Driving the Clown Car (h/t @BrentBeshore) - Mistakes I made as a beginning Real Estate GP ('09-'12):

1. Creating no-fee structure. LP thought he was aligning incentives. Having no $$ coming in put me under insane financial pressure, leading to a bunch of sub-optimal decisions.

2. Not always using construction permits. Got talked into this by a GC. Resulted in a ton of unnecessary fights with the city, liability, and loss of sleep. Never again.

3. Paying cash for services. Again, talked into this by a GC. Created all kinds of headaches when it came to banking, taxes & accounting. Again, never again.

4. Not having air-tight accounting. We grew really fast, without strong accounting controls. Created a huge mess that cost an insane amount of money & time to untangle. Undermined our credibility with our single LP.

5. Sticking with one LP. Love the guy to this day, but it's dumb to base your whole biz on one LP... if he decides he wants out and you haven't developed the necessary fund-raising skills / network to replace him, you're screwed. We certainly were.

6. Getting in business with family. Love my brother, but we're too close in age and too competitive with each other to be in business together. Still remember a neighbor in our orig. office complex yelling at us to stop yelling at each other.

7. Not having a clear decision-making hierarchy. See above. The docs we created made us both Managers of the umbrella LLC, with equal power. This meant that disagreements festered, bc no one had final authority.

8. Picking a name without doing enough research. We were "Better Dwellings"... there was a well-established flipping co called "Better Shelter". Spent like 3 yrs telling people "no, we're the other 'better' guys."

9. Being slow to fire. We had pretty mediocre employees in two of three positions. I was afraid to fire them (for different reasons), and they chewed up enormous $$ without adding commensurate value. (Fortunately, the 3rd employee was spectacular - he's my partner at Adaptive.)

10. Giving LP liquidation right. Even w/ all of the above, if we had just refinanced our portfolio in 2012 & held on, we would have made a fortune over the next 5-6 yrs. Instead, we sold, made a decent pre-tax profit, and watched helplessly as the value of those assets exploded.