Episode 20: Visionaries vs. Integrators

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:09)
This is your other host, Justin Piche. We're here to teach you how to win the ground game.

All right, man, what has been going on for you this last week? I know you've been in a frenzy of hiring. How's it going?

Clayton Hepler (00:37)
Yeah, man, I made a post on on x Twitter, so called Twitter. We had 450 applicants for an acquisition manager position in six days.

Justin Piche (00:47)
That's amazing. Did you put, was it on LinkedIn? What'd you post it on?

Clayton Hepler (00:51)
Well, I posted it on in indeed and linkedin but like honestly 50 % of the applications came from Twitter or X and We've had some good candidates. I have a bunch of interviews tomorrow a bunch of interviews the next day Some really all stars and I'm pumped to get in and start giving them opportunities to hunt so We're hiring

two acquisition managers because they're going to be running end end process from intake to close. And yeah, it's going to be interesting. Another thing that is interesting is that in two weeks, I'm taking my mother on a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights for her 70th birthday. So we bought our plane tickets, my mother and father and

paying for hotel, plane tickets, and taking her up to Norway, which is like super cool. And this is all while onboarding a director of operations, which we're gonna talk about today. Next week we're onboarding this director of operations, and he's gonna be by himself the week after that, and I'm gonna be in Norway time trying to be present with the fam. And...

hiring, bringing something, someone in before something like that or after is a strategic decision. And I can talk about how why I made that decision later. But that's been on my plate lately.

Justin Piche (02:35)
That's awesome. Man, hiring. I love hiring, but I also hate hiring at the same time because the amount of work we've, and we talked about this on previous podcasts, but the amount of work that goes into finding a really quality person is so much. It really is. So I can empathize with the struggle and the time that it's taken you to kind of find that. But that's awesome about the applicants. That's really cool. It's about, had about that many applicants to my kind of acquisitions sales.

Acquisition ops manager position when we posted on LinkedIn, but it took a lot longer to get that many applicants 450 and six days is nuts. I don't even know how you can possibly go through and check out that many people. Hopefully there's some There's some Some sort of disqualifiers that are easy to to to find for most of them So you're only kind of narrowing it down to a shorter list. I had one Why no, I had one kind of my big not necessarily disqualifier, but I wanted

Clayton Hepler (03:26)
We have this incredible- go ahead.

Justin Piche (03:34)
somebody who was kind of not that I'm ageist by any stretch. I'm definitely not. But I wanted somebody like young and hungry in the role. Like I didn't necessarily want somebody super established in a career to join in that role. I wanted somebody maybe with 10 years of industry experience or like related industry experience who has just had potentially more energy to grow and scale with the company. That was kind of one thing that I was looking for. So that helped, you know, narrow things down for me personally pretty quickly.

Clayton Hepler (04:03)
Yeah, mean, that's, I don't find that age is, that's the requirement of job. For example, in our, acquisition, the profile of an acquisition manager in our business, in someone's business could be very different than another. You could be a volume based shop and you have a high, like almost car salesman type, know, door to door salesman type person. And then if you are going after larger subdivides,

Then you'll have more of an enterprise sales, longer sales cycle, relationship building salesperson. Those are different types of salesperson. It's just like being an industrial engineer versus a chemical engineer or a nuclear engineer. mean, the basis of what they know is pretty similar, but they have a specialty and that's what you're looking for. And for this position for our company, we're really looking for that person that is a more...

consultative relationship based person that's going to build relationships with sellers for long periods of time so we can get more at bats for these larger opportunities.

Justin Piche (05:08)
Yeah, which take

a lot longer, obviously, to take down. Sweet. man. Let's see. What's been going on with me? I'm just dealing with a lot of like big kind of moving pieces on big deals, which is fun, exciting. But some of it's pretty new territory for me, like lining up three to five million dollar transactional funding potentially for a deal and things like that are just not in the normal.

kind of day to day of a land flipping business, but now they're becoming things that I have to think about as we get involved in some of these larger development deals, which is, which is great. The team is crushing on sales. Sales is crushing right now, which is fantastic. I think we got 13, 12 properties under contract to sell this last in the last like seven days, which is nuts. Sell to sell in the selling.

Clayton Hepler (06:00)
Under contract to buy or under contract in the selling. Okay, got it, got it,

got it.

Justin Piche (06:05)
One

of them is actually really interesting. We have this deal in Georgia that we're buying for 117,000, it's 50 acres. our plan is or was to subdivide it into three lots. I work with a local bank there that works in these counties. And so I sent it over to them. They started the underwriting process and started talking to the attorney, our closing attorney to get kind of the loan originated and do a cash out refi. Or sorry, actually this is not a cash out, just to buy.

originate the loan at closing and we pre-marketed it as a three lot split with one of our agents there and somebody came in with a $275,000 owner financed offer on all three lots. So like not even splitting them up. I mean, which was offer 45k down, 230k note, 12%, 60 months. And so the total gross after I always like

think about if I'm gonna generate a mortgage, what do I think I can sell it at? Likely 18 to 20 % yield very easily, very quickly without my, like I don't have to add any padding to that. I know I can get those numbers. So at about 19 % yield, it's $195,000 note sale price. And after closing fees and attorney, I mean, and commissions,

It'll basically be about 123 or 223 sale. So make a hundred K on the deal. I messaged, I emailed my banker and I was like, Hey, I was like, Hey man, we thanks for getting started on this balloon so quick, but I think I'm just not going to do it. Cause I'm going end up selling this the next day after origination, you originate it and have to pay it off to release the property from our mortgage. I can originate a new mortgage to this, to this buyer. And then, yeah, so that's pretty cool. Fun.

Clayton Hepler (07:39)
Solid deal, solid deal.

Justin Piche (08:00)
Man, just yeah, selling it, killing it. We have another subdivide, three lot subdivide that I use the bank for, that somebody's coming in and buying all three lots. I bought for 100K, put 15K down and we have it under contract at 195, no realtor, buyers paying all closing costs.

Clayton Hepler (08:16)
Let's go. Let's go. I love that man. It's really good.

Justin Piche (08:19)
Yeah, scared.

All right, man. Well, the topic of the day, we are going to talk about integrator and visionary. And I guess the little tagline is, you struggling to align your big ideas with the day to day operations of your business or vice versa? Are you an excellent operator, but you don't know where you want to go, right? So we're to talk about what, what is an integrator? What is a visionary?

How do you know which one you are? How do you know when to hire them? What are the right roles for them? How do you onboard these folks? And Clay and I are just gonna, yeah, we'll talk about kind of our experience, what we think we are, which is pretty, probably pretty obvious if you listen to this podcast, but. So sweet, why don't you start us off, man? What is a visionary to you? What's an.

Clayton Hepler (09:01)
haha

Well, I think this is particularly timely because we are, actually in the process of hiring this position and onboarding this position. And so this will be straight from exactly what we're doing in our business. So it'll be a roadmap, not a theory. It'll be actual what I'm doing, like physically what I'm doing to bring this person onto our business. I'm really excited to bring them on. So to answer your question about visionary, I think that the

The visionary is someone that's focusing on larger goals, larger opportunities, larger leverage activities. They're focusing on spearheading new marketing initiatives in the land business. They're focusing on improving the revenue driving aspects of the business.

Going and building out a plan for long term goals. This is where the business is going to be. This is common. A lot of land investors are this person. Most land investors that get in are this person. Visionaries are often the people that take the first step, they take the first leap. This is what I want to do. This is the life that I want to have. I'm going to go out and put myself out there on a limb and build this business.

An integrator is the person that captures, takes what the visionary is actually doing and they realize it. They put actions around thoughts. They optimize processes. And of course they manage operations. So you can have an integrator who is a operations manager, a senior operations manager, a director of operations, a COO.

Or you can have people that have integrator base characteristics. If you're the type of person that gets more energy from going out there and closing a deal and you're not particularly detail oriented or process oriented, you're probably a visionary versus a integrator who is the person that makes sure that the trains are

meeting all the times that they need to be at stops. I give the analogy of, imagine you are a person that says this train goes from station A to station Z, right? The integrator is the person that makes sure that when the train hits the stop that they're supposed to hit at to pick up people, it's on time. There's not like paint splatters or dirt in the cars.

Justin Piche (11:30)
you

Clayton Hepler (11:51)
It's not jerking. It's a great experience for the people that are on the train. They just make sure the train is running in the way that it should. Whereas a visionary might not be that person necessary. I kind of captured a lot of it. Did you have any additional things that you thought of to add to that?

Justin Piche (12:14)
No, that's pretty I think that's pretty good. Visionary is obviously the person who is the risk taker. You said it well, like the person that takes the first step. Like you have big vision. You have a vision. I mean, you have you have big goals. You have something you want to accomplish. You have an end state that you want to be at. But getting there is where the integrator comes in and they they they execute on that vision. That's kind how I like to think about the visionaries, the one thinking big, breaking down barriers, pushing people past what's possible.

And then the integrator is the person who actually helps you execute to get the business to that point. Those are kind of the, if I had to break it down to those kind of two major things. So how about this? How do you know what you are? And maybe I can talk a little bit how I know what I am, but I'm obviously a visionary. I, I like to dream big. I like to take risks. I like to bet on myself, my business. I get energy from.

like the possibilities and the opportunities. And I do have a bit of an integrator streak. Like I'm pretty operations focused and it can be relatively detail oriented, but I will not let the details slow me down. And I think about this, like when you hire people in your business and we'll get down to like hiring in a second here, but I'm just doing this mental self assessment of my own team and the people.

that I have in key positions are very much more integrator focused people. And I think the reason is because I intuitively know that that's the type of person I need. And actually I was just on a conversation earlier today with a coaching client and we were talking about sales, the disposition side. And we were talking about my sales manager, Brian, who's been on this podcast and he's like, he's crushing it, right? was like, yeah, he is crushing it. And I kind of the way I

explained it was like he focuses much more on the systems and processes than I would. So like I want to get to the end state and so I will just break through and bust through all the cumbersome stuff and probably not do everything perfectly right to get to the end state. But Brian's mind works a little differently. Like he will look at a process and he'll say, okay, I need to get this more efficient.

But in order to do that, I need to do this other thing with this system or this integration or this marketing piece or whatever. And then in order to fix that, I need to focus on this other third one up here. The flow goes through. Once I fix this and I can fix this and I can fix this and then I can save myself 20 minutes a day for the rest of time. Like, that's the way his mind thinks. And so I'm always like, dude, are we, do we have this property listed yet? And he's like, I'm working on it.

but these are all the things that you don't see because you just want the end state of the property listed and the leads coming in that I need to do and fix. I think that's like a really good, like that's a, I'm pushing him to get things done, but he's focusing on getting things done the right way. Anyway.

Clayton Hepler (15:11)
That's an excellent point. The self-assessment, if you have read Traction, there's another great book which is called Rocket Fuel. Have you read Rocket Fuel, Justin? If I remember correctly, Rocket Fuel really takes the outline of Traction, which is entrepreneur operating system, and then it implements the visionary integrator

Justin Piche (15:24)
No, I have not.

Clayton Hepler (15:41)
kind of this is how you run your business and it focuses on that in the book. So Rocket Fuel is like, if you have an integrator that you want to bring onto your business, this is exactly what I'm going to be doing with my integrator. Reading that book or having them read that book is like a critical part of the process, right? EOS is how we run our business. A lot of people run their business on EOS in the language that we're using, integrator visionary.

is directly from that book. It's from Entrepreneur Operating System. And so there's a lot of assessments in there. think Rocket Fuel has assessments around this is how you know if you're a visionary, this is how you know you're an integrator. What we're talking about is the basic level, but you can live on a spectrum like Justin, right? Most entrepreneurs that are good entrepreneurs can live in both worlds.

We have been able to cobble together a business and do all the things that we need to do and push it forward. And so we've been able to live in the detail oriented world, the more visionary world, busting things through, focusing on the outcome and the end state. But you might have a bent and I think that's really what we're talking about here. A visionary is really more of a bend to that and an integrator is more of a, I'm more like an integrator.

but it exists on a spectrum. But to say this, the book goes into this more, but most people are either an integrator or a visionary. Very few people have the skillset of both integrator and visionary. It's like, I think the book says something like 10 % or 8 % of people are that dual threat. So that's just if you'd like to look up how to...

know if you're an integrator of visionary rocket feels a good place to start.

Justin Piche (17:41)
Yeah. Some other kind of like things to ask yourself could be, are you more comfortable having everything like rigidly structured? you like a, here's a good thing I like to think of, the building a plane in the air type of analogy. Are you the type of person that will not take off in a plane unless it's fully built? And if you're the person that, you know,

Clayton Hepler (17:55)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (18:05)
spent five years listening to podcasts like this one or like bigger pockets or whatever, and always dreamed about investing in land or real estate or whatever, but never actually took action because you wanted everything to be right or you wanted to have the perfect CRM or you wanted to have the perfect marketing dialed in exactly who you're sending to, the perfectly scrubbed list, whatever it is, and you struggle with those, just getting it out there, you're much more likely to be

kind of on the integrator side, in my opinion, than the visionary side. And if you're someone who's done that and then has finally taken action, like heck yeah, you overcame that. And if you're the kind of person like me, where you just take off and it's like, all you have is maybe some wings on your arms and you're trying to flap them, but you don't have an engine yet, you don't have anything figured out, but you know you're gonna go fly, whatever it takes, then you're much more likely to be the visionary side.

Clayton Hepler (19:00)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one, one additional thing that I want to put here, most of the people that listen to this are business owners, right? But if you're not a business owner, you can also be an integrator or a visionary within a department. You can be an integrator and visionary and not be the founder, not be the, the co-founder. Because for example, a director of sales could be a visionary director of sales and they could have integrators underneath them.

A department head could be an integrator and there could be underneath the integrator there could be someone who is more of a visionary of course in the context of rocket fuel and EOS and Traction that what we're discussing of course that's it's for business owners entrepreneur operating system but if you are not a Business owner yet or you're working for someone else that doesn't mean that you can't exhibit these characteristics and be rewarded If you if you exhibit your full self, which is either an integrator or visionary

Justin Piche (20:03)
Absolutely. All right, man. So why don't we talk about you and how you know that you need to hire for an integrator position. Like, when do you hire and like what kind of led you to this moment?

Clayton Hepler (20:16)
Okay, so yeah, so there are, what led me to the moment was self-awareness. And I, even though I have a larger than your average Atlanta investor team, I have not had an executive level thinker, strategist, an executor on my team yet. And.

I knew that that would unlock an incredible amount of growth in my business if I had just even one person that would live on that level. so previously I wasn't, I did not prioritize investing in people in that way. I'd rather invest in marketing. I didn't have the capital to invest in the person that I thought that I needed to invest in. I was thinking, hey, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this really well, right? Which I can get into that philosophy and how that broke down.

recently, but that in America is 150, 250K. So we're talking like 15 to 20K base plus commissions. That's a huge hire, right? And for most land investment businesses, including mine, which was in year two last year, that's not like an easy hire to make, right? That is a huge hire to make. And because I wanted this person

to be essentially managing the operations of the company, it wouldn't be like your position, which is a disposition manager or a sales manager, whatever, because I still like that part of the business and I wanted to have someone that came in and actually ran marketing under contract and then transactions to Dispo.

that those two areas is what I wanted this person to run. Financials, things like that. The operations of the business, right? Outside of the sales component of the business, and acquisition sales. And so I realized this is a needed position because I'm not able to come into the business and actually add value where I need to add value, which is reducing cash conversion cycles, increasing profitability per transaction.

better market selection, better screening, all these things that an operations efficiency expert would be able to do. Of course, I can do this, right? It's not that I can't do it. It's just what are the priorities of the CEO? And I have different priorities. And so all this stuff added together in what we talked about a couple of weeks ago, Justin, about I want to go and build a quality shop. But in order to do that, I have to build this mechanism, this machine in the meantime.

that allows me to consistently produce this revenue as we are focusing on these larger opportunities. So I need a co-pilot. I need a co-pilot to be able to manage the main thing and enhance it and optimize it as I go out and find these additional opportunities and build our sales process along the way. So I knew that the co-pilot was required. Of course I could do it myself, but I wanna get to my goals faster and so I needed to bring in an expert. And so what I did is I said,

I wanna have the highest bang for my buck. I wanted to get a senior operations person. I didn't want a director of operations, right? Because a director and a COO have a level of, they live in a strategy realm. There's a spectrum of operation manager, senior operation manager, director of operations, and then the, above that, the COO. As you go up,

they spend more time in strategy and less time in execution. And so I needed this very healthy friction between an executor and a strategist, right? And so, is this helpful by the way, Justin?

Justin Piche (24:23)
Yeah, no, this is good. I, you know, I, think a lot of people listen to podcasts, I think, because we talk about higher level stuff than, what is the right type of marketing to send and how do I pick a market? So yeah, man, I mean, I love the way you think about this type of stuff. So keep going.

Clayton Hepler (24:40)
So essentially the friction here was the executor and strategist, right? This is a critically important position, a higher in my business. And so I needed someone that was able to simultaneously spearhead new marketing initiatives and also able to get in and make that higher and like also able to be the executor in building out SOPs. we can think of, we can...

brainstorm of an SOP and we could build it out. Those are very different skill sets. This is a builder versus an optimizer. And I needed both of those. This was a hard person to figure out. And so I thought through what would be the best background of a person to do this. We were talking about enterprise salespeople versus pest control salespeople earlier, right? The salesperson that you really want is

is that enterprise level, the more complex, longer sales cycle, it's still a salesperson, right? And in this case, I needed someone that I felt had the skill set in the background to come in and win in this position. And so I thought someone with a manufacturing background would be uniquely equipped because someone in a manufacturing background with an operational bent in manufacturing, supply chain management, understands the process from taking something

a piece of land in this case, from finding the opportunity, the raw material, the data, right, to converting the opportunity into potential energy, profit, in getting the deal under contract, to taking that energy and making an end result, a car, a ship, a whatever, the profit that we have in our business. And so I have talked about this so many times that our business is a conveyor belt.

and someone that can understand how to increase throughput, decrease mistakes, a manufacturing background would be the perfect fit for this position, engineering, manufacturing background. so I made this job, said, this would be this type of characteristic as someone supply chain management, manufacturing, heavy materials, things like that would be a perfect fit. And so the gentleman that we'd offered the job to,

has a background in supply chain management, manufacturing, shipping management, worked for a massive firm and had all the characteristics of someone that could look at a system and say, what I can do is increase throughput, decrease costs, increase profit. He knew about a couple of things. One of the things that I asked is a theory of constraints, which is a manufacturing concept, right? He knew, he read the book and he,

I knew about the theory of concerns and this is one of the things we asked. There are many applicants for this position. But this person to me was a perfect fit for a land business. I wasn't looking for an operations manager of a staples, multiple staples. I was looking for someone that was pre-built to look at a conveyor belt that is our business and integrate. So all I needed to do is then take this person and say, this is where we're going. This is where we currently are. Knowing what you know,

increasing throughput, decreasing costs. Let's do that same exact thing in our business.

Justin Piche (28:10)
You know what I, I don't know if you know this about me, but you know I worked for ExxonMobil and Amazon before, right? Do know what I did at Exxon?

Clayton Hepler (28:20)
No, I did know you worked at Amazon, but I didn't know you worked at Exxon. I did know you worked at Exxon, didn't you Amazon, but what did you do at Exxon?

Justin Piche (28:26)
Yeah,

was a supply chain manager. I worked in America's exports doing like all the supply planning for exports that we would do. we had sales that had a certain amount of orders and forecasts that got pushed to the manufacturing plant. The manufacturing plant had to manufacture certain SKUs or certain types of product. And then my team was responsible for getting all of that material into the right warehouses and the right places in the world.

on ships, et cetera. And then from there, I moved into a supply chain supervisor position at a manufacturing plant where we did all the, team as a supervisor, but we did all the raw material ordering, like all the constraints, like what do we need to have? What are our minimums? And then all of this production planning, like what are we turning this into based on our sales forecast and what our orders are? And it's just so funny that you said that because I have like all of those backgrounds that you were looking for for your ops, your ops manager position.

Clayton Hepler (29:09)
Ha!

Justin Piche (29:24)
guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast again to say thank you for listening. We really appreciate it. We're working to bring you guys good content that maybe is a little different than every other land podcast that you listen to. Not to say those aren't great because I listen to almost all of them, but this one is special. So if you also think it is, leave us a review, leave us a comment. We really appreciate it. We want to know what you want to hear so we can talk about the things that matter to you.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clayton Hepler (29:54)
Yeah, that's really funny, Yeah. It makes sense, right? It's very logical why this position is what you...

Justin Piche (30:03)
It is. And

it is a conveyor belt. I mean, it really is. It's you know, the funnel method. Clint Turner kind of had, when I was starting in land, I went through to Clint Turner, learned land's funnel method course and all that kind of stuff. And it made perfect sense to me because you're essentially creating a basket of opportunities at the top.

and you're creating processes and steps to get those down to the highest likelihood and potential properties that you can buy. And then it's the same thing on the sales side, right? You're, you for the buyer's leads, you're, you're marketing to generate a certain amount of buyer's leads and having processes to get them out to the property, qualifying them, et cetera, to find that, that person to, to, to buy your property. And then what you're doing to the property in between, are you improving it? Are you subdividing it? You know, how are you adding value? Maybe it's just marketing, you know, maybe that's all the value you're adding, but

that's substantial for an unmarketed property to have marketing and be listed for sale. There's like, that's some value there, right? To find a buyer, but it's just a bunch of, it's a machine. there are, our current like drive for both my acquisitions, like sales ops manager and my sales manager. So Dispo and acquisitions kind of like process integrators essentially is minimum time and like process optimization.

Like those are their primary focus, focuses, both of them. How do we get properties to market ASAP? So we have more time to bring, or we can shorten the cash conversion cycle, the amount of time our cash is out until it comes back in by getting that property marketed at day, say 10 after we take contract or versus, you know, after we buy it or day 50 or whatever, however long it normally takes for us to buy, get a property under contract, get the title commitment back, get our broker price opinion, get our drone materials.

get all of our marketing material, auto buyers, emails, everything's set up for that process. That time needs to be condensed to a minimum. And that's like a huge focus on the sales side. Same thing on acquisitions is how do we, our follow-up process, like that's the key thing is how are we making sure we're nurturing these long-term relationships? And it's a process. It's a, anyway, that kind of resonated with me.

Clayton Hepler (32:08)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, makes sense, right? Every business sort of has a different process, right? But in the reality, we're trying to take this material, let it sit on our shelves as little time as possible, and get it off the shelves, right? And so there's a lot of levers that we can pull as land investors. We can choose better markets. We can build out a dispositions team.

We can offer owner financing. We can market the property better. We could reduce the price of the property. There's a lot of things that we can do, but an operations person is going to be able to see and say, okay, Clay, here's an objective. We want to reduce our cash conversion cycle from 150 to 120 days. Let's just say. That's the goal set by the visionary.

the integrator is gonna say, okay, here are all the levers that we can pull. Of course, the visionary can contribute to that, but here are all the levers that we need to pull in the most important levers to achieve this outcome. Because I see how the execution of the day-to-day operations as the integrator, I can see them better than, for example, maybe the visionary could.

Justin Piche (33:29)
So how do you know when to hire for an integrator just for someone of our listeners? What do you think is the right time for somebody to hire? What about their businesses? Like, hey, you need an integrator.

Clayton Hepler (33:39)
Well, mean, the thing is hiring is like a superpower, right? And bringing on the right person if you can afford them like should be like day one. Right? I don't think I think when to hire is, I mean, when it's appropriate with your business and when you can afford it. think that's the answer to that question. I don't think that if you could having a partner

Integrator visionary combo is incredibly helpful. but I think you should hire as soon as it is possible, right? Cause you're, you're crippling yourself without this, this person, the, the integrator. mean, for example, we talked to Brian, right? A couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, you wouldn't be where you are without Brian. You made that hire though. You brought him into the organization. You had the culture, the core values, the aligned structure.

You saw within him what he could be, right? But your business wouldn't be nearly where it is. Now, that's called smart hiring, right? You brought a man, you created this incredibly good incentive structure that he's benefiting from in the long term. But you've told me this. I I'm putting words in your mouth, Justin. So same exact thing with some strategic hires.

Justin Piche (35:03)
Yeah, no, no, that's true. Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (35:09)
So if you could just hire a team of people and create pure incentive structures, I mean, you build the biggest businesses in the world. This is what tech companies do. This is what the biggest companies in the world do. They find the best people and they just put them in the seats. And so theoretically, what your role as the visionary would be in that scenario, as I hire my integrator, I'm no longer in the day-to-day. What's the value that I'm bringing to the business? Opportunities, clear thinking, strategy.

revenue driving activities, right? But if you can add that from the beginning, you're just going to be that much better. And so my answer to that question, this is a long way to way of me saying this, Justin, is as soon as possible. What do you think?

Justin Piche (35:54)
Yeah, I like to think like when you know it's the right time to hire like an integrator position as a visionary. And the reason why I speak about it like this and not say, hey, if you're an integrator, when's the right time to hire a visionary is because I'm more of the visionary. Like I've not been in the opposite side where I needed to find somebody to help me set big goals. Like that's not a problem for me. I'm pretty good at setting unrealistic goals for myself and working really hard to achieve them. It's more of like a feeling of what's going on in your business. And I see this a lot.

with different coaching clients or other people that are just like trying to, you know, asking me for advice or whatever it is. Where it's like, they feel like everything is disorganized. Like they look at their marketing plan and they feel like, man, we're just like blasting things out, but we don't have like a structure to this. And their follow up, it's like, we're just like dealing with leads as they come in, but we don't have like a path of all these leads need to follow until they're marked.

cold. It's either like if we don't get to them, then they're gone. And like we they go cold and we don't really follow up with them. We don't have these processes in place. And on the sales side, it's like, yeah, we we list with these brokers, but we don't really get a ton of feedback. And we don't really know how many views we've got or how many site visits or how many like we just don't really hear anything unless we get an offer. And they just don't feel comfortable because they don't have the right people in place that are keeping track of these things and making sure everything happens. They think it's happening, but it's not happening the right way.

And so there's just like this feeling of like, things aren't working as smoothly and clearly as they should be. And I can't look at my business and say, I'm generating this many opportunities a day. I know I'm not missing opportunities because I have somebody who is diligently monitoring and optimizing these processes and this followup and making sure we're not dropping any balls on this side of the business. And on that side of the business, that's kind of the, that feeling of being really disorganized with your marketing.

with your acquisitions, with your sales, that is a key indicator in my opinion that A, you're probably handling too much more than you can personally handle because you feel disorganized and B, maybe you need an integrator that is really focused on those operational things that need to happen for you to have a clear picture of how you're doing in your business.

Clayton Hepler (38:09)
I couldn't agree more. One of the things that I thought of as

If you are a couple steps ahead, sometimes you feel like you don't have control, which is different than being disorganized, right? Not knowing what's going on in the day-to-day is different than being disorganized. And so if you have a layer of people underneath you, not knowing what's going on at any one point, you can obviously go and check KPI boards or however you keep your team accountable. But that's just one thing I would add to that. So.

Justin Piche (38:42)
Yeah, that's a good, I think that's a good clarification because I often don't know exactly what's going on in the day to day, day to day, but I can get a report or I can go look and see, Hey, how many leads did we generate yesterday? How many contracts did we send out? How many offers were made? You know, what, what is our return on this campaign or that campaign? Like I can go look at those, those numbers whenever I feel uneasy or if I feel like, we have, know, last week we got one contract, our targets three to four. So why'd we get one? I can say, well we got

20 offers out and three of them are being mailed back and like maybe this week we'll have five or six contracts. Like I can see those things and know what's happening when I want to. But yeah, I often don't know. So it's a good clarification.

Clayton Hepler (39:22)
So the roles and responsibilities of this position, I think we went over them pretty clearly, right? The visionary is strategic direction, long-term vision, motivating team, new opportunities, integrator, implementing the vision through effective management, through effective processes, a team alignment accountability, and overseeing daily operations and project management. Now, one of the most important things

Justin Piche (39:27)
Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (39:50)
of integrating with an integrator is having a clear path of success. If this is your first big hire, this is a big responsibility. You are stepping up from going from maybe you're hiring primarily administrative global talent, and you might be hiring your first US-based employee. You might be hiring your first higher level MBA person, right? This is for the people that want to make that strategic long hire. We do this with all of our

sales reps, people. For administrative roles, not really. I don't really do this now. Again, if I had an integrator, we probably would. But when I have an integrator, we probably will. But for a higher level hire, one of the things you really need to do in order to make sure that they succeed is define what success looks like. And success oftentimes is defined in the first 30, 60, 90 days. They're gonna get a feel.

for your company in the first 90 days there. So sitting down with them when they come in onboarding them and saying, this is your 30, 60, 90 day success plan for high level hires is critical in order to create, the expectations with what you expect this person's output to be. And then also make sure that they're like, hey, this is a reassuring feeling that this company knows what they're doing. You might have been disorganized up until this point in your business.

And it's okay to admit that to them, hey, I'm hopelessly disorganized as a visionary. But there's a very clear plan of this is how you get into the business and this is what success looks like during your 30, 60, and 90 days.

So for me, when I think about an operation hire, right, if you're a hiring integrator, you don't want to overwhelm them, but you do want to provide challenges and alignment with what they are going to be doing. So I think about it as 30 days is learn the business, 60 days is run the business, 90 days is improve the business, right?

So the first 30 days there should be limited expectations for output. Now, when I say that, mean creating of new processes, outputting of new processes, and taking on incredible amounts of responsibilities. Now again, this is just me, some guy on the internet. You can run your business how you want to run your business. I'm not telling you how to run your business. This is just what I'm doing, right? This is what I'm doing in my integrator. The 30 days is an audit of

learning the business. They're gonna audit how the business stands, what the bottlenecks are, challenges, meeting with people. There's gonna be a lot of FaceTime with other people and sitting back and observing what's going on, including a lot of FaceTime with me. Then at the end of that first 30 days, there's gonna be clear, my gosh, what's going on? There's a lot of fires burning here or wow, this process is really good. We don't need to touch it, right? And a lot of things in between there.

The 60 day, when you create that 60 day, it's really about running the business. They're coming in, at this point they have a context, they have context. Specifically with global talent, what you wanna give them, you don't need to give them, you need to give them context. Let's just say that you're not in the office day to day, you're not sitting at the water cooler, you're not drinking coffee with them or spending time outside of the office. The context of their work is incredibly important. So you can use a project management tool to give them context.

But it's difficult sometimes to understand a new process or a new business if you're just slacking, if you're sending a written message or even on a notion board. Maybe it's not as organized as it should be. And so making sure that they have adequate context to run the business is very important. It sets them up to success. They want to feel like they have success within those first 60 days. Now 90 days is you've audited the business, you learned the business.

You've run the business, right? You kind of see where the kinks are and you've kind of felt it. Maybe you've started to implement some initial improvements. 90 days is, hey man, we're two months in here, we're knocking on three months. It's really now time to start to improve the business. And within 90 days there should be serious production. I I talked about 60 days there should be production, that second month there should be production, outputs that are actually changing, improving processes.

after the first audit and understanding of the business. But when you get to the 60 to 90 day track, this person really needs to be creating outputs. Now, if you are making a high level hire, there could be a tendency of being intimidated by this person. This person is incredibly talented. I want them to just come and run my business. There is a humbleness that you can give them if you haven't run a big business before.

honoring their background, but you're the CEO. If you're listening to this, you're the CEO. So you dictate what success looks like, and if they do not crush it within those first 90 days, you may have made the wrong hire. And so the reason why we have these 30, 60, 90s, and we really hold our team accountable to these, Justin, is because they need to know what success is, but we also need to know what success is, and we have to have buy-in and alignment. This is possible within 90 days. If you give someone like 100 things to do,

at they might, and you don't get them to buy in, there might be a misalignment of accountability. But we want to make sure that they have authorship over the 306090. So before we sign the 306090 document or go through it, we're going to really make sure that they have authorship over that, that they're owning that and saying, hey, I know this is possible. I can manage this. I can do this.

That's it.

Justin Piche (45:44)
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's an incredible process and I have a similar kind of way of bringing people in to this role, like an integrator position specifically. So the latest hire, my sales ops manager or acquisitions ops manager, I'm just going to call her ops manager because that's the best, that's what her title actually is. But she's the end of the acquisition side. When I brought her on, the very first thing I told her was audit everything on acquisitions.

Like your first two, three weeks plus is doing nothing but figuring out exactly how everything works because I want a cold and fresh set of eyes on how we're doing things. And I want you to just look at it and think about all the ways you would improve it. That's first. And then the next 30 ish days, she spent time helping to train the team on the quick things that she saw having an issue or an issue with sales processes, starting to think through follow ups.

and like start to improve processes. And now we're in, we're in past the 60 day month or mark, and she has outlined our acquisitions, KPIs for success for the year. She was a part of the annual process, annual planning process. So she was proposing rocks and annual goals for the acquisitions team and is actually executing on those things. And so by the 90 day mark, like she's, she's executing, which is fantastic. We have a obviously really similar process to this.

Clayton Hepler (47:08)
Yeah, that's incredible, dude. So I just want to talk about actionable takeaways here with implementing this into your business in the event that you want to implement this in your business. The best time to hire a integrator or visionary is yesterday. And if you can afford them, you do want to bring them into your business. I like Justin's thought on if

there is chaos and you don't really know what is what and how you can get a hold of your business, like having an integrator come in and that's a really good way for you to get control of your business. Now, people pay consultants to do this too. This is one thing I did wanna add to this. There are like operational business consultants, EOS consultants, land consultants.

That helped you scale your business and that sometimes is a good option if you don't want to take the big swing at a new a you know a big strategic hire but if you have those feelings and you want to scale your business your one higher away from completely transforming your business and I Firmly believe that having an integrative visionary combo is one of the top ways for you to get a grip

on your business. Justin. Anything else, buddy?

Justin Piche (48:35)
Love it. Couldn't

have said it better. That's it, man. Have a good one.

Clayton Hepler (48:39)
Guys, thanks again for listening to the Ground Game Podcast. I've been looking at the reviews. First of all, we haven't had a review.

Justin Piche (48:48)
Did we get any that said, that called me out? Like Justin's the reason?

Clayton Hepler (48:51)
There is there there

is someone that called Justin I didn't go all the way back but there is someone that called Justin out I think someone said something about him being a great host. I don't know. It might have been on a different podcast to be fair but Long story short guys, we have so many people that reach out to me on social media I'm sure Justin to and they listen to podcasts and you know and rate review and subscribe It is a one-time thing. It is a five minute thing

and not even five minutes, it's a 30 second thing, we would really, really appreciate it, right?

long story short, please guys, no one's reviewed this podcast for two months and we've been consistently bringing out stuff to you guys ad free, sales pitch free to help you scale your land flipping business. So take that time tonight. If you're in the workout room, capture to when you're sitting down, when you're by yourself or even right now, take a moment, leave rate review and subscribe and make sure that you

You heard it from me and you include my name in the review. Thank you so much, guys. Until next time. Justin.

Justin Piche (49:57)
See you next week.

Clayton Hepler (49:58)
We'll see you, see you later.