Like the proverbial frog in a bucket

There I was, in a small, semi-dark basement room near Old Street, London, at 10 o’clock in the morning in early September. A shadowy figure behind a glass wall was giving me the thumbs up. I was sitting behind a table and facing a movie-style camera on a tripod.

To be honest, it was all a bit shocking. I was there to record an hour-long training video for a legal training organisation. It was about buying property SPVs. I had volunteered for it a couple of months before, and it seemed like a great idea at the time. It didn’t feel like such a great idea now.

I had written the slides (about 15) – which were based on a guide we had published on our website a while back. So the content wasn’t a problem. I just wasn’t expecting to be plonked in front of the rolling camera and told to get on with it. “Just tell me when you’re finished.” (Actually, in retrospect, the guy behind the glass was perfect for the job. He had an unusually laid-back way of talking, which made everything seem very natural and normal.)

I’d like to say the moral of the story was to prepare better. I hadn’t really given much thought in advance to how it would actually work. I certainly hadn’t prepared to talk continuously for an hour, flipping through my own slides in Powerpoint. But really, it turned out surprisingly better than expected despite my initial mild panic when that camera started to roll, and, you know what, I would do it again. The most important part of the story was actually back in June, sending an email to the training company to offer the course. A very short email which took a couple of minutes to write – and which set off a chain of events which led to me sitting there, like the proverbial frog in a bucket of boiling water. Except that the end result – a recorded video available for ongoing download as a webinar – was something extremely valuable to us as a business, and something I am now very grateful for.

So here’s a question for you: what end result could be very valuable to you (even if you don’t yet know how to do it), and what simple action can you take that could kick that off?

Here are some free materials that could help kick off a project that could make a difference for you – with planning being the key to reducing any later ‘pain’:

• Due diligence log and questionnaire for a corporate simplification project / removing dormant companies
• Project planning form for a group reorganisation
• Guide to creating a self-managed property investment syndicate
• Checklist and heads of terms for a property development JV