Naomi Findlay, Australia’s Rapid Renovation Expert, shares the 21 common mistakes renovators make and her personal advice on how to avoid them.
Renovating can be so exciting! If anything, sometimes it can be quite exotic. Doing things with your hands, therapeutically changing, creating, and moulding can be something people absolutely love getting involved in. If you’re changing careers or dabbling in something different, it could be a really wonderful experience to be involved in hands-on elements of the renovation.
I’m by no means saying that you shouldn’t do that at some stage. It’s a wonderful experience. But I do remember a time when I was working on a fibro shack property. On that property, I was the labourer, cleaning person, project manager. I sourced all of the products and stocks, designer…and you know what? I was recalling the other day, I remember walking along in a pair of boots and shorts in the pouring rain. Holding sods of grass and rolling them out like it was a lawn bowl. You know what happened when that was the case?
On that project, I missed so many deals whilst I was working. I was so intent on getting the project done. I was so involved that I was absolutely have blinkers on. What that meant is in the 3 months that I did that project, I noticed that when I finished, so many deals had passed me by, so many agents had gone into my patch, and so much data I had stopped collecting. Because I was so intensely involved in the project. It was a great learning curve, because it was something that I haven’t done since.
In fact, one of my clients personified my role in the project nowadays by buying me a tool belt. He bought me a custom-made tool belt. It doesn’t fit hammers, I can’t hang a drill of it, and I certainly have no place for a saw in it. However, it does have space for a pen, a tape measure, a mobile phone, a notebook, and my set of keys—so I don’t constantly ask all my trades where I left them. You know what? That’s all I need to be effective on a construction site nowadays. As a professional renovator, you need to know who to call, not what to do. All the time.
Just remember that if you’re too involved in a project, if you’re doing too much of it yourself, you’ll start to miss essential elements that you need to keep going to make sure that your renovating business continues to grow and thrive.
So remember, you don’t need to know how to do everything. You just need to know who to call to do it.
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