Episode 14: Lessons in land investing and visions for 2025

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Welcome to the ground game podcast. This is Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:06)
And this is Justin Piche and we're here to teach you how to win the ground game.

Clay Hepler (00:08)
Dude,

Justin Piche (00:22)
All right.

Clay Hepler (00:22)
got some exciting

stuff you're telling me about, some pipeline stuff you got going on. We just

some feedback from a subdivide. It was interesting. The subdivide is in an agricultural district. Okay. And so you can only subdivide it for fewer than five acres or four acres, excuse me, or greater than 15. Okay. So we got this deal and

We're under contract for 165 and we think we could subdivide it into Not think we know we could subdivide it into five like four ish acre parcels and we think that they'll sell for like 130 to 150 each

Justin Piche (01:06)
Each. Wow. That's nuts.

Clay Hepler (01:09)
So it's

a really, so it's like buy for 165-ish, sell for 750. By the way, by the way, by the way, I remember getting this feedback from my broker and I'm like, this is the deal. This is the easy deal that you get once a year or once a quarter. And you're like, dude, this is like, I wish every deal was like this, right? But it's pretty straightforward.

Justin Piche (01:19)
That would be insane. I hope that works out.

Clay Hepler (01:39)
And got off the, got off a call with our, like the township director, just kind of talk through the specifics because it's like in a County. And then this is something that the listeners can benefit from sometimes when you're doing a development, there's like County regulations, but the local township or jurisdiction has, regulations that supersede that of the County. and so you gotta be really careful because on a County level, we could cut this thing up.

very differently. And we were thinking about cutting up into like three, five acres or two tens to sell it quicker. And if we would have anticipated that and had a survey or go out there, it would have been bad, right? And so making sure that you really understand when you call counties on these subdivide deals and development deals that you really dive deep into it, because that could really blow up a deal.

Justin Piche (02:11)
you

Yeah, I actually read it. I read into this. I was doing a subdivide in Etowah County, Alabama. And to me, I thought it was countywide, not a part of any municipality or anything like that. So I reviewed the county subdivision regulations, hired my surveyor who I'd worked with in multiple counties around Alabama. So he wasn't like

the most familiar with this specific county. anyway, he surveyed it. And then I had a kind of contractor who also was in a different county to come install culverts and put in driveways and stuff. And, you know, I mean, I don't know, I just assumed like, obviously, we're going to install these culverts like the contractor is going to know what to do. But like, they don't. mean, sometimes they just go by pipe and put it in without consulting with the county engineer or anything like that. So

Anyway, we did that. He put in these pipes, they were like 10 inches or something like that. And the county engineer drove by the subdivide. after we tried to file the plot, he drove by it he's like, hey, your culverts are too small. And you need to do something to account for the rainwater runoff due to the clearing and driveway that you put in that's going to come into the main road. And so my heart sank. I was like, my gosh, am I not going to get this approved? And he was like, no, you're doing this in the municipality.

Like this land is jurisdiction of the local municipality and not the county regulation. So we have a slightly different approval process than what you thought you were doing. So I mean, long story short, it cost me about three grand extra to put a couple. was nothing. Yeah, it was nothing. We swapped out the pipes. I think we had to put 18 inch or something or two. I don't know. The pipes were pretty closed. We were able to like...

Clay Hepler (04:06)
my gosh dude. Nothing, nothing.

Justin Piche (04:20)
sell them and buy some new ones and do the work and then put some little kind of ditching type thing to divert rainwater into the ditch as opposed to directly down the slope into the road. But yeah, lesson learned. That could have been much more painful if we weren't allowed to do what we were trying to do because it was in a municipality that had much stricter subdivision approval regulations.

Clay Hepler (04:39)
Yeah, yeah, those little things could bite

you in the butt like oil and gas rights access specific jurisdictional requirements that are like very esoteric and you don't they have to like read the fine print and the fine print. So yeah, that's

Justin Piche (04:58)
So another one I just thought of just randomly, tax deeds, tax deeds, man. If you try to get, if you buy into property with a tax deed, there's a length of time before like you have to own something. It depends on the state, but in certain states, there's a kind of a time length. Somebody has to own that before you can actually get a good title insurance policy or an insured title on it. So.

Clay Hepler (05:13)
Yeah.

So here's actually one thing that the

listeners can benefit from.

So I bought a tax deed last year, earlier last year, and I heard of this company that will insure over quick claim deeds. And it's a much more expensive title insurance and only certain...

States like only certain attorneys in certain states will take this title insurance, but we bought this quick claim deed that was from a tax auction in less time than this specific county or this specific state would allow to get full title insurance. And we use this additional insurance service. It is more expensive. It's like two to $5,000 more.

for title insurance, but we were able to buy this and we actually closed it and sold it. But we had to make sure that the buyer used the same title company, but I forget what the title company or the company's called, but it's this company that's probably in like 40 states enables you to buy quick claim

Justin Piche (06:25)
Dude, yeah, let me let me know what that is. Tell me what that is because we I run across a lot and I have a good one right now in Tennessee that I think we're able it's it's been 10 years these guys owned it. This guy's owned it for 10 years, but I think the limit is 15. I think it's I think it's 15 in in Tennessee for title insurances companies to normally underwrite open insurance policy. But it looks like we're able to find a title company that can get it done. It's still a little bit up in the air, but anyway.

Clay Hepler (06:52)
Yeah, well, stuff like...

Justin Piche (06:55)
What I was going to say about tax deeds is, even before your anecdote was, if you don't recognize it's a tax deed upfront and you are doing, especially if you're doing a subdivide and you start doing like survey work, engineering work, all this kind of stuff, just to realize you're not going to be able to get a clean title insurance policy. One of the things I basically almost, I always do this. I wait to get a title commitment before I invest any substantial money in the property. I know that

I'm going to lose 250, 300 bucks in abstract fees if I cancel the property, whatever. part of doing business, but I'm going to try not to spend like 15 grand on a survey or 10 grand on a survey before getting that title commitment back.

Clay Hepler (07:35)
It's happened to me. That's actually happened to me this year and we're

still trying to figure this out. I talked about it a couple episodes ago with this estranged seller that like the wife is basically senile. I think she has a medical condition that she cannot sign her own documents. And so this sister is the POA.

and the husband is the second in line for a POA and the only way that we can close on this transaction is if we go into a extensive long court battle, which I have to, I'll have to pay the fees to do it with a seller who's incredibly unstable or we have the sister resign as the POA and she hates the guts of the brother POA.

And so just guys, this happens a lot, specifically when you're under $100,000 a year, or $100,000 properties. Quick clean these happen a lot more often, title problems happen, and familiar problems happen. You gotta get good at handling this shit. You gotta get good at handling this, right? The reality is the buck stops with you as an operator.

Justin Piche (08:33)
man.

Clay Hepler (08:59)
And so when I talk to the people that I work with directly, I'm, when we're, Justin and I are sitting behind doors and we're talking, we talk about these problem solving things. And this is the, this is the difference between someone who gets successful and someone who doesn't in this business or in general, your ability to solve challenges and problems when they come up, you think that we're sitting here and we're special, right? And in the reality is we're not.

Right. We've probably, we probably got more lucky breaks. Like Justin was just talking about, then we were good for, but we were up at the plate swinging away at opportunities. And we kept learning and kept growing and learning for these things. Justin now knows this about culverts and making sure he, connects with the county engineers. I know this now about surveyors. Don't I, spent $10,000 on this property. It's a strange sister.

and this seller's husband are fighting and we can't close this deal. So I'm losing $10,000. Now that could be an anchor. That could be an anchor. And so really learning from other people. And when you're behind closed doors, we're not saying that there's a secret formula to success. In fact, it's really about continuously getting up, stepping up to the plate and swinging away. And that's what makes you successful, the consistency.

because someone who's been in this business and consistently learns and grows is someone that will be successful in learning from people like myself or Justin or other people in your network that have done this before to solve challenges and problems, reach out to us on social media, right? We're always down to talk about challenges and dive deep into your business to help you kind of get to the next level because that's what we did when I initially, I remember, I kind of tell this story, but

Justin I first met, was, you know, he's a year and a half ahead of me. And I looked at this guy, I was like, this guy's super successful. And I really admired what he was doing and how he was building his business. And we had a real, we had a connection very, very quickly. And he was a mentor of sorts for me. And now we're, now, you he's still ahead of me. As much as I, as much as I don't, you know, I say, hey, I'm going to catch your ass, right? But, you know,

Justin Piche (11:01)
you

Clay Hepler (11:23)
being around people like minded people we learn and we grow together and we collaborate versus compete what this is one thing that I'm really we're going to talk about in 2025 with this podcast and talk more about this but the real way to grow your business is to collaborate versus compete. don't hold anything back when I'm behind doors with Justin and he does the same thing with me and so you have someone in your life you know your $200,000 $300,000 half a million dollar a year business there's nothing that you're doing that's special.

that someone else couldn't benefit from and vice versa. And if you open up yourself and you're really vulnerable with your business, people will be vulnerable back and you'll grow together because really, there's so much land in this country, there's so much opportunity. And so it's important to collaborate versus having this very transactional competition based mindset.

Justin Piche (12:16)
Yeah, man, well said. You we were just talking about kind of some I was talking about how we were just kind of in a good spot rolling into 2025. We both feel like we're going to crush 2025. You got to have that mindset, obviously. But and I was looking at my deals and I think six. Yeah, six of the deals that are in my pipeline right now are partner deals like their deals that.

were either brought to me by a partner or I'm working with a partner on or something like that. Actually, probably more than that. I just thought of a couple more that I don't even have listed on my CRM right now because they're kind of being managed outside. And that's huge. That's huge. I won't own all of the profit of those deals, but I don't need to. I've got good partners that were working towards a common goal and that is enhancing my business. There really is. Much more than just going it alone would.

Clay Hepler (13:06)
Right, and so this is gonna bring us

to our questions here. We're gonna go into TBT, or team, yeah TBT, team building tactics here in a second. But you'll see, if you look around, you see the people that are accelerating. People accelerate not because they're a genius.

They accelerate because they're a part of a group of other people or they have someone in their life that's in their business that is helping them grow. It's never a one man show or one woman show. And so we'll talk about this year kind of like over the next couple of episodes, like how are we planning on our year? Right. And we'll talk more about our teams and we'll talk about ourselves.

And we'll talk more about collaborating with people more than it's just about us being the person that is out there in front. One of the questions today is, is we're talking about ethical considerations in land investing.

Right? And building a personal brand. These are some things that our listeners have asked us about and we're gonna deep dive into these. So I wanna go into the TBT this week. Justin, take it away, man. We're not going over our goals because we crushed them this quarter.

Justin Piche (14:23)
Yeah. Yeah, so.

Yeah, I guess we should we should quick comment. I saw I had a $800,000 gross profit realized goal. I hit it and then exceeded it by close to $200,000. So I think we hit. I don't know what the final numbers are because we're not through the quarter. We have more sales and purchases and random things this week, but I think we're to hit over a million gross profit for this quarter, which is crazy, crazy to think about. I'm super pumped. So I bonus my team. That brings me into the the thing I I.

Clay Hepler (14:51)
Hahaha

Justin Piche (14:57)
Yeah, do, know, compensation is one of those things. We're talking about compensation and specifically bonusing your team members and how to do that. I don't think there's any really right answer. I think the rightest answer, if you will, it's not a word I know, but the most correct answer is you've got to make it based on performance, right? That is what bonuses should be based on. And the reason why you want to make it based on performance is because you want everybody on your team to...

strive to be higher performers. And if they know there's going to be a bonus at the end of the year, that's that is potentially multiple months salary, just waiting for them based on their performance, they will work harder the whole year. I mean, everybody like it just, it's like the carrot at the end of the stick type of thing. So we had a great quarter, we had a great year. I more than I grew my team this year as well. But I was looking at it and we're bonus out two and a half times as much money as we bonus out last year to the team, which is really exciting.

And so the way I do it is essentially I have my manner. We do it kind of an employee assessment, something actually we want to get better at as a more formal kind of employee assessment. But we assess their performance as the management team assesses performance for the performance of employees. They grade them against our core values. So that's part of it. Our core values that we have as a company, how do they perform in each of those core values? How do they exhibit those core values? And then we look at their actual performance.

For acquisitions, it's a lot easier, right? How many leads did they generate? How many contracts resulted from those leads? How many closed deals? How much profit from the deals that they negotiated? It's pretty clear. You can very easily rank from one to 15 or 14 or whatever it is, the acquisitions employees and how their performant, their actual monetary addition to the team was. But we combine both of those. And then I just have a scale essentially and a time weight factor, right? Because if somebody joins my company in the middle of the year,

they didn't work for a full 12 months. They're not going to get a full year's bonus. going to get kind of a bonus. Bonus can measure it with the amount of time that they spent. And so we basically have a factor for each of those items. A performance factor, a factor bit that exhibits the core values, a time factor. And then I go through and I essentially like, I mean, it's kind of, I basically rank them from top to bottom and then they each get a certain multiplier based on

their relative performance to everybody else.

Clay Hepler (17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (17:23)
But it ends up being in some cases two months salary and some cases a half month salary or something like that. And it's pretty substantial. know, one of the things just to comment on a lot of folks in this industry have overseas employees that are in the Philippines and there's a cultural thing in the Philippines called the 13th month salary and traditionally paid on December 1st. It's traditionally one extra month of pay and it's paid on December 1st.

for them to go on vacation, for them to buy gifts for their family and all that kind of stuff. And so I did that when I first started, but then I kind of moved to more of a Christmas bonus type of thing. So it's really just a discussion to have with your team to make sure they have the right expectations. But I can guarantee you there's some folks that probably have Filipinos employed right now that did not give a 13 month pay, didn't know about the 13 month pay. And I'm willing to bet your employees, they...

I don't know if they expected it, maybe not, because they've kind of worked with US employees, it is something that's normal for them that they may not have received this year.

Clay Hepler (18:23)
Yeah, the Christmas

bonuses is pretty big. And I think it always needs to come down to like how your team is working throughout the year, right? The question is, do you have quarterly bonuses?

Justin Piche (18:39)
No, have monthly gross profit commissions that get paid out, but I don't have quarterly performance bonuses.

Clay Hepler (18:44)
And is that based purely

on the, is it the whole team? Like does the transaction coordinator get it as well? Does the.

Justin Piche (18:52)
Yeah, the entire overseas team gets a piece of gross profit. I have a monthly profit share that every person in my company essentially gets a piece of the monthly profits. That's kind like the everybody else holds everybody else accountable because if somebody's not holding their weight, they're going to directly hurt a significant portion of that person's compensation. So that's the profit share that the whole company gets. There's obviously base salary.

profit share piece and then an end of year bonus. That's how we do it.

Clay Hepler (19:24)
That's pretty cool. That's

pretty cool.

Justin Piche (19:28)
I could do quarterly and make the end of year bonus smaller, honestly, the monthly commissions in some cases are pretty substantial, like a substantial percentage increase over the base. I feel like that's where I like to be.

Clay Hepler (19:40)
Cool deal. Yeah. So let's

talk about the questions for today. Some listener questions. We've gotten good feedback on this. Guys keep posting your questions in our social channels. Reach out to us, DM us. And of course rate, review and subscribe. And when you leave a review, make sure that you post your questions if you have some. So the question is, what advice would you give someone looking to transition from full-time

traditional job to a full-time land investing. I can go first on this one. So I was in a very different position as many of our listeners probably know my background was, you my wife got laid off because her company went under a couple years ago. And so I was in a position of I need to make money very quickly and I don't have a choice. And so my

Justin Piche (20:16)
Man, yeah, go for it.

Clay Hepler (20:37)
feedback is going to be probably different than most people's because I lived through the hell that was a first year trying to scale a land business with trying to pay for my wedding, trying to pay for my honeymoon, trying to live. And it was really, really, really hard. Sleepless nights. Am I going to make payroll this month? What can I do to try to keep this business going? Ended up being a successful first year, right? But

not without 90 hour weeks, 80 hour weeks, right? I mean, really, really putting it out all on the line. And so I would say, you my kind of best practices are when if you're transitioning from a full time job into land, you got to have a proven model, you got to have to have consistent results that are happening. Now, consistent results can be different, right? That the difference between someone's business that is

you know, I'm sending $5,000 of mail or whatever, and I'm getting $25,000 back every month, like that's a that's a significant difference between where you are, you're consistently doing it for a couple months. That could be enough, right. But I but I always like to think about it's like that the living expenses that you have are covered up to six months, right. So if you have personal living expenses, you can go six months completely dry. And you're okay.

Now this is incredibly conservative. I'm not the type of person that thinks that you should earn all the boats specifically because I know the good, the bad and the ugly of land investing and you could be unlucky, right? And so it's better to have the W2 job longer and have that security. You have six months of expenses, daily expenses, like you could fall asleep for six months and everything's covered. And then, you know, your land investing, you might have some deals in the pipeline.

But you have some consistency. There is a proof of concept here that is clear and you're like, hey, I know that I have a couple of deals in the pipeline that's gonna sell. And I also know that I have this business down. I have the right systems, I have the right help, I might have some team members here so that I can go fully into this. But I am not a burn the boats guy. That's completely against what a lot of people think the gurus say.

But I think that, know, depending on your circumstance, if you're like 21, you know, your risk level is a lot different than I'm in the mid end of my 20s and I have a wife and a child. And so my risk appetite is a lot different than maybe a 20 year old, right? You can just go and live with your parents. But that's how I think about the, you transition from

traditional job to full-time land investing. Proof of concept, six months of expenses, and having a couple of deals in the pipeline that you know will profit.

Justin Piche (23:40)
Yeah, that's pretty that's well said. You know, I, I had my W two job for six months, the first six months that I started the land business. And then I went on essentially paid leave, I took paternity, my paternity leave and my four weeks of vacation. So I basically got another three weeks. And then I was able to kind of work a severance type of a thing with Exxon. And that gave me another three months. So I almost had

let's see. Yeah. It was like six to seven months of full pay where I wasn't actually working for Exxon because I was on leave or on a kind of terminal leave. And that was incredible. I mean, it gave me so much more confidence, but I made that decision even with, would have made the same decision at that point either way, because I had gotten to the point in the business where I had, I had already had started to have realized profit, realized net income from the business.

And I had a, I know pipeline profit is one of those things that we shoot after because that's the engine, but we never really know a hundred percent if that is going to result in realized gross profit. But I had enough pipeline profit that was doubling my annual salary. And I got to the, I got to the personal point where I was like, I am losing money by spending my time working this W2 job because of the opportunity, lost opportunity cost.

of working on my business. That is the point that I got that I could not shake out of my head. And that is the moment at which I was like, I'm done. I've got to quit. I can't do this anymore. I agree 100 % with with not burning the bridges. know, there's a like, especially if this is your first kind of entrepreneurial foray, there are a lot of we try to be as real as possible on this podcast.

I don't want to scare anybody. mean, like it's a great business. It really is. I really, really enjoy it. I love the community. I love doing deals. I love underwriting things. I love thinking about financing side of it. I love building teams. Like I love this business, but it is not as easy as many people think. And you could, you could definitely lose your shirt. People have people have there's there's kind of the tail, like a, maybe a warning tail or whatever is folks who

And this happens a lot in the business, but folks get really focused on doing bigger deals. They establish some sort of business model of flipping that kind of works, and then they get focused on doing bigger deals and they let the flipping side kind of die. And if you get involved in too big a deals that require too much capital in the mid, like too much, you know, soft costs, survey engineering, et cetera, and then the deal doesn't end up panning out.

You could lose some serious money, right? That stuff isn't recovered. Why? And Clay was talking about losing potentially $10,000 on a survey. I just lost $7,000 on a survey, a timber report, et cetera, because we couldn't get access on a property and that we thought the seller would sign an extension so that we can work things out. But he basically, it was like, no, you didn't pay me double what you were offering for me to sign this extension. Of course we couldn't do that. So we canceled the contract, lost $7,000. But when you're talking about really big entitlement deals,

that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars that you have to pay before you even know if you can actually go through with the project. So anyway, all I have to say, if you're transitioning from a W2 into the land investing space, I agree 100 % with Clay. think you have six months of runway. I think you feel the pain and build out and get a proven model for your business. And you just work your behind off to make it work kind of like I did. I mean, Clay was obviously a tougher.

a tougher spot. did the whole dual W-2 and full-time investor type thing for a few months before I was able to transition out. But yeah, don't burn the bridges. And that's not as it's not as glorious as people say. It's really not. But as soon as you get to the point where you're like, definitely am losing money by working this W-2 and not going out for the opportunity in my business. That's that's when you know.

Clay Hepler (27:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I love that.

So the next question is, do you balance the pursuit of profit with ethical considerations in land investing, especially with dealing with distressed properties or vulnerable sellers?

Justin Piche (27:55)
Yeah, I got, I'll take a quick answer on this. You know, you've really got to, you got to be above board when it comes to this stuff. You know, you've got to make sure that, that you are, you are not really, you're not taking advantage of people and you gotta, you've got to understand kind of where your personal line is, right? I'll give a little story. I was, when I first started doing this land investing thing, I came across, across the seller had a lot of property, really nice property and

North Carolina and We started negotiating on these big beautiful tracks in North Carolina and the pricing I thought was like around 50 to 60 percent of market value that the seller wanted and so I was like man This is great. This guy's asking for a certain price. I think I can pay it and started negotiating sent him a contract and then I got a letter from his daughter who had a power of attorney for this guy because he had dementia and I didn't

I honestly couldn't tell he was so like, like eloquent and like well spoken and excited. And we only spoke twice. So there wasn't like plenty of time for him to like, I don't know, but I did not know this. so, you know, it got me thinking, I'm like, Holy smokes, like, I can't obviously can't enter into contracts, somebody who can't make these decisions for themselves. Like I need to be careful. Like this, this, this daughter probably thinks I'm a predator or something, trying to go after somebody who can't make these decisions for themselves. And you know, that would just like not be okay.

And so that's one of the things we do is I tell my team, hey, if anyone's really old or like is struggling to like figure out technology or things like that, see if you can talk to their kids or if there's somebody else that that can be involved and help them make this decision. We do that all the time. We skip trace the kids or ask for the kids numbers and talk to them and just like check, just do a check. Like, hey, we're speaking to your mother about buying this property from her. And I just want to talk to you because I don't I want to make sure that like

everything's good. She's able to make this decision or like if you guys have any problems with it, you know, I just want to make sure everything's good. And yeah, it results in kind of deals that probably don't pan out, but we can sleep at night, you know, you know, we're not doing something doing something kind of wrong.

Clay Hepler (30:06)
Yeah, so

how I approach this conversation is I'm very transparent with sellers. Like I tell my acquisition guys that there's no reason to inflate what we do. We are investors. And so we need to purchase this property in a number that produces enough profit for us to keep our business going and generate personal profits and pay our team. And so...

Every time we talk to a seller, we always say, have you spoken with a realtor? Where are you in that process? And, and, really not say that we are the only end to the problems, right? That's, that's just how we do it. And we're just very honest. We're not going to be the highest and best offer. we are going to be the most convenient offer and we are going to be the most straightforward person to work with. But you know, if you want to put your

property on the market and potentially wait six, eight months, whatever it takes in this specific county, then you can do that. And you're probably going to make more money. You might not, but you might. And so we're always very honest about that. We don't hide the fact that we're investors. think where a lot of people mess up is they're not honest about who they are. And so we're just super honest from the start.

Justin Piche (31:30)
Yeah, mean, we're pretty, we have websites and talk about what we do. the company, like we have our company name. Like it's obviously not me, the owner talking to people at this point. It's like, if somebody can't figure out we're a land investment company, that's pretty, we're not ever saying, it's just me, Justin. I'm just buying this house or this property because I want to have a great place to live. gosh, no, none of that.

Clay Hepler (31:52)
Yep, yep. So,

What are the most effective ways to build a strong personal brand in the real estate industry? And how has your branding strategy evolved over time? I'm going to be very, very, very vulnerable here and honest. Most of you, most of you people don't need to build a personal brand.

Justin Piche (32:10)
Yeah, you go first, man.

Clay Hepler (32:14)
You need to spend more time in your business. You don't need to focus on posting your land deals. I think this is a massive shiny object. This is exactly why I closed my education company. Justin and I have thoughts of doing something else with that and we've shuttered them because it takes away from your main thing. Now, the reason why Justin and I do this is because we believe in the long-term

we can add enough value to the market that there will be opportunities for us to work with people. They can see us as people that actually execute on a high enough level and they wanna partner with us. And Justin's already experienced this, I've already experienced this as well. And so we put out this free content because we know that when you put enough free content in the world, 99 % of the people are gonna say, like, you know, this is, I'm just gonna take from this and...

go about my way and build my business. But the 1 % of the people that really resonate with who we are and how we operate want to partner with us, want to work with us. so, you know, most people don't need to build a strong brand. Justin and I have the time and the liberty that our businesses can run essentially without us. And this is a longer term play. And so we're giving out all this free content, this free information, because we believe in the long term.

we'll be able to create a very, very clear mutual win-win partnerships Don't worry about building a strong personal brand. Our strategy has not evolved. It's just putting out stuff that we've done and talking about stuff that we've done. don't pretend that we, like we don't pretend

What we're doing, We just talk about stuff that we've done.

Justin Piche (33:57)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast just to say, thanks. First of all, thanks for listening. Seriously. know, we've Clay and I've got a lot of good feedback on this podcast and we just really appreciate what you guys give comments, subscribe, download the podcast. It really helps us know a we're providing value and B helps us help set the direction of the show. We really just want to provide value to everybody. Another way clay provides value is in his newsletter. Every Friday he releases the land letter. The link is down in this, in the

podcast show notes. So if you're interested in kind of getting his musings on the land industry and getting some really good actionable advice each week, subscribe. Now back to your podcast.

And, frankly, like, I don't have a big personal brand. mean, like I've been on a couple of podcasts of some people in my space. I've spoken at an event or two, and then we have this podcast. Like, I'm no kind of Seth Williams or, or, or, you know, insert, insert somebody that everybody in the whole land space knows. I just try to focus on being authentic. Like, not like I'm trying to be authentic, but like when I, when I create kind of content, like we're doing this podcast, like I just try to be honest.

I try to talk about what I'm actually thinking. You if I post something, I'm like thinking about what I'm actually thinking, a video I make, whatever. Whatever you see, like that's what you get. there's no kind of mystery behind it. You know, I'm pretty open book type of person. I like to help people. I've been helped so much throughout my time building my business and like it just feels right to give back. And I agree. Like I love working with people. I really do. I love working. I love partnerships. I think they're...

again, win wins for most in most cases. And so if that if that is a byproduct of this, that'd be great. And like the last thing is, I just really love talking to Clay every week. Like, I really enjoy our podcast time we had. We were recording earlier this week, we had some technical issues, and we had to end it. And I was like, sad. I was like, man, we only were talking for 20 minutes, we got to reschedule so we can get our kind hour and a half chat in.

Clay Hepler (35:54)
Yeah, yeah, collaboration

over competition. We definitely enjoy talking to each other. One thing, one last thing. If you're thinking about building a strong personal brand, pick three to five people in the industry that you're interested in building a meaningful relationship with and focus your efforts instead of building a personal brand. Focus your efforts on impressing those people and that'll get you much farther, especially when you're just starting out, than just building your own personal brand.

Justin Piche (36:23)
Yeah, that's good advice. All right, we got another question here. How do you define success in your land investing journey and what metrics or milestones do you use to measure your progress beyond just financial gains? It's a little deeper one.

Clay Hepler (36:39)
You want to take a snack you want to this first you want me to hit it first

Justin Piche (36:46)
man. Yeah. Okay. So, so when I think of success in my business, the first thing I think of, okay, so I'm sure a lot of people in this space, I me included have like fantasized about the fire movement or like, you know, fine. Yeah, whatever the retire early financial independence, retire early type stuff.

When I was working at a job I really didn't like, that's kind of what I thought about. was like, man, it would be so great to have enough money to be able to do what I actually want to do. And then I started a business and man, was it stressful, but I loved it. I really enjoy and get a lot of purpose and meaning out of what I do, the things that I'm building, my team that I'm building. And to me, that is success. I feel...

I kind of feel retired. I don't know if that makes sense. Like I feel like what I would want retirement to feel like, which is fulfilled in my work day, enjoying my family, the freedom to travel, the freedom to go where I want to go. I think maybe there's aspects where I'm pushing a little harder than I probably will when I'm like older and like have grandkids to hang out with and know, discussions back and forth with my wife of like, how much really should I be doing, spending with the family and working. So there's, we're not a hundred percent exactly aligned with where that is, but I feel

Like I have success just because of the way that I feel about my business and the way I'm able to spend my time. And so I don't know if that like satisfaction, maybe like self satisfaction in what you're doing, enjoyment of your life. You know, when I was working for Exxon, for example, I would dread Mondays, right? I would dread the commute back into the office and not because like the work was particularly hard. mean, I feel like it was relatively easy work. It was just, I didn't.

enjoy it. didn't like it. I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. I didn't have the ability to be as creative as I wanted to be. didn't have the ability to build what I wanted to build. I was in a box. And there are ways to kind of extend and expand the box, but very limited box with very little limited additional kind of compensation that kind of that obviously comes with that. like the financial is part of it, having the ability to be rewarded for your work and have that be not necessarily limited by some

hourly wage or some annual salary. That is motivating to me as well. But success, think that's my main definition of success for me.

Clay Hepler (39:11)
Yeah,

I think that.

Building a business is the...

most profound self-development book seminar course combined that you can take.

Justin Piche (39:30)
I think with one small exception and that is parenting.

Clay Hepler (39:34)
Okay, fair enough. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.

Asterix parenting, parentheses plus parenting. so the real fulfilling of fulfillment is when you can be by yourself and say, man.

Justin Piche (39:42)
I agree though. I agree though. I agree though. It's I mean,

Clay Hepler (40:00)
I left it out on the field today. I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm really pushing myself. And there's an amazing book by Simon Sinek, think it's Infinite Game, and he talks about infinite versus finite games. Finite games are like football or chess or any other game, like your standard games or even video games, right?

There are known players, there are known rules, there are known boundaries, and there's a start and an end.

Infinite games have known and unknown players. have boundaries that are only expanded by your imagination. The rules are defined by you. And I could be butchering the book, but business is this infinite game that you can continue to grow, collaborate, learn and expand. And there's never an end to it.

And that is incredibly satisfying for a human being. Now, I'm saying all this first, because this is the natural maturation of any business person, right? I want to just keep playing. Now you could be like Scrooge McDuck that wants to just keep stacking cash. Totally get it, right? You just want to hold it, hoard it, whatever. I come from a background of immense scarcity as well, right? But...

The game that we play, that's the true fulfillment, like beyond just the cash. Now, of course, I haven't gotten to my number yet. I have a number, then I'm like, this is the number. This is the number that I don't have to worry about anything. I can help retire my parents. I can help anyone in my life. I can give fully to any organization that I want to. And that number is in my head.

Justin Piche (41:53)
you

Clay Hepler (41:58)
But the games, the game that we play, I love the game. I love building, like learning. was like, dude, I've never done this much preparation for Q1. Never. I I've been preparing for a long time, right?

hours and hours and hours to make sure that everyone is fully empowered and learning and growing and being a better leader and learning how to sell better and focusing on my unique ability and getting deeper and deeper and deeper as our business grows. And that's so much fun. And so of course there's the financial, get to the number, have financial freedom, but there's also the infinite game that we play with business.

Justin Piche (42:41)
Yeah. You know, quick aside, we were together a week ago, a week ago. We spent all Friday together in Pittsburgh and it was awesome. Like I had such a good time. I flew in Thursday evening. That was just, don't know what day that was. The 13th, 12th, the 12th, December 12th. We got dinner, nice restaurant, and then spent the whole next day just kind of talking business planning. And it was great, man. It really was.

Clay Hepler (42:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (43:11)
And the ability to do that, I mean, that's success. Just being able to do that, you know, having the luxury to kind of change. I mean, I was like, it was like several days planning. I was like, OK, I guess I'm going. Let's go. Bought a ticket, rolled out, used a lot of credit card points, you get a lot of credit card points when you get a lot of business expenses in this business. But. And I wanted that one thing I wanted to say when I kind of go on is I as we were leaving, right, I was I was trying to get ready for my flight and doing a few things.

Clay Hepler (43:25)
You

Justin Piche (43:41)
And you were leading one of your calls with your team. And I was just really impressed. I mean, was, you were just, you were on it, man. You were like inspirational. You were, you were kind of firm with expectations. You were asking them hard questions, going through your level 10 meeting. And I was impressed. And I was just like, that was legit. I mean, I think we run them obviously really similarly. Clay's not faking it, you know, he's really a good leader and I got to see that firsthand. So that was really exciting.

Clay Hepler (44:07)
Thank you, Justin. Appreciate that,

Let's go to our last one here.

Justin Piche (44:14)
How do you foresee the future of land investing evolving in the next five to 10 years and what trends should investors be aware of? man. So there's no way any of us can predict the future and I actually know what's gonna happen. But I guess I can think, you know, we were talking about this when we were meeting up in Pittsburgh, so I'm sure you have probably a similar answer. But I think the biggest changes in the land investing space are probably gonna be with

marketing and how marketing is able to be sent. Right now it's relatively easy to send texts and RVMs and cold calls. But I think as the industry matures and more and more people get those types of media that they don't want, more regulations will be passed that are going to make it harder or just the fines. It'll be easier to get fined. It'll be easier to the risk will be higher. The penalty will be higher, something like that. So I think it's going to be hard to maintain this. really do feel like we're in kind of a

good space, I guess, right now where there's opportunity, but it may not always be there. I think that's one thing. I think additionally, it continues to happen. There's tons of land. like there's always going to be opportunity and there's always going to be sellers that are just in that right spot when you call them that are going to want to sell to you. Those opportunities happen. But there are more and more people that are getting into the land investing space.

There's more people that are seeing it and maybe there's people that are falling out of it. I don't know. I only see the people that are coming in. guess when people when people leave, they do kind of a silent exit. You know, they don't necessarily announce they're shutting down their land investing business. But there's lots and lots of people that I see coming into the space, lots of different coaching programs that are training these folks and that by, you know, that there's additional competition or competition. There's competition in all the different marketing channels. And if that continues to grow, I think it'll be.

the amount of marketing you need to send to get an opportunity may continue to rise a little bit. So keeping your costs down and getting really good at niching down on certain property types or certain areas where you can be precise with your offers and then developments either on, you know, subdivides, being able to add value so that you don't have to offer 50 cents on the dollar or 60 cents on the dollar to get a deal done. I think that's another thing that's going to, that people are going to have to continue to work towards. Otherwise,

They're not going to have enough opportunity to keep the lights on. And I guess the last thing to talk about would be AI. You know, who knows how AI is going to change. But I think a lot of margin businesses, businesses that rely on buy and sell margins to survive are probably going to be impacted by AI, either the people that are better at using those tools to figure out like the right amount of margin where they can be much more precise with offers and still make money and just do it at a larger scale.

So like, you know, a mom and pop kind of land operator, they've got to buy a property at 50, 55 cents, 60 cents to really make it feel like it's worth it for the risk. But a you know, if there was some sort of industrial scale partner that is running these AIs to understand margins very, very precisely, they could run it at 90%, you know, 10 % margin and still make money if they're doing it at a certain scale. And I don't know if that's all gonna happen.

land is very, it's different obviously than houses because it's so varied. It's so varied and there's so many little things about it that could make it worth more or worth less. It's really hard. I mean, even with visual stuff or like even if you're just using like AI imagery analysis, you still can't tell everything about it. You can't tell all the soils. You can't tell. There's so many different things you can't tell. So there's always going to be that aspect of it's hard for an AI or for a computer program to really understand the true value. And then there's the relationship piece, which

Obviously, you know, some people are never going to sell to that corporate giant that is that is doing this type of thing. They are going to want to sell to you, you know, somebody who can build that relationship that they can trust that they can shake hands with. All that to say, I have no idea.

Clay Hepler (48:17)
Yeah, that's good.

That's good. Retweet, retweet. You know, we were talking about this. know I kind of hit Justin with when we were together is very, I don't know if it's doomsday, right? But it was like very like clear. This is where I think it's going to go. And the reality is, what AI does is it does shrink margins, right? Intellectual, financial,

base margins, right? You can think of it as simple as a chat GPT can shrink your attorney that you were paying on $250, $300 an hour to help you write a contract. Now you can get it blessed by the attorney, but everything gets streamlined in that way. And so what happens is the people that make the money on the edge, everything compresses. Now as markets get more sophisticated over time,

You look at large corporations, for an example, it's like Amazon, right? Amazon, their margins are razor thin, but they do such volume that they can continue to have their business grow and grow and grow, right? So I think that you'll, this is just completely conjecture, not based on anything other than this is my opinion. So don't like change your business based on this, right?

But you know, there are that there will be the volume shops that are very, very sophisticated. And they have enough capital, cheap enough capital, and they can buy and sell at certain numbers. And then there's going to be the the more sophisticated operators, right. And Justin and I are kind of working on something in the background that's personal. That's like, I think this is the next wave. Right. But I think the middle market because of the efficiency of markets over time.

will collapse. Well, there will be more opportunities, but the cost to acquire a deal on a national scale will be, unless you're like a really good operator will collapse. Now people have been saying this about houses, you know, for years, right? Like virtual wholesaling doesn't work. And then you get to see the guy that's doing, you know, in 50 markets and absolutely crushing it or gal, right? So I think that take everything that Justin and I say with a grain of salt.

And at the end of the day, it's your personal resolve that gets you through the next five to 10 years. Because we don't know what's going to happen. We know that life is going to accelerate. And so what's the most important thing that you can do is keep an open and flexible mind. If you want to stay in this business for the long term, you have to be flexible. You can no longer be the scatter shot. I talk about this all the time on, the I actually talked about this in my landlender today, right?

And by the way, if you're interested in getting a land letter every week where I talk about what I'm doing in my business and kind of some high level thoughts, you can sign up below in the podcast notes. But I talked about like, how do I go 5X this year? Right? And for some people it could be how do I survive this year? Right? And it's always about getting better at what you currently do. And so how do you stay alive and continue to be 5Xing and 10Xing?

You work with quality people,

Justin Piche (51:38)
you

Clay Hepler (51:40)
you get better, you hang around quality people. This is a people game, right? And so in order to stay solvent, in order to survive, it's all about people. And so I think the emotional intelligence, the ability to learn, the flexibility of mind is gonna enable you to be successful. And this is the same stuff, guys, that I'm telling myself. This is not like I'm sitting here and professing that this is what you should do. Like I tell myself the same thing.

Because I look out in my business and I say, hey, where are we gonna be over the next year or two years, three years? I'm making a huge bet right now. Justin and I both are, we're making a massive bet. And a bet that I would go all in on because I believe it's the future. But you gotta be willing to have that conviction, right? And know, hey, this could mess up. Just like when I started this business,

Justin Piche (52:33)
Mm-hmm

Clay Hepler (52:34)
I'm just scattershotting things. So I know that was a lot of thoughts, guys. In sum, it's really just about the quality versus the quantity. It's about refining processes, getting the right people on your team. It's about doing business as business should be done and being, flexible at the times. I think that'll keep you solvent in the next five to 10 years and successful.

Justin Piche (52:59)
Yeah, I agree. What are the things that, I mean, everybody kind of talks about, like, what are the jobs that AI is going to replace? It's never going to replace. And I really don't think it can, like in-person styles, like sales, like sales. If you're really good at selling things, you're not really going to get replaced by AI. I mean, that's always going to be there. People are people. People need interaction. People need relationships. People need, people do business with people they trust.

So people skills, emotional intelligence, like being able to talk to folks, being able to like communicate well, to do partnerships or whatever, negotiate sales. Like those are really good skills to have kind of going into the next five to 10 years in my opinion.

Clay Hepler (53:42)
I agree.

Well, dude, we're coming to the end of the hour here. And I just wanted to open the floor up any other last parting thoughts for us before we end the podcast today.

Justin Piche (54:00)
No, man. Merry Christmas. I probably aren't going to be on a call again before, maybe we will. Are we going to do next next Tuesday, Christmas Eve? We'll see. come on, let's go. I know, I know. I'm the same. There's no way my wife's going let me do that. anyway.

Clay Hepler (54:08)
No way dude, no way my wife just...

Honey, is it okay if we end at six o'clock on Christmas

Eve?

Justin Piche (54:20)
Yeah.

my gosh. Yeah, man, Merry Christmas. No, it's been, it's been, I really enjoyed Pittsburgh and I'm looking forward to the next time we meet. Hopefully I can meet Kara. I don't know where that would be.

Clay Hepler (54:34)
Yeah, well, no, I

think you and I are both going to be at Drew Haney's event in December. She'll be there.

Justin Piche (54:42)
Okay,

in the summer, I'm gonna we'll see, we'll see I kind of I pitch it to my wife and she's like looked at me like seriously, another another event. I missed it this year because I was in Europe, we were traveling in Europe for the whole summer. So I missed his event. And like I seriously considered flying back for it. I wanted to go so bad. And this year, I know we're gonna we're planning on doing some sort of a road trip vacation this summer.

Clay Hepler (54:48)
Haha

Justin Piche (55:07)
going up to Washington area, spend some time with some friends and kind of do some camping, hiking. But maybe that'll bring us right through Colorado end of June. We'll see. We also have the, there's so many other things, man. Life is busy with three kids, so.

Clay Hepler (55:18)
haha

Yeah, do you see? Yeah, yeah. Long

story short, you have the privilege, right? You have the privilege to do that. You can say yes or no, and it's not based on financial obligations. It's based on familiar obligation, which is a really good, really good thing, really good problem to have.

Justin Piche (55:33)
Yeah, familiar, time. that's

we're going to put my priority. That's right. That's right.

Clay Hepler (55:41)
All right, well guys, thanks for listening to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. As always, make sure to, when you put the reviews below to include my name first. No, no, no. So please rate, review, and subscribe. Let us know that you're really liking this podcast. Again, 1 % of the people that listen to this podcast rate, review, and subscribe.

Justin Piche (55:42)
Sweet man. Well, as you guys know, you do it.

Clay Hepler (56:05)
to this podcast. Guys, this is really what we can ask you to, this is a benefit for us and this is the one asset we have on this. We are not going to sell anything on the show. It's really about talking every single week and bringing value to you to help you scale your business and help you win the ground game. So the gentleman's agreement is just post down below, give us a review and rate and subscribe so that we can continue to get the

ground game podcast

Justin Piche (56:32)
Yeah, well said.

Clay Hepler (56:32)
Until next time.

Justin Piche (56:34)
All right, Until next time. See ya.