Make Your Own Kind of Music

Listening to this old tune by Mama Cass Elliot, I realize that songwriters and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. Read these lines that begin her tune–

Nobody can tell ya
There’s only one song worth singing

And then she sings this:

You’re gonna be nowhere
The loneliest kind of lonely
It may be rough going
Just to do your thing’s the hardest thing to do

Sound like the life of an entrepreneur? You bet.

I figure this out while creating a list of real estate projects for my Ninja Real Estate course that entrepreneurs can build for themselves and their families/partners/investors which perform above average, way above average.

To do that, they need to have:

-great business model

-lots of DV (differentiated value)

-MMB (magic marketing button) to (easily) connect with customers/clients

-not much in the way of competition, especially from low cost-of-capital competitors like banks, penfunds, insurance cos, REITs, publicly traded (monster-sized) firms

-reasonable access to finance

-scalability

-quality location

Why build? Why not just buy existing product? First of all, there are too many people and dollars chasing too few investment properties. 

Everyone is fed up with horrible returns in mutual funds, t-bills, GICs etc so they are turning to real estate. But most people are afraid of developing something new–too many unknowns like construction or zoning risk. So they all buy existing product, which pushes cap rates

down.

Secondly, a lot of existing product does not possess many of the qualities I listed above so, if you want higher cap rates, more differentiation and less competition/more sustainability, you have to “roll your own”.

Anyway, here is a complete version of Mama Cass’ lyrics–

Nobody can tell ya
There’s only one song worth singing
They may try and sell ya
Cause it hangs them up
To see someone like you

But you gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along

You’re gonna be nowhere
The loneliest kind of lonely
It may be rough going
Just to do your thing’s the hardest thing to do

But you’ve gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along

So if you cannot take my hand
And if you must be going, I will understand

You gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along

You gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind music
Even if nobody else sings along

Songwriters
Mann, Barry/Weil, Cynthia

Published by
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC