Episode 64: Scaling a Land Flipping Business Without Burning Out Your Team (or Yourself)

Justin Piche (00:00)
Welcome to the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Justin Piche.

Clayton Hepler (00:04)
This is your other co-host, Clay Hepler, and we're here to show you how to win the Grand Game.

Justin Piche (00:21)
what a great intro. Clay, your voice. Tell us. Tell us, what's going on?

Clayton Hepler (00:24)
Yeah, man. Have you

ever seen the Family Guy episode when Peter gets a cold and his voice gets very deep and his wife can't stop feeling super attracted to him. She tries to have sex with him whole episode and she tries to keep getting him sick. know, because when your voice...

Justin Piche (00:46)
What's that?

Yeah.

Clayton Hepler (00:53)
you know your voice gets a little deeper. So, might. You might, exactly.

Justin Piche (00:56)
That's not happening for you.

Yeah, so how was your holiday? Okay, let's just acknowledge that we've been... Our last episode was number 63 that we filmed at the end of 2025. And so now it is January 13th. It's been a couple weeks. We've been busy. Holidays are busy season. Man, did you actually rest at all during this holiday season?

Clayton Hepler (01:26)
⁓ yes, for about four days. ⁓ we, I basically took the week of Christmas off. So Christmas Eve to that Sunday, I was off. My team was off until New Year's Eve. So basically an entire week, but I ended up working on that Monday, that Tuesday, that Wednesday, just because like, I had a lot of catching up to do.

We're in this really interesting moment of our business where we're doing some really great positive pivots, but it required some more of like quiet CEO time. And so I was able to take that quiet CEO time, which is really great.

Justin Piche (02:13)
Yeah, did I actually rest? I don't feel like I got any rest. No, mean, honestly, worked, see yesterday, yesterday was Gracie's second birthday, so my youngest turned two. And ⁓ we went to breakfast and then we went to this little music class thing with all the kids and it was really fun.

Clayton Hepler (02:14)
How about you?

Woo!

Justin Piche (02:39)
But I was just, it was kind of my first day back fully at work since kind of really the holidays started. I mean, I've worked days, but not, and full days too, but it hasn't really felt like the season's over. It's time to get back to work type until Monday. And I was ready to get back. So I just got, feel like I got hit by a wave, you know.

crashing down from the beach on Monday and today is gonna be no no different. It's just all these like little things, problems, like things we need to do, executing our plans that need to happen now.

Clayton Hepler (03:15)
Kind of on your agenda.

Justin Piche (03:18)
What do mean, Mike?

Clayton Hepler (03:19)
Like,

like, like, like, tactically, like you say, okay, do I have all these things? Like, one of the things I know we're going to discuss today is kind of a little bit about like CEO focus and, know, I don't want to jump the gun too much, but I'm super interested in.

Justin Piche (03:31)
and

Yeah, I

mean, we had our annual planning with leadership. historically I've done it with kind of more people on the team, like a little bit wider definition of leadership. But this time I did it with just my two ops managers, acquisitions ops manager and sales ops manager. It was just us three going through annual planning. And so there's a lot of things that have come out of that.

that we're gonna need to implement. And I'm not ready to talk about all of them, will later. But one of the big ones is just a redesign of marketing. We're rolling back out mail, we're doing some really specific targeting with mail that we, giving a whole lot more focused effort.

Justin Piche (04:20)
yeah, so there's a lot more coming and changes we're going to make. Obviously, you know, I think most of the things that we're going to do are going to, I mean, I think all of the things we're going that we're implementing are going to help the business. And, you know, we talked about this last year. Net profit is what it's about. And so a lot of what we're doing is cutting out excess, cutting out things we don't need.

There's gonna be honest there's an honest effort underway to simplify some of our procedures and processes that we do for Especially for dispositions. I mean, we've got a lot of we got high-power dispositions team with a lot of detail that we've got There's a lot of things going on there, but it's it that just means it's a lot to manage, right? I mean we may have a solid listing plan and we may have things super organized in our CRM and we can answer every question but

Do need all that to move things as quickly as we do? Is that the differentiator? Is that gonna knock a couple weeks off of our inventory whole time, speed up our cash conversion cycle? I don't know, I don't think so, not all the time. So we need to make some conscious decisions to simplify that type of stuff. There's just things like that that we're going to do. The other thing we did, we took your advice and we focused on the one constraint.

Like what is the most important thing that we need to do to have ⁓ the biggest impact on our business? And we brainstormed quite a few potential constraints. So we've got a list to go back to to start looking at the next one once this one gets solved. But the first constraint we're looking at is just conversion rate. I mean, we have OK conversion rate across different marketing channels, but it's not great. It's not as good as it used.

Clayton Hepler (06:03)
Cool.

What do mean by that?

Justin Piche (06:13)
lead to contract, lead to contract. That, I mean, that's not like the root cause, that's like the main symptom. So we kind of brought it back a few layers, but that's what we're focused relentlessly on improving right now. And if you think about it, ⁓ a 1 % increase in, let's say your conversion rates 3%.

Clayton Hepler (06:15)
Okay.

Justin Piche (06:38)
a 1 % increase, that's a huge amount more contracts and deals. Exactly. Right? And I think we have, I think we can at least improve it by a percent or two, whatever ours is right now. ⁓ So that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest impact too.

Clayton Hepler (06:43)
25 % more.

Yeah, that's really I love that man. I love that you kind of went in on that and and kind of built it back. ⁓

know, we've talked about this many, many times, unless you want to scale a very, very high volume, very high volume business, right? Probably pass like five million, right? Just consistent volume. It really is much more of an attractive business at like 1.5 to two with like simple systems and then adding the development deals on top of it. Anything interesting that you have?

because we haven't really been, we haven't spoken in a while, right? Anything interesting that you've been thinking about ⁓ within the context of your business or in general? ⁓

that, yeah, I don't know, maybe it's changing how you are. You're thinking about business, changing what you're putting together.

Justin Piche (08:01)
You know?

I just need to figure out how to simplify. I think maybe this is what I've been thinking actually. I've been thinking I got into this business originally to have control over my time, have more direct control and input over the income that I make.

not be beholden obviously to like a company and a 3 % increase here and there and all that kind of stuff be able to actually like make money when I put the work in it can figure things out and solve problems in the world etc. But another huge reason was to spend a lot of time with my family and I do like I do I Yeah, I'm really available

Clayton Hepler (08:47)
Yeah, dude, you're pretty good at that. You're pretty good at that.

Justin Piche (08:53)
Obviously I have times where I tell my family, like, hey, lock the door for this. Guys, please don't come into my office for at least a couple hours so I can work.

Justin Piche (09:03)
was talking about availability, et cetera, with my kids. And I am super available, but I find myself very stressed a lot of the time about the balls that are in the air. And it's not like one specific thing. It's just I think when your brain gets split into so many different things that need to be focused on.

Clayton Hepler (09:04)
ill-ability.

Justin Piche (09:31)
It can be really overwhelming at times. And I'm a hard person to get overwhelmed. I kind of always have a lot going on. ⁓ But not a lot of those things are always tied directly to like my income and my family's welfare and my business. It might be like a bunch of personal things or like Bible study type stuff and commitments and like all these things I'm managing. But when the business side gets so big, that's when it starts to like really impact.

how I am around family, right? Because then I'm trying to spend quality time with my family, but I'm thinking about all the things that are left undone or all the things that need to happen between now and some period in time in the future or even tomorrow morning or whatever it is, you know? And so I want to stop that. I need to kind of simplify what I am directly focusing on. And I think a lot of that comes down to empowering the team a little more. I've been pretty blunt with some of my

my leaders on my team of like, hey, for example, just quick example, we're starting up mail in earnest again, like really putting a solid effort behind it. you know, designing your mailers is a hugely important part and designing them so that you can collect data on them as well. So, you know, what works and what doesn't is hugely important. like, you can, it's not.

the best idea to just blast out random mailers to people anymore. Like you should think about how you're marketing, what your mailers say, what pictures are on it or not, how many pages is it, is it color, is it black and white, what type of properties are you sending these to, this is your first design, second design, third design, making sure those have reference numbers so you can track the lead, you should know all that stuff so you can improve on your designs, otherwise you're just wasting money that you could've.

Clayton Hepler (11:26)
You're lighting it on fire, dude. You're lighting money on fire.

Justin Piche (11:28)
Yeah, you're lighting it on fire. You're

not collecting anything from that. So those need to be thought out. And I was just really blunt with my ops manager on the acquisition side. She sent me a design. She actually didn't say, can you review this? She just said, hey, here's the design I'm looking at, working on another one now, which was great. But I told her straight up, I do not have the bandwidth to look at these designs and really do much with them. I can say, yeah, I like that, but I'm not going to tweak.

I need you to do this and come up with a copy and test it and get feedback from people or whatever you need to do. I can't do that.

Clayton Hepler (12:08)
I understand man. That is incredibly difficult, right? Like, so one of the things that I think that as I've as I've built out, as you know, I've built out the landlada right. And I've really observed like, in my business, what are the things that I didn't do well enough that really can help?

Justin Piche (12:15)
huh.

Clayton Hepler (12:38)
propel a business, right? And one of the things that happens at a level of, I would say anywhere between, let's say just person count, like four to 10 people, ⁓ or even more, the leader loses the ability to manage everyone. And so,

You either need to hire someone to manage other people and then empower them through ⁓ middle management level discipline. Right? Like how do I lead this person? Which is a skill in and of itself, right? ⁓ Or how do I buy this person's autonomy? Like do I pay more for this person? Do I train them up? And in our business, these decisions are quite important because

There are the difference between, my business is at a 19.3 % margin and my business is at a 43.5 % margin. And that significantly impacts the amount of money that you bring home on a year-to-year basis. Now, it's about creating the structures, it's about creating the engines in the business in order to empower the team members. The playbooks of this is what really good looks like.

and you should execute it this way. But there's also the letting go of the vine as EOS says of giving them more autonomy, which is really scary, It's very scary ⁓ to just say, yep, just go do it, right? Like one of the things that I've really struggled with recently is, and I've always kind of, I haven't been great at this, which is,

And I talk about this all the time, You know, a lot of the stuff you write about, talk about is stuff that you need to know, you know, remind yourself of as well. Right? Right? So I'm a fallible human being, very fallible. So the thing is like the outcome, there's like kind of two ways to manage, right? There's a managing based on outcomes and managing based on processes. So like think about like a football coach, Nick Saban, like

Just follow the process, right? John Wooden, right? If we follow the process, the outcome will take care of itself versus if you just make one call in a month, but you bring in, this is for my AM, my AM is responsible for about 300K a month in profit. If you just make one call and make 300K like you did the output.

And so I think it's very difficult in ⁓ an immature business like ours, if you have an immature business or you've been in this for five or seven years or whatever, to know how to manage people better. Because we all say, I just want to manage based on outputs, yet you're micromanaging based on processes. Or you don't have established enough processes such that you end up trying to micromanage within the processes.

So that's something that I've been really struggling with, I would say. ⁓ And not like struggling like, ⁓ you know, but gritting my teeth, more like how do I become a better leader and manager of people? And is it, should it be purely outcome based? And then I trust this person to get there, right? It's like, I need you to meet me at New York City at 12 o'clock p.m. on Tuesday, right? Process is like, you need to take the train to

Philadelphia and then from Philadelphia up to New York. That train runs on these times at these dates. Or just be like, just meet me in New York. Right, so there's a lot of trust that you're giving this person. And there's a higher likelihood that it's not gonna be exactly how you like it, but that's not how you build autonomous team members.

Justin Piche (16:53)
guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast to say thanks for listening. Today, Clay and I are closing some loops on some old podcasts that we did last year and talking a lot about output management, planning, et cetera. If you guys are getting a lot of value out of this, please leave a comment, subscribe.

We really appreciate it. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

That's a good point. It is tough sometimes. And I think a lot of it depends on the level of trust you have with that particular employee. Like a good example is, just to talk about Brian, my sales manager, who you know. Actually, a lot of people in the land space know, because he's been to quite a few events. And he's just an awesome dude. But there's employees that he has that work for him that he can trust really well.

And so he can, still felt, know, we have a process films and, ⁓ you know, a loom video gets a, an SOP made, whatever shows them one time, et cetera. They've got this, this process or this, this procedure to do some tasks. And then he can just say, he just assigned them tasks. He's got a really like detailed task assignment kind of procedure for everything in in sales. And you can just assign them to them and know that it's going to get done. And he can check on them without having to micromanage, like not like.

ask them or tell them exactly what to do next step because there's a really well established process and he also has trust, right? And once you have that process and trust, you can manage by outcomes. You can say, need this done and that done and this done. And then they get it all done. You trust them. You're golden. But there are other employees that it's really challenging to trust because they miss things constantly. The attention to detail is poor or maybe just.

poor every once in a while. They're good enough, but a lot of times it just doesn't happen, something like that. And in those situations, obviously the best thing is for that person typically to go and get a better quality employee that has the capacity to do the tasks that you're trying to get them to do without making mistakes and giving you a headache. But in those cases, you almost have to micromanage.

And you just don't want to be there, right? I mean, the real answer is like that person needs to go and you need to get a better person in there that you don't need to micromanage. But it's hard to break that when you don't fully trust. And I've seen this so much with a bunch of land investors who have their first few hires. And frankly, like we're all guilty of leaving people on the team for longer than they probably should in some cases. Everybody is, it's hard. mean, it is, it's hard.

especially to leave somebody who you have this relationship with that depends on you for their income that you've trained and that you've invested a ton of your own personal time and energy into and that you care about regardless of how well the performer they are. It's like hard not to care about the people that work with you and for you. ⁓ But I've seen this time and time again with newer investors is that they cannot trust the outputs of their employees and so they're just stressed and constantly trying to micromanage which leads to just

more than their time wasted overseeing something that you should be able to trust somebody to do and the employee not feeling trusted and empowered to actually achieve and give more to the team and get what they need to get done done. And so it's just this bad relationship where neither party is happy and neither party can really spend the time they need to on the things they need to because they're too interwoven and spending too much time on.

just micromanaging and dealing with that micromanagement.

Clayton Hepler (20:31)
I'm going to say something that might cause 50 % of our listeners to hate me and 50 % of our listeners to love me. So there is a tunnel. In Pittsburgh, there's a bunch of tunnels. So I live in Pittsburgh and there are a bunch of tunnels that go into the city. Okay? So no matter whichever direction you come into Pittsburgh, there's a tunnel, which actually makes it incredibly beautiful.

to visit because when you come into the city, for example, if you're coming from the airport, you come into the city, you go through a tunnel and it just opens up. It's unlike any other skyline you'll ever see because it's not like you drive up into the city. You don't see the skyline as you drive up and then all of a sudden it's there. It's really cool, right? Because there are hills that surround the city and there are rivers that are around it. Of course, we know rivers.

They're down in the valley and Pittsburgh's down in the valley next to the rivers, right? The three rivers, we all know Pittsburgh, right? Probably most people don't, but it's a city. And so on the way out of the city, there is a tunnel, right? You're leaving the city going towards where I live, which is east of the city, Kind of southeast of city. So at one point, there is a shoulder,

There is a lane, there's a three lane. Normally it's a two lane, but there's a three lane. This three lane goes about three miles. You get lane on left, lane on the middle, and three lane. But this three lane goes for three miles. It only has one exit. But the problem is people slow down when they go into tunnels.

It drives me crazy because why would you slow down? But everyone slows down, everyone hits a break. And so at all times of the day, these tunnels have a little bit of traffic in them. I hate traffic. Right. I just hate traffic. I know you're used to traffic in Houston, right? Right. Everyone hates it. so so long story short, every single time that I'm leaving the city, I go in this right lane, the far right lane.

Justin Piche (22:36)
No, I mean, I hate traffic. Who likes traffic? Houston's a huge, yeah, there's a lot of traffic in Houston.

Clayton Hepler (22:51)
No one's ever in it because people stay in the middle lane and I go in this right lane and I speed ahead and I've probably saved hours, maybe a day out of my life, maybe two days in just waiting in traffic because I always go in that right lane. Right? No, so that is a known thing that you can do that, you know, it's a little bit, you know, it's kind of quite, right, okay, it's kind of quite, you

Justin Piche (23:16)
I do it, dude. I do the exact same thing. There's an

intersection in Houston, I-10 and 6-10 coming east where there's actually three interstates that all collide and there's one lane. It's the lane that usually you're forced to exit in, but in this particular case, it's not a forced exit. There's lots of exits off of it, but you don't have to exit any of them. If you stay in there, the traffic's always moving until all the way to the end. I will do the same thing. I totally understand.

Clayton Hepler (23:23)
Right.

Yes.

So long story short, long story

short, the point of this story is I do that, right? I do that.

That is this known thing that you can do that increases your ability to reach your location, let's just say, right? Try to get an analogy here through this lane. Try to get this analogy through. usually when you're at the operator stage or the architect stage, which is according to the land ladder, which is, hey, I got four, six, eight, 10, 12, whatever, 14 people. One of the best things that you can do

to increase your ability, it's kind of like this off-ramp, it's this unknown territory that most people don't ever go into because they don't realize it. It is backup ownership.

Okay, so the reason why people stall out when we're talking about these conversations around ⁓ employee with lack of capacity is because there's the cliffhanger of how do I replace this person, right? Well, if you have backup ownership, so say you have an EA, general VA, and then this position is a more administrative position, right? If you have a backup owner, that's your way, that's your speedy ticket.

So you can fire this person if they have a low capacity and you know there's always backup ownership. So if you're down for one, two, three weeks, but it overall lifts the speed of your organization over a year time, man, it's worth it, right? But the pain of letting go of someone and replacing them, by the way, I feel that pain, sometimes it can be subdued significantly if you know this little extra kind of lane, right, the lane.

And the lane is backup ownership assignment to your core team members.

Justin Piche (25:39)
What a good point. We do this. Obviously, it's hard to do if you don't have very many employees. Like, if you have two people, like, you might be able to do it a little bit, but it's gonna be challenging. You know, get 10, 15, now you have some serious capacity for people to learn other skills in your business that can help support and just give you a whole lot more continuity in the event that either an employee has to leave for some reason or you have to let somebody go. But.

I mean, we call it backfill training and cross training. It's kind of the terms we use inside of the business. and we do focus on making sure that, ⁓ different people from different departments are trained in other roles or ancillary roles to their own. ⁓ we have them shadow. We have like a shadowing schedule where team members will like pick somebody to shadow for a bit and, and, know, learn their role.

give them access and permissions to the SOPs, et cetera. I think that's a great, a great point. And it definitely can help when you have to let somebody go or, or, you know, I mean, a lot of our employees are overseas and anything can happen, right? There's, ⁓ you're not in the same social circle, right? If they ghost you, there's no.

negative impact to their social circle, the people that they see every single day. So there's just less tying them to you generally than there would be here in the, you know, in the States. It would be pretty taboo for you to just like ghost your employer, you know, especially if you're in the same community as them. You at least give them some respect and say, here's my two weeks.

Clayton Hepler (27:17)
Yeah, that does not happen, I find. And I will say I found specific, and I mean this in the, this is a neutral statement, right? Let me just preface this, but I found certain cultures do that more than others. Right, I found that in my experience with ⁓ the Filipino culture is that happened often in the Filipino culture. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it is.

I'm just saying I've hired over 50 employees at this point globally and every single one ⁓ that has done the ghosting, even if I've fired someone or not, right? So say I've fired someone. I've fired many people, right? Every single one that has ghosted me has been a Filipino. I've had other people, Central American, South American, Egyptian, South African.

that I fired American, that I fired, and not a single other one has ghosted me. Now that could be my very, very limited experience. Admittedly, it's 50 people that I've hired, and I would say maybe I've fired probably, I don't know, 20, 25 people, 30. But every single one that has ghosted me has been Filipino.

Justin Piche (28:20)
Interesting.

Yeah.

I have not had a single ghosting from anybody in the Philippines. Mine have all been, I've actually only had a couple and they've been in Latin America. But I don't know if it was, I think it was more like an age and experience thing than anything.

Clayton Hepler (28:45)
What?

Justin Piche (28:55)
Like I think it was the generation of that person rather than like their culture. But who knows? The point though is it's a higher likelihood to happen because these people aren't in your community and seeing you every day. Like period. You can get ghosted by somebody who's working remote for you in Chicago because they don't live in your community. It's just like, it's the same thing in my mind. It's the same kind of thing as...

Clayton Hepler (29:02)
Right.

Yes.

Justin Piche (29:21)
your loan is more likely to be if you are if you own a mortgage it's more likely to default if you don't have a high doubt that they don't have a high down payment because they don't have as much skin in the game if not tied you in any way other than a zoom call every week and they're working for you and you're paying them there's just a higher likelihood of getting ghosted when they leave because it's hard confrontation is hard people aren't comfortable with it they don't do it regularly and they don't want to do it and if they can avoid it they will

Clayton Hepler (29:48)
Good point. Justin, where do you want to go from here?

Justin Piche (29:51)
Let's land some planes. Let's land some planes. We don't have a ton of time left, but we have a couple of episodes that we didn't quite land. And so I want to loop back to them. And I guess the first one is annual planning. ⁓ So we talked about what kind of the first day agenda was, and we talked about the constraint. And I actually went over and talked about my own here earlier in the episode.

The question I guess for you and I can talk to this too is with EOS the constraint analysis is one piece. What about the VTO, the vision traction organizer? Is that something you guys still go through? Is it an abbreviated version? Because obviously it is the main point of it is to set your goals and set your rocks and all this stuff. But if you're focused on one main constraint instead of three or four rocks by department, how does that change your VTO and how you go through it?

Clayton Hepler (30:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. So we have constraints and rocks, right? So ⁓ the constraint is sort of the North Star, right? So we have our like North Star KPI, which is always revenue generated, right? It's always the North Star, right? And then we have the constraint, which is any additional special projects that we do must all this specific constraint. But I'll give you an example of a

quarterly rockfit does not necessarily connect directly to a constraint. So our goal this quarter was a certain amount of... ⁓

testimonials and video testimonials. And that has nothing to do with getting better at finding specific types of data for ⁓ development parcels. Nothing, nothing to do with it. But, you know, ⁓ our transaction coordinator does not have, like, she's not going to be on a call with a seller or she's not going to be putting time in finding these data.

So there are additional rocks that we believe will strengthen the business as a whole, but does not directly solve a constraint or like, you know, improving our financial reporting, right? That's that's a rock for, what's a rock for my ⁓ COO, right? And there's a lot more there. There's a lot underneath that, even though that doesn't directly solve the constraint. But the constraint is sort of the focusing, ⁓

question ⁓ orientation of our business during that quarter. Or I mean, whenever we saw the constraint, it's solved, then we just move downstream. one of the newest constraints, we're gonna have to start raising a lot more money, which is ⁓ a great constraint to have, but like that's gonna be a big constraint for me very soon.

Justin Piche (32:45)
Got it. No, no, no, I agree. That's similar to what we do. There's one overarching constraint that anybody who's involved in or has the capacity to work towards or solve is primarily focused on that. But there are other things we need to be doing that we have to achieve. So you still have to have goals. You can't just leave half your company without a goal, without something to work towards and have like only the leaders focusing on something else. So I agree with that.

Clayton Hepler (33:14)
It's interesting to think it, think this through because, know, I've questioned whether or not I should even, I should add a, you know, even people that are not necessarily correlated to directly to the position to ⁓ solve the constraint. Like for example, the transaction coordinator, because the goal of our system is profitable throughput, right? If we can increase the profitability of our throughput, ⁓ like a, like a pit crew.

in a ⁓ Formula One race, ⁓ there's 21 people in a pit crew in a Formula One race. someone might just be holding the wheel, another person might be installing the wheel, another person might be adding gasoline, another person might be changing out brakes, I don't know what F1 pit crews do, but if...

Justin Piche (34:05)
mostly fuel

and tires but also other things.

Clayton Hepler (34:08)
Right, right, right, right. Adding an extra racing stripe, Just to go extra fast, right? But like, we use that analogy, which is kind underneath, kind of lives underneath the greater analogy of ⁓ increasing system throughput, then theoretically, our transaction coordinator should be a part of

Justin Piche (34:12)
Hahahaha

Clayton Hepler (34:36)
increasing that throughput with any additional slack. But then you have the reverse argument, is, but then even if, so even if she's at 80 % utilization, let's say on terms of the output that she has on a day-to-day basis, ⁓ that still allows us to close our deals faster. So her not being fully utilized is probably better for the greater business, right? Versus having her, giving her additional slack to a

something outside her general focus. ⁓ Again, these are all questions that we have to answer as business owners, And, you know, it's kind of like our...

It's our decision, right? Like we're the ones that make the decisions and it does, they both seem right, right? If you're listening to this, they both kind of seem right. Like you can make an argument for both. And then it comes down to how do you want to run your business? What becomes your theories? And this is why, to wrap it up, this is why I always say after a certain point, right?

the best thing that you could do as a business owner is look internally, not externally, because your form, your span, your business is a combination of a series of minds, a series of people, right? A series of systems and processes. And ⁓ if you focus inward and improve all those things versus trying to continue to add new things, new people, new processes, new goals, you learn how to run your business better, right? Because Mercedes-Benz and

a Ferrari have different cars, right? In in Formula One, they both do well. So ⁓ they're different cars, they're different pit crews, but they both crush it, right? So you got to figure out what your strengths are, what your business strengths are by tracking your KPIs, metrics, et cetera, understanding your core constraints. And that's what we were talking about earlier. And that allows you to build a more robust and profitable business.

Justin Piche (36:44)
I love that. I agree. We have some other loops to close, we will do that on the next episode of the Ground Game podcast. Appreciate you taking the time today, man. I know we're both so busy, so it's hard always to find time, for our listeners, apologies for the break. I hope you guys had a really restful holiday season. Got to spend a lot of time with family, and I think for most of it, it's...

Most of us now, it's probably back to the grind. So the ground game is here right with you grinding away, working hard to build better businesses.

Clayton Hepler (37:20)
Love it, man. Well, thanks guys, as always, for listening. You know, the gentleman's agreement is if you like the podcast, please rate, review and subscribe. Let us know. You can reach out to Justin and I on our socials if you have any questions, want to talk dirt. We're always here to talk dirt, talk deals. ⁓ And we'll put our social links down below and we will sign off. Anything else, Justin?

Justin Piche (37:44)
That's it. We'll see you guys

next week. Bye.