Episode 15: How to scale with quality and crush your 2025 goals

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the ground game podcast. This is Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:07)
And this is Justin Piche, and we're here to teach you how to win the ground game.

Clay Hepler (00:23)
As we are preparing for New Year's Eve today, we are recording on New Year's Eve. You know what's something I've realized? People will say Happy New Year's with an S. Happy New Year's instead of Happy, it's actually Happy New Year. And for years I said like Happy New Year's with an S, but it's like that's grammatically incorrect. It's actually Happy New Year.

Justin Piche (00:50)
We're going to talk about grammar stuff for the longest time. I don't remember. It must have been in elementary school. I got corrected because I said exclamation mark. And I think a teacher has corrected me and said, no, no, no, it's exclamation point and it's question mark. But that's not necessarily true. Exclamation mark is a totally valid punctuate. Like that's the normal American way to say it. Exclamation point, I think, is more of like a British thing.

But for my whole life, every time I've ever heard somebody say exclamation mark, I've always thought in my head, I don't correct people because I'm not like a rude person. it turns out I would have been incorrect, I would have been wrong if I corrected somebody to tell them that that's not how you say it. I looked it up the other day and I was like, oh, my whole life I thought it was this one way and it's totally a separate way.

Clay Hepler (01:28)
Hahaha

Dude, I love like the hacks or the little tactics of things, whether it's, you know, just like I remember a couple of years ago, I learned this thing. It's called the doorway drill, which is essentially like you walk through a doorway and you like, you create a habit of like walking into a room more charismatically. It was from the Jordan Harbacher show. Ended up never really following the habit, but those types of like habits.

or tactics like waking up early, like these meta habits that are really helpful or like interesting grammatical ways of speaking that really allow you to communicate more clearly or this little like party tricks. Like I know this homonym or something like that. I've always found this really fascinating. But today we're not really going to do our normal, as you know, we're not going to do our normal ground game podcast kind of structure.

Right? Instead, we're going to do a focus on my business and a New Year's resolution and a realization that I made that I really think the listeners are going to benefit from. Now, for those of you who are subscribers to the land letter, you will really notice a lot of similarities between what I'm about to talk about and the land letter that came out on it would be

January 3rd, Friday, January 3rd, because a lot of the core concepts are actually in that land letter. But I'm going to discuss a little bit about our pivot in 2025 and how we actually figured this pivot out. Right. So a lot of times I find new entrepreneurs and new people in land space, some of our private clients, they really just focus on, I want to throw out this big goal.

And one of the things that they do is they won't do what you do well, Justin. You talk about this a lot and I do as well. It's like, you know, goal setting to the now. Like what does it actually take to hit your goals? Right. So there's a really important part of, you know, casting your goals out and then actually goal setting back to now and saying, Hey, how many leads do I need? How many offers do you need? How many qualifications? How many letters do I need to send out marketing? Whatever. That's really important, especially when you're starting out.

when you're kind of an immature stage of a business, let's say you're one, maybe even you're two, for a lot of the people that you and I discussed, but as you grow, you get into your two, three, or even just a higher level of maturity, maybe we'll say a more mature operator as defined by someone who really tracks their metrics, something that really understands and has robust systems, you start to when you cast out your goals,

The way that you get the most benefit is not doing the exercise of, how do I actually get to this goal, right? How many calls do I need to make? Although that's helpful, it's actually looking back. It's actually reflecting, right? And so this is something that I believe is a core part of the people that are most successful. Navy SEALs do it. They call it after action reviews. You know, the top football teams, basketball teams, professional teams,

They're always watching game film, right? Why are they doing this? Because you can learn more by reflecting than you can by projecting, right? And so what we did recently in my business is we actually reflected. We reflected on our past quarter. And of those who've been following the ground game, they know that we hit our goals. We hit our profitability goals, our projected profit goals this quarter. But as we dove into the numbers,

We didn't hit our leads goal. We didn't hit our qualifications and our offer goal. And so frankly, what I found is we actually got lucky. It kind of stings to admit this as a CEO, hey, we got lucky. Even though we hit our goals, we got lucky, but it's important. And so what we did is I started analyzing, I remember the excuses that I was hearing, and I remember even talking to you about this, Justin, on the podcast. You know, it's the holiday season.

November, December, it's just a little bit harder. And I used that as this, it was kind of a mask that I put over to not actually analyze and look at the things that were important. And so as we reflected back, we started to see some things that were really, really interesting. It was very painful, I'll tell you that, but I said, hey, I talked to my outbound manager and I said, hey, I want you to go deep, I want you to focus on a couple more metrics.

to actually track to give us a better idea of the people that were the performers because we were just qualifying the value of an outbound performer. And this can be, guys, this can be in any department, right? This could be for any statistics, right? What seems like the right statistic on the surface or the right metric on the surface that drives results in your business might not actually be the one that actually does. And we found that leads per day, which is what we are talking about,

quite often this past quarter, was too basic of a metric for us to actually see the performance of our outbound team. What we found was it was a combination of the quality and the types of leads produced that correlated more to what matters, which is profit. We get caught up after we get from level two to level one to level two. A lot of times, dude, we get caught up in

I just need to track metrics, right? I need to track more metrics. But if we track metrics and they don't tell us what we need to know, it's kind of like trying to measure the speed of a car by how much gasoline it uses, right? It's just an ineffective way to do it. And what matters in our business in this specific, what we're talking about now is profitability. And so what we saw was I was tracking too basic of a metric and this was my fault as a CEO is saying, hey, this leads per day is the

is the highest correlation. But there were a couple more things that we need to focus on, quality leads per day. Now you might say, hey Clay, of course man, like I've been listening to the Ground Game podcast and you and Justin talk about standards and quality and all this stuff. But this took us three weeks and 40 hours of dedicated effort to actually reflect properly and find the things that most matter.

And so we can find these lead measures, these lead metrics that indicate that we're on the right track. I think that the potency of a business is directly correlated to the depth and the breadth of the metrics that it tracks, right? That are actually related to profitability. Now here's how you can actually think about this, right? So imagine you are, you're targeting

direct mail campaign in a certain area. And you send out a bunch of direct mail and you say, on average, the quantity of direct mail that I send, it's every 5,000 letters. We hear this all the time, 5,000, 8,000, 2,000 letters to get a deal. Right? But what we've done is we've looked and said, okay, of all of the deals that we've done in 2024, what were the most profitable?

What was the demographic data? What was the metrics? What was the time that they were in our CRM? How old are these people? I mean, all these additional data points so that then we can target these types of people in the future. You're gonna see how this kind of dictates our strategy in 2025. But let's go back to the example that I was just making about direct mail, right? And Justin, feel free to jump in here at any point.

Justin Piche (09:40)
No, keep going. will,

yeah, I will jump in.

Clay Hepler (09:42)
But the example of direct mail is this. So a lot of times you'll hear, especially if you're starting out as a new investor, it's 5,000 pieces of direct mail to get a deal. I would propose that that is too simple. Because what type of deal are you getting?

and what type of targeting are you focusing on? Right? Really the mature businesses understand that that lever is just level one. Level two is the people that I target, I know that if I target these types of people, it's 400 letters.

It's 600 letters, but it's a different type of letter. It's a higher quality type of letter. And they also understand, and I talk to people about this all the time, they DM me about this all the time, A-B testing mailers. So they might say, I just send out one type of mailer. I just send out range offers or blind offers or neutral offers or whatever. And I said, well, many split tests have you done?

And they look at me and they're like, wait, what is split testing? Right? And it's really, it's kind of hard with direct mail because the feedback loop is longer. But what we know is if we're sending out any type of marketing, we want to look a couple of layers deeper. Right? So you start with tracking your normal metrics, which is what we talked about. Level one, tracking normal metrics. Level two is getting deeper in the metrics. What other things can we track? Demographic data, quality of leads, types of leads.

that we can use to target more thoroughly in the future. And so if we go back to the example a little bit earlier that we were doing with the cold calling team, what we found was two of our outbound marketing team members were like the Michael Jordans. I mean, they were submitting a decent quantity of lead, but their quality of lead in terms of the qualifications

Like this is a qualified prospect as defined by our lead manager and the quantity of offers was significantly higher than their team members. And so we looked at that and we said, okay, so these two guys, and it was guys, are performing significantly better than our other team members. Why? And so what this did was we were going to double

our outbound team, right, in Q1, Q2. And what we found is we're now gonna double down on them. We're gonna focus on quality, not quantity. We're gonna figure out how our other team members can be like Mike, right? They can be like Mike and they can imitate these other cold callers or outbound callers, right? And so,

Now, the goal in Q1 in 2025 is higher quality callers. I was telling my wife this, and I was saying, hey, the mindset as you scale this business, So anything below like a million and a million and half a year, right? It's sort of like you need to do the volume gain, right? And then at that point, what you need to do is you need to prioritize.

You either prioritize, there two ways to prioritize. You cannot live within one or the other. What happens is you get anxiety, you're constantly stressed, and you're either going volume game or you're quality game. And you see people try to make this difference too early in the process. They're like, dude, some of these guys are like, hey, I wanna scale out of my business. I'm making $40,000 a month. I said, bro, what are you scaling out of? There's nothing to scale out of.

And so at this point in your business, right, when you're between one, 1.5, and wherever, whenever you are in that level, you have the experience, you've probably done maybe a subdivide or two, you maybe have done a development or two, maybe you partner with someone to do something like this. And what happens is then you have to make a decision. You got to make a quality decision. Now, this is how we're defining our 2024 or 2025 strategy.

Because we look back and we said, we thought we needed to just keep getting bigger and bigger. And there's a famous, know, Hewlett Packard, David Packard said, more businesses die of indigestion than starvation.

And what that means for the land businesses, people add too many team members too soon. They have a zombie crew of global talent that they just hired because someone on the internet said, you should hire more people when in reality you should focus on quality. Even when you're in a lower quality shop. And so they have this business that they're just trying to get bigger and bigger and bigger, but they're not at the point. They haven't reflected. They haven't seen what works.

They haven't casted a vision. In our case, we've reflected. We've seen what works. And so now in 2025, what we're seeing is quality beats quantity. Like I was laughing about earlier, I was telling my wife about this. And for me, a guy that's a direct marketing guy, a sales guy, like I'm getting out there like belly to belly with the sellers. It's like trying to remove this mindset is like shoveling a driveway full of snow with a spoon.

Right. It's just like, working, I'm trying to get this out. I'm every day, I'm like, I should add someone. I should add more callers, right. Or send out more mail. And in reality, that you got to make a decision and stick with it. Right. And so we make this decision, the volume shop, which is more headcount, more marketing, a higher volume, right. More people. Right. Or you do the quality. Reduce headcount, increase standards, focus on quality. Both of them work.

Both of them make money. It just depends on what type of business you're trying to build. And so when we looked out in 2025, when I did, said, I want to do business with people who focus on a quality shot. You know, there's a unique level of stress that comes with being a volume person. A unique level when you have $100,000 or $200,000 overhead, right? And you're sitting there and you're like, man, if I don't sell this deal.

going under, right? And so at that point, when you make this decision to go quality or quantity, which we made the decision of quality, we want to forex our business in 2025, you have to do things categorically different. The way we went from year one to year two is 3X, we 3Xed and we did it through volume.

But now we have to do it by focusing on exponential relationships and massive, massive deals. And so when you do something like that, like I was talking about removing the old mindset with like a little spoon, what you have to do is you have to set a level of standards. This is what we've done, right? I'm not saying you have to do this. Let me rephrase that. This is what the type of standards that I set, right? So in order for us to forex this year,

In order for us to take our business from where we are to where we want to be, we got to focus on doing everything we do exponentially better. Increasing our level of detail in level and detail of tracking our metrics. metrics as defined by things that make us money, right? Things that make us money.

increasing the standards for production for each of our team members.

Spending 10x more time on the front end targeting our dream landowners, not sending scattershot marketing. Increasing our standards for new hires using the Amazon hiring mentality. They need to be 50 % better in skill set and 50 % more of a core value fit than our current team.

Justin Piche (18:08)
The old bar razors.

Bar razors.

Clay Hepler (18:14)
Bar Razors

guys, Clay here interrupting you in the middle of me talking for another part of me talking. 1 % of the people that listen to this podcast rate, review, and subscribe. Guys, it is a five minute thing. Just go below, say, I really like Clay. He's incredible, he gets great feedback. Justin's okay too. But just leave a little review below. Make sure to shout out to me. Thank you so much. And back to the regular scheduled programming.

Aligning 80 % of our actions to will this get us more customers, wait and make them worth more. Setting a minimum profit of 40,000 for all deals. Now, one thing that I didn't add to the land letter that I wanted to talk about on the ground game was partnerships, collaboration over competition.

I'm reading this incredible, incredible book right now by Adam Grant called Give and Take, think it's called. And basically he analyzes people that are in the professional space, know, basketball players, I mean, across a wide range of professions. He talks about the difference between givers, takers, and matchers, right? Givers are people that...

give in abundance, and they give without an expectation of a return. I'm giving you, I'm helping you out without any expectation of return. Takers are people that it's always tit for tat. I'm gonna give you something and I expect something back. And oftentimes takers do get ahead in the short term, a year, two years, three years, but over a period of time,

Adam Grant says that they actually don't. You can see the people that really over the period of their entire life, from life satisfaction to overall success are the givers, right? The matches are people that kind of go like, actually, tit for tat, right? So people say, hey, you give to me, I give to you. The giver is the disposition is someone who gives fully, right, to another person without any expectation. And I'd like to highlight my co-host here.

Justin. Justin, the reason why we're sitting here today is because we've been on Twitter and Justin got on a call with me and I was shocked by how transparent he was and honest he was and just willing to help, just willing to be, just get on a call with a random guy off the internet. And it was an incredible conversation. I ended up sending him some stuff twice.

Justin Piche (20:54)
You

Yeah,

a kettlebell and a bottle of whiskey. was surprised. like, I came home and there was like a box and it was like so heavy. And I was like, what on earth is this? And I saw this from you. was like, my gosh. It was very kind of you. It made an impression. It's like, that was very kind. It showed me that you valued my time, even though obviously I didn't want anything or wasn't asking for anything, but I really appreciated it.

Clay Hepler (21:01)
Yeah

Right, right, and then the bottle of whiskey was, it was a bottle of whiskey aged in a submarine.

Justin Piche (21:31)
Yeah, Jefferson's,

right, Jefferson's Ocean, I think, is the whiskey or age on a ship, age on a ship as it went around around the world.

Clay Hepler (21:34)
Yeah.

He's on a ship and it was,

yeah, was just in, as an ex-submariner. what I'm saying is that collaboration with people, whether it's you pay to play, right, you pay to be coached or you find a partner, is your way of accelerating, right? And we've talked about this so many times on the podcast, but as I've developed,

And as a professional, I've realized more and more that it's better to have a part of a watermelon than a whole grape. And it's also more fun.

Justin Piche (22:15)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you get to learn more. You know, maybe I can like just jump in and comment on some of this stuff that you've been saying. I really resonate with the quality over quantity thing. I have coached a few people and been through a lot of like land coaching myself and I've had a ton of conversations with people about kind of the philosophy behind scaling.

Clay Hepler (22:19)
Right?

Justin Piche (22:41)
a business, specifically the land of business. And I think like there certainly is a place for quantity. think there's there's you need to like you said, there's there's multiple ways to make money. You can do it quantity wise or you can do it quality wise. But I think what you're saying is absolutely the much more powerful kind of directions someone should go, which is the the quantity needs to be at a certain level to get deal flow that you need. But then

Once you have the players in place and you have the systems in place, you need to heavily focus on the quality to increase the deal size that you're doing, increase the profit per deal that you're doing, double down on the marketing that works, the customers that are the ones that you actually want to focus on where you're spending a small amount of marketing but getting a hugely outsized return on. that's exactly where we are. In fact, we haven't done our year review or our

annual planning, unfortunately, I couldn't fit it in this year. We're doing it in a week and a half, all day Friday. We're going to just, the management team is going to just be on zoom for eight hours and probably have to do a follow on session the next Friday to finish it out. But I've already been in conversation with the team and told them exactly like we have the team size, the team structure, the good players in place to easily double our business this year.

We do not need a single another person. We just need to focus on the things that worked this year and double down on them and upscale everyone to be doing what the A players are doing. And that's, I'm, man, I am super pumped because, one of the metrics we talked about for my quarter when we stood, I think a podcast too, we went into our quarterly goals was on bordering, on bordering, on bordering, on boarding and hiring a U S based salesperson. Well, this person is

fantastic, has a huge energy for what she's doing, really passionate, really wants to work in a company like mine and is quitting her full-time job to come in full-time in the company to upscale the heck out of the acquisitions team. Both from a sales training perspective, a follow-up perspective, I'm super excited about it because it's one of the things that, you know, when you get to, I guess, the scale of my business is my...

I was just reflecting on this. What am I spending most of my time doing right now? Most of my time right now is spent on funding relationships, investor relationships, financing, large deal partnerships. That's where most of my time is spent. I don't have the bandwidth anymore to dive in deep, upscaling the acquisitions team, diving deep into the KPIs. I need to rely on my team to be able to do that. I can set the vision. I can set the priorities. I can...

tell them exactly how we need to do this and just get everyone rowing in that direction. But I really need to rely on my team to do those things so that I can focus on the larger deals, the partnerships, all that kind of stuff. And just to comment on partnerships, I feel exactly the same way. I consider myself a giver. I think that when people call me and people ask me, just like we had that conversation, I guess almost two years ago now,

When people ask me for help, like, I'm very transparent. I want them to succeed. I want to give them the tools or give them what's worked for me. And I think people can tell that. And so what has happened is it's resulted in quite a few partnerships for me over the last quarter of this year, like four, six, six, like multi-six figure or seven figure profit deals that are split, that are shared with partners and with investors. It's like, I'm going to make all that money, but I don't need to make all that money, right?

I want to be involved in a lot of deals. have high capacity to do deals. I want to help raise other people up and upskill them with the things that I've learned. And people can tell that. They can tell when you're authentic and they want to work with you. yeah, I mean, I agree 100 % agree. Collaboration over competition.

Clay Hepler (26:42)
Yeah, guys, and just you know, Justin, his business is not doing 50,000 a month. So don't think about trying to upscale your team and get out of the day to day yet. So the question is like, it's really fun for us to talk about this. And the reality is it does require an immense amount of work. Right. And Justin's in year three, going to be in year four. And I'm year two inching up on year three here in my business.

And so we catch these incredible visions out here, but what happens if you get a deal that falls below your standards? Right? I was saying a $25,000 profit deal, our minimum is going to be 40, right? In 2025. This is when this stuff gets put in it on the test, right? It's not when you're sitting on a podcast and talking to a dear friend of yours, right? It's when you're sitting and looking and you're saying,

This is a $20,000 deal, it's an easy flip. Do you take it, do you not take it? It does not matter when you're talking about in public. It matters when you're tested. This is when the actual work happens. One of the things I've been talking a lot about with my team is, and it's more of a reflection for myself, is that if you are not...

getting more customers, getting more clients, making them worth more.

then you're not doing work. We can define productivity in the land space as producing opportunities, outcomes that are profit producing. Now you can make an argument that increasing your aesthetic and user experience on your notion is gonna make you money.

but it's really hard for me to find a world in which that's true. Everyone kind of knows that when they're actually doing things that make money. I even caught myself this afternoon as we're, it's before 2025, so I'm giving myself a little bit of a break, right? But I was doing a little bit of work, wasn't actually not work for about two hours. And I got caught up in this looking at my cashflow forecast.

And I was like, after looking at it, was like, why am I looking at my cashflow forecast right now? Like, I know what I need to do. Like, why am I doing this? And so even people like, you know, even Justin and I, infallible as we are, we get caught up in this stuff, right? And so people don't achieve, this is for our listeners, you will not achieve your goals in 2025 if you start to make exceptions.

and I made an exception today and I caught myself. It was two hours later, so I wouldn't give myself credit for that. But imagine if that didn't happen for you this year. Justin, I really appreciate everyone that has devoted the time, the energy and effort over the past quarter, a little bit longer, to the ground game. I we have put it out all on the field. And for the people that have listened to us, there's so many people that can do it. You can do it.

You can do this, you can increase the quality of your business. You can take it to your next level. You can get your dream business this year. And the thing is, no one's gonna believe in you more than you believe in yourself. And last week, I was sitting down with our team doing our quarterly planning. Like Justin was talking about it, he was doing it January 10th. And we were talking about this. I was like, guys.

We have these big goals and I always want my team members to define their goals because I believe authorship is ownership. If I tell them what to do, if I tell them you should do this goal, you should have this goal, it's so much less effective than having them author their own goals, their own outcomes, their own key results, their own tactics and strategies for the quarters. And one of my sales guys, my acquisition manager, said,

hey, you know, I really resonate with this. I don't have any children, but I want to work in a way that my unborn children would be proud of me. And for a dad of an eight month old, that really hit me. Right, if you have kids, if you're listening to this and you have kids, would they be proud of you as a father or a mother by you putting these massive goals out there, like I'm talking about today, right? Putting these massive goals out there.

And as soon as it got hard, you just gave up. You made exceptions. You said, you know what, I'm gonna take this $15,000 deal instead of holding those standards that you had. You know what, Clay said on the podcast, know, it's 50 % better skill set, 50 % better core value fit. This person's like a 10 % better skill set, 20 % better core value fit, but I really need someone. Everyone kind of, you kind of know, right? Everyone kind of knows

what it really takes. I don't think that your kids, my eight month old son, can't really talk, but if he could, he would look at me and say, know dad, you're so much better than that. Because young kids, see so much in you. They always look at you and they're like, you're Superman. You're Superman to you. Or mom and dad, you're Superman to you. And that's from the example that you set.

And so use these goals this year, your 2025 goals. Set the example for them. Whether it's your children, whether it's your partner, your lover, your partner in business.

So set the new standard this year. So here's how this actually looks. I'm gonna give you a step by step for how this would actually look. Look at your business and focus and figure out what pulls to plug to see where you actually fell down last quarter or year. When asking it, ask yourself, is this what a business owner 5X or 10X by size would do? Would they stop at one metric or two metric or five metrics?

Or would they go to 10 metrics? Would they look deeply? Would they spend three weeks and 40 hours dedicating to looking through the metrics like we did? Step two, analyze what you found to plug the leaks. Stuff's gonna come up. And you wanna plug those leaks, right? Reflection is very helpful at this stage. Now, if you're a new investor and you're listening to this,

You might say, this is great, but how do I reflect when I have a new business and I haven't been tracking numbers? Because I haven't been really listening to the podcast, even though I've been listening to it. And Justin and Clay have always said, track my KPIs, but I haven't yet. Well, this is your sign to track your KPIs, number one. Number two, talk to your other people in the space. Message Justin and I on social media, hey, what's a good offers per leads rate?

or leads per offer rate. What's a good profit per deal? What's a good mailers to all these metrics? Ask us, reach out to us on social media. Ask your friends, people that are in the trenches with you. This is where collaboration over competition really helps. So if you don't have that visibility in your business before you set your goals and you want to reflect, you want to analyze, you want to benchmark, then you can reach out to people like Justin and I or go.

and connect with other people in the space to plug the leaks. Number three, it's set the standard, It's set that massive goal. We're gonna 4X. We 3X, now we're gonna 4X. also, guys, hey, one other thing. Just make sure we wanna 4X the amount of people that review the podcast and mention me versus Justin.

Justin Piche (35:03)
you

Clay Hepler (35:04)
No, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. No, I'm not actually kidding. No, set a massive goal, raise your standards, create departmental and individual KPIs to hold your team and yourself accountable to results. Notice the difference. You have the goal, you have the standards, and the departmental transaction coordination, acquisitions, marketing, departmental KPIs that feed up from individual KPIs. And you might say, well Clay, if I have one transaction coordinator, what's the difference?

Right? Can I have just the KPIs of my transaction coordinator? Isn't that good enough? Well, we want to think of this as individual departments. There are health metrics on a departmental level. There are the KPIs that feed up to the individual KPIs that feed up to that. But there are other things that we want to be tracking on a departmental level that maybe are influenced by the individual KPIs. They're a product of the individual KPIs.

but they're not necessarily the individual employees' KPIs, right? And then step four is when it gets hard, smile and know this is where the work starts. Guys, good luck 2025. I'm gonna leave it over to my co-host as I finish up this, but good luck in 2025. I believe in every single one of you.

in part because you know if you're listening to this podcast you're one of the very few people that are really trying to learn and really trying to change your life and that's a really incredible thing. Land investing changed my life as many of you know. Little over two years ago when I got a call from my wife the day before Thanksgiving and she was like hey man like ships ships we're sinking like ships going down baby you got to figure something out right and for a lot of you

This is a door to a new world. It is an opportunity to change your life. It's already changed Justin and my life. I wish every single one of you guys an incredible 2025.

Justin Piche (37:14)
well said. Man, I'm really excited about 2025. So this was an episode of Clay's reflection and incredible advice on how to really raise the bar in your business and focus on quality. I want to spend maybe a little bit of time just like thinking forward to the next year about like what I'm excited about in the business. And right now it's really just bigger deals and partnerships. That's that is

That is really what I'm the most excited about. I've done a little bit of pre-planning in preparation for our team meeting where the whole leadership team is going to get together for 2025 goals, a 2024 reflection, and first quarter planning. But I don't have any plans on adding team members this year. I really don't want to hire anyone else. I want to just double the output of the existing team.

improve the processes, not have any of the misses. know, one of the things that I think is really important that Clay said is like, he said, you need to look at your business and plug the holes that you currently have. That is so important to look at what is going wrong and be brutally honest with yourself of what you aren't doing well and write it down. Like actually looking at what you aren't doing well and writing it down and getting a plan together to solve that issue.

to improve on that issue. It's one of the reasons why I love the EOS framework is because every week in our level 10 meeting, the leadership team sits down and we look at ourselves honestly and we think about all the things that have gone wrong in the past week or the past month or the past quarter that we need to solve. And we just brainstorm. And it's just an hour straight every week of thinking about all the issues we have and then spending some time thinking about how to improve them, putting tasks or action items on the team to improve them.

And your year-end planning, one of the things you're supposed to do in EOS is to go through all of the outstanding issues that you have that you have not yet solved and solve all of them in that meeting, every single one of them. It can be a really long, brutal, challenging meeting, but that is plugging the holes, right? That is plugging the holes. know, actually I got something out of this. I've been talking to my data marketing person for a while about

getting more granular on our acquisition metrics. Because at this point, we have more than a million contacts uploaded in our CRM. We have hundreds of thousands of people that we've communicated over the last several years. We should know really well what our ideal demographic is, what our ideal county or zip code, we should know all of that. We should know where we've had the most success, where we've had the least success and be able to

spend the same amount of marketing dollars in a much more effective way to get more out of it. There's no excuse for not looking at that for me, right? I know a lot of folks that are maybe listening may not have all of that data yet, but I have years worth of exceptional data that I should be able to go back and look at. So maybe Clay's little fire where that's going to be a big talking point for me in this annual planning is the same kind of focus on improving the marketing quality by using the data that we already have.

Clay Hepler (40:37)
I think it's interesting, as you hear Justin and I talking about this, you hear us talk a lot about relationships, right? Whether it's team relationships with employees or partnership relationships. And again, very trite, right? Very, very cliche. But the reality is, this is a people game, right? And you can get so far,

not being a people person. But one of the things that I'm really focusing on in 2025 is just becoming better at interacting with people, being more deliberate, thoughtful about my communication style. because I know this is a people game and having that giver, the go giver mindset and the giver mentality. Because at the end of the day, that's really the mentality that helps the whole industry get lift up.

The whole point of the podcast, the GroundGame podcast, was for Justin and I to be transparent about our businesses, how we're thinking, what we're doing, seven-figure operators. And the reality is we have a lot of stuff that we want to work on. And we are probably talking about the same things that you're talking about in your business. We've to have better people. We've got to train them better. We've got to focus on them better. We've got to invest in them better.

And we're just doing it at a little bit of a different level. So we really hope today was beneficial To help you guys. This is a little bit of a shorter episode But we hope that it was beneficial for you guys to think through your 2025 plan if you've done it already maybe rethink it through and if you haven't done it already this be a an indication a universal indication for you to dig deep and think through

What are the biggest needle movers for your business in 2025?

Justin Piche (42:30)
All right. Well, as usual, we've said it on here before, but this has been, I guess it's the last day of the year. So why not say like I've had, I've looked forward to recording this every week. Like I really, really look forward to getting on with you, Clay, and just talking to them, talking shop and trying to provide value to everybody. And I hope you as the listeners have felt that. And if you have, give us a review.

We would really appreciate it. We've got a lot of good reviews from folks that have asked for different things or helped give us ideas for topics that y'all want us to discuss. And that really helps. We've got a lot of feedback from friends and other investors in the space that we're just being really transparent and it's helping them see ways they can improve their businesses. And my hope is that by us giving this information out that you guys would also be more giving with people.

Look for some strategic partnerships in your business. Look for people that you can partner with to take down different deals, bigger deals. I think that you'll find, like the book that Clay is reading, that when you give, you get back. You really do. When you give without expecting things back, you get back. This has been a really, really exciting and fun endeavor, and I'm super pumped for the ground game 2025. Super pumped.

Clay Hepler (43:51)
Yeah, man. Pump for the ground game 2025. Pump for our thing that we're working on in 2025. And for our listeners, again, we appreciate you guys listening in. Have a happy new year. Justin and I are both in your corner. We're hoping that you guys crush 2025. You hope you finish up your year 2024 better than what you anticipated because you were able to find the ground game podcast in Q4. And until next year,

We will talk to you guys soon.

Hahaha

Justin Piche (44:25)
Oh, man.