My cheese moved… again
Today I’d like to tell you about a little book that if you have never read, you really should. It’s called “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson. It’s a tiny book that packs a huge amount of insight into how people should deal with change, and it’s in the form of a fable.
The story starts by identifying four characters who spend their time exploring a maze trying to find cheese. The first two are mice named Sniff and Scurry. The other two are “little people” named Hem and Haw. To begin with, they spend day after day running the maze and only finding small amounts of cheese. Until one day, they all find a huge store of it at cheese station C.
At this point the story focuses on Hem and Haw. They view that store of cheese as “their” cheese. They move their families to that location, set up their lifestyles around it and eventually begin to take its never-ending supply for granted. At this point they kind of get fat and happy which leads to complacency and finally an entitlement type mentality. Then suddenly, at least to them, the cheese was no more. When this happened Hem got upset, turned red faced and even yelled “Who moved my cheese?,” which is where the book gets its name.
Now Sniff and Scurry did not get upset when they arrived to find no cheese. Instead, they realized the situation and adapted quickly, running off into the maze to find new cheese almost immediately. Hem and Haw, on the other hand, kept showing up to the same place day after day waiting for “their” cheese to show back up. They did this for so long that they started becoming weak from not eating.
Eventually, Haw suggests they go looking in the maze like they used to so that they can find new cheese. Hem, still clinging to his old ways, will not budge. He wants his cheese back. He “worked hard” for it. He deserves it.
Out of both fear and loyalty, Haw stays for a while, getting weaker and weaker. Until finally he decides he has to leave his friend, face his fears about change and inadequacy and go search for new cheese.
As he goes along he learns to laugh at his mistakes, that most of his fears were unwarranted and that he is actually having a lot of fun out in the maze searching for new cheese. And finally, he finds a new cheese station with a larger supply than the original one. And when he gets there, he is greeted by his two friends Sniff and Scurry who had been there for a while.
The moral of this story is change happens. You have to anticipate change, look for it to happen and adapt quickly once it does. And never get complacent because the cheese keeps moving and you need to as well.
Now the first time I read this book, my cheese had just moved. Just prior to 2015, our cheese was found at the foreclosure auction. We worked Bartow and Gordon Counties. We would attend both foreclosure auctions where we would buy all of our projects. But then the hedge funds came in and drove us off the courthouse steps. That is when our cheese moved.
We then adapted and began working the pre-foreclosure. Here we bought a bunch of subject-to deals and were able to keep our pipeline working because we had a monthly stream of leads coming in. But then those dried up and the cheese moved again.
We started doing direct mail campaigns and other marketing to solicit sellers. This worked well for a few years. But we have not bought a house from a mail piece since 2022. Last year all of our houses were bought either by referral or through a relationship we had with a past seller.
We have continued to do the same marketing as in the past. But so far this year, we have not bought a single house that we didn’t have in the works from 2023. Our leads have dried up. So, in other words, our cheese moved… again!
So, I did what Sniff, Scurry and eventually Haw did. I took off into the maze this week and went door knocking the pre-foreclosures in Gordon County. And y’all, I had so much fun. I got to see subdivisions that had grown tremendously since the last time I was out there. I found houses I knew had been vacant for years that were still vacant. And I found shadow inventory like before.
As an investor, you need to take the lesson Haw learned. Change is going to happen, and you have to be ready to change with it instead of standing still and going broke. You need to be looking at different deal types, deal structures and strategies regularly. Even while things are going good with your current strategy, you need to go off to different parts of “the maze”, that is your market, and see where change is and if there is going to be an opportunity to shift there.
To be ready for that pivot, you need to get together with other investors regularly and talk to them about what is working for them. And you need to go to seminars like Bill Cook’s “What Box” in September to expand your deal structuring skill sets.
My cheese moved, and I’m out looking for new cheese in my maze. It takes work to find it, but it’s fun learning how to get there again. And that’s the point. I’ll leave you with the final words of the book to ponder and remember: “Move with the cheese and enjoy it!”
Joe and Ashley English buy houses and mobile homes in Northwest Georgia. For more information or to ask a question, go to www.cashflowwithjoe.com or call Joe at 678-986-6813.