I toyed with the idea of moving to Omaha for a few months and then I decided against it.  Sioux City is only an hour and a half drive, which means I could go down there any day that I wanted to. Besides all my other units were in Sioux City, so I felt my business needed me to be there. 

The biggest mistake I made was I did not keep an eye on my business.  I left Jen and Stu to run the show, and I did not even bother to check up on them.  No wonder they took the money and the computer. They had no other choice but to run.  If I did not care enough about my business in Omaha, why would they? Leaving them with no guidance, they created their own rules.  Rules that I had to suddenly follow, because I was not the one that created them.

So my solution to this problem at the beginning, especially after Jen and Stu mentioned that they would be moving the offices to the manager house I had bought especially for them to live in, was to let both of them go and find someone else to take over the management in Omaha.  Until I find someone, I thought, I could at least manage the properties myself.

Going internally into my organization now, I scrutinized all the books, looked at the way they screened the tenants, and the way the leases were structured.  I was not a happy camper when I found out they kept the application fees instead of using them to get updated police reports on all the prospective tenants. As a matter of fact the expletives I used during this process, now have a special meaning in my heart.

By not knowing what kind of criminals Jen had placed in my buildings, my most important investment, I had to swallow another bitter pill. I swallowed it with grace, and moved on to the next step: talking to the tenants. I needed to decipher what exactly had happened, and I still needed to collect rent from at least four of them.

If I had kept an eye on my business from the beginning, trained Stu and Jen a little bit better on property management, and had taken a leadership role with the properties, instead of making them be completely in charge, things would have ever ended up the way they did.  They started running the business as if it was their own business, not mine, which is the worse mistake anyone can ever make when in business on their own.

Keeping a watchful  eye on my business became my number one priority in every area of my life. I became untrusting.  I became paranoid.  I became despondent. I blamed the economy, my bankers and this stupid financial crisis that we as a society created because of our greed, including my own.

I was so upset for losing track of my business to a couple of no-good trashy, I thought blaming the economy would be an easy way to explain myself to others. It was a heck of a lot easier to blame the economy, than to point the finger at me.  I look at myself back then, and realize how lazy I had become.  If I did not care about the business I was building, what in the world made me think I would ever get a team that was productive and cared about me and my investments? I had to set the example, and the example I was setting at that time was not great. I eventually got rid of the laziness that had consumed me. I took action in a very big way.

I learned to trust my instincts, stay focused on the  task at hand, and always, yes always, KEEP AN EYE ON MY BUSINESS.