On today’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, Darren speaks to Vincent Hovorka, an entrepreneur with an inspiring story. The pair met at a Professional Speaking Association (PSA) event, where Darren first learnt about Vincent’s success in the property industry.
Below, we’ll find out how Vincent manages to turn over such a huge profit, while owning only minimal properties himself.
Darren: So, we met at a Professional Speakers’ Association meeting, didn’t we?
Vincent: That’s right, we did.
Darren: And what made you want to speak professionally?
Vincent: That’s a good question. I’m coaching people in property mindset and business startups at the moment, which I’ve been doing for two and a half years now. I love to do it, but I would like to be able to impact more people. I want to learn how to become a better speaker, so I can have a better influence.
Darren: You said you were building up to do presentations from the stage – have you done that yet?
Vincent: Yes, I have some experience now with speaking on stage. Just recently with the PSA I did my first showcase, and had some pretty good feedback – it’s always good to hear another speaker give you advice, so you can learn and progress.
Darren: For people listening who don’t know what the PSA is, and what a showcase is, can you explain what that means?
Vincent: Yeah, so basically the PSA is the Professional Speaking Association, and it helps people who want to become good public speakers. It can be beneficial to anyone – for example, if you’re a manager and need to lead a team, it helps to have good speaking and presenting skills. A showcase is like a 10-minute presentation, which is great because after they will give you feedback on what to improve on afterwards. It’s really useful, because outside the PSA, I don’t know many speakers.
Darren: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, if you do a speech among family and friends, they’re typically going to be biased and say “wow, that was amazing, you were brilliant!”, but when you’re doing it in front of other professional speakers, they’re actually going to give you feedback you can benefit from.
Vincent: Definitely. I’m not very well known in this circle at the moment, so I feel like if I go to other public speaking events and stand on more stages, I’ll have more of a chance to grow my audience.
Darren: Well, you say you’re not well known in this sphere, but you are quite successful in property, I think it’s fair to say. Can you explain a bit more about your property journey, and what is it that you want people to come along and listen to?
Vincent: I’d wanted to do property for a very long time – since I was 19, and read a book by Robert Kosowski. I then moved over to the UK, but had to learn the language first. I had limiting beliefs at the time – I thought I needed money to start investing in property, because property is so expensive. So, I didn’t start for a very long time. I started doing different businesses – I had a food truck, and then a café, but all this collapsed because I didn’t know how to run a business. The only thing I knew was how to cook, but I didn’t know anything else about business, so I failed, and lost a lot of money. But I learned from those things, and after one day I said, “enough is enough”. I was listening to Tony Robbins on YouTube actually, and I said to myself, “I’m starting this property journey”.
Vincent started his property journey with limiting beliefs, and little funding
In January 2020, I started with my business partner, and together we managed to raise finance from going to different people and asking for a bit of financial help. I have to say now we have two successful businesses in property – one is our service accommodation management company, where we manage other people’s Airbnbs, which brings in a great cash flow. The other is a property sourcing business, so we help to find property deals for our investors. This one is really good as well. In two years, we’ve sold for over £100,000 in fees. Property sourcing isn’t even my main focus – I just do it on the side. So, I’ve decided to coach people on these strategies, so they can learn to do it too. I want to help them with their mindset, because it’s not about money or time – if you want to do it, there is always a way. People get stuck in their job, and they are afraid to take a step forward because they feel like they’ll make a mistake and fail. I’m here to help them with their limiting beliefs, and to accomplish whatever they want.
Darren: That’s brilliant – so you’ve got two separate property businesses, and even the part-time venture has managed to generate 100 grand in the last two years. You said your main focus is the service accommodation – so, how many properties did you say you manage?
Vincent: We manage 50.
Darren: So, you’re sourcing deals, you’re sourcing properties, and you’re managing 50 units, but you don’t own any of them?
Vincent: We do own some now, but not many. I never needed to use any of my own money when I started, because I never had any. Every deal we’ve ever done in property was either through raised finance, or with people who have money, but were afraid to do it themselves. So, it’s like a joint venture – I have the knowledge, I know how to find the deals, and they have the money. I pay people interest rates that are better than a bank, so they’re happy to invest with me.
Darren: So, let’s take a step back to what you said at the beginning. When you first started, you knew how to cook, but you didn’t know how to run a business, and you said you ended up losing a lot of money – what happened, where do you think went wrong?
Vincent: I just didn’t know how business worked. I didn’t know that I needed to market myself, which is such a big part of it. I wasn’t able to get my food track on festivals like other people could, because I was really focused on my food. I was cooking food from my country, Czech Republic – people really liked it when they tried it, but it was very difficult to get customers in the first place. I was living up in Scotland, and there just wasn’t a market for it. I was on the wrong path – other people were becoming successful because they were giving people what they wanted, and making business, whereas I was just making the food that I liked to eat. I was also very well prepared and could serve people quickly, meaning there was never a queue at my food truck. I think not having a queue puts people off, because it makes it look like no-one wants to eat your food!
Darren: It’s the same thing when you’re running events. If you organise events and have lots of videos and photographs showing big crowds, more people are going to want to come, because there’s that curiosity there. So, what made you decide that the food truck wasn’t for you, and that you needed to try something else?
Vincent: I had a unit in Glasgow that sold street food, and it was doing really well. I had three members of staff, and I was turning over a good profit. I also had a unit in the Highlands for a season, which was going well too. Basically, my accountant told me that I needed to register for VAT because I’d crossed the threshold of allowance. I needed to increase my price to 20% if I still wanted to keep the same income, but the owners of the warehouse where I had my unit told me that I can’t, because it’s going to be too expensive for street food, and people won’t buy it. So, I started to go into the minus, whereas before I’d been making a decent profit. After that I tried running a café, but Covid hit and shut us down, so I lost money again.
Darren: I see that VAT problem with a lot of businesses. They teeter on the threshold, and as soon as they go over that line, it debilitates them, because they have to increase the prices, which loses them customers.
Vincent: Yes, that’s right. I’d wanted to build a property portfolio for a long time, and I’d read a lot of books about it. I had so much knowledge already, so I just needed to start applying it. Tony Robbins, who I was listening to a lot at the time, says “it’s never a lack of resources, it’s a lack of resourcefulness”.
We found the first house for £22,000 through auction. We won it, and then had 28 days to come up with the money. It was the hardest month of my life! We managed to come up with the funds by going through friends, family and other people who were willing to help out. It was a great experience, and we learned a lot.
Darren: So, you made a small profit from this one, and then and I take it you immediately went in and did another one?
Vincent: Yeah, we went right away to find two other houses that were like, houses you can buy for a pound. It’s like a lease option agreement, and they both needed a lot of refurbishments. We raised the finance and just rented them out, so we had three houses at this stage. We manged to get a cash flow that was good, but kind of slow.
Darren: What was the catalyst for helping you to ramp it up?
Vincent: I think I just I have to say a big thank you to my coach. I hired a coach for myself, and I was basically applying things more and working on myself. She wasn’t a property coach, she was a coach from Tony Robin’s team, and she helped me to understand a bit more about self-development. In the year following me hiring her, we got from taking in £1,000 a month to £4,000 a month. We were taking different approaches, different actions, and it really help us to move to the next level.
Vincent went on to achieve huge success through self-development, drive and determination
Darren: Investing in coaches is a big step – not everybody’s willing to make that move, because most people in business think they know it all anyway! What made you decide to invest in that coach?
Vincent: I was doing the property business for one year with my business partner without any help. I’d never really done any training; I’d just read a lot of books. I’d been a big fan of Tony Robbins, and done some online courses with the team. I wanted to scale the business up, but I didn’t feel like I needed any more property knowledge – I felt like I needed to be working on myself with certain things, like taking action, communication skills, and things like that. So, I hired her. I didn’t have the money for that either, so I had to pay in three or four instalments. It really helped me to get to the next level with my business partner, and we realised every time we invested money into education, we went to the next level.
Darren: Well, that’s the key isn’t it. The more you invest in yourself, the better you become. It’s having that accountability, too – having that person who is going to, quite frankly, kick your *ss. So, where are you now – you’ve got 50 properties being managed under the service accommodation business. How many of these do you own yourself?
Vincent: We do have three properties with the service accommodations that are ours, but the rest are sourced and passed to investors; we just manage them on their behalf. I have a lot of investors from my own country in Czech Republic – I actually have a waiting list of people. They pay me up front, and once we have a deal, we just sell it to them, and manage it for them.
Darren: Having a waiting list of investors is a lovely position to be in. So lastly, let’s talk figures – how much are these properties generating in terms of revenue on a monthly basis?
Vincent: It’s around £20,000 a month. With our 50 apartments, we take over a million a year in our account – I think at one point, we had about three million. But of course, we have to pay the money to our investors, and we just keep the management fee, which is around 18%. From this we have staff costs, so we need to pay the people working for us, too.
Darren: There’s going to be people listening to this thinking, “hang on, that that doesn’t make sense”, because you only actually own three properties. I think people need to understand you don’t need to invest in a buy-to-let, or buy a property with a mortgage the conventional way, because it’s a slow process.
Vincent: Yes, and it depends what people want. Some people do it over long periods of time on the side, because they want to create a pension pot, and they know that property is a good investment because it grows on value. So, for them, it’s fine that it takes time. But if somebody wants to create a business, and wants to grow at a faster rate, this approach is very slow. I’ve seen thousands of properties in the last four years, because I’ve been on so many viewings, so it depends on what you’re after. A lot of my clients want financial freedom, so it’s different for everybody. I can help clients grow from £2,000 to £5,000 a month by putting strategies in place and helping them learn how to raise finance. Like I said, you don’t need to have money to invest.
Darren: Well, no – you’ve got 47 properties you don’t even own, and you’re generated over a million pound in the last year! So, if somebody wants to get in touch with you about how they can do what you do, how can they get in touch with you?
Vincent: The easiest way would be my website, or you can find me on any social media platform. We actually have a new app developed and I’m giving away a lot of free things, like courses. People can buy my book, too.
Darren: Thank you very much for recording this podcast, I love speaking to people who’ve made a massive success in property – particularly when they’ve not even spent their own money doing it! You are an inspiration, so thank you, and hopefully we’ll meet again at the next Professional Speakers Association meeting.
Vincent: Yes, maybe we’ll see each other! Thank you.
About Vincent:
Vincent is a motivational speaker and entrepreneur who has achieved an enormous amount of success in the property industry, proving you don’t need to have money to invest.
You can learn more about Vincent by visiting his website or social media pages, below:
Website: https://vincenthovorka.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoNrguHhQwHcQLuAUdkM76A
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-hovorka-474694231/?originalSubdomain=uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vincentcoachuk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxe7lZeRgUz/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@vincent.hovorka
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
