£1m raised in under three months with an additional £300,000 offered. This was indeed one of my more memorable tasks within The Vincit Group which enabled us to joint venture for our Hoxton project. I have been raising money for property investment projects since 1998 in various forms from £20,000 to the more recent £1m mark. I seem to be quite good at it only because I've been doing it long enough to know that investors are not all the same, but this wasn't a good enough answer to the question posed by an investor friend of mine. After much deliberation I realized it was down to me putting myself in the investor's shoes every time.

My longest serving investor, Bill, mentioned to one of our directors, Harinder, what he liked about my approach was how I presented the deals. I always showed him at least two exit strategies. For this I thank my chess playing days, and specifically Mr Phelan (my chess teacher), where one has to anticipate different outcomes, while always keeping the possibility of check-mate in mind. So working at something day-in day-out one would expect to get good at it.

It wasn't only raising money that I did; I had the habit of finding a lot of deals for myself back in the days when I was working for myself. I was actually multi-tasking on a number of projects, even the admin until I got smart and hired a PA. I was a 'jack of all trades and master of none'.