Episode 32: Transforming Your Land Investment Strategy for Success

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.

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

Well, what's going on, man?

Clay Hepler (00:25)
Dude, this weekend is Dad Duty. ⁓ So I'm, you and I are dodging, dodging ⁓ duties here, jumping between raindrops to make this happen. My wife is in ⁓ Branchwood, Santa Fe this weekend for a funeral. And so I'm just doing some Dad Duty stuff. And what else is new? Man, I've been thinking a lot about, ⁓

Justin Piche (00:28)
⁓ yeah.

Yeah, yes.

Hmm.

Clay Hepler (00:53)
our goals, like my company's goals and a new way to approach them, which is instead of doing a bunch of separate unrelated goals, a single constraint bottleneck focus to concentrate a lot of the resources of the company to a specific outcome. I can talk about that in a little bit, but I've been thinking about it lot lately and there are certain things that

as business owners are valuable and we have a limited amount of research resources that we have access to. so investing our resources into getting a certain output is something I've been really tackling internally. Like we've talked about in the past, like quarterly objectives, right? Which I think is a really helpful way to do it. And, um, if 25, 50 % of our resources as a company,

Justin Piche (01:44)
Great.

Clay Hepler (01:53)
is going after things that don't directly address our bottleneck. might be one or two steps after that, but it feels like a misallocation of resources, right? It's sort of like trying to say, Hey, I want to get the highest return investing in the stock market. And you say, I'm going to put my money, for example, like a standard asset allocation, I'm going to put my money in stocks and bonds and maybe a little bit of gold, or maybe a little bit of this.

Right? And have this asset allocation. That's kind of how I think about the resources of people on our team. And if we can say over the long period of time, I'm trying to hit this return, right? I want to just put my money in the highest returning, even though it might be quote unquote more volatile. The best way to do is just concentrate all your, all your time, energy, resources, et cetera, in that one thing, the S &P 500 for an example of like a standard investor money.

Justin Piche (02:47)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (02:49)
And so I've been thinking about that a lot as it relates to my business and like where are the things that we really need to focus on right now? Like what's the core problem? And

I'll get back to you, but I think it's going to change how I'm approaching resource allocation with my team, i.e. operations manager, my executive assistant, people that can play multiple positions. Of course, I'm not going to tell my outbound manager to help with selling deals, right? Like there's certain buckets that, but the people that are like the second baseman, the short stops, the center fields, how can they play those? How can they focus on, Hey, I know this

Justin Piche (03:20)
Great.

Clay Hepler (03:32)
The hater is going on this side of the field, he always pushes it this way. We can shift our resources to the side of the field. So that's something top of mind for me.

Justin Piche (03:42)
That's interesting. I could see the value and like a ton of resources focused on one thing and then the next thing and then the next thing. And I think if your business has really significant bottlenecks that are key and critical and it's clear like that's the one thing I can see that approach working really well. I think for my business, we just kind of have bottlenecks, little bottlenecks kind of spread across. I don't know, you know, that we

It's an interesting thought. I haven't really thought philosophically about if that makes more sense for us rather than picking three to five, you know, critical path forward each quarter, you know, our rocks that we're focused on.

Clay Hepler (04:25)
Well, that's a good point. How I'm thinking about dude is like, if you, if we think about a quarter and we, we, we define like a period of time in which is like, I have a quarter to accomplish this goal, right? If you instead reallocate a lot of those resources towards a specific outcome, which is within the umbrella of the outcomes that you're looking to achieve in a quarter, right?

And you say, I'm going to hit this first. What maybe have taken you 12 weeks takes you to, and then you can, then you can reallocate to the next two weeks is this. then, then, right, right. So look, it's like as business owners, we have to allocate the, like, this is a experiment, but I'm really thinking about, ⁓ reallocating, ⁓ my utility players to let's focus on this, ⁓ so that we can get that output.

Justin Piche (04:55)
Hmm

The next thing, kind of snow.

Clay Hepler (05:20)
quicker with certain problems. And let me tell you what made me think about this. know it's kind of, we're going on a little diatribe here, but I think the listeners would benefit. We've been having a hiring bottleneck for a couple of positions. We're hiring a bunch of positions right now. And the person that's doing the majority of the hiring also has other tasks. And then the departments that we're hiring within,

has people that are like siloed to that department, like a manager of that department, but they're not contributing to like really pushing. They're maybe doing 20 % or 10 % of what they could have been contributing to bringing these people in. And so if they, if they were to do 80%, could we have compressed that time down by ⁓ two weeks, three weeks, which increases the speed of our, our team and the speed of execution on our team.

And so that kind of spurred this thinking. ⁓ and then got me to like, why, like we want to get to 35, 40 offers per week, company wide in our, in our land business by the end of the quarter. And so was thinking, well, why don't we just focus on doing that over the next two weeks, get that figured out. Cause that'll solve our, all the other problems. And if we get to that level, right, to, to, right, solve the other problems within this context.

Justin Piche (06:28)
you

Thanks

.

Clay Hepler (06:48)
If we get to that, if we get to that point, it's like, then the problem becomes funding or fulfillment. I imagine right fulfillment funding. It's like good capital and the fulfillment is our transaction team. But we've been trying to focus on funding fulfillment and offers per week. yeah.

Justin Piche (07:05)
Yeah.

No, I think it makes sense. Yeah, well, keep us keep us posted. I'm interested to hear how how like a much more focused approach on effort on one one bottleneck at a time works. I mean, theoretically, it seems to make sense to me. one of my best friends had had his 35th birthday, his 35th birthday today. So we.

Have you ever done I think I talked about this maybe last time you don't ever done critical mass

or heard of Critical Mass. So I did Critical Mass in Houston. had like spent, I pulled an all-nighter and souped up my electric bike, put like a new motor on it. just like I did a ton of work to it. And on Friday evening went and rode for like 30 something miles with Critical Mass. And it was really fun and it was nuts. It was probably like 300, 350 people on bikes.

Clay Hepler (07:37)
I've never done it. I've never done it.

Justin Piche (08:05)
on e-bikes, on electric motorcycles. There was a group of guys on Honda Ruckus Moped's just cruising through the streets of Houston. We started a little bit east of downtown and went really far south down to the Texan Stadium and up north, traveling along pretty major roads. And there's just so many people on bikes that the roads, while we're going by, doesn't matter, stoplights, whatever, we're just going and all the cars just have to wait and stop.

It was really, it was cool. And I expected a whole lot more anarchy from it. You know, like just a bunch of people, obviously kind of in some, lot of ways breaking the law when you blast through a stoplight, but it's just, have so many people. are they going to, you know, what is anyone going to do? ⁓ but it was, it was just, it was really, I feel like people were generally pretty respectful of the rules and motorists were pretty respectful of us cruising by, you know, it wasn't like, it didn't take like 20 minutes for the whole group to go by, but like maybe three to five minutes, anybody who was waiting in the light might have to wait if the whole.

Clay Hepler (08:34)
Hahaha ⁓

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin Piche (09:04)
biking group is going by, but it was really just cool. It was fun. I got to talk with my friend and his wife and then we had a he'd had a hibachi for him. His wife threw him like a hibachi party in his backyard. So they hired a hibachi chef and we had probably 20 something people there and the chef cooked hibachi for everybody. It was just a really fun, fun weekend, but I'm a little, I'm a little tired, a little, a little tired from it. My wife is like, I need a nap. I'm going to, I'm going to go lay down. So, huh? Anyway.

Clay Hepler (09:25)
Hahaha

Anyway, well, let's talk about, what has been top of mind for us. And I keep talking to people, whether it's people that are reaching out to me in DMS and people reaching out to me for private coaching or, or, ⁓ people that I'm working with and you know, that's funding deals and the same stuff comes up, you know,

the reason why land investors stay at a certain level, right? They stay broke, right? They stay at an inconsistent level. And how do you cross that chasm to the 1 % the people that actually truly are making money in this business? You know, you and I both have built successful businesses.

Um, by doing the opposite of what most people start out doing, which is flipping the desert squares, right? Um, you know, like doing just purely one marketing channel, direct mail, you know, 500 direct mail pieces a month and you're a millionaire. And so today what we want to talk about is, going from the hustle, the hustle of the hustle and bustle of hustle flipping.

that's basically everything's relying upon yourself and you limit yourself in a tactical way, in a task-oriented way, and also in a mental way. We're gonna talk about both of those things. And then how do you position yourself quickly to become a real operator? So we're gonna talk about this today. ⁓ Justin, anything to add to this, before we hop in here?

Justin Piche (11:11)
Yeah, you know, it's for some people, a couple thousand dollar profit can seem like a lot, you know, if you're and then I what I want to maybe be cautious of to anybody who's listening who who's like, yeah, man, I two, three, four thousand dollars, five thousand dollars. That would be huge for me. This is not by any stretch to disparage you or or anything like that. Amazing. Like make that make that profit. Get started. But

You don't want to get trapped in the cycle of lots of small deals or just having to do a ton of deal like like incredible amounts of transaction volume to make any significant like long term wealth out of this business. And I think one of the things that I resonate with is the limiting belief. And not to say that I started with small properties. I started with larger tracks. You my first few deals were 15 to 30 40 K one was about 100 K profit.

So I was already targeting larger deals from the get-go, but I was doing it myself for the first six, seven months, which I think is normal to get your feet wet, understand the whole ins and outs of the business, see where your big bottlenecks and constraints are, and then start hiring to break through. But it was really, I don't wanna say tempting to not hire, but it was a little bit scary to say, okay, I can't do this all myself. And I just had to be realistic that

I would be able to achieve more with a team. I'd be able to achieve more ⁓ by going after larger deals, by systematizing the business and not treating it like a side hustle. So I burned the bridge, quit the W-2, kind of went all in and had no real plan to fall back on anything else. And obviously that helped make some critical decisions early on that helped my business be successful. But that's what we want to talk about today, right? That's what we're talking about is how does avoid being a person who is

a land investor who's been in business for five, six, seven years and you're still stuck in the low six figure kind of profit range, know, a hundred grand, a hundred fifty grand, two hundred grand in a year and you're doing a ton of work and you don't have a team behind you. And as the market changes, as marketing gets more competitive, as markets get more competitive, you're still not seeing the traction you want to see. That's what we're going to talk about today.

Clay Hepler (13:30)
So I like to kind of separate it how I think about it. There's like the tactical and then there's the mindset, right? There are two important components of this. The first thing, couple of things that I want to bring up is from, know, this might be you if you are exemplifying these things. Number one, you hire specifically based on

A dollar sign not based on an output. We give an example. So there are different levels of when you're investing in, for example, an employee, there are different jumps of skill sets that are directly correlated to a dollar sign. So I am currently hiring a, a director of revenue position for my company.

Justin Piche (14:01)
you

Clay Hepler (14:27)
which is a six figure salary. And I was

speaking with the executive recruiter that I'm working with to find this. And he was giving me an example of the difference between someone that you pay a hundred K versus 120 K or 130 K is completely a different ballgame. It's not even in the same world. And from a United States base, which is this is obviously a US base hire.

Justin Piche (14:31)
Okay.

Clay Hepler (14:55)
Of course you can add a ton of commission on the backend there. Um,

Justin Piche (15:00)
you

Clay Hepler (15:00)
but that, that exists in different spectrums, right? So you might at the beginning say, I can only afford a $4 an hour VA, right? The difference between a $4 and a $6 an hour VA or a five and an eight. It's the world of difference, right? A lead manager who's being paid in my experience.

1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 a month, which in many of global talent areas is like a very good

living is going to be significantly better than if you try to hire someone that's even a thousand a month, even 1200 a month. And so where I struggled early on and what, what kept me from really taking my business to the next level is I didn't understand the jumps of dollar per hour and output.

Justin Piche (15:49)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (15:50)
And so that for me was a really big handicap that I experienced. what, couple hundred bucks more per month and you get a completely different person. But people can't think that way, man. It's just, and I was stuck in that trap.

Justin Piche (16:06)
Yeah, and you know, and just to give you yourself some grace, this is like a, this is a common struggle. I see this all the time with coaching clients that are coming in who have, you know, have a couple of VA's that are working for them, or they're thinking about hiring VA's and they, a lot of folks are, they need to prove it out in their minds. Like they need to see the business working with some consistency. They feel like they do with some consistency and some

reasonable amount of income before they pull the trigger to get that person in the role that produces the output that they actually need to achieve that consistency. It's like a chicken and an egg kind of thing. And I don't want to say you have to hire before you're making any money. That's not necessarily the truth. You've got to really hustle hard, but you've got to quickly adjust. And I think people maybe generally need to have a little bit lower barrier for it. Does this business work or not? Because the truth is it really works.

Like it absolutely works. I mean, we are both proof that it works. There's thousands of other land investors are proof that it works. If you can execute on the business model, it will work for you. You just can't do it all yourself. And you need to think about the output of the person and not pigeonhole yourself into a lower quality output employee because that's all you can afford you. And instead focus on

like Clay said, the output of what that employee is going to produce. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. Another one I really think is that it's really big for people is the is the do it yourself syndrome, thinking that I'll just figure it all out on my own. And this is something that I personally struggled with when I started real estate investing back in 28 into 2018 2019 and doing houses. You know, first it was the

Clay Hepler (17:35)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (17:59)
Burr method. And then I was like, Oh, well, I send some marketing and try to do some wholesaling and that kind of thing. I did not. I listened to some podcasts, but I didn't hire a coach. I didn't take a course and I didn't have, I had a little bit of success, but not much, you know, not, a lot. I made a lot of mistakes that I could have avoided. Of course I didn't have a team. was just doing it myself. You know, I didn't need, I was, I thought to myself,

I don't need anybody. I'm gonna do this all myself. I I understand. I can send some mail, I can spend some money, I can field phone calls, I can get the leads in, I can value the properties myself, I can get them under contract, I can hire the title company, I can list the property, I can negotiate with sellers, I can line all this stuff up and work a full-time job and have ⁓ multiple kids. But you can't. If you want to actually scale something meaningful...

And you have all these other things that are pulling your time and not to mention the full gambit of the business, which frankly is a lot of disparate tasks that all work together and with one or two deals a month and really low volume. Yeah, you totally can do it yourself. It's not that much, but that doesn't build generational wealth, right? That doesn't build you a business that completely transforms your life. And there's something I'm super I like really, really think now after spending quite a bit of money on

coaching and spending quite a bit of money on just like paying people for their knowledge and paying people for helping me skip steps. Man, has that helped. Like there's no way I would be where I am right now without that. I would be way farther behind. It would have taken me so much longer to learn the business, so much longer to learn how to not build a business.

Clay Hepler (19:43)
Yeah, Justin, yeah.

Justin Piche (19:43)
And it's, but it's tough. mean, it's right. It's tough

to bite the bullet and pay five, 10, 20, 50 grand for somebody else's knowledge. But man, has it been the best investment ⁓ I've made.

Clay Hepler (19:53)
Yeah. So I think about, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about this in three distinct ways. You can pay a employee to help you figure it out. Right. That becomes very expensive. Like if you're going to pay, like if you're to bring someone on that actually has a skillset, ⁓ at a level that, that you like, for example, you want to

You want to figure out marketing better. You want to figure out operations better. That's a $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a year cost. Okay. So you can absolutely do that. And that really takes it to the next level, right? You now have this person that is driving, right? Where I see a lot of people mess this up is they say, I'm not going to pay for the knowledge exchange or the education exchange.

I'm going to pay a VA that is, has some of the skillsets, but not all of it. I'm going to dump the outputs on them and then get angry at them that they don't have the skillset that I'm looking for, for my standards that I have as a, as a U S based person for someone who's never done real estate in the United States before. That's one thing that I see people do. Number, number two thing is you can pay with your mistakes.

Justin Piche (21:06)
.

Exactly.

Clay Hepler (21:17)
So you can pay with, I'm going to figure it out myself and I'm going to, I'm going to, handicap myself and it's going to take me two to three years longer. Right. And right. Right. Yeah. Yes.

Justin Piche (21:26)
That's the most common mistake, I think. That's the one that most people

make, and the one that I made when I started doing my house flipping stuff.

Clay Hepler (21:35)
And then the third way is like what you mentioned is a coach or a consultant. Now, the best way to do this is not to pay for blanket advice, it's to pay to solve problems. So what I've done in the past is I've said, ⁓ someone's selling me this thing online and they're a very good salesperson because a lot of ⁓ online educators are incredibly good internet marketers. And so they sell you a

and what your life could be, right? The trip to Maui. And then it ends up like not working out because you're trying to pay for something that's actually not solving the core bottleneck of your business. And so if you want to do the third thing, is I'm going to call, I'm going to pay someone to do this, pay the person that you know can help you with a specific bottleneck, right? So that, and that, then you're like,

Justin Piche (22:14)
you

Right.

Clay Hepler (22:34)
I can, I can tangibly see this, this is going into this. So if I can pay this person, uh, 25,000, 50,000, 10,000, whatever it is, and I, and it could take my business from 50 K a month to a hundred K a month. That's a $600,000 difference in a year. What's your ROAS on that? You probably can't get the same ROAS in marketing, right? So you could pay the person, you could pay with your mistakes or you could, you could pay to hire an employee. So great, great point there, man. And, um,

Justin Piche (23:01)
Thank

Clay Hepler (23:04)
Yeah, I think

that that's one of the main reasons why people can't just they just get stuck. They just can't get it to the next level.

Justin Piche (23:11)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast again to say thank you for listening. And this podcast Clay and I are talking about what it takes to be a top operator. If you've gotten some value out of this, please leave a comment down below, follow, subscribe. We want to hear from you because we want to provide content that you enjoy every single week and bring as much value as possible. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I think another one that is a really common one is being worried about funding and paying for deals. Like being worried about where the money is coming from to actually buy a deal. And this is really common, right? Especially for new investors, they get started and like a lot of folks get started, they have a little bit of money. Maybe they have a hundred grand, maybe they have 200 grand, maybe they have 50 grand. I don't know. They have some amount of money.

Clay Hepler (23:45)
Mm.

Justin Piche (24:04)
that they know they can spend on marketing, they can spend on deals, and then they need to sell some stuff to make more money to then further fund or further pay for marketing or OpEx or whatever it is. And so they say, okay, well, if I need to spend, I need to have six months of runway, let's say, and it's gonna cost me $5,000 a month to run my business when I'm first starting it out. So I need $30,000 of my 100K. I have 70K left. So I need to buy my properties with this 70K.

So they target really small potential, small profit deals. And the return on marketing output or the number of leads you generate from a given marketing output, while larger for those smaller value deals in terms of a percentage of like outreach to responses and leads generated and opportunities, not like exponentially, right? It's a little bit more. And so you end up getting these small deals, buying a few of them, running out of money and then waiting for deals to sell to buy more deals.

I would say that's a bad kind of a, that's a really for scaling and for growing your business and being the top performer in this business. That is not the way to do it. Right. You're going to, you're going to delay larger profits. And I think the encouragement I'd say is that there are funders out there that love funding deals for one. Yeah. Maybe you have to give up a good bit of equity to get a deal funder to do it. But you can JV, you can partner, right? You can use a bank.

There's so many ways to get funding for deals. If the deal is good, you will be able to find the money. You just have to start asking people and sending your deal out there for investors. It will happen, right? And that made me really nervous when I started. I actually had, we talked about this before. I had quite a bit of money, like cash just ready to go. But I still got a little nervous like buying properties for 150, 200, 300K cash.

It made me nervous. was like, man, that's a lot of money to pour into one piece of property. What if I'm wrong? You know, what if I'm wrong? And thankfully I kind of nipped that fear in the bud pretty quickly and just like went and went for it. ⁓ But I see this a lot, right? And I see it because the coaching client will come to me and they'll say, Hey, this is the property. I sent out a few mail campaigns. Usually it's like, I've sent out some mail campaigns.

Clay Hepler (26:06)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (26:25)
Here's my target list. And I look at the target list and I see the acreage range and the areas and the counties that they're working in. And this may lead into another one of these points. ⁓ But they're just bad. Like they're low dollar properties. They have poor sell through rates. They're usually like rural rec markets in like class B states or something. Whatever kind of markets because the properties are cheap and there's a lot of them for sale.

And it's just like, man, you've really limited yourself. What if you had just sent mailers to larger tracks? Or what if you had focused on the population centers where people are actually wanting to live around the population centers instead of this middle of nowhere area? That'd be much better way to do it.

Clay Hepler (27:04)
That's a great point, man. I see that. I see that a lot with people and I struggled with that as well. The next thing is I was having a conversation with an incredibly talented, ⁓ private client and you see guys, the listeners, we learned so much from, from, from, teaching. There's such an amazing feedback loop that you learn and you get better over time and you help people better, better over time. And then

It allows us to come on here and be, give these anecdotes that are like super beneficial. So it's been really amazing for me to learn, to grow, and also to just become a better coach and leader for my team as well.

But I was having this conversation with my coaching client and he listens to this podcast and so he's going to know I'm talking about him and he's going to laugh very loudly. So we were looking at his channels. So he went from one lead, I think I've talked about it before, one deal per month to four deals per month. He was doing one deal per month in Q4. Now he's doing four deals per month in Q1 and he's going into obviously in Q2.

Justin Piche (27:51)
Hahaha

Clay Hepler (28:13)
So we're looking at his ROAS, because we always look at KPIs in every call. always look, we say, hey, what's going on in last two weeks? And we're looking at his ROAS, and he's got a channel that's getting 9.9x ROAS. 9.9x, which is, for those listeners, it's almost a 10x return on your investment. You put a dollar and you get $10 out. Give me a break.

Justin Piche (28:34)
.

Clay Hepler (28:37)
He is murdering him and he's on this call with me and he's saying to me, okay, man, so I have, working with this new eight. I'm going to work with this new agency that's going to help me with this new, ⁓ channel that it's going to help me establish this new channel. And I'm super excited about it. And I'm like, well, okay. So how is that going to affect your sales process? Well, he's like, well, I've done this channel in the past and like,

Justin Piche (28:47)
.

Clay Hepler (29:00)
there's a lot of scammers on this channel and it's PPC by the way. And like one in three people are trying to scam you and most of the deals don't end up closing. I basically broke even when I did it last year. And but I just think that I'm going to add this channel to he's probably laughing right now. Add this channel to to my business because like, know, I'm, I'm, looked at him and I said, dude, you're getting a 10 you're getting a 9.9 extra OS, why don't you do more of that channel?

Justin Piche (29:22)
you

Clay Hepler (29:30)
And he kind of needed that to shake, you know, sometimes we need that, that feedback. We were talking about, I need to figure it out myself and we see it because we hear someone else is doing it. And I'm like, how does this come? He's a, I know someone else doing this in this group that I'm a part of. And like, they're doing really well. And I'm like, well, if they knew how well you were doing with this channel, would they want to have your channel? And he'd be like, yeah, yeah.

So why don't you just do more of this specific channel? If you're being so successful with it, it doesn't introduce any additional operational complexity because you're just doing the same thing. You're just doing more of it. You know how to comp, you know how to qualify, you know how to offer on these properties. It doesn't change any part of your process and you don't need any more people because the type of channel that it is, it's not going to put so much more additional stress, even if you double, but you might be able to get a double amount of contract side.

And he was like, yeah, yeah. This is a successful guy. This is a guy that's gonna do maybe three quarters of a million bucks this year in gross profit. He might even hit a million bucks. And he is struggling with this. And so the lesson here is jumping to the next marketing channel. I hear that Justin is doing this on, people bring these conversations, he's like, ⁓ heard you and Justin talking about this.

You know, they're like message me. I'm like, don't listen to don't don't like do what's working in your business. Right. And so the thing is jumping to the next marketing channel, because you hear someone else talking about it in and you're not saying what does my data tell me versus what is someone else telling me? ⁓ I think that that's that's critical, man. That's a critical thing that people mess up and it's why people get stuck.

Justin Piche (31:20)
Yeah. Another thing to just think about when you hear other people's performance of marketing is it's so dependent on what specific market property type, et cetera, that they're going after. Right. You hear somebody who's doing cold calling and they're just killing it. They're just, they're just crushing it in their market. They're getting exceptional return on their, their spend. Well, that's great. And I, and I think that's, that's, that's, can be something that people experience.

But it also you need to know what type of data they're going after what type of sellers and what market and compare that to your own market because it's not it doesn't mean it's going to be the same performance. Mail is probably the most obvious example. If you send a bunch of mail to desert squares, you're probably going to come back with a lot of leads, right? If you're mailing properties that nobody wants, you're probably going to come back with a lot of leads. And if you mail really high dollar properties, you're probably going to come back with a really low number of leads. And that's just how it goes.

Clay Hepler (31:53)
you

Justin Piche (32:20)
And so when you hear, I can see like a lot of people, my friend is having this much success or man, this is how many, takes me 1000 mailers to get a deal. Immediately my thought is, okay, well what type of properties and what markets are you in? Because I don't see that performance and I think I know why, it's because I'm mailing really large properties that are all developable. And so we don't see a thousand, it's not a thousand. That would be incredible, but that's just not how it goes when you are marketing to a different type of property, different type of.

Different type of seller. I agree, you need to go back to the data and your business and maybe that just highlights why it's so important to just track the KPIs, track everything so that you can make these decisions based on real data and real performance and not just like how you feel. I feel like this marketing channel is going well for me. So I feel like this one could be better. I'm gonna do it. Well, what does the data say? What does it actually say?

Clay Hepler (33:13)
Yeah, yeah, hire a fire add new channels remove channels make decisions based on what the data says not on what Your emotions say because a lot of times when you're making a lot of emotional decisions You don't you can't track the data so you can't say I made this decision This is why I did this and then you can't look back and say like we talked about in the past episode I Made this decision because I wanted to do this and this is what I expected

the outcome to be and you just say, yeah, yeah, we're gonna do this because I heard this on a podcast. Got it, got it. ⁓ So from the guys that have a podcast. ⁓

Justin Piche (33:50)
Yeah.

I'll jump

on real quick. Another thing you said, I agree like the about how coaching keeps you sharp or like teaching and talking to people and being in this business keeps you sharp. I cannot tell you how many times a week or a month or whatever. I'm in the middle of a coaching call and somebody asks me a question about how I do something and how my team does something or whatever it is. And I start to answer the question.

in the way that I know we should be doing it. And then I think to myself, actually, I don't exactly know what my team is doing. Because obviously in the position I'm in now, a lot of the work has been delegated to the managers and a lot of the processes have been developed and are being executed on by the managers and the team. And so then I sent a little message and I'm like, hey, what are we doing for this? And so I get to like give the advice I know we should be doing. sometimes I can, and in that, by doing that,

thinking critically about the process, I can correct my own team where we may have gone a stray from the way the process is supposed to work. And that's like a very constant feedback. I'm like constantly improving the team based on coaching other people's business, which allows me to see things in theirs that I may not be doing as well as I should either.

Clay Hepler (35:04)
That's right. That's a great point, So I want to get to the mindset part of this, right? ⁓ Number one, ⁓ people, this goes back to the emotional things. They just make decisions based on what the world tells them, not what the data tells them. So the world is...

Input from podcast input from conversation with friend input from whatever something external versus internal input from data that's actually happening in the business and so if you can shift from external inputs to Decision to internal inputs to decision you your business literally will change overnight

Now what will happen naturally is it will be very painful to get from this to this. It's like eating broccoli, right? No one likes to broccoli, but it's good for your health, right? And people

Justin Piche (36:00)
Yeah

Clay Hepler (36:09)
Want to just say, this is what I keep talking about it. But so I just hear it every day of the week. And it's a, what are your dad? What does your dad tell you? You want to do this new thing? What does your dad tell you? One of my clients wanted to spend 15, almost $15,000 on a new marketing initiative. And we.

went from that $15,000 to let's build out a testing protocol so that you don't have to have, it doesn't cost you an additional cent. You just add a little bit of your day to day of one of your team members to test this out. So you don't spend $15,000. You spend a limited amount of additional output from one of your team members.

But he heard that he heard that from from external instead of looking internally and saying, what is this? What does this business really mean? And now that's a huge, huge, huge thing.

Justin Piche (37:05)
Another mindset mistake is absolutely treating it like a hobby and not a business. I mean, I think there's people that want a hobby. Like they want a stream of side income. And this again is not to disparage that person. Go after it and make a little bit of income. Like amazing. I'm so like, I'm proud of you for even trying and doing it, but it's not going to get you to a top performer. It will not happen. You cannot be a top performer in this business.

and have this as a of a side gig that you do a little bit on the side.

I think you need to ask yourself, everybody needs to ask themselves, like, what do they want out of this? Obviously, we all have different goals. We all have different desires and state desires or journey desires of how this business should go for us or what we want, what change we want in our life or what we want our children or spouse to have or be or feel in the future about what we what we've accomplished. And obviously, my goals are big. And so I'm going big and going after it big. And if your goals are small, that's OK.

You know, that's totally okay. But again, if you want to be a top performer, you can't treat it like a side hustle. It's got to be a professional business. You've got to execute on that.

Clay Hepler (38:20)
So is your jet going to be called Justin's jet?

Justin Piche (38:23)
gosh, I don't want to jet. No, no, no, no. I don't have that big a goals. goodness. It's so funny. There's like there's elements of like a luxury lifestyle that no matter how wealthy I was, I don't think I would ever feel comfortable having, you know, if you don't like if you're not if you don't grow up in that kind of kind of lifestyle, I think it's pretty hard to like enter into that. But I have no desire for that type of thing.

Clay Hepler (38:30)
Justin's Justin's Jumbo Jet.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's the jumbo jet. Yeah, I think private flying private would be pretty cool. But you got to be at a real at a level. You got to be at a level to get there. Right.

Justin Piche (39:04)
Yeah, I don't know if I value it enough.

Maybe I would in the future. I feel pretty comfortable being in basic economy and grabbing a middle seat when it gets assigned and flying. just doesn't bother me very much.

Clay Hepler (39:15)
It

doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me either. It doesn't bother me either Yeah,

Justin Piche (39:23)
.

Clay Hepler (39:23)
agree with you completely. I think that

people want to scale out of the business. And look, I haven't been there. don't know. This is conjecture. So I'm just going to, I'm a little bit over my skis here. But when you get to a $7 million a year business, $10 million a year business, do you really want to be out of it?

Justin Piche (39:28)
Thank

Clay Hepler (39:47)
Usually when you're that type of person that really wants to grind to get there, right. You get to that level, which is incredibly difficult in our business in any business, right. You usually don't want to get out of it. And so people put the cart before the horse and say, I want to scale out of my business. I've kind of gone like between I'm like trying to scale out. It's like, no, like I am the principal. So it's my responsibility to parachute into departments and be the person that.

Justin Piche (39:48)
Thank

Thank you.

Clay Hepler (40:16)
can be an aid and be a driver of outcomes. And so, you know, people will say to about their employees, why can't my employee move so quickly? Why can't my employee have the same level of ⁓ output as me? Why can't my, why can't my employee do these things? Because you're the person writing the checks.

So if you want your business to move as quickly as you want it to move, you need to be actively involved. And it's that balancing of you don't want to be destructive and parachuting into departments and just screwing things up, which a lot of visionaries tend to do. They just come in and just created a lot of chaos and leave. ⁓ but it, being able to be in that business and say, man, I'm the driver here. If it is to me, it's up, if it is to be, it's up to me. And.

Justin Piche (40:44)
you

Clay Hepler (41:10)
The responsibility, the ownership of the outcomes, it's up to us, man. And if you want to treat this thing like a hobby, I'm a little bit, I'm not as charitable and kind as Justin. Man, you shouldn't do this. Like seriously, you should not put the stress on your plate. Here's why. The reason why is because if you want to build something that's great,

Justin Piche (41:13)
you

Clay Hepler (41:40)
And great could be a million dollar a year business by the way. Bring it home, bring it home, $500,000, quarter million dollars a year business, a quarter million dollars. For some people it's like dude, that's awesome net, quarter million dollars net, right? That's awesome, right? But the pain that it takes to get there, the disappointment, the peaks and valleys that happen in this business, just get a job and be like a really good salesperson or like climb up in a company and get like equity percentage, like wouldn't do the business.

So I'm going to take, I'm going to take a different, I don't agree with Justin here. ⁓ I would take, I would say just don't do it.

Justin Piche (42:15)
You

Bold take. You know, have a, just to quickly say, a, I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine last night who is an exceptional salesperson. And he works as a salesman for a large steel manufacturer, one of the two largest steel manufacturers in the country. And he makes a really, really good amount of money. I mean, he makes great money. Good salespeople can make a lot of money. He moves a lot of steel.

Clay Hepler (42:21)
So how do we get, how do we go from, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Justin Piche (42:47)
And he's interested in starting his own company. He wants to start his own company, but he totally understands he can't do this on the side. He has to, he would have to cut ties essentially with his company or at least cut ties as an employee of the company to be able to sell, steal and build his own book of business and build the lay down, you know, have a lay down yard and have trucks and have like the, like the, the supply chain built out. And I, you know,

but he's got the perfect golden handcuffs, I think are the hardest ones to break in my opinion. You know, if you're, if you're making like a hundred K or 150 K or 200 K or even maybe two 50, I don't think those golden handcuffs are that hard to break. If you have bigger dreams and you know, you can make more money doing something like this business. That's not something in my opinion that like would really, really keep somebody in a, a, in a position that they don't enjoy, but he's got a harder golden handcuffs to break than that.

to take all that risk to go off on his own. ⁓ But I think that the point in just telling that story is that his mindset is the right one, right? He knows you can't make, it's not gonna be a side hustle. It's gotta be like his whole thing to really like live it, breathe it and scale it into something that's much more substantial than what he's currently doing.

Clay Hepler (44:06)
If he's listening to this podcast, you can tell him to reach out to me. I'd love to love to talk to him. So how do you become 1 %? How do you become a 1 % land investor? Number one is what we're talking about is, you know, thinking bigger, right? Strategic thinking. Thinking bigger doesn't just mean go after bigger deals. That's the lazy version. That's like level one. It's like everyone says, I'm going to go after a subdivise. You're like, great.

But that's what literally everyone else says. How are you going to do it in a way that's bigger? How are you going to do it in a way that's systematic? How are you going to do it in a way that a $5 million a year business does it, not a business that's making 500K and wants to get to that? Like what's the steps that you need to take? And so thinking bigger is not just like, let's go big. I'm going to 10X my business. Like 10X is greater than 2X is a Dan Sullivan book that I think took the world by the storm like two years ago, right?

Justin Piche (44:53)
you

Clay Hepler (45:05)
It's not like that. In my opinion, it's about expansive thinking. What would, what would this type of person do in this scenario? How can I be strategic about my thinking? How can I update my thinking? Like I was talking about earlier with allocating resources, like an investor within my business. So how do I bring short stops, second basement to come into different departments to hit a strategic goal that if it hits, if we hit it,

Justin Piche (45:24)
.

Clay Hepler (45:34)
Everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. The one thing, the Gary Keller. So the strategic targeting, strategic thinking, thinking expansively is how you change. Because I guarantee it guys, thinks differently than if he thinks differently than someone that's making $250,000 a year in this business. Guarantee it. Guarantee it. And so you think about bigger, better opportunities. You think about bigger, better systems. You think about bigger, better partnerships.

Justin Piche (45:46)
Thank ⁓

Clay Hepler (46:03)
And that allows you to get to the next level.

Justin Piche (46:11)
Agreed. ⁓ I guess number two would be funding, using funding, using other people's money, using banks, using leverage to be able to handle more deals. ⁓

It is really constraining to have a limited pool of money that you can allocate to an inventory and then you have to rely on that inventory to sell in order to release that capital to then reinvest in further deals. I mean, it's definitely, it's easier, it's less risky and not easier. Okay, it's less risky, it's safer, but it's not gonna get you to be the 1%. You're not gonna become the 1 % just doing that unless you have just an incredibly enormous pile of cash sitting around that you can pour into deals.

Clay Hepler (46:56)
I completely agree with that. And the reality is like, basis owns 11 % of Amazon. you know, Elon Musk, I don't know how much, what percentage he owns of Twitter or X or whatever. ⁓ if you want to get to the next level, giving up a little bit of equity at the beginning, you will give up equity. I always think about it in like, it's like a, it's like a wave, right? At the beginning, you give up equity because you have no experience, you have no cash, you have no, ⁓ expertise. And so you

Work with a funding partner because what you do is you shorten your time to execute and learn due diligence. So your first year, year and a half, if you're not coming from a lot of money or have money stacked up, you work with a funding partner. After that, you say, hey, I don't want to give up as much cash or as much equity. So you go out and use more bank financing because you have the credibility to go out and do that, or you raise private debt. So you reduce your cost of capital in your maybe one and half, two, three.

Justin Piche (47:49)
you

Clay Hepler (47:52)
And then what happens again is you go into bigger deals and you do equity. So, so it's an equity debt equity. That's just how it works because the, it's always a risk adjusted return that you're at the beginning. It's a risk adjusted return because you have no idea what you're doing. And so you need to rely on, on funders if they're the right funder to help you get to that next level. Right? Number two is you have the idea of what you're doing. You want to reduce your cost of capital so you can streamline and make your business more efficient. So you take on debt.

Then when you get larger, there's too much risk for taking on purely debt or you just can't finance something a hundred percent at a level. Exactly. Exactly.

Justin Piche (48:27)
Yeah, you can't. Yeah, the deal come too large for you to finance, you know yourself and you have to bring on equity

partners. That's you guys showing what happens.

Clay Hepler (48:36)
Exactly. Okay. Number three is invest in speed, right? You don't, you don't need more free YouTube videos, except for the ground game podcasts of that. You can keep that. ⁓ but you do need feedback and accountability, right? Accountability can come in different ways. Accountability can come like I was talking about earlier within the context of your business. It could come from colleagues. I've always talked about my relationship with Justin. There's a couple other land investors with whom I have a really close relationship. And, and if you, if you

are vulnerable, you can learn a lot and bring that feedback into your business. The other thing is, is, is accountability through a groups, right? And then last is accountability through a coach. And so you can choose any one of those, but what that does is compress timelines. It compresses timelines.

Justin Piche (49:21)
Yeah, which is incredible.

Like what a superpower to be able to do learn from somebody else's mistakes and take years of mistakes and compress them into quick wins for you and then consistent wins.

Clay Hepler (49:34)
Yep.

Justin Piche (49:35)
Number four, building your business for volume. mean, there are, here's a good, here's a good story. One of my partners, Ben, awesome, awesome guy. We're going on a few large deals together. We worked on one that I talked about on this podcast ⁓ in Texas. That was just an incredible, incredible, unbelievable deal, best deal. And I was talking to Ben about the win and I'm not going to say the number, but he made a lot of money and I made a lot of money on this deal.

And he was like, he told me, you know, he goes, you know, it feels like five years of wins, like rolled into one win. And a business that can hit a one hit wonder is a business that's very likely to fail. Not to say you will, not to say you will. If you're going after the grand slam every time, that's it. You, you may hit it and you may, you may perform well, but like Ben took him five, six years to have that one freaking grand slam run took me.

three years to have that one grand slam deal. And so you need to build a business that is consistent, build for volume, something that's consistent. you know, Clay, you have a bold goal of how many 30, 35 offers a week is what you said, 35 to 40 offers a week.

I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot and it's hard not to have consistency if you're able to execute on that.

Clay Hepler (50:56)
That's a lot.

Yeah. You know, if you think about it like this, 35 offers to 30, 45 offers per week, depending on what type of business you have, the type of deals you're looking at, you can assume a four, five to five to 10 % close rate on those deals. Right. So if you have 40 offers per week, you got four deals under contract per week, which is 16 deals a month. Right. Let's assume that 17, 70 % of those actually close, right? Cause

It's never going to close them all. just doesn't work like that. Doesn't work like that. So you're, so you're, so you're going to end up closing about 10, 10 to 10, 11 deals a month. If you're doing 25 K a deal, your business, if I'm doing math is a $3 million a year business plus 3 million plus. So the reason why we're like, we can ramp up to this is because if we can hit this offer goal, we can consistently hit that.

Justin Piche (51:32)
You're never gonna close them all.

You

Clay Hepler (52:00)
We can hit our $2 million or $3 million goal. We can do that. ⁓ and, so the, the sole and only goal, the bottleneck here is if we can hit this, we hit 3 million. Absolutely. Just in flipping standard flips. Now, if we get a big deal, holy crap, man, we, we, we might get a one big deal a quarter or maybe one big deal over two months. And so then we turn from a 3 million to a five. Right. ⁓

Justin Piche (52:05)
you

Yeah.

that is so important. it's the reason why that, I mean, we have, there's obviously a lot of differences in our businesses, but one of the things we both do is we have a pretty high marketing output. And the reason why I built my business this way, it was an iteration, right? At first it was, I needed consistent work for my team. I needed to have a base number, like I needed my employees to have very consistent lead flow.

And so that everybody was doing about the same amount of work every single day and so that I could give them reliable work. Right. I one of the big struggles I had early on when I was doing only direct market direct mail was that I'd send out mailers and I'd send them regularly space like every week or every week and a half or two weeks or whatever. We'd send a big batch of mailers and we get this flurry of calls and leads to follow up with and then we get nothing for several days. And when you don't have a big when you don't have consistent lead flow it's really hard.

Clay Hepler (53:16)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (53:19)
for your acquisition, especially your acquisitions manager to be consistent on the amount of work they're doing. Either they're telling you, hey boss, I'm drowning in leads. And then three days later, like, hey, I have nothing. I mean, I have some follow-ups, but I have no new leads to call and whatnot. And that was really challenging. And so we went through towards the cold calling, very consistent lead flow route. And the beauty of having a large team that's putting out a lot of marketing is that your cross-sectional area of opportunity grows, right?

Those Grand Slam deals are out there. They come every once in a while. And so you build a business for volume so that you have more opportunity to hit those freaking Grand Slams when they come across your desk. You just have more FaceTime and more conversations with sellers. And so you're gonna get more incredible deals than somebody who has a smaller output. ⁓

Clay Hepler (54:09)
Right. Unless the person like there, of course there are, you're going to, you're going to listen to Justin and say, well, you're actually wrong guys, because you know, one development team will do one deal a year and they'll make more than both you guys combined. And you're like, and I would say, yeah, that's right. That's right. Our business is going to look very different in three years than it does now. And we're at this section of our business and we don't know where we're going to be in a couple of years. But what we're saying is this is what actually we have seen is the reliable execution. Now.

If you want to do this with direct mail, you got to send a hundred thousand pieces of direct mail a month.

So that's $57,000.

Justin Piche (54:47)
Then just drip it every day. Every day some letters are hidden mailboxes. I know.

Clay Hepler (54:49)
Think about that dude, that's insane.

Think about that. 100,000 pieces of direct mail a month.

Justin Piche (54:57)
There's people that run business that way that I think do pretty well. So I don't want to disparage that because it's totally possible. You could send 100,000 pieces of mail a month and you could grow in scale a really exceptional business doing that. I just don't think it's maybe the easiest way. mean, it's just a totally different business from the way that I run it.

Clay Hepler (55:18)
You can reduce cash conversion cycles, right? Or you can come with a ton of money and not a lot of people can sustain $600,000, $700,000 a year in just direct mail costs.

Right? So you're going to need, you might have a need a ton of price or is data people like markets, like it's going to be in tech. You could totally scale a business like that. And there are plenty of people that send that quantity of in like the house wholesaling space, ton of people do that. ⁓ but in, our space, not, maybe not yet. So let's get to the end of the podcast here. Kind of imagine, imagine 12 months from now.

You've closed your first 100 K net profit deal. have two to three subdivides lined up fully funded. You're no longer hustling in $5,000 crunch crumbs. ⁓ and you're operating like a real business owner. You're not a land flipper on a hamster wheel. You are an operator, not a hustler.

And so the purpose of this podcast was really to show you the tactical things that you're probably stuck in and in four things that you can implement right away to get to that next level. So Justin, anything to add here, ⁓ both, both before the end of the podcast, ⁓ before we sign out.

Justin Piche (56:47)
Yeah, I mean, everybody's at a different place in their business and I think everyone needs to ask themselves what do they actually want out of their business and just be brutally honest with yourself and then build the business that gets you to what you want. And if it is that you want to be a top performer and you want to grow and scale a seven figure multi seven figure business.

There's a lot of advice here I think that you should take. And if you want to have this as a side hustle, Clay and I maybe differ in whether or not that's a good idea. I mean, go for it, but don't be surprised if you burn 40, 50, 60K of marketing and end up stopping in a little bit.

Clay Hepler (57:35)
No, dude, hopefully everyone takes it as a side hustle because then it'll just make it so much easier to win.

Justin Piche (57:44)
It does. Yeah. I, it, it makes it harder to compete if it, if it's something you're not giving it a ton of attention. That's for sure. And I think, I think the thing that keeps people doing that is that, that you can get lucky. Like you really can, you can have that one deal on your first mailer. That just is incredible and feel like, man, I've really got this all figured out. And I just, the myth that I want to bust, you know, at the end of this podcast here is that it, it, it, that is exactly what it is. It's getting lucky.

And it's hard to get lucky consistently. But if you can build a consistent business, scale your volume and become an operator, like what Clay is talking about and not a hustler, I think you'll build something that you can be proud of and that will support your family for years and years to come.

Clay Hepler (58:31)
On that note, you guys know at the end of the podcast, man, we're getting shout outs on social media and people aren't reviewing the podcast. If you guys got benefit, if you got benefit from this, seriously guys, we're not running ads here. Please rate, review and subscribe on all channels. If you want to reach out to Justin and I in any way, there's some link downs below in the YouTube and podcasts for certain things. If you're looking for a little bit more one on one help.

Justin Piche (58:39)
I saw that.

Clay Hepler (59:00)
or if you want some eyes on a deal for funding or just for deals. Justin, I love talking about land. My wife is like, is this like what your favorite thing to do is, talk about land deals? it's like, I mean, it's pretty high up there, babe. It's pretty high up there. So guys, always we appreciate you. Please rate, review, subscribe. Until next week, Justin.

Justin Piche (59:05)
you

Kinda.

See you next week.