Academia and me don’t really get on. But intelligence, I realize I’m intelligent enough to know that, you know, if I pay two pounds or two dollars for something, and I sell it for four dollars or four pounds, I make gross profit or two.

28:55 You know, I look at things simply. But what that death of my sister did, it made me realize, hang on, you know, I’ve got a choice to do every second of my day the way that I want to do it. And if I don’t make the most of that, you know, I’m a fool to myself, because she didn’t have those choices. Those were taken away. And you mentioned a couple of charities in the beginning.

29:16 I’m an ambassador to Make a Wish Foundation, UK. And I do a lot of work with Make a Wish, because they’re granting magical wishes to children with life-threatening illness. Those children haven’t got those choices either, you know? And we’re fools to ourselves if we don’t make the most of every second we’ve got. If we moan and complain about stuff, you know, we’re just going to get negative energy coming back, because I’m a strong believer that whatever you put out in this world comes straight back at you.

29:41 Yeah. No, no, very much so. And so that all leads into kind of that whole zest for life. And that ties into everything you learned when you interviewed those people. Yeah, I mean, I got totally invigorated by, I mean, when you interview somebody like Sir Richard, and he’s so calm, so grounded, and he gives you those one-liners, you think, wow, yeah, that is absolutely bang on it.

30:04 You know? And something Richard said to me, something I’ll share with all the viewers here, if you recognize qualities in another person that you admire, that’s who you are. Those qualities must be already in you for you to have seen them in that person. And I was told that by Richard, and I never forgotten that. That’s a fascinating point, and I’ve heard you make that on stage as well.

30:26 And if you notice, oh, that person is grounded, that person is intelligent, that person is, you know, puts out good energy in the world, then you probably have those inside you. Maybe they’re down there somewhere deep, but you obviously are resonating with those feelings, right? Yeah, I mean, and I think people put themselves down too quickly. Oh, we can’t do that. We won’t do that.

30:45 We mustn’t do that. You know, at the end of the day, you can do anything that you want to do, but it’s what’s right for you. You don’t have to be a multimillionaire. It’s just, you know, that’s just happened for me. I wanted to be a millionaire.

30:55 It’s just gone quite well, you know? I always wanted to be a millionaire from a young age. I told my careers advisor that. And his answer to me was, don’t set your sights too high so that you won’t be disappointed. You know, this was the advisor in school.

31:09 But I went back and found him some years later, and I said, look, Mr Wilson, look what I’ve done. And he said, yeah, you got lucky. So it teaches you a few things about life. And that mantra you have is, everything will be okay. No, what is the mantra you say?

31:24 I’ll always be fine. I’ll always be fine. It’s me that it matters. Not everything else doesn’t matter, okay? If you’re fine, that means your family is fine.

31:33 You know, charity begins at home, you know? There’s something I’ve learned. I always used to help other people first. You’ve got to help yourself first, because you get yourself in the right place. You can help so many more people.

31:44 Yeah. I always have this saying to someone, everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end. And it’s just a way when something really crazy is happening, you know, everything is going to be fine. If you’re in the middle of it, you know, just continue.

32:00 Yeah. You know, crash through it. Get that persistence. Keep grounded, because it will always be fine. You know, and when you know that, when you can see that light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what’s happening, and I’m not going to go through examples, but there’s tons and tons of stuff that happens in my life.

32:14 And, you know, people don’t see that. They only see other success, or if there’s one big failure, they want to focus on that, you know? I don’t see what goes into all of the mechanics to making all that happen. And every entrepreneur works damn hard, I can tell you. Yeah.

32:29 I want to fill a little bit of your backstory in. You know, you have an incredible backstory. You’re homeless at one point. Yeah. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that happened and then how you made the transition to a dairy farmer.

32:41 Okay. Well, my grandfather and my father were dairy farmers, so I was expected to follow suit, which I truly did. I came to the home farm after school and left school early with only four O-levels, all the practical subjects, failed O-level math, O-level English, much to the disgust of my mother. And I came to work on the home farm. And then I attended agricultural college in Standilo in South Wales, because my father said, you know, there’s the farm.

33:08 You know, you’ve got a free hand, really, as to the ideas. Go away to college and bring these ideas back and you can do the farming, and I’ll continue with a business which I’m setting up, which was selling steel frame buildings, you know? So he was a small-time entrepreneur himself. And I was fantastic there. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

33:28 What I didn’t realize, in my heart and guts and soul, farming wasn’t for me, you know? And I know that now. And, you know, going back to that time, I wanted to please my father, please the family, went to college, came back with the ideas. I went, well, hey, you know, we’ve got to increase the cow numbers from 40 to 400. We’re going to up the stocking rate.

33:45 We’re going to use these new ideas of New Zealand grazing system. He went, no, no, son. You do it my way, or it’s the highway, basically. I was like, huh? You know, it was a big clash.

33:56 And over the months then, we really didn’t see eye to eye. And I loved my father a bit, so we’re very close now. But it led to us physically having blows. And I ran away from home without any plan, without any money. All I had was a Mark II Ford Escort that I’d built.

34:13 You know, I loved my cars. And I ended up having to sell that as well to pay for food. I went to the West Country because a lot of my family are around there. But I was too proud to actually go to the relatives and ask for somewhere to stay. You know, I made out.

34:28 I was fine. I was OK. But I was actually sleeping on the streets. And I ran out of money. And this was by July time in 1988.

34:36 How old were you? And I was 19 at that time. And I remember then going into the transport cafes and, you know, begging the lorry drivers, basically. I would say, are you going to leave those chips? Because, you know, I really ran out of money.

34:49 I had a bit of a problem. And I had to go away from it. They were buying me meals, you know. I’ll never forget that. And that’s how I survived, really, was by begging and borrowing a little bit over those weeks.

34:59 And I thought, well, I’ve got to snap out of this. You know, this is ridiculous. I’m worth more than this. And I’m sleeping under the railway arches in Yovu, you know, and sleeping next to the other people who are down and outs, really, and speaking with them and understanding why they’re in that position. And then I applied for this job to be a farm manager because it’s the only thing I knew how to do.

35:19 And I read the John Nick’s book of farm management and I found that difficult because I’m dyslexic. So I kind of done all this research under the railway bridge and went for this interview. And I got this job as a farm manager. And I don’t really know the first thing about managing a farm properly, you know. So I got friendly with a guy down the road called Nick from another farm, Caddestock Farm, who’s a manager there.

35:40 And he guided me. And the boss to this day, I’m still, well, if he sees this, but he didn’t know that I didn’t know everything. I just learned it as I went along. And I ended up then getting involved in three farms with that person, Mr. Lawrence of Trow Farm Dairies in Long Burton.

35:56 And I was doing really well. And then as I was coming up to the age of 21, away from home, I was very close to my mother, not so close to my father. We still hadn’t built that bridge. But I was doing all the things, really, that I could have done on the home farm, on somebody else’s farms and making it very successful. But farming wasn’t for me, you know.

36:18 I remember I was in the milking shed one day and the cow behind me coughed and pooped at the same time that she lifted her tail. And all this cow shit come all over me, you know. And so I was putting the milking units on another one because I used to physically help as well. And that was a turning point in my life where I said, I really don’t want to do this anymore, you know. Because it’s in your ear and you can’t stop milking.

36:39 So you really have to be with that situation. I had to, you know, not drop those units because the muck might have gone into the milk, you know, and it could terminate the whole tank. So I had to put up with it and it hit me. And it was warm. That was a plus side, you know.

36:51 But it stunk. But then the second stage of that, I started running down my neck and it went cold, you know. And I remember it like yesterday, the smell and the feeling, you know, was that. That was a trigger point for me where I decided to get out of farming, which was culminated really with the death of my sister, who then died suddenly through lupus. As a cancer well, leukemia-related disease where the white blood cells which are supposed to heal you actually work against your body.

37:19 And she went very quickly. And that was a big wake-up for me. I formed allegiance with Dad. I said, look, you know, I’m really sorry about this. And he came to halfway ground as well and said he’d been too stubborn, you know.

37:32 He said, come and manage the home dairy farm. And that was a real dilemma for me because I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to get out of farming. But because of the family commitment, I went to the home farm and I took those cows up, the cow numbers up to 460. And then I got married, a beautiful lady got married, and everything was fine-ish.

37:52 But I had this will and want to get out and do something else, you know. It was inside me for a number of years before I actually then pushed the button at the age of 37 and won a scholarship and started that 40-meter vehicle then to have a look at other things, you know. Right. You said once that if the pain of where you’re at is not great enough, you’re not going to make the change. Yeah.

38:13 I mean, I guess that incident with the cow and the calf. That was it. That was the one, Brian, you know. Okay. And that’s certainly true.

38:19 A lot of people ask me today, okay, I want to be a millionaire or multi-millionaire. How do I do it? And I say, well, read these couple of books, you know, and then come back to me and I’ll ask you some questions. Do you know only about 5% of the people come back after having read the books? People are too lazy.

38:34 It’s too flippant and easy to say, I want to be doing this. You’ve got to get off your backside and get some structure and start doing it, you know. And that’s the problem. People are too lazy. They won’t commit.

38:45 They haven’t got the persistence. They haven’t got the four points that we spoke of already. Or they got them, but they don’t want to follow them through. And they haven’t hit rock bottom. Do you need to hit a rock bottom or a certain point where you’re like, okay, I’m going to change my game up?

38:58 I think myself, I’ve had huge pain in my life. There’s two big pains, the fallout with my father and the death of my sister. And I think it’s important, yeah. I’m not saying you’ve got to have pain to become an entrepreneur, but certainly in my case, I went through that. And it made me appreciate, you know, really what I’ve got and who I am.

39:14 And from there, really, you know, even today, I sleep only three or four hours a night. I make the most of everything every second of the day in doing stuff, you know, stuff that I love doing. And then you got the scholarship and you were allowed to travel the world. You ended up interviewing, meeting Sir Richard Branson, interviewed Bill Gates. You know, you mentioned interviewing earlier.

39:36 And, you know, I’m very fortunate. I get to speak with some amazing people, including yourself. And about a year ago, I started thinking to myself, what’s different about these people? Because you meet them. A lot of times, they’re a bit introverted.

39:46 They seem pretty normal. They drink coffee like normal people. They use the loo. And I started getting an idea, and I’m curious what you think of this, is that they have the things that you mentioned, too. But a lot of times, these people are willing to go to uncomfortable places to get where they are.

40:02 And repeatedly, whether it’s Eddie Izard here, who can now sell out 30 days straight in London. How did he get there? Well, he used to be a street performer in Covent Garden, and I’ve seen a lot of those guys. So why did he get to where he is? It’s because he kept pushing himself to go to where fear was, uncomfortableness, and then he kept improving on the back of that.

40:21 And that’s the only difference between someone who isn’t sitting there. I wonder what you think of that first, because you interviewed people as well. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And I suppose I’m lucky. I can speak from my own experience.

40:33 And that is very uncomfortable at times, when you go down those roads where you’re totally alone, because your family’s not supporting you. They, in my case, they wanted me to continue farming, because that was what was safe. I was pretty good at it. It’s quite a career change. Yeah, but you know, when you can, you’re doing something and you’re fairly successful at it, but you don’t look forward to getting up in the morning and doing it.

40:54 It’s time to change, you know. And for me, like, I absolutely love what I do now, and I choose what I do, you know, including the speaking. I don’t have to do it, but I absolutely love it. And that really is the key, is taking that change, first of all, and committing yourself to it. I think that the problem or the fault of a lot of people is, they go on too much Rara courses, you know, and they have what’s called shelf development.

41:19 You’ve got to feel the pain of doing. Does that make sense? Yeah. You’ve got to, you know, when you push the button, you’ve got to actually do something and have an action plan. And that’s not easy, you know, especially if you’re coming from an employed background, to take that lead and to take your backside into that position, especially when you’ve got family commitments, responsibilities, exactly the same as I have.

41:40 We have three beautiful children, all grown up now, and, you know, very proud of where they are today. But, you know, you really have to take self-control and direct yourself into that. And yes, it’s painful sometimes because the biggest pain is the torture that you’re putting on yourself, the doubt thinking, if I fail on this, I could actually stuff the family’s future, you know, and that’s the thing you have to break through. And I suppose my mantra, I’ve always had the mantra of, I’ll always be fine.

42:10 And that I know that, you know, whatever happens in the medium term, if I go homeless again, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got my health, you know what I mean? Yeah, that’s a great mantra. And it is, it’s something where it’s the total opposite of moaning and complaining about government or the neighbors or your friends or somebody else, you know. You have to take responsibility for your own actions with the pain that comes with that as well.

42:31 Because through change, pain will come, for sure. And so to answer your question in a nutshell, yes, I do think you’ve got to have pain to become successful. Yeah, you talk about shelf development. In my TED talk, I said, you know, research is procrastination in disguise. And a lot of times it’s just, it’s going to that uncomfortable place.

42:48 And a lot of people just don’t want to do that because it’s the scary thing. And so you watch a course and it’s entertaining and that kind of thing. And there’s this concept called resistance. There’s an author named Steven Pressfield. He’s got a book called The War of Art.

43:01 He said whenever you go to do something, resistance shows up. I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept where you want to do a deal and then that’s the one point where a family member says, I have a crisis. But that’s the one point where you actually stub your toe or you do something and there’s all these things keeping you from doing it. And you have to be like, no, no, no, no, no. We’re going to push through those.

43:18 It’s just normal. It’s just natural when you’re actually going to get something done, a little pain, a little this, and then… I think the universe tests us as well. If it’s too easy, it wouldn’t be so rewarding, would it? So at the end of the day, there’s nothing that’s really, really easy.

43:33 There’s always a glitch somewhere. And I quite often say if it’s not broken, break it. Make it interesting. Because if we’ve got challenges on a daily basis, it keeps us sharp. It keeps the old cogs ticking.

43:47 And I think if you get too complacent and too comfortable, then that’s when you die. And the brain knows it won’t give you those endorphins until you earned them. So until you go on that stage in a few days and there’s 10,000 people up there and you get nervous beforehand and then you give the speech and you kill it, then you can have the, I feel good for maybe 24 hours to the next thing, but you’re not going to get it any other way. So that’s why you’re pushing yourself.

44:09 I mean, as an introvert in school, I never would have spoken on a stage. You know, that was the biggest pain thought for me, was to speak on a stage. And when I won the Nuffield Scholarship, I knew to speak for 20 minutes in front of the leaders of the farming industry and some leading entrepreneurs, you know, and get judged on my talk. And the fear of doing that was huge, you know. But they made me do it.

44:34 You had to do it. Otherwise you didn’t get your sponsor money to travel. And having done that then and nailed it, I won the competition out of a load of people there and had a shield off the queen. I was like, wow, you know, I was the best public speaker in that group, that year group, you know. And it was like, it’s a hell of a feeling, you know, when you’ve done something to the best of your ability.

44:55 You don’t have to be the best in the world necessarily, but you need to do the best you can do. And I’d done that. I’d given it, you know, a thousand percent because I knew it was something which was a huge fear to me. And to get over that hurdle and now be in a position where I’m paid, you know, a lot of money to give a keynote, that’s a big responsibility, you know. So I’m always striving sometimes physically sick before going on stage.

45:16 But I’m always striving to deliver the utmost for that audience. You know, number one, to have fun. For the audience to have fun. And number two, to be empowered. Yeah, it’s funny, when you show yourself that you can be successful, it listens.

45:30 And then it’s, oh, wait a second. Okay, maybe I can do this, maybe I can do that. And it’s a weird way of like, I also believe you’re not only always pitching everyone else, you’re constantly pitching yourself every day. Oh, for sure. To tell yourself, yeah, I can do that, I can do that.

45:42 And that’s like why you do your yeses in the morning. I have to do it, but if I didn’t do that, you know, I’d be like, oh my God, what the heck am I doing? You know, it’s like, perhaps I should go back to having a job, you know what I mean? You have to drive forward, and you have to have that empowerment at self-motivation as well. Absolutely for sure, on a daily basis.

46:01 Let me ask you about these interviews. So Richard Branson, probably a pivotal point in your life when you interviewed him, is it true that he told you to go into property? Yes. Well, not directly. Richard said, if you go into a asset-based industry, then you’re always going to do well.

46:15 He said, be careful on what you do. If you’re gambling, then in some form you’re trading, you want to really bank some of that. And property is a really good bank, is what he told me. And he was buying Necker at that time, you know? Yeah.

46:30 And I was looking at that, what he paid for that island and what that makes him today, because that’s a money-making exercise. He just bought Virgin Trains as well at the same time. And all the media were saying, he’s going to fail on this one. Or this is no way he’s going to turn this round. Sheer value within the next two years of Virgin Trains goes and trebles, quadruples, you know?

46:47 Richard creates environments in which people love to work. That’s his secret. And when he directed me towards property, he wasn’t saying, you must do property. He said, you’re like assets, don’t you? I said, yeah.

47:01 And he said, well, property is a good asset. And that was it. And I picked up on that. I thought, wow, hang on. And then I met a guy called Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad.

47:11 I interviewed him about a year ago. He’s fantastic. I’ve been speaking on the stages with him recently. He’s great in person, isn’t he? Oh, and Kim is even greater than him, to be honest with you.

47:19 Kim Kiyosaki. Yeah. He’s only successful because of Kim. Because of her. You know, I’ll spin that a little bit better.

47:25 He’s a very introspective guy. Oh, he’s fantastic. He’s got some really deep thoughts and really good thoughts on energy too. So you met Robert. If you meet Robert, then how can you not get excited about real estate if you meet him?

47:37 Well, it really fired me up, you know. And I suppose that started the engine going. And I went on the Rich Dad trainings, you know, to learn how to raise finance, how to put deals together. And then I’d run some of these things past Richard. And he’d be like, yeah, you know, if that feels right, you do that.

47:51 It’s a very open answer, you know. And I was like, oh. He was starting to get me into the feelings of things, you know. And I walk into a house today and I feel the energy of the house. The figures might all be fine.

48:03 And I walk in with the feelings wrong, and I won’t buy it. You said you love property because you love people. Yeah. Explain that. I think property is a people business, you know.

48:13 I love creating lovely places for people to live. You know, whether they’re going to be buying from me or they’re going to be renting from us. You know, that is the transformation of taking a stinky, smelly house and making it into a nice home and a nice feeling, a nice place for people. It gives me a good feeling, you know. And I think the whole of the industry is about looking after and serving those people.

48:38 You know, whether it’s a sale, you know, and it’s a short engagement, or it’s a tenant who you keep for many years, you know, who’s the tenant in from you with you. You’ve got to look after them. So we pride ourselves in that we don’t charge tenants up front, prospective tenants to come into our letting business. We look after, we’re not full of the top price in the market with fare, and we give the top condition of properties, you know, so it’s being, I suppose, friendly, fair, looking after the people.

49:08 I think it can be encapsulated by what I want written on my gravestone because I was a big fan of Stephen Covey when I was learning, and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that book. Okay, okay. And Stephen says, you know, what do you want written on your gravestone? Because that says a lot about you in your life. Everything.

49:24 And I thought, oh, he’s left the world a better place. He’s helped others. It’d be something like that in the beginning. But now all I want on there is the three Fs. You know, here lies Kevin Green.

49:33 He was friendly, fair, and funny. And I think I bring that into the businesses, you know. We have fun as a team, and our customers should have fun with us as well. Enjoy the experience, whether it’s, you know, renting property from us, or it’s any one of our other service or product businesses, you know. You mentioned the reason Richard Branson’s successful because he creates companies people want to work at.

49:55 Yeah. I think that’s what you just said. Very great. He creates environments in which people love to work. Right, and which makes them great companies.

50:00 Sounds like you have that similar aim in your property business. Yeah, very much so, Brian, you know. I just finished a book called Delivering Happiness by Tony Shea, who created Zappos, which is the huge internet retailer that Amazon bought for like a billion dollars a few years ago, and let them continue to run. And Tony says that a company’s brand is just a lagging indicator of the company culture. And so if you focus on culture, it becomes your brand, whether you like it or not.

50:27 Yeah. I’d agree with that. Yeah, yeah. And I believe you have to put your influence into your brand, whatever it might be, your ethos, your feelings. And people would buy into that, the right people, and then you will enjoy doing it.

50:40 You know, if you truly express who you are into your business, you will attract the people that you want to attract. Yeah, I guess that’s Branson, you know, pretty much personified. Yeah. I had a really fascinating guy in here named Julian Treasure recently. He’s been spoken, a TED speaker, like five times.

50:55 He talks about the sound of business. Yeah. And he said the perfect example of the sound of a business, because every business has a sound, not just a logo, but in everything, he said he got on a Virgin flight like 20 years ago or 10 years ago, and the hostess came up to him and she said, hi, sexy. And he said that epitomized what Virgin was at the time. Yeah.

51:14 You know, it was a rebel in the airline business. We’re going to make it fun. We’re going to make it different. Pushing the boundaries a little bit. Opposite of British Airways.

51:20 Yeah. And that one line that was basically coming from the top, right, that comes right from Richard, let’s do this fun that the whole company culture was embodied in those two words. Yeah. And it was, I think, a fascinating thing. He’s still exactly the same today.

51:35 A recent keynote with him. He won’t actually do a keynote. He’ll do an interview. So he comes on stage. And I’m fortunate enough to be his warm-up man, if you like.

51:44 And he comes on with a brunette lady and a blonde lady, very, very attractive, in the full Virgin cabin crew gear. Such a showman. You know, with the stars and the, you know, all the fireworks going off on screen. And he goes, well, wouldn’t you? That’s his opening line, you know.

51:57 He’s just such a rebel, even today. Are you still, a lot of people forget, like, all the hot air balloon stuff you used to do. You know, it’s really dangerous stuff. Very, very clever PR man, though. Yeah.

52:07 When you look at the background to what he’s doing, the Virgin brand is highlighted through all of those stunts, you know. Yeah. Now it makes sense. Yeah. At the time, you’re like, who is this guy?

52:15 You could kill himself. Yeah. Pre-internet, it’s probably the greatest advertising you can do. Well, the greatest PR you could ever do without paying for it. Yeah.

52:24 Paying for the balloons. So, you’ve learned that from Richard. I got to hear the story of how you interviewed Bill Gates, and then I want to talk a little bit more about property, and we’ll go from there. But how do you get, you know, the CEO of Microsoft in an interview? Very, very difficult.

52:38 Out of all the interviews that I was chasing, that was the hardest one by far. He doesn’t do interviews very often. Yeah. Richard was relatively easy in comparison. And, you know, I wrote to him, I wrote then to Microsoft, no responses whatsoever.

52:54 You know, at least when you write to Virgin, you get a response. But it’s basically a polite go away. It might happen, but probably not response, you know. So, I was determined. I was going to find out where he was.

53:06 So, I thought, right, I’ll fly to America, because that’s where he lives. That was the first thing, because I’m not, you know, the most clever person in the world. I deal with things, you know, on a piece by piece, simple basis. But, right, I’ll go there, and I’ll find out from there where he is. He must be down in Silicon Valley area.

53:21 So, I go down to California, pretty much unprepared, and I go and find him. And I find out where he lives, and he’s not there, because he’s already flown up to the Consumer Electronics Association show. Something, okay, I need to go up north, Wisconsin way. I need to go and find out what he’s doing up there. And then he was ending up in Las Vegas in this show.

53:46 You know, so I end up following him up north, and he’s left there now, and then he goes back down to Vegas to this big show. So, I’m like, I get to the show, and I’m thinking, right, where’s he staying? You’re stalking him. Yeah, I’m stalking him, basically. I find out what I’m missing him, because I just want to confront him.

54:00 You know, I’m so naive in some ways. I just want to go up to him and say, you know, Mr. Gates, could I please have an interview with you? I’m just a, you know, a homeless person who wants to do well, to do that. I’ve won this scholarship type of thing.

54:11 Would you help me? I’m looking at the attitudes and personalities of people. And that was, I was hoping it would come from that, because I’d really done that with a lot of other people, and I’d got through some doors, and then they’d opened others. But I had no way into Gates whatsoever. Nobody that I’d interviewed knew him or could help me was totally, you know, on the back hoof.

54:30 So, I get down into Las Vegas, and I find out he’s staying in the Bellagio Hotel, and he’s up top floor, obviously. So, I try to get to that now. There’s security guards everywhere. You can’t get anywhere near, you know, so he’s obviously there. And I’m thinking, right, how am I going to do this?

54:44 So, I go to the show itself, and it’s just massive. It happens every January, Consumer Electronics Association show. Microsoft took off one of the biggest stands there. They launched their new products, et cetera. There’s an annual big event for them.

54:56 That’s why, you know, Gates was really, you know, sort of driving towards this. And I start speaking to people, and I’m saying, look, I want to interview Bill Gates. Are you mad? He doesn’t do interviews. And this is all the press I’m speaking to as well.

55:09 And so, then I managed to get a press pass just by getting friendly with this guy, having a pint with him in the bar. And I said, look, if I could get into the press room, maybe there’s a way through to interview from there. He said, you won’t get it, but I’ll help you get into the room. He said, you need to be a reporter. I thought, well, I’m on a scholarship.

55:27 I’ll pretend to be a reporter. So, I made up this paper called Nuffield News because it was a Nuffield scholarship. And I got a person inside Nuffield to say that I was on a research and interview for Nuffield News, which technically I kind of was, but there was at that time no paper called Nuffield News. And that got me the press pass to get into the press room. And then I started speaking to the guys there.

55:49 And one of them told me that he always appears on the Microsoft stand on the morning of the second day. I was like, that’s good enough for me. I’m going to get on that stand and wait for him. And that’s exactly what I did. And I told all the employees on the Microsoft stand that I wanted to interview Bill Gates.

56:05 They were like, ha, ha, ha. You know, that’s probably not going to happen. He doesn’t do interviews. And I said, well, does he come on the stand? We don’t know what he’s doing.

56:12 And I waited there, and I waited and waited. And just before the lunch time, I was standing by a side door, which is like a back entrance near the stand. And out comes Bill Gates, just like that, with two people beside him. Not a blond and a brunette, though. No, no, not this time, no.

56:28 This is personal assistant, John Pinnett, and another guy whose name I forget. And they’re there. And I said, Mr. Gates, and I got three questions answered straight away, and I was amazed, you know, that he stopped and answered those questions. And then I got the photograph with him, and then John Pinnett said to me, the rest of those questions you’ve got, you said, email me.

56:50 Here’s my card, and I’ll make sure that Mr. Gates answers them for you. I was like, what? Do you think I was pretty chuffed by that time? I was like, oh, you know what I mean?

56:59 And off he went, and then the press found him, and it was all proforma from there. So I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, in this quiet corner, where there was nobody about for a couple of minutes, and just got that unscripted, really, unplanned interview with Mr. Gates. And I got the rest of the answers. I don’t believe today that they necessarily all came from Bill Gates.

57:24 They’re probably from John Pinnett’s stock answers or through the ethos of Mr. Gates, but I got them, you know, at the end of the day. And what less does that tell you, persistence? Persistence-based. And I believe the universe rewards that, too.

57:38 The chances of that happening were really small. But it’s funny how these magical things happen when you really want to do something in your life. I really wanted that interview. I was going to do whatever it took. Even if it took years, I was going to get it.

57:53 Talk to me about these magical things in life. As we get older, and I’m getting older, too, you start to sense a little bit more energy. You start to sense things a bit better. Maybe you get more in touch with your heart. I don’t know what it is.

58:05 So maybe more sensitive, maybe even as a man, you kind of calm down a little bit. But tell me about just how you sense people’s energy. I also know you’ve had some kind of spirit guidance, whether it’s your deceased sister. I know you had a crazy story where you climbed up a mountain in the States and there was no one around and there was a man there and I think he said to you, Kevin, the answers are all inside of you. And then he was gone.

58:31 Tell me about these things. Well, those two people you mentioned are here now and people sometimes think I’m a bit weird for saying this, but the old man who was on the squawk peak, he’s there, and my sister’s here, and they’re my guides. And everybody’s got, I believe, everybody’s got the spirit guides and an angel or archangel as well. And that’s just my knowing. I just know that.

58:55 And whether people believe that or not, it’s there. And they’re there to help us and protect us. And be aware that they’re there because they’ll give you a yes or no answer to something. I’m a bit daft sometimes and I’ll ask a question of my sister or my other spirit guide here and I’ll say, what is the answer? Is that yes or no?

59:14 And if you make it a very clear question, you get the feeling of the answer come back. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And that really is something I never used to be able to connect with but in the latter years, it’s very strong. And I’m guessing your sister tells you messages like, you know, use every second is precious because I don’t have that time.

59:33 And I’m guessing that old man on the mountain is saying, you know the answers. You can ask me, but you already know the answer. It’s all inside you. He’s a very calming influence, you know, and it’s exactly how he is. He’s like, yeah, because I’m like, well, I’ve got to do this.

59:45 If I get an idea, I’m one of these who wants to get up, get it done straight away and get the results, you know. I’m very results driven. And he’s like, cool down. Just think about this. Who’s going to help you with that?

59:56 How is it going to be put together? And you can almost feel him saying, oh, he’s the one, you know. And then she’s the one saying, get real. Don’t be an idiot. You’ve only got X amount of time.

1:00:07 Use that time wisely. You know, think about what it is, what your true core values are and what you want from life. And it’s almost like you’ve got Alan Sugar, the apprentice, with, you know, Karen Brady and whoever sort of feeding into you and Nick Hewer helping you, you know. Do you think we all should have those spirits and choose a few that we just carry with us and just bring them into the room with us and just have them with us at all times? I believe so because we are just, you know, a speck in the universe time and there’s greater than us around, you know, the magic and energy that’s in the universe.

1:00:40 You’ve only got to look historically to see what’s happened with people. And I believe we’ve all got that magic, you know. Some of us can actually realize that a little bit and do something quite magic in our lives as well. Yeah, I think you’re right. And I’m so many successful people that I talk to feel the same way you do.

1:00:56 They don’t all talk about it, but they definitely do. Talk to me about property. I don’t know that much about property investing, residential property. It’s such a big industry. There’s also a lot of people out there that sell things that I don’t think are good for everyone.

1:01:10 It seems to be, it’s hard because there’s a lot of noise, I believe, in that industry. How do you stand out? How do you choose, okay, I want to be this guy and I don’t want to be that guy. What is your read on? I suppose you make money when you buy in business and my main focus is how can I get discounted deals, you know.

1:01:31 So the stinky-smelly stuff, you know, where you walk in a property, you take a big sniff inwards, you can smell the money in a deal, you know, it smells so bad that nobody else is looking at the outcome. They’re going like, ooh, look at this, look at that, look at that. You know, that side of it, I quite like the challenge of the transformation and it really fits with me buying a discounted value. It’s difficult in a London market because the London market has been so strong but there’s still ways we can buy under that market value and when we know those ways, we’ve learnt them, it gets quite exciting because everything else you do thereafter is going to fall into place.

1:02:06 The trick is or the magic is or the secret is making sure you buy that asset less than what you can sell it for and one of my mantras with property and everything else is I’ll never buy something unless I can sell it the same day for more money. And I have to prove that to myself as well and I have some margins under which, you know, that discount has to be and if it doesn’t fit that criteria, I’m not going to try and emotionally convince myself to buy because the facts are saying different, so we’ll test the markets and in property, you know, we use lots of hints, trips, magic, if you like, to make it happen. I will sell a property before I’ve even bought it to test the market.

1:02:47 So if I’m buying in SW6, I’m buying here in EC2, I’m going to run an advert in the local press here to sell the type of property that I’m thinking of buying and see how many takers I’ve got and, you know, the answer to the phone calls that come in, if they come in, would be, I’m sorry, that property is sold, I’ve got another one coming through, you know, can I take your details and give you first chance on the next one? So it’s really doing the market research at the front end. The customer will always tell you the price point on something and you have to test that market in any way you can.

1:03:18 The property, I sell the demand, I rent the demand in any sector, in any market, in any country, you know, and the principles are the same, whatever you go in the world, that’s what I found. I’m seeing a parallel to the man on the mountain. Are the answers already inside? Are the answers in the market? Yeah.

1:03:34 So you’re listening to the market to tell you the answers. The market will always tell you, you know. You can read the press, you can look on the land registry to see facts of prices sold, but really you’ve got to look to the people. It is a people business. The buyers are there, the renters are there, and one of the benchmarks I look at is affordability, and this is why London is softening a bit at the moment.

1:03:55 The average wage in any area, you can find that easy on the websites, communities.gov.uk. Government have put all their statistics on there, and then from that, you can look at the average house price. You can divide, then, that wage into the house price and look at affordability. You know, it shouldn’t go in, really, more than six to seven times into the house price. That is showing that it’s affordable for the tenant to rent from you or to buy from you.

1:04:20 You’re in the right margin sector, and with rents, I always look at, you shouldn’t really, with your wages, pay more than 33% of your wages on rent. This is for home consumers. After tax. Yeah, okay. Because this situation then becomes a tight situation, and a lot of people are putting half their wages or higher net into the rent.

1:04:41 I read an article yesterday in the Standard, it was like two-thirds, is what some Londoners are paying for their rent. I mean, that’s a license for disaster, isn’t it, at the end of the day? It’s unsustainable. Yeah. So I go into markets where it’s not that case.

1:04:52 So I don’t rent property out in London for that reason. You know, I’m in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales in the UK, because we know that the affordability is there for the consumer. If they want to get a property loan, they can afford to get one to buy or to keep. And if they want to rent from us, they can afford to rent, you know. So it’s really, the market forces are a large part of what we do in deciding where we buy and what we buy.

1:05:15 Do you stay out of London in a general sense, because it’s its own strange animal? Well, London has its protected market. So I won’t say I stay out of here. I would trade in London all day long, you know, buy and sell. Then there’s some interesting deals that we do do, but I don’t invest here, which means I don’t keep rental property here, because I can get a higher yield elsewhere.

1:05:36 So I can take my profits from London and buy five properties with the same value as the one here elsewhere. You know, if one of those five goes empty on rent, I’ve still got four putting money into the pot, you know. So from an investment perspective, for me, it’s not a strong market. For trade, very, very strong. Let me ask you a question about property.

1:05:55 Earlier, you said you have a lot of businesses, and some are asset accumulation-based businesses, like property, and some are very different service-based businesses. And you said that Branson said, noticed in you that you liked assets and that that might be a good way to go. I interviewed Kiyosaki, actually, at the Excel Center about a year, year and a half ago. And fascinating interview, I really was impressed with how deep he was. Had a lot to say about meditation, a lot to say about energy, that kind of thing.

1:06:22 When you expect him to just talk about real estate, and he didn’t. And I then re-listened to Rich Dad, Poor Dad, like verbatim on the Audible, and I got really excited, because it’s a really beautifully written book. I don’t know if he had two dads or not, and I don’t care, it’s a great book. So I did that, and I started learning more about the property market. And then I met Dan Pena, the $50 billion man, the guy up in Scotland, and I went up there.

1:06:44 Everybody was asking him, and he encourages people to buy up businesses, roll them out, sell them, set up boards of directors, that kind of thing. And someone asked him about passive income, and he said, he said, I’ll do his accent. The problem with passive income is it makes you passive. And that was his line. Well, he’s a sharp individual, isn’t he?

1:07:02 He’s a very sharp individual, but it rang through to me, and I was like, I do know people in London that own a certain number of assets, and at some point, they have 20, and then they manage them, and they sit back, and I must say, sometimes it does make them passive. Is that a way to look at that asset class, or is that the wrong way to look at that asset class? I think it’s got some argument. For that reason, I trade as well as invest. I do a mix.

1:07:26 If it was just passive, it’d be very easy for me, because when I’ve cleared the loan on a property, I pass it on to the ownership of one of my three children. So when I die, I want no assets to my name, and for inheritance stats purposes, it’s a very wise thing to do. I’m properly trained. I’ve been trained by people who are multi-millionaires, and I follow most of what they say. If I take Kiyosaki’s training as a case in point, there’s one key difference between what I’ve learned from Robert and what I actually do.

1:07:55 I clear down debt. Robert doesn’t. Robert borrows the great cash flow, and that’s what he trains all the time. So he’s always highly geared. I don’t.

1:08:03 Within 10 years, I’ve cleared the debt on a property. I clear that from other trading business that I do, bringing that profit in and from the surplus rent. And I feel that’s a safer way. And of course, the accumulation there is very safe. It’s three S’s, what I call it.

1:08:17 Safety, certainty, and speed. That’s the way I approach the portfolio. When I get people to write that down, and they write certainty, it’s obviously with a C, but I’m dyslexic, so it sounds like an S. So safety first, then certainty. Speed is the last priority, is what you’re saying.

1:08:30 Yeah. I mean, now speed is a priority of getting the deal. Okay. Safety is clearing the debt. Certainty is the figures, and speed is getting that deal under contract, because opportunities are never lost.

1:08:40 Somebody else will take that one you miss, you know? You’ve got to, when you see these undervalued deals, you’ve got to be able to move fast. You’ve got to know your game, you know what I mean? But is it passive or is it exciting? Passive income is very passive in property.

1:08:55 In my business, once it passes on into the portfolio, I only get involved if there’s a court case where a tenant hasn’t paid their rent and we’ve taken them to court eventually, hopefully not, but we’ve had to, or they’ve damaged the property or we want a possession order, you know? And I get involved in those because I like legals, and I hate an injustice at the end of the day. They’ve gone through it. But that is all passive. But I’ve got the peace of mind knowing that that now, by the 10th year, has got no debt on it, and it’s passed into the beneficiary trust for the benefit of my children.

1:09:26 So that bit’s done. You know, I’ve done the passive bit. It’s done. I’m still actively then always buying and trading and very busy on the front bit, which is both setting up the new investments and the trades. And I believe in any business, and this is what Richard taught me, you must trade and invest because it goes well together.

1:09:44 The trading profit can clear down that debt. You know, debt should only be a bridging facility. And I suppose that’s the key difference between myself and Robert Kiyosaki. Robert doesn’t believe in clearing debt. He believes in dying with a debt, passing a debt.

1:09:57 I believe in clearing debt, paying the tax, and then making it safer for the kids. Right, because you’re an asset builder. Yeah. And Branson is, to a certain extent, with Necker and these other pieces. He’s building those kind of long-term core assets.

1:10:08 Yeah, and I mean, Richard clears debts down, you know. And what you’ve got with capital adequacy, because I’ve got a peer-to-peer lending business as well. That’s one of my other service businesses. Okay. But I give savers a higher return on their money than the bank, and then that same money is lent out to the investors, you know.

1:10:25 Yeah. And I take a small margin for linking those two up. What I’ve learned in that business is two words, capital adequacy. I’ve learned through that and my own experience of dealing with the mainstream banks. Banks would rather lend to somebody who historically has cleared debt.

1:10:40 You know, if you’re borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, and following Robert’s way, Robert Kiyosaki’s way, you’ll come to saturation point in the United Kingdom where the banks will say, hang on, you’re too much of a risk. It’s not safe to lend to you. It’s not certain to lend to you. It’s certainly not going to, you know. And that happens to a lot of investors in property.

1:10:57 They don’t realize the importance of clearing down the debt. When I lend money to people, there’s only two questions I want answered. What do they want the money for, and how are they going to pay it back? And that payback is important. So I’ve got a long track record now of clearing debts.

1:11:13 So I can go to any main clearing bank and borrow millions because of my track record, you know. Had I not done that, then I couldn’t borrow so much to set up assets then to clear again. Talk to me about one of your biggest fears you had, which was your first borrowing of money to buy a property. I think it was 61,000 pounds. I’m not sure.

1:11:33 And for you, that was probably one of your core fears you had to get over, but one you probably need to get over in the residential property market. Can you tell me about, well, how you approached that, what you learned from that? Yeah, I mean, it was all good in theory, and then I took it into practice. It was actually 43,000 pounds, that loan. I remember it like yesterday.

1:11:50 It was the scariest thing to sign the loan document, knowing I didn’t have 43,000 pounds, but I had to pay that back. My auntie lent me some of the money for the deposit, and then I got the refunds off the credit cards, you know. And then I sold this property for 8,100 profit, you know. And the relief, it was like, I couldn’t, you know, I was really uptight because my dad had always taught me, you know, not to pay for something, unless you got spare cash money wrongly.

1:12:16 I mean, he thinks differently now, and we’re really close, you know. He’s got his own portfolio now. But coming back to that first deal and signing that mortgage statement of debt of 43,000, it was so alien to me, you know. That would hardly buy a front door in London, you know what I mean? This was a property in Wales.

1:12:34 Is it true you used to drive by the property every day to see if it was still there? I did. I did. It’s very true. You’ve done your research well.

1:12:40 You know, it was a few miles from where I lived at that time, and I was checking it, and I was physically working on it as well, which was wrong. You know, I was doing all the fix-up, and it was taking a long time. It took three and a half months to turn that deal around, you know. But when I had the profit off it, I was still milking cows at the same time. You know, happy days. It was such a relief.

1:13:00 And the second one I did, I didn’t work on it. I got the experts in. It took three and a half weeks, you know, instead of three and a half months. And that was $11,200 profit on the second one, so I traded out. I had to build up some reserve, some cash reserve, to make it safe before then holding the investments, you know.

1:13:18 That was my plan, and that’s what I teach today as well. Always make it safe. Okay, and you conditioned yourself out of that fear by basically just doing it. Yeah. Yeah.

1:13:26 At the end of the day, there was, you know, you’ve got Richard saying, just do it, you know. If you don’t do it, you don’t know. And I suppose I got over the fear by, again, going back to Stephen Covey. He taught me a lot in his books. And he mentioned the part where you’re sitting in your rocking chair at retirement, and you’re looking back on life, you know, what you want to be saying to yourself.

1:13:47 And most people are sitting in that rocking chair, rocking it slowly, saying, I wish I’d bought that property. Look what it’s worth today. I wish I’d done that deal. I wish I’d rented those out. They sit there with regret, you know.

1:13:58 I made a big cross through that in my mind that I wanted to be, and I will be, sitting in my rocking chair in years to come, rocking it so flat out. There’ll be steam coming off the rockers, you know. And I’ll be shouting, yahoo! So that made me have a go, you know. The fear of not doing it was higher than doing it.

1:14:16 And that fear was that picture of me in that rocking chair looking back with that regret. You know, I didn’t want that. Yeah, they say Jeff Bezos started Amazon because he wanted it’s his regret minimization plan because he didn’t want to look back and think, I could have done this. You know, I saw the internet growing. I saw books where it was going to be.

1:14:33 And he had a great job at a hedge fund in New York that I actually interviewed with when I was at school. And he could have stayed there, but he didn’t. Because he knew, not really the money, it was that he was going to regret it when he was old. Yeah. And I think you will regret it.

1:14:45 And that would be a terrible feeling, wouldn’t it, to get to that and sit there with regret. You know, we only have one chance in this life. Is it true for every deal you do, you have two added strategies? And I wanted you to talk about that because you seem like a relaxed guy. You know, you kind of, you play the I’m the Welshman with the dyslexia, but you’re a very obviously smart guy as well.

1:15:05 And so that can work well in deals as well, I’m sure. My grandpa was a great horseman. But I wanted to know about that. I just had the astronaut Chris Hadfield in here a few weeks ago. Fascinating guy.

1:15:17 I spent 166 days in space, covered David Bowie’s Space Oddity when he was in space. You know, he filmed the music video in space. And he has a theory. He says, prepare for failure. He says, a lot of people say prepare for success.

1:15:29 He says, prepare for failure. Once you do that, then you can live even a riskier life. You say two exits for every deal. Is that a way that you’re preparing for failure? Yeah, I’m looking at worst case scenario.

1:15:41 What if? What if I can’t sell it? What am I going to do? What if I can’t rent it out? What am I going to do?

1:15:46 And those, I’ll always put two scenarios on property. It’s the same with any business. It can go wrong. You know, the competitors can come in. The government can change their policy and guidance and it can really stuff your business.

1:15:59 How are you going to get out of that? And, you know, touch wood every business that I’ve set up. I’ve done okay or it’s flown. And the reason for the first part of okay is I’ve known when to get out as well. You know, budgeting, planning, and making sure you’ve got the exit strategy in place up front.

1:16:17 And then knowing the business is going actually towards that, it might be the time to sell. You know, there’s two things important in business is when you’re going to transfer that ownership of it or when you’re going to sell it. Because if you die with it to your name, you’re a fool. I learned that a long time ago. Your dependents, your beneficiaries will pay a lot of tax.

1:16:35 So if you can’t answer the question to when you’re going to sell it or when you’re going to transfer the ownership of it, then you shouldn’t start the business. So there’s a lot of planning around that as to if it’s a second exit strategy, I might have to sell sooner because the environment’s changed. The customers demand has changed. I help a gentleman set up an apps business, mobile phone applications. His name is Rahul Joshi, who lives here in London.

1:17:00 The company’s called AppGeeks. And our point of sale for that is sooner than later because the new best tech thing will come in, whether it’s augmented reality, 3D holograms, coming out of your books, and they will be absolutely taken over. We know that. Yeah. Okay, so he’d be a fool to keep that for years.

1:17:20 There’s a big high-cash business at the moment where he gets the outsources, the building of the apps to the Philippines and Malaysia, sells the apps to the customers here at an affordable price, makes a good profit. Right, so you have a short horizon for something like that. Yeah, so something like that. The timing of sale would be shorter, and the risk to that, obviously, is pretty apparent in technology moving on. With property, there’s not quite such a problem.

1:17:45 However, with property, there might be a deal that we want to rent out. And then all of a sudden, rental demand changes for whatever reason. There’s a new directive coming in now. The tax regime, which is in 2017 going to alter the market, where the interest relief on investment property is not going to be allowed to be offset against rent income. That’s going to put tax up a lot for investors.

1:18:07 It will change the market a little bit, undoubtedly. And you’ve got to preempt that. And you’ve got to say, well, if I can’t sell it, am I going to rent it out? Can I rent it out, and does it wash its face? Does it pay the loan that I put in place to buy the property?

1:18:22 Because in most cases, people have got to, and I’m no different, have borrowed money to buy it, and then we clear the loan down. So we’ve got to make sure that all the mechanics of that work, in the best case scenario and the worst case scenario. In the city, we have something called a stop-loss order. And when you go and buy a trade or put a trade on or buy a derivative, you already say, if it drops 2% in value, I’m selling it no matter what. And no matter what my monkey brain tells me then, no matter how much I try to justify, it’s time to buy more.

1:18:51 Sounds like you have those scenarios in your mind. Yeah, I mean, don’t ask me a lot about stocks and shares trading. It doesn’t float my boat because I don’t own the business. I’m leaving my wealth and my decisions going to somebody else’s hands. So for me as an asset builder, that doesn’t work.

1:19:05 Nothing wrong with it. A lot of my best friends and associates trade the stock market commodities for its indices. Brilliant, not me. It’s not for me. I like asset building.

1:19:16 And to that end, I’m in control of that. I know what the outcomes are, and I can push the button. You know what I mean? And I’m also not one that likes reading a lot because of my dyslexia. So to look at company refs and do the research that’s needed on the people behind the businesses that you’re investing in is something that’s alien to me.

1:19:32 Does that make sense? Yeah. So that’s why, really, I won’t go into stocks and shares myself because of the type of person I am. However, and I’m not saying that’s wrong. Brilliant marketplace there.

1:19:44 You know, for me, it’s simpler for my needs in controlling that simple asset, the property. And I suppose if when you step back and look at the bigger picture of wealth and the way that things work in the world, you look at the richest people in the world, they’re either directly or indirectly involved in property investment. There’s a big clue there. People always want a place to live. And that’s slightly different to a certain company that’s trading techno stocks or might be buying or selling oil.

1:20:13 Things are volatile there. And the good people get that really right in the trading. I want peace of mind that my assets going up in value on average on a daily basis. And that’s what property does. Has done since doomsday.

1:20:28 One of the thing about you that I thought fascinating is that you said you weren’t always the guy that had the systems in place and was the detail oriented. And a lot of people would throw up their hands and say, I have someone else do that. But you said, I do that now. I learned how to do that. So I suppose I’m a picture thinker on things because of my dyslexia.

1:20:46 I picture outcomes. And I put myself in that two years, five years ahead. And is the feeling right? And I’ve always been that way led. And the bit in between the systems and action planning, I haven’t in the past paid a lot of attention to wrongly.

1:21:00 And what I’ve learned is from certain people, and this was where interviewing people is important. You pick up tips. Systems are everything. And we’re a big fan of Google Sheets, for instance. Thank you, Google, for inventing that for us.

1:21:15 Because we can have all our databases on their templates, the simple part of it, and everybody can see it. And as something’s changed, we can all see it. I’m a big fan of CRM. We’ve got that now in our business. My daughter, who is really high up on the techie side of things, she runs on that.

1:21:34 But I input into it. And before, I wouldn’t have done all that. I helped to build it. On the rental side, we’ve got Microsoft Access as the base for all of the management on the lettings, because we couldn’t find a pro forma off-the-shelf software, which was good enough to do what we wanted. So we’ve built everything, you know?

1:21:53 And my guy that runs that, John Paul, he’s an XIT trainer. So again, he’s brilliant with us in the team and inputting how to get these things together. And I take an active part in that, even though my brain and psyche and energy isn’t naturally the type of person who would historically get involved. I now do, because now I understand it. And I understand the importance of it, you know?

1:22:14 Yeah, it’s that important that you’re willing to go and do something that’s not comfortable. Yeah, and by doing the uncomfortable, it’s become comfortable, you know? It’s like when I failed O-level maths. Yeah, I’m a multimillionaire. You know, I went back and sat the maths O-level and passed it with a B grade, you know, some years later, because I learnt it in a different way.

1:22:33 And when you practice and practice and practice the figures, even though you’re mad at them initially like I was, you know, it works. And when you’re excited about doing percentages on deals returns, you know, and just keep working at it, it becomes the normal. And that’s what I’ve done with the systems. You know, I’ve been persistent in teaching myself how to do it. You know, despite my psyche and my energy, we should say, no, I don’t want that.

1:22:56 You know, I want to be walking and mounting, you know what I mean? I’ve had to focus and do that for myself. And surprising how it becomes natural then after a while and how you actually start liking it, you know. And I love it now. I love systems.

1:23:09 I just, I love the philosophy of Ronald McDonald, you know, where he’s got a manual which tells people how to properly wash a lettuce leaf. There’s a right way to do that, you know. My friend Ron Mountsey, he’s got the biggest number of McDonald franchises in the world and through ownership and franchising. And he’s, you know, I love speaking to him about the way that the systemization works in that business. Because if you want to replicate or duplicate or expand yourself, the only way you’re going to do that is systemize what you’ve got.

1:23:40 Yeah, and it’s not sexy, but you know, there’s a great theory that says that, you know, income follows assets. And I think the systemization is the transferring of your IP into an asset. It really is. Because you have all this knowledge, you know how to wash the lettuce, right? You know the percentage is necessary for a rental income property.

1:23:59 If you put it into a hard-based system, you know, it’s not an asset. But once it is, your income will follow based on those systems. Yeah, for sure. And I’m living proof of that, you know. The profit, you mentioned a figure.

1:24:12 We’re actually worth quite a bit more than that today. Okay. But I’m not going to be facetious and say what it is. I think that was an old speech that you said 49. When RDF, a production company, investigated us for the secret millionaire program, which I didn’t want to do initially, wrongly, a figure of 29 million came out then.

1:24:30 And that was back in 2009. So the business has expanded hugely since then. And I think a lot of it is down to the systemization. Well, I know it is. It’s down to realizing, right, we’ve got this hub here now.

1:24:44 If we’re going to grow, we need to get the people to understand exactly how to do that part of business. And I’ve become more of a HR manager, I would say. They call me the head of happiness in my organization. Because I go around with people. I say, you’re happy.

1:24:59 And if they’re not happy, why not? It could be something in their private life. Boyfriend’s just dumpy or something. Fair enough. There’s not a lot I can do about that, is there really?

1:25:07 Just say, oh, it’s not worthy for you. Another one will come along. It will always be fine. Use that mantra. And that’s the kind of limit of the help I can do there.

1:25:15 But when it’s something within the business, if I can make it easier for them and systemize something so that it flows better, I mean, we’re always tweaking. And there’s something I’m looking at. So we hold performance review meetings every month with all the team. And we ask for input. And it’s something I’ve learned, again, from Richard.

1:25:33 Those answers are probably not all inside you. Some of them are with a team. And a team will bring back the ideas. You think, wow, that’s a great idea. Let’s get that in place and work together on that bit coming into the system.

1:25:43 You guys all happy with that yet? Because there’s a knock-on effect all through the various members of the team. Yeah. Very important part and one we don’t talk about that much. And again, it’s not the sexy stuff.

1:25:54 It’s not an easy mantra to say, except get your systems right. But the income does follow those assets. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people watching this, I’m sure, would be sky blue thinkers a bit like I am. And the thought of putting systems and manuals, ooh, it’s like alien to us, initially.

1:26:10 But I absolutely love it. And you hear Sir Richard say when he’s interviewed, you know, all the money just happens. He’s got that press answer which comes out. I can tell you the real answer is he watches the systems. He measures and monitors everything.

1:26:25 And I’ve learned from him, every Friday, like Richard, I look at the profit and loss accounts and I look at money at bank. And from that, then we’re looking at what systems are working better, what aren’t quite so well, and we make the management decisions, you know? Yeah. And every great entrepreneur looks at the numbers, too. Oh, you must.

1:26:40 You’re damn right. 100 million, is that about right where we’re at? I’m not going to say. Kevin, I just want to ask you a few questions about some of your own personal success secrets, maybe some daily habits you have in the routine. I know the naked in front of the mirror.

1:26:54 Yes, yes, yes. But is there anything that you’ve done over the years, whether it’s sleep or training or meditation or anything that seemed to give you that extra edge? Yeah. These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more.

1:27:21 Now back to the rest of the show. Last question, Kevin. I always ask everyone that comes here just a question at the end, and I think I know where your answer’s going to be, but I’m going to ask you anyways, if you could make a phone call, you know, to the 20-year-old Kevin Green, probably right around the time where, you know, you’re sleeping under the arches, you know, and probably talking to a lot of people who were down and out, but I’m guessing you saw a lot of light in them, too.

1:27:49 Yeah. And you probably learned a lot as a young man and about your own priorities, but if you could call him and just give him a bit of advice, like literally you could talk to him, what would you tell him? Listen to the voice inside you. It’s there, you know. All of us know it.

1:28:06 We know we can do it, or whatever it is we want in life, but quite often some of us want to be wanting, you know, so I always had it. I know it was there. I didn’t have an easy upbringing, and maybe that’s afforded me the opportunity of a bit of independence, if you like, in doing things for myself, but what I did do when I was younger was do things for everybody else, listen to everybody else, everybody, and do what they wanted. What I should have done was what I wanted to do for myself, and I think follow that path, because it’s a lot better, and if I could get the phone call back to him, I would say just do those things that you’re thinking about doing inside you, what you feel is right, because a 20-year-old doesn’t necessarily understand the life’s experience yet.

1:28:55 You’ve got to keep it really simple. Yeah, and by doing what you love and what you’re passionate about, it works out for everyone in the long run, including your parents that don’t think you should be doing that, and it comes out and it is shown in great businesses, great lives, great charities, great everything. I mean, the teachers don’t want you to do it, the parents don’t want you to do it. When I said I’m doing it, they were like, okay, you know, we love you and support you.

1:29:19 When you make that decision, they do come on board a certain amount, and then when you get the results, it’s like, wow, you know, how are you doing that? So the turning point for me was with my father. Four years after I started investing, he had an endowment policy payout. He put in £28,000 into this endowment over 10 years. It paid him 32,000.

1:29:39 He said, you’re probably thinking that you do. He said, what would be the return if we put the 28,000 in over 10 years? It came out to one and a quarter million. You know, and he’s like, why didn’t somebody tell me this before? From that point, he said, right, I’m going to get in the property game.

1:29:53 And he asked me how to do it. And I thought, wow, this is, you know, from somebody that didn’t like it in the beginning, didn’t like what I was doing, wanted me to continue dairy farming because it was safer, I could understand where he’s coming from, to now be out of dairy farming and got his own portfolio at 78 years of age, you know. My ex-wife full-time in property, but she didn’t like it in the beginning. Her new partner, full-time in property, my children, you know, this is how I systemize things.

1:30:18 They’re all born in February. That was a chance thing, by the way. I got a funny feeling, I’m going to be full-time in property soon after meeting you. But obviously, people see your passion and they see how much you love it and they see the success you’ve had and it’s obviously infectious in a way. I think, you know, you’re bound to be that way, aren’t you?

1:30:38 If you, you know, people look at the Olympics, they want to be an Olympic champion. You know, you get enthused by things you love. There’ll be some people watching this who love the feeling of property. They’re buying this stinky smelly house, fixing it up into this grand home, you know. I absolutely love it.

1:30:52 The day I stop loving that, which I don’t think is going to happen in this lifetime, I change and do something else. You’ve got to love what you do. You’ve got to be enthused by it, you know. And I can see the outcomes. I look at these houses and I can see what they’re going to look like, you know, and then I get nothing.

1:31:07 I don’t get involved at all with any other fix-up for project management. You know, my son now is a project manager on all the build teams, you know, at 19 years of age. And I wish, you know, what I’d have done that is now being done by my kids, you know, by their own choices, their own vision, their own feelings. They’re in that environment. You become your environment, don’t you?

1:31:27 You know, and that’s what I really wanted. I’ve never afforded them, you know, a lot of money from me. It’s just being encouragement, support, whatever they wanted to do. And I think that’s important. You must do that with yourself as well, whatever you want to do in life, you know.

1:31:42 Look after number one. Look after you because you’re the most important thing in your life. Yeah. Second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received. Could be business, could be personal, could be from Sir Richard.

1:31:52 What’s the one thing that sticks out in your mind? Never waste a second of your time. Is that from your sister? Yeah. Okay.

1:32:00 Very well said. Very well said. It’s very funny. We had a guest on recently. He’s a movement expert.

1:32:07 He’s a fascinating man from Israel named Edo Portal. And we had this great walk around London and we filmed it. It was our very first conversation walking the streets of London. And at the end, he said, Brian, today is a good day to die. And I said, what?

1:32:21 And he said, I think you should meditate on your death every day. And I wasn’t ready to hear that. And now the more that I think about it, I think you should. Because if you are meditating on your death today and there’s something you haven’t done in your life, to make you feel like you can die, then it’s time to go do it. I see the angle, yeah.

1:32:38 Which is a way of saying every second support. Yeah. And be careful what you wish for. Because what you truly wish for when you get to the heart and soul, that’s what the magic creates for you. Another good angle on that.

1:32:51 Last question, last part. To the 20-year-old that’s out there listening, if the internet had been along back then, you could have been under those arches listening to you, who’s listening to us out there and maybe they’ve had a fight with their father, maybe they don’t know what they want to do, can’t follow their passion. You know, what’s the one thing that you can tell them they can do to try to get back on track or find a way to listen to all the information that’s out there?

1:33:12 They have to use the internet. I mean, it’s fantastic. And certain things will resonate with you. YouTube is brilliant. You know, what you guys are checking out on YouTube.

1:33:20 When I was coming up through the ranks, I started listening to TED Talks, you know. And some of the inspirational stuff on there is amazing. Listening to it resonate with the bits that are really, the bits that you connect with, you know. When I read a book, for instance, it’s the same as when I listen to a talk. When I read a book, I use a yellow highlighter and I highlight probably a dozen things which have really hit home in that book, and I revisit them.

1:33:46 And that’s what sticks in my head. When somebody speaks, I write down the two or three points which have really hit home, which really resonate with me. And I’d say to the young people or the people here who want to achieve, get that information out from out there, bring it in, and form your list of key points The one thing to be careful of, because there’s always a good side and a bad side to everything, I’ve always taken my advice from people who are genuinely at the top.

1:34:12 I’ve never learnt or gone on a course and learnt from somebody who isn’t who they say they are. Check people out. Okay, check out. My USP in speaking is I’m business first, I’m speaking second, which is quite unusual in the environment of wealth training that I’m in. You’ve got to be careful who you learn from.

1:34:34 And in any walk of life, you’ve got people who walk the talk, mother trains, I learn from her, if that’s the sector you want to, you’ve got other people there, and Richard Branson, he walks it, you can see it. So I’ve targeted people who are really at the top of their game in the various sectors, and I’ve resonated with, and I’ve taken their information and I’ve formed a dossier of me, who is Kevin Green, and how am I going to use this in my own life. So I’ve taken that then and implemented that into the business.

1:35:04 I wanted to be a millionaire. I didn’t know it would be property that did that for me. You know, it was just a dream, a wish, a want, a challenge, a goal. And people asked me why. I couldn’t answer that at the beginning.

1:35:18 I didn’t know why. I just wanted to do it. You know, it was just a feeling. If you’ve got that, just do it. You know, whatever it might be.

1:35:24 And it’s not, you know, I went out looking for the answers in life. It’s much like it was a story told to me by Mike Tilly, the then head of Merrill Lynch Investment Group, on my study. And he said that this old man who was looking for the meaning of life, this old man, every day he was a recluse. He’d walk into these woods and he’d reflect on what these answers to the meaning of life could be. And then he couldn’t get the answers really.

1:35:51 And then 10 years of doing this, he walked into the wood, and at this time there was a clearing, which he’d never noticed before. And in the middle of that clearing, there was a hut with smoke coming out the chimney. It was obviously somebody had lit a fire in this hut. And as he walked towards the one door he could see in this little hut, this big booming voice came from the heavens and said, all the answers you ever wanted to all of those questions about life are inside that hut.

1:36:18 You just have to knock on the door, wait for their gesture, and go in. And he went to knock on the door, and he didn’t. And the moral to that story is a lot of people want to be wanting rather than actually doing. And when I heard that, it made sense to me. You’ve got to knock on that door of opportunity.

1:36:40 You’ve got to ask those questions. And you’ve got to form your own ingredients, if you like, of you. We’re all unique. You know, who you are and what it is you want from life. Once you’ve done that and you’ve got that positioned and you’re grounded, you’ll see the direction you want to go in.

1:36:56 But you’ve got to knock on the door. You’ve got to knock on that door and go through that door. Not just be looking at it. Not just go into courses and looking at stuff. A lot of people do that, especially in London.

1:37:07 I’ve noticed it. And you’re totally right. And while YouTube is a wonderful, wonderful resource, it’s also potentially a trap because you can just be entertained constantly by messages and inspiration and it’s entertainment. It’s not action. And you really do have to push through resistance and do something uncomfortable.

1:37:26 Well, I would be wary as well. Most of the people you listen to are into hype and they’re selling something. So look where that message is coming from as well. The marketing is a wonderful thing. But make sure you’re not being marketed.

1:37:40 Make sure that is something that you truly need and something that is going to be good for you because people are too quick to part with their cash on, you know, quantum realization, quantum physics. When perhaps they don’t need it, the answer is already there. Kevin, you’re a very different man than I expected. And thank you so much for coming here. You know, I’m very lucky in that I get to sit down and feel people’s energy in the studio.

1:38:08 And if you watch a lot of your things on YouTube and you look at your CV and you have your idea in your mind that it’s this guy, you know, it’s the wealthy guy with all the properties and the this and the hard nosed and he’s going to be like Dragon’s Den and da, da, da. You’re very much not like that. And I can see why you build cultures and your businesses of people that want to work for you. And I do believe you listen to them. And I believe people enjoy being around you and your kids love working with you.

1:38:34 And that’s got to be a huge ingredient into your success. And so it’s nice for my theories to be proven right, you know, that there’s more behind great business, you know, than just the numbers. I mean, I haven’t got everything right, but we’ve got most of it right. And I think the other bits are put right before too long. Well, I look forward to seeing some of your talks in person and seeing some of those wealth dances.

1:39:02 Is that what it’s called? Yes. Yeah, the wealth dance. This is actually on YouTube. There’s a few people have filmed that a different time.

1:39:08 Good. Somebody wants to laugh. They can have a look at that. That’s good. I want to see that because I think there is something to this physicality and to getting out there and really acting out those feelings.

1:39:19 But as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you all on yours. And thank you so much for your time. Thank you.