I’ve been super lucky in that I’ve managed to spend a lot of time with people who are, in my world, top of their game.
These people are world-class thinkers, get world-class results, and have the results that I want in my world.
One of the side benefits of spending a lot of time with them is the opportunity to discern what qualities they have, how they organise information in their heads and how they plug the holes around content and ideas that they don’t have to be a balanced investor.
I’ve patched a lot of these ideas and thought processes together to create what I call the Freedom Warrior framework.
I’ve had some of our podcast listeners request a deeper look into the framework that we use in Freedom Warrior. So, I’ve decided to unpack the nine core areas that you should focus on if you want to successfully think like professionals.
When I’m creating content and IP inside the Freedom Warrior programme, I’m always looking to see how it fits into each of these nine boxes and how to make sure that there’s a level of emphasis on these accelerators.
The Parable of the Pipeline
Before getting into the accelerators, I want to give you some insight into the context for how I designed the wording and the thinking behind the framework.
The framework that we’ve designed is very much based on the metaphor of the parable of the pipeline.
The parable of the pipelines is a simple story of two guys who want to bring water from the nearby village. One guy carries buckets of water while the other develops a pipeline.
In the Freedom Warrior context, the story illustrates the importance of building a pipeline of passive income when it comes to creating financial freedom. But the story doesn’t necessarily tell us how we can go about doing that.
So, the framework is about understanding all of the projects and designing how and what we can consume to give us the desired outcomes.
The Ultimate Reason People Go Into Business
At the simplest level, I know that people are trying to achieve financial freedom, and business is often the vehicle we choose to help us get where we want to go.
So, ultimately, a big part of why people go into business is the desire to develop financial freedom and establish a concept of legacy.
In other words, how can they leverage their time, amplify resources and create wealth that continues to influence people for many years ahead rather than just creating a lump of capital that gets frittered away within a short space of time?
Three Primary Areas To Focus On to Step Up As a Professional Investor
I reference the concept of legacy because I want people to understand that, from my perspective, there are three primary projects or areas that you need to focus on if you’re going to step up into the world of a professional investor.
Primary Area 1: Building a Pipeline Blueprint
Your first project is building your pipeline blueprint.
Your pipeline blueprint needs to tell you how to:
- allocate resources;
- manage your personal finances;
- deploy capital and time investments in an organised and mindful way.
Primary Area 2: Develop Alternate Sources
In the second project, you need to focus on developing alternative sources.
So, what we want to do with our investments is build a high continuous flow of income. And, frankly, most investors don’t do a great job of that and usually take many decades to get where they want to go.
Here is where you need to be developing multiple ways and strategies of approaching your investments. You also need to understand the risks and returns across different asset classes.
Then you need to choose strategies and investments that are actually going to get you where you want to go, in the most direct manner and with the least amount of risk.
Primary Area 3: “Become the Captain”
In the third area, the focus shifts to becoming the captain.
Becoming the captain is about structuring your wealth so that it lasts and using that wealth to influence people and things you care about.
The Three Sub-core Strategies for All Primary Areas
Within each of these three “big picture” areas of focus, there are three sub-core strategies that you have to use to dive a bit deeper.
Pipeline Blueprint Sub-Core Categories
Primary Area 1 Sub-core 01: Unpack the Quantified Vision
So, under the first sub-core category of the pipeline blueprint, I want to go back to the discussion about the parable of the pipeline metaphor.
Imagine trying to use a garden hose to fill a dam. You know there’s a trickle, it’s slow, and if you’re not in a hurry, that might be completely tolerable. But, if you’re anything like me, you’re impatient and want to get to where you want to be a whole lot faster.
If you take time to step back and design a more substantial pipeline, it’ll fill the dam up more quickly. The dam will be filled faster, and you can get on with other projects.
You need to have a crystal clear understanding of your vision to form the foundation of your pipeline blueprint.
More often than not, people are guilty of saying they want to be wealthy at some point in the future, but they don’t express precisely what that means. If you don’t have a clear understanding of your target capital base and the rate of return that you want, it’s pretty hard to achieve financial freedom.
So, in the first sub-project, I encourage people to embrace unpacking their quantified vision which is a crisp and precise understanding of how much they want to have and at what point.
Primary Area 1 Sub-core 02: Installing Sustainable Strategy
The second piece of building your pipeline blueprint is what I call installing a sustainable strategy.
Now, installing a sustainable strategy is about looking at the investment opportunities that are available to you and categorically deciding whether something is a fit or not.
This way, you can be laser-focused on the investments that you will and won’t consider.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve worked with investors who have a portfolio full of investments properties that are completely misaligned with where they’re trying to go. It’s because they’ve been swept along by somebody else’s opinion.
And this goes back to why I’m such a massive advocate of leveraging expertise but never outsourcing the decision-making power around your investments.
You need to retain control; otherwise, you’ll end up diluting the impact of your outcomes.
So, installing a sustainable strategy is about being crystal clear regarding the strategies that are and aren’t a fit for you.
Primary Area 1 Sub-core 03: Implementing Elegant Executions
The third component of building your pipeline blueprint is implementing elegant executions.
If you don’t have the correct support structures in place, or you don’t move money in the right way and don’t dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s, then the execution of investment deals can become difficult.
So, here’s where you need to establish how you can spin all the plates and acquire and offload investments, as needed, in a frictionless way.
Many people end up not getting their ducks in a row, and then everything becomes frantic – it becomes a race to buy assets and investments.
There are so many aspects to elegant execution, but implementing an elegant execution plan is crucial.
Developing Alternate Strategies Sub-Core Categories
Primary Area 2 Sub-core 01: Find Alternative Opportunities
If I go back to my metaphor as the developer and owner of your pipeline, it’s so important to examine where you’re drawing water from.
Are you just going down to the local lake where everyone else is focused and trying to draw water from? The problem with that is, if that lake runs dry or if the quality of the water deteriorates, you’re stuck because you have no other sources to draw water from.
So, you can either wait patiently for a change of season or look for other opportunities that may be set in a completely different space.
The way I like to describe it is, perhaps if you just walked over the hill and up onto the new mountain range, you might find that there’s another huge lake up there or another river going past. And, if you take the time to understand all of your alternatives when it comes to investing, you can tap into those.
Not only does diversification mitigate risk, but it can also help you navigate changing conditions.
The space of alternative investment was a game-changer in my experience. It went from being difficult to acquire new assets to accumulating properties that gave epic cash flow super fast.
Primary Area 2 Sub-core 02: Install Mindful Diversification
The next sub-strategy under developing alternate sources is installing mindful diversification.
Installing mindful diversification isn’t just about geography. Mindful diversification is about looking at all facets of the investment that you carry:
- How liquid is it?
- Where is it geographically?
- How is the deal running?
- What is your commitment?
- How easy is it to turnover?
- What is the duration of your investment?
There are so many different ways of thinking about diversification. But it’s really about establishing your primary investment objectives and then marrying that with your reality.
For example, if you don’t earn as much money as you would like and you need to keep a reasonable buffer, then perhaps what you might need to do is lean into at least a small percentage of your portfolio into investments that can be liquidated quickly and which may also give you cash flow.
Once you’ve established how to marry your capital with the opportunities available, then you need to be clear about how you’re going to structure so that you don’t get locked into a whole bunch of investments where there’s enormous pain around entry and exit.
The more diversified you are, particularly when it comes to economic turbulence, the higher your level of immunity is.
Primary Area 2 Sub-core 03: Developing Protected Navigation
The final sub-project inside of developing alternate sources focuses on developing protected navigation.
If you’re investing in areas of the economy or markets that you’re not so familiar with, or maybe they’re not as mainstream, then you need to develop really good ways of making sure you can distinguish between a good deal and a bad deal.
Unfortunately, there are many people, publications and other media sources that have a vested interest in what they want you to invest in, so you need to build up a healthy level of scepticism when it comes to surrounding influences.
Developing protected navigation is about finding the right people to support and advise your journey and developing your own rules for investing.
It truly breaks my heart when I meet business owners who have worked incredibly hard to establish great businesses but have ended up being led down investment paths that were clearly a mismatch for them.
And because they didn’t have their own set of rules to help them determine whether the investments were a good fit or not, they’ve ended up carrying underperforming assets that have slowed them down.
The Value of “Being the Captain”
Before delving into the three subcategories of the third focus area, I want to share more about the value of being the captain of your investments.
As I said earlier, becoming the captain is all about using the wealth you’ve created to influence others.
And wealth is only one part of the legacy equation. How you leave behind is not nearly as important as the knowledge and the wisdom that you pass onto future generations – especially if you want them to understand how to keep your pipeline flowing.
Here’s where I often like to tell the story of the two brothers. One brother created massive wealth, and the other decided to become a school teacher.
But the school teacher brother, who had a more modest existence, did a much better job of teaching stewardship and investing to his children. So, his kids went on to achieve great things in their lives.
The children of the wealthy brother ended up spending the money, and it was gone within a decade.
So, this concept of becoming a captain is not just about how much wealth you leave behind but also about how you use your role as a captain to help people understand what it’s going to take to keep the pipeline going.
To succeed in becoming the captain, you need to elevate your thinking. So, from the viewpoint of the parable of the pipeline, this component of your journey is about examining ways to improve the strength and capacity of your pipeline.
The best way is to surround yourself with experts who can support your ongoing flow because they understand how to find the weaknesses in your pipeline structure and advise on how to better structure it for endurance.
Primary Area 3 Sub-core 01: Leverage an Elite Network
So, the first of the three subcategories under becoming a captain is about leveraging an elite network.
I say this repeatedly: it isn’t what you know; it’s absolutely about who you know.
I only started to 10X my results when I stopped chasing deals myself and started to leverage people who:
- had the results I wanted;
- could show me insights; and
- Could connect me to opportunities that I wasn’t going to be able to find by myself.
It’s probably the single thing that has had the most significant impact on my results over the last 12 years.
So, leveraging your elite network is about going out there and finding the people who have the results that you want, and then using their wisdom, their experience and their networks to help you speed up and amplify the results that you’re getting.
Some of the best mentors I have had over the last 25 years have been unassuming investors who don’t want anything from you. They’re people who genuinely have the experience and access to finding a more efficient and powerful way to get the goals that you want.
So, leveraging an elite network isn’t always about finding people who you pay as advisors.
Primary Area 3 Sub-core 02: Elevate Your Money Wisdom
The second project you need to undertake when becoming a captain is elevating your money wisdom.
If people gave more attention to the art of stewardship, I genuinely feel that it could have a massive impact on their overall investing results.
I meet super successful business people all the time who have killer incomes, but they have a terrible relationship with money, either because they’ve experienced some loss in the past and they haven’t digested that properly or they haven’t understood how to regain their footing so that they don’t end up making the same mistake again.
Elevating money wisdom is about building a great relationship with money and stacking your odds for success – and there are so many ways that you can stack the odds in your favour as an investor.
Primary Area 3 Sub-core 03: Build a Robust Rudder
The final piece that sits within sight of becoming a captain is what I call building a robust rudder.
This final stage is about delving deep into the legacy concept. It’s about establishing what tools you have and what methods you can utilise to stack the odds in your favour and ensure that your wealth isn’t lost.
There are too many people who spend their lives building a huge capital base, and then they just pass it on and hope for the best.
And it’s not that they don’t care to leave a legacy behind. It’s more that they don’t know what opportunities are available to them that they can use to structure their wealth in a way that allows their recipients to continue growing that wealth.
Imagine a dollar that you invest today still working to change the world for the better and having a more significant impact than just being spent by the recipient after you’re not around anymore.
This final piece of the framework is probably the most complex. It usually only becomes evident to investors when they realise that the income coming off their investment is way more than they need to maintain their lifestyle.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it – Freedom Warrior’s nine accelerators to financial freedom:
- build your pipeline blueprint: unpack the quantified vision, install a sustainable strategy and implement elegant executions;
- develop alternative sources: find alternative opportunities; install mindful diversification and develop protected navigation; and
- become the captain: leverage an elite network, elevate your money wisdom and build a robust rudder.
Now you need to ask yourself how great you are at each of those pieces:
- Are you green?
- Are you amber? In other words, you’ve done some work, but there are opportunities to go deeper.
- Or are you red? Is it an area of opportunity for you to learn more?
Start with unpacking your quantified vision because it’s the cornerstone for building out the rest of your plan.
So, if you’re interested in understanding your freedom formula and unpacking that quantified vision, I would encourage you to get in touch with me because I’m more than happy to help people genuinely looking for a better pathway to developing financial freedom.
And if you’re interested in understanding how to create wealth through alternative strategies, please check out my programs, where I help you catapult your investment income and blend strategies to shave decades off your timeline to financial freedom.
