Episode 73: You're Not Losing Deals. You're Losing Ground.

Clayton Hepler (00:12)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:17)
And this is your other co-host, Justin Piche, and we're here to show you how to win the ground game. Well, good afternoon, Clay. It's been a minute. It's a busy season. At least it feels that way. My daughter's last week of school. Mabel is almost two months old. This last week was my wife's birthday and Mother's Day, which I'm always terrible at. They're so close together. I'm always terrible at separating the two. So this year was no...

Clayton Hepler (00:37)
Of course, very important.

Justin Piche (00:46)
There's no exception. How about you, man? How you feeling? You feel busy?

Clayton Hepler (00:50)
I do, I'm reading this book and the premise of the book is basically like, I mean there's many premises, but one of the core things that I gathered from it was, and this is a book that I read in the past, was kind of give yourself time in the day. Dude, this is like cliches, like two white guys on a podcast talking about giving themselves space. So for the listeners, don't judge us.

We are two white guys on a podcast. But I gave myself lunch today. So I went and sat on my back patio and dude, it was amazing. It was a beautiful sunny day. was sitting there just eating some food. 10 minutes I just gave myself, sat there. And I just felt so much more creative and like attack the rest of like what my day was. It was kind of this bifurcation between the first

first half and the second half. I'm gonna do that more, man. Kind of giving yourself that space. I feel like I am the worst at that. I run at like 250 RPMs at all times. And that's actually not something to pat yourself on the back, because that actually makes you more ineffective as a leader. You don't know how to listen, because you're just constantly going, going, going. You don't know how to think creatively, or as creative or innovatively. And that's what we get paid for, right, as CEOs.

I gave myself that 10 minutes and it was great.

Justin Piche (02:07)
Man, you know, I don't do that very often. I recently, really like last couple of weeks and today, like sitting at my computer this morning, I like see all the things that need to get done, you know? And you you look at all of them and you start to feel this like feeling of weight of like, all these things I need to do and all these decisions I need to make, they're all big. Like none of them are like easy to knock out.

Now, sometimes you can get your ball, you know, get the ball rolling by by starting and accomplishing something small and then accomplishing something else. And you're like, OK, now I'm moving and grooving and now I'm going to tackle this big thing. But I have felt this morning kind of almost like a bit of like paralysis analysis of of analysis paralysis, I guess the right way to say that of like, what do I tackle next? It's like too many things are not going quite right, you know, to where they need they need attention. But I I feel like a good.

Clayton Hepler (02:55)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (02:59)
10, 15 minutes of just sitting outside and like looking at the garden, you know, watching the grass, ⁓ having a coffee might be good.

Clayton Hepler (03:07)
Yeah.

There are these big trees behind my house. They kind of like envelope. It's like my house is right. The back porch is a bunch of huge trees that even go kind of over the house. So it almost feels like you're in this encased bit like grove of trees, right? Although you can see through the trees because there's like these cool this hill behind me and this farm and, and then you can look out to the left and you see a big ridge.

you know, a big ridge. And so it's a very, very bucolic scene and it kind of decompresses you. And so yeah, man, look, this is my day one of one, right? Check in on me tomorrow, see if I do it. But was super, super relaxing. yeah, I'm gonna commit to doing more of that to give them that creativity.

Justin Piche (03:55)
Management advice, give

yourself some space to be creative and think about things instead of just operating at 250 RPM nonstop.

Clayton Hepler (04:04)
Yeah, it's sort of like I was writing this morning, I was kind of thinking about, and this brings me to our point for today, which is a pretty significant point. But you kind of have these three things that are very critical to build a lasting enterprise. First, you need the space to reflect.

But reflecting without context is sort of like daydreaming. And so you do want it to be a productive reflection. so external feedback is from the market. So you talk to your customers, you talk to the market, you talk to, like you understand what's going on, you talk to other people in the space. That's why I love communities. And then there's internal context, which is talking to the people in your org.

What's going right, what's going wrong, what are the constraints, what are the KPIs telling us, all that stuff. And those combination culminate into that space, taking that space and actually thinking through the new problems. And the problem is not always just like the knee jerk, it's kind of like a novel problem that you're two or three layers deep. It's not the first 10 minutes or the five minutes, it's the next 25, 30 minutes where all of a sudden it bubbles up.

So that was something I was really thinking about. Like how do I create more opportunities for me to have better internal and external contexts that flow to me in such a way that I can internalize them and then act upon them to drive the business forward in a really productive way.

Justin Piche (05:28)
Hmm. Yeah.

You need those. I mean, you need to be able to have context for things that maybe are outside of your purview when you have employees working certain things. feel like that's kind of, at least when you just said, maybe think about all the areas in my business where I don't want to say that I'm blind, but I trust other people to get things done. And so when problems come to a head that require my intervening, which they do all the time, without those...

kind of metrics, those KPIs, those discussions, those touch bases with your team. It's kind of hard to place yourself in understand the full context of a problem to solve it. It's probably something we haven't been doing as good as we should in our business. A little bit of introspection there.

Clayton Hepler (06:10)
What's interesting too is that depending on the maturity of the business, you might have two layers below you, right? You might have three layers below you. And I got feedback from someone about direct reports of this other person that he was not aware of these complaints of these direct reports. And so working through someone and know, someone that's owning an apartment,

becomes more difficult because you have to work through them and then underneath them they might have two people or three people or four people or whatever. And you need to be somehow able to get the visibility from the front lines without actually day to day managing. And that is an interesting, like how do you do that? How do you do it effectively? Now most of the people listening to our podcast probably are five to 10 people. And so,

you know, that they have five to 10 people in their organization. And so they're, they're, can kind of directly manage the people in their team, but it's definitely interesting as you grow your business to have those types of problems, which I'm certainly aware of in my organization right now. How do you create that sort of feedback loop? Do you feel like you have confidence in the way you do it? To understand what's actually going on and are the people that are your managers managing in the

the way to lead the department and thus the business forward.

Justin Piche (07:30)
Yeah, I mean, so we have, we do EOS, we have a level 10 meeting, and that's kind of the place where most of the issues, department issues get brought up for team discussion. And so feel like through that, there's a good amount of understanding of what they've solved on their own and what they're capable of solving on their own and what things percolate up to become real issues that we need to talk about as a leadership team. think that's an effective tool to understanding.

you know, some of the inner workings of the business. I do have confidence. I, you know, my sales manager, Brian is a great leader on his team or of his team and they're able to accomplish a lot. Um, there's always room for improvement, you know, and you can see when you, when you, when you understand the inner workings of a department, one of your departments and how your team members are leading it, how you might do it differently, but that doesn't always mean it's the right way to do it. We have discussions daily.

on kind of what needs to get done. And then there's so many things when you actually talk to the person doing the work that you don't understand if you're not doing the work. Like here's a perfect example, this morning we have our TC meeting every Monday. And on Monday we go through all of our open contracts on the acquisitions and the sales side and we understand kind of where all these deals are in the pipeline. Like what are we waiting on? Where's title work? Where's...

this, that, the other thing, double closes, not double closes, bank loans, not bank loans, project management. It's like kind of like the update on every deal that we have in the pipeline. And we have been slower than I would like to list properties. Like we have these properties, we have properties in inventory that we've purchased a month ago even that aren't up on the MLS at all right now. And I'm like, man, why is this not up?

And then I start to dive into this kind of problem and it's like, okay, well, there's this issue, then there's that issue, and then we change this and then we change that, and then I can't delegate this, and all these issues came up with this other thing. So like, you start unpacking this one problem, you're like, man, there's so many things here that we need to work on and fix and make better. Like, how do we do it? And at some point, you've gotta be able to trust those people below you to make those changes, and you can provide as much guidance as you want, but somebody's gotta just execute it.

I don't know if that answers your question, but something we're working on right now is like, how do we get these barriers removed?

⁓ Yeah, it's tough. It's an interesting. I mean, we were talking before the call about, you know how it's tough out there for lead flow right now, right? That's kind of like a big challenge for a lot of folks and we're experiencing it too. Right? Lead flow is less lower than we would like every week. I look at the metrics and I'm like guys like we should be hitting this number and we're hitting like 60 % of that number or less. All right, and that's results directly in the number of contracts we're getting is lower than we would like which leads to the number of deals we do is lower than we would like and

Clayton Hepler (09:51)
Yep.

Justin Piche (10:21)
And like, it's this compounding problem that goes all the way back, you know, to lead flow. And then you start to dive in, you're like, okay, well, why is our lead flow low? Like, why, why isn't it, why is it low? And then you, look deeper and you say, okay, well the data, you know, we're, have issues with data, but, like, you can't really fix the data all that much. Like the data sources we have are the data sources we have. The, can, you can adjust them. You can shift them. You can look for different ones, but.

that we've done that so many times that we pretty much know where the good data sources are and we're gonna use that. So what else is the problem? It's a little overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people right now.

Clayton Hepler (10:53)
I think it's a really interesting time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin Piche (10:54)
What are you seeing? Yeah. What are you seeing right now

in terms of lead? I mean, you're because like I used to coach quite a bit of people and when I started handling a lot more bigger projects, like I realized I just I couldn't give people the time and energy from myself, the focus that I wanted to give them. Right. If I was going to take on a coaching client, like I don't want to do it half baked. You know, I want to be all in and really truly help.

And so I kind of pivoted to more like, if you have a deal for me to review, I'll give you honest feedback and I'd love to partner on it. And that's kind of what, and it's been working great just doing that without really taking on coaching clients. But you are actively coaching, you know, a lot of folks and helping them grow their businesses. And so you probably have a lot more exposure. You definitely have a lot more exposure now to seeing issues in other people's businesses than I do. So I'm curious, what are you seeing people struggle with right now in terms of leaf flow?

Clayton Hepler (11:44)
Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things that are pretty interesting that I'm seeing. all the channels still work. It really comes down to the operator. I'm still gonna spill the beans though, right? I have to preface that with that because then people will hear what I'm about to say and they're gonna be like, right? Over time, every business gets more difficult. The early adopters,

which was 10 years ago, right? They, you know, they had it easy, right? Imagine being in the business right now, dude, 10 years ago.

Justin Piche (12:14)
Yeah, man, holy smokes.

Clayton Hepler (12:16)
Right? 15 years ago, right? People were doing this business 15 years ago. So I think that there are a couple of interesting, when I think about land investing, right, I'm hiring people on my team and people ask me, Clay, like, why are you so bullish on this business? I think that land is going to get more and more valuable over time. I think people are gonna be moving out of, I will get to lead flow thing, I'm not avoiding the topic.

like a politician. I think people will, more and more people will want to move out of the cities for a variety of different reasons. think that land is going to get significantly more expensive, right? And so I think that the toolbox and the tool belt of a land investor needs to change. Just like e-commerce did, even though, know, e-commerce, whatever, it's kind of the same thing, right? Like e-commerce in the early days was super effective.

then it got less effective, then you had to get more sophisticated, then you had to do different things like different types of development deals, then you couldn't have the bloated team, and then you had to continue to professionalize it. And now it's to a level of like, you just need to be a professional, right? Now there's always gonna be a low hanging fruit for the people that get in and they get their first couple of deals. I think there's just gonna be a bigger failure rate for people that are starting, which is exactly what I talk about in everything that I do.

And I think that the type of marketing that we do needs to be better and better over time. We need to get better and better at everything. I think the leads per deal is going up across the board, right? Cold-calling leads. The iOS update with cold-calling is just murdered. I think it's primarily the iOS update has murdered results.

Justin Piche (13:50)
Yeah, no, I agree

with that. I agree with that. There's been a step change, a step change in the quality of leads.

Clayton Hepler (13:53)
So cool.

You're saying recently in your business?

Justin Piche (13:59)
Yeah, mean, like looking at numbers, like comparing last year's lead numbers to contract rate versus this year. And just the number of leads generated for a certain amount of marketing output has gone down pretty much across the board, right? So, which means you have to spend more money to get the same number of leads or you have to hire more people to get that marketing out and to get those leads. it's been challenging. ROI has gone down substantially on marketing channels.

Clayton Hepler (14:11)
Correct. Yep.

Correct, so the way that we're sort of, because what happens is you need to get better at doing everything that you're doing, right? But this has happened in household selling, et cetera, right? So this is not a new thing, right? We just need to be better. That's the honest answer. But with cold calling, cold calling calls per deal, or calls per

or leads per deal has gone up. Texting is still an insanely effective channel, right? It's by far the most effective channel across the board. There's a lot of regulatory stuff that you have to be aware of with that, but it's super, super effective. I don't know how much longer that's gonna be a viable channel, but that's the reality. Last thing is gonna be direct mail. Direct mail, I think, and I can go into the other channels, but...

getting super sniper approach to direct mail, that's gonna be incredibly, incredibly important. Layering on demographics, that's gonna be the new norm, right? And so, I have a community of people, like very high level operators, called, like we've already, we talked about it at the Deal Engine, it's CAP, we have a CAP number that we're gonna do, and basically what it's gonna be is sort of an aggregation of the best,

people in the space that share the kind of proprietary secrets and we're all gonna rise up together to build a kind of a group of people that are crushing deals, but I think the majority of the people dude are gonna get washed out. I think it's gonna happen and you know a variety of different reasons why but definitely lead flow has gotten more challenging I think particularly in the cold calling space. So how we've handled is we're

building an agency partnership now, trying to figure it out. But there's an agency that's not known by anyone in the space yet, that's outside of the purview of most people that have been doing this for a long time, that we're considering a partnership with in terms of bringing them on to help us with running our cold calling team, because it's also a pain in the butt to run a cold calling team. I mean, it's really a pain in the butt. You know, I'm not putting the cart before the horse here, but I think that these are all things that matter.

And then last but not least is the sales aspect

I kind of coined the term internally and externally of a 3D investor, which is cash double close seller finance, but that's what you need to do in 2026 and beyond. And I think that that's what you have to be able to do to convert the same amount of leads that you converted last year. Guess what? Next year it's gonna be more difficult. In the following year it's gonna be more difficult.

is gonna be more difficult to every single year and so you get either better or you do more exit strategies. You can use the same marketing channels but that's how I think about it, man. More exit strategies and getting better at what you currently do.

Justin Piche (17:14)
I don't know if that's gonna sit easy with some listeners, but I don't think it's meant to.

started the podcast we

We don't want to blow smoke up anybody's rear side and say, hey, this is all rainbows and butterflies. Like you're going to crush this. It is harder out there than it ever has been. And even experienced operators like Clay and I are feeling the pressure, right? I agree with the getting better. You know, we've talked about kind of our different strategies for how to kind of scale up the business or continue to grow or just continue to have a viable enterprise that lasts longer. My main strategy has just been larger deals.

Right? The larger deals with less competition at that level, but requiring significantly more work and a different skill set than your average kind of land deal that most folks are doing. And those have been working great. And I think the only reason we've been able to be successful there, or at least the way I've been able to make money while doing it, because it takes so much money to do these deals, is by having a successful land flipping business that has kind of carried the regular income.

through the years of building up the skillset to be able to do some of these larger developments. I, know, yeah, it's just, it's interesting.

The business needs continual improvement by everybody. And it needs continual monitoring to understand how well you're doing in any respective segment of it. And by segment, I mean your data analysis, your marketing, your sales on the acquisition side, your transaction coordination handling, your listing, your selling on the Dispo side, the strategies you use to get rid of property and get money in the door. All those things need constant attention and rework. It's like,

That's one of the things that I think burns a lot of people out. And part of what I'm feeling today, really, which, know, Clay and I were talking earlier, I don't know if it's gonna make it to the podcast, but like, there's a lot of, it just feels overwhelming sometimes with how many things, how many moving pieces there are in this business. But you really can't rest. You know, I think this is a fallacy maybe that some of you listeners might believe that I certainly believed when I started this business. I thought, I'm digging a hole.

Okay, and at the bottom of the hole, I'm gonna find a ladder and I'm just gonna climb out and I'm just gonna keep climbing this ladder and just keep going out and it's gonna crush. And for the first year, that's exactly what I did. I dug a hole, I put a bunch of money in, I had spent so much time, I negotiated a ton of good deals, I got money, I paid myself back, I started hiring employees, I started doing more and the market was good and we just kept making more more money even through really like last year. There was nothing but up, even though it got harder, it was still nothing but up.

And now we're at the point where, I don't know, it's like something's shoveling dirt on the top. And so not only are we trying to climb, but we're trying to wipe the dirt out to the side as well while we're climbing. And so maybe there's another ladder that we're trying to climb up as well. this is not the best metaphor, but that other ladder is these kind of bigger deals. But we wouldn't be able to do them if we didn't have the cash flow from the core business. But in order to keep the core business alive, which employs a

good bit of people on my team, like we've got to keep working at it, right? And a lot of that is getting the right people in place. And also as the CEO, being able to spend my mental energy improving and helping the team, you know, get the processes refined every quarter, feels like every quarter, really every quarter, it feels like, we need to work on this process. We thought we had it dialed. Things have changed in the market. We need to change it again. We need to refine it. We need to make it more efficient. We need to make it better.

It's probably not gonna sit well with a lot of folks. It's the reality of this business.

Clayton Hepler (20:46)
Yeah, so it's very interesting that you say this and it's gonna bring you to the point that we thought we were gonna talk about, but now we're gonna talk about. So I was super gun-ho about the integrator hire that I hired. I hired this integrator, the COO, by the way, shouldn't have called him a COO because COOs are paid like $350,000 a year. And this guy wasn't, right? He did an amazing job.

And something happened in his life of transition, which I'm super happy for him, but he's transitioning out of the seat, right? We're on very, very good terms. It's all positive, but he's no longer gonna be with my organization. So, instead of acting, what I did was I looked around and I said, okay, like we have some things that are going well. We're doing well on some deals and some projects, and others we need to improve upon.

What are those other things? What are the other things that we need to improve upon? Because I sense there's some overwhelm in our transactions department. We're doing a lot of deals over there. And so how do we ride this ship? So I go in and I interview everyone in my organization. I go in, I go through, and I sit down for an hour and half, two hours, Justin, with everyone in my company.

And I tasked them before this meeting with what's the biggest constraint, where are your biggest problems, where are you frustrated, where are you not empowered, where are you confused? And they fill out this five, seven page sheet. Because the COO of the business, and dude, this is a huge lesson, so get ready, because this is going to change the trajectory of myself as a business builder for the rest of my life.

So, I get all this context from people. There are, for example, in the transactions department, there are things that are not being passed over from the acquisitions to the transactions in the way the transaction needs, so transactions becomes this dumping ground for information. And then my funding, my funding department, which we got this great deal, the funding department.

is not getting the right information over to transactions and so we're degrading relationships with our external clients because we're funding a lot of deals. And there are all these things, there are all these things that I could have acted on. dude, know, the amount of little nail biters, big business changing things that we need to handle. So I kind of sat back and I kind of said, you know, like,

What do I need to do? Because I'm no longer going have this operator in the seat. Like how do I, because this is, because I have a funding business and I also have this community that I'm super a part of and that I care about and I spent a lot of time in and I, you know, and I have this main business, right? So how do I actually do this, right? Well, it's about empowering your people and giving them the gusto.

to go out and make mistakes and solve the problems by themselves and then come back to you. One of the things that I did really poorly, and the reason why I hired the integrator is I felt overwhelmed by all of these tasks that I had to get done. I'm like, I'm just gonna give this to an integrator and let him fix it all, right? That was the wrong decision, despite all the other things that I said on all the podcasts. We can change, guys. I'm a human being, right?

And I definitely admit what I'm wrong. And so I made this, what I did is I created this environment of me pushing down work to the COO, right? And then him pushing down work to people, and then them pushing work back up to me. Or back up to him, and then back up to me. And I would create these memos that I didn't have the context of what people were doing, and then they would push you back, this is confusing, and then there would be this gridlock. Because people were analysis by paralysis.

They didn't know what to do, they didn't know what my intent was, because the intent was being diluted. And there was also an aspect of me as a leader not being able to properly convey, because I just didn't have the right tools, and I didn't have an experience like this to kind of reflect. These are all very positive things, and I hope you guys learn from this more than I do. Now here's the actual lesson.

The lesson is a lot of times what we think we actually need is not what we need. And especially in the organization that we're talking about. if you look at your organization, you reflect, you pause this, whatever you're doing. Hopefully you're not driving, hopefully you're sitting by whatever, hopefully you're not listening to us when you're working out too because you want to focus on your workout.

But what I really grasped was there's this level of empowerment that you need to give your people that you trust in them and you slowly give them this, this is the difference between the delegation and the application and then you slowly, and you have them fix these nail biters. You have them fix these problems. But the problem is, what happens is, and the mistakes that I would make, is I would bring someone on to my organization.

In the first 90 days, I expect them to be like me. I expect them to have all the context of me as the leader. And they don't have any of the context, none of it. And so I would give them a lot of information and tasks and go complete this, go do this. And then I would do that with a bunch of different people. And by me giving them all this information, and I would give them a reasonable amount of context but not enough and not communicate with them enough.

I never empowered them individually to solve the problems. And then to make it worse, I would hire based on emotions, right? And so I would hire all these people based on emotions, and I wouldn't wait for the perfect people. I have really good people on my team now, they're extraordinary. But I made all these mistakes. And so then the way I solved this, Justin, was to hire an integrator. Because I didn't look at myself and say, I'm the problem.

Justin Piche (26:28)
How often are you the problem? You know what I mean? Like, not you personally, I just mean like, yeah, you, you, you like, I think in business in general, looking for.

Clayton Hepler (26:32)
Me, man me, that's my wife, that's my wife. So how does this relate to

Lead Flow? How does this relate to the new business, whatever? So earlier we were talking about reflection, internal and external context, right? And the internal and external context, the context that we got that I was talking about last week, if you're following with me, some people are like, this dude's talking so fast, I can't even. The internal context that I got from last week,

I reflected upon that and made a decision to empower my team and support them along the way. Not only because I don't want to be a micromanaging person, which I'm really good at micromanaging people, but also because I believe that they will create solutions to these nail biters and constraints that I wouldn't have been able to think of. And like you mentioned earlier on this call, or this podcast, was they might not do it the way that I...

I think they should do it, provided they solve the problem, that's actually what matters. So how does this actually relate to lead flow to building the organization? If you strip this down and you think about what does my organization actually need, a lot of times it's me either empowering my people or me going and grabbing and grasping more information to figure out how are other people actually doing this? How do I improve this process, whether it's me getting my hands dirty,

But these are all decisions that we make as leaders. And I thought I needed to hire someone to tell me that, the integrator to tell me that. But if I really had a marketing problem, I should hire a marketing person. Or I should get really good at the marketing thing. And marketing is kind of the big thing that I hear a lot of people talk about in the deal engine. People in the deal engine are doing well, but a lot of other people are saying, hey, I'm just not getting enough traction, right?

And I think that comes down a lot to you having to stare yourself in the mirror and say, dude, I'm the problem, not empowering my team enough or I'm not learning enough to get this right. Because there are other people that are crushing it. And sometimes, you the last thing I would say here is sometimes, you you're not good enough to build the business that you want to build. And so you need to slow down and not hire so damn fast and say, I'm going to build this business so that I can

pull cash out of it and I'm gonna slowly get to where I need to be, but I need to be there in 10 years, not two. Because the way people screw this up is they build a bloated team, and we've talked about this a million times, they build a bloated team, they move so quickly that they're not actually thinking through, I need this integrator, by the way, I'm pointing at myself, not blaming anyone else. Or I'm micromanaging my team or I'm doing all these things that are taking from the success of my team.

And I just need to point at myself and blame myself. Because people have gotten through harder markets, people have done harder things, and at end of the day, the buck stops with you as a CEO, and I believe it's our responsibility to figure that out ourselves. Whether that's going to get more coaching, curriculum, working with people, community, whatever, or looking at your numbers. Justin and just went through a lot there. ⁓

Justin Piche (29:34)
Yeah. I mean, well

said. I, yeah. I mean, I agree. I mean, that's an important lesson to learn and important lesson to share. You know, you can only hope that not everybody has to learn it by experience and can instead learn it by understanding somebody else's experience and make strides to fix it in their own business. think setting up a team where your team is empowered to solve problems from the get-go is obviously the desired, the desired state of any business.

I think along the lines of the same lesson you've learned, the lesson that I've one of the biggest lessons I've learned in growing this business over the last five years is really like the same thing, which is I can't I can't force this business to grow because of my own effort. There's only so much of me to go around, and when you bring on bigger deals or you're expanding or whatever, you get these key roles underneath you that are helping, you know, keep the core business going and growing it themselves.

Like you've got to get the right people in the seat that are going to solve these problems and take ownership and make things happen. And I think a lot of the reason why I'm currently feeling overwhelmed is because maybe that isn't happening to the level that I want. And so whose fault is that? Right, it's obviously my fault. There's something that I'm not quite doing right or communicating correctly or setting expectations correctly with the team if I feel like...

problems aren't being solved and they're all falling on me to solve. Because the point of those hires in the first place, right, was to solve problems in their own respective departments, bring the solutions to me so that we can keep growing as a team, right? Not necessarily find problems and push them right back up to me. You know, I feel like I have a good week when I don't hear about problems, but I only hear solutions. And I have a bad week when I just hear about problems after problem after problem.

Like, yeah, if I look back over the past like several months and I think about the weeks that were really good and the weeks that were bad, like that's the underlying theme is the ones that were good problems were solved and I didn't have to solve them necessarily. Maybe I gave some input or guidance or whatever, but solutions were brought. And the bad weeks, you know, I felt like the workload is just growing beyond my capacity to handle it.

Clayton Hepler (31:51)
Yeah, which kind of brings me to the crown, the end of the podcast, right? Which is, hire, if you cannot afford to hire the person that you need to hire, you need to become the person that you are trying to hire until you can afford that person. And I'm not talking about like, you know, having to hire the $200,000 a year employee. A lot of times guys like, we're not at that level.

Like a lot of the land investors just aren't at that level. You can't even pay yourself $200,000. You shouldn't be thinking about that high, right? That's point right back at me too. But just the quality of the people that you bring on, whether it's global talent, there's amazing global talent. Just pay a little more. Bring on the right person. And so one day you can have someone that, my underwriter is from Indonesia. He's an absolute beast.

and he runs the underwriting department. He has my total confidence. I don't double check anything. He's a beast. But we hire these people and we don't empower them and we don't need a lot of people to build this business to be incredibly profitable. We just need the right people and the right people allows us to have these hiccup months or to get through the storm of, leave flows down right now.

to get to where we need to be, to build the profitable business that we're looking for. And that's a limitation of self that we're all fighting. We fight that battle every day, every single one of us. And yes, that's all I got, man.

Justin Piche (33:15)
Yeah, I guess quick updates. We're closing our biggest deal here. Me and Ben and Trey at the end of the month. we got we are the best drop deal. Seventy seven or 78. We'll see lots asphalt roads, water infrastructure, power infrastructure. And yeah, I mean, it's been a crazy.

road, feels like getting this deal over the line. have a meeting tomorrow in Bastrop actually to meet with the water company. We went through like a huge back and forth to get approval to get water from them. And this company is known for being challenging for developers. And then maybe just like the quick synopsis, sent, had our engineers, we had to pay their, you engineering team to do an analysis, this determine if our

our development could get water from them if they had the right flow rates, if they had the right pressures, whatever, for fire flow. And they came back to us with an analysis that would have had us putting in three to $4 million of offsite improvements, which completely killed, would have killed the deal. Like, couldn't have done it. And so we looked at the analysis and they used completely wrong assumptions. Not the fire flow assumptions that we gave them. They doubled the fire flow or tripled, quadrupled the fire flow for double the amount of time.

and tied a connection into a smaller line than the one we were asking to tie into. And because of that, it gave us these numbers that were like, you gotta build 18 inch line for three miles or something crazy like that. We're like, okay, no, we can't do. So we saw the analysis, we had them redo it, they came back and actually it was good. It was like, hey, we can provide you. But what they did, and this is like more of an engineering kind of technical thing, but to give the audience who's listening some kind of

Clayton Hepler (34:43)
Gosh.

Justin Piche (34:58)
Project's moving forward, I got a meeting in BassShop to discuss it, and next podcast I'll share with everybody the results of that negotiation and discussion. Clay, thank you for sharing all that today. I think there's a lot of valuable lessons in this podcast for the audience. And I'd love to leave everybody with a super positive note. And I guess the positive note is when you're building a team,

You cannot rely on just yourself. You have to rely on other people, right? And you have to rely on, you have to empower your team to make decisions and solve problems for you. And if you can do that, you will be able to get through the down times in this business.

Clayton Hepler (35:33)
Couldn't have said it better myself, Thank you guys always. As always, we appreciate you guys listening to the podcast. And if you got benefit from it, like, rate, review, and subscribe. Make sure to put my name there as always. Anyone else that puts Justin's we got a problem. And have a great rest of your day. Thanks, guys.

Justin Piche (35:51)
by y'all.