Episode 6: Overcoming Objections and Team Building - Inside a 7-Figure Land Business

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Welcome to the ground game podcast. This is your host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:06)
And this is Justin Piche, and we're here to talk about how to win the ground game.

Clay Hepler (00:24)
And today I wanna talk a little bit about our agenda. We got some incredible topics that I know our listeners are gonna really love, including a new short in our podcast that we're gonna be adding to our repertoire every single week. So we're gonna be talking about number one wins and losses, what's going right in our business and what's not. And it's interesting.

As I think about wins and losses, my mind just easily finds more losses than wins. Even though we locked up, you know, six figures of profit last week. Updates on our goals, how we doing versus our quarterly goals. We're just going to do a little bit of update, talk a little bit about that. We're going to introduce the TMT short, which is a little short tactic building.

Short that we're going to be talking about every single week and then we're to go into our main topic this week, which is deal killers You know a couple just and I are going to go through Some of the deal killers that we've experienced over the past couple of months that have actually killed real deals This is not arbitrary or or talking about it This is real deals that died because of certain things that happened and then we're going to do a wrap-up So Justin man, what's going on?

Justin Piche (01:44)
Yeah, you know, so we're going to start like, like I said, we're to start out with wins and losses and clay, you know, I think there's a maybe like an apprehension for a lot of people to be transparent and share the bad things that actually happened, right? Everybody kind of wants to paint this rosy picture that everything is amazing and they're incredible. And, know, it's just, we all know that's not exactly the truth. There's, there's challenges in every business. And so one of our missions.

when we started this podcast was to be more transparent. All And so that's kind of what we're going to, I'm going to talk about here. So first I'm going to go into wins and then I'll, then I'll go into some losses. So one win, I listed a new subdivide near Auburn, Alabama, 11 lots, about $560, $575,000 purchase price. We've got the entire development listed at one, maybe 1.2 million. and I got the first four lots under contract, which is great.

So that's a little over, I think my bank loans, 450 bank loan. Those four lots will be, will pay off about 330K of the bank loan, which is great. So next lot pays off essentially the balance of the bank loan. The next two lots pay off investors and myself, and then the rest is profit. So just excited to get something moving pretty quick. So that's a good win. Another win for me is,

I'm hiring a US based sales agent, somebody who's just a killer salesperson that grew up here that can really talk to sellers on a level that's hard for some of the overseas team to talk to. They mainly like to deliver more creative financing. JB offers some of the more challenging, more price motivated folks, maybe get them to the table and help bring them over the line for understanding why it's a good move for them to work with us.

So I had some great interviews and one today in particular that was exceptional that if, you know, I would hire her right now, but I have one more interview tomorrow and I want to give everybody a fair shake. So that's exciting. That's a win. Some losses. Yeah. The biggest loss, honestly, for me this last week was just the hurricanes that came through. My markets are the Southeast U S and so Helene and Milton really decimated a lot of the communities that we typically market to.

And, you know, I, I want to be, I'm pretty sensitive to the hardship that folks are going through. And I do not want to come off as predatory. I certainly do not want to take advantage of people that are in really tough spots. And so we turned off a lot of our marketing lists, which is a little bit of challenge to the team, right? We have this marketing plan that we build out, this marketing schedule that we build out. And we basically had to turn off about half of it because of the impact of those, of those hurricanes. And so.

Lee Jen last week is my first week with zero contracts in a long time. And so that's a loss. know, kind of, the team was a little discouraged. This week's picking up again. We're starting new, you know, different markets. And so it's picking up again, but yeah, it was kind of tough last week for that loss. How about you, Clay?

Clay Hepler (04:57)
for me is we lock up about 150, 160 grand of profit of deals. These are projected profit, obviously. As you know, projected profit is one thing, actual profit is another. But about 150, 160K in projected profit with some pretty interesting deals. One of them is gonna be wholesale deal and the other one is just conventional flip.

wholesale actually to builders, which is an interesting play. And it could be a lot more than that, but we like to pad our numbers pretty low because I found that pretty much any wholesaling or house flipping or land flipping, you might hope to get market value, but when your land's sitting for a longer period of time, you want that thing to move, and so you price these things to sell. And so that's why we're...

150k, which is good, which is really good for us for that week, and it's definitely aligning to our quarterly goals. then losses is, I just got a message from my transaction coordinator who is an absolute rock star, that she was rushed to the hospital, and she has to get a surgery, she has appendicitis, which is just like horrible.

Justin Piche (06:16)
my goodness.

Clay Hepler (06:19)
and I'm so concerned and so disappointed and sad and hope she's okay, like an hour and a half ago. So she has been absolutely crushing it for me and exceeding my expectations. And so it's definitely a big loss for us to have her out of the seat. Who knows how long she's gonna be out of the seat. So that's a big loss. And then we have two deals

Justin Piche (06:23)
Yeah, man.

Clay Hepler (06:48)
we have to go through the probate process in and our profit on these deals is about like 20K and those that know per deal, those that know about the probate process, like it can be a $2,000 legal bill. It could be a $10,000 legal bill depending on the hour that the attorneys dedicate to it. And so I think it's gonna be closer to the $10,000 range.

And so it kind of blows up a deal. so, you know, we, we, we having this happen on two deals. And so, you know, these are all challenges that we learn and we adjust our script. We adjust our contracts, but you know, that's potentially 40 K off the, off the profit rocket and not definitely not a, definitely not good. So we're learning, but those are two, those are two clear losses for me losing 40 K and then having a

a critical team member out.

Justin Piche (07:49)
Yeah, man, that's rough.

Clay Hepler (07:53)
Right, yeah, and Justin, with that being said, I wanna kinda update on your quarterly goals. Where you at right now with your goals for the quarter?

Justin Piche (07:53)
That is Russ.

Yeah. So I mean, we had a lot of goals for the team. There's four kind of core goals for the whole company. And then each of my leadership team members has their own goals. But today I'm going to talk about goals that a couple of them that I'm directly responsible for. Like I'm the primary contact on. So the first one is Q4. want 800K in realized revenue or realized gross profit. And so we're actually, October 1st through

yesterday's 15th, the first couple weeks of October, we have crushed on lining up sales transactions. So I closed, I think nine properties in the last eight or nine properties in the first two weeks of October at 222,000 of realized gross profit. So was a pretty solid start to the quarter. So we're a quarter of the way there and we're only, I don't even know.

a eighth of the way or something through the quarter, something like that. So that's good. We're ahead. I like seeing that. For one of my other deliverables, which was to train and onboard my underwriter project manager, which was my new hire basically at the beginning of the quarter. She's coming along great. She has taken over all of the contractor outreach, all of the surveyor outreach.

Basically any property improvement outreach on any of our active projects, she's taken over. She's built out a project management dashboard in our Notion CRM so I can go and I can check the status. And she's really just like taking charge and taking ownership despite how pressed my time has been. I've not had as much time to sit with her and train with her as I'd like, but she's got a, just a go-getter attitude. You know, like somebody who really takes action and takes ownership.

And that's what I want to see in an employee. I'm really happy with how she's been performing so far. And I guess the last deliverable that I want to talk about for me is two large subdivides. That's two large subdivides purchased in Q4. And I would call large for me, like anything with an end sale price over a million dollars for the development. And so I have one deal we're in negotiations with, we're really close on price.

The seller is looking for 4,200 an acre. We're at 3,700 an acre for about 150 acres or so. And so we're close. We're sharpening our pencils right now on the underwriter, but I'm hoping we can get this one locked up this week. And I also had an exceptional deal that some partners brought me where I'm a one third partner in that we're taking down in Texas. That's a

maybe a total sale at 1.6 million. And these are great operators that reached out through one of our mutual friends, Ajay, and basically brought me on board to help them take down kind of a larger subdivide for them. And they're awesome. It's incredible. And so just to be asked to participate and yeah, it's really incredible. so that's that's a big, I don't know if I count that towards my two large subdivides, cause it's brought from somebody else, but it is exciting to have.

partnership be proposed and have the potential to bring a really solid deal across the finish line and make some money and build some relationships that way.

Clay Hepler (11:34)
Yeah, dude, that's super exciting.

Just for the listeners, that's like a really valuable thing, right? Because you're not bringing... I don't know, we'll talk about that in a second, but, someone brought a deal to you. That's zero dollars out of your pocket. So when someone brings someone else a deal, they're looking for exchanging something. Sometimes they're looking to exchange finances, they're looking to exchange experience. So why did these people bring you this opportunity?

Justin Piche (12:00)
Yeah. You know, I think, I think the main reason is just my, my experience. I've completed more than 20 subdivides in the last 18 months. And by completed, mean either at least we haven't listed where they're sold out or those properties are listed. and if you're like, if you're new to doing a subdivide, it can be a little bit, I don't want to say scary, but certainly like, Hey, you don't know what you don't know. So when I started doing subdivides, I had joined.

the Casual Fridays Subdividing Mastermind with Justin Sleva, Adam Salpy, Trevor Proban. And those are some really great operators. And I joined a really solid group of guys that are some of my really good friends in this industry now. And, you know, it's not particularly challenging to take down some of these subdivides. However, you don't know what you don't know. And having somebody looking over your shoulder that's been through the process multiple times to help advise you, what are you not seeing?

especially when you're taking on investor money or you're taking on a large personally guaranteed bank loan. There's something about that peace of mind that helps give you the confidence to do these deals. I think that's probably the main reason. maybe the other is just, we met, we had a really good rapport and I think they liked me. I really liked them. I liked working with them. And this business can get lonely. Finding a good partnership, somebody who you enjoy working with.

that can shoulder some of the burdens, some of the responsibility and help get deals over the finish line. I think, I don't know who said this first, maybe, I'm sure a lot of people have said this, but half of a watermelon is better than a grape or something like that. If you get a big deal and you don't have all the skillset to take it down, partnering with somebody who does, you can still make a whole lot more money than failing on a deal.

Clay Hepler (13:54)
Right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And especially for people that are starting out, that's super beneficial, you know, to, you know, this is why people hire coaches. This is why people partner with other people. You know, there's a financial component, which we've talked about in years past, bringing the ability to personally guarantee a subdivide. That's, that's super valuable, but also the experience component is, is critically important as well. So

Justin Piche (14:16)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (14:24)
Awesome dude, awesome. That's great, I can't wait to hear how that goes. For me, one of our goals is 720 in pipeline rev. We're between about 160, 180 at this point for the quarter. And that's good start to the quarter. In order to hit where we need to hit, we need to be about two.

50-ish per month, 240. And knowing that we're, you know, we close about 70, 75 % of the deals that we get on our contract, in order to hit that 720 of actually pipeline rev gross profit, that we need to be over that number. So we need to be closer to 275 per month to actually hit it 300 per month, which I honestly think we're really set up to do.

because of the next thing. know, one of the things that we, that I'm focusing on this quarter is the hiring of two more lead managers

up-skilling some of my current employees. One of them being one of our lead managers. By the end of the quarter, actually having him run ops. He's very talented with operations and managing people. And so building out the...

process for the roadmap for him to actually get up skilled into the into that role is is not easy it does require a lot of overtime thinking and thinking about like what is the actual outputs of this position and and Not just to put him in there just to put him in there. Where can he actually add the most value in his specific skill set? So I'm really really excited about excited about that and we're and we're moving towards

Justin Piche (16:00)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (16:18)
him owning that operations, we'll call it operations and marketing manager. So he's gonna live between both of those worlds because in our business, we're a sales and marketing business and so they're very intertwined. And so just managing the actual marketing, making sure that marketing gets out on the time that we need it to get out is gonna be a lot of his responsibility. And then also upscaling one of our other team members to start up.

underwriting deals by the end of the quarter and then the last thing is It's

transaction coordinator managing some some parts of our dispo process which is You know after what I said earlier and she's out. We're not really sure how that's gonna go but actually managing the relationships and conversations with brokers specifically for our flips

she's gonna be the person managing the relationship, connecting with the brokers, keeping them accountable, dropping prices, et cetera, when we need to or resetting prices when we need to, which is a big, big thing off my plate because I used to be calling brokers and having those conversations. And even though you're like, it's three to five hours per week, it's a lot more than to actually think about it and to keep that in the back of your mind.

Justin Piche (17:44)
Yeah, 100%.

Clay Hepler (17:46)
And so even though it might not seem like a big responsibility, managing those relationships is a lot of time and more mental radiation. always in the back of your mind, like I wonder what's going on with that property. And instead of taking that, right? Instead of taking care of that myself, I have her to do that, I hope. You know, just hope that she recovers quickly.

Justin Piche (18:15)
Yeah. Man, you know what, that just brings up a kind of side point, just introspectively looking at your business, right? One of the things that I've tried to do, or I tried to do on a routine basis, along the lines of upskilling is making sure multiple members of my team can fill in for other members of the team. Especially on acquisitions, having the skillset to use the different cold outreach tools that we use so that if somebody is out,

somebody else can kind of step up and fill that cool calling seat and continue to generate leads or lead management, for example, and you can do that second call and ask the deeper questions and move those through. Right now we're a little bit down staffed. got two, one of my lead manager and one of my main cold outreach employees are both out. One's on vacation, the other one is sick. And so we're having to fill those slots. And if I didn't have that kind of routine acquisitions training where the team is backfilling and training on other people's roles, I wouldn't have the flexibility.

to move people around. what it also does, it kind of illuminates for me a huge risk, which is I have one transaction coordinator who is incredible, right? And you're talking about appendicitis for years, That's really tough for her and her family, but it's also really tough for you and your business in managing all the transactions that are currently in the pipeline. And for me, I have one person who's skilled and has all those relationships. And now we use the CRM, like all those communications are in the CRM.

We're in follow up boss, so her emails are there, all the title company contacts, the seller contacts, those are all there. But if she were to go out for an extended period of time, that would probably be my hardest seat to fill. so, you know, I'm already thinking about one of our, one actually kind of brings me to another goal. One of our goals for my, my assistant, Aaron, is to build out much more detailed SOPs for the transaction coordination space and a lot more automations in terms of communication updates, et cetera, so that.

In the event something were to happen, if she were to have to go out for an extended period of time, it'd be easier for somebody else to come in and backfill that role.

Clay Hepler (20:17)
Yeah, yeah, you know, there's, heard this, man, it's from, it was from a Silicon Valley coach, I his name is like Matt Mokery, something like that. His book is a great CEO within, and he has what is called an AOR document, area of responsibility document, okay? And you have the first line of defense, which is, the, not first line of defense, the person who is responsible to,

the output for the position. And then you have a secondary person that's able to fill in that task. And so we've actually built out in our notion the beginning, unfortunately, we're in the preliminary stages, but the beginning of what we call the area of output, which I will talk about later. But it's the responsibilities, the output responsibilities for each of the positions.

and then the person who's primarily responsible and then the person who can fill in if that person is not present. And what we hope to achieve is such clarity on the actual output of the specific position, not the responsibility, but the output, right, of the specific position so that I could call someone, you know,

bring someone in off the street and they can do exactly what they need to do with very little training. Now sales is a little bit different because there is a muscle that you really need to build with sales, but for the majority of the administrative tasks, they're very easily, I don't know if replaceable is the right word, but someone can come in and easily execute the task if there's a much

clarity on how to do it.

Justin Piche (22:13)
Yeah, enough clarity, enough SOPs, the process is clearly defined and the output is clearly understood. I agree.

Clay Hepler (22:20)
that perfectly brings us to our new short on the podcast, which is the TMT, Team Building Tactics. The point of this is to provide our audience with hard-hitting, actionable tactics that we're actually, you and I are actually using to enhance, manage it, and scale our teams. And so we'll talk about the AOO in the future.

But today I'm gonna talk about another acronym that I use with my sales team. So I just hired two lead managers and one of the biggest things in our business specifically is like we're on the phone with sellers and the sellers are going to, depending on what lead channel you use, they're gonna give us objections. Actually every lead channel they'll give us objections. And some of the primary objections that they'll give us is, you reached out to me.

is like one of the primary, or just give me an offer, or that's none of your business. Right? And so my team was really struggling with handling these objections. Now, at first, you kind of need to like, if you're learning a new skill, specifically sales, you kind of need to feel it. You need to see it written down and understand it. But actually, at its base, you need to understand the principle.

because then you could apply that same principle to any objection. So if I say, you you guys reached out to me or I said another objection, you'd be able to handle it in the same way. And so I was doing this training for my lead managers today because they were not following the script to my standard and they were getting plowed over by objections. And so the acronym is AIOL. It looks like a-ole.

you know, mayonnaise, aioli. It's acknowledge, isolate, overcome, loop. And so you can teach this to your salespeople, aioli, acknowledge, isolate, overcome, loop. Here's actually how that plays out. If someone gives you an objection, you don't just plow over the objection, right? You have to acknowledge it. You have to acknowledge the validity of the objection, right? Like if you're talking to your spouse, right?

and they give you an objection and you do not acknowledge it for the legitimacy of it, you're gonna get plowed over, right? Or anyone, right? If you don't acknowledge that you understand empathetically their point of view, you can't possibly change their mind. You can't possibly continue to have a productive conversation, because they're gonna put a wall up immediately. Okay, so we acknowledge it. So if someone says, this is the most common objection we got.

Justin Piche (25:04)
percent.

Clay Hepler (25:08)
You guys reached out to me, so we acknowledge it. Yes, completely understand we did reach out to you. Like, that's a fact, we did reach out to you. Then we wanna isolate that, right? So if someone says, reached out to you, but, right, we wanna isolate it, and how we isolate is say, you're probably not spending every hour of your day talking to people like me. That's isolating the objection, right?

that's acknowledging it where it's at and isolating it and making it kind of stand on its own. After we do that, and I can tell you how to do that with other objections, Justin, if you have any other questions, but then you overcome it. Right? So how we overcome, we say, hey, I totally understand we did reach out to you. You're probably not talking to me or people like me every day of the week or even spending 10 minutes on.

the phone or five minutes on the phone talking to one of my people that called you and now you're spending that same amount of time with me on the phone.

reason why we're having a conversation like that is you're trying to solve a problem. You're trying to get through a challenge or trying to use the actual money from the land to achieve some sort of outcome. And usually that's financial. And so the looping part of this is, so go back to the question, what has you considering selling?

Okay, so that is how you acknowledge, isolate, overcome, and you loop, right? And so if you have a question with a price, if someone says, hey, you you're gonna be the first person, or I'm not gonna be the first person to give a price, for example. You say, completely understand that, you know, that's the oldest trick in the book, right? But in order for me to advocate for you, to get you the most money possible,

and I can go back to my underwriting team and talk to them, I need to know your number. So, what number gets this done for you?

way that we can overcome a lot of times is we focus on solving the problem, focusing on the benefit. And so that is, I'll acknowledge, isolate, overcome and loop. And you can teach that to your team in order to get through any objection.

Justin Piche (27:23)
I love that. know, I went to, let's see, last week, I went to go speak at local high school with some seniors. had kind of like a career day. My sister is an administrator at the school and she said, hey, you're an entrepreneur, Justin, do you want to come and just talk to some high school seniors about what you do? And I was like, yeah, that sounds really fun. So I brought my sales manager with me. Who is it? great sales guy. He worked in door-to-door sales, solar sales.

You he had to overcome some serious objections from people to sell like these, you know, $30,000 plus solar systems to folks. And we were, we were in the car, we got stuck in a ton of traffic. And so I was just kind of spit balling with them on sales. And I was like, Hey man, like what, give me some examples of ways that you would kind of overcome these objective objections. And he goes, Hey, you know what? One of my things my bosses always told me was if you, if the person is going in to eat lunch or they're going to eat the meal.

invite yourself in. And I was like, dude, how on earth are you inviting yourself in to eat lunch with these people that you're cold contacting and doing like these sales, trying to sell them the solar system. And he's like, just role play with me. And I was like, all right, all right. So he, talks to me, goes, all right, I go, okay, hey, hey, Brian, I appreciate all the time you spent with me, but I need to go get lunch ready. I need to go inside and eat. And he goes, that's great. What are you having for lunch? You know, it's just like he's

He's talking to me. He's like, yeah, totally get it. You need to eat lunch. What do you have it? You know, and so they respond, I'm having a sandwich. He's like, man, sandwiches. love sandwiches. What kind of sandwich are you having? You know, is it roast beef? Is it turkeys? you know, I'm making Rubens or my gosh, my grandmother used to make a best Ruben ever. Why? Do you need any help with that? Why don't I come in and help you make a make lunch? Like, no, no, no, I've got it. You've done your job. You know, you're okay. I'll set another appointment. And his follow up is something.

It's something like, hey, no, no sweat. I'm really hungry. I've been working these calls all day and I just haven't had a chance to eat. Are you sure? Kind of making them feel, he was relentless. We kept spitballing back and forth. And honestly, it was just a really good example of looping. think looping, I think was the big, kind of the big principle that he was able to do effectively, which is always bringing it back to the seller with kind of a,

Clay Hepler (29:32)
Haha!

Justin Piche (29:51)
question, a new question that keeps them going and through that process helps overcome some of those objections. And so the end is his main kind of go-to was, why don't you go get your lunch ready? That's fine. I'm going to go walk around and I'm going to go look at the site. I'm going to kind of do an analysis on where the panels can go, where the placement can go and work on some figures. And while you're having lunch, I'll come in and I'll just present with you and I'll show you what we can do. That's kind of his end tactic after he gets through all that. And I was like, man, that's a great.

Like it's kind of relentless, relentless, you do it in really kind way and you loop back and you put the question back on them as you're overcoming the objection. Maybe not the perfect analogous example, but it's just, I mean, what you're talking about really is just powerful. It's really powerful.

Clay Hepler (30:34)
Yep, I love using the principles, right? Like, because talk tracks are fine, but then you memorize them. And particularly if you have global talent, for example, they're gonna just memorize what you say, and they're not gonna understand the essence behind it. And even US-based people, right? They're gonna memorize it. And so what you wanna do is you wanna teach principles versus just words.

And if you can teach principles, they can say, I heard this objection that I've never heard before. I can do acknowledge, isolate, overcome, loop. And I can just loop it back to my original question. I know what I need to do. And if I get that done,

guys, jumping in here in the middle of the podcast to interrupt to ask you the benefit of this podcast is us freely sharing exactly what's working in our businesses to build multiple seven figure, eight figure businesses. And so the gentleman's agreement, as we always talk about every single podcast, if you get benefit from this, rate, review and subscribe. We're not promoting anything. We're not adding any ads because this is the way that we can get.

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Justin Piche (32:03)
Yeah, I think that's great. Cause when I do weekly sales training with the team and you know, we'll go over tactics, know, tactics for how we, overcome an injection, but it's more of teaching them what I tend to fall into the trap of teaching them a specific strategy to overcome a specific, a specific problem or a specific objection. But I think this is, this is way more powerful now. I'm getting stuff out of this right now. Knowledge isolate, overcome a loop. I think, yeah, looping.

Re-ask them the same question after you've after you've acknowledged their problem, you've talked about it specifically, you've presented a way to get past it and then ask them again, or at least a reason of why they should not have that

Clay Hepler (32:45)
let's hop into the main topic here, some deal killers.

Justin Piche (32:49)
Yeah, deal killers. Man, there are so many. I know we talked on this last episode about subdivisions and some of the things that kill some of those deals, but there's so many more that do. And so maybe I'll dive deep. I'll start with one that hits me all the time. And this is a huge reason why we drop a third or 25 % of our contracts is the old non-existent easement. I don't know how many times you've negotiated with the seller.

You've talked to the seller, it looks like great land. Maybe there's a two track or some kind of driveway to the property. not, maybe not, it's set off the road. Maybe doesn't have road frontage. And they say something like, yeah, I have an easement. I got an easement. And so that's kind of the question our team asks, hey, is there an easement here? They say, yes, I have an easement. you know, we, we don't, we, what I try to do is I try not to do a ton of due diligence before getting things under contract. I think that if you spend a lot of time,

investigating every fault in a property before you actually have control of the deal with a contract, you end up doing a lot of unnecessary work. And so what we do is we get the property under contract and we just try to kind of trust the seller, right? We trust the seller, we get it under contract, and then we get our title commitment back. So the first thing we push for is the title commitment. And it pops up with there's no recorded easement. There's no recorded easement. And so this is a killer on a lot of deals for us.

Generally we ask for a survey, the seller will say something like, yeah, I got a survey, I'm a survey of the easement. We look at the survey and yeah, there's not really an actual easement on there. Or there's no deed language for an easement. Or there's deed language for an easement, but there's no deed language on the property that the easement crosses. And so it's not actually a valid easement. We've run into all those issues. That's a real deal killer. It sucks to have that happen, but.

Clay Hepler (34:38)
Yeah, so I want to just kind of ask you about that. Of your percentage of property, so you're not doing a lot of due diligence, right? So what is your percentage of property so you end up dropping?

Justin Piche (34:49)
It's right at about 25%. Maybe 70, we keep 70, we close in 70 % of the properties we get under contract.

Clay Hepler (34:57)
It's about right. That's pretty industry average to be fair. And the easement thing is solvable if you have amicable neighbors.

Justin Piche (35:09)
Yeah. And let me maybe just say real quick, we still buy properties without easements. In fact, I have multiple right now. One, I a property under contract. I sold it already last year. Actually not this year. We sold it this year. I think we got it under contract at the end, maybe at the last, maybe December of 23. I needed to get 30 signatures on a shared driveway easement to get access insured by the title company.

And it was one of the first big tasks I put my assistant on and she worked with a local realtor and a local attorney. And we were able to track down every single person and literally get every person to sign the, the easement. And it was an insane deal. Insane deal in the that the one person whose property and let me, let me, this easement already had a dirt road. Like there was a clear dirt road. There were people with houses along this road.

that just didn't technically have legal access to their property. So it was in pretty much everybody's best interest to get the Seisman established, except for the one guy at the end who was this kind of old goat of a guy. Dude.

Clay Hepler (36:16)
this is this is your the thing that you were talking about on social media

Justin Piche (36:22)
No, no, no, this is a different one. This is a different one. This is a different one. We got that easement too, but this is a different one. The guy, he lived in Tennessee. He owned this hundred acres and less than one third, the far less than one third of an acre, the far Western boundary of his property cut off about 200 feet of this sole road. And he was wanting me to pay like 15 or $20,000 for this little dinky easement. But he was also actively selling his lot.

And so in this process of getting all of the other signatures, he would not sign him and all of his family. They would not sign the easement. They ended up selling the property and the guy who bought it was much more willing to work with us and he signed the easement. So it was just kind of like a turn of fate. We were about to have to sue the guy collectively to get the easement because he refused to sign it or he wanted way too much money for it. And when he sold it, the new owner of that property was like, sure.

Whatever, it's literally no impact to me at all because it's less than third of an acre of this hundred acre tract on the far western side and there's already a road access there. But we were able to get that one done.

Clay Hepler (37:28)
Wow. And it was a good deal.

Justin Piche (37:32)
Yeah, I bought it for 85. I put a maybe like maybe it was more like 90 something with survey and everything. I put about 60 K into it. So was all in right around 150 and we sold it at 250. So it wasn't like a, you know, two extra money, but it was a solid profit deal. Yeah.

Clay Hepler (37:49)
Dude, that's a great deal. That's a great deal. mean, no one's going to complain about probably end up making 70 grand.

Justin Piche (37:55)
Yeah, exactly. That's about what it was after brokerage fees and everything, about 70 grand.

Clay Hepler (37:59)
Yeah, so let me tell you about a little deal killer that I have.

first week on the job, my acquisition guy got a deal under contract for 400. We thought it was going to sell for nine. Like I was freaking head over heels. I'm like, dude, this, are you kidding me? We're going to make like 400 grand on this. Like I was so pumped. And next week we got an email from his attorney threatening to sue us.

saying, this guy, we're no longer interested in selling the property. this was much earlier in the year. I called my attorney up and I said, hey, is this an enforceable contract? Is my contract enforceable? Can we force these guys to sell? Which you can, by the way. And if I had an enforceable contract, I would have forced the sale. Because $400,000, it's worth,

pushing the sale through, right? But at that point, I did not, I had an enforceable contract, but it was like on the edge of enforceable. I learned a $400,000 lesson. what I learned from that is have enforceable contracts. And also, when your salespeople are talking to sellers, make sure that they are bought in, they're bought in,

twice, three times, four times, and all of the stakeholders that are not on the call that have inputs are also included in that conversation. So what we do now, besides having the bulletproof contract language, is we always ask in our lead intake call, right? So if you're listening to this and you're interested about our sales process, Justin and I talked about it in a previous podcast, but...

In our second call, when our lead manager talks to them, we make sure that we include anyone that is involved in the conversation that has input. We don't say decision maker, do not say decision maker, that's 10 years ago language. Say people that have input, and we have that conversation now with every single person and make sure that we double, triple check on the lead manager call, and then we do not offer on a deal unless all the people that have input.

have said we're ready to move forward with this transaction.

Justin Piche (40:17)
Yeah. What was the bulletproof, un-bulletproof part of your contract that made it kind of on the edge or not enforceable that you changed?

Clay Hepler (40:26)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was kind of a boilerplate contract that did not explicitly state that if the seller defaulted upon the agreement that the buyer could pursue damages and or force the sale, yeah, specific performance. And so that was like not explicitly stated. again, we could have done it, but I was like, you know what, I'm just not gonna push this because...

Justin Piche (40:40)
specific performance, yeah.

Clay Hepler (40:51)
My attorney said, hey, this is gonna be a 50-50 toss-up, it wasn't worth it for me.

Justin Piche (40:57)
Yeah. You know, that, is a really good point. think when a lot of people get started in this business, they find these land sales contracts, these one page contracts. And let me be clear by saying, I have a one page contract that I use, but we've added some language to it and do some things specifically so that it is an enforceable contract. We've had it reviewed by an attorney to make sure that's true. But you get these one page contracts that sometimes are not up to snuff. And I'd encourage any listener.

who's getting serious deals under contract to make sure that their contract is enforceable in the state that they're doing business in. One thing I always do now on contracts that I used to not do when I was first starting was I always put earnest money down. I always have equitable interest in a property. And you don't have to put significant amounts of money down. I usually do 1%. It goes over pretty well with buyers, especially if you're buying like a $100,000 property, you put a thousand bucks in earnest. It's a bit of show of good faith.

as well as gives you equitable interest in the contract so that if you do pursue a specific performance suit, you can show clearly that you are intending to close, that you've put up money for this, that you've done what you needed to do in accordance with the contract. And then the other is obviously having clear specific performance language in there that allows you as the buyer to pursue a lawsuit to enforce the sale. That doesn't mean you're going to do it. You have to make a calculation on if it's worth it. 400K is substantial.

And maybe that leads into kind of my next deal killer, which I think I touched on the subdivide, but I'll kind of maybe expand a little more in this podcast. I just lost a deal this last month, a subdivide that we had under contract since August or end of July. So I've been under contract for a while. We were supposed to close here on the 10th of October. It took me a while to get my subdivide crew like organized and out there. They had some delays.

So we burned through our due diligence period, but I had no issues with closing. Our due diligence period ended. Our earnest money was now non-refundable. We had about $1,500 or so in earnest at the time. It was non-refundable at that point. I was making all good efforts to close, keeping the seller in the loop. And all of sudden we got this random email from the seller that was just like, hey, I'm not going to sell any.

And it came into my transaction coordinator. And of course she escalated and was like, I don't know what to do here. And so my first thought was, okay, let's turn it over, back over to our acquisitions manager who built the relationship, who made the offer on the property and let's get her to call the guy and just kind of understand what's going on. And so she called him and kind of explained, Hey, you know, this, this is a legally binding contract. have this kind of language in here. You know, we're not saying we're going to sue, like, you're trying to default on this contract and there's remedies here in the contract.

And he wasn't, you know, not adversarial at all. He just said, Hey, I get it, but I can't sell it. need an, I need an address that I can send official correspondence to. That was what he said. And now I get that back from my transaction coordinator. get that back from my acquisition manager. I'm just like, what is happening? What is going on? So I called him myself. I left a voicemail and just like, Hey, Mr. Seller, like, you know, what's my, I'm hearing from my transaction coordinator and my acquisition manager that

you're thinking about not moving forward with this contract. I'm just trying to understand, you know, what went wrong and what we can do to try to move towards close. He called me back. We had a discussion. And basically his family found out that he was selling and not like his wife and like children, but like cousins and other people. And while they had no ownership stake at all in the property.

they wanted to buy it. was old family land that he had inherited that he and his brother were selling, but these other children, whatever distant relatives wanted it. And they raised, I guess, a lot of problems in his family and with him. And so I kind of talked about it. was like, hey, you know, I don't typically pursue lawsuits to close. And this is about a hundred thousand dollar profit deal, by the way. I don't typically pursue lawsuits to close these. not in the business of like forcing people who don't want to sell to sell, but is there any way we can kind of move forward?

with this deal and he looked at Eric, didn't look at me because I'm on the phone, but I could tell he just kind of took a deep breath and he goes, you know, I do not want to get a divorce. I don't know what to tell you, but I cannot sell to you. And you know, my heart sank because there's a big chunk of pipeline profit. I'd already had about $4,000 invested in the deal in terms of survey costs, drone costs, due diligence. I'd already gotten multiple contractor bids. My contractors were scheduled to start the next week on the $30,000 clearing project on it.

the guy with the kicker is the seller is an attorney. And so he didn't kind of threaten anything. He's like, Hey, look, I'm not a litigious person. have a reputation. I'm an honest guy, but this is a really hard situation for my family. And, you know, if you do decide to pursue a lawsuit, you know, I just want to let you know, it doesn't cost, it's not going to cost me anything to appeal anything that you do. You know, he kind of made it clear to me.

that it would cost me a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time to try to pursue a lawsuit for this deal. But at the same time, like I'm a compassionate person and you know, maybe if he had told me, hey, I got a better offer and I just don't want to sell to you, you know, that would be a different circumstance. But because of the family situation, you know, I made the call to agree to cancel. just, my ask was that he cover my expenses and he agreed to cover my expenses. And so we signed a release of earnest money.

for him covering all the expenses I had incurred on the project and cancel it, but it sucked. You gotta decide how you run your business.

Clay Hepler (46:44)
great story, man. But there's always the calculation we have to make, which is the return on hassle. Right? And so, you know, we always look at the ROI, but in our business, the ROH is just as important. And so, do you really want to tie a deal? You know, this guy's a fricking attorney, Like, you know, I think you took the right choice because he...

Justin Piche (46:49)
Yeah.

I know, I know.

Clay Hepler (47:09)
The point of suing someone is not to win, right? I heard that quote one time. I come from a family of attorneys. The point of suing someone is to drain their bank account and they eventually give up. And so you're not draining this guy's bank account. He's an attorney. And so I think you took the right deal, the right road. So I'm gonna go through another quick one and we'll wrap up here.

Justin Piche (47:26)
Nope, nope, it doesn't cost him anything.

Clay Hepler (47:36)
because we're getting towards the end of the podcast but So we locked up a deal in a state that does not allow wholesale deals and the seller explained to us that we would have to Contact his estranged brother who he hadn't spoken with in three years because his other his brother had to sell Signed to sell right his brother was also on the deed Got this deal under contract

The spread was about 25 G's, but it was in a state that you couldn't wholesale in, and so we were trying to figure out how to get around the wholesale deal, and then we also figured out we had to do an action for quiet title, which could cost a significant amount of money. By the way, we're doing one now, and I could talk about that on a future podcast episode. But we were gonna have to pay 6,000 to 10,000 dollars for an action for quiet title. And.

Our spread was like 25 G's, 20 G's, something like that. In a state that doesn't enable wholesaling. And if we were not to wholesale it, we would probably made 10,000. So we basically eliminated our profit. So the lesson here is like, if it isn't difference between what you're going to make and the headache involved in making it. Justin gave you an example on the subdivine. I'm giving you an example on the exchange brother that this guy's been met in three years.

and we have to do an action for quiet title that is absolutely zero guarantee ever of closing, right? It's better just not to get the deal under contract. It might feel good in the moment to slap your acquisition person in the back and say, job, buddy. But when you have to close it, it actually demotivates them. When you have to end, you know, close the deal because you can't close on it, you gotta end the contract, it demotivates your team. And so,

Locking deals up that are not, that you know in your heart that you're probably not gonna close, just don't lock them up. And so that's lesson that we learned and our acquisition guy learned that if there's not enough meat on the bone, there's no reason to even start chewing on the bone.

Justin Piche (49:43)
Yeah. You know, I had one more thought. Maybe I wanted to touch on before we wrap up this episode. This has happened to me a couple of times. And the first time it happened to me, it really, like I just wasn't expecting it. wasn't something I even knew to look out for. But, you know, in this business, a lot of the folks that own these properties that we're going after, a lot of the reason for selling is because they're older and they don't have, their kids maybe don't want their land and, you know, they don't

They'd rather have the cash. They don't want to deal with the turning over this piece of land to a bunch of different heirs. in that some folks are not all mentally there. so we had had this incredible deal in North Carolina that we had negotiated with a seller who I mean, I didn't negotiate with him personally. My acquisition manager was he was very friendly, very nice, amenable. wanted to sell his land.

We able to get it for about 50 % of what we perceived market price to be. This is a multi hundred thousand dollar profit deal, large acreage. And so we send the contract, everything looks good and he signs it. And then about two weeks later, I got an email from his daughter and the email basically said, Hey, I see that you have this contract with my father, but he has Alzheimer's and

He can't sell this property. am his power of attorney and this is not a valid contract. And it really struck me. Obviously we're not trying to buy a property from somebody with all timers or anything like that. But I didn't even think about that as being a possibility. and my acquisition scene and my acquisition manager obviously didn't really think about it either. And so that's one of the things we, we, you know, we're kind of careful about now, especially with an elderly seller. We generally ask them.

Are there, do they have any children that they would like to be a part of this discussion? And a lot of folks will, you know, they know they're old and their children are a big part of their decision-making. They'll bring them in. And I also have told them, like if there's anybody that seems like they're forgetful or they're not all there when you're on the call with them, like you, cannot make that decision. cannot send them contracts. Like we've got to figure out either who the stakeholder is and if they want to end up selling, but get their kids on the phone. If that's the case, we do not, do not.

want to deal with anybody who isn't in their right mind to make a decision to sell. I didn't even think about it, but it was a pretty solid lesson learned. It's happened a couple of times now. We've identified sellers where we need to get the family involved to get the deal done. So just something to be aware of. You really, really do not want to take advantage of somebody who can't make that decision themselves. That is just predatory and it's not good business practices.

Clay Hepler (52:15)
Exactly. you know, even more importantly, if you're in a position like that, making sure that you involve everyone is going to, if we just look at it from a purely practical perspective, it's going to also increase your ability to close deals. Because I've been in situations with buying houses, with buying land, that you get a deal on a contract, you're not aware that the seller has early onset Alzheimer's or whatever. And

you get an email from a pissed off daughter, a call from a pissed off son threatening to sue you because they think that you're a predator. And you might not have the intention, but guess what? That's perception is reality. And so just looking after your own best interests, making sure that everyone involved is involved. And one of the things that I was actually talking to my lead managers today, to kind of recap what we were talking about earlier with

helping your lead managers overcome objections is that sellers, as a general rule, they're

They are looking to get the offer. Okay, and they will say and do anything to get the offer. And whether that person's of sound mind or not, they're looking to talk to you and get to the offer. And so before you get to the offer, you want to make sure that everyone, part of the conversation, every motivation, every pain point, having a comprehensive picture of exactly what's going on in the seller's life is brought up. And so the reason why we overcome objections

that we use acknowledge, isolate, overcome, and loop. The reason why we do that is not to just overcome objections for objections state. It's to prevent what Justin and I are talking about right now. It's to get ahead of the problems before they happen. There's plenty of sellers that you get into conversations with, and I have a slew that I could go for the next two hours of we've getting a deal under contract and after the fact they have sellers remorse.

after the fact we didn't underwrite it correctly because they didn't tell us important information that we could have actually done. It was our responsibility to get out in the initial call. All these things that are actually prevented by having the quality conversation with the seller on the front end.

Justin Piche (54:40)
Man. All right. Well, I think that was some good information. Talked to Deal Killers. We gave a little bit of an update on some wins and losses and progress towards our quarterly goals, which is one of the points, right? We want to make sure people understand like, we set big goals and we are actively trying to pursue them. And when we're behind or we're ahead, we're going to share those wins. We're going to share those losses. Clay dropped some exceptional information during our team building tactics segment here about acknowledge, isolate, overcome, and loop.

Man, I think that is worth the price of admission by itself. And as a part of that, everybody, there's a bit of a gentleman's agreement here. We're trying to really hard each week to bring you guys high quality educational content about land investing, kind of an insider look at what goes on in two seven figure land investors businesses. And with that, we want you to engage. We want you to comment. We want you to follow. We want you to like and really.

You know, Clay jokes every time when we're ending these podcasts, hey, if you liked me a little bit better, make sure to put it in the comments. So I'm going to say that this time, you know, if you like what I was putting out, let me know, say Justin had some good stuff. But I think this episode, you know, Clay might get the crown because that was gold, man. I literally got takeaways from it. I got takeaways. I'm about to talk to my sales team right now and walk them through the process of overcoming objections as opposed to giving them specific tactics to overcome objections. I think that's amazing.

Clay Hepler (56:04)
Yeah, thanks man. and guys, thank you so much for your time. Again, rate, review, subscribe if you got benefit from this podcast and we'll see you next week.