Episode 23: Why More Deals Won’t Solve Your Business Problems

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
to the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:05)
And this is your other co-host Justin Piche And we're here to show you guys how to win the ground game.

right, Clay. What's going on, Another week? Busy as usual. How was your weekend?

Clayton Hepler (00:32)
Weekend was good my wife was at a baby shower and so his daddy and and the little man all day on Saturday had a we had an amazing time a lot of playing a lot of Crawling at this point, which is cool. He's almost to walking. He's about almost 11 months old pretty soon in about 10 days So he's getting those hit knows milestones had a great time with him. He's

Justin Piche (00:50)
Yes.

Clayton Hepler (01:02)
A super smiley baby. The doctor said my wife went to the doctor with him today. He's like this is like the most smiley baby I'm like, where do you get that from even get that from his dad? So we go was great Yeah, and dude for business like making some really incredible Internal process changes and I'm really excited about

What our operations manager is doing. I'm just so excited about it. He's doing I think he's doing a strong job and I can just see that everything's starting to crank so I'm super super pumped about that

Justin Piche (01:42)
love it. I love it.

Let's see for yeah, man for me busy just like so I'm just super busy busy weekend it feels like a blur, you know, I got three kids and I think there is multiple times this weekend one of my wife and I Just looked at one another and we're just like, oh my gosh, we're so tired. This is so tired last last week was crazy too because We didn't cook dinner one night last week, which is crazy we just like

Clayton Hepler (01:46)
How about you?

Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Justin Piche (02:14)
either went out to eat or had like date night type things with people or like social things or order a pizza. And like when you're both working, you and your spouse and you've got three kids and it's it's just it's a lot. So I'm very much looking forward to the time very, very soon when my wife is no longer in her job. She went back. She went back to work in January after a year off from our first.

for a brief period of time because there were some rumors at work of kind of what's going to go down with the Chevron corporate restructuring. And Chevron put out a town hall meeting and kind of guidance that they're doing 20 % layoffs for the company, which is a pretty deep cut. I think they probably have 50 or 70, somewhere in that range, thousand employees. So they're going to be cutting like 10,000 plus employees and totally restructuring their business, which is great for us just because like, you know, we're kind of

Clayton Hepler (03:06)
my gosh.

Justin Piche (03:12)
at the point now where it just doesn't make sense for us both to be working anymore with all the things we have going on. So layoffs are a great opportunity for folks that actually do want to, or are thinking about exiting the company. So I think all that's going to come to a head here in the next two months. So pretty exciting.

Clayton Hepler (03:32)
That's super exciting, dude.

Justin Piche (03:33)
But

spend busy busy busy busy busy busy. Sweet man. Well let's let's hop in once you introduce our episode. This is your idea here and I'm excited to talk about it.

Clayton Hepler (03:43)
Yeah, and it's really a topic that a lot of our listeners are probably not going to expect us to talk about. It's why doing more deals is not going to solve your business problems.

And we are rewarded as real estate investors and land investors by doing more deals, right? That's like, you know, more deals equals profit, right? And when I say more deals, I mean more deals under contract, right? And that isn't how you scale.

course, that is how you scale, but that's also not how you scale. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about why that's a part of the equation, but not the only part of the equation. I think it really hurts a lot of land investors that they focus all their effort on that specific thing. By the way, for those listeners that are really following me on social media, you'll hear that I always talk about that, but you're gonna listen by the end of the episode, you're gonna see why we're saying this. Stay to the end.

because we got some really interesting stuff at the end that we're gonna be talking about. But mean, Justin, what are your initial thoughts when you kind of hear that, right?

Justin Piche (04:58)
So.

Yeah, I had actually was talking to Drew Haney yesterday. He just started a podcast. And so we were we were on there for almost two hours. And it was it was awesome. Just talking. It was more definitely not talking about business, more about kind of life and fulfillment. And it was really interesting. I had a great conversation with him. But one of the things we talked about is like when you hit a ceiling.

in your business. And when you say, you know, doing more deals is not going to solve your business problems. What comes to mind is if you are, if you, you kind of overwhelm your existing processes, structure your own bandwidth with just focusing on more and more deals, and that's what you're focusing on, then you hit a ceiling, you hit a ceiling and just not being able to handle the amount of work. And, know, he asked me a question about

you know, what is my experience with hitting a ceiling in my business? And there's been multiple times where I feel like I just hit the absolute limit. And so something had to change structurally in the business to be able to handle what we were trying to accomplish. And then you get to a point, I think most people get to a point where doing more of the same types of deals is not going to get them to where they want to go. And think that's kind of the point of what this episode is.

Clayton Hepler (06:27)
Hmm

Right, so I think about this in three distinct ways. Doing better, more profitable deals. And I'm sure you were talking about this with Drew, but hiring the right team. And we're really gonna dive into that. That's something that you and I talk about internally, you and I always talk about our clients, people messaging us on social media. That is a huge problem for a lot of people. Working harder, in other words, is not just gonna do

The hamster wheel is not just going to get you to the next level. And then systematizing operations, right? If you leave your business for four weeks, and it does not continue to grow, you have a job, you do not have a business. And you cannot scale that because you're intricately connected to it. Now, there's a lot of nuance there. But those are the three things that I look at right away. And I'm like, that's why people don't scale.

Justin Piche (07:10)
Thank

Thank you.

Clayton Hepler (07:29)
So let's get into it, man, I mean.

Speaking from personal experience, my first year, and even until very recently, I was doing marketing, I was doing acquisition, I was managing Dispo, I was managing transactions. I was doing everything, and I find a lot of people are doing that. They're trying to do everything, they're targeting everything and everyone. They have a list that they're just shotgunning out, they're targeting everyone.

Justin Piche (07:47)
Okay.

Clayton Hepler (08:01)
in order to continue to go and build their business, they gotta chase the next deal. Of course, we're in a transaction-based business, so that's a given, but they're just constantly like, I gotta close this deal

to make next month's payroll, or the next month's payroll, right? And the problem here is, it's the scatter shot focus and the too many low quality deals that really prevent someone from scaling.

Justin Piche (08:18)
you

Clayton Hepler (08:34)
If you continue to double down on marketing costs

while not also getting more clear on, you this is the minimum profit that I'm going to take, then you just keep in this hamster wheel, man. mean, I'm sure you've seen it like, you know, should I take this $10,000 profit deal, which might end up being $3,000? I spent all this time, all this energy, all this effort on this deal. Is it even worth doing that? A really interesting concept that

Justin Piche (08:43)
you

Clayton Hepler (09:04)
I heard a couple of years ago and it really changed my worldview around being a business owner was your hourly

rate by Naval Ravicon. So basically he said, you know, in order to really understand scale in business and leverage, you put together this aspirational hourly rate. I'm worth, for example, a thousand dollars an hour, 3000, $10,000 an hour, right?

Justin Piche (09:21)
I

Clayton Hepler (09:32)
And then you look at everything that's below that in terms of the task that you take and you delegate those out to other people. Well, you can apply that same

thinking to the type of land that you're targeting. It's a filtering mechanism. And so you then filter higher quality deals and you're able to 10X because you're doing fewer, more quality deals.

Justin Piche (09:55)
Yeah, I mean, I certainly have seen that in the evolution of my business. Now, I will caveat that by saying every year we've done more deals, but there's two kind of factors to it.

Clayton Hepler (10:06)
Thank

Justin Piche (10:08)
We've done more deals, but we've also done more higher quality deals. So when I started the business in 2021, I didn't have like a firm minimum profit target on the business or like on a deal. I wasn't never doing kind of these desert square flips, you know, make a couple thousand dollars owner finance stuff. I always went after what I consider to be quality properties, minimum of like a 30 to 40 K purchase price range property and up.

My first year I was totally fine if I could make 15 grand on a deal, know, 10 to 15 grand, we'd still absolutely do it 100 % of the time. And then the next year, I raised that up to about 30. And I think we averaged right around 37. sorry, that was the third year. The second year was like 20, 25 and 30. And now this year, we've set a minimum gross profit target of $50,000 per deal.

And now I just, I also want to say I'm also the type of person that isn't going to throw away a good marketable deal. The way that I'm really filtering that is, on the properties I'm targeting. So I'm just not targeting or trying to find any sellers that have property that's worth less than call it $75, $80,000 at this point.

Clayton Hepler (11:24)
Yeah, yeah. And so why have you found it helpful to go from 17 to 25 to 37? Why have you thought that that was a good move for your business?

Justin Piche (11:43)
Yeah. mean like the complexities of scaling your marketing output, your team to handle that marketing output, your inventory or transactions. It, it, it isn't, it's, it's complex. Like it gets complex. You know, I mean, I have, there's a listeners probably know I have 23 people on my team, which is a relatively big team in the land investing space. And while the only reason I'm able to manage that many people is because I have, I don't manage that many people, right? I manage.

five people and those people manage their teams. But the challenge of finding those good people and scaling your team to handle more marketing output at a point, it just becomes this crazy race and your burn. I mean, your burn rate is really high. And so the next episode we're going to, we're going to talk about what happens when sales slow down and lulz.

And we'll kind of probably dive more into what does that mean when you have a really big team and really high OPEX and how do you manage cashflow? But, for now it's, it's complex. And I think the listeners probably know that if you've tried to hire people, I've had multiple conversations with coaching students this week who have had employees that they had to fire because they were working two jobs or not able to meet some relatively base level of expectations and

For somebody who has a really small team, that is a huge hit, especially if a critical player, critical person leaves your company. It leaves this huge gap. You've invested this time's energy into hiring and now they're gone and you have to fill in that spot and find another person and train them up to replace them. just stinks. And as your team grows, those problems grow. As your deal flow grows, your teams has to grow and those problems have to grow.

And at a point it makes sense in my opinion to transition to higher value properties. So you can, with the same good small manageable team, you can handle and do and generate more profit.

Clayton Hepler (13:41)
So thinking aloud, it a revenue goal? You hit a certain revenue, is it a person goal where you start to target larger properties? For me, it's this really interesting ratio between cash and the bank, okay? If you have other income coming in.

the business that you're trying to build. It's not just like an independent decision, Justin, that is everyone should do it this way, right? It's a triangulated decision that we think, okay, how much cash do I have? What's my burn rate? I would even add one more, right, a subpoint, which is how successful have I been in my business? How consistent is the output of my business? Because if you make a shift into, for example, this high dollar value property,

Justin Piche (14:18)
Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (14:39)
Man, it takes longer to underwrite. You're calling counties, you're calling zoning teams. Maybe it takes you three times as long to sell it because you might be subdividing. It might take you five times as long. Can your business take that cashflow hit? And so it's really a calculated decision. And the reality is there is no right answer. That's the problem with business. We are paid and proportionate to our ability to strategize and prioritize.

Justin Piche (14:45)
Thank

Clayton Hepler (15:09)
outcomes in our business, but also like there was a lot component to it. But if you think about it, more deals equals more headaches, expenses, that is not headaches. It also equals inefficiencies, right? So if you have so you have to do more and more deals, you're doing such high volume. Again, this is not a bad thing. This is just an additional perspective for listeners. We're not prescribing that you should do this in your business. We're just offering a different perspective.

Justin Piche (15:21)
Okay.

Clayton Hepler (15:36)
Like you said, you might have 20 people on your staff or 15, and you have one critical role. What happened to me this week? Out of the blue, it happens to everyone. Someone just leaves. And so if you don't have cross-training initiatives

or the backstop, it could completely derail your process. But if you're focusing on fewer higher quality opportunities, you have a lower overhead, a fewer amount of people.

You might only need to do one or two or three deals per month to hit what you're looking for in profit. So just a perspective. Do have anything to add here?

Justin Piche (16:14)
Yeah.

I think you need to also think about what is it that you want to personally focus your time on? We've talked about this on many different episodes about how you decide to hire somebody. And Clay just alluded to it earlier. If you value your time at $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, then the things that are below that dollar amount, you need to delegate out and build that team. The way I've always thought about it is really truly building a team that can fully operate.

without me involved in the day to day. One of the conversations we were having, I was having yesterday with Drew was talking about how much time I spend on different aspects of the business and like, is my return on time for the flipping side of the business? What is my return on time for the development side of the business? And obviously the return on time for the development side is significantly higher, like way, way higher, but

Clayton Hepler (17:01)
Mmm.

Justin Piche (17:16)
there is obviously value in consistent transactions that are happening on the flip side. While it doesn't make as much money as the developments do, and I make probably more dollars per hour focusing on the developments because they're big deals, they're also riskier. They're lumpier. I mean, one of the big challenges I think with everybody who's starting a land flipping business, especially when you're early on, is it's a very lumpy business. And if you don't have a high volume of deals, you're going to feel those lumps pretty substantially.

Clayton Hepler (17:39)
Yes.

Justin Piche (17:44)
And again, next episode, we're going to talk about strategies to manage manage those lumps. But I found a lot of value in scaling and growing a competent team that can generate off market opportunities, underwrite them and get them under contract, manage through the transactions, value them on the sales side, subdivide them, manage the projects and sell them without me really having to give any input.

Like I don't have to give any input. And so while that business doesn't make as much money as the development stuff, I've created for myself a business that supports off-market lead generation activities that enables me to identify really solid value-add opportunities that can take over into the other side of the business where I want to spend my time. And so now I spend more of my time on these larger developments and raising money from people and working on partnerships and

doing some coaching and things like that, doing this podcast that I love to do, and I like spending my time doing.

Clayton Hepler (18:50)
So imagine this scenario. mean, really the numbers are, you you buy some 50 lots for 10K or 10 parcels for 50K. You make a half million bucks a year. You gotta do 12, five, three deals a month, four deals a month in the first way. the second way you gotta do a deal.

every three quarters of a month. The administrative cost of that is much lower. Your gross profit may be higher. That's a question mark. You don't really know depending on marketing channels. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin Piche (19:20)
Yeah, how much it costs in marketing to actually acquire those higher

quality deals, et cetera. your return on brain damage is certainly a return on hassle. Is that the that's the right term, right? Return on hassles, obviously lower with a higher value, smaller transaction number business.

Clayton Hepler (19:34)
Now.

Right. So tactically, how you go from this first step is you shift from going after a little bit bigger parcels. It's that just shift in and maybe you're adding a little bit more targeted marketing towards those larger parcels. And you're trying to target the parcels like Justin said, every year our standard for per deal number increases. Now you could

Think, hey, my first year, it's been my first year, my average profit was 15. I want to take it up to 25. I want to take it up to 35. Think the ratio between your monthly burn rate and the number of profit is something you really need to keep in mind. What I mean by that is my business might be, let's say your business is $50,000 per month or $40,000 per month, which is a pretty high overhead for most line investors, right?

And so you got 40,000 a month and you're like, my minimum, I'm gonna

Justin Piche (20:41)
you

Clayton Hepler (20:42)
change my minimum deal to, for example, $35,000. But you're, you were having success closing $20,000 deals, wait, know, three, four of those, five of those a month. But when you get to 30,000, you might only be able to close two a month, right? Because it's more, you're trying to cut deeper, you're focusing on the same people and you're trying to get these properties under contract for,

Justin Piche (20:50)
you

Clayton Hepler (21:06)
lower, deeper discounts. And so you got to understand too, when we are saying this in the same breath, there's this consideration that as a business owner, we need to make, is I need to continue to have my business moving forward. And so if I'm going to shift into this, I need to shift properly. And I need to shift thoughtfully given my monthly burn rate. So anything else before we move from bigger, more profitable deals to the number two thing that

Justin Piche (21:23)
Thank

Clayton Hepler (21:38)
that our listeners should focus on in order to solve their business problems.

Justin Piche (21:44)
Yeah, you know if you're focused on lower numbers of higher quality deals, you very likely need a smaller operations, smaller operations than you do if you're focusing on a higher volume of lower quality deals. And so kind of with those numbers you were talking about, if you're able to consistently close four deals a month at 20k gross profit, and there's kind of these smaller deals, you're generating 80k gross profit and you have 40k burn rate, that's $40,000 in net profit a month.

So you're making good money. All right. And then if you switch that to two deals a month, $35,000 each, that's 70 K gross profit. But if you're able to cut your operation, your OPEX in half by reducing your team size and the complexity, you actually are going to increase your net profit, right? From 40,000 to 50,000. And I think that is a, that's an opera, that's a way to make more money in this business without

Increasing your complex actually simplifying your business a little bit.

Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast to say thank you like I normally do. We really appreciate your views. We appreciate you listening. We appreciate your feedback. If you can take one minute right now, pause that episode. Subscribe, set up automatic downloads and leave a quick review that says Justin is the best. But I could also say Clay is the best. We'd really appreciate it.

And we really just want to know what you guys want to hear about so we can make sure to bring topics that are valuable to you and now back to your regularly scheduled programming

Clayton Hepler (23:22)
I agree with you completely. that's the point, but, but playing those, like, this is why the volume, just more volume is not directly the reason why the way for you to scale, it's not going to solve your business problems. Cause you have too bloated of an organization, which really takes us into the next point of building the right team, building a rock star team, then your net profit, no matter if you change, you switch to higher, gross profit deals.

your true net net is going to be, is it going to be lower if you don't have the right team in, in place. So one of things I always go through when I think about hiring people is I think about the hiring ladder, right? I've learned this from, I I forget who I learned it from, but it was definitely a real estate investor. it, it, it's kind of Dan Martell and a realist, another real estate investor. But, first thing is the admin support, right? If you're starting out scrubber.

EA, admin assistant, and anyone that's sort of in the administrative level, disposition admin. After that, it is fulfillment, right? Transaction coordination, right? That's another pseudo admin position. It's not really an executive position. And so that's kind of the next hire that I always think, hey, you should definitely be bringing that person on, depending on the volume that you're doing. Of course, you can interchange that with the next one, which is marketing. This could be cold callers, this could be techsters, this could be people sending RVMs.

a PPC agency, a direct mail marketing agency, a pricer, all those positions that lot of land investors do. And then next is sales, lead manager, acquisition manager. And that's really the hiring ladder. then at the top there's leadership. I know Justin has a disposition manager. He has a acquisition lead ops manager. And I have a senior integrator.

Justin Piche (25:07)
you

Ops manager. Yep.

Clayton Hepler (25:17)
operations manager that sits atop my organization and just manages everything. But building that team, having a quality team is the key to scaling. And so this is an emphasis on, of course, doing more deals makes you money, but having the right team makes you more money. Having the right people in the right seats that are able to execute.

on your behalf without you being in the seats is really the key to scaling this business and it being more profitable. If we're talking about the analogy that I gave early, which is your time is worth X, imagine you're working in your business 80 hours a week and all of a sudden you hire all these people and you might be working 60 hours a week, but your profit, your dollar per hour in terms of business, you might be working 60, goes up significantly, right? Because you have other people, even though you're paying them,

Justin Piche (26:13)
you

Clayton Hepler (26:14)
They're working for you. They're executing on your behalf, right? You're giving them a great pay in exchange for that service. They're helping you achieve more profit in your business. Then you might even hire a rock-sol operations manager. We can get into more of the strategic hires. But Justin, mean, you know this, you might be working 40 hours a week, making four times as much, five times, 10 times as much money than if you were working those eight hour weeks at the beginning.

because you have that rockstar team around you. But some people say, I don't need to hire someone. I'm just gonna do it myself, right? And sure, that can help you, and I'm gonna focus on doing more deals. Sure, that can help you scale and build a business, but it's gonna build you a job. It's not gonna build you the freedom that you're really looking for. It's working on your business, not in your business. That's the real nuance. And that's how you can take your business to the next level.

Justin Piche (27:13)
I got a question for you, Clay, for the listeners to maybe get some, understand the way that you think about this. What do you think is the right 12 month target? Let's say somebody started their business 12 months ago. They've here's the, here's the scenario. Somebody started their business 12 months ago, uh, back in March of 2024. They up to this point have been solo with maybe an assistant or two.

like low level VAs, of more of like the cold outreach or sales kind of assistant type positions. They're still managing all the negotiations on the buy side, the sale side, realtor, et cetera. And they've managed at this point, they're doing about two to three deals a year and most of them, I mean a month, and most of them are kind of low dollar deals. So maybe they're on track to make 200K.

this in this 12 12 month period, is objectively a great milestone for any of you listening. Like I'm impressed if that's you like pat yourself on the back. Now they've listened to this podcast. They've heard us talk about traction. They've heard us talk about business planning and like, what are our goals and how do we design our team? How do we hire these right people? And what type of deals should we target? They've heard they've gotten all this advice on this podcast. What do you think is what should they shoot for between now March, 2025 and March, 2026?

How should they design their team and what type of deal should they go after?

Clayton Hepler (28:42)
much money do they have to invest?

Justin Piche (28:45)
Let's assume that they generated 400K of gross profit in their first year. They netted about 200. They spent 100K on living expenses and they have 100K sitting in the bank account, maybe a couple lots in inventory, call it another 150 in pipeline profit. That's where they're starting from. 100K in the bank account, 150 in pipeline profit and 10K a month burn on marketing and team.

Clayton Hepler (29:12)
What are their goals? Do you know what their long-term goals are for the business or is it like, I wanna double my business next year or is it like I wanna make the most amount of money? What are their goals?

Justin Piche (29:21)
Yeah, their goal, they want to scale. They want to scale. They want to keep growing. They're really hungry. They're really motivated. They're not, they're not saying, you know what? I'm happy with 300 K a year. I'm happy with 500 K a year. The sky's the limit for this person, but, they need to focus. They need to have a realistic target over the next 12 months. They need to redesign their business. mean, we, we can both see they're lacking in some of the critical high value ad hires that you need to have to scale both transaction volume and deal, deal quality.

Clayton Hepler (29:53)
Okay. No, I got it, I got it. We don't need to pause it. So, first thing I would do is I would ask them, what is their superpower? Are they a sales-based person or are they more operations-based?

Justin Piche (29:54)
Let's pause it right here real quick while we think about it, because I know it's kind of off the cuff stuff. heck yeah. All right, let's go, baby. No pause needed. Let's go.

This person is operations based. They don't love getting on the phone with sellers. They're okay at it. They're pretty good at it. They've been able to manage it this far, but it's not their happy place is being on the phone with sellers.

Clayton Hepler (30:18)
Okay.

I told him to suck it up, no I'm just kidding. No. Yeah, so for me, if you're an operations based person, I actually think you're kind of at an advantage because most entrepreneurs are that visionary, that high dollar, like I think you're freaking anomaly dude. You're kind of both, although you're not as sales, but you're like, have the sales acumen. I know your operations do.

Justin Piche (30:30)
No, no, no, no, no.

Clayton Hepler (30:57)
If you're operations based, I think the first hire you need to do is you gotta find an acquisition manager that's just like a killer. And I would pay that person a good share of the profits. Now, depending on how you are going to structure that, Justin, you can do eight to 12 % of the net profit on a deal. Like that's really healthy, right? So imagine you made 400K last year.

they would make on that, they wouldn't make that much money. But if you're thinking you're scaling, you bring that person on, if it's a US based person, pay anywhere between, depending on your volume of business, right, you can pay them a base, I'd say 2000 to 3000 a month base, and then the eight, 10, 12 % based on the total quantity of opportunities they are closing. Where it's structured at would be 2 % on the front end, or six, eight,

Justin Piche (31:51)
Thank

Clayton Hepler (31:56)
10 % on the backend. You know, they get that clip on the front end, keeping the dollars through the door, and they know that they're gonna get that on the backend. Next thing I would do is, dude, we're in the sales and marketing business. And so I would go and look at all their cost per lead, cost per contract, cost per deal, average profit per deal. I would look at that with them and I would say, if they're in multiple channels, are they in multiple channels or are they using one?

Justin Piche (32:20)
Yeah,

right now they're doing some texting, some cold calling, and a little bit of mail. They've kind of dabbled in everything. But nothing real focused. No real focused plan.

Clayton Hepler (32:28)
Okay, okay, so well,

I mean, then what I would do is I'd look at that and would say, okay, like, what are our best channels here, right? And I would then just do one channel. I would just focus on one specific channel to seven figures. I would perfect that channel. So if it's cold calling, if it's texting, I would focus on getting so good at that channel, understanding all the text backs, understanding, you know, how to convert people, building a sales process specifically for that lead channel.

A seller that is inbound versus outbound is very different. The time to convert a seller, in my experience, for outbound is three to six months. You might get the 10 % of people that are ready to rock now, but if you get a cold call lead, mean, they're not gonna be that motivated. Of course, the inbound leads are direct mail, are more motivated, but I would focus on that one channel. Now, what I would do is, depending on their bandwidth, right,

I would have the acquisition manager calling some really high dollar value properties too. So what I would do is I would build a data scrubbing process to focus on the highest, best properties. And I would call those people, man. I get on the phone with them, I'd say, hey, you know, maybe I can get one big deal a quarter, right? And this is what I do with my acquisition manager. Because I'm like, dude, you can make 40K, 50K on a clip if you do one subdivision deal.

You do four those in a year, man. You're $200K. And so I would really make sure I have the right acquisition person in the world. That would be my big hire. And then I'd start to stack one specific channel and get amazing, the best. Like I could teach a course on this channel. gets so good. And then when I start to hit, I would say probably like five to seven deals a month, like consistently. And you could think that's probably a million dollar business, maybe four to six deals, depending.

then it would layer on another channel to market. Notice how I'm not talking about operations. Fancy Notion setups, websites that are like AI enhanced, no offense Justin, I know that you have a fancy Notion setup, so do I. But like all the things that are not directly producing, getting more leads, making them worth more, and reducing the likelihood of them.

Justin Piche (34:38)
you

Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (34:55)
of that not happening in your business. Like that's your focus 80, 90 % of your time. I rip that from Alex R. Mosi. That's directly from Alex R. Mosi. I would just talk with this person. mean, listen, all you need to do is focus on getting your data right, the best data, right? Focusing on that process, making sure that you're ruthlessly tracking your cost per lead, cost per contract, cost per deal, ROAS, cash conversion cycle. How long is it taking you to

sell deals, my man, and then average profit, right? And scale that channel, then when you get to, like I said, four to six deals a month, then you layer in whatever the next channel you wanna do is. But I would keep it simple. I would not be doing all these crazy channels. I would do really good at one, and then make sure you have a good data process, you can collect and recycle that data, so that in the future you can retarget them.

Justin Piche (35:45)
Okay.

Clayton Hepler (35:51)
And so I would hire an acquisition manager. You can have one acquisition manager hitting 20 offers per week. You make sure you need a lead manager in that setup so you'd have your data scrubber. If you're doing texting, for example, you probably need two text here. I would send 8,000 texts a day if I was texting in this scenario. And out of the two full-time text, there's a full-time text, you can do 4,000 a day. You can expect probably 800 to 1,000 on

text for a really qualified lead on something like that. Justin, you could probably do, I don't know, eight to seven deals a month, something like that. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depending on your closing abilities. I'd have a lead manager, a lead manager can manage eight to 12 leads per day. And so if we're taking 8,000 decks per day, you're have one lead manager and one acquisition manager. And that's the only people you need in your business, because you're an operations person.

And that's all I would do.

Justin Piche (36:51)
I love it. That's really good advice. I think it's hard for people in a state of not having been through that growth and really understanding what to focus on to take a step back and be like, okay, what's my next plan? Like how, and honestly, that's what a lot of people reach out to Clay and myself about. It's like, okay, this is where I'm at. This is where I want to go. What is the pathway to get there? And think Clay, you just did a really good job of explaining a pretty logical way to get there. I don't.

really have a ton of changes to make. think I would do the exact same thing. speaking from kind of a more operational mind, I certainly would hire that killer sales closer right off the bat. you know, I have the benefit of hindsight. I got lucky with my first hire, my first acquisitions manager hire. Filipino VA, she is incredible. Been on my team now for three years, more than three years, which is amazing.

And that doesn't always happen if I could go if I was starting kind of back at this this hypothetical person stage I Would and I had enough deal flow to give somebody give a US-based closer Like know that I could solidly pay them 60 to 80k a year year one. I would absolutely hire someone US-based

first. And I would hire I would hire probably overseas for lead manager, but I would hire someone US based first. And I would it's really I'd have to work in the sales skills, you know, or be a really good salesperson because I have to sell them on the vision of what this company will be with their help and show them the plan of how we're going to get to them making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But when you find somebody like that, that's really bought in that sees the growth and they're willing to bet on themselves. Man, that is special. That is like

That is the best.

Clayton Hepler (38:43)
Yeah, I mean, you have vision, which if you have no vision, that's fine. You could just pay them an insane amount of money. they're like, right, like so so you don't have to have this like perfectly crafted vision to set you up to the next step, which I like to kind of finish off the podcast speaking about that. Let's talk about systematizing and automating the business because people focus a lot on deal even though I was just talking about massive amount of deal flow. We've kind of went a little tangential here.

But the last thing would say is that systematizing the automating of the business. Follow up sequences, standard operating procedures, what happens when this happens? How do we know who we should send contracts to? Should I call a seller after we get a deal on a contract if I'm a transaction coordinator? If that lives in your brain, it's really hard to scale, right? So if you have the right people, which is why we brought that before this one, they can actually do that for you. But I find the best thing to do

Justin Piche (39:39)
you

Clayton Hepler (39:40)
as an entrepreneur, Justin, you might disagree with me here, but especially starting out, you building those processes out, knowing exactly what success looks like, and most specifically the end state, you can't expect paying someone four to $5 an hour to have those executive functioning skills to build out a process. You want to set them up to succeed so that they can crush the role, right? And so I made the mistake early on in my business that I was like, yo, go like $5 an hour VA, build my system.

Justin Piche (40:07)
you

Clayton Hepler (40:10)
and just abdicating ownership of the outcome of a specific department, of a role, Justin. And when I started to systematize and automate me that being that person sitting in that seat and then handing off and then holding my team accountable to the results is when the business started to produce more predictable outcomes and a predictable end state. So, you know, in some,

The becomes profitable, my definition of profitable, when it can run without you. Right, because then it's just a job if it doesn't. And so that's kind of the final step here, right? The systems, the automations, the right team, the quality of deals, that all adds up to a business that if you want to have that business that runs without you, that's what it takes.

Justin Piche (40:39)
.

Yeah, I actually I agree with I don't disagree at all with kind of the systems and an optimization piece of things the way my the evolution of my I've experienced this so the evolution of my business over time Started with like everyone a one-man show right doing literally everything myself and building processes for it and understanding every process because I was pulling the data

I was scrubbing the data. was putting together the mailer. was pricing the mailer. I was sending the mailer out. I set up the website. I set up the CRM. I fielded all the inbound calls. I called every seller back. I negotiated with every seller. I got the properties under contract. brought them to someone and so forth. Did the entire process for several months, uh, through a couple of deals. And then at that point in time, I definitely did not have the optimum process by any stretch of the imagination, but I had a workable process with procedures. And then I started bringing folks in.

And I said, here's the way that I've been doing it. I'm going to train you on how to do it this way. And then they started executing. And then I, then that frees your time up now to take a step back and look at all these processes and look and see why is this taking so long? Why is this taking so long? You've been through it. You know how it works. And now you can see where those bottlenecks are because you're not living it. You're not in the day to day firefighting of every single aspect of your business. You can now focus on.

preventing those fires from ever happening in the first place by optimizing those processes. And so the next stage was getting competent managers in after hiring that kind of base levels and level employees to do all those administrative tasks. know, the next, the next layer, Clay was talking about fulfillment and then kind of your, so after you've gotten your TC or fulfillment kind of person, that next level is those managers that do have those executive level kind of critical thinking, improve the process, optimize on your behalf.

mindset to get into the business. And that's the point at which my business really took off is when I was able to bring in somebody who owned a department, owned the processes and was implementing improvements themselves without me in it. And that freed me up to focus on the next thing, which is how do I upscale the deal size? How do I do more complex deals? Right? Who are, who is the next person I need to take over? How do I get a project manager in? So I'm not spending 50 hours a week.

calling surveyors and engineers and all kinds of things trying to get subdivisions approved, right? It's just this iterative process and at each iteration, you're able to focus on those processes and improve them. But not until you get the people in place to handle like the actual tasks of it all.

Clayton Hepler (43:36)
I love that man. So to wrap it up, if you're serious about scaling from six figures to seven, you want to focus on more deals, not focus on more deals. You want to chase better deals. You want to start building a team so you're not the bottleneck and you want to implement systems so your business can run without you. For those loyal listeners, at this point in the process of the podcast,

You know what's up? The gentleman's agreement. If you got benefit from this podcast, please, rate, review, subscribe, leave us a comment. Let us know that this is something that is resonating with you. I just, and I actually really liked doing this, you know, so we'd probably do it without the ratings, but making sure that you put my name down there really gives me an ego booth and, and, and, and, and, so just put clay. Thank you, Clay's for the episode. It was really great. I appreciate your thoughts.

Justin Piche (44:11)
Thank

Clayton Hepler (44:34)
And we'll send you a gold star

Justin Piche (44:37)
We need to add a segment to the end. We need to start keeping score. Everybody who reviews that, yeah. So if you get all the way to the end and you're listening, we're gonna start keeping score. Anybody who leaves a review and says, Justin rocked it, Clay is also good, or vice versa, Clay is the best and Justin's okay. We'll highlight that and maybe we'll start keeping a little tally and be like, all right, Clay's up to 10, Justin's at a million, no, at one or whatever the...

Clayton Hepler (44:41)
We should keep score. We should keep score.

Justin Piche (45:07)
the tally ends up. think that'd be pretty fun. Could we like, Clay and I, it's fun to razz one another. I think we're both really good sports. It's fun.

Clayton Hepler (45:15)
Yeah, yeah, good deal man. Anything else before we head out?

Justin Piche (45:19)
No, that's it. I'm looking forward to this next one talking about the lulz. What happens when deals slow down? So stay tuned listeners and we'll talk to you guys later