Episode 39: 6 Hard Questions Every Land Investor Must Answer

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

Justin Piche (00:06)
This is your other co-host, Justin Bichet. We're here to teach you how to win the ground game.

Good morning, Clay. This is not our normal recording time in the AM, but I'm glad we were able to fit it in because this weekend we're going to Denver for the 5280 mastermind, formerly known as the Super Cars and Land event. It's a short week. got to cram some stuff in. What are you leaving?

Clayton Hepler (00:45)
Dude, I'm leaving tomorrow morning and I'm traveling with a 15 month old, 16 month old, which is like, you think you have to...

Justin Piche (00:57)
That's the worst age for planes, man. It's the worst age for planes.

Clayton Hepler (00:57)
First time, first time, it's the worst.

My wife is like, I'm like, honey, I gotta get, like, when we land, I gotta get somewhere, because I have a couple of meetings and stuff, and she's like stressing out about, you know, the fact that, you know, what if Hess is freaking out, and, you know, it's just, there's a lot of stuff as a mom that you have to consider. So.

I literally have back to back meetings all day today, all day tomorrow and then tomorrow's my anniversary. In Denver, in Denver, yeah. Yeah. Thanks man.

Justin Piche (01:29)
Oh, man. That's a congrats. Happy happy anniversary. Mine's coming up,

too. I didn't know yours was really close to mine. Mine will be on July 6th. Twelve years, twelve year wedding anniversary.

Clayton Hepler (01:45)
Okay, did you do something like special for your 10th?

Justin Piche (01:49)
Uh, probably. Holy smokes. Yeah, I think I did. I think I did. No, no, no, no. We went to Newport, Rhode Island. That's what we did. Where I proposed to her. I took her to Newport, Rhode Island. We stayed at a place called Castle Hill Inn, which is where I proposed to her. I was like, man, I know I did something special. What was it? Yes, I did.

Clayton Hepler (01:51)
⁓

Okay, that's cool.

Vegas Vegas

remarried in Vegas.

Justin Piche (02:13)
No, ⁓

Clayton Hepler (02:20)
So like we've so we've like known each other yet, too. It's too. It's too. Yep. Yep. Yeah, but like we've known each other for like 10 years. So like like seriously known each other for that period of time. So it feels like a lot longer and it's been just absolutely incredible. ⁓ So, yeah, it's going we're going to. ⁓ My wife used to be the head writer for a culinary. It's called 303 magazine, which is like a.

Justin Piche (02:22)
It's second wedding anniversary though. Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (02:47)
lifestyle culinary magazine in Denver and she would open all the bars and all the new restaurants and so she loves like very good craft cocktails like loves very good craft cocktails and the number one spot for cocktails in Denver is a a bar called death and co death and co and they have a location in New York and LA and Denver at this point I think they only have three locations

And it is absolutely extraordinary. Like it's a truly craft masterpiece. They have their own brand.

Justin Piche (03:25)
Is this the type of place? Because I've been to I have a really good friend who was like a connoisseur of cocktails and we were in Nashville. We went to this. I can't remember the name of it, but this exceptional cocktail bar. They don't have a menu at all. They just walk up to you and they're like, what are you feeling like? Spirit forward fruit forward. They just like talk to you about what like you're feeling like drinking. You just describe the taste and like texture and whatever you want and then they just go make something for you and it's it's

Amazing. It's incredible.

Clayton Hepler (03:56)
Amazing.

It's in ⁓ terms of caliber. It's like known as the cut like probably the top He would he would 100 % they have their own like, you know mixology book and they're very well known So we're going there and then we're going to a place in Denver ⁓ Called sushi den which is like a really good sushi like incredible sushi restaurant. And so ⁓ If anyone's at sushi den on Wednesday night, I will be there

Justin Piche (04:01)
The place. My friend would definitely know about this place, I'm sure.

Mm-hmm.

Clayton Hepler (04:26)
And I will see you there. ⁓ although I'm not sure if this is posting this week or not, but yeah, man, it's so super excited in it. Okay. I'll tell my wife not to listen to it. So, ⁓ what about you, what do you man?

Justin Piche (04:32)
This will. This one will post today.

The next one will post next week.

I am ⁓ similarly to traveling with an 16 month old. am actually driving from Houston up to Denver with my three children and my dog and my wife. ⁓ We're leaving. We're leaving at 3 a.m. on Thursday. So today's Tuesday. We're leaving 3 a.m. on Thursday. Throw the kids in the back. I got a bunch of blackout shades that I like put up on all the windows. Our minivan has a

Clayton Hepler (04:59)
Ooh.

Justin Piche (05:12)
rear view camera rather than a mirror so can like black out the back all the black windows so they don't get you know when the sun comes up it stays a little darker in the car for them to potentially keep sleeping although that rarely happens and we're just gonna drive try to make it try to make it till like seven or eight before we stop for food and it's about it's like a fourteen and a half it's like a fifteen hour drive ish from Houston to Denver

But it usually takes us, we've done this drive before, not to Denver. We went to North, we have a house in North Carolina. We're driving over there. It was about the same, about 15 hours. And it took us maybe 19 to get there. Cause we stop every three or four hours. We stop, we go to a park. We left the kids out, the dog out for like 30 minutes, like run around, get off some energy, swing, and then hop back in the car and roll. So it'll be, it'll be, it'll be a challenging day, but I'll be, I'll be in Denver late Thursday evening.

and ready for the mastermind on Friday. But in that spirit, that brings us to the topic of this podcast. Clay and I are going to be leading pods. We're going be leading some pods, groups of investors, hot seats, asking questions, really digging into people's businesses. And there's a few questions that we're going to be asking. And I thought it was only right that we answer these ourselves.

That's the podcast today. We're going to talk about nine hard-hitting questions for scaling your land business. And we're just going to go through them similar to a Q &A format.

Clayton Hepler (06:44)
Yep, for, this is the type of thing that you'll read a book,

This type of stuff is beneficial if you work through it. I was actually looking at the questions and some of them was like, I know that right off the bat and others it's like, hey, I need to look into that a little bit deeper. But this is an active episode. We want this to be engaging so you get the benefit of what Justin and I are talking about so you can kind of have that frame of reference, but also try to put this in your business so you can get better visibility into what you're doing and how you're doing

The first question is what type of marketing are you doing and what metrics do you track?

Justin Piche (07:20)
Yeah, I can take a swing at this one. So we primarily do code calling. That's our largest like single team for outbound marketing. We do direct mail marketing and we do pay per click and some other outbound type marketing. And the metrics that I care about are like the...

primary metric I care about on a day to day like operations basis is the output of that marketing. Like the top of the funnel is how much you're actually doing and that's more of like is my team giving me the output that I need? Are they actually executing on the sheer volume of marketing? But the quality matters so much too. So it's like you can't just have a person sending out or making you know, but whatever to a couple hundred phone calls and get no leads from it.

So then we track for each person. We're tracking the number of dials that they're doing each day and the number of connections that they have each day, the number of leads they're qualifying or pushing to the CRM on a monthly basis. We track the number of deals that resulted in contracts from the leads that ⁓ they pushed. that's really important because at the end of the year, we do kind of an employee assessment.

resulting contracts from leads that you qualified is a huge indicator to me of cold-collar performance. There's not very many more ways or like not a ton of ways to differentiate them. You could have one cold-collar that pushes a ton of leads and one color that doesn't push very many leads, but the one that doesn't has way more contracts than the one that does like that's a higher quality cold-collar. They're better at qualifying leads and they're better at getting leads in the pipeline that are going to result in contracts. ⁓ Let's see. We also look at our like tool.

and make sure that we're not having too much time in between connections. So like the delay between connections, we don't want to waste a bunch of time. And then I look at the time that the team is not ready. So the time that they spend in wrap up between calls, that's another thing that I look at to make sure we're not just like wasting time after a call, typing up notes that we don't, that, know, too much notes are going too slow or something like that. So that's code calling. What about you for code calling? Maybe we'll just get Spitfire back and forth.

Clayton Hepler (09:36)
Yeah.

So here's really interesting things. ⁓ For that type of channel, There's a couple of things that I really care about, right? But like you were saying, hey, what's the biggest thing that shows the health of ⁓ our cold calling department? It's probably not what you think. We really like to focus on qualification rate. So, you you'll hear someone talk about on social media, hey, we get this amount of leads per day.

you know, ⁓ hey, I get right. And I listen to that and I say, okay, like what's the quality of the leads? How many of those leads actually turn into contracts? There's so many nuances here guys that is it's very difficult to like listen to someone in a vacuum and say, hey, this is the performance of my team. And so the biggest metric that I care about is qualifications per day. Right. And so of course you have

Justin Piche (10:06)
I know. Yeah, yeah.

Clayton Hepler (10:34)
You the front end of the funnel connection rate.

Justin Piche (10:36)
And real real quick

for our listeners, that's called that's leads have been pushed. Lead manager is qualifying the lead for negotiation. That's what you care about. It's a lead manager output. That's the primary. Okay.

Clayton Hepler (10:46)
That's exactly right. That's

exactly right. Exactly right. So that, that is the most important, KPI. Why? Because that, that's our offer. Like we offer on deals that are qualified, right? And so I don't care how many leads per day that we have. ⁓ I care about how many qualified leads per day that we have. Right. And so we track, ⁓ the connection rate. We track the Dallas per day. We track leads per day. We track qualified leads per day.

one thing that we really pay attention to is the drop rate. So I 2.5 X'd my qualified leads per day by focusing on the drop rate. The drop rate is the first five to 10 seconds of a call. And it's everything. It's everything. And, and, and so that's, that's something that we really focused on and improved on. ⁓ and then of course, cost per lead, cost per contract, cost per deal, return on ad spend.

Justin Piche (11:31)
Which is the most important. Yeah, it's everything.

Clayton Hepler (11:46)
and leads to a deal, right? Those are the core metrics that we track. You know, and we're constantly reviewing it. One thing that I would say with our, ⁓ yeah, those, those are our KPIs for that channel that we really focus on. Now, of course, within there, there's context, like over what period of time, how do we know like that this is a good period of time to ⁓ track over because weekly

It might not be an indication of the success of a KPI. It might be monthly or three months or six months. And those are things that we've tested internally so that we have our own

in other words, those are our top KPIs for the channel and how we measure them is constantly shifting and changing.

Justin Piche (12:34)
I really like what you said about listening to other people's metrics, acquisition metrics, and not having enough information to really determine what that means. Because they only give you a piece of the pie. Like my team generates X number of leads per day. I agree 100%. Every time I hear the same thing, I think, OK, that's great. That's a lot of leads to work through. But what is the quality of those leads? How many of them result in a contract? How many of them result in an offer? How many of them are just people that said, sure, send me an offer?

Like you don't know those things.

It's really hard to compare yourself to other land businesses and your metrics against theirs. Not that you necessarily want to compare yourself, but you want to know like, are you doing well? Like is the, is my execution of this marketing channel pretty good compared to somebody else's or am I not doing well? And those things are kind of hard to tell when you're just comparing back and forth with someone. A better indicator is really the end results, right? You were saying you care about your qualification rate.

Or their number of deals that are qualified enough for you to submit an offer on as like a metric for the health of your cold outreach. I think that's pretty, pretty good. and it probably like the truest form of comparison is honestly probably gross profit. That's probably like the, you really want to compare your business to somebody else's, how much money are you bringing in terms of gross profit per month? And then to go a step further, it would be what is the net?

from that because that's your efficiency. You can spend a ton of money and get a huge amount of gross profit, but you have 10 % margins, that's probably not the business you want to be running.

Clayton Hepler (14:12)
That's right. Again, these are all must be taken in a vacuum, but they are helpful heuristics for you to use in apply to your business. What you really find is as you scale these businesses, there are industry bests, like those industry bests under contract leads, you know, to under contract rate for cold calling. might be 40 to 60, right? Something like that, right? Depending on what you're targeting, comma, right? And so

This is why it's really helpful to know your numbers, to track your KPIs religiously, because that will serve as the basis for your business. And then you have someone like a friend, like a community, like a coach, they can come in and give you context of saying, hey, let's look at all these factors specifically in this marketing channel. And then we could say, is this healthy? Is this not? The last thing that I would say, if you want to take

If you scrap everything, if you scrap literally everything, qualifications, leads, cost per deal, cost per contract, the only thing that actually matters is your ROAS. How much money do you put in to the machine and what do you get out? Right? Now, when we're thinking about ROAS, it's incredibly important to contextualize it with time. You might hear a ⁓ wholesaler say,

Hey, I need a 3X ROAS is like healthy, right? For being a wholesale house flipper. And people say that and say, okay, so in the land business, 3X ROAS is healthy. And you're like, well, yeah, but the cash conversion cycles are four times as long. And so you have to expand the ROAS. And so I would say healthy ROAS in this business is about three. 5X, 5X is like a good ROAS. That's kind of the...

four to five X's like the bros that you want to be in ⁓ because of the time period of ⁓ that it takes to put a dollar and get it out.

Justin Piche (16:15)
Man, that's the time the cash conversion cycle is something I think that surprises a lot of people who start this business, especially who come from

Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast again to say thanks for listening. Clay and I really appreciate it. This week we're talking about several questions that are going to be discussed in the hot seats pods at the 5280 mastermind. We didn't have time to get them all, good hard hitting answers. If you guys are getting value, leave us a comment, leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you and hopefully we can see you in Denver. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

All right, so that was cold calling. What about for direct mail? I mean, there's probably not as many metrics to track for direct mail, but curious what you track.

Clayton Hepler (16:56)
Yeah, yeah, mean, you know, pieces out response rate per campaign per state per county. You know, and then again, cost for lead, cost for contract, cost for deal, lead to deal, lead to deal ROAS.

Justin Piche (17:12)
Yeah. Yeah, we're, pretty similar. And we also started doing PPC recently. So for PPC, honestly, we're, we're, we're tracking really similar metrics, but the primary ones are obviously cost cost per click and then cost per contract. ⁓ and then what we also are looking at what our market share for those search terms is in the markets that we're in. ⁓ and trying to optimize based on based on cost per click and deal quality in each state that we're working in.

and then what our end cost per contract is. It's still a work in progress, but it's been interesting. It's been interesting to see the results of that. Margins and profitability. What kind of margins are you seeing? What percentage of gross profit goes to overhead staff and marketing? And kind of the question I think that this question is trying to get at is if someone does a million dollars in revenue or gross profit, what net profit are they taking home before taxes?

Clayton Hepler (18:10)
Okay, so I'm going to just say, right? Yeah. How many people do you have on your team? How quickly you want to scale? What's your marketing channel? There are so many. What are your commissions? Right? So I think a healthy business is at about 40 % net margins to 50 % net margins. think that's healthy. Unhealthy is anything lower than that. If you're at 20%, then what are you doing? That's my philosophy.

Justin Piche (18:22)
so many.

Yeah, I have a little different philosophy. I agree that I think 40 % is a pretty healthy. And if you run a lean team, there's no reason why you can't be at 50%. I don't run a lean team. My team is not super lean. We're very well equipped to handle large volume of deals and bigger deals, which allows us to be generally a little more selective, but we're right around 40 % gross margin on our stuff. I can see like,

I can see as we continue to scale and we add in more US based employees with higher salaries and higher commissions. I can see how margins like business net margins can get compressed to get those a players on the team. And it's kind of a challenge of figuring out like what's the right amount of OPEX and scaling and people on your team to have in order to do better and bigger deals versus when do you make less money?

as the business owner because you're spending too much money on OPEX. Like if you double your business but you 2.5X your OPEX, are you going to make more money? You know, probably not really. And anyway.

Clayton Hepler (19:52)
Yeah, I think helpful measures revenue per employee in company level revenue per employee. ⁓

Justin Piche (19:55)
Mm, that's good.

That's a good metric. I

don't track that, but I should start because we, yeah, we, think we have 27 people now on the team.

Clayton Hepler (20:09)
Right. So, you know, I think a healthy, a healthy business, it's difficult. And this is something that I've struggled with, man. Like, do I count my outbound team? Because technically I could, they could be quote unquote an agency, right? I could think about them as like a marketing agency within my context. And so do I count them? I would say revenue per employee should be around admin sales marketing.

⁓ operations, fulfillment functions, HR legal versus like purely outbound. So I think a very healthy revenue per employee is 200k. Right? And you know,

Justin Piche (20:55)
Yeah, that's a good metric. I'm thinking in my head.

Clayton Hepler (21:01)
I'm not a 200K if we, if we, if we say, ⁓ our outbound team, I'm not 200K per employee.

Justin Piche (21:08)
Yeah,

I'm not either. mean, 27 people, that'd be a $5.4 million gross profit business. That's the goal for this year. So we're not quite there yet. We're not quite there yet.

Clayton Hepler (21:21)
Yeah. So,

so I think that, you know, as we're going to, we're doing this, this quarter, we're really like honing in on revenue per employee. But I think that is the best metric for talking about profitability ⁓ for a company, right? Because it does take into account OPEX. It does take into account, you know, owner's draw, owner's profit, taxes. And ⁓ if you have a company like WhatsApp that has a

you know, $5 million revenue per employee. You don't really care that much about OpEx, right? And so if you can do, make your decisions based on how do I increase my revenue per employee, you know, you're inherently going to be able to take more home as as ⁓ a CEO. That's why, that's why I was mentioning earlier, like ROAS is, yeah, ROAS is the thing for marketing and revenue per employee is the thing for margin. Like you can forget everything else. mean, everything else is important, but

Justin Piche (22:08)
Yeah, as a general rule, I think.

Clayton Hepler (22:19)
That's the primary driver.

Justin Piche (22:21)
I like it. mean that that obviously can help you identify how well your business is performing over time, especially as you scale and add add employees. Now, the one thing I will say for that metric is it can probably get really good if you get really efficient with your team. You you grow it, you scale it, and then you find the super a players and then you pair back maybe some of the less slower performing B or C players.

that you probably see a pretty significant increase in revenue per employee.

Clayton Hepler (22:56)
Yeah. the thing here is what Justin and I talk about all the time. We talk about scaling, but like we're trying to make money here. Like I don't want to scale a business that's not profitable. Like profit is the things that matter. And that's why the revenue for employee is super important because it does dictate profit, right? Because you're, right. You're inherently in building that into the metric.

Justin Piche (23:06)
Yeah, for sure not.

Yeah, mean, quantity is important because it gives you more access to opportunities, like the size of your team, the amount of marketing you can do. Like those things help you identify more or just get opportunities to take swings at more deals. But if the quality doesn't also improve, you're just going to be paying a ton of money for like lackluster results. And the quality piece is that's the primary purpose is increasing your revenue per employee. I mean, that's the thing I said to my team at the beginning of the year or really the end of

I should say like, we're at the size we need to be to hit our target. So how do we increase our output per employee? How do we increase our revenue per employee? What are we doing to get better as a team so that we don't have to hire and scale like this just a massive team to do the type of revenue that we want to do or the really it's the, the revenue is not the goal. Like the profit is the goal. So we could do the revenue. I can throw money at the problem and people at the problem and do the revenue and hit my gross profit goal.

at the expense of my revenue per employee and my actual take home, right? I'll just, I probably won't make more money. I'll just, I'll have this big flashy number to talk about. look, I hit my, my $5 million gross profit goal, but I'll be making 500 K, you know, like, which is great by the way, that's a lot of money, but that's not very high margins. Okay. That's not the goal of this.

Clayton Hepler (24:35)
Right.

That's right. That's right.

Justin Piche (24:42)
All right. ⁓ Summarize in a few sentences your let's go like real quick. One sentence your worst deal ever and your best deal ever. And you can include some rough numbers if you want.

Clayton Hepler (24:53)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Worst all ever, I lost money on it was in Williamson County, Tennessee. I bought a lot that's unbuildable because I got referred to a broker didn't know what the heck he was doing. And I ended up having to pay my investor. lost about $60,000 on it. I paid and because I, I honored my commitment to my investor. And I said, Hey, I gave you this return.

This is what I said. He's like, just give me my money, my principal back. And I said, that's not okay. I want to give you a return back. He's still an investor today, by the way.

Justin Piche (25:25)
Yeah. Yeah. You save that relationship. I always when I was starting out, that's what I told everybody. Any family and friend that was investing with me. It was like ⁓ a double guarantee. It's like no matter what this deal does, you will not lose a penny. Like I will make you whole no matter what it takes. And sometimes that's what it takes. When you get into these big giant deals, investors, especially when you raise a fund, investors understand like there's a risk of loss.

So like you don't have to tell people I'm definitely gonna make you whole no matter what. You just have to have good judgment, good economics on the deal and be conservative so that you can very likely and in almost all cases make a profit for them. But in the case that things go south, you're not gonna be coming out of your pocket to reimburse investors. What about your best deal?

Clayton Hepler (26:17)
I would say the best deal is in terms of like a deal that was just super, super easy. We bought a deal in pretty similar county and this was last year. We sold it in like 20 days and made $234,000. I literally didn't do anything in 20 days, 234. It's a great deal. It's a great deal. We love those. And it was a flip dude. It was a flip like.

Justin Piche (26:33)
That's a great deal.

That's like a super great deal. ⁓ great.

Oh, man, flips. Oh, I have not had

very many like six figure easy flips. I've had plenty of them, but they've all been really hard and take it a long time. Oh, that's awesome. guess for me, I lost money on a deal and it was a really sloped HOA property that I bought early on in land investing journey for 25K and I ended up selling it for 25K. But owner financing.

With like five K down. And then I sold the note. I took about a five K loss on the deal, but it's made me pretty gun shy about HOA and slope properties. Best deal. talked about this earlier on like a previous podcast was the Stephenville, the Erette County, 281 kind of lot split double close type deal that I did earlier this year. Uh, all right. I'm not going to belabor the point one minute newbie advice. All right. You got a minute.

a motivated newbie, which honestly is probably easy for us to answer because we have people come to us all the time and ask questions. But for motivated newbie, what's your top piece of advice for them?

Clayton Hepler (27:49)
Yeah. Um, I'm going to say a couple of different things. Number one is target properties that make you money. Go after bigger deals, 30 K 40 K 50 K flips. You know, it might at the beginning, it might not seem like you're getting as much motivation or I'm sorry, attraction, but it, it one deal at 50 K a month, two deals of 50 K a month is a lot easier to scale than 10 deals at five K a month or 20 deals at five K a month.

Number two, pick one marketing channel, get really good at it. Right, pick one single marketing channel. Number three, track KPIs. 95 % of the people that come to me and I help with skill in their business, they're not tracking the right KPIs, they're not doing a discipline, they have no idea what's going on in their business. And last, join a winning ecosystem. Right, so.

Community is a cheat code. Now I'm blessed to have a guy that I get to spend an hour or two hours every week on a podcast with that I admire and I think he's super smart and accomplished and you know, we spent 30 minutes before this call talking about land. ⁓ And so, you know, having people around you, you know, that that are at your level or much above pulls pulls knowledge down. So

Justin Piche (28:58)
You

Clayton Hepler (29:10)
One of the things that I was telling my employees is kind of a little tangent, ⁓ my employees can ask me for context. They can ask me for resources and they can ask me for priority. So ⁓ when you're training a leader in your organization, what you do is you have them push down responsibilities to someone below them. Right? They push down responsibilities and they pull down knowledge.

So as a business owner, you scale by pushing down responsibilities and pulling down knowledge, right? And so if you're in the right community, you're working with the right person, you're able to pull down knowledge quicker and you're able to push down responsibility to your team so you can scale. But most people don't do that. Most people don't wanna pull down the knowledge. And so that's my much longer than one minute advice about scaling.

Justin Piche (30:09)
⁓ I honestly couldn't have said it better. I agree with all of the, ⁓ the, the advice you gave for newbies. I agree. Do not chase small flips. It is not, it is not worth it. It is not worth it. Go after quality land and quality areas with quality margins. ⁓ and the other, yeah, absolutely. The other ones, I think the hardest one right now is probably to join the winning ecosystem. I mean, as a newbie, it's maybe not so hard because there's a lot of folks that are, that are beyond you.

in terms of experience and size of their business and things that they've been through. But for the folks that are in the middle, know, folks that have had some success, folks have been doing this a year, year and a half, maybe they've done 20 deals, 15 deals, 30 deals. That's where it starts to get hard now. You know, back, back when I started, we had LearnLand and LearnLand was a group of like pretty experienced, like by the time, you know, through the middle of it, it was really experienced folks. So was pretty easy to find somebody that was

at your level or above and be in a community with them. But obviously learn land has gone towards distressed asset type stuff and they've kind of they've gone totally away from this kind of traditional land investing model in terms of education. And that doesn't really exist anymore that I know of.

ask it?

Clayton Hepler (31:20)
how do you know you're

in the right stage to invest in land coaching, sales coaching, life coaching or business mentor versus reinvesting that money into your deals?

Justin Piche (31:28)
my gosh, what a great question. So a story of two businesses. I started to lay a wholesaling house, wholesaling and flipping business in 2018 19 sent out mail marketing, not even close to the scale that I'm doing this business at obviously right now. ⁓ it got a couple of deals, ran into some issues, didn't see a ton of traction, made enough money to barely cover my expenses for what I was doing all the while listening to bigger pockets.

looking at YouTube videos and doing my best to learn everything I could from just myself so I could reinvest money into the business and the deals. Fast forward 2021. I started this land business. The first thing I did literally the first money that I spent was coaching.

was the right decision. 100%. And so I would say that it may even be right as you start to invest in some sort of education or coaching program. I don't necessarily think you need like a one-on-one coach day one, but there it does help to get some like a framework. If you're a land investor and you're looking for a coach, most coaches. And so this is maybe coming from my perspective and probably clay shares this perspective. I don't think.

that somebody who has no experience in this space, you're a newbie is going to get as much value out of my coaching as somebody who has been working at this for a period of time has seen success in deals who understands the basics of the business, how to comp there, how to market, where to market, how to do different types of creative deals, but they just can't scale like they maybe they have one or two employees, but they don't know where the right next hire is. I am much more helpful to that person than I am.

to the newbie. The newbie's just gonna pay me too much money for information they could probably get from some YouTube videos. So kind of two answers and two different scenarios there.

Clayton Hepler (33:24)
Yeah, yeah. Nothing is a higher return on investment than education. But when you invest in education, you want to invest to solve a problem, not to solve an emotional need. Right. So I spent a lot of money on, on coaches. just paid for another coach, right? Literally. ⁓

And going to California, do a mastermind like in a couple of months and joining other coaching groups. Like I'm constantly investing in education, but when I do, I do to solve a problem. And so my only advice for a newbie is if you're a newbie, you have the knowledge problem. If you have, if you are experienced or semi-experienced, you have the execution and implementation problem. And so when you hire someone, whatever, at whatever stage you hire to solve a

⁓ result to get an outcome, not because you're like, I'm lonely or anything like that. So I've always invested in coaches. I've invested in like probably three coaching programs this year already to scale me as a leader, to add ⁓ additional revenue streams, to learn more so I could be better ⁓ coach for my, people that I work with to scale my business, information and coaches. But it's always been because I'm like,

I'm deficient here. I'd rather spend 5, 10, 15, 20K to collapse this gap because if I get a 10X ROAS, which I probably will, or 20X or 30X, it's better than what I would get in my business.

Justin Piche (34:58)
Yeah, it's a good answer. All right. Technical versus leadership skills. Most new folks to this space. Obviously, they focus on technical skills, the mechanics, because they don't have a team. They're doing this themselves. At what stage? At what stage should they shift focus to leadership skills and why?

This is something that is essential to start developing from day one. If you have not had experience as a leader, if you have not had to support a team of people, serve a team of people, break down barriers for a team of people, then it's going to be hard.

but it's not impossible and you need to invest in yourself to learn how to be a leader. And it probably starts, it starts with hiring somebody. It starts with self-education of some kind. mean, Clay, just talking about how he's investing in coaches to help him become a better leader, to better scale his business. You can start that at a small scale too. You don't necessarily need to pay the coaches that Clay is probably paying to help him. There's people that are above you in leadership that you can work with to figure this out.

I, is, this is probably one of my, my personal, ⁓ I don't know what you would, what you would want to say secret weapon, but like maybe blessings for when I started this business is that I ha I was, I was trained to be a leader, ⁓ by the United States Navy for years and forced into really challenging situations in which, ⁓ I had to perform and places I failed and places I learned.

but I spent years thinking about leading teams and actually executing on leadership. And so when I started a land investing business and grew a team, it was a lot more natural. came naturally that piece of it, but I can see how a lot of folks struggle with this. It does take a team to get to the next level in this business. I think we'll talk about this a little bit in the next podcast too. What do you think? What do you think? When should they somebody start focusing on leadership?

Clayton Hepler (36:58)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, first we have to lead ourselves and we lead other people. so self leadership is the beginning of this. And yeah. So, you know, if you can lead yourself, you can lead other people because people follow actions, not words. And so you should start shifting, focusing on the leadership skills that you have by leading yourself. And then, you know, as soon as you decide that you want to build this business,

Justin Piche (37:07)
Self-discipline. Oof.

Clayton Hepler (37:28)
Then you start to use the hiring ladder, hire people that hire you out of basically buy back your time. ⁓ which is something I learned from Dan Martell, which is an incredible book, buy back your time. But, ⁓ so I mean, you, when you have an admin person, you're, you're a leader. That's your first hire. so immediately you have to do both. I don't think there is a focusing on technical skills or leadership skills. You as a CEO have to do both period.

Justin Piche (37:57)
Yeah, I agree. That was a great answer. You need to lead yourself. You need to end. And I think to me that's you need to have self discipline to do what you say you're to do to execute on your tasks and obligations and things that you need to focus on to grow your scale, your business. If you can't do that, how can you expect a team to do it? How can you lead somebody else to do it?

All right, so we made it through, we made it through seven of these questions. We've got, or I guess six of them. We've got some more to answer, but we've got to end this because it's a short week and we got tons of stuff to do before we leave for Denver. I guess Clay, you're leaving tomorrow morning, so he's got a full day. Clay's got a full, a full day.

Clayton Hepler (38:33)
I hope that these six questions have provided a lot of value for you and going through the rest of your week. We're going to be again at the 5280 summit here at the end of this week. ⁓ But you know at the end of the podcast guys, the one thing that we ask is the gentleman's agreement. We provide value at no additional cost to you, no ads to you. ⁓ But in exchange, we want you to just rate, review and subscribe. Let us know how we are doing.

Let us know that we are improving. look, less than 10 % of the people actually listen to this podcast, rate, review, and subscribe. And this gives us the information, the feedback, just like we were talking about earlier today with the KPIs, the feedback that we need to continue to improve this podcast. So please, please rate, review, and subscribe. And until next week, Justin.

Justin Piche (39:19)
That's all I got. We'll see you guys in Denver who's there and see you next week.

Clayton Hepler (39:24)
See you next week.