12 Apr Rebuilding after divorce – Rob Flux
Rob Flux has built his property portfolio two times over after a divorce left him starting again in his late 30s. Rob joins us for this week’s success story and we learn that since that set back, he’s since transformed his wealth with a clear combined cash flow and development strategy, allowing him to retire financially free. Hear Rob’s story.
Transcript:
Kevin: Earlier this week, I released a video that I did with Rob Flux. Rob is featured in the current edition of Your Investment Property magazine as a success story. I want to take a different tack from the video. Go and have a look at that because we talk a lot about Rob’s strategy, how he’s built that over time. But I want to talk in this interview about mindset.
Rob, firstly, welcome to the show and thanks again for your time.
Rob: No problems, Kevin. Thank you.
Kevin: I want to talk to you about the difficulty of restarting. And just a bit of a backstory here, you’ve built a very healthy portfolio, which has now allowed you to retire, but you’ve done it twice because of a divorce. Now, we don’t want to focus too much on that, but I’m interested to hear from you what happened after that, the fact that you pretty much had to rebuilt it all.
How did you go about it? What was the inspiration, Rob?
Rob: The inspiration was… I guess, first of all it took me 20 years to build it the first time around, so the inspiration was to try to find a way that didn’t take me 20 years again. But the inspiration came from reading a book from Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, which really gave me the impetus to try and turn this into a business rather than a part-time hobby, which it was previously.
Kevin: How important was mindset? Is that what you discovered out of that book?
Rob: Yes, absolutely. I would say that 20% of it is skill, 30% of it is effort, and 50% of it is mindset.
Kevin: Yes, makes it pretty important, doesn’t it?
How were you financially at that time? Did you have the capital to get going, or did you have to re-invent how to do it without any money?
Rob: I won’t say that I was completely broke, but I certainly didn’t have the wealth that I started with. I did originally own my first house outright at the age of 24, and at the age of 38, I no longer owned my house. So, I was starting from a fairly low base.
The challenging part is there are always three problems you need to solve with finances. One is equity in order to come up with the deposit to purchase a property. Two is serviceability in order to service the debt. And three is cashflow in order to run the deal. So, you need a combination of all three to get across the line.
What I found is that with the right mindset, I could be very creative in how I did the deal so that I didn’t necessarily have to be the one who provided all three of those elements, and that I could work with the vendor or third-party joint venture partners to come up with the missing elements of that, and that I didn’t have to solve the problem all by myself.
Kevin: A lot of learning inside that, and it’s been a great journey. Now, you’ve offered people the opportunity to learn from your experience, so you’ve developed your own network group, which we did mention in that video. But I want to mention it again because I think it’s a great way for people to learn from, I guess, the mistakes of others, but also the successes of others.
Tell me about that network group and why you stated it.
Rob: We’ve been running it for a little bit over six years. It started out as a bunch of mates sitting around a kitchen table all trying to help each other across the line with their own projects, very much in a “pay it forward” type capacity where we were helping each other first knowing that if we helped the other person, they’d be able to help us when we needed it.
That outgrew our kitchen into the lounge, and then outgrew that and went public in about June of 2012. We have close to 750 people in that network group now, and we get between 60 and 75 people to every meeting that we run once a month as a meetup group called Property Developer Network.
Kevin: Okay, and that’s how you can find it if you want to get along to that. It’s a Brisbane-based group called Property Developer Network. If you Google that, you’re going to find two websites. The other one I want to talk to you about as well as the network group is the two-day event that you’re running in May. That’s focused on mindset.
Does that have a lot to do with the journey we’ve talked about in this chat?
Rob: Yes, absolutely. I’m going to reveal a little bit of my soul in that. It’s on the 5th and 6th of May. It’s called the Psychology of Property Development. It’s really trying to get people in touch with some of the challenges that they’re going to face with that mindset challenge. There are always going to be obstacles on the way, but it’s really about whether you treat those obstacles as something that is in the way or something that’s on the way to your success.
Kevin: Very good. So those dates again: did you say it was the 5th and 6th?
Rob: 5th and 6th of May.
Kevin: And that’s being held in Brisbane?
Rob: It is being held in Brisbane. It is open to everyone. I have people coming from Melbourne and Sydney to that event. We also run other events as well, but that really I think is the crux of what people need in order to kickstart their journey.
Kevin: Okay. Go google it; it’s Property Developer Network. You’ll find those two websites there for the network group and also for that two-day event that’s coming up in May.
My guest has been Rob Flux. Rob, thank you again, and congratulations on that story in Your Investment Property magazine. And I really appreciate you giving me a double-up here. We did the video, which we released earlier in the week, and it’s on the website right now of course in the Your Investment Property channel, and this interview too.
Rob, thanks very much for your time.
Rob: No problem. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, listeners.
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