When I first left banking to embark on this odyssey that eventually led me to run the real estate and non-performing loan portfolios for Castle Rock, I went to work for a hedge fund with the mandate to build a similar portfolio. My vision, however, didn’t match the vision of the person running the fund company.
I’m a person of action. I take the time to plan out my strategy in any endeavor, but I also know that when it’s time to put the plan into action, one must pull the trigger. The gentleman that ran the fund company, however, had a tendency to succumb to “Paralysis by Analysis”.
He would invest in large spools of butcher paper and tape it up all over the walls of his office. I’m not taking about a sheet on the wall…I’m talking about the entirety of his office walls being covered by butcher’s paper. He would then proceed to cover them with flow charts and outlines. At some point, he would decide he needed to redo it. Over and over and over the process would go until the opportunity he was planning for had passed.
It is very important to be thorough in your due diligence, but many people fail by overanalyzing a situation to the point of paralysis. At some point, you have to take the baseball bat off of your shoulders and swing at a pitch if you hope to hit a home run.