Thank You Mr. Pilot

If you’ve ever taken a flight anywhere you’ve probably been more than content to sit back, watch a movie, read a book or even sleep while the pilot dealt with the business of flying the aircraft.

Maybe you’ve had some nervous moments and you’re not entirely sure how or what keeps this incredibly heavy piece of metal up in the air and prevents it crashing down to the ground. Or if you’re like me, you just sit down, buckle up and leave the flying to the professionals.

Wherever you fit, the important thing to remember is those pilots you’re flying with are professionals.

They’ve logged countless hours of flight time, simulator time and classroom time to hone their skills and they have dozens of checklists with myriads of steps that they go through to ensure their flight and your safety are a top priority.

Now I’m not sure how many steps are in a checklist for a big passenger jet, but I did go online to search for a simple checklist for a smaller Cessna and found it had almost 100 steps in the checklist before the pilot was off the ground. It doesn’t have quite as many dials, knobs, levers and controls as you see in the picture above…

If there are any pilots out there reading this (and I believe we have one out there!), how many steps were there for your plane before you took off?

But What About The Flight Plan?

Again, I’m not a pilot, but I know a pilot’s job typically doesn’t end with just a beginning checklist. there’s flight plans to file, constant adjustments to make during the flight and even more checklists to prepare before descending.

Now many of these pilots have completed hundreds if not thousands of flights, but they consistently need to check these checklists, make sure their flight plan is accurate and they constantly make adjustments as they go. All so they can get whee they are going safely.

Are you starting to see a parallel yet with being a landlord?

Are All Systems Go?

Obviously taking the lives of a couple hundred people into a pilots hands by flying them across the country can’t compare to you renting out a single property. But owning an investment property and making mistakes along the way can take the life of your financial future away, and that can have a huge affect on you and your entire family!

The worst part, many of those mistakes are avoidable. Which is where checklists come into play.

There can be so many moving parts when it comes to purchasing and owning a rental property that we tend to forget bits and pieces along the way.

When it comes to buying an investment property, many folks only do it once, or once every several years. When it comes to finding tenants again it may only occur once every several years.  This leaves plenty of time for you to forget the steps along the way.

That’s why following the model of airplane pilots and creating your own checklists for various processes in your landlord business can help streamline recurring events and help you avoid costly mistakes.

And it doesn’t end with a checklist, you still also need your flight plan. After all, if you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you’re off course? Part of your system as an educated landlord is to not just take advantage of checklists to make your systems well, systematic, but to also have a longer term plan of where you are going.

Understanding you have a ten year plan, a twenty five year plan or simply a plan to never end being a landlord makes you stay on course, makes those hiccups or diversions along the way become a little less taxing. I’ve previously referred to making sure you have a plan (You Need Your Own Real Estate Plan and What’s Your Real Estate Plan?), so if you missed those articles, be sure to check them out for reference.

My Flight Plan AKA My Checklists

2015 is going to be a big year for me. It’s the year I am hoping to spend more time focusing on getting some more educational courses and packages put together on this site to help those of you without processes and checklists in place.

Whether you’re new, experienced or somewhere in the middle I’m hoping everyone will find as much value in them as they did in my Tenant Screening Course.

This course is one of my most popular paid courses as it’s full of helpful information, processes and checklists to point a landlord in the rigth direction.

So the lesson to take away from this right now is, if you don’t have a checklist already don’t wait.

While I may have something down the road, the next time you purchase a property, break down the steps. From must have conditions in your offers to specifications of properties you buy a checklist can keep you on track.

The same goes with your next tenant screening. If you’ve taken my course, you should already have some screening steps to follow, turn that into a checklist you can use and keep, rather than try to remember again in another 12-24 months.

Make sure all your systems are GO!!

And hey if you already use checklists, can you take a moment and share with everyone how they’ve worked for you?