Episode 3: AI, Hiring, Outsourcing, and a Deal Review

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the ground game podcast. This is your host clay Hepler

Justin Piche (00:07)
And this is Justin Pichet. We're here to talk about how to win the ground game.

Clay Hepler (00:24)
past weekend you had a big event that you went to, actually spoke at, so I'd love to hear a little bit about your presentation too, but tell me a little bit about what we're talking about and catch our audience up to speed.

Justin Piche (00:38)
Yeah, absolutely. this weekend, this is right now. It's October 1st when we're recording this. This weekend was Ajay Sharma's land scaling summit. And, know, it was honestly, I think it set the standard for kind of boutique land conferences. All right. There's a lot of different real estate conferences that people go to around the country. And there's a lot of ones that are really designed as sales pitches, you know, like it gets a bunch of people. There's some value. They bring some

some students or some people to learn and some people to talk. And then at the end, there's this huge pitch. It's like sign up for my coaching program or sign up for my like software or sign up for my mastermind or get help with your scaling your land business or whatever it is. But this one was nothing but information from some of the best operators in the space, exceptional networking and topped it off with a charity gala where the room raised $36,000 to support human trafficking.

It was incredible. It was just an incredible weekend in every way. Ajay is a good buddy of mine and I was just honored to speak at the event and just showed how incredible of a human he is and what he can put together his team.

Clay Hepler (01:52)
was it like? What was the structure like? Like, what made this a little bit more beneficial than your average pitch a $25,000 course?

Justin Piche (02:02)
Yeah, think, know, Ajay put this together without any goal of making money. You know, like there's no money being made from from this event. It's really just giving back to the community and just building a place where people can come and network and learn. And so the structure was kind of like this. It was like two days, two days of two day event all day, one day, and then basically like a half day the next day with the afternoon free and the gala in the evening.

And so we showed up at 8 a.m. breakfast networking, you get to see everybody you haven't seen in a minute. For me, it was really cool because I got to meet some of my coaching students in person and some of the folks that I coached through LearnLand in person. It's just, you know, shaking their hand and talking to them was incredible. And yeah, it started off obviously with Ajay's keynote. And then we went through multiple panels of experts. We had like a social media branding kind of panel.

of people that have really kind of crushed that game and how they do it. had, you know, there's one guy that was an incredible investor that's moved into the entitlement space that has AI texting, essentially, where he does like, has AI bots do all the texting. It's almost like a paid per lead service, which I thought, or it is a paid per lead service, which I thought it was just, it was interesting to see how different people are solving and tackling those problems. Sales, and then,

plenty of time for networking and just talking and asking people how they do certain things in between. The second day was the day that I spoke. It started at nine. We had an AI presentation with Callen Faulkner, who's amazing. She's amazing. And man, I took so many things away from that. My talk was second, which was more, my talk was titled, let's see, Big Teams and Big Dreams. That was what it was titled.

But was kind of, it was a little bit of an origin story, plus my philosophy on growing a team, growing a business, like what is it supposed to do? What are our core values? How do I hire? Who do I hire? And what do we look for in growing a team and growing a team culture? Yeah, it was just, I mean, it was great. And then the charity gala, man, holy smokes. Intense, incredible. We can go more into that later, but from that, what do you got? What questions you got?

Clay Hepler (04:24)
Well, man, I mean, I think the big thing is the team, you growing a team, right? And we were talking at one of our first episodes was a little bit about like, what's the structure of our team actually look like? Right. And everyone has a little bit of a different philosophy, but I think there are principles that really can guide someone from, know, maybe they're doing two to three deals a month consistently. And they're saying, Hey, like, I know that there's a couple of bottlenecks in my system. And one of them is hiring people.

So what do people actually get wrong with the hiring process?

Justin Piche (04:58)
I'm gonna like, I'll just say I am uniquely blessed in the sense that like my life path has taken me such that, you know, going through the Navy, being forced in a very young age, you know, I was 22 essentially when I commissioned, yeah, I was 22 when I commissioned as an officer in the Navy. And then by the time I was 23, I had a division of 30 sailors.

of which I was by far the least knowledgeable and least experienced in terms of how like the ship actually operated and what the maintenance schedule really was. And like, what did we have to do? What did I have to do as their leader? Like in charge of them to make their lives better. And you know, in the Navy, you get a lot of coaching from senior enlisted. I mean, they're the chief's job. So the chief in the Navy, the chief is an O or as a as an E -7 So senior enlisted. part of their job, honestly, is training.

the junior officers to become leaders. And it's a quick, know, it's like trial by fire, man. You get in there and like you realize immediately how big of an impact you can have on people's lives just by breaking down barriers. And I think the philosophy side of it is like you as a leader, your main job is to build up your team. Your main job is to remove every barrier. So those people that work for you.

can achieve more and more and more. So a lot of people don't understand that, I think, right? They say, they see growing their team is like, okay, I have these tasks that I need done. And that fundamentally is like what you got, have a lot of things that need to be done and you cannot do them all. But if you just hire somebody to do a task.

I mean, sure, you might be a little more effective. It's almost like teaching somebody to fish versus catching them some fish. Like you really need to not just hire them to do that job, but like invest in them so that they can not only perform better in it, but also invest in them to the point where they are now finding the issues and finding ways to do it better themselves. So I think when people, maybe to answer your question, right? When hiring, I think one of the big mistakes is they don't really know what

Clay Hepler (06:59)
Yeah, that's a

Justin Piche (07:05)
they're hiring for exactly and they don't know how to onboard people correctly.

Clay Hepler (07:10)
Okay, so I want to go through actually a practical example of this here so that the listeners can in real time kind of talk through and understand your philosophy, right? So right now in my business, right, I'm thinking about hiring an operations manager, right? But there are different types of operations managers. Some people might say, hey, I need an operations manager and they don't really define clearly exactly what they're looking for. An operation manager could be a chief of staff.

They could be a COO, which is more strategic based, which is more output based, or it could be an operations manager that is handling processes, that is maybe a lower paying, you know, handling tech and things like that. And so really getting clarity on what exactly am I looking for, right? So what I want to just work with you through right now, Justin, is like, if you're recommending, how does someone pick the role or,

outline the job description, what would be the step by step that you would say for someone to actually do that?

Justin Piche (08:11)
know, we have obviously AI is huge now. And so I rely heavily on maybe using AI to pull the information that I have and that I know out of me. Because like, it's hard to sit down and just type up a job description. But there are ways to prompt AI so that AI can act as the exceptional, you know, job post writer.

and I need to come up with all of the responsibilities, the expectations, goals for growth, whatever of this role, ask me 20 like great questions that will help you give like a great job post. Something like that can really help you define it. I mean, as just like a, hey, let's get started. How do I get started with a job post? Right. But for me, it kind of starts with, you've read the book by Dan Martell,

Clay Hepler (09:02)
Have a good time.

Justin Piche (09:03)
Buy Back Your Time, holy smokes. Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. Great book, really good book. It was actually recommended to me by Callan Faulkner, but it right when it came out. And one of the things that he talks about in the book is when you're looking at all the tasks that you have to do, this is an exercise I think everybody should do. All the tasks that you have to do in your business. There's four quadrants, right?

And in the bottom left hand corner, all the things that don't really add a ton of value, like there are things that have to get done. They're not necessarily revenue generating activities, but they're things that have to get done and you don't like them. Right. And then the top left corner, you have all the things that are revenue generating, but you also don't like. And then the bottom right, you have all the things that are revenue generating that you don't like. And then at top, have all the things that are revenue generating and you like, and your goal.

is to make sure you're only working on the things in that top right corner, the revenue generating activities that you enjoy doing. And the first place that you should look to outsource those tasks or hire somebody in is that bottom left quadrant, the things you don't like that aren't necessarily revenue generating, task-based things. And so just performing that exercise can give you a pretty clear picture of all the things that you need to offload. And I can help you formulate maybe your first job posting to figure out, who do I need to hire first?

Clay Hepler (10:26)
Yeah, that's very helpful and I think that when you're starting to think about the hiring process, right? Some people are like, hey, you know, I don't necessarily like sales, right? Or I don't necessarily like the marketing component, you know, getting leads through the door. And in a land business, we're in a sales and marketing business, right? And so as much as you might want to get that off your plate, at the beginning, that is the task.

Justin Piche (10:49)
I

Clay Hepler (10:56)
Right? Even if you don't maybe necessarily love it, it's hard to beat an owner in their tenacity, their perseverance and their perspective on closing deals. Like no one's going to work as long and hard as you are as an owner. Right? And so of course, you know, the support positions for that is very important, but in my, in my estimation, a lot of people try to scale out of the actual revenue producing activities quickly versus

Like they wanna scale out of the sales and marketing when they should be scaling out of the admin and fulfillment. Do have any thoughts on that?

Justin Piche (11:29)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I do very much. I think the first place generally most people should be scaling out of and specifically in the land business. But I think this is applicable to kind of any kind of high, you you need to sift through a bunch of leads to find your deal, right? There are high value activities and there are lower value activities in there. And honestly, lead qualification, just qualifying the leads, getting them in the door and making sure you're looking at good properties and good sellers. That's the first thing.

people should outsource. Get your processes and then all of the really time consuming work to actually reach out to these people, figure out if they're interested in selling, look at the property, figure out if you wanna buy it and try to arrive on some sort of price that you think you might be able to negotiate on. That whole task, that's like the first thing I think anybody in this business should outsource, right? Because it frees you up as the owner to do that really high value task, which is negotiate.

right, make offers, get things under contract, right? And eventually, eventually, relatively quickly, ideally, you now don't have enough time for that activity. And then it's time to hire a much more skilled person who can take over that aspect of it.

Clay Hepler (12:42)
Yeah, that's an excellent point, but especially like most people are scaling themselves out of a hundred thousand dollar a year business. usually unless you hit that seven figure mark, you should not be scaling outside of a sales, you know, your sales role in the organization. That's my personal perspective. Do you have anything to add to that? Like, are you more of like scaling out of that so you can think more strategically early on?

Justin Piche (13:05)
Yeah.

That's not really good point. don't I don't necessarily put like a dollar amount or I don't think I don't really think about it as like a dollar amount. I think certainly if like it's hard to support the OpEx if you have a hundred thousand dollar a year business and it's hard to think that you're really going to get the quality of person you need to scale you out of that if that's what you're producing. But the other thing is like you also need to build the the team to support the goal. Right. And that's honestly like a lot of what kind of my personal talk.

was about is that in this business and a lot of businesses similar to this when you're trying to scale and you're trying to grow it feels like you're walking on a tightrope and you're holding this big bar. Okay. All right to balance yourself and on one side you have scaling your OPEX too quickly scaling your team too quickly and not being able to support with revenue generating or profit to actually pay them. And on the other hand you have lost opportunity costs of not scaling quickly enough to support your goal. So it's like

You're walking on this tightrope and you're trying to build this team and grow the revenue simultaneously. But one has to come before the other. I don't know. It's a chicken and egg thing, but one of those has to come first. And my philosophy is that the team has to scale into the before the goal. You can't, you're going to hit a wall if you're going hard after a goal without the team to support it.

Clay Hepler (14:31)
Mm-hmm and you know when when I make hiring decisions particularly like I'm making a couple of decisions of bringing people on right now I'm always thinking about like if I am able to have this person in my organization Can I bring in me personally because I'm giving this person I'm advocating responsibility. I'm delegating a lot of my tasks Can I bring in an extra three thousand a month? Can I bring in an extra four thousand a month if I'm hiring a?

global talent person, right? And I can, right? I went to a conference a couple of weekends ago and I raised half a million dollars just by talking to a couple of people and reduced my cost of capital by 20 % annualized. so, things like that, it's hard for someone that's just sort of sitting in the business to realize that those types of activities, the high leverage activities,

Justin Piche (15:17)
Yeah, that's huge.

Clay Hepler (15:30)
for a CEO are often raising capital, like reducing cost of capital, empowering people, like you said, Justin, earlier, like the role of the CEO is to make everyone else's jobs easier. In other words, removing barriers for achievement, right? So I'm thinking as a CEO, I'm my core sales guy, I'm thinking, he told me, hey, this is my revenue goal this year, right?

And so I'm thinking to myself, how can I bring in enough opportunity for this guy to allow him to hit his revenue goal? I'm not even thinking about writing revenue goal because I know that that's gonna be taken care of if I build a lead flow mechanism that's gonna support that. So those types of high value activities are what you're constantly trying to appraise as a business owner. And a lot of times, it's a weekly basis, right?

on a weekly basis, you're like, okay, now I actually need to do this this week because I've solved this nuanced constraint and now I need to go and solve this because this constraint is having problems now because I've created more opportunity in this part of my business.

Justin Piche (16:42)
we talked about this on a previous podcast, but we talked about the EOS system and just being able to hold your business accountable, being hold yourself accountable to the issues you're having in the business, like a cadence, a weekly cadence with your leadership team, or honestly, if it's just you and a couple of, you know, virtual assistants or remote employees, and I don't really like the term virtual assistants. Honestly, I think it's, I like the term like employees, but they're just overseas employees.

For you to go through that exercise yourself, identify the issues, prioritize them and solve them on a weekly basis. You it's kind of hard sometimes when you're scaling, you're like, okay, I'll deal with that when I get to it. But having that every week, no matter what, I come in, I look introspectively and I really look hard at myself because I want to get better. And I see these issues that I have, you've got to create some opportunity to actually prioritize and then solve them.

Clay Hepler (17:31)
guys, this is Clay with the Ground Game. Sorry to interrupt your podcasting experience, but if you can give us some reviews, give us some feedback on what do you like, what don't you like, and subscribing really helps us grow this channel. I mean, we're laying it all out there every single day. We're playing full out, and the gentleman's agreement here,

is if you like what you hear, you're getting benefit from this, please like, review, and subscribe. All right, back to the podcast.

there was a study that showed, you know, in December, you know, there was two research groups. Like one of the research groups was looking at the scale every single day. And the other research group was just say, Hey, you know, like count your calories in your head to try to like stay healthy. The one research group that did that,

didn't gain any weight. The other one gained 15 pounds on average, right? And so if you track what you're doing in your day to day, you'll be able to say, okay, am I actually doing the thing that's moving me closer to my goals? Here's an example. I did what is called a time audit. I think Dan Martell talks about this, Justin, I'm not exactly sure. Okay, so a time audit. So I tracked my time in Excel spreadsheet. And there's another app, it's called Rescue Time, which is an app that you can use that's sort of like really

Justin Piche (18:36)
Yeah, it does. Yeah, 100%.

Clay Hepler (18:48)
like software based time tracking using calendars and everything like that, but I actually like to manually put it in. And I looked at my, I've been doing over the past two weeks in 15 minute increments and I said, whoa man, I'm not working on the right stuff, right? I need to work on different activities. And so I constantly am looking at myself and checking myself and saying, okay, am I working on the right things that are actually moving my business forward? And if things are showing up,

like we were talking about earlier about buying back your time, if things are actually showing up more and more that you're getting on a call with someone to hire a task rabbit to send a purchase and sale agreement out to someone's house, you're like, you shouldn't be doing that task as a CEO, right? And so things like that, you can delegate or find someone to buy back that time so that you can start to focus on other things as a CEO.

Justin Piche (19:41)
And maybe just to circle back on your kind of question is like, what do people get wrong about hiring? I think a lot of it is that like being able to realize that your time is more valuable than the tasks that you're working on and have maybe the confidence to know that when you hire somebody, yeah, you're gonna have to pay them, right? Yeah, that's gonna cost you some money, okay? But what it should provide you is the ability

to generate more revenue doing higher value tasks. And that is the core principle behind it, right? You're trying to build a team, leverage people's work to be able to yourself generate more revenue and generate more revenue through your team.

Clay Hepler (20:26)
Yeah. And I find when hiring, one of the things that's helpful to always keep in mind is like focusing on like a hiring ladder or a core set of principles, right? Like whether you say, hey, what's the biggest constraint in my business and I need to focus on that. And so all the other things that are distracting me from that constraint, this is the theories of constraint, which is popularized by the book, The Goal. It's a great book. Highly recommend you read it. Or you use sort of a framework there. I've heard about like a hiring ladder, which is

always hire admin first, fulfillment, then marketing, then sales, then leadership. And so if you can focus on using that hiring ladder, especially when you're early on, that you can always use that as a frame of reference instead of just saying, I need this person because I've been in meetings all day and I'm overwhelmed that I need an executive assistant, when in reality you already have an executive assistant, you're just maybe not properly using them or you just feel overwhelmed because we're human beings.

And so using heuristics are also very helpful. Do you have anything that you use, Justin, that helps you sort of stay focused on the most important people to hire in your business to scale?

Justin Piche (21:37)
Yeah, mean, we mainly it's the quarterly quarterly meetings that we have with the leadership team. Like the thing we talked about, I think last podcast or the podcast before we're talking about what are our goals for the quarter, what are our annual goals? Those are the exercises that inform who needs to be hired next. Right. Because if I'm setting, for example, five million dollar revenue goal next year. Right. OK. Well, what is what is my average? I can work backwards. I can say, OK, what is my average gross profit or revenue per deal that we're currently targeting? OK.

How many leads does it take for us to close? Okay, how many cold calls or cold outreach do I need to do in order to actually get that many leads? Can my current acquisitions managers handle that many leads? Can my current cold outreach team handle that many outreaches? No, okay, where do I need to add people to do those tasks? And another goal might be

Right. want to, I personally want to take down more larger subdivides exempt and minor splits. Okay. So I want to do that. And right now on my team, I'm the underwriter. I'm the project manager. So how do I handle more? If I already feel like I'm totally pressed with my time, I don't know how many more I could personally take on and reasonably expect to complete effectively. Well, now I know, Hey, I need somebody else to do this. So I actually this last week or last week on Monday, I had my, I hired a

a underwriter project manager to start taking on. So she's building out our project management dashboard and notion. She's hooked in with my transaction coordinator and my leadership team now learning underwriting and comping on acquisitions, understanding what sales needs to get ready. And I'm training her personally on, hey, this is how we go through these deals because we have probably 20 different subdivides right now in the pipeline that are in various stages. And so we're looking at all of them. These are the steps we've taken. Here's the shortest path that we needed to take. Here's all the people.

that we needed to reach out to. This is what it looks like. Every project's unique, but in general, there's a flow to it. You need to be doing this. I think it's just, yeah, I mean, it's really just like making sure you're looking at what your goals are, setting clear, actionable, think quantifiable goals. And then from that, evaluating your current team, can you meet those goals with that team? And if not, that's kind of where your next hires come from. That's where mine come

Clay Hepler (24:00)
That's a really good set of heuristics. So I'd like to circle back on the land scaling summit. mean, is there any other practical pieces of advice or thoughts that really came out of that that you think, it's super relevant that help you're applying to your business?

Justin Piche (24:11)
man, yeah for sure.

Yeah, I mean, well, let me just stop and say, like, I brought my sales manager, Brian, who's really like a partner with me in this business. He came on pretty early in twenty twenty two when I I mean, I scaled real quickly right at the beginning and had a ton of properties like in the pipeline to market and sale or sell. And I, you know, I hit a bottleneck right of my own time. And so I brought on a U.S. based sales manager because I wanted somebody who could take ownership completely over Dispo, build out the sales team.

and get our properties moved. that was honestly an incredible hire. He's awesome. And I brought him to this land scaling summit. I mean, the takeaways for him on the sales side were incredible, right? The networking for him with other operators were incredible. networking in general and the relationship building aspect is something we can talk about and touch on. You know, there's, it can be a lonely,

Road. It's one of the reasons why we connected. Right. I mean, it's like land, like running this business is kind of a lonely thing and there's all kinds of masterminds and groups and whatnot that you can, you can engage in to kind of talk with other good operators, learn from them, learn from the questions they ask in a group coaching format or something like that. But there's something about in-person events or something about being able to shake someone's hand and look them in the eye that builds a level of trust that you can't really get from a zoom call. Right. And there's just.

There's a lot of people are more vulnerable. People are more open to sharing when they have that personal connection and that in itself made the event worth it.

Clay Hepler (25:54)
So Justin, I wanna just veer off here really quickly on what you said. I love the networking thing and I think we should touch on that. But some people are completely global talent oriented. Some people are all US based. So do you mind sharing the sort of structure of what a sales manager does? Is this guy in your day to day for your sales team?

Are you doing sales? Like, just give us a brief overview because a lot of people are their own sales manager. They're their Dispo manager, they're their Acquisition manager. And so, when did you know that this was the right time to hire this person? I just want to keep on the thread of hiring here.

Justin Piche (26:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, it goes back to like the quadrant that we were talking about earlier. What are the revenue driving activities that you enjoy, which is where you should be starting using your time and what are the revenue act driving activities that you don't enjoy or vice versa the ones that aren't revenue generating but are necessary and you know those two questions but really what I'm talking about is the revenue generating that I do enjoy and that I don't enjoy and pretty quickly one of the things that I decided is that I don't really enjoy like creating property listings.

And I don't really enjoy all of the buyers kicking tires, if you will, and all of the amount of workload that goes into that and properly marketing properties to sell. My enjoyment comes more on the, what is the possibility of this deal? And how do I make this deal work creatively on the purchase side? And we got to the point where the leads, the number of leads I was generating and the number of contracts we had were such that I didn't.

I wasn't able to give sales and dispo the right amount of attention, but it was absolutely necessary. Right? I mean, like the engine of the business is your acquisitions team. That's what's creating the opportunities. But in order to bring money on the door, you've got to sell them. Okay. You got to sell them. And yeah, I mean, that was, it was more of like, what do I enjoy spending more of my time going? I couldn't do both of them. We scale, like we had too much going on. And so, I hired that, that role. And so he, I mean, literally everything leading up to the property being listed and selling.

hiring our, and maybe to give the audience some idea, we entered 2024 with more than 100 properties in inventory. And right now we probably have like 75 properties in inventory that we own, that we are in the process of selling. And in that comes dozens of realtor relationships, a lot of Facebook marketplace postings, a lot of land ID postings, and many, many a buyer lead that come in each day.

So how do we build out the automatic follow ups? How do we build out the automations in our CRM to make sure we're following up with these people, right? I think you posted on X a little while ago, like a graphic or something about how quickly, speed delete, right? How important speed delete is. It's freaking important. It really is, especially, I mean, on both sides, it's super important in this business, speed delete. How many times have you gotten a text, a cold text or something like that from somebody on a property that you own?

And you're just like, sure. Like they may say, Hey, Clay, I'm interested in your land in Columbus County. Consider a bid for it or something like that. Cause you like, you would know automatically they're using like launch control or something like that. Well, whenever one of those texts comes into me, I reply immediately and I say, sure. Yeah. I'd love to hear an offer or something like that. I can count on my hand of like the hundreds of texts I've gotten like that about my houses or anything. I can count on my hand on one hand, the number of times somebody got back to me just the same day.

Not even like within five or 10 minutes, but like the same day. And as a seller, it's very clear when somebody does that. And as a buyer, it's very clear when somebody does that, they don't really care. They're not prioritizing you, right? They may not be serious. You just get this like thing in your head. You're like, whatever. It's the same thing with sales. And so we were, I wasn't able to keep up, right? And so I needed people to help make sure that we were on those leads, following up with those leads, building out the automation process. And then frankly just,

A lot of people, this is one of the big topics of the summit too that I had some great takeaways from. had a panel, four great guys up there talking about, and most of them were wholesalers, Or like a double close, primarily double close businesses. And so when you're in a double close business, there's a much higher priority put on finding a buyer for your property. You don't have the luxury of waiting around in some cases, 180 days or more to sell your property for top dollar. You've got to get those leads in immediately to sell the property. Otherwise,

you're gonna have to cancel the contract on the acquisition side, right? You're not gonna be able to buy it. And those guys up there, I mean, was just so good hearing some of the strategies that they employ to have like 50 days in inventories. Like some of the are, yeah, 50 days. I was like, man, we need to get our numbers down. But all right, I kinda, maybe a little off topic there.

Clay Hepler (30:45)
Yeah, so we'll definitely have an episode about the wholesaling and inventory reduction in the future. But I really like the breaking down of the Dispo Manager. and you might say, as a listener, might be like, my gosh, how, there's so many different things that they need to hire for, right? And what,

Justin saying here and you what I'm saying about the operations manager is you hire when you can't you cannot bear it anymore Especially in this business. This is my opinion because we are in a cyclical business. We're not in like a monthly recurring revenue, you know Justin might differ on this but when you were like to your wits end because I think most people scale too quickly because they don't have a pain threshold of I can work hard to push this thing through at a level that is

Notable. And so you gotta push hard until the point that you're like, dude, I can't do this anymore. And then that's when you go and hire very quickly for that position, right? at the beginning, if you're doing two, three, four deals a month, dude, you just need to get back on the phone in most cases. You can hire an executive assistant, a data scrubber, some basic global talent.

But, and the reality is, most of the time you just need to get back on the phone and call sellers, right? And like Justin said, get that lead manager to help you with qualifying those leads. So I wanna talk a little bit about something that you and I briefly touched on, AI, right? And that was a core thing that you said you gained from the scaling summit. Do you mind going into...

Kind of what you learned on a high level. We already talked about it with the job description here.

Justin Piche (32:42)
Yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of like a basic, obviously, really basic use case. But so Callan Faulkner, any listeners don't know who Callan is, you should change that. Go check her out. She's got a website called REI Optimize. She she's a great land investor, business owner, and she's also like an automation and AI kind of wizard in the space. Right. She comes from a corporate background of

of working in optimization, optimization of CRMs, et cetera. And then she's really taken that into the land space. And I've learned a ton from her over the years. The stuff she's put out for free, the master classes she's put on, and then also as a client of hers. But she had a great presentation. And we use a good bit of AI in our business already. mean, of course we use ChatGPT all the time. I've actually recently started using something called Abacus AI, which for those of you who are listening,

This is going to be worth the price of your time to listen to our podcast just in itself. Abacus is clutch. It is a multi-LLM kind of interface, and it has the ability to build out your own custom agents custom documentation that those agents can reference.

And so we're building, I'm building out a bunch of custom agents right now for my team. One's like a development guru, right? Where it's going to take all of the subdivide regulations for any of the counties that we're working in and compile them and be like the reference guide for when we get new properties, like what is the optimum way to split these based on the regulations that keep us in the exceptions or the minor things like that to quickly identify opportunities without my underwriter having to just Google every time. Like, I don't know, like Bibb County.

Georgia subdivision regulations, like what are they? Okay, read through them, kind of have them interpret. We're gonna get all those in there compiled so that we got an agent there that's able to advise on that type of stuff. And like I used one for this podcast. I have one called my Podcast Guru Chatbot. it really just, I mean, helps figure out, hey, what's the best way to do certain things? And you can train it on the specific tasks. So you don't have to build like a new kind of text thread with a Chat GPT every single time.

It also has the newest one. Here's the other one. It's only $10 a month and it has access to Claude Pro. It has access to O1 Preview, which is the newest chat GPT model. It has a bunch of them in there. It's really cool. Really cool. Really cool tool.

Clay Hepler (35:10)
Yeah, and you guys can let us know how effective it is because we use it for this podcast. So if it's, you know, if you're not having a good time listening to us, maybe don't use it.

Justin Piche (35:18)
Yeah, it's funny. so here's maybe here's an example of something that that Callan shared on the presentation. And I'm sure if you sign up for her, she has like a free master class that she's going to do some, think, October 8th or something. So it'll be it'll be before this podcast airs. You I've already passed. But she she was talking about using a tool called Clay Dotcom Clay AI to enhance your data substantially.

So one of the things we're guilty of is we download our data from Land Vision, we get into our CRM, and then we export it to do our cold outreach. And we're limited by the data fields that we're able to pull out of Land Vision. But we can use things like the GPS coordinates and use Clay to take those GPS coordinates and say, hey, Clay, create five new columns. And in each column, add the top five attractions closest to this property.

And then when you're formulating, when you're talking to a seller, you can be like, Hey, Clay, you know, one of the things that interests me the most in your property is how it's only 15 minutes from Rocky Mount State Park or like whatever it is. And, you know, that, type of an intro can, can it just builds a whole lot more credibility. Like, you know, what you're talking about as opposed to, Hey, Clay, are you shouldn't selling your property in, in Columbus County? Like there's just kind of a difference. It's like, you obviously know more about my property.

Clay Hepler (36:39)
Mm-hmm.

it's not as easy as just doing it like that. I mean, I've actually gone through Clay and done the data enrichment. You need to hire like a consultant and it's not like going on chat GPT and saying like, hey, like my wife and I haven't gone on a date in a month, like where should we go? Right? It's not that simple.

Justin Piche (36:50)
Right, right. It's.

No, it's not. It's not.

Clay Hepler (37:05)
Hey guys, by the way, I'm not guilty of doing that. I've never done that in my entire life. That was just a point of reference. So, I mean, I think AI is incredibly useful in the way that you're using it in your business is really based on, you you spending 20 hours and just enhancing your learning just a little bit. It's like such a big leverage point that most people, don't think use enough. It has to become as

ubiquitous in your business as Google is for searching for tasks and just like creating that muscle for using it and you'll be really surprised. Like for example, we've created a sales call analyzer in our business that has taken some of the best sales training and we just upload transcripts to a sales call analyzer and

gives us feedback on like, are the things that we really need to focus on in building a history with the sales call analyzer in order to enhance our team? And so we have a custom GPT and we have like a team chat GPT account that our team can just upload right into there. And it's really, really helpful for a lot of our team members because it gives quick actionable feedback. dude, want to talk, speaking about sales and closing deals in general,

I want to kind of talk about a deal. I know that we're gonna do a deal review on a weekly basis. I want to talk a little bit about a deal that we're doing. we are purchasing a 35 acre track, okay? And this 35 acre track is owned by two sisters. So these two sisters have been fighting about how to sell the property. They inherited it

Justin Piche (38:29)
Yeah, let's do it.

Clay Hepler (38:51)
So we really got down and understood their problem. And the problem was not that they didn't want to sell it. It was that they only wanted to sell part of it. And they wanted to then split it down the middle. And they sort of had this I want to sell part of this parcel, but I also want to keep it for sentimental sake. But they didn't really come to that conclusion on their own. In fact, we had to force that conclusion.

And so we had a conversation with the sellers, 34 total acres. We said, hey, listen, no big deal. We'll pay for the survey of the parcel. We'll give you your side of the survey for free if we can get it under contract for this number. Okay, so we got it under contract. And so we subdivided it to two smaller parcels for the sisters and then two larger parcels. It was one big parent parcel and two larger parcels for us that we were buying it for.

34,000 originally and we thought we could sell it for probably 90,000 total, maybe 100. what we did is we subdivided it and then we got the survey back, right? So we got the survey back and instead of being 34 acres or something like that, it was 27 acres. And so what we had to do is actually go back to the seller and we had to renegotiate with the seller, right?

Justin Piche (40:11)
Mm.

Clay Hepler (40:12)
And so here's something I actually learned about this deal. a clause to our purchase and sale agreements that states the established and agreed upon acreage is X, right? And it's more extensive than this, but the established and agreed upon acreage is X. If the acres is, if we do a survey and the acres come below,

the agreed upon acres, we will change the purchase and sale agreement, the number for the purchase, using the price per acre that we use to purchase the parcel for. So we don't have to sign an addendum or negotiate with the seller. And we get them to agree with that on the front end, right? So we say, listen, we saw the survey and this looks all good, I just wanna make sure that this is okay.

Justin Piche (40:57)
Right.

Clay Hepler (41:08)
And notice the language we say if it's less than that. Now we don't say if it's more than that, right? We keep it the same, right? But if it's less than that, right, because we're gonna spend the money to go out there and use the survey, and buy the survey, right? And so if it's more than that, well, we are spending our money to do the survey, and so we're still taking the risk of doing the survey. And we explain to the seller in that way, but if it's less than that,

we still have a new survey that we can share with the sellers to prove it to them and we still took the risk. So sellers are open to that type of thing. And so we try to learn every time, Justin, that we have a transaction like this.

Justin Piche (41:51)
That's great, just to like I've done that myself. We had a property. We don't add it into every contract, which honestly, I don't know why, but we had a property in Georgia that I was purchasing and the deeded acreage said 55 acres and the land ID kind of measurement said 46. And that was a big enough deal. We were paying two K an acre for it. That was that was, you know, a 20 K almost 18 K swing.

what we were going to pay for it based on the 55 acres and what I thought it probably was based on the GIS and based on the land ID map. And so I put in there from the beginning, I was like, hey, you we agree on this price, you know, 110 or whatever it was. But we'll they agreed to amend the price to a 2000 per acre based on final surveyed acreage. And so we got the survey and it came back at 49.

.98 acres, right? Kind of right at 50. And so we reduced the price down to like 99,000 versus 110 just by putting that clause in there. And there was no renegotiation. It was like, okay, yeah, this is the price we agreed on per acre. This is the, the, the final surveyed acreage. Here's the final price. And it was great. I mean, it really was. And I've had that burn me on a couple of deals too, where I didn't get a survey on the deal, right? I bought it. And then when I went to go sell the property, Hey, I thought it was 10 acres or 11 acres or whatever it was.

My buyer surveyed it and it came in lower. And so then obviously there were trade backs on that sale as well. Like, hey, you know, we'll just honor the same price per acre and reduce it. But if I got that survey from the front end and had that clause in there, I probably would have paid a little bit less for it and been able to make a better margin on the sale side.

Clay Hepler (43:29)
Yeah, and just for the listeners, like this is also a calculation that you have to make. Like if you have a large parcel, it actually makes sense, right? Like a 55 to a, you know, 80 or 55 to a 60. Like if you're paying 4,000 an acre, like that's a big swing. But if you're buying a two acre parcel and they do a survey and it's 1.67, like usually those...

Justin Piche (43:46)
Right. Yeah.

Clay Hepler (43:57)
that swing's not big unless you're in like a crazy expensive county in, you know, close to a big city and it's like 200,000 an acre and then you then you might want to have the survey. But it's all based on, for me, it's all sort of based on how it's showing up with the numbers that we're investing, right? I'm not gonna do a three acre parcel survey if I'm buying it for $10,000.

all these things that, you know, you're, that we're doing like to basically conduct due diligence, they're all analysis is for risk for the amount of capital that you have. Some people have more money than

they know what to do with. And so man, they're gonna go out and do the perk test. They're gonna do the survey on every single track. Like I do perk tests on every single track though, to be fair. But a lot of times, it depends on your risk appetite and also the price. And so that's just things that you should consider when doing the due diligence on the front end. Justin, I I think we covered a lot today. I we covered the land scaling summit. We covered a little bit of AI.

Justin Piche (44:49)
Hahaha.

Clay Hepler (45:08)
very briefly, armchair AI experts we are. A little deal review here. Do you have anything else to add, man, before we wrap it up here for today?

Justin Piche (45:12)
Yep, yep.

Yeah, you know, I think just to touch on your kind of like the things you've learned, you learned from that deal and kind of the discussion on, hey, do you survey, do you soil test, etc.? I think my philosophy is more on what is going to make this property easier to sell and like how much money should I invest to make it easier to sell? Because there's no question that clearing work like a good survey and a soil test, they answer a lot of the questions that some of your buyers have, which is how am going to get on this property? Where is exactly the boundaries of the property?

and can I build my home on this property? And so, you I think you definitely have to do a calculation of each property of like, you know, what's the profit margin on this? What's my expected gross profit? Is it worth investing this? And it's certainly once you get over a certain threshold, it's like every property we do those things on, because we just want to be able to answer all the questions before the sellers come or the, sorry, before the buyers come so that we can move this property quicker and get that money back in our, in our bank accounts.

So anyway, just a quick quick little addition there. But yeah, man, this was a great podcast. Thank you for asking me some good questions about the land scaling summit and just to maybe encourage the listeners, you know, to get out there. It's easy to get Conference fatigue or like event fatigue, and there's a lot of different events that happen all around, but you really should consider getting out to a few of them because the relationships you can build are, you know.

It could be the thing that rockets you to the next stage in your business, finding that right partner, finding that right person with the right advice.

Clay Hepler (46:48)
Yeah, I think that's an excellent thing. also, getting on social media too. Social media is like a virtual conference. If you follow the right people, if you connect with the right people, Justin and I are very active on X. We'll make sure to put our handles below. We're answering DMs, Instagram as well. And you can really interact with us there and talk. If anything about this podcast specifically, like jumped out to you.

You want to talk to Justin about, tell me a little bit more about how you're thinking about team, or tell me a little bit more about breaking up and using a cost benefit analysis to survey or add a home site or protest or anything like that. Like guys, we're so available and so open to talking to other people, part of the ground game community on our social media.

Justin Piche (47:40)
Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Clay. Good talk, man. And we'll see you next time.

Clay Hepler (47:44)
We'll see you next time.

Justin Piche (47:47)
Hey guys, this is Justin from The Ground Game. Thank you so much for listening. This is a great episode. We had a lot of takeaways from in-person events and talking about AI. If you got something good out of this podcast, please give us a follow, a subscribe, a like. It really helps us and it helps get our content out to other land investors and real estate investors like you.

Look forward to talking to you next time.