In this episode Flux details his life that has been a flurry of activity, taking him from Darwin to Brisbane and keeping 44 countries alive— all while flying under the radar. In pressing the ‘reset’ button on his life in his 30s, his property journey and ultimate goal of financial freedom suddenly seemed out of reach, but Flux is no stranger to resilience. After spending a down payment on an education that ended up teaching him nothing he needed to know, he realised how his previous lives had always been leading him to where he wanted to go.

Timestamps:
01:30 | Turning a Negative Into a Positive
08:17 | The Honour System
11:31 | And Then…
13:55 | From TV to IT
18:51 | Data Tells the Story
23:09 | NT to QLD
26:16 | From Lawnmower to Owner in 30 Minutes
28:31 | Take Two

Resources and Links:

[00:28:31] So at the age of 38, I no longer owned my house, and was having to start again. And so I had that 20 years of investing. And the second time around, I didn't want to take 20 years to do it again. And so that's when I started on my property development journey. 

This is Property Investory where we talk to successful property investors to find out more about their stories, mindset and strategies.

 

I’m Tyrone Shum and in this episode we’re speaking with Rob Flux, head of the largest property networking group in Australia called Property Developer Network. In sharing both his personal and professional journeys he explains the mindset that allowed him to acquire his first property at 18 and pay it off at 24, and illustrates the talk he gave his parents that changed his life forever.

Tyrone Shum:   

Flux has worked hard to attain financial freedom, and is passionate about educating and coaching others to achieve the same goal. However, financial freedom hasn’t slowed him down one bit— in fact, it may have evern spurred him on more. As well as running Property Developer Network, he runs four additional businesses and has a fifth in the works.

Rob Flux:   

[00:01:30] I'm one of those people that [is] restless, and I'm always wanting to do stuff. 

  

[00:01:35] Between running those businesses, I have a combination of mentoring calls, I have a combination of preparing and running property networking events. We run a bulk purchasing power card for all of our member community, and still running some deals. 

  

[00:01:53] So I guess when I put all of that together, plus a software platform that we're putting together from a space, so five businesses, not four. So it's busy, mate. Very busy.

Tyrone Shum:    

He certainly has a lot on his plate, but it’s made easier by the fact that all of his businesses are within the same realm, which he sees as one of two main keys to success.

Rob Flux:   

[00:03:21] They're very complementary, very symbiotic. So each business runs in its own right, but they benefit from each other. But the way I do that is by having an awesome team that sits around me. I've got 11 staff that work with me, scattered all the way around the country and overseas. And I guess the power of delegation, mate, that's really the key to this.

Tyrone Shum:   

[00:03:44] Totally, totally. And I agree with you. You need a team, you can't do everything yourself. And it's usually the question is 'who', rather than how you do it. At the end of the day, you've got to figure out who's going to be able to help you on that side of things.

Rob Flux:   

[00:03:55] That's one of the best pieces advices that you will ever get. ''Who' rather than 'how''.

Tyrone Shum:   

[00:04:01] Have you read the book from Dan Sullivan, or have the book from Dan Sullivan? Who [Not] How?

Rob Flux:   

[00:04:05] No, I haven't. And I guess this is where I own up to your audience that I'm partially dyslexic, so I don't read a lot. So a lot of my world comes from real world lived experience, and the lessons learnt from that. 

 

[00:04:20] I try to learn from others and mistakes that others make, rather than reading books. And I find that by doing that, I can actually apply my knowledge really fast. And like you said, who not how. Who's the person that's gonna get me the knowledge the fastest? 

Tyrone Shum:   

Dyslexia is just one of the struggles Flux has faced in his life, which started in Darwin in the Northern Territory. After living there for 33 years, he felt the itch in his feet and made the jump interstate.

Rob Flux:   

[00:05:26] I went through Cyclone Tracy. So we had all of our house destroyed in that piece. The house was eight months old when it got knocked over. And I spent three years living in a caravan underneath the floorboards of the house, having a shower through a garden hose behind a corrugated iron curtain, and a whole bunch of things like that. 

  

[00:05:49] So I kind of came up with a really harsh upbringing. Not through anything that my parents created, but just the circumstances. And so that kind of forged the foundation for me to say, 'I never want to go through that again'. 

  

[00:06:07] And the house that that we grew up in, as I said, was eight months old, [so it] wasn't insured. So Mum and Dad lost everything. That set them up for a life of hardship from there to try and pay back that loan [and] go into the next house. 

 

[00:06:25] And so I was really, really, really determined to not have that happen to me. And to make sure that everything I did was gonna set me up for success.

Tyrone Shum:   

[00:06:36] Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. That's quite challenging. Do you remember what age that was roughly? 

Rob Flux:   

[00:06:41] [I was] five. 

 

[00:06:43] I guess as a kid, you don't really think about the hardship. You don't know any different. So it's not a negative, it's actually a positive. I had a great life. 

 

[00:07:00] One of the fun facts that you have from a cyclone: Cyclone Tracy hit [on] Christmas Eve, for those who aren't aware. And so one of the fun facts is that we would find toys strewn all through the neighbourhood. And I had a Tonka truck that I that I dug out of the mud in my backyard, that became a toy for me. So there's fun things that can happen from it. But it wasn't my present, it was someone else's, but I'm sure that they enjoyed mine.

Tyrone Shum:   

Although school returned after Cyclone Tracy, Flux’s primary school had been shut down. This forced him and his classmates to join the high school campus, though the primary school’s library still saw its share of visitors.

Rob Flux:   

[00:08:17] I would walk past my primary school every morning in order to get to where we were having primary [school]. 

  

[00:08:23] And the library that we went past, there was a giant hole in the side of the wall. And I remember that on the way home every day, we would walk through the hole in the wall, borrow a book out of the library, go home, read it, come back the next morning and just throw it through the hole in the wall and return it. It wasn't like the books were living on shelves. They're all they're all strewn all over the place. We figured if we were returning it, we were never stealing it. So we still used it quite fondly.

 

[00:09:09] A lesson for everyone out there: Bad stuff happens. Okay? You can't change the fact that bad stuff's gonna happen. You can't avoid it. But the story that you give that and the power and the meaning that sits behind that is really what determines whether or not it's going to be something that inhibits you or enables you. 

 

[00:09:29] So for me, I look back at those things as an enabler. It's not something that is going to hold me back, but rather is going to [be] something that's going to power me and fuel me to actually say, 'Well, I'm not going to have that happen to me'. 

Tyrone Shum:   

The positive mindset he adopted at an early age has served him well in all areas of his life, including property. After he and his family moved into a new home after Cyclone Tracy, he used this way of thinking to get himself onto the property ladder at a young age.

Rob Flux:   

[00:10:16] I spent 25 years in the same house. I actually ended up buying that house off Mum and Dad. When I got to the age of 16 I went to work, I used to deliver catalogues, junk mail into your mailbox. [I] was a trolley pusher at Kmart. [I] saved up a lot of cash. And I was determined, as I said, to actually go out and buy my own house. 

  

[00:10:45] Mum and Dad were still in a little bit of financial challenges from their early days. They knew that they couldn't help me to actually do that. Except for a very creative thing that we came up with, which was: 'What if I bought the house off them?'. And then they could stay and pay me rent. That would get them out of some financial challenges and would also set me up. 

 

[00:11:08] So I was an 18 year old, bought my house off Mum and Dad. They were living with me, paying me rent. Mum was doing the cooking [and] the cleaning, I was being an 18 year old and going out and doing the things that 18 year olds do. Going out at seven o'clock at night and coming home at 7am in the morning and doing all the teenager type things. 

Rob Flux:  

[00:11:31] And then one day Mum and Dad sat me down and went, 'Son, this life that you're having, this party life, it's probably not good for you'. And I distinctly remember the words coming out of my mouth. And it's a moment that I'll never forget. And I went, 'It's my house. It's my rules'. 

 

[00:11:52] Now, that moment changed my life. Because Mum and Dad looked at each other and they looked at their watch or they went, 'It's time for us to go'. And they moved out. 

 

[00:12:04] And all of a sudden I was looking after that mortgage by myself and having to be very responsible for myself. And that was just before the recession that we had to have. So 17 [and] 18 [and] 19% interest rates. And times were tough, mate. 

 

[00:12:23] So when we look at lessons learnt, I very quickly had to work out, 'How do I scramble to actually do this?' And I started subleasing rooms out. So I was doing, I guess what many people call HMOs or rent per room all the way back when I was about 19 and a half.

Tyrone Shum:   

Although he was a typical 18 year old in terms of socialising and having fun, his focus on his goal never wavered. He continued his education after finishing high school by completing three trade certificates.

Rob Flux:   

[00:13:55] I did electronics repair, so TV, video repairs. Then I went into computer maintenance and computer hardware repairs and that sort of thing. So electronics trade, radio, TV mechanics, and computer maintenance were the three trades that I kind of accumulated. 

 

[00:14:17] Basically, in the TV world, I was fixing things down to the two cent component level, and then suddenly realised that the apprentice that I had trained up who moved over to IT was earning twice as much money as me, and he was just throwing boards away. And I was trying to fix things down to this two cent component level. 

 

[00:14:35] So I transitioned over to IT and had a 20 year IT career and ended up designing multimillion dollar data solutions for Virgin, for BHP, for Flight Centre, and a whole bunch of other people like that. So very, very long career in IT.

 

[00:15:12] I grew up with mobile phones that were like that. Netscape as a web browser. Like, the Internet was being formed as I grew up. So I've gone through the lot, mate.

Coming up after the break, Flux reveals what helped him make the change from electronics repair to IT…

[00:16:33] That's when I decided to transition over to the IT world, where as I said, my apprentice was earning twice the wage as me doing half the work. 

Why public accolades aren’t the be all and end all…

Rob Flux:   

[00:20:45] That's the kind of work where you have to really, really think about everything that you're doing. And the funny thing about that, and the sad thing all at the same time, is you get success at the end of the process, when nobody notices what you did. 

We dive into how an ocean drive and being mistaken for a lawn maintenance worker set him on a new path.

Rob Flux:   

[00:26:01] But I had this beautiful drive where I was that was an ocean drive. So every time I left my house, I would go via the ocean drive even though it was the long way out, because it was always a pretty way. And I saw a home open sign. 

And that’s next. I’m Tyrone Shum and you’re listening to Property Investory.

Tyrone Shum:   

Despite being admittedly naive about his career options at the time, Flux knew where his interests and talents met. Choosing electronics repair was a sensible choice, but didn’t turn out to be as long-lived as he’d hoped.

Rob Flux:   

[00:16:12] And it was the advice from our parents: Work hard, do the things that you need to do. And so I did that, and then very quickly realised that that was a dying career, that the world was becoming disposable. And that electronics repair was not going to be a long term career. 

 

[00:16:33] That's when I decided to transition over to the IT world, where as I said, my apprentice was earning twice the wage as me doing half the work. And that's probably the smartest decision I ever did. And then I went back to university and got myself an IT degree. And that kind of set me up from there.

Tyrone Shum:   

In his IT career he designed systems and did a portion of what was called solutions architecture.

Rob Flux:   

[00:17:20] So I'd design anything from a cloud based solution to a data centre to disaster recovery solutions. Anything that had seven or more zeros on it was really the kind of work that I would work on. People that didn't need their stuff to stop working. And [we focused on] how do we build things that are completely redundant so that if something breaks, there's going to be something that actually takes over it. 

 

[00:17:49] Understanding data, data flow, you start to see that data actually tells you a story. And that has formed a lot of the foundations of what I do in my property world is understanding the data. And knowing that if you can read the data, it's like The Matrix. You start to see all the ones and zeros and you start to see patterns in the data. And when you see patterns in the data, that's going to give you the insights into how and what to do with that.

Tyrone Shum:   

Flux was an architect of sorts in that he was dealing with data, which translates well to the world of property development.

Rob Flux:   

[00:18:51] It transitions really well. The number of people that we see in property development that have come from an IT background, because it's a very logical kind of process. Because it's less emotional, I guess we're not emotionally attached to the property. We're looking at the numbers and that tells us a story. 

 

[00:19:12] So a lot of people from that very... whether it be IT or otherwise, but if they come from a very systematic type approach in their normal career, they transition really well over to property development.

Tyrone Shum:   

Flux enjoyed working in the IT space as much as he does property, due to his innate ability to recognise and analyse data, and see problems as a puzzle to be solved. 

Rob Flux:   

[00:20:06] It's 'Don't be afraid of the problem, take on the problem. Solve the problem and see the success that comes out of that'.

 

[00:20:12] I have done major, major, major projects. So one of my biggest achievements [was at a] company called Flight Centre, I'm sure most people have heard of Flight Centre. 

  

[00:20:25] At the time, they were in 44 countries. Now, most people don't realise that they're that big. So my role was to move their data centre from one location to another location, 30 kilometres down the road, and keep 44 countries alive all at the same time. So trying to do that, and not have a system outage. 

  

[00:20:45] That's the kind of work where you have to really, really think about everything that you're doing. And the funny thing about that, and the sad thing all at the same time, is you get success at the end of the process, when nobody notices what you did. 

  

[00:21:05] If you have a failure, everybody notices what you do. And so at the end, I'm sitting in the room with my team, and everything's moved across. And there [were] no balloons, there was no fanfare, there was no confetti. And we [were like], 'Okay, well, I guess we're going to the pub'.

  

[00:21:59] It's because of that that I don't need a pat on the back from someone else. I get personal satisfaction because I know that I did a good job. And you don't need the glory, you don't need everybody seeing what you've done. You just know that job is [done] and I can drive past and I go, 'That's where it used to be. And that's where it is'. And in my mind I still get joy out of that nearly 20 years after having done that one project. Probably 15 years now, I should say. Because I know what I achieved, and I don't need the accolades of others.

Tyrone Shum:   

After spending the first 33 years of his life in Darwin, he jumped on an opportunity that came his way and made the move to Brisbane. 

Rob Flux:   

[00:23:09] When I moved to Brisbane, I found that it was a very similar kind of culture to Darwin, [it had a] very small hometown kind of vibe. It's not what you know, it's who you know, it's two degrees of separation. So  it's if I don't know you, then the person I know knows you. So you always have to do the right thing. You always have to have integrity and honesty. And if you make a mistake, you have to always fix it. 

  

[00:23:34] And when you move into a new town, it takes a lot of time to rebuild that reputation, because nobody knows you. But now that I have, I can't see me going anywhere. It's now grown up to be a big city, but it still has that small town vibe.

Tyrone Shum:   

Although the move wasn’t initially for his benefit, it worked out in one way— but not so much in another.

Rob Flux:   

[00:23:58] My wife at the time— [I'm] currently divorced— had a very senior role working for Optus in the Northern Territory. So she used to look after the Northern Territory Government contracts for Optus. They lost that contract. And so when Telstra took over the contract, she was given an offer to either have a redundancy or relocation. And we went, 'Well, if we take the relocation it's like having a free swing for a holiday to see whether or not we like this new place'. So we decided to do that. 

  

[00:24:33] Things didn't pan out in that department for her and I, but I guess from a location perspective, I'm very happy with the outcome.

Tyrone Shum:   

Returning to property, Flux fondly remembers the first mentor he had after he purchased his parents’ home. However, she likely isn’t aware of her influence.

Rob Flux:   

[00:25:25] I then read a book [by a] lady by the name of Jan Somers. So I guess one of the first educators in the property world. And indirectly, she became my mentor without having ever met her. And I would love to meet her at some stage. 

  

[00:25:45] The book was all about investing and negative gearing. And so I bought my first investment property at the age of 21. And I distinctly remember that I had no intention of buying that particular house on that particular day. 

  

[00:26:01] But I had this beautiful drive where I was that was an ocean drive. So every time I left my house, I would go via the ocean drive even though it was the long way out, because it was always a pretty way. And I saw a home open sign. 

Rob Flux:  

[00:26:16] And I walked in. I had just finished mowing the lawn. I was 21 years of age. I'm uncovered in lawn clippings. And I walked in, and the agent looked at me sheepishly and went, 'You're clearly not a buyer here'. And within half an hour, I'd put a deposit down and actually purchased my first investment property overlooking the ocean. 

  

[00:26:41] And at that stage, I didn't really know what I was doing. It was more that [I] was a local area expert, just from living there without actually being a property expert. And I guess I've got a whole bunch of good timing with regards to the market and that sort of thing. 

  

[00:27:01] And that made a massive return inside of about three years, which I then flipped, which then allowed me to own my first house outright with the one I bought at 18 by the age of 24.

 

[00:27:21] That first house was in a place called Rapid Creek, and the first investment property was in a place called Nightcliff. Overlooking the ocean and the Northcliff rocks, it's a gorgeous spot.

Tyrone Shum:   

He no longer has the property, though flipping it was the catalyst for what happened next and propelled him to where he is today. 

Rob Flux:   

[00:27:45] That allowed me to pay for the first house outright. So at 24, I was completely unencumbered. I just started purchasing a few more investment properties [using] negative gearing, which I did 20 years of negative gearing, and found that there are a lot of obstacles in that approach, given serviceability. You keep hitting glass ceilings with regards to what you can do. Do you have enough deposit? Those sorts of things. So [I] did very well out of that. 

  

[00:28:16] Mathematically, I was in a position where at the age of 38, I could retire. But regretfully, as I touched on before, got divorced at 37. So didn't quite hit that magic marker, and had to reset. 

Rob Flux:  

[00:28:31] So at the age of 38, I no longer owned my house, and was having to start again. And so I had that 20 years of investing. And the second time around, I didn't want to take 20 years to do it again. And so that's when I started on my property development journey. 

 

[00:28:53] And in doing that, I spent a lot of time paying for a lot of educators and mentors out there. [I] found that many of them were more spruikers. They left you motivated to do something but didn't give you the how-to on what that something was. 

 

[00:29:13] And I guess having spent about $120,000 on my own personal education, [I] found that I still didn't know exactly what I needed to know. 

  

[00:29:24] And [I] had five mates that had a very similar experience. We all sat down together over a kitchen table and decided through the power of a masterminding process that we would try and help each other's projects move forward. And that then started to [give] me momentum [and] started to [give] them momentum. And as each mate invited a mate and they invited another mate, that slowly then [was] turned into what is now the largest property networking group in the country. So that's Property Developer Network. 

  

[00:29:56] And it's through that process that I got most of my learning, because you can only solve a problem through your own worldly experience. But when you mastermind with others, then you get the collective of the group. And you get the wisdom of the collective experience, and so [it is] much faster to accelerate. 

  

[00:30:17] 'Proximity is power' is a phrase that I would like to throw out there for your community. Hang around with people that are doing the things that you want to do.

Rob Flux’s story continues in the next episode of Property Investory. He explains how there’s no such thing as worst experiences…

 

[00:01:44] But it's also the thing that empowered me to move forward. Every career that I've had— so electronics repair, I guess the computer repair, the solution architecture, design, everything— was about problem solving. So there was never, never a problem that I was afraid of. 

 

The question that took a lot of guts to ask, but paid off tremendously…

 

[00:04:56] When I did that, it unlocked the opportunity for me that then became the deal that got me out the second time. 

He reveals what’s capturing his attention at the moment, and where he’s headed next.

[00:12:05] I like that because you can get in and out very quickly. You typically need a lot less money to actually run the deal. You aren't exposed to the building and construction risk that a lot of people are actually concerned about right now. 

 

And that’s next time on Property Investory.