To those who doubted me!
You may have seen some bad newspaper articles about me or things that look like a smear campaign and today I want to clear all that up in this article.
I want to tell you exactly where it all stems from because there's been lots of different people that seem to have written stories about me but it actually stems from one place.
I've never done this before but I’m going to give you the facts and the evidence and the story of how it all started and why I started picking up so much negative attention and honestly this is going to completely shock you.
A little bit of context, so that you can get to know the back story.
I bought my first house at the age of 17, no money down deal, I then became pretty successful in property, became financially free at the age of 21, was in bible college, traveled, did some charitable projects and set up a training kids business network.
In 2015 I really started scaling the business and started aggressively deal packaging and selling deals as I sold hundreds of property deals and made a lot of money, started aggressively investing that money into property and I had also people ask me to teach them about property, started running events and I did put myself out there on the map.
Vanessa Warwick’s Story
I remember a few years back I saw a little thread written about me on a forum called property tribes which is owned by Nick Tad but his wife Vanessa Warwick kind of runs the show as she's the face of the forum.
Vanessa Warwick was questioning me and basically trying to imply that I wasn't really wealthy and she was saying look at his companies on company's house and I’m thinking you don't know me this is crazy like we've never met who's this person? is she a journalist?
I thought maybe I should respond and maybe I shouldn't respond because I didn't feel like I owed any answers to anybody but I thought you know what as I’ve put myself on the map maybe I’ll respond.
So I went on and explained that the reason that you can't find my wealth on my companies is because my wealth is earned in property and I buy properties in my name as you can't see that in company's house.
I explained everything and I ended this by saying to Vanessa Warwick and everybody on the thread come down to my office if you want, this is the office address and look at everything such as the paperwork as I’ve got nothing to hide.
Now what happened was that, the thread began to run into this campaign of questions and questions steered by Vanessa where they wanted to see receipts for everything and I thought you know what I didn't sign up for this, I got nothing to hide, you didn't come down to my office and I don't really want to be spending my time showing receipts to strangers because they just think they have a right to know everything.
I didn’t really sign up for this and my wife Amanda was pregnant at the time and I just thought let's have a quiet life.
I was successful in property because my training company at this point wasn't making any money and it was years before my training company started making money and therefore me and my wife moved into a lovely little barn conversion and we just enjoyed our profits from property.
I started aggressively growing my property business again and I was getting a massive demand of people saying can you run some more training and can you do this and have you got deals and I thought forget it I’m going to do this thing.
So I really pressed hard and started packaging deals, set up a training company, became more successful as my wealth started increasing and what I noticed is as my wealth started increasing and my success started increasing this little forum on property tribes was getting more and more rattled and the haters began to get more and more obsessed and at this point to be honest everybody loved me as it was just property tribes and occasionally some people saying have you seen property tribes though and I believe I learnt to ignore them.
If somebody in property tribes was a genuine customer of mine and had paid me money and have got a concern or a gripe, I would have offered to meet with them, talk with them and deal with it but if it's just someone just speculating and has never met me, that's never done any training, then to be honest I’m just going to ignore that.
There was one lady who was part of property tribes and she was bickering and saying how bad I was and it really surprised me at the time because this lady was called Diane Granville.
I don't normally like to name people but as she has publicly on TV and in the newspapers said a lot about me, I’m going to name her.
She left me a video testimonial for the further advanced training and was really happy and took me to court by demanding her refund and an additional five hundred pounds for transport and hotel costs she incurred.
She did take us to court and this is the very first time that I’d ever been taken to court ever and it's the very last time that I’ve ever been to court.
I had a witness with me as well who was also on the course and Diane Granville’s case got thrown away by the judge but of course I wanted to know what pressured her to do so and when I met her in the courtrooms hallway, I offered to refund her money back provided that she signs a confidentiality agreement which she agreed to.
I refunded her money back due to compassion, the thread was pulled down but later resurfaced and Diane started saying bad things about me again despite getting her refund.
I think that's when I really realized that sometimes no matter how much you give, no matter what you do, there's some people that you are just never going to please and sometimes you can't even try and reason with unreasonable people and I should be spending my energy not trying to talk to Diane Granville, not trying to talk to Vanessa Warwick and answer on the thread because these are unreasonable people but I should be spending all of my time and all of my energy on my students who are paying for training, who are actually implementing and putting their energy into themselves and into their businesses, who are investing their resources into winning as I’m going to help them win and not try and fight off these people that I’m never ever going to please.
Since Vanessa gets paid to run stories on her forum by advertisers, I now understood why she wanted to use my name since writing fake stories about me boosted her number of views.
Mike Winnet’s Story
Someone tagged me on a LinkedIn post where a guy called Mike Winnet was trying to expose Grant Cardone.
I thought that's a little bit unfair and I could see what he was saying about Grant Cardone and other trainers and a lot of what he was saying was really good and I enjoyed his material and I thought that's really good but I thought it was a little bit unfair in what he was saying about some other trainers and so I actually messaged him on LinkedIn and said Mike I’d love to interview you on my show to talk about training courses and standards as I’d love to get your input.
Could we do an interview but mike declined because he said that he was too busy and then shortly after that he said let's meet up so we ended up meeting up and I don't know how this happened but I ended up going on his channel even though initially I wanted him to come on my channel but you know what, I didn't really see the difference because I thought being on his channel or whatever as long as we get to chat and as long as it's filmed, there’s no big deal.
Now maybe at the time I was a little bit naive because I didn't quite realize how this sort of thing works and how people edit stuff and after going on Mike's channel, we actually had a really good chat I really enjoyed it.
I quite liked him and loved the fact that he was challenging things with a really healthy and great conversation and I left thinking that was really great!
We took a selfie and I went back.
In the interview we spoke quite a lot about his property journey as well because I asked him what's he doing and how he made his money and he talked to me and explained how he'd made money in property and he talked through the figures and I thought that's great because that shows that not only am I making money in property, but what I’m actually teaching is valid because even Mike Winnet is doing exactly what I’m teaching.
I then had a few suspicious thoughts and thought I wonder whether he's going to edit this interview in such a way to try and fit his agenda and I messaged him and we talked back and forth and I was like look Mike please can you send me the footage because I want the raw footage in case you edit it you've got it?
Mike did not want to send me the footage and when it was released, it was indeed edited and took out the bits where he said about how much he's making in property and how he's made his money.
He also edited a few bits in my opinion I think it was deliberate but maybe it wasn’t such as when I said that I’d only met Grant Cardone once in London and then he had me saying that with b-roll footage of me with Grant Cardone in Miami and everyone's commenting that I’m a liar when in the real sense, I was with Grand Cardone in Miami months later after doing the interview.
Paul Water’s Story
Paul is a very successful student I’d taken him to see Robert de Niro, he'd met up with Robert Kiyosaki, I’d paid for taking him to Barcelona where he'd become very successful doing a lot of deals.
He said to me you can't be the best training company and the biggest you know, you need to just be the best don't jump and I was like what? Why?
He told me just keep it to a few hundred like it was back in the day.
I said no that's not my intention as my intentions is to go really big and to help as many people as I can and in the same way that I’ve helped you become successful.
To be honest the fact that in my family, and in my life, most people that knew me and talked to me absolutely were wonderful in fact I’ve only ever once had somebody in real life but she's seen me face to face say to me I don't agree with your training or I don't only once all this nonsense all this bad stuff it's all online and nearly all of it's on property drives anyway and the only once that it happened in real life and it was it was a little bit awkward because I was actually out at Starbucks with a celebrity and we were chatting about business and this person came over to an author and started talking acted like he was a friend and stuff was oh wow sat down and then slowly started getting a little bit bitter and said actually Samuel I don't think you're good at that and I was thinking this has never happened before and it turns out I said what do you do though? what's your occupation?
What does he do of course? he is a property mentor.
All these people have got an issue when it all comes down to money and it's just like they're either trying to compete with me or they don't want me to teach more people because they're competing with my students but despite all this, I genuinely just wanted to help as many people as I could and I thought for every time you get a hater, you're going to have probably helped 10 or 100 people and I just continued teaching and most of our students were coming from London and we're in Wolverhampton and they were traveling down and people were flying in from all over the world and often coming from London so I thought you know what, I want to continue growing and I want to continue helping people and I’m going to scale and systemize the training business as well as continue to grow my property business and we moved to London but of course that upset a lot of people as well.
My Final Take
People are asking me to tone down my teachings but I’m just going to continue with it regardless of the consequences.
I mean Vanessa already had the police interview me and tried to create a story out of that and the hate group on Facebook are like trying to create stories and I’m a bit thinking about the government but of course I’m creating my own self-regulation plan which I’ll share soon and continue teaching my students on financial freedom no matter the cost.
Playlist of Samuel Leeds Rebuttal Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
More info on the BBC: https://www.samuelleeds.com/…
Voluntary Police Statement: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder…
I talk about Vanessa Warwick from Property Tribes who speaks about me all the time but won’t meet me Dianne Granville who makes out she took me to court and won, when really her case was thrown out.
I also respond to Simon Zutshi and the question the true agenda of the Property Investors Bureau which has extremely questionable people associated with it.
Thanks to those who never doubted me.
