This week's Rainy Sunday is coming on Monday. I have to admit that since I have come back from my vacation, things are really busy. Setting priorities is difficult when you have a "full-time hustle", a "side-hustle" like this newsletter, basic human relationships, and investments you need to regularly look into. I am thinking about paying somebody to do the administrative tasks like contracts, email, scheduling, accounting, reporting, building presentations...
Full-time hustle: Continue in Project Management
So, I finished three projects at my current client which were all of substantial magnitude. This is why I thought that I would get myself three months of calmness in Q3 before jumping to the next big ones. The issue I underestimated: Very much is still, depending on my knowledge I acquired during the time of the project.
This means concretely that I am continuously buzzed in person or by phone with operational topics, questions for the right contacts, what about this, and that... It drives me crazy!
I took it as a lesson learned: IF you are a good knowledge worker, you will need to spread and delegate as soon as possible. Otherwise, you will never lose the topics you have been working on. And no, it does not have anything to do with the quality of your documentation; people do not read the documentation. Even if their lives depend on it.
You do? Well, then consider yourself a good knowledge worker. Otherwise, you will run into the trap described perfectly by Tiago Forte in this picture of productivity in a typical knowledge worker's day:
Back to the headline. I am planning on taking on at least two further projects at Airbus as they are too attractive to say no. In addition, I need liquidity because I will invest almost my whole liquidity into the new property.
Part-time investment: Real Estate
I had to take care of so many things within the last few weeks related to the new property because I tried to push a lot of topics into August and September to pave a better future for my family. I had meetings with our notary, attorney, and accountant, wrote contracts, founded a company, spoke to suppliers & distributors, negotiated the price of the property (1.000.000€), opened bank accounts, negotiated the loan with a few banks... While working full-time at my client.
The central challenge you have to tackle in order to get "wealthy" is summarized well by Scott Galloway:
"Rich is having passive income greater than your burn."
I would add that saving taxes is a big part of increasing income.
To be clear: I would never propose to avoid taxes illegally because I hold myself accountable to pay for the welfare state which I and my family might depend on if things go south. Furthermore, all my mum's family is working for the state.
But when I see how much more bureaucracy my father as an immigrant (who always paid his taxes) needs to comply to, I have no pain in using the legal opportunities to ease his obligations.
That is why I pushed for a construct in which we
- pushed most of the debt on my dad's account
- handed over the family business to his wife
- while I purchased the house with a firm partially owned by me and my dad
In a nutshell, we diversify the risk for 10 years until I will have much more credit than my father has right now and will get better conditions for the loan while we pull money out of the business to reinvest it into the property renovation.
Then I will take it over so he can live completely on the passive income from the rents we will be collecting. In reality, it is more complex and if you want to know details, let me know.
What we will do with our family business, is still open, but I am already on the search for somebody who will take it over in 5-10 years because I won't be able to do it as I have other plans.
Part-time investment: Our family business
The good news: We had the best month in July since December 2019. And to give you a reference to what that means in numbers: December is around 20% better than the average month.
The 20% increase is coming nowadays from the food delivery I initiated for my father during the first lockdown in Germany in March 2020. At first, we only sold our products over lieferando.de which is the German subsidiary of Just Eat Takeaway. In January 2021 we launched our own online delivery system.
Now, we are acquiring customers through Lieferando and then trying to convert them with a coupon to our platform. In addition, I started pushing Facebook and Google ads in the geographical area to attract new customers. The numbers speak for themselves:
- Around 80-84% of Lieferando revenue remains for us while
- approximately 93% of our own system's revenue stays in our pocket (incl. ads)
When I stopped doing ads from May-August, our revenue on Lieferando stayed the same while our revenue on our own platform plummeted by more than 50%! Super interesting what you can do with 200€ in ad spending per month.
The bad news: This costs a lot of time and focus. I need to keep the numbers in check and have regular discussions with my dad...
Part-time investment: This one right here
All of this was going on mostly in August. Quite a month...
Well, this is why I was not able to write last week. I have quite a few topics for the next ones because I would love to share the paradigms that come with them. The issue is that I would like to dive deep into the topic and not just leave a comment about the topics.
But to give you a foreshadowing:
- Why the media is so polarized and a model to analyze intentions
- A different approach to productivity by focusing on your mood
- Why we are at the crossroads of moving towards infantilization 2.0 or renaissance 2.0
- and why bureaucracy is the biggest enemy of our time and not climate change
Summary
As I started this week’s Rainy Sunday with the prioritization issue, I would like to end it with it. I have no issues with prioritizing because I just block time slots in my calendar. The problem is more on the execution side because I am very bad at saying "No" to spontaneous requests.
For example, I had a lot planned for Sunday and kept it completely clean from any interpersonal commitments. But I was out on Saturday with my bestie Pascal, and, well, one thing led to another and we drank two bottles of wine. And an aperitivo. And another one at the end.
So, I lied in bed almost all Sunday. F*cking up my commitments to myself and others. Sorry to Pierre and Francesca
Do you have any frameworks regarding prioritization? Do you use any tools? Let me know :)