Episode 40: 5 Predictions for the Land Game in 2025 and Beyond

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the...

GroundGate Podcast, this is your co-host Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:06)
This is your other co-host, Justin Pichet, we're show you how to win the ground game.

Clayton Hepler (00:22)
Dude, if you heard that little snap in the back, I have, have you ever, you know about Oli Pop, right? Dude, this, it is so good. It is so good. I mean.

Justin Piche (00:27)
An ollie pop? yeah, yeah. I've never had a banana cream one though.

Clayton Hepler (00:37)
I'm addicted to it, totally addicted. So one of the things that I said for my wedding, you know, my wife picked out the venue is in this like beautiful castle in Spain at the base of the Alhambra. And, you know, she picked the lighting, she picked the food, she picked the hors d'oeuvres, she picked the wine, she picked the champagne, she picked the cocktails. And I said, honey, let me pick the

cake. And so I didn't even think it would be possible in in Spain because, you know, very conventional, they don't really have a big wedding culture and they don't. They have like the nice confectionaries and the pastries and things like that, the breads that you would expect from a normal European bakery. But I said, hey, I want to have a banana cake for my wedding cake. I love banana. Right. And so we hired this this company from Sevilla and they brought it up.

This Bananic dude, it was so good, but I have these two little cousins and they ate like five pieces each, like literally five pieces each. And it was at the end of the night, it was like probably 2 a.m. And I'm like, I'm just taking a break. were dancing with this DJ that we brought in from London, this house DJ. And I'm like dancing. I'm like, dude, I'm hungry right now. Where's that cake? And so I went and I got the like last piece, but it was super small piece.

It was so good, but I was like, dang, I wish I had some more of my wedding cake, man. So I like banana, that's why like banana cream.

Justin Piche (02:15)
I like bananas. actually had a...

peanut butter honey banana sandwich for lunch. Which is not something I normally eat, but it was a little bit, just a little bit of an indulgence. Our fridge is a little bare. My wife and I are going out of town this weekend, and so I put it together. Delicious.

Clayton Hepler (02:36)
Yeah, man. That's the banana, peanut butter, honey. Look at you, man. That's like a, that's like a, I don't know, middle school indulgence, right?

Justin Piche (02:44)
Yeah, exactly.

Sometimes our kids could go through phases of not wanting lunch meat or not wanting sandwiches or whatever. so sometimes we'll make them one of those and it'll get eaten. And then the next time we'll make it, it won't be touched. But I digress.

Clayton Hepler (02:59)
Interesting

interesting ⁓ So I mean It was interesting. I was talking to one of my coaching clients and it's super Timely he was saying, you know, I was telling about my goal Hey, you know $15 million of top line gross profit by this date in this time and whatever he's like, well, that's weird, man I thought that you know, the heyday of land is over and it's too saturated and

two or three years from now, you're still gonna be in this business and ⁓ whatever. He was saying that. And I think he was just hearing, he was hearing, he's a successful guy. mean, he's gonna make probably seven figures this year. And I was like, no man, like this game could be played and it could continue to be played. It's been played for thousands of years, the LAN game, right? But things are changing, things are shifting. And so this podcast is about

Justin Piche (03:55)
yeah.

Clayton Hepler (03:57)
some predictions for the land game in 2024 and 2025.

Justin Piche (04:02)
Did you see, I think it was yesterday actually, Clint Turner posted something on Facebook. He said, where it's like unpopular opinion, the land investing model, land flipping model as it exists is toast, on and so forth. Did you see that post?

Clayton Hepler (04:17)
Yeah, he says that we got nine contracts, you know, nine deals on our contract over the past.

Justin Piche (04:20)
Well, I'm not going to

totally disagree with them. think I, because I read through it, I got another text from another buddy and then I was on a call yesterday afternoon with the land investor who was just looking for advice of like, what do I cut? How do I reduce OpEx? How do I keep surviving? What do need to focus on? And we came up again. So I talked about that post twice yesterday with two different people. And I mean, it's not a bad post. It's not a Doomer type post, but

I tend to agree a little bit with what he said, because we're seeing it. I mean, we're seeing the rural recreational market slow down substantially. And I think the thing I would add to his post is that owner financing is so important right now in today's market. Like being able to offer owner financing and originate notes and sell those notes and have a liquidity pool to sell those notes into that really, really helps slow markets. And so maybe as for any land investor who's

not seeing movement. you're not offering underfinance, underfinancing on your lots, that's probably a big reason. And the other would be marketing and sales. I mean, if you don't have an in-house disposition team, you don't have to. Okay. And don't the last thing I want is for somebody listening to this to say, Justin and Clay, we're talking about this. I need to go implement this right now. You've got to be at the right spot in your business where you can support having that type of a Dispo funnel in your own business. But if you are there and you're, if you're, if you got a

You know, you're doing three, four, five deals a month and you don't have anybody helping on sales, but you just put it all out to brokers. There's definitely some room for you to speed up your sales process by by marketing in-house as well. I say both those things would be are good. But let's get into these predictions because I've got a lot of I got a lot of thoughts.

Clayton Hepler (06:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and just one more commentary. Absolutely. ⁓ I got a deal. What we bought it for 120. And it's on the market. And we have a hundred and 88 all cash offer within four days. And it's rural. mean, we're not talking like we're talking rural. It's

Justin Piche (06:25)
Beautiful, beautiful.

Clayton Hepler (06:31)
You know, one buy for 120 sell for 185, 188.

those types of deals are, it kind of brings us into the next prediction, right? But those types of deals you can make money on and you got to be flexible and make those types of deals work. So what is our first prediction for 2025 to 2028?

Justin Piche (06:56)
Yeah, so the doom and gloom version of this would be flip margins collapse.

Right. And there's always people coming into the space. AI is getting better. Valuations are getting better. Sellers have more information than they ever have about what their property might be worth through tools like Zillow and Redfin. And so it's just going to be tough on just regular non-value ad flips. And we've seen this. OK, this has been happening for years. The heyday of land investing 2017, 18, 19, 20 even before COVID when a lot of people started getting into this.

Margins were great. It was very easy to buy something at 30 to 50 % of market value and turn around and sell it near or just below market value in record time for a profit. But over the last four years that I've been in this business, things have slowed down big time. Margins have compressed, compressed, compressed, compressed. And at first, we had to adjust quickly because we're not getting these properties under contract. And so we're leaving money on the table by...

not saying no to that 60 % of market value offer over and over and over again. So then we started doing that and saying, okay, well, we can buy this at 60 % and still make a solid margin on it. margins have continued to compress. So a perfect example of deals that I do now that I would never have done in the past. I bought a property, I literally just bought it, we're about to close on the sales side, 15 acres, Mobile County, Alabama. We had under contract for 50K.

Had to do a survey, a few other things, all in cost 55. I had it marked as a double close only for my team. So for them, that means we need a price, who cares what the price is on the sales side, aggressive marketing, get a buyer before we close. The seller was not willing to extend the contract. We ended up getting a buyer, but at 70K. So we're all in it for 55. 70K is the sales price. No realtors, sellers paying all.

closing costs so we will get that 15k. It's not like we're losing a bunch of that on the the close on the sale side. But the buyer or the seller would not extend and so we decided I decided to close the deal pay the fit pay the 55 have that cash outlay for about three weeks before we close the sale side and bring in that 15k of profit. I would never have done that deal in the past. I would have just canceled.

the contract because it's not that much margin. It's not just not a lot of margin for kind of a risk. Like what happens if the seller backs out? But nowadays I see that and I have excess capital laying around. I'm not putting it to use in other places. I don't need it for other deals. I have plenty of OPEX budget. Why not put a quick 50k, 55k to work to make a 30 % return in 28 % return in three weeks?

Clayton Hepler (09:46)
over time the there is a ⁓ market efficiency theory which is over time markets get more efficient, right and so The most efficient market people say in the world is public equities. Okay, so

There's, I think it came out of Chicago, the theory, you know, market efficiency theory. And basically it posits that the market is so efficient that no matter what, you can't get alpha on the market, right? And then you have trillions of dollars of funds that are in public equities, hedge funds, trillions of dollars that are trying to get alpha and get alpha.

in the most competitive market, theoretically, right? Public equities, right? Your Bill Ackman's, right? Incredibly liquid, incredibly competitive, like no inside knowledge like we have, like we have in our business, we have literally inside knowledge, right? Of the markets. There's no inside, right? And people are getting two to three times to four times the compounded growth rate of the market. And so,

Justin Piche (10:41)
Yeah, incredibly liquid. Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (11:05)
The question is, if even though flip margins, quote unquote, are compressing, there is additional complexity, there's more information from sellers, all this means is what do I need to do to equip myself to adapt? Right? You hear Warren Buffett reads all day, right? We're not Warren Buffett's here, right? We're not building that type of company, but we can apply the same type of tenacity to building our business. We've talked about this in the past. Justin's brought on his Dispo guy, you know,

We've talked about how I'm bringing on the director of revenue. We've talked about our sales team. It's about continually to adapt and grow. And I believe even though margins will compress, there will be consolidation for the best people. There will be more opportunities at the top. Right? We've gotten nine contracts, good deals on a contract within the last six days. Right? Nine deals that are really solid, you know, 50K, 100K profit deals.

⁓ why? Because of people, because of our process, because we can do what Justin was alluding to, is taking in house, wholesaling, double closing, JV structures, value add utility upgrades, things that create margin. Right? And so you create margin through expertise. You create margin through expertise, like ⁓ market expertise. You create margin through skill.

sales ability, disposition ability, what Justin was saying, and you create margins through your ability to add value. Those are the three levers that you can pull to ⁓ increase your margin. So even though I believe as a whole, flip margins are going to collapse, they're going to shrink, it just means that we need to create new margin centers and expand our margin centers.

in order to stay profitable because this is an incredibly profitable business.

Justin Piche (13:06)
Yeah, I agree. I really agree. I think that this is something I learned early earlier. I think that a lot of folks in the flipping business, which has helped my business become really successful is you cannot turn down an opportunity because you only have one tool to do it. You have to upscale yourself and your team to be able to handle different Dispo different acquisition strategies. So Clay just talked about a bunch of them.

Wholesaling double closing entitlement JV's value adds, whatever it might be entitlements, which I already said zoning changes Larger deals deals where you have to raise a bunch of money like there's all kinds of different ways to do this business the way that I see my business right now is a major marketing funnel presenting opportunities and it's our job as a company to figure out what is the best way to take advantage of those opportunities

And if we only have one tool flip or we only have one tool wholesale, you know, it's not going to be great for us. And I can look back at past year's performance. I just was talking to this talking about this with somebody. I can look back to past year's performance and I can identify the 10 % of deals that made us all the money and the 90 % of other deals covered our expenses, kept things rolling, kept consistent cashflow coming into the business. But they didn't. If I had not had those 10%, I might have broken even or I might have like

barely made any money or lost money. it's it's those opportunities that the large amount of marketing and the team to generate those leads is creating that make this business really profitable. And I mean we also obviously have the skill to take down larger deals and do these larger developments. And I don't want to tell people you should not focus on the flips at all or you should not focus on the outbound marketing because if you're only focusing on some of the big deals it's a whole different set of problems. Cash flow being number one.

especially when you get long-term deals, there's a lot of risk up front in your due diligence. Right now, I have a deal in Spokane County, Washington, which I think is a beautiful, fantastic deal. I've got 100K out right now on it in hard earnest money, due diligence, survey work, engineering, and if I don't close that deal, I'm gonna lose 100 grand. The deal is fantastic, but there's still moving pieces that need to be ⁓ worked out. We're working on the bank.

the lending piece right now. We're working on the raise right now. And I have an incredibly high conviction that we're going to deliver exceptional returns to our LPs. Incredibly high. I wouldn't have put a hundred grand of my own personal money on the line if I didn't believe this, right? I would have killed the deal long ago if I wasn't so behind the deal. But it's still a risk, right? There could be things that happen that make it so that we can't end up, we don't end up doing this deal. And if you're only focused on those types of deals, it can be really hard if you don't have a big bank roll.

Right, if I lose this 100 grand, and the other thing is with that deal, even once we close it, we still have a three year sales horizon. And we'll get some of the capital back and some of our initial capital investment back and the GPS, me and partners as the GP will earn some fees, not a lot, but some fees that'll kind of pay us for all the work we're doing on the development. But the profit won't be realized until I think it's like month.

Clayton Hepler (16:02)
That's right.

Justin Piche (16:25)
24 or something is when we actually start to see profit from that. So if you're only living off those profits and you need that capital that you've deployed into the end of the deal to do other deals, that's tough. That's tough. It's gonna take a long time to get to that point where you're finally making a lot of money with only big deals. So the small deals, the flips, the rural subdivides, the wholesales, that's what keeps the lights on. That's what keeps your team employed. That's what keeps food on your table. But you need to open up space to do these larger value, the larger value add really. That's kind of my.

Clayton Hepler (16:55)
Yeah. Yeah. With the understanding that in order to get there, you want to have a base. So a base could look like internal structures like we have, which is consistent, reliable and predictable profit coming from opportunities. Or the base could be you have a super, super high powered W two, and all you're doing is dumping cash into specific types of value add opportunities.

But you need that base because, you know, many of many wannabe developers went all in and say, I'm going to just do it, right? I'm to go all in. And what ended up happening, unfortunately, for them is that, you know, they run out of gas. They run out of gas because they don't have the three years is a long time. Man, market could change. Market can change. Market can go. Market can be 10 percent lower, 20, 25 percent lower than what it was.

Justin Piche (17:42)
Yeah, Mark can change.

Clayton Hepler (17:50)
Most likely not, right? But you can't just rely on those big deals, especially when you're scaling your business. And speaking about big deals, big opportunities, you know, a lot of the ways that we get these opportunities is about compliance, know, lead flow, outbound, right? And I believe that, you know, a lot of outbound RVMs, other outbound marketing channels is invitations for lawsuits.

right, but I do have something that is incredibly exciting that I'd like to share. I am not an attorney. I don't pretend like I'm an attorney. I'm going to just this is this is you need to take this with a grain of salt. Okay. On June 5 of 2025, there was a case that was settled.

between Kofi versus fast, easy offer LLC. It presented a critical legal question that had significant implications for land investors, real estate investing in general. Does an unsolicited offer to buy a person's property constitute a telephone solicitation under the TCPA, Telephone Consumer Protection Act?

I'm going to say again, I am not an attorney. Okay.

Justin Piche (19:21)
I'm on the edge of my

toes because I'm standing, but I'm waiting to hear this.

Clayton Hepler (19:24)
the

traditional interpretation is that a caller an agent ⁓ an agent this that is that offers to list a property sell a service in which a homeowner buys a service and pays a fee is Interpreted as a telephone interpret or traditional interpretation of TCPA solicitation per the cofee ruling

a caller who is an investor who offers to buy a property in which the homeowner receives money.

is not a TCPA solicitation. Now, I'm not an attorney. Every state's different. If you're calling in California versus Missouri versus South Carolina, it's gonna be very different, okay? But the court analyzed, this is in Arizona, whether the defendant's outreach constituted an offer to buy property, a buying activity versus an offer to self-service, which is what I'm talking about.

This distinction is the paramount. the, the, the, the U S district court for Arizona sided with the defendants. Now Arizona is a red state, right? But they sided with the defendants on the court TCPA question. They, it was grounded in the literal reading of the statute, focusing on the transactional role of the call recipient. The court found.

that the call is pertained only to potential future selling activity by the plaintiff, not any future buying activity on her part. The fact that the plaintiff would be receiving money, not spending, it was a determinative factor, right? So.

The question is, how does this affect compliance? How does it affect calling? How does this affect outbound? Right? Again, I'm not an attorney. This was an incredible win for real estate investors, but every state is different. Why is this so significant? Well, the fact is compliance and lead infrastructure becomes competitive.

If you are compliant if you have the right processes if you can reach more sellers at a lower cost per lead cost per contract cost per deal you build a competitive moat against your the people that you're competing against right and so forward-thinking operators Look at this stuff. They really they keep themselves abreast to all this information because a lawsuit can knock you down really hard

In a year, this could change. In Arizona, it could be this, and in Florida, it could be this. So you want to make sure that you are abreast to all of the changes, but it becomes paramount that you as a professional investor know what's going on. And that's obviously the point of this podcast, right? The point of this podcast is to help you scale your business, help you take your business to the next level. But making sure that you have protection, that you understand the importance of these

new laws and and TCPA litigation is critical, because you can build a moat, a profit generating machine, or you can lose all your profit, depending on how you do it. And so prediction number two is compliance and understanding and leveraging these types of ⁓ new rulings will will separate the people who win and the separate the people who don't.

Justin Piche (23:16)
That's incredibly good. Again, nothing we say on this podcast can ever be misconstrued as any kind of legal advice in any way, or form. Just so that's really abundantly clear to anybody who's listening. But that's, I mean, that's, that's good news. Obviously it's, it's not bad news. Bad news would be they find it absolutely in violation of TCPA no matter what. So.

So what do you think then about texting and cold calling specifically moving forward based on this lawsuit?

Clayton Hepler (23:46)
I think that calling is, this was a big win for calling. think with texting, it's kind of in the, yeah, I think it's pretty gray. I think it's pretty gray. These are thoughts, not legal advice. But yeah, I think that it's definitely a win for real estate investors.

Justin Piche (23:56)
The cards haven't fallen fully yet.

Yeah, I agree. I Exciting. All right. Well, prediction number three is hiring becomes the competitive advantage. And, know, I don't know if this is like a an incredible epiphany realization. I think people intuitively probably understand this, but this is something that has become more and more apparent to me personally.

as my business has scaled.

Many, people are hiring some incredible US based closers and that's up leveling their business. People are hiring the right types of project managers or underwriters to help them manage more deals. That's kind of my own personal thing that we've been working on about to have my second overseas civil engineer start next week to help us manage more of these development projects that we're working on. If you can't hire, if you're not a good manager, if you don't teach, learn to be a good manager and

identify high quality people to execute the tasks of your business. I think that you will be left behind by the people who do who run bigger and more efficient teams that can handle more and handle things better. We've seen this in the wholesaling space. I mean, if you just look back 10 years and you see how especially like when bigger pockets was like the biggest thing, everybody wanted to be a house flipper. Everybody wanted to be a wholesaler. So people were in many of our listeners, including me and clay have all

dabbled in that type of realm. And when I was starting doing it, it's kind of towards the end of that 2019 timeframe, I found a ton of, I struggled a lot because I was doing everything by myself. had nobody working for me. I was just calling and sending mail and sending letters. And I just could not compete with the level of cost of these larger organizations with on the ground salespeople working to talk to this person about buying their home.

And the land business, obviously, people have seen the land investing and land flipping business as this greener pasture of higher margins. And they've not been wrong. It is that way. That's the reason why I started doing it, is because it was easier and greater margins for a lower capital risk on each deal. But as people move in, as it gets more competitive, the people that are rising to the top are the ones that can effectively hire and use that as their competitive advantage.

Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast again to say thank you for listening. Klan are talking about some predictions for the land market moving forward. ⁓ The key. God, that's like to. Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast to say thank you for listening. Playing are talking about some predictions for the land investing business over the next several years. The key here. The common theme. Good people produce good results.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please leave us a review. Give us a comment about what you want to hear about. We love reading comments from listeners and we love implementing that into our next podcast. So back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clayton Hepler (27:24)
I can point with a finger on the date that I've hired people in my company and the date that my business has changed.

It is the difference maker. It is the difference maker. And the sooner you realize that, it's so cliche I'm sitting up here talking about hiring, right? Like it is the difference maker. I'll tell you why we got nine contracts in six days. I hired more acquisition managers.

That's it. Now you can train your team to become better. Hiring and training is obviously, you know, train people that are open. You got to hire the right person, growth mindset.

growth mindset, a leader, someone that wants to continue to expand, someone that's a cultural fit, but you bring on people, man. People are the whole thing. They take you, it's not you or me. If we were by ourselves, people were like, how do these guys go so fast? How are they growing? How are they able to do a podcast and talk about development deals and get this quantity of deals under contract? It's not us, it's our people, man.

It's the people that are part of the organization. We've created the ecosystem, the environment and aligned incentives. I want to pay my people. My acquisition managers are compensated better than any other in the industry that I know of, right? I'm sure that there are some people that are compensated incredibly highly as well, but of the people that I know, my team are compensated incredibly high. People have the share of the profits. I know you do that too, Justin. All your team members have a share of the profits.

That is the competitive advantage. I don't know. So as you're thinking about scaling your business, I was talking to a client the other day and said, Clay, I'm kind of halfway through my year. He's going to double or he's going to probably double his businesses here. Right? He said he started working with me in December. He's at the point that he was last year in December in June. And he's like, but I wanted a 1.5 X my business.

And he's like, how do I do that? And I said, who do you need to bring on your team to help you get there? And it's the reframe that takes someone from how do I do it all myself to who do I have on my team that can help us get there and they share the profit.

Justin Piche (30:01)
Agreed. Yeah, think my probably the biggest step change in my business from hiring over the last year has has been project management.

Clayton Hepler (30:11)
Okay.

Justin Piche (30:12)
Um, our acquisitions team has always been pretty, I mean, it's been solid. We've scaled it pretty well. Our acquisition managers are great. They close a lot of deals, but the biggest bottleneck maybe about a year ago was the ability to manage value add deals. And so when I hired my project manager, it, it just totally expanded our ability to bring revenue in through value add deals. And that's why we're hiring number two is because we have so many, so many in the pipeline right now that we need another person.

to help stay on top of all the contractors, all the surveys, all the soil work, all the county engineers, all the plot approvals. ⁓ That's been my kind of biggest step change, I think. There's been a bunch of them. That's the last biggest one in the last year. Obviously, Dispo and Sales was a huge one. Ops Manager.

Clayton Hepler (30:58)
How about your director

of acquisitions? ⁓

Justin Piche (31:03)
Again, another

one that has, mean, ⁓ man. The director of revenue inherited a relatively disorganized acquisition process. We had just gotten through, because I've said this before, but I've always, as I've grown my business, I've always done it on first quantity and then quality. Quantity and then quality. So she came on board at the tail end of a doubling, more than doubling of outbound marketing and team without the then.

Clayton Hepler (31:14)
Okay.

Justin Piche (31:32)
quality, the step-changing quality that you need to do to get the team up to the next level. So she basically inherited that and her job has been for the last six months, get everything going quality wise, KPI dashboards, requirements, scripts, everything that we need to execute well on our lead flow process and has also inherited an additional lead channel that we started up and managing that. So she's been performing really well. It's a lot of like high brain power type stuff that

that was all sitting on my plate along with development. It's like every time, it's kind of funny. A lot of people say, and we talked about this before, like I wanna, in fact, I just was talking to one of my coaching students today that was like, I wanna get to my business to a point where I'm only working two to four hours a week. And I'm like, dude, that's great. He said, I don't think I could do what you do. I'm like, yeah, I tend to fill up every spare, I'm ambitious, so I tend to fill up every spare moment with.

more things that drive revenue for the business or for my company or for my personal life.

every time I get to a different kind of level of the business, I feel like I've arrived at some sort of different level of the business. I feel like I don't have as much work to do anymore. I now I'm managing this man. Last summer was a perfect example. I went to Europe for six weeks last summer. This was before the director of revenue. This is before the project manager. And I had a lot of coaching students as well. And I was working essentially four hour days.

Clayton Hepler (32:44)
Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Piche (32:58)
three to four days a week over in Europe for six weeks. But during that time, things were maintained, sure. They were like working because I still had good people in the right seats. But nothing was growing. I wasn't improving anything. I was just kind of holding things steady. And every time I get to that level where things are going well and I see my personal need in the business back off, something inside me just says, you can't do that. You can't stop there. What is the next?

Clayton Hepler (33:15)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (33:26)
Or what is the what do you need to improve to improve revenue in the existing functions of the business? What's the next revenue generating piece of the business that you need to start implementing? Who's the next person to handle this other side of it? How do you I just can't stop thinking about that stuff.

Clayton Hepler (33:43)
Yeah, I will say this. I'm making a really big hire right now. I'm bringing on a director of revenue and then I'm going to be bringing on a basically a chief of staff, ⁓ COS ⁓ 2IC, which is a second in command ⁓ that will have a HR orientation, a financial orientation. And the biggest bottleneck

Justin Piche (33:54)
Mmm.

Clayton Hepler (34:11)
in my business has actually been hiring, has been hiring and retaining good people. You know, after you solve the hiring issue, then you have to keep people. You get your key people in there and then you keep them in. You know, the quality of your key people is the quality of your business. And so I realized, hey, that's a huge thing. And then I looked out on my calendar and I said for Q3, I'm like, what? You know, I'm bringing in a director of revenue, right?

I have an operations manager. have three acquisition managers. I have a ton of lead managers. Our team is cranking. I'm bringing on a chief of staff. What am I gonna do? Right? And you brought up kind of, hey, I wanna stuff my schedule with all this stuff. And I'm like, dude, that's my orientation as well.

And I would challenge both of us to say, we can stuff our calendars with a lot of stuff, but is it the right stuff? And when you hire, when you hire, you get to buy back the time of asking that question. And as a CEO, we are paid in our proportion to allocate people, our time, and our capital. And so you've bought back

the director of RevTime, you've bought back the project management time, and so now you can think, okay, so what do I do now to drive? Like, how do I drive the revenue of the business? How do I drive it forward? But that's the competitive advantage. Having the right people sit in the seat is incredible, but allowing the CEO, you, to drive the business is how the business gets outsized returns.

Right? It's really how you can say, you know, imagine the life of you having acquisition managers and lead managers and team members that are driving revenue when you're not there. And gives you the time to make, to, build out ⁓ a competitive mode so that it's, it's, it's both physical in the world of we get better people. And then it's also, ⁓ mental, which is you have more time to think and plan and.

and focus on making those strategic pivots. yeah, that's why I really think it's an incredible competitive advantage. One of the things too with hiring is we have a very specific way of doing it in my company because it's very difficult to find good people, right? And so, we go through what I call this kind of hiring, the hiring ladder, which is ⁓ we create the job post.

right, whatever it is, whether it's for an administrative position or for an acquisition manager or an executive position, whatever it is. You create the job post and then we'll post on different platforms, okay? And we will then either use an assessment or we'll use an external form, like a type form, to filter the applicants. You'll get a lot of, like we had 450 K-Lates for our acquisition manager position on

Indeed, and 200 candidates on our LinkedIn. So we had like 650 candidates for this position, right? And you know, we put money behind it and, but that's a lot of people. how do you direct your organization resources, organizational resources to find the best people? So we use an assessment for a lot of salespeople. We want people that are cognitively, personality wise, bent to be salespeople.

Because people on a lot of time I found on Indeed is there are people applying for a lot of different positions and they might not even be qualified. From there, we do an initial interview, a quick screening interview. This is the chief of staff that I was talking about or the EA or maybe one of your admin team members. It's a 15 minute interview. Are we aligned with compensation? Are we aligned with cultural values? Do you understand the job? Are you showing up on time, right?

Secondly, if it's more of a serious position like an AM or an executive, we're gonna have a second interview. That interview, by the way, you don't have enough people for this, bring your wife on, bring a friend on, right? Bring your husband on to make that interview if they're not in the business. For the second one, which is more that kind of cultural component, making sure they're the right fit, that's usually a 30 minute interview for us. For an administrative position, it's usually EA admin to

the department head, you know, we don't want to waste too much of our organizational time for an administrative position, right? And then for the acquisition manager position or an executive or kind of a higher level leadership role, manager role, we have that cultural fit and then the last is technical. And usually, like with an acquisition manager, I'm gonna be the last person. We're gonna get into detectable, it's gonna be 45 minute interview, it's gonna be contact sports.

You know, we're gonna get in there, we're gonna do some objection handling. I'm gonna just completely throw them off their, you know, their balance and ask them a bunch of different questions and make them super uncomfortable, right? As salespeople, we wanna see how they think on their feet. We wanna see how they receive feedback, how coachable they are, if they're smart, if they're hungry. ⁓ And the technical interview at the end is really what we do. And depending on the position, we will also do a test task, right?

So if you have more of an administrative conceptual position like a data scrubber, an executive assistant, a transaction coordinator, an operations based person, a test test is really gonna show you how they think. And you gotta think of it like, gone are the days of sending a test test home and someone thinking independently they're gonna use ChatGPT, right, of course, everyone will. And so you have to kind of create an ability for them to not.

use that or to diminish it, right? To make it so that it's chat GPT augmented, not chat GPT like leaning on like a crutch. And so that's, dude, that's our hiring process. You're surprised by, I hired four people off of 650 applications. Okay? So it takes that much. It takes that much to find really, really good people.

And I think that's one of the things when we're talking about prediction number three and how much is gonna impact businesses, it's gonna either your business is going to die if you don't have the right people because it's gonna be more competitive or it's gonna thrive and gobble up more market share. It's all about that hiring flow, making sure you're dialing that in so that you're bringing in the best people every single.

Justin Piche (41:07)
Couldn't have said it better. Let's go to the last prediction we're going to talk about here, which is it's going to be tough to scale with a one man shop operator led teams of people are going to win. And this I feel like this has been true for a while, but I think it's just going to exacerbate even more. There is a ceiling you hit as an individual operator.

And we've seen it because we've talked about how much more marketing it takes to get a deal in today's day and age. There are so many demands on your time as the CEO of this of a company and if you're a solo operator in the land space your business is going to look very different and you have to have different strategies for how you make money and the flipping 20 30 40 $50,000 profit deals as a solo operator. It's probably not the best way to handle it because the amount of

leads you have to sift through, negotiations you have to have, time spent with deals in your pipeline, talking to sellers, buyers, title companies, listing, the financing, funding, bank loan, it will be just so overwhelming for you, you will burn out before you can make substantial money in the business.

Clayton Hepler (42:22)
In other words, the gurus that say that this can be a part time side hustle. It's part time to get in, but I don't think it can be a side hustle anymore.

Justin Piche (42:32)
Not to not to exceed or not to excel, right? Not not to be be a top performer. And if you are doing it as a side hustle kudos like way to go like way to way to start something and try to figure this out. I just don't know that it's going to work out all that well without putting a lot of energy and effort into it and growing a team specifically to help you manage the leads. ⁓ If you are a side hustle person that is focusing on something like on market value ad deals or like high potential deals.

where, you don't need the revenue from the business to sustain your life, totally can be successful. I think you can be very successful doing that type of thing, part-time, focusing on large scale deals, where something else is funding your lifestyle. But if this is your business by yourself, it's gonna be hard. And it doesn't mean you can't do it. I just wanted to be clear, there are outliers, there are people that get lucky, and there people that work so hard that they're gonna make it happen no matter what. But on average, it's gonna be really hard. It's gonna be really hard. You need a lot, yeah.

Clayton Hepler (43:30)
I completely go

ahead.

Justin Piche (43:33)
I was going to say you need a lot of runway. I mean, let's just use some rough numbers. If you are a solo like investor and you're sending out a bunch of mail and maybe your operating budget is 10,000 a month, let's just say you're spending 120 K a year. That's not including your lifestyle. And let's just say you live in a reasonably low cost of living place and you've got not too bad of a mortgage and you don't have expensive tastes. And so maybe you're able to

live comfortably and maybe save a little bit of money on another hundred K a year total total income. So you're at 120 plus two to us here to to to to 20 or call 240, know 10 K a month 240 K.

you're gonna need to do a minimum of like two deals a month, maybe three of like solid profit deals to be able to fund that lifestyle. And two to three deals a month, well, it doesn't sound like a lot, as a solopreneur who's only sending out mail, because you likely can't really co-call or text because you don't have anybody else with you, it is going to be hard. There's a lot of mail. I don't think you're marketing, but you're gonna have to increase your marketing budget to be able to do that. And it's just, argh.

It makes me uncomfortable to even think about that being like a reality for so many land investors.

Clayton Hepler (44:46)
Yeah, I completely agree.

Justin Piche (44:51)
It's like you won't even find out, frankly,

you won't even find out that it's not really gonna work for six, nine months, a year of doing it. Especially if you have early success, that's the worst. If you have a really good deal early, proof of concept, you make some money and you double down and invest in all this mail and you're still kind of handling it yourself and a couple months go by and it's like you had ⁓ maybe 90K of profits and boom, now you're at 60, now you're at 30. You've only got a few months left of runway and you're sitting there wondering like, what do I do?

Clayton Hepler (44:59)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (45:20)
What do I do now? How do I cut this off? How do I get the most out of this? It's, it's tough. It's tough.

Clayton Hepler (45:27)
It's tough and the thing is then you have this sunk cost bias, right? So you've been you see It's so hard to say so you have the money in you have the money in and you're like I could just keep grinding I can keep doing it and sometimes it's good to just cut the ties it but it's hard and you know the perspective of people who have done it before that's the reason why people listen to the podcast, right? because you get the perspective or you you join a coaching group or

Justin Piche (45:31)
Yes. man. What a bias that is so hard to shake, right? I feel it all the time.

Clayton Hepler (45:53)
you have people in your life that are other business owners that you know locally, that's the benefit of it, man. You can get that feedback, but yes, I think that the theme of today is really ⁓ competition. It is collaboration and it is building community, having the context from community. ⁓

whether that's your community and your business, also community in general. I don't think that the solo investor exists anymore. you gotta have a team, you gotta have some people on your team. I don't think, and not having the right hires, you can't just have a skeleton crew of VAs. You can't just be living ⁓ without any context around what's going on in the industry and sending out, you know,

automated messages indiscriminately and you know, you and you can't be ⁓ just doing the way business was it was 12 months ago 24 months ago, it's constantly changing. And for those that are constantly changing with it, it's going to be an incredible opportunity. But for those that are not that live in their shell, that are stuck in their ways, my prediction is it's going to be a rough 2025 2026.

Justin Piche (47:16)
Let's wrap this thing These are all our predictions and thoughts based on us being active investors and scaling businesses. We are not soothsayers. We don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future. But what we do know is that leveraging people is the superpower that can help your business succeed, especially into the future. That is kind of a theme, I think, through all of these.

Other than maybe the compliance piece, you know, that's kind of a separate a separate piece, but leveraging people to manage value add deals. Having more tools, new tool belt, more people to be able to handle more lead flow. Having hiring the right people that are driven, equipping them with the right skills, giving them the ownership over the business and giving them a piece of it such that they feel they have ownership and take more charge. And then.

Obviously, if you're a one man shop or you have a really, really small team, you got to think about how do you buy back more of your time to focus on higher revenue generating activities? Clay and I have both talked about buy back your time by Dan Martell. That book was recommended to me by Cal and Faulkner several years ago or whenever it first came out and it was incredible. And a lot of it you think about if you think honestly to yourself, a lot of it makes sense. A lot of is relatively logical, but to see it laid out so clearly really helped me visualize how I was

how I was spending my time and where I should be spending my time. By doing some of the exercises in that book. So if you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. I highly recommend it. There's a huge bias for people that have not hired people before of I don't want to spend this money. Like this is going to cost my business. And I just had a conversation with this about this with a coaching client. It's like, hey, when is it time for me to hire like this US based acquisitions manager? I don't know if I have the lead flow or the deal flow to support.

Clayton Hepler (48:54)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Justin Piche (49:08)
And it's a tough question that I think probably a lot of people struggle with. Do I have the lead flow to support this other person coming in? Can I pay them enough money to get them motivated? The right person though, that you're going to hire for this job, and you obviously have to frame it the right way, is going to increase your revenue so that you can focus on scaling the lead flow. If you have no leads at all and nothing for them to work on, nothing in the pipeline, yeah, okay, it's probably not the right time. You need a freaking.

get your lead flow up, get some good deals across your desk, make it so that you have no more time left to do anything but negotiate deals and then get a good closer that's driven and motivated in there so that you don't have to focus on that piece and you can focus on scaling the lead flow and scaling your business. ⁓ man, but it's tough. It's a tough question. If you're not hired somebody, especially a high dollar, high value employee like what Clay is talking about, it can be a little scary. Like how am gonna afford paying somebody $100 plus thousand a year in my business if I'm not even making?

more than a couple hundred gross profit. How's that gonna work?

Clayton Hepler (50:10)
Yeah, and you know, I think that I agree with everything Justin said, number one. Number two is ⁓ if you're going to bring someone on like that, you want them to drive revenue right away. And so you should have a runway for them, but they can drive the revenue. You know, I wouldn't hire like a CEO.

If, if, if you're going to hire a person that's going to be a higher, more expensive person, you want them to be directly tied to rev. ⁓ unless you're that person and they free you up to do that, right? ⁓ you know, Hey, I can easily, if I have this extra time, I can easily bring in the. The costs, think in buyback your time, Dan Martell talks about his buy the buyback rate, which is, you take your.

after tax your income every year and multiply it by, you know, 0.25. And so you're $100 an hour, you can, you can afford to pay someone $25 per hour to take stuff off your plate. And that's the buyback rate that he talks about. And so for those of you that, you know, are like, Hey, man, I heard this podcast, I understand.

hiring super important. want to be abreast to what's going on in the market, but I don't have time because I am doing everything. I'm understanding I'm seeing flip margins collapse and I want to be able to think more strategically about, you know, how do I get more wholesale deals more, more double, you know, double closes, more value adds to my business, but I'm just so overwhelmed. feel the pain that when you feel pain, that's when you hire admin.

That's when you hire someone to free up your time. And you can find really good admin people for 800, 1200, 1600 a month. And you might be like, I won't have enough for them to do like we mentioned earlier, but trust me, a business owner can find things for someone to do.

Justin Piche (52:21)
I have never

ever had trouble filling somebody who I hired up with work to do. I have never had trouble with that. Even when I thought I didn't have enough.

Clayton Hepler (52:26)
That's right. That's right.

Yep, yep. Okay, okay. Justin, at this point in the podcast, our listeners know, it is the gentleman's agreement. If you guys got benefit from this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, leave us a review. I say this every week, 10 % of the people that listen to this podcast or less have reviewed. Probably, I mean, at this point it's like 5%, 5%, 2%. Don't be those guys and gals.

Justin Piche (52:55)
Probably a lot less.

Clayton Hepler (53:01)
Give us a rating review allow us to to take the preeminence of the top land scaling podcast around ⁓ And you do that by giving us a great review so we can continue to bring this zero cost Information to you guys every single week. We appreciate you all and until next week