Interview with Diksesh Patel |Entrepreneurship is a Slow Money Business

Welcome to the Slow Money Podcast. Where we give you realistic ways of attaining financial freedom.

We share Get Rich Slow strategies to help you go from employee to entrepreneur and turn your dreams into income streams.

In this episode, we have a chat with Diksesh Patel, CEO of Lighthouse Capital. Someone who has followed the SlowMoney approach and gone from employee to entrepreneur.

As well as a successful career in investment banking,  Diksesh has been involved in property for more than 25 years and has built a large Buy-to-Let and HMO portfolio worth £3.4 million. He started building his portfolio in 1993 and expanded into HMOs in 2015.

He gave up his career and has since gone on to found Lighthouse Capital Group which focuses on sourcing and developing large-scale property projects for investors. Diksesh and his partners at Lighthouse Capital are experienced property developers with over 30 years of experience and over £300 million of projects behind them.

We discussed some of the core values of his business such as transparency, fairness and integrity, and the importance of developing lasting relationships, based on trust and mutual respect.

Key talking points included:

• What it was like growing up in North West London council estate and going in to study at London School of Economics despite  being told by his teacher that he “was never going to get in”
• Beginning his career as a programmer before taking his first steps on his entrepreneurial journey when he decided to take redundancy and start an e-commerce business
• Diksesh spent a lot of his evenings and weekends building his tech platform. His goal was to build an income which could supplement his income, and eventually replace it.
• He ended up loosing “well in excess of £500k” from his first endeavour. Some of the biggest learning is that “It’s okay to ask for help. Especially from subject matter experts because when you’re farting off you don’t know what you don’t know”
• Going back into the corporate world a second time but with a different perspective. “This brings challenges of being an employee with more experience than the people he was working for because of his entrepreneurial journey.”
• Diksesh spent 3 years establishing his business before moving back into the entrepreneurial world. This time with a lot more experience and understanding about what he wanted from a lifestyle business.

We also had an in-depth discussion on some of the reasons why property was a good enterprise for someone who was also working in full-time employment.

“Property has ring-fenced, outsourced, systemised contracts. I’ve got a very thin business and I love that. And as your business grows, you will have to grow your team around that”

Breaking it down into 3 main elements

1. Deal
2. Funding
3. Delivery

“Focus on one of the three! The more you partner the quicker you can transition from employee to entrepreneur. It’s a Slow Money business.” he insists.

Other talking points included  What’s a reasonable runway?  What does a typical day as a developer look like? How and what CRM does he use?

Additionally, he breaks down one of his current development deals and the strategies he used to get the deal.

For more information check out SlowMoneyClub.com.

You can keep up with what Diksesh is up to at Lighthouse Capital Group here