Episode 17: Scaling your land business strategically

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

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

Clay Hepler (00:23)
So today we're going to talk about something that many land investors, I believe struggle with. In fact, this week I was talking to a private coaching client and I was saying how impressed I was with his business. You know, he had, not going to disclose the number of gross profit, but in his first year, year and a half, he had an impressive number that was there.

Right. And I was just talking to him and I said, dude, like you have done such an amazing job with what you currently have in your business. Right. Your profit looks great. You build an amazing business. You're scaling. It's exciting. And there's a lot of things that you're still doing that are going to hold you back from where you need to be. And so that's really the topic today, man. Like how do you go from the hustler

that is in your business, working on your business. Now you and I, I mean, we'll talk about this, but we work a lot still. I I love the work, I love building, it's amazing, it's exhilarating, and I'm not gonna stop doing it. But there is a level of tasks and what you're doing on a day-to-day basis that burns you out if you continue to do it. And so today we're gonna talk about how do you go from that hustler stage to the CEO stage.

Justin Piche (01:48)
Yep. Yeah. mean, there are so many, I think, and we've talked about this before on podcasts, but I reflect on this often. There's so much more to running a land flipping development off market lead, Jen dispositions team than I thought when I was getting into it. Right. And when I was getting into it, I thought, you know, I knew that I wanted a team, a small team, like let's get some more stuff done, leverage other people.

but I had no idea all of the things that had all of the plates that had to keep spinning to treat this as a true business and not just like, again, a side hustle or like something that I can just put in a ton of work myself and really scale it to what I wanted to see. And yeah, you can't like you totally can't. That's the thing. It's like, it's hard to say to people like you have to build a team. You don't like you could totally do this without a team, but there are limitations you're going to find and you may not be able to get to where you want to go.

And for some of us like me, I've got a lot of other obligations and I need to be able to focus on this business for an amount of time. And yeah, I mean, maybe a little more sometimes than I'd like, or at least that my wife would like, you know, it's a business that I own. like, you know, it doesn't stop, but there's no way I'd be able to achieve what I have achieved or what my goals are without setting up the rest of the team and acting as the CEO and being, making, being the vision setter, right?

Clay Hepler (02:58)
Hahaha

Justin Piche (03:13)
Holding the team accountable for what their objectives and responsibilities and outputs are There's just not enough. I don't there's not enough time in the day for me to enjoy my life not be totally burnt out and scale to where I want to scale

Clay Hepler (03:27)
You know, I think the, the nuance that I'm going to try to make today, I'm going to talk about Justin is probably different than what our listeners are going to be, well, Clay, like he's talking about something different than I want to anticipate. think a lot of people on podcasts will say, well, you got to scale yourself out of your business. Right. And I, I don't for our listeners, for our base that I know a lot of our listeners, that's not what you need to transition into.

But you do need to transition into a position in which your time is worth more. Right? And so the transition looks like if you leave for a week on vacation, you don't have to take a call. The transition looks like I'm no longer doing a lot of my administrative tasks. I'm focusing on tasks that actually grow my business and allows me to think strategically. And instead of always being in my business, I can work on it.

not to become the CEO that's like an investor, right? Like a founder investor that has that. I basically am not doing any of my day to day because frankly, you and I both know this in this business, you got to be clear in some serious cash, serious cash, four or $5 million a year to be able to kind of completely be out of it in the way that we run our businesses. Of course, there are different ways to run it, right? But in order to be completely out of the day to day and Justin, I don't want to do that. And so we're not going to talk.

or at least I don't want to do that. I know. can't speak for Justin. So I'm

Justin Piche (04:49)
Yeah,

yeah, I I really enjoy, like, just enjoy running the business and there are aspects of it I don't enjoy. And here's a perfect example, maybe to like color for the listeners, just to understand a recent thing for me that really like highlighted this. Bookkeeping, okay, like I haven't done my own bookkeeping, okay, I've hired a bookkeeper, but I recently got fired by my bookkeeper.

Clay Hepler (05:14)
Ha!

Justin Piche (05:14)
because

it was just complex. They're a complex set of books. You you're buying and selling properties across many states, generating owner finance notes, selling owner finance notes, outside investors. It gets complex. It gets a little complex. And so my bookkeeper just, it wasn't the right fit. And so he, we agreed to part ways. He sent me a letter, text. He's like, Hey man, I just can't do it anymore. So I'm onboarding a new bookkeeper. And one of the things I needed to do is I need to reconcile from like,

April all the way through the end of the year. Like I have to go in because I'm the one to know and I'm like, this is just insane. I don't have the time to think I not only don't have the time, but man, it is not a revenue driving activity for me to go in and reconcile every expense and income. And that is just not something you as a CEO are going to work on, right? That's a perfect. mean, that's just one item, but there's hundreds of items that are really similar to that. You should not be working on those things. You need to be focusing on

Clay Hepler (05:56)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (06:12)
things that you enjoy that drive revenue. That's where you need to focus your time as a CEO.

Clay Hepler (06:18)
Exactly. the main thing here is we all have a finite amount of time, right? And if we want to get hit our goals, it's not always about working harder, right? If you are not able to transition into a more CEO strategic role, you're bottlenecking your own growth. You're going to miss opportunities to make decisions because you have to be in there day to day doing reconciling the books. That sounds like

It sounds like I don't even want to go there. I don't even want to go there.

Justin Piche (06:50)
Yeah, I literally like it.

It invokes like a like an actual stress body response, thinking about all the real things I need to be working on that are going to grow the business and then think about how much time I if I were to be the one totally doing this, how much time and mental focus I need to put in there to actually look at the accounts and credit card bills and reach out to my team because my team is spending a bunch of money on different things. Like what was this like? That's not my like I cannot be doing that.

Clay Hepler (07:18)
Yeah. So in other words, what we're talking about is how do we transition from those tasks to the tasks of a CEO? And I think it actually starts first in the mindset, right? And not the mindset of I need to scale out of my business making $40,000 per year. But it's really about the mindset of it's okay if someone does a job for me that's 80 % correct.

Right? And that starts with, we're going to talk about the hiring ladder, which I talk about all the time, but someone that does something 80 % correct is oftentimes better than you doing it 100 % correct. And that's kind of like a known thing. A lot of people talk about it in entrepreneurial circles, but you can, you need to let go of the things. Maybe you're a salesperson. Like for me, one of the biggest things for me was actually letting go of the sales role. Cause I love sales. I'm really good at sales. And I know though, my role,

needs to be elevated in more in a managerial role and more of a strategic thinking role. And so it was a bottleneck of my growth to have to take all the sales calls, even though I might be able to close one more a month. I know that strategically, if I can think through the direction of the business, that's actually going to add more value in the short and long term. So the letting go of sort of the perfection and output of your team is one of the big mindset shifts.

transitioning from I need to execute tasks, like I have a to-do list, to a output-based thinking, right? So one of the big realizations I had in my business in 2024, Justin, was I don't hold my team accountable for responsibilities. I hold them accountable for outputs. And there's a huge difference there. Responsibilities is basically like you have to create a set of rules that

facilitated outcome, right, which is a franchise model. Like McDonald's says, this is how we do our French fries every single time, which is really helpful if you have a McDonald's multi billion dollar empire. But when you're in a small business, you expect your people on your team to be knowledge workers. And you'd be able to think through a problem. If we want to sell a property, we don't have to sell it the same way every time. As long as the output is the same, we can have a little bit of flexibility there. And so

Justin Piche (09:26)
you

Clay Hepler (09:36)
transitioning from a CEO to I need to complete these tasks because I validated myself in the past as an operator, as I'm the person that's willing to do, you know, sweep the floors to I need to be strategic about my time and focus on outputs and focus on what the biggest thing that I can do for my business is put someone in the right seat now. Or the biggest thing that I can do for my business is make the decision to go down and attack this niche or do this thing.

Justin Piche (10:01)
you

Clay Hepler (10:05)
And that is a completely different mindset shift than if I was just sitting in my business day to day working.

Justin Piche (10:12)
Yeah, helpful maybe framework for folks to think about responsibilities versus output, especially when it comes to your team is if anyone's ever tried to apply for a job, you've probably written a resume, right? And most people's instinct when writing a resume is to talk about what they were supposed to do or what their job responsibilities were. But nobody who is actually trying to hire someone really cares what your responsibilities were.

They wanna know what you actually accomplished and like what you actually did. Those are the outputs and that's what you need to focus on when it comes to your team and yourself. Not what they're responsible for, what are they doing? What is the expected output?

Clay Hepler (10:52)
That's a great point. That's a great point. So the mindset shift is rooted in that. Like as a CEO, what's my output? Well, if my business is driving more profit, like what can I do to contribute to that? And in as you grow, as you hire more people, as you go from the hustler to the CEO, your contribution can't be on the front lines. It has to be in a different role. And so you have to figure out what is that role that I can, what, how do I solve problems? You, you, you go from that.

to hole digger to problem solver, challenge remover, bottleneck remover. And that's a huge mindset shift. Do have anything to add Justin with mindset shifts of going from the hustler to a CEO?

Justin Piche (11:33)
No, no, we'll talk, we'll get more into it.

Clay Hepler (11:37)
Yeah, and then from there, one of the things that I always do with the people that I work with on a one-on-one basis is I have them track their time. A lot of times, the visibility of just knowing what am I actually doing is helpful enough for lot of people to say, okay, I need to shift my focus from doing these remedial tasks, these administrative tasks, into more of a strategic role, and it's an eye-opener. Very similar to if you're tracking your food.

If you want to change anything, you want to track it. And the way that we get visibility in what we're doing and how it contributes to our business growth is we figure out what is going on in our day to day. And a lot of times we're like, well, I just spent like 30 minutes talking to that person when in reality it was an hour and a half because you had to prep for the call, you had to get a recap on the call, you had to send a follow up email. There's a lot of stuff there. After that, when it comes to tactical changes from going from a hustler to a CEO,

Talk about the hiring ladder a lot. I've talked about it on this podcast, but you want to start with an administrative role first. You then do go into fulfillment, which is transaction coordination. Then you go into marketing, which is I want to hire a agency to cold call for me or text for me or RVM or direct mail or whatever, and then sales and then leadership. And so after you figure out where do I need to delegate the task from my time on it, then you go into

hiring the key roles for administrative roles, data scrubbing roles, acquisitions, operations, disposition. And then you, because you have that extra time, you can focus on who's the right core value fit, who's the right fit for the long term of my business, what type of skills do I actually need? Because for example, I was dealing with the night, like trying to hire an operations manager in my business, okay? And there are so many different types of operation managers, okay?

Justin Piche (13:07)
you

Clay Hepler (13:30)
You can have an operation manager that's more like a COO, which is more of a strategic thinker, like an integrator. You could have an operations manager that's more like a sales-based operations manager that knows how to run sales teams, sales processes, marketing, so kind of more marketing-based. This could be a sales, they call it sales ops in the tech world. You could have just a regular operations manager that just holds people accountable and it's kind of a mid, a mid to lower mid.

level manager that has a lot of doing, right? They're not very strategic. so getting clear on that requires time to yourself thinking and not being a hustler, having that extra time

Justin Piche (14:00)
you

Clay Hepler (14:11)
that you can focus on what exactly does my business need? And then, you know, from there, you know, after you do that, then you can say, okay, I have all this time back. Now I can, now I can spend my time on finding the constraint in my processes. Right? So I have the, I've audited my time.

I've hired some people, I've delegated tasks, I've brought them onboarded, and then from there it's going through constraint. What's the biggest bottleneck of my business challenges, whatever, and that's the actual tactical things that you can do after you shift your mindset.

Justin Piche (14:41)
one other kind of helpful thing on audit your time and a lot, think a lot of this framework, I mean, there's many business books that talk about this type of stuff, right? We talked about one on previous podcasts called output thinking. There's another one, buy back your time that we've talked about. you know, and that one by Dan Martell, I really, found a lot of value in there. One of the two kinds of things, the time audit,

Clay Hepler (14:51)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (15:03)
where you literally just sit down and you look at your time and basically 15 minute chunks for weeks, two weeks or something like that. And you just see what are you actually spending all your time doing? You get put in a nice Excel spreadsheet, visually look at it and figure out what are you doing that isn't driving revenue? That's like kind of the starting point. Then what you do is you take those tasks, those items, those things that you yourself are working on and you put them into four quadrants. And on the

kind of where the X and the Y axis meet, those are non-revenue driving necessary tasks that you don't enjoy. And as you go further along the X axis, but still on the bottom side, you Y equals zero. Now you're talking about the things that you do enjoy that still aren't revenue driving activities. As you go up the Y axis, now you're talking about revenue driving activities. So the stuff against the Y axis, that stuff that you still don't enjoy, but are revenue driving. And then in the top right quadrant,

is going to be the stuff that you enjoy that is revenue driving. And what Clay was talking about with his hiring ladder is like hiring these administrative roles. That is all the stuff or mostly all the stuff that is in that bottom left quadrant, which is the necessary tasks to run your business that don't drive revenue that you don't Right. You don't like them. And maybe some of them do actually drive a little bit of revenue, but they're not like the primary revenue driving activities, but they have to be done to keep things going. That's kind of the first stuff you need to offload.

And the next stuff is the other stuff you don't like. Maybe it is partially revenue driving, but that's where you start getting into your like ops manager type positions. You're like higher, higher level positions.

Clay Hepler (16:39)
I agree with that. and the, the hiring ladder that I talked about is also like, it's helpful because you can kind of understand like, this is the, this is what I can use as a heuristic for admin fulfillment, marketing sales leadership, but

If you're not necessarily a person, maybe you enjoy marketing more than you like sales. Maybe you enjoy operations more than you like sales. Maybe you, and so your approach can be a little different than how Justin and I do it. Right. I'm like a sales guy through and through. love it. And if I would have gone back, I would have hired an operations person first because I could stay in that role and I could have really high output for very little input. I mean, I enjoy it. I would do it at any point.

And those are just mistakes that you make. So this is not a one side fits all. This is how we did it in our business. But that doesn't mean that you can't change your own hiring ladder and kind of, these are just the best practices as I've found.

Justin Piche (17:42)
As I've kind of thought about hiring and scaling and stepping out of that in every single thing role of my business where I was working in everything and more stepped out to be kind of the CEO, I mean, the CEO of the business. I've always thought about it as a kind of a quantity and then equality.

Like there are seasons of quantity and then there's seasons of quality. And what I mean by that is it's mostly around like marketing output and lead generation and just sheer workload of the business. What I've hired, the way I've hired in the past has been to handle much higher volume or output of marketing and output of in quantity of leads. And then spent the next, maybe that's like a six month period. We build up the quantity, we build up the team and then spent the next six months

focusing very much more heavily on the quality of that team, upscaling the team, upscaling and refining our processes, SOPs for everything, changing the way we do things, changing and honing in on a kind of a marketing tactic, building out our CRM much more to much more effectively utilize the team and get more out of the same team. But it's like seasons of quality or quantity and then quality. And it's really hard to focus on that.

the quality piece of it. If you are working in the business and just like hand to mouth everything, just fighting the next fire as it comes. And I think that that to me is probably the most important thing about becoming the CEO and being able to think strategically and set a long term vision and actually plan for what the outputs of your company are supposed to be. And then what are the milestones you need to achieve to actually get to that output by the end of the year, the quarter, whatever it might be without

that time to think about your business as the CEO, it's just really, really challenging because you can't see past all of the to-do lists. You can't see past the next deadline of this contract that's going to expire or this seller that you need to negotiate with and get your underwriting back on or this property that you found that you bought that actually has some sort of access issue that the title company didn't get or whatever, like the random thing that like absorbs your brain. And yeah, it might sound like a

five minute message, like somebody just sends you a message on your team. You're like, yeah, I gotta go deal with this. But that interrupts that chain of thought. And it really derails you for much longer than the length of the conversation you're thinking about. You need that time to step back and really truly plan. It's really hard to get there when you're hand to mouth.

Clay Hepler (20:18)
It is incredibly hard to get there. And even more when you cannot step away from your business. You know, I talked about becoming a quality shop and that was a decision because, I, the infrastructure, one of the reasons is the infrastructure of my business facilitated that decision, which was, I want to build a business like that.

And I don't want to have to hire so many other people because I don't have an operations person yet in my business. And so I run a lot of operations. have siloed departments that are successfully running, but I have to deal with every department still in my business. you know, that's another mistake that I made, which was not bringing on an operations person to manage all the nodes of the business. And at this point it's like, that's

who we want to hire, that's who we're trying to hire, but it's hard to find a really good operations person that can fit within what you're specifically looking for, right? And if you don't do that, then you have to shift your strategy. And you have to shift to, okay, I still need to focus on my outputs, even though I'm working still on my business a little bit in every single little node. And so the outputs that you're shifting to is, I need to focus

on fewer things, bigger, higher quality things, so that with these, the resources that I have, that I can strategically produce the output that I want, right? Instead of if you're a super high volume shop, then you're just like, everything's coming in. And if you're in that managerial position, that's how a lot of people burn out, right? And so you can do fewer things and still be more involved, or you have to be having all those.

siloed departments that are run by certain people that all report up to you. Justin, what have you found to be the sweet spot for people that are reporting to you that you could manage and still work? You're smiling a little bit.

Justin Piche (22:25)
Well, yeah, I

think it's different. Obviously, it's like a kind of a different thing for everybody. I'm not going to claim to be any kind of expert on what's the sweet spot of number of direct reports. But I currently have what sits with me is sales dispositions. So have a dispositions manager, sales manager who we interviewed on podcast number eight. So he runs all of this bill, all sales, basically everything now from we get the property under contract.

We have transactions, then anything that's not related to transactions, marketing material, price, realtors. And actually now, as of this year, as of our annual planning meeting, the decision whether or not we close on that property lays with sales. So that has all been pushed down. that's sales, acquisitions as well.

That's its own kind of thing. have an acquisitions ops manager or a sales ops manager as you kind of talked about, who's really a trainer. Like I said, a sales trainer, really good closer and works on the processes of the sales team and the training of the sales team to upscale everybody. And then also as a good negotiator. So negotiates bigger deals. I have marketing, which is a data and marketing. It's just one person who works part-time. And so.

She reports into me and when we kind of exit, we discuss and decide on what are the markets we're going into? What's our strategy for what types of properties? Where do we need to pull more data? What's our right marketing kind of structure? But she's making those decisions based on data. And then I'm at least bringing the data to me to help make the decisions. So that's three people. I have my chief of staff assistant who she manages transactions. Her and transactions work really closely together, but transactions doesn't really report into me anymore. And then

I have project management. So those are the five main ones that report into me. I think it works. I think it works. you know, it's, could I, could I go slightly less? Maybe underwriting and project management could sit under sales as well. That might be the only kind of change in the future that might make sense, but they're just, because underwriting and project management kind of spans the acquisitions and sales teams, right? It starts.

before we get something under contract. And then once it is under contract and it's a subdivide or development, then it runs with the sales team through there. And it kind of sits in transactions too. It's like kind of all of them, just right now it makes more sense to kind of report it to me.

Clay Hepler (24:54)
That makes sense. And for me, I have my Dispo Manager, right? That's sort of in the sales role, right? She kind of runs our dispositions department. I set the standard for a lot of those things, but I'm not really in the day to day. She manages our Dispo Associate Dispo Manager. Then I have my Head of Acquisitions who I manage directly TC who's also my

At this point, she's also my executive assistant, so she kind of plays both roles. Then I have my data manager, my kind of marketing admin, and then I have two scrubbers underneath her, my cold calling manager, and those are kind of similar type of reporting structure. But like theoretically, my cold calling manager could sit underneath my acquisition.

director of acquisitions, head of acquisitions, but he's doing like more complex, like subdivide stuff. And so that takes up a lot of his time.

Justin Piche (26:01)
Yeah. Yeah. there's no, I don't think there's really a right answer. think, think the, you don't want to have so much vertical that like there's multiple levels of managers in between you and everything. Like I prefer a very flat organization. So it's like those, and they say these aren't huge teams. mean, like for anybody who's listening, as you know, like land businesses like these flipping and development businesses, they're not these massive companies. Okay. I've got 20, a little 20 something employees.

And the majority or a large portion of them are cold outreach, right? I need that many people to generate the number of leads I need, but they're not, and they're doing great work, right? They're doing exceptional and necessary work for our business to function. But I wouldn't say they're doing like hard, like thought-based or very high skill-based roles, like planning for dispositions or planning for acquisitions, like strategy, that type of stuff.

And so it's okay to have like that a bunch of people reporting into one person and that person reports into me. It's a pretty flat, it's really like three layers. It's like kind of bottom layer employees that are doing the kind of the initial stuff and then the managers then they're reporting to me. It's not a very vertically integrated organization.

Clay Hepler (27:10)
Yeah. And I think with technology and the type of business that we have, you don't really need this massive organization to go from hustler to CEO. In fact, a lot of times you just need one strategic hire to alleviate the need that you have in that position. Like I felt a lot of times we hire people, immature hustlers will hire people to solve an emotional need when the business has a different need than your emotions do.

Justin Piche (27:19)
No, you don't.

Clay Hepler (27:39)
And so sometimes you need to learn how to cope with the emotions that drive us to hire someone to say, I just need this person in this position right now when the business might need something different. And by hiring that person that the business actually needs, that's when again, we're talking about auditing your time. We're not talking about the emotional decision. We're talking about what actually we need to do using the hiring ladder versus saying, you know, I was talking to a private client the other day and he said, Hey, I

you know, I needed this acquisition person, he was hiring this acquisition person. said, why did why did you hire acquisition person, you don't even have a at this point, like a true data team, right or scrubbing team remote, like admin, and he has a full time W two. And about a weekend, he fired his acquisition person. And he said that was the greatest decision I've ever made. Because now I'm closing more contracts consistently, it's not taking any more time off my plate. But that's what he felt that he needed.

to do because that's what quote unquote everyone else was doing. When he wasn't looking in his time and saying what does a business actually need to thrive? And that's a real difference. But you cannot use your emotions to drive your decisions when it comes to hiring.

Justin Piche (28:53)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast to just say, hey, thanks for listening. Really Clay and I really appreciate it. Take a moment now, if you don't mind to subscribe, rate, review, leave a comment. It helps us bring more content that you actually want to listen to each week and it lets us know, people are enjoying what we're putting out. As always, we really appreciate you guys. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clay Hepler (28:54)
Yeah

Justin Piche (29:19)
right, next topic we're going to grind to is delegation tips for scaling effectively. And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with, you especially if you've not had a leadership position before. I had maybe the blessing of being forced into a leadership position, not forced. I made the decision to join the military, but I was forced into,

leading larger teams than I maybe had the skill set for at the time, kind of like forged by fire, if you will, into having to manage large teams of people that had higher skill levels than me and a lot of the tasks that were happening. And so I realized pretty quickly on how much I needed to rely on members of my team to make things happen. I realized where my shortcomings were and then how I could leverage

the expertise of my team to get more done than could be done by myself. And delegation is really kind of, mean, that's, that's, what it is really is delegation is, is getting the right task to the right person to do the task. A lot of people think of delegation as maybe just like, just don't, don't want to do this. I'm a delegate to somebody. I'm a delegate to this other person, but that's not really what it is. What it is is, is thinking about the total business tasks and getting the right person to do them at the right level.

And sometimes that means pushing someone on your team out of their comfort zone and giving them a task that they may not be quite ready for. But if you're there with them to help train them through, can help. That's a great way of upscaling your team and seeing who can handle more and who deserves to be in a higher position or have more authority or have more response or be responsible for more output. Maybe is the right way to say that in line with kind of how we're talking. But one of the things that that.

Clay has in here is the use the who not how principle and that's that's really what it is finding the right person to do these tasks on your team or hiring for it if you don't have them on your team.

Clay Hepler (31:19)
of the ways that I have improved my ability to delegate to people is a three step formula. I learned it from Alex Hermosy, which is a document. demonstrate duplicate document, demonstrate duplicate. And so if you are giving a task to someone,

you want to document it first, whether it's through loom videos, some people are better with reading, some people better with videos, then demonstrate it to them, right? Show them, hey, this is how you do it in real time and have them duplicate it back to you, have them teach you essentially. Teaching is the best way to learn. And so far, far too few people when they hire people, including me, this is what I used to do. I just say, okay, go hire and figure it out. And depending on the skillset level of the person, like they can figure it out, but most people want direction.

Most people want to know what success looks like. And we show people what success looks like by having a documented process, a series of SOPs that empower them to achieve what the output of the role is. And we do that oftentimes by bringing them on and really for one day, two days, showing them everything they need to know. Right? A lot of times people will, including me, will do...

Especially when they're starting out. They'll do this. Okay, they'll like sort of half step it they'll half pour I'm gonna demonstrate this to you send you a bunch of loom videos and expect them to perfect it when you don't have them actually to give you feedback So when we hire someone whether it's a lead manager acquisition manager data scrubber, whatever I have them literally Meet with me and we call them milestone meetings, right? So I'll document the process with loom

I'll have another team member, maybe it's a transaction coordinator or a revenue operations position or whatever position we're hiring for lead manager. I'll have other people work with them too, in that context. This is how we succeed. You watch the Loom videos is how we succeed. And then we meet Clay and this person will meet together and we'll sit together an hour long meeting. Now, if you have a different structure like Justin, maybe you would have the head of dispositions or you would have the head of direct acquisitions or whomever. But in this case,

What I've done is we'll meet for an hour, two hours, and I'll just say, okay, show me how to use the CRM. All right, open up the CRM. All right, now show me how to comp. Now show me how to execute a perfect lead manager call. And so we go through a series of 15, 20 tasks of what there should be expected to do. We'll figure out the things, what are they lacking, if it's not a two hour standard, then you teach with that, and then you have them repeat it back to you, and then

in a week, you have this person succeeding in the position instead of having them ping you every time on Slack when I don't really understand this. I don't know how to do this because they, you didn't actually train them adequately. And a lot of times I found with global talent as well, when you do not train them adequately, they will want, they'll feel like I'm not doing this job correctly. And I need to, you know, I, I, I feel like I'm, failing and they'll, they'll resign or quit. It's happened to me a couple of times.

Justin Piche (34:12)
you

Clay Hepler (34:28)
because I was not a good enough leader to empower them through. Hey, this is exactly how to do the process and the milestone and supporting them with other people.

Justin Piche (34:28)
Man.

That is gold, man. What wisdom. No, seriously. So this brings me back because one of the things that when I was in the military, one of the things you do as you're kind of qualifying for different positions that you have to have is you have to go through this. We call it quals. This is whole qualification process where you have to go and learn and do all of the tasks that either the people that are reporting to you are going to need to do or that you're going to have to do in that position. And then

you get tested on it just like this by people who are qualified, who know exactly what they're doing and they grill you and they test your knowledge, they test your knowledge of procedures and theory and everything. And only once you've both accomplished all of the loom videos, if you will, and like executed on the tasks and proven that you could do it, on your own, following the instructions, and then also been tested by somebody who knows exactly what you're supposed to do. And it's going to kind of throw you curve balls and make sure you really truly have a depth of knowledge. Only after that will you

be allowed to be in that role fully. And if you don't, if you're not able to like meet those qualifications in the kind of the board where you're where you're being interviewed and being tested, you have to go back and continue training and you know where to focus because you weren't able to do it. And it's very, I mean, it's a very successful model for making sure that the only people that know what they're doing are in the right role. And it also is a great, I mean, the way kind of you described, I think is perfect. It's like, you can very quickly get somebody up to the right skill level because you're spending focus attention.

Clay Hepler (35:52)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (36:10)
on their gaps based on where you need them to be, making them redo or giving additional training in those gaps to bring them up quickly rather than just kind of giving them a bunch of SOPs, letting them go and fielding the questions for months. You're really spending a lot of time focused training on your team members. And I think that's one of the things that I tell my coaching clients or anybody who kind of asked me about hiring, like, hey, it's not easy. It's really not easy. There's a couple of things that are really hard about it. One, it's hard to know if you've really found the right

Clay Hepler (36:37)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (36:40)
person. And it's also hard because you have to equip them for your success yourself. You can't just expect somebody to come into your business and crush it day one without you giving them clear set of expectations and the tools to succeed and then verifying that they understand them. All those things have to be there.

Clay Hepler (36:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. And to add to that, that there is an importance of clear direction, right? That is a continuous level of clear direction. And a lot of what I struggled with early on was micromanaging. And micromanaging because we have a remote based company. And so I would ping people and say, Hey, did you complete this? Did you, you know, did you complete this task, right? And

That's not a good way to manage people. They feel like they're being stifled. They can't be creative. They can't they feel like they can't bring things to their boss because their boss is going to say, well, did you do this? And what how are you spending your time? And so accountability for is how you sort of bring someone onto your team and you hold them accountable to a set of results and the results.

the outputs and the KPIs associated with the position. So when I bring someone onto the team, we go through the milestone here, and then we say, these are the outputs that you are responsible for. These are the KPIs that you are responsible for. Clear KPIs. And there is a framework, it's called Gapology. Gapology is a book, have you heard of Gapology, Justin?

Justin Piche (38:25)
I haven't. No.

Clay Hepler (38:26)
Okay, it's an amazing framework. It's basically how, I think it's, the title is like how to create a high performance team. And it's a three step process, right? So if someone does not understand, I'm gonna pull it up so I make sure that I get this correctly. If someone doesn't know how to do a task, there is a knowledge gap, right? If I recall this correctly. And we solve the knowledge gap.

Right? When we're hiring, we're going from hustle to CEO. We solve the knowledge gap from training, from procedures, from teaching. Right? If then they know something, then there is an importance gap. An importance gap is what does this actually contribute to? So if I'm hiring a transaction coordinator and there is an output for the position, there are KPIs for the position, we also have to understand the importance of achieving these KPIs.

So we set the expectations, which is you have to hit these KPIs in this timeline. For example, if we're doing a standard transaction, standard flip, we want to find a title company and submit a title order to a title company within 24 hours. Because for us, that is the number one KPI in that position in order for us to close sooner to convert our cash conversion cycles. I can go into that later.

The importance of that is I tell my transaction coordinator, hey, this is important because it allows us to scale our business faster because the faster we purchase a property in escrow, the faster we can get a deal done, the faster we can sell it, the faster we can scale. And your position is directly related to that. And so your ability to execute is important, right? Because it directly impacts our bottom line.

So after they know it's important, then they need, there's an action gap sometimes, right? So someone might know, they have the training, the SOPs, they come on, they know exactly what to do, we've taught them everything, they've done the milestone, then we understand the expectations. How do you prioritize tasks in this position? This is the single most important task, getting these title orders to title companies within the first 24 hours. Then there's the accountability.

which is they now there's the knowledge gap, importance gap, and then there's the action gap. There's a commitment that they make that they have to make to us. There's a culture which comes with our core values and our vision, and then there's the accountability of this is the results that you're accountable for through filling out KPIs or something like that, Justin. And so that's gapology. And so when we hire a new person, we have someone in our business or we're coaching someone,

When there's a performance gap, someone's not completing a job, say, is there a knowledge gap here? Is there an importance gap? Is there an action gap? And then everything underneath that, how do we solve those problems? And that's really how you coach for performance. And you go from hustler to CEO. It's not good enough to say, I don't know why they're doing this. I've told them to do this, right? There could be an importance gap. They don't understand the importance of this. There could be an action gap. There's not enough accountability behind it, or they don't, they're not embodying the core values of the culture, the commitment of the

of your company. All those things can be solved if we know what part of the what gap they're having for performance.

Justin Piche (41:54)
Man, that's so good. I mean, think a lot of that is kind of, it feels intuitive to me, but mainly maybe the framework isn't, I've not heard of the framework just because of my past experience. But I think for a lot of people, it's totally not right. It's like, I gave them the procedures. They should know how to do this. Man, that's really, really good. You really got, you have to communicate. That's one of the, another really hard thing about being the CEO is like, you have to be able to communicate down to the members of your team.

priorities and why the wise it's really about like why are we doing this one of the reasons why I wouldn't I bring people onto my team no matter what their role is they start with training videos that show them how the entire business works from end to end and the reason why I do that is because I want everybody even a co-caller who's just generating leads on you know on the on the acquisition side I want them to understand what role their position plays and the overall success of the company like what is happening down the line

Clay Hepler (42:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (42:54)
And what are they actually, what are they doing with this lead? What is this lead generation going to do for the rest of the pipeline, if you will, of the company from front end to back end? And it's really important. Yeah, why the why and the priorities of what tasks, what is the single most important task you need to focus on? How do you prioritize when you're overwhelmed with tasks to do? That's super important. Super important. Man, so good.

Clay Hepler (43:13)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So I would like to move now to, we've talked about good things, right, that can happen. And I wanna talk about challenges. And one that I faced a lot. letting go of control. Letting go of the steering wheel for some of my team members.

And it's easy when you have a very high performer to let go, at least for me, it was easy Justin, for me to let go. have a couple of team members and I'm like, this person, like they're gonna crush it, right? They have a principle based attitude versus an agent based attitude. But people, mostly me, other people too, but we cannot get out of the hustler mode because we do not let go of control. Does that resonate with you?

Justin Piche (44:08)
Yeah, I you know, I might be, I was thinking this too, when you were talking about micromanaging. I feel like I might actually be too far the opposite direction of micromanaging, which is I tend to trust people to be in and trust in people's skill levels, maybe more than I should in a lot of cases. So I can go to like, if I'm looking introspectively at myself, I'm not more, I'm not really the micromanager type.

Clay Hepler (44:28)
Mm-hmm

Justin Piche (44:36)
person. I'm more of like the I expect people to have the level of ownership over tasks that I feel. And so that's kind of how I run. And what it can lead to is slower moving than ideal. Right. Because people don't we're talking about prioritizing, communicating that that's probably something that isn't that I'm not as good at is communicating those priorities to people so that they share the same priorities that I have and they know what tasks I want them to be working on most diligently, if you will.

Clay Hepler (44:46)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (45:06)
So that's kind of what I was thinking of when you're talking about a record manager. I think I'm a little too far the opposite direction when it comes to giving up control. Yeah, I think there's certain things that I kind of hell I will hold. I've hold that held on to too long for sure. You know, and I think we talked about this on a way earlier episode, which is a lot of folks want to quickly scale out of their business, but they haven't really felt the pain and like the growing pain and like the understanding of.

pushing their boundaries and what they can really achieve. Maybe they don't fully know all the details or like the, the, the, the, they don't know maybe exactly how they want their business to be run at scale, but they want people in there to kind of get to that scaling point. I definitely have felt the pain and like held onto things a lot longer, just white knuckling, you know, when I should have hired somebody to go into their role. So I resonate with the control aspect. I don't necessarily resonate as much as the micromanaging.

because I'm too far the other way, in a bad way, I think.

Clay Hepler (46:05)
Yeah, and I would say as it relates to our business, there are general business tomes that are applicable to many scenarios, but I've felt that the nature of this business is one month you have an amazing month, you said, honey, we're going to, we're buying that Lambo that we wanted to buy, and the next month you're like, we're going to the poor house, right?

And that's the nature of a development-based business like ours, like a kind of a flipping business. because there's a lot of factors that go into how quickly we sell our dirt, specifically macroeconomic factors and specifically the last, I would say 14 to 16 months, right? And so one thing you just said, hey, I tend to white-knuckle longer than I should. I would...

I would be prudent because I've gone the other way. I've hired too quickly and hired bad quality people too quickly. This is another, this is a iteration of the scaling too quickly, Justin, but it's also a, just hired for the emotional need, which I wanted someone in the seat and I could have stayed on longer and become more profitable and reinvested in my business because I,

Even though Justin and are sitting here talking about, you know, go from hustle to CEO. It is the great. It is the right move. It is the right move. But as soon as you introduce a new, a human being into your business, it creates an additional level of complexity that you cannot imagine. Right. And so as you bring more people into a system, every, every additional person that comes in, unless you have managers underneath them, like we were talking about,

If you're starting out, have five people, then you have seven, then you have 10, and you're early on in your business. It's an exponential increase of complexity. And so a lot of people, what will happen is they will say, okay, yes, Justin Clay. When I say a lot of people, I'm talking about me. I keep saying a lot of people. And I hope this benefits our listeners. I'm like, all right, I'm to hire all these people, right? We're going to hire these people. We're going to bring them in. And then...

Some of them aren't gonna work out because you're just starting out, right? You didn't document, demonstrate, duplicate. You didn't set the right culture. You didn't close the knowledge gap or the importance gap or the action gap. You're not managing well because you don't have enough reps and then you lose a couple of people because you fire them or the market changes and things happen, right? Challenges happen in business and then all of a sudden you're like, you know what, I'm just gonna do this myself.

I'm not going to hire anyone. I'm just going to do it myself. And that's the wrong lesson to learn from that. Right. So as you're growing, there will be growing pains. You have to manage those properties and not falsely attribute something that happened bad. As you transition from hustler to CEO, it's not just perfect. Like it sounds like in a podcast, right? I've had many growing planes, right? And, and so as you're, as you're transitioning from this in this vital change,

I felt different types of growing pains. Sometimes it was my elbow. Sometimes it was my ankle Sometimes it was my hip and and you in I never knew kind of emotionally how to handle that because I didn't have the Context I didn't have the people a coach. I didn't have you know podcasts like this I didn't have the ability to kind of sit back because not only are you experiencing these emotional growing pains, right the difficulties of scaling the difficulties of hiring

the day to day, stress of am I gonna make payroll, the stress of how do I allocate this money, I have this big tax burden because I crushed it this year with these growing pains and you're still in the hustler mode so you can't get out of it and that's the hard part. And so that's why we have to transition from the hustler to CEO but it's not the perfect line that Justin and I are talking about here today. I wish it was.

Justin Piche (50:15)
No, it's definitely not. There's

so many growing pains, trial and error. That's why I always tell people that I feel like got lucky hiring certain people. We talked about this last week. Yeah, there's obviously a level of skill set to certain things, but sometimes it really is luck to actually find that right person. And over time, you get the process in place and you learn what you're looking for and you're better able to qualify people, you're better able to vet people. But at first, it's tough.

you're going to have to fire people likely. And if you don't have to fire anyone, either you got incredibly lucky or maybe you don't have as high expectations for your team as you need to have. And it doesn't mean that you don't you weren't able to get the right people in there from the right from the beginning. But it's also like this is something that I think a lot of people probably feel. I certainly do, which is.

Clay Hepler (50:54)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (51:10)
I feel like I'm a genuinely caring person and I bring these people on my team and I legitimately care about them. I really do. I care about their families. I care about them as people, as my employees. And when you form personal relationships with people, it is very hard to let them go if they're not performing. And it's one of the things this year that I, as my business has grown and as it's become much more like a professional organization, if you will, or we're just accomplishing more, I need to personally

Clay Hepler (51:29)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (51:40)
run it that way. Right. I need just not that I don't know if I've been to lacks per se, but maybe I have like I don't I think about it. Sometimes people talk, you know, talk to me about all I'm firing this person, that person. I think about myself and I'm like, you know, I don't have that like killer attitude that like a ruthless CEO needs to have to scale like a bit like billion dollar company. But granted, this will never be anything like

Clay Hepler (51:41)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (52:06)
I want to set up a great life for myself and my family. want to continue building and growing things. I don't necessarily need to have that cutthroat type attitude, but there does need to be an air of what is ever best for the business is the decision that needs to be made regardless of emotions. And so maybe that's some growing introspectively that I need to do over the next year or season of my business.

Clay Hepler (52:26)
Mm-hmm.

And everyone faces those if you're a caring person, right? And you can go back to gapology. can, you can, you can, you know, I've had trouble with having to fire employees in the past. I'm like, man, this is, it's never fun to do. It really is hard, right? Especially if you have a relationship with them. But you can always point back to, we had a conversation about in a knowledge gap. We had a conversation about an importance gap and we had a conversation about an action gap.

And we specifically went through all these things. We supported you and empower you to succeed. And despite all the help and support that we had, you're not where we need to be based on the accountability that we set out based on the KPIs. But I feel that where I went wrong in the past, Justin, with this, and I'm not saying that you do this, by the way, I'm just giving a personal anecdote is I didn't have enough clear KPIs and accountability.

Justin Piche (53:26)
Yeah, no,

Clay Hepler (53:30)
within my business, so I couldn't point back to say, this is why there is a mis-disconnect here, right? Instead it was a feeling.

Justin Piche (53:41)
Yeah, which is tough, right? It's tough.

Clay Hepler (53:42)
And feel, it's tough,

it's tough. Yeah. So any last minute things, Justin, you want to add here before we have some takeaways?

Justin Piche (53:55)
talking about KPIs, you talked about, you know, having KPIs that you can tie back to to show this person, hey, this is where maybe a gap is. That is absolutely something that has been lacking for me over the course of my my business. Now, it is much better now. Right. We have we have much clearer expectations and much clearer KPIs. And when we started, I think a lot of our listeners, you know, if you guys are tracking your KPIs diligently. Good.

keep doing it and get better at it. If you're not, you really need to start. Like I know it can be a hassle to look at the performance of a mailer or the performance of a cold calling campaign and see how many leads you forwarded and how many, you know, negotiations you had, how many offers you sent out, how many offers were accepted and so on and so forth. But if you don't have that data, then you don't know how well you did. You just don't know. You don't know where the good areas are. And if you don't have the data on how well your team is performing,

Like how many negotiations are they doing a day? How much time did they spend for your acquisitions folks? How much time did they spend talking on the phone? Like those are critical KPIs to understand how much work they're actually doing. I've seen it time and time again, where folks have been frustrated at their team's performance. Then I'll ask them, well, how much talk time do they have? Like how many, how many follow-up calls did they make yesterday? And they'll kind of go in and they'll be like, how do I find this? They'll look it up and they'll be like, wow, they only made three calls yesterday. I'm like, this is your acquisitions manager and.

You have a pipeline full of leads and they made three calls yesterday. You it's, you gotta know exactly what those are and they need to know what those expectations are. And if they don't, you're not going have good, you know, you're not going to, you're not going to be able to improve. You're not going be able to, you can't measure what you, don't, you can't improve what you don't measure. Right. Isn't that the saying? And it's so, so true. So that is a huge focus this year for me is we're doing this massive notion rebuild.

Clay Hepler (55:24)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (55:49)
for our CRM and it's coming along great. I'm so excited. like, like, and we'll talk on our next podcast episode, we're going to talk about annual planning and I'll share my rocks and I'll share kind of what my, my metrics or my goals are, the measurable goals that want to achieve by the end of the year. And it was crazy when we were doing this annual planning a week ago, Friday, we were so focused on the notion CRM, like rollout being this pivotal, pivotal piece of a

accomplishing a bunch of our objectives. Because if we don't have clarity on the data, it's so hard to actually make strides in the right direction.

Clay Hepler (56:22)
Mm-hmm.

Awesome. Yep. And data is something that I feel that many people struggle with and it doesn't make it any less important. And KPIs are the drivers for

decisions in our business. So how do we go from hustler to CEO? We just talked about a ton of stuff and I want to talk about for me the top things that I would would say help me go from a hustler more to a CEO. Not to say don't hustle, I still hustle a lot, right? But I think the number one thing was the gapology framework. Of course, it's the time audit, it's the

going the hiring ladder that I talk about all the time, but the gapology framework, when you hire someone into your business and you focus on the knowledge, importance and action gap, you can close performance loops very quickly. And then for those that are not performing, you can find a better place for them. You know, if they're not up to the standards of your organization, that doesn't mean that they're not gonna be able to thrive somewhere else. And then so you find someone somewhere else for them.

So you build a team by delegating effectively. You build a team by holding them accountable to results. And that's one of the best ways I've found for holding people accountable for performance results. So you find out what's going on in your life, what you're doing on your day to day, and it doesn't have to happen tomorrow. You don't have to scale out of your business tomorrow, but slowly, methodically go up the hiring ladder.

slowly methodically implement things like KPI more KPI tracking output based thinking and the gap ology and you'll start to see your organization turn around and you'll spend maybe instead of 95 % of the time in the task doing that you're used to maybe to 60 % or 65 and that's a massive change the amount of difference between 65 and 90 is

you know, 65, like a 50 % difference in 50 % more time on your plate, or less time doing the tasks and more time focusing on strategic goals and big picture priorities.

Justin Piche (58:43)
Yeah, man. For me, think the most maybe important mindset shift for stepping out of the business was doing the time audit, recognizing how many things actually had to be done in the business for it to succeed and scale the way I wanted it to, and only focusing my time on the most important things that drive revenue.

Clay Hepler (59:02)
Mm.

Mm.

Justin Piche (59:09)
But

before actually just focusing on that, knowing that I needed to set up the system's team processes to manage the rest of it. So was kind of like, I saw where I needed to be. I saw where I was. And then the gap between those two places was the team built out. was like the, anyway, for me, that's kind of what went through my head is I need to be here. I can't get there until I build the system in this team. I have to focus on building the system and team.

Clay Hepler (59:25)
Mm-hmm.

I love it. So if you got benefit from this podcast, guys, you're a land investor and have other land investors in your circle. Please rate, review and subscribe. I'm telling you every week, 1 % of the people rate, review and subscribe this podcast. And it really helps us get our name out there. We want to be the number one land podcast for entrepreneurs that are really not beginners, right?

the people that are striving to try to get to that seven figure mark. That's what we want to be. And we bring information to you guys to help you get there. And the way that we know that we're doing a good job is if you rate, review and subscribe. That's the gentleman's agreement. We hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. And if you liked this podcast, DM, Justin and I on social media, this is a little bit of a different format than what we've used kind of what we've done in the past, but we feel more tactical advice.

people might benefit from. So DM us on social media, give us some feedback on the podcast, maybe the comment section on YouTube, so we can see if this is a format that you guys would like more in the future.

Justin Piche (1:00:52)
Outstanding. Until next time.

Clay Hepler (1:00:54)
We'll see you guys.