Episode 2: Quarterly Goals, Planning, and Accountability

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Hello, this is your host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:03)
And this is Justin Piche. Welcome to the Ground Game Podcast, episode number two, where we teach you how to win the ground game.

All right, Clay, we got a sweet episode today. We're going to talk about goals. We're going to talk about our teams. We're going to talk about kind of our planning and annual planning kind of process. And then what are our priorities this next quarter? Right. We one of the things we discussed when we were starting this podcast or in talks to start this podcast is, like, how great would it be to just

bear out our goals and the objectives we have each quarter and then come together every week and talk about the progress we're making or the lack thereof to light a fire under us, to keep rolling and move towards that end goal

Clay Hepler (00:59)
For sure, man, yeah, I'm super pumped to talk about it. We briefly talked about our yearly goals, but when you're a competitive person, you hear the other person's yearly goals, and you're like, I think I could do that or more. So we kind of kept it under wraps, right? And so the listeners are learning as we're learning. And so, yeah, let me kind of start it off here and talk a little bit about yearly team, kind team structure.

and then I'll volley it over to you. to you.

next year for me, gross profits can be four mil. Yeah, so gross profits four mil. And as a part of that, Justin, I know we touched a little bit on this first episode is four mil plus be under contract.

and working through at least three entitlement deals. that's a significant part of that. And that's not an or, that's an and, right? Because entitlement deals do tend to take longer. But that's gonna be the least three entitlement deals that in the process of going through entitlements, which I'm sure we'll talk about throughout this next year. That's the business goal, four million gross profit.

For those that don't really know what gross profit means, that means the revenue that's actually come into the business, right, before the expenses, right? So, you know, if we have payroll, we have OPEX, we have, you know, marketing expenses, things like that. Anything that's not deal -related expenses. So if I'm paying interest to someone or there's a profit split, that's actually gonna come before the gross profit.

So that's the revenue that comes into the business. In this business, depending on how lean or fat you are, I mean, I've seen it as bad as 30 % margins, right? And as good as 60, 55 % margins. So you can kind of get an idea about where you end up being. And as you grow, your margins, of course, compress, right?

But in that range, think a healthy mix for me would be 45 to 60 % margin. So I want to just tell you, this is how I think about it. I don't want to build a $4 million a year business that has a 20 % margin. I want to build a $4 million a year business that has 50 % margins. So we're actually bringing home profit of $2 million, which is a very good year.

Justin Piche (03:37)
A lot of money.

Clay Hepler (03:38)
Yeah, a lot of money, a lot of money, a lot of money. And the government loves to tax that money at a very high tax rate. Because as land investor, as you know, we get hit by the short -term capital gains, which just flows into your income. I'm not an accountant, so check your facts here. And then other than that, the other thing that's really pertinent for OKRs is 75 people in the landmine community. So I have a...

the the Land That Accelerator, which is the cradle to grave of actually how to get in and excel in the middle market business, the business that we're in. And that program basically teaches you from I've never even heard about land investing, what is that, to how to get to six figures and beyond very quickly. And so I wanna have 75 people in that community. It's an application only thing, it's not a factory.

there is an application process to actually get involved and get into the community so it's not just we're taking everyone, anyone off the street. But success for me really looks like having 75 total people in the community. And that would be kind of year one, 75 a little bit about team structure as it currently sits. So I have an executive assistant, kind of admin assistant, general admin.

hey, I need you to help me with this, post a job on Upwork, stuff like that. Handle my emails, calendar, scheduling. That's my admin assistant. I have a transaction coordinator currently. And I have a three acquisition person acquisitions department. So I have an acquisition manager closer and then two lead managers that are essentially setters.

that's how we structure it and we really can handle a very high volume of leads in that. We have a overseas outbound team that consists of seven people. So we're reaching out to sellers outbound. We have some cold calling of people. We have a five person cold calling team, cold calling manager, soon to be six. And then another person that's just doing some outbound prospecting as well. Hiring.

a data analyst, which is a marketing manager, a data analyst marketing manager, someone that has a background in data analytics that will help us find specifically entitlement tracks. It's a little more complicated than going on your Redfin or Zillow and finding your tracks of land.

Justin Piche (06:23)
I mean, you're looking for by right zoning, right? mean, that's essentially the, it's tough. Yeah. To find that bright parcel in that right place with the right utilities that's zoned correctly to actually go through an entitlement process. We don't need to talk too much about that right now. Sorry. We're talking about team structure. Go for it.

Clay Hepler (06:39)
No, that's great, man. I appreciate that ad that's really important. So what might look like, I'm gonna reach out to thousand people. If you're doing the regular mid -market, it's like 50. If you're going in it. And so 50 people, very selective, very select marketing, and low conversion rates, but very high profit, right? So that person's gonna help with...

finding markets for subdivides, rural subdivides, which is your bread and butter, right? And then general flips and then the entitlement zoning. We are in the process of hiring what I'm calling a rev ops position, revenue operations, which is, I can go into that, what kind of my thesis behind revenue operations is kind of an internal underwriter slash CRM management slash.

catch all for calling counties, setting up realtor conversations. Think of it as like an executive assistant for my sales team. So they're the spoke on the wheels of the sales team to increase their productivity and throughput. So the closer is spending time closing. Like all he's doing is spending time closing. So it don't have a lot of drag of additional closers. I don't have a heavy team and that person's also gonna do some on market underwriting as well. So that position is called rev ops, revenue operations.

And I'm sure we'll talk about later why I have that position. And then we have a scrubber, right? So my scrubber's been with me pretty much the longest, and this person is really going through, and before we actually market to people, we're scrubbing leads, and we'll probably have another scrubber here soon. And then one, another hire that we're in the process of looking for is dispositions, right? Dispositions manager.

The name of the game, as you know, is selling these parcels quickly. And as much as I love real estate brokers, for those who are listening and not watching, I was a little head nod on the side, we want to come in and help them. We want to reach out to neighbors. We want to come alongside them to help sell properties quicker.

even if we're paying them a commission, if we can sell a property in 60 days versus 120 days, man, that speeds up our ability to scale.

Justin Piche (09:10)
Yeah, you get another turn on that cash. 100%. Absolutely.

Clay Hepler (09:14)
So that's another position that we are actively looking for and we will be, we're gonna be implementing into our business. So that's team structure, that is yearly What do you got going on?

Justin Piche (09:27)
Yeah. Yeah. So on the annual goals thing. So I know I, so I did annual planning at the beginning of 2024 and we set a $2 .5 million gross profit target. and we made a conservative assumption on, on, on, margin of 40 % and we've beaten that. And so we got to go bigger. So we're going five mil next year. We got to beat it. We got to beat it. We're going five mil gross profit.

next year target. All right. And it's not. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like, think part of the, and we'll talk, we're going to talk a little bit more about how we think about our annual planning and quarterly planning later on. But like, it's got to be achievable, but not easy, like really uncomfortable. And like my team has to, not just the team, I don't think the team necessarily has to get much bigger to handle that. I mean, we talked in the kind of the first episode, you know, I believe like scaling your team before the growth that you need to see.

If you don't have the people in place, that growth is going to lag. And so I believe in setting the team up to achieve that goal. And so that's what we've done. That's what we spent the last quarter on. this quarter, guess, on is getting that team ready and prepared for that next year's annual

Clay Hepler (10:40)
do it, man. That's a really good goal. The reality is, if you have a $5 million a year business, depending on what industry, there are plumbing businesses. think people just don't realize this, plumbing businesses, contractor businesses, they might have $5 million a year business, but their margins are like 15 to 25%. And so it's almost like Justin has a $10 million a year plumbing business, or $12 million a year plumbing.

Justin Piche (11:05)
Ha ha ha.

Clay Hepler (11:06)
And with his hat, you know, he's got his backward hat. He almost looks like a he's he almost looks like a builder

Justin Piche (11:11)
Ooh, I'm about to get some, I'm about to get some swag for my company. going to get, or go into Ajay's event, the land scaling summit here this weekend. And so I had my, my assistant give me a, the brand of hat I like, which is melon with our logo and a, know, like a polo with my logo. So it'll be, you know, I'll it rep, maybe I'll rep it in another podcast.

Clay Hepler (11:27)
Ooh.

Justin Piche (11:32)
one other annual goal, which is to be sole funded through a limited partnership fund style funding rather than kind of the hodgepodge of private investors, promissory notes and personal cash that I use to currently fund my deals. So that's the other annual goal is to move to a much cleaner funding model with very clear cost of capital. So it's easier to plan revenue. It's easier to, it's easier to understand what we're going to do in a year and

less of a deal by deal basis style deal funding. You know, this month we closed a bunch and so we have a ton of cash that we need to deploy. So we're going all in on these deals and next month sales got slow. And so now I need to find other investors. I just want a smoother, cleaner model. And so a lot of my cash is going to go into the LP to fund my own deals. And it sets up a little bit of a more advantageous tax kind of structure because those LPs are as an LP in a fund that then does investments.

You can get taxed on long -term castle capital gains again. I'm not an accountant So, you know do your own research and talk to a CPA or whatever, but Yeah, there's a there's a little bit better You know not having to pay self -employment tax on fund like money that you don't actually access because it's paid out in dividends and there's a whole bunch of Advent Advantage is to it. I think over the current way that I do things. Let's talk team structure real quick. So I three main departments. I have acquisitions I have

kind of admin ops and I have sales. The acquisitions team consists right now of two closers, two closers, and then we have 10 kind cold outreach team members who are reaching out to sellers and working our leads through that process.

Clay Hepler (13:17)
So let me just add Justin because you know the listeners are probably saying wait a second the clay just said he has to leave managers and the closer and Justin says so

Justin Piche (13:25)
I know we at least everybody uses a little bit differently. I would say acquisitions managers, like somebody who's taking the lead after. we kind of do like a three call, three call close model. Call number one is lead qualification. And that's the, those are like the lead generation cold outreach kind of folks. That's called number one. Call number two is the acquisitions manager or lead manager, whatever you want to call it. That person has done some initial comping, some initial research. They're ready to talk to this person.

But they're not trying to do a hard close on call two. They're trying to establish further credibility and get the questions that weren't answered on the qualification call answered and then also kind of help color what you know our our coming offer to the seller to prepare them for maybe lower than expected. Right. A lot of people have unrealistic expectations for what they can get for their land and we want to prepare them in a call before rather than just give them a cold number without them knowing who we are and give them some reasons and kind of prepare them for a third call close.

And not everything's like a third call close, you sometimes it's five, sometimes it's 20. but that's generally the model. So the closers take call two and beyond and the kind of setters or the, the, I like to call them like lead generation team takes that initial lead qualification call. So that's a 12 person team. I have, I have a marketing manager who works very part -time data data analysts, but, but in, that she's able to get all of our data processed, our campaigns organized.

and upload it into our CRM so that the rest of the team can take that data and run the campaigns per the schedule. then I've got a transaction. So that's kind of acquisitions on the admin side. I have a transaction coordinator who's fantastic. She's been with me the longest of any of my employees. have an EA who really does, she does kind of, she's more like general assistant. She like does everything that I need her to do. It's kind of.

There's the model of EA where they're managing every aspect of your calendar and all like all these kinds of things. And she's just got a bit of a higher skill set than that. So there's things that I need her to do. Some of them involve like hiring attorneys, processing lawsuits for easements and like random things like that that are hard to give to just anybody. And so I give them to her a lot of like broker price opinions, following up with realtors. Yeah, stuff like that. It's just random things, honestly, that I have to do. I end signing all of our closing documents. That's another thing she does.

So I don't have to do really do that anymore. I just hired this week an underwriter project manager to take take over really the last part of the business that I'm very much in, which is underwriting subdivides and managing those projects from front to back. So she she's I mean, it's going to be a long process to train, but I'm pretty excited to have her join the team. So right now she's training with the acquisitions team on how to comp. What is our acquisitions process look like and really just kind of understanding the whole business because she's going to be in the middle.

kind of touching both acquisitions and sales from the moment we're in negotiations on larger tracks or even seeking out on market deals all the way through the last plat as approved in the last contractor leaves and we only are marketing and selling. She's going to be touching that. So that's a role pretty, pretty excited about. then on the sales side, I have a sales manager and he is, he does a of stuff, but

You know, lot of folks in this business have partners, right? They like join up with another person and they both start this business together. So I don't, I'm the sole owner of the business, but my sales manager started really early and has really grown the sales side of the business and set up the team, set up the automation, set up the processes. That's been something that I haven't really had to have my hand deeply in because I have someone really good doing it. And then he has two, he has two assistants that work for him.

One of them's goals, kind Facebook marketplace, lead generation, getting emails, getting phone numbers, getting people onto the buyer's list. And then the other one is an appointment setter essentially. And she's getting all the information to the buyers and moving them towards actually going to see the properties.

the last role is I have a social media manager. So one of my co -callings, co -callers, amazing co -caller, she had been a previous social media manager. And obviously, you know, we're starting this podcast. Like I want to create educational content that's valuable to people. And honestly, it's just not my skillset. Like my skillset is not editing videos or like coming up with cool graphics or like thinking about everything that I need to say. My, my, expertise is in land.

development in subdividing in landflipping in growing a team like that's my expertise. So I want to put content out there. I want to help help people achieve their goals and grow their businesses, but I It's better for me to hire somebody that can help me make that content. Let's just let's just leave it at that

Clay Hepler (18:17)
Right, so yeah, so Justin, mean, there's a of questions that I think is relevant to the listeners, but a lot of people know our business as, you guys use realtors to sell your tracks. And those who don't know, we use realtors to sell a lot of your tracks. And so, you and I both talked about dispositions people. So they might be asking themselves, why are these guys hiring?

in -house dispositions people to sell their tracks. Do you mind walking the listener through sort of why you hire people to do that?

Justin Piche (18:53)
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

So I mean, this is kind of, this is an evolution, okay? Because when I first started the business, the prevailing model was, hey, you don't need to pay a realtor commission. You can list these properties on Facebook. You can list these properties on lands of America. You can bring the buyers yourself and save on that commission. But when you're doing a fully remote business where you don't actually live next to the land, and don't get me wrong, I've been to plenty of my properties, but just, can't go to all of them and I can't get there every month or every week, right? Because they're,

in different states and I have a family and I have obligations here. And so I started the model with a sales VA. That was the first person, like one of the first people I hired. When I hired my transaction coordinator, I was doing all acquisitions myself. And then I hired a sales VA to handle all the Dispo, because we had a bunch of properties under contract to buy. And I wanted to get them listed and moved out. And that was taking a lot of time because I was still working full time at the time. And I had transaction coordinator because bringing things through, communicating with the sellers, communicating with the title companies.

It was just kind of, and she was more of a catchall at that point. And then she moved into a solely TC role as our transaction volume grew and that job grew to be a full -time job. And so, you know, we really quickly scaled the acquisition side and had all these properties to sell. And I just found I did not like these Facebook listings and everything. So I hired a person to help me manage all of that. That was my sales manager. So that's how it started. But then,

We realized very quickly that a lot of folks have trouble with vacant land. Like we can give them every piece of data about how to access it. Google pins, dashboard cam or dash cam video, like aerial video of every part of the property. We can give them literally everything and they still sometimes can't find it or sometimes don't feel comfortable or whatever. And so we were in a position where we're like, man, we need local boots on the ground.

or else because we've lost, we lost a bunch of sales because people just got frustrated because they couldn't find it or whatever. and then we just made the decision, you know what? We're going to list every property with a realtor. We're going to do a lot of work to find good realtors. And the, the, the thing is though, realtors are generally good at MLS listings and they generally aren't super great at other types of marketing that sell properties. And our goal is to

reduce the number of days in inventory and turn our cash as quickly as we can. Now we don't want to give up a bunch of profit for it, but it is sometimes worth giving up some serious profit to turn that cash again. If you have better opportunities coming down the pipeline and if you don't have an in -house sales team, you're really reliant on just a realtor to list it and feed, give you feedback and you know, bring you the contracts as they come in. But a lot of realtors are relatively disorganized. mean, I don't want to speak in generalities here cause there's in

Incredible brokers and realtors that we work with every day. We go back to them every time because they're amazing but there's also a lot of folks that kind of do this on the side and maybe aren't as professional as others and We don't want to put all of our eggs in that one basket. There's a lot of value to finding buyers yourself

Clay Hepler (21:59)
Yeah, that, so in other words, we're hiring brokers, but we're also taking it into our own hands to post it on Facebook to, and I don't know if you do any type of wholesaling, which we'll talk about later, probably in one of our podcasts, but getting deals, selling deals on the market or direct using Facebook, Facebook listings, Facebook groups, man, there's so much power in that.

as you become more professional, you wanna use every single way to actually get the deal off your books. And if you have to pay a broker and bring the buyer to the broker, like Justin was saying, we wanna turn our cash quickly. So I thought that that was important. And the last thing here is, you and I, got a lot of people here on our team. What do we do all day?

Justin Piche (22:52)
Dude, that's a great question. was asked that earlier. What do you do all day? Yeah, I mean, I can talk to that. A lot of it is building and breaking down the boundaries for the team. Like we talked about my kind of philosophy on team building through the Navy on the first episode. And a lot of my day is spent figuring out what the issues are and how to solve them so my team can do more.

Clay Hepler (22:53)
Nothing, we don't do anything, we just have podcasts.

Justin Piche (23:21)
And then obviously thinking strategically about what markets we're going into and how we're going to market to them and analyzing the results and making changes and adapting. and then, you know, the, the financing funding side of things is kind of ever evolving. So there's a lot of thoughts behind that. This is a very, let's just say my CPA charged me a lot of money to do my taxes last year. Like it's not a super straightforward, like there's a lot of transaction volume.

We're generating mortgages, we're selling mortgages, we're buying property in multiple different states. have dozens of investors. It's a very complex financial picture. And so I really need to stay on top of that side of things as well. And then right now, I'm still in the thick of project management and underwriting for our subdivide deals. And so that's obviously a big part of what I do. And then guess the other thing is I coach. I have some coaching students, some private coaching clients. And so I do spend part of my week.

know, helping other investors scale their land, their land businesses.

Clay Hepler (24:19)
Yeah, so for me, I'm also in that same exact position. It's reducing our cost of capital over time. At the beginning, you're gonna do JV partnerships, you're gonna do land funders, maybe for the first year or two, but as you start to get scale, you get the ability to raise capital. That's a big thing. I had a conversation with someone that I got an 11 % interest rate over the past weekend. Well, that's huge compared to maybe you're paying a

know, land funder 40%. Not that that's bad. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you want to mix up your cost of capital stack, but as you scale, that's really important. And then the leadership component. know, finding the right people in the right seats. I wish I knew this sooner, but if you find the right person, and they can do your job better than you can, or they enjoy doing it, and they allow you to, you know,

you hire dispositions person, well this person is focusing all day on selling your deals faster. And if you're very clear and articulate exactly how you are this person, what their position entails and their goals, which we're gonna talk about here about quarterly OKRs, and hold them accountable to those things, man, you're able to scale so much faster. And people are like, what do you do all day as a business owner? I find problems and I fix them.

I keep my team members accountable to high performance. I talk about the vision and where we're going and what we're doing and I put together, allocate resources, which is people, which is strategy, and which is money towards excelling and going after new business opportunities. And the difference between whether or not Justin and I hit our $4 million, $5 million a year businesses is it's not really a lot to do with us.

It's about the strategy that we employ and the people that we bring onto our team at this level and how we hold them accountable to

Justin Piche (26:21)
think let's go into the kind of how we think about planning and specifically I had written down EOS because that's, that's generally what I use. The EOS framework. And for those who don't know what that is, there's a book called traction by Gino Wickman. I think it's his name. And it's a great book. It just kind of talks about how, to treat your business and,

get accountability and actual planning, confronting your issues, a weekly cadence of meetings that actually produce results and solve problems. It's not easy to implement at first, but once you start doing it, you see the incredible value. And it's been huge for my business to get a great cadence of solving the issues we face and holding the team accountable for what they own and their goals, their KPIs.

et cetera.

Clay Hepler (27:13)
I think we should do an episode this quarter, man, about the actual EOS and how we roll it out because that's one thing that I'm this quarter actually, we'll talk about here, and then our quarterly objectives, our ROCs, as they say in EOS, and one of mine is actually to roll it out in my business. Now, I use objectives and key results, which is from the book Measure What Matters. Measure What Matters is, think Google uses OKRs, similar thing, ROCs, and then, I don't know what's underneath ROCs, but.

Justin Piche (27:33)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (27:41)
like the quarterly objectives for each individual person.

Justin Piche (27:42)
Yeah, have annual for free. We can do more on us. That's a great idea to do a podcast on. But for us, you have your annual goals, targets, and then you have quarterly rocks that you assign. And then under those rocks are actually like the tasks and things that need to get done and like kind of mini projects that need to get done to progress those rocks.

Clay Hepler (28:03)
Yeah, a couple of objectives for the quarter. I have four big objectives for the quarter. So keep in mind that the fourth quarter is historically a slower quarter.

That doesn't mean that you can't have a lot of success, but it is a slower quarter. That's the reality. know, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, dude, forget about it. You know, forget about anything

My quarterly objectives are the following. So the way I think about it is, before we go into a quarter, I have meetings with some of my key team members. I'm not meeting with my scrubber to focus on her objectives for the quarter, right? But I am meeting with my sales guys, I am meeting with my outbound marketing guys, I am meeting with my executive assistant, chief of staff, my transaction coordinator, things that are contributing to the goal.

Now, how we actually find and define these goals is I'm not like sitting, I'm not like walking one day and I'm like, let me just call up Justin and think what's he doing in his business and then I'll build my goals off of what he's doing. My goals are based on where I need to be in five years, which is a part of EOS, which we'll definitely go into later. But my quarterly goals are the following, $750 ,000 in projected profit locked up, build and execute.

entitlement and subdivide market selection process by the end of the quarter. So really understanding and building this process out to hone in on these core markets. Another one is more and better, which I'll go into in a second. And then the last one is sell over a half a million dollars in profit and close over $350 ,000 in profit and deals for the quarter. So that feels good to me given the time of year again.

And elections coming up. There's a lot of stuff that's gonna probably make it so that deals aren't selling as

Justin Piche (30:00)
Yeah, for us, we go through, my team goes through an annual planning and we really started implementing EOS this year. So we were a little bit delayed. I hired my EA in February. And so right after she came on the team, that's when we held our first kind of annual planning meeting. And it was really like two days, six hours Zoom. It was brutal.

Honestly, like I'm not a big fan of huge long meetings, because it robs both the predict the daily productivity of the team. And it's also really tiring to be on a zoom all day long, but we're remote remote team. And that's how we ran it. And you know, it was absolutely worth it for everyone to get aligned. And honestly, the first one is the longest, you know, it really is because you got to do it. There's a lot of things you need to discuss and set like your vision. You know, what is your like, what is your niche? What are your what is the purpose of your company? There's a bunch of things that it has you go through.

And then for quarterly planning, we basically have two four hour sessions, because I don't want to take up an entire day. I like to kind of split it up. We have two four hour sessions to set both quarterly objectives. In it, we review our annual objectives. We look at the last quarter and see, hey, how do we perform compared to the quarterly rocks? we get our rocks done? Did we not? We make a decision of if those rocks are almost done. Maybe they move to tasks. If they're not done, are they worth doing this quarter? Should we move them to the next quarter and then try to figure out, like, did we take on too much last quarter?

Right. Because the kind of principle is like four things to focus on is great. Three to seven is what they say in EOS. If you pick too many things that are important, everything's important and nothing is important. can say it's you really need to focus on the key things that are going to move you forward and only a few of them because you can't do everything well every quarter. Right. You can do a lot of things well but but you need to focus your energy on the things that are going to move your business forward towards those goals. And so for us.

right, the first one is three acquisitions signed contracts per week on average for the entire quarter. So that's the first quarterly rock. And obviously that is a cadence of contracts that will just give us really consistent deal flow. And obviously that moves us towards our profit goals.

Average days in inventory for our sales, all of our inventory under 150. So we have a lot of kind of longer term subdivides and properties maybe like in development that we're moving towards listing, but we're still working on an easement or getting a subdivide approved. So our days in inventory is kind of starting to tick up and the goal is to get the average down to 150. 60 plus qualified leads per week to my acquisitions managers, lead managers.

Clay Hepler (32:11)
Okay.

Justin Piche (32:33)
and then two large subdivides acquired. So this is like, I don't know, maybe 500 K purchase price or above would probably be where I like, if I had to draw a line in the sand, like two properties that cost me 500 K that have maybe the potential for 400 plus K and profit each this quarter. and then the last one was create an implement and employee review process.

like an annual review goal setting for each individual employee. And so the goal of that is really to have the team themselves take ownership over their own development, commit to achieving certain things during the year. And then it's my responsibility and my leadership team's responsibility to both hold them accountable and to set them up for success so they can achieve those goals. And those don't have to be necessarily business goals. They can be personal goals.

And I have a lot to talk about on team and how to get the, you know, we'll probably do a whole podcast on like culture and whatnot at one point. But yeah, I just, want them all to be better, feel better, do better. And I think being held accountable at work is maybe an easy way that we can help make their lives better and make them better at their job and have them give them more pride. And anyway.

Clay Hepler (33:52)
I think another thing too is that a lot of new investors, including me, I speak from personal experiences, you like give someone a job and then you say, do this, and then you don't hold them accountable to results. And so it's really unclear to someone in order to be successful. Like what is success? How do we measure success? How do we focus on success so that you're constantly going towards that?

There was this study of two groups of people during the holidays. One group of people didn't weigh themselves during the holidays. They just sort of ate and they kind of measured themselves, but they didn't really follow a diet. The other group of just stood on a scale. And the one group that stood on a scale didn't lose that much weight. The other group gained 15 pounds.

And that was an example. It was me, the other group was me, by the way. But that's an example of tracking results and just being accountable to something. Just tracking simply creates high performance. It's as simple as that. It's not like rah -rahs and listening to Tony Robbins tapes a lot of times for our teams. It's just holding them accountable and tracking the results and they see it.

Justin Piche (34:57)
Yeah, that was me. That was my group, by the way.

Clay Hepler (35:20)
and so they know what success is.

Justin Piche (35:23)
100%, absolutely. Yeah, you can't measure what you don't track or you can't improve what you don't measure. What's the, you know the saying, what is it?

Clay Hepler (35:31)
you can't improve what you don't measure.

Justin Piche (35:32)
There you go, that's the one. yeah. I mean, it's absolutely true. know, everybody in my business has a KPI that they are responsible for. They have their own specific goal that they have to hit on a daily basis for a lot of cases, on a weekly basis, but there's something they can take ownership on or over and look at and say, I did or exceeded my expectations here, or I didn't meet them here.

And when those expectations are clear, not just to one person on your team, but to the entire team, honestly, I think it lifts everybody up. Right. And this is maybe a little bit of a, like a departure from the quarterly goal setting, but I think it's a, like a, a tangential topic that's worth talking about. Maybe like a team compensation and a philosophy on, like how to build a good and successful team. That's all rowing in the same direction. I want every good thing that anyone does.

on or for my business to benefit everyone else on the business. Because when that happens, the whole team knows like, man, if I am able to get better, let's say, at cold outreach and get over the no better and get more engaged sellers on the phone to push those leads to negotiate to grow the, you know, get, get profit in the pipeline. I know that my friend or my coworker, every single other person is it's going to

build them up, right? It's going to make, if they're going to make more money, they are going to be more prosperous in their life. Every single person. And you know, it's a big, we do, we do like a profit share commission based on gross profit for the business. Like if I'm able to double the gross profit in a year of my business, I am going to substantially increase the income of my team. And that is like one of the biggest rewards is being able to like,

People's livelihoods now depend on my business. Like there's a weight of responsibility that is on my shoulders that wasn't there when I was just working for Exxon Mobil or Amazon or like working as a cog kind of in a huge corporate machine. Now there are people's children that eat and go to a better school, know, or buy a property, buy a house, whatever that depend directly on the success and the results of my business. like that's that's a, you know, that's, don't take that lightly.

I don't think that lightly. I want the whole team to realize that and to put more in so that everybody gets more out.

Clay Hepler (37:56)
Yeah, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.

so one of mine was more and better. And a lot of times we think that, especially early on in our business when we can't really look back and say, I screwed up this quarter, I screwed up this quarter because of all these reasons, oftentimes we just need to look at what we currently are doing and just improve it, and that will improve our business, right? And so,

For the more and better category, it's enhancing, designing and implementing WorldCrest, HR, business ops, SOPs, marketing and all other functions in documentation and Notion. So we're gonna take everything and we're gonna put in a Notion by September of this quarter. We're gonna roll out EOS in 90 .io. 90 .io is a online software for EOS. It's incredible, I don't know if you have it, but it's really, really great software.

Justin Piche (38:45)
I don't, I have a Notion dashboard that's built out for EOS.

Clay Hepler (38:53)
Okay, cool, A KPI tracking and bookkeeping is delivered by the third week of the month every month by the end of the quarter without the involvement of the CEO. Perfect the wholesale and creative financing pitch in our business such that we pitch wholesaling over 30 times and seller financing over 30 times. And those are the more and better of our business.

Justin Piche (39:15)
I love that. That's really nitty gritty. I want to talk about is average days in inventory under 150. To a lot of folks listening who may be newer investors or have gone through kind one of the intro to land investing courses out there,

You know, you may be, you may think you may come in with some expectation like, I'm going to buy this deal. I'm going to sell it like immediately. I'm going to make quick flip profit. And you can, right? You can wholesale, you know, you can be really good at sales. can get things turned over quickly, but when you start getting into developments, especially, and you have to take title, these deals subdivide, and you start to increase your inventory substantially that day is an inventory can creep up. And when you're not able to turn your cash very quickly, it means you need more capital.

to do the same number of transactions. And that leads to higher costs, et cetera. And so for us and for me, I think of acquisitions and sales, I think of one overarching principle that I'm trying to achieve on each of those. For sales, is minimizing the amount of time that money is out until it comes back in. Like that is, if I had to pick one single thing that my sales team is most focused on,

It is bringing that time down to as low as possible because that means we can turn that cash more and more and more and more and more. Faster turns. That is the goal on sales. And then on acquisitions, it is getting in front of as many qualified sellers as possible. That's, that's the thing because the whole, the whole business runs on opportunities and conversations. That's like, that is the input. The, the input is,

Clay Hepler (40:37)
Mm -hmm.

Justin Piche (40:56)
giving yourself as many opportunities to engage with people that want to sell as you can. so anyway, those are the kind of two main principles that I like to focus on. yeah, 150 days in inventory, that's a big one for us. Get it down below that.

Clay Hepler (41:11)
Yeah, and then, you know, there's a direct relationships between what is called cash conversion cycle, which people define it on different parts of their process. But, you know, how long does it take from a marketing dollar? So for example, I spend $10 and I get a lead on leads aren't $10, but I wish they were, but I spend $10 to get a lead. And how long does it take me to take that $10 and bring it into

to actually convert that lead. So we focus on the back of the funnel, right? We focus on how long does it take for us to sell a deal, but we also want to focus on the entire funnel, right? So how long does it take for a lead to come in for us to get it under contract? How long does it take for us to get under contract to close? How long does it take for us to close to sell? And so at each part of your business,

You know, we track these things meticulously, like specifically when a lead comes in to close, like that's really important. And so if we can slowly shrink that time in each tranche, I don't know, in each part of the process, we can scale our business faster.

Justin Piche (42:20)
Yeah, I think that's awesome. Yeah. think one of the things we, I tend to not maybe hurry up on the close as much. I like to kind of be flexible with when we close properties and oftentimes we're, you know, we're, doing some improvement on basically every property, even if it's as little as getting a survey to clearly define the property boundaries. And, sometimes those take some serious time and so you got to give yourself some time. But I, yeah, I love the principle of that marketing dollar spent to that, that, that profit coming in.

and minimizing that longer kind of cash conserved version cycle, that's pretty substantial too. I tend to personally think about it more of like the money leaving on the deal side to profit coming back in, because obviously that's the huge chunk, that's the much bigger chunk. So I got something to learn maybe here from you on how to reduce my cash conserved version cycle for marketing dollars.

Clay Hepler (43:10)
Right, and one other thing here is every single part of our process focuses on, our acquisition team, we wanna focus on speed to lead. We wanna focus on getting a deal on a contract. My transaction quarter, guess what one of her key results of the quarter is? Reduce our time to close by 15%, right? And then we're hiring this disposition person and reduce our time to sell.

And so if we can close these gaps, like you say, sometimes, know, per test and surveys take longer. But if we are doing, you know, 70 transactions a year, 80 transactions a year or more, right, and we're able to reduce the total time by 30 days, we can scale faster. We can invest our dollars faster. And so that's the key. And those are the insights that, you you get from, you know, being, listening to the Ground Game podcast, you know?

Justin Piche (43:58)
Faster. 100%.

Clay Hepler (44:09)
Hahahaha

Justin Piche (44:09)
100 % 100 yeah

Clay Hepler (44:12)
yeah, the gentleman's agreement here, guys, you know, we pour our time and energy effort into this podcast and appreciate you spending your valuable time in listening to us. And if you got value out of this, if you don't like us, if you don't think Justin should keep his hat like that, he should change his hat, or if you don't like my camera, we were talking about my camera before.

Justin Piche (44:31)
I'll come with a new hat for the next one.

Clay Hepler (44:37)
Please leave that in the comments, rate, review, and subscribe so that we can continue to get feedback. And like I said in the previous podcast, the most important thing is when you subscribe, don't say, hey, I like, know, these guys are super funny. The value here is, I like that these guys spoke about this so that we can bring more of that specifically in so we can enhance your

Justin Piche (44:57)
well, thanks, Clay. And thanks, audience, for listening. This has been episode two of the Ground Game podcast. And we will see you guys next week.