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The Ground Game Podcast
Welcome to The Ground Game Podcast, where land investing meets real talk! Join your hosts, Justin and Clay, both 7-figure land investors and seasoned entrepreneurs, as they dive deep into the world of land investing, team building, and personal growth.
The Ground Game Podcast
Episode 27: Avoiding shiny object syndrome in land investing
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🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
Episode 27: Avoiding shiny object syndrome in land investing
In this episode, hosts Justin Piche and Clay Hepler explore the exciting yet challenging world of land investing, sharing their recent experiences and insights on navigating new opportunities. They discuss the delicate balance between stepping out of your comfort zone and avoiding shiny object syndrome, providing valuable lessons for both seasoned investors and newcomers.
Key Highlights:
Personal Updates:
Justin and Clay kick off the episode with a candid discussion about Justin's recent trip to Durango, Colorado, where he’s exploring a property under contract. They also touch on Clayton's significant entitlement deal involving a 10,000-acre purchase, setting a relatable tone for the conversation.
Understanding Market Dynamics:
The hosts delve into the evolving landscape of land investing, discussing how market fluctuations and increased competition can impact deal flow. They emphasize the importance of maintaining focus on core business operations while exploring new opportunities.
The Importance of Professionalism:
Justin and Clay highlight the necessity of a professional approach in land investing, stressing the significance of having robust systems and processes in place to achieve consistent results, especially when stepping into new ventures.
Data-Driven Decision Making:
They discuss the critical role of data in empowering investors, explaining how better access to information can influence pricing and negotiation strategies, ultimately leading to more successful deals.
Building Relationships:
The hosts share insights on the value of networking within the industry, emphasizing how strong relationships can open doors to new opportunities and collaborative ventures, reinforcing the importance of community in land investing.
Value-Add Opportunities:
Justin and Clay explore the importance of identifying and creating value in land deals, encouraging listeners to think beyond simple flips and consider long-term strategies for growth.
This episode is packed with practical advice, personal anecdotes, and actionable insights that can help you navigate the complexities of land investing. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, this conversation is essential for anyone l
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Justin Piche (00:00)
Welcome to the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Justin Piche.
Clayton Hepler (00:04)
And this is Clay Hepler and we are here to teach you how to win the ground
game. What's up, man?
Justin Piche (00:24)
You might notice that my background is different today. I am currently in Durango, Colorado with my good friend Buck and we were checking out a property that we are under contract to purchase that I'm pretty excited about. I don't know if I'll share a ton of details, but I have this like massive stack of documents from like a previous development that was planned on it back in 05 and like this huge stack of plats and
plans and a bunch of other stuff. And Buck and I have been driving around visiting the property, talking to engineering firms, talking to the utility metro district. And he's got some more meetings after I leave. I got to leave tomorrow to fly back to Houston, but he's had some more meeting with with county planning and it's really exciting. And it's going to lead into, think, our topic today, which we'll introduce in a second.
So yeah, that's what's going on with me. My wife's got the three kids at home. So I know she wants me back. I don't blame her. Three kids is a lot to handle solo.
The ring is beautiful.
Clayton Hepler (01:39)
It is pretty cool. pretty cool. I Colorado is a general, um, you know, the foothills into the, you know, the mountains are just incredible, you know? So like, what are you going to say, especially during this time of year? It's like, it's pretty, it's like, could be really beautiful, like 65 degrees one day. And then the next day it could be like 30 and snowing. Um, so it's really crazy weather.
Justin Piche (01:59)
Blizzard, yeah. One thing that always gets
me when I come up to Colorado is the dryness. Like my hands, my throat, and I just like have to like, you don't sweat as much, but you need more water. So I'm just constantly having to remind myself to drink water.
Clayton Hepler (02:06)
Yes.
Yeah, man. And you and I are going to both be up at the, we'll see each other here in two months, two months, two and a half months, three months in the super car, Drew Haney's event. And in Golden, Colorado, it's a super car and land investing event, two day event. And I'm going to be a panelist on there at the event. And I know you're coming through and I'm sure they'll ask you to come up.
Justin Piche (02:45)
Well, I think I am.
My plans currently are to come. We've got a whole bunch of things in flux. But I feel pretty confident. My wife has been talking to other people who have plans to visit Houston over the summer saying, like, I think Justin's going to be gone this weekend. So I think in her head she's accepted it. I just haven't booked anything yet.
Clayton Hepler (03:03)
Haha!
Yeah, man. Well, on this front, got really good news on an entitlement deal that we're doing that we're purchasing for about 10,000 acre. we think that after we kind of did another analysis, it's never like this, but we think we're going to exit around 25 to 27. An acre, it's about 46 acres. So it's going to be a really, really strong deal.
Justin Piche (03:13)
Yeah.
Clayton Hepler (03:37)
And going through the rezoning process right now, it's kind of a, it's pretty difficult because it's in this agricultural district that essentially allows for only 5 % of the, the parent parcel and the history of redevelopment of this entire parcel. So for example, if it was a hundred acre parcel, only five acres could be parceled out unless you do a rezoning. And so I'm going to have to go up in front of the planning commission in person.
⁓ and it's probably like a 10 hour drive for me, eight hour drive, or I might just fly there. it might be so, I don't know, but I'll probably fly out there, go, go do a day, fly back. ⁓ and, know, present our plans at front of the planning commission, get it rezoned. ⁓ and so I'm super excited about that. That's like a really big win for, for us, on the entitlement front. And then, you know, acquisition got new acquisition guys locked up three deals over the past, like.
three, three days, three, four days. So, you you suspect 70 % of those close, right? But I'm really excited about that. And then as it relates to other personal life updates, my son is almost 12 months old and he's hitting this stage that I think some people call regression, which is essentially like he's had really good sleeping habits. He's really good. He's had really good sleeping habits like the entire time.
Justin Piche (04:57)
Sleep regression? Yeah, yeah. yeah, that's what they call it.
Clayton Hepler (05:05)
Two months, three months in, he was sleeping through the night. was extraordinary. And so now he's been very restless and like super energetic and I think he some allergies. And so that's been, that's been interesting to navigate. But it's, know, one kid. not, not like three. So, ⁓ yeah, things, things are finishing up Q2 planning, this week. We got a lot of big stuff. doing this big data project to, ⁓ consolidate our data into, to a.
We think Airtable, not sure yet though, to consolidate into one big platform so that we can use machine learning, AI to essentially allow us to target our data and look back, use historical successes and historical losses and allow us to predict that sellers that have the highest probability of selling. We have a lot of interesting projects going on right now. So dude, that's kind of updated my world.
Justin Piche (06:06)
Yeah, let's see what is going on business wise. We got a lot of sales contracts last month, which has been fantastic. So some of those are starting to come in and close. I was just messaging my my ops manager and I think we just got our biggest entitlement deal under contract. I don't have the contract yet, but they signed it while they were on the phone with their owner or sending it back. And so.
We'll see. mean, obviously you got a long due diligence process. Got to get a site plan, like kind of density and start discussions with engineering firms and start the process of pitching to builders and before all your earnest money and whatnot goes hard. So that's exciting. Exciting. Something like 160 acres. I think it could feasibly, you can get 300 lots on it. $2.9 million offer.
The old calculation of 5 % of finished house value for the paper lots puts it at about a $5 billion total value at 5%. So we'll see. I'm excited. But these type of deals, this is leading directly into our topic, which this other deal that I'm working on with Buck is stepping out of your comfort zone. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about...
stepping out of your comfort zone. How do you know when you should? And how do you balance that with shiny object syndrome? Which is a tough. I mean, it's a tough conversation to have. It's kind of more of a philosophical discussion. Yeah, that's what we're talking about today. So clay.
Clayton Hepler (07:53)
I think it's something
that, yeah, think it's something that plagues everyone, you know, there are sort of different layers of shiny object syndrome. So you first get shiny object syndrome around, you know, softwares that you use, right? ⁓ this investor is using this CRM, this investor is using this software, this person's using this or skip tracing or whatever. And I'm gonna upend my software stack or maybe it's systems or maybe it's people.
And so some people think about it as just a business model, but I think it plagues us in every single opportunity. And so one of the things that has helped me think through this personally, and sure we'll talk about anecdotes today, but I heard this thing from Alex Hermosy. Most people listening to his podcast probably know who he is. He's a famed business owner, YouTuber.
a social media star talking everything about business, how to build a business, how to scale a business, and really successful entrepreneur. And he was talking about the cost of change. So when you create a new, when you implement a new process, there's a cost of change. There's an opportunity cost. So when we're talking about an opportunity cost of adding a new vertical to a business or a new marketing channel or going after a new opportunity, there's this time period
in which whatever you're doing, you're going to reduce the production of that. So if I'm creating a new sales process or I'm doing a new CRM Justin or trying a new skip tracing software, I'm going to have a period of time in which I'm going to be significantly less productive, hoping that at some point in the future, I will be more productive. Right? So the calculation when you when you're thinking about changing out something or improving something or
Obviously in this case, it's a shiny object. It's when to step out of your comfort zone. There has to be a calculation that you make, right? If we're just talking purely metric driven decision,
Clayton Hepler (09:56)
um, 20, 30 % reduction for a period of time. And then maybe after that, it's you, you increase your, your throughput or your efficiency or productivity of a system, maybe by 40%. Right. And so the net net is a 20 % increase of productivity, let's just say. Right. And so if you're thinking about.
That's how I've started to think through the opportunity cost of changing out a process. Like I was thinking about changing my CRM this quarter because I was, right, right. So I was thinking about changing out my CRM and I went through this and I spent the time to actually, took, dude, I dedicated probably 10 or 15 hours, man hours, of thinking through is this the right decision? At the end of the day,
I realized because of the, we're bringing on a new acquisition manager here in a couple of weeks and because of the quantity of changes, it doesn't really make sense. The juice, the 40 % in this case, wasn't 40%, it was probably at 30%, so it was almost a net net, wasn't worth the squeeze, so I didn't do it, right? And so those types of decisions plague us. We think that we're doing this right decision and adding productivity, but if you're doing that every quarter,
and you're changing every quarter, you're going back to zero at the end of the quarter. So you think you have all this momentum, but you're rowing in the wrong direction. So, Justin, mean, what do think?
Justin Piche (11:22)
Yeah.
This reminds me of a, or makes me think of, so my wife works for Chevron, and obviously Chevron is a huge corporation. I'd be surprised if anyone listening to this didn't know who Chevron was. And every couple of years, Chevron goes through this massive reorg. And it's all in the name of efficiency, in streamlining business operations, and being able to try to cut out some redundant levels of management by putting more things under
certain groups purviews or whatever. But she's an employee, right? And so as an employee, what she sees is just constant change. And every time they do this massive change on an order of magnitude way above what anybody listening to this podcast would do in terms of the amount of total man hours and money and lost productivity that goes into that change. It's huge, it's huge. It's a huge upheaval of the company.
of people's roles, lot of uncertainty for employees, and tons of lost productivity for that period of time. But obviously the thesis behind each of those reorgs, mean a multi-billion, multi-hundred billion dollar company is not going to undertake something as large as a complete reorg and like layoffs and restructuring unless they see significant competitive advantages or the ability to actually compete with other companies who have already implemented some of these efficiencies.
But it does feel like from her perspective that it's always felt like it happens so frequently every couple years that it's just so much churn. Anyway, that's just what I was thinking about when you were talking through and describing the churn, the lost productivity of making some of these changes. But I agree. I have the tendency to when I see some changes that I want to make, try to make a bunch of them at one time.
And every time that I've done that, the whole thing has taken probably longer than it would if I instead made smaller incremental changes. And the biggest thing that I think has been negative about making massive changes all at once has been it's hard to determine what change had the biggest impact. If you make multiple changes to processes or to your CRM or to your systems or the way you make offers or the type of marketing you do or
so on and so forth. It's hard to tell if you have an improvement or if you don't have an improvement why you didn't or didn't. Whereas if you're making smaller incremental changes, you can actually just see, I made this one change, this A, B change. B is better than A because I'm seeing these results. Let's keep that change. And it's just less to digest, less productivity loss. That's kind of the way I like to approach things now, is incremental changes and things. And that actually...
where kind of the stepping out of your comfort zone enters the conversation because, and when I say stepping out of your comfort zone, what I'm talking about is doing things that you haven't done before. Which is also why, know, shiny object syndrome is another term that we're using to describe what this might look like. Advice that I've given to people before, and this is from both experience and seeing this happen to people is,
don't necessarily chase the shiny object. If you have something in your business that's working, for example, it might be flipping or it might be simple rural subdivides or something like that, which a lot of folks are doing. And now you're going after entitlement or horizontal development. When you don't have your core business stabilized and you're putting a ton of input into that core business and that core business relies on you,
to maintain it, going after one of these other big things falls much more into the shiny object syndrome. When you have a really solid handle on your core business and you have talented employees that are able to continue the operations and improve the operations of that core business, and you find yourself with more kind of time and curiosity and the ability to pursue other things, that is in my mind when shiny objects turn into
stepping out of your comfort zone opportunities.
What are your thoughts on that, Clay?
Clayton Hepler (15:47)
appreciate how you approach it from a subjective perspective because it is quite subjective, right? So what is a handle, right? It's important, I think it's, right? So I think it's important to define those things. But when people know they have a handle on their business, that you kind of know, like a lot of times we're a lot more self-aware than what we...
Justin Piche (15:57)
Yeah, that's a good question.
Clayton Hepler (16:14)
make ourselves out to be. And so I think that there's a business need when you're stepping out of your comfort zone, right? And then there's an emotional need. So I think a lot of people make decisions based on an emotional need that they want to, because they were rewarded by doing that in the past or because they can't stand still or because they haven't learned the skill set of patience of going through and following up and reviewing your process.
Really, most businesses in general, unless we're an engineer in a nuclear reactor, are quite simple. Doing the simple things really, really well is more often than not the way to produce outsized returns and outsized outcomes than adding additional...
you know, lines of business or shiny objects or kind of getting out of your comfort zone. I'll give you a perfect example. We were reviewing our outbound team this week and looking over a past month. So every month we look at our outbound team and we assess are there people hitting the expectations, their KPIs? Are they not hitting their KPIs? Why are they not? Is it our problem? Is it a data problem? Is it a training problem or is it just a person problem, right? We do all that until we look at the person.
And we found this past month that there are quite a few team members that are not up to our expectations. so that we could go out and say, Hey, I'm going to add a different rev, a different channel to bring in opportunities. I'm going to add PPC. I'm going to add referrals. I'm going to call brokers and see if they can give me deals or I could just improve our outbound team. And what's going to be a better return on time. A lot of times people want to do the new thing. They don't want to do the improvement thing.
They don't want to look and see, is the, are 25, 30 % of this core group needs to upskill or get out. And I think that's, that's more difficult to do. So I think conducting audits is a real way to see where your problems are in your business.
Justin Piche (18:23)
Yeah, no, I agree with that 100%. It is a lot harder to look internally. It's like a, it's a quantity versus quality type of a discussion. And this is like, this is a, we've talked about this before in the podcast. This is really kind of my philosophy behind scaling this business is you have to, in a lot of cases, people's problem or the reason why they don't have consistency in their businesses because of quantity.
Just the sheer amount of marketing that it takes to actually get consistent deal flow is quite high now. It's much higher than it used to be, and it keeps continuing to be a higher requirement. You need to have some base level to see consistent lead flow. But then you get to a point where you're seeing consistent lead flow, but you may not be seeing consistent deals. Then you have to switch back to a quality. Like you have to improve the quality. And ideally, you're doing both of those things kind of along the way at the same time, you're keeping your quality high, improving it while increasing quantity.
at a very smooth rate so that it's scalable and you don't have any other aspects of your process totally break down or just unknown constraints pop up that you didn't realize were there until you've exceeded them and then your team is scrambling. But the internal audit process, the upscaling of your team, it's hard, hard to do that. It's much easier as entrepreneurs, I think, to wrap our minds around, hey, this is something new that I can pour my, can obsess over.
and I can figure out and I can implement, but just doing what you're already doing better, that's hard.
Clayton Hepler (19:56)
Boring,
Justin Piche (19:58)
It's not as exciting, yeah.
Clayton Hepler (20:01)
But it's exactly what's required. so I think like I said earlier, it's this sort of the getting out of your comfort zone, the shiny object is not shiny if it serves a purpose. It's shiny if you're making a decision to do it for the emotional need or because you don't have the skill set to handle a problem that's currently in your business. For example, the evolution of the land investor is
If you choose to do this, it's I'm going from wholesaling or desert squares to flipping smaller lots, buy for 10, sell for 20, buy for 20, sell for 40, and then go up to a different type of asset, right? Buy for 100, sell for 160. Buy for 200, sell for 280, 320. And what happens is people...
When they hit that, when they kind of hit that next level, right, or they're trying to get to the next level of their business, right, I'm trying to go after these larger deals, it takes more opportunities and they're harder, more complex. And so what I see a lot of people do is they jump into this, then they say, hey, I can't do this because it's a different type of process, right? In reality, if they wanted to achieve that outcome, which is, you know, everyone, you hear everyone say, if you just add another zero, it doesn't get that much harder. Well, in our business, it does.
it gets significantly harder to take down a larger deal. And so people jump from small deals to I'm gonna target these larger deals and they haven't, like you said earlier, they haven't managed their business. And so they're jumping in and out, have all these shiny objects, they feel like they're doing it to get to a certain outcome. But the reality is, a lot of times, by the way, I'm speaking from personal experience, a lot of times you just need to work on the business. You need to just improve the business.
Justin Piche (21:56)
And I think that the incremental approach to improvements in your business and stepping out of your comfort zone because there's a purpose in it, right? Maybe that purpose is another, you know, another vertical, obviously scaling additional revenue. People want to make more money. You want to do that six, seven high six, seven figure deal, but going from, you know, flipping desert squares into high seven figure deals or high six, seven figure deals. There's there's certain building blocks.
that I feel like give you a competitive advantage to actually being successful in that. one of the ones that pops to mind is a track record and investors, track record and money. And it's really hard. mean, if you're wealthy, independently wealthy, and you've got lots of money to burn, then you of course can just jump right in, right? You can figure it out along the way, because you're not responsible for convincing or selling to someone else this investment. But if you're, and if you have,
friends and family that really trust you and believe in you that have deep pockets. Again, you can shortcut some of the track record required to invest people's money in these larger deals. But if you're raising money from people that don't know you, then the deal has to stand on its own merits and you as the operator have to be able to defend why you're the correct person to develop this property and why you're going to make money for this investor.
the incremental improvement of business over time by moving from these flips into these kind of rural subdivides into minor subdivisions or small entitlement deals. And then finally into these larger multi-million, tens of million dollar development deals. It's a very natural progression to work through it that way because you have to figure out all these things at different aspects. When I first started my business, I had hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash that I was able to utilize in deals.
So I didn't have to pitch a deal to anyone, right? I just set out marketing. I evaluated the deal and I said, I'm going to buy that. And then I bought it and then I sold it and then I made some money and I made some bad decisions and have at least a deal that I lost some money on some deals that basically were break even and some really big winners. But I wasn't putting anyone else's money at risk. I didn't have to have any track record. I could just make that decision on my own. But then as the business scaled, I ran out of deployable cash, right?
And so I needed to raise money from folks. And then I went to my immediate network of people who believed in me. And I at least had a track record of that time and I could show them, hey, these are the deals that I've done. Here's the returns I've gotten on them. Here's my thesis in this deal. And they still were betting on me. We didn't do all these kind of crazy formal structures. And there really not very many protections for those first few deals that I did with friends and family, other than my word and then trusting me and knowing that I would make any mistakes right. But then I exhausted most of that.
you working in deals. And now, now I'm obviously in a place where I'm raising money from people that don't know me. And at that point, there's no way to convince somebody that doesn't know you, that doesn't trust you, that to invest with you, unless you have the track record and the deal merits stayed on their own. You have to have those kind of two things.
Clayton Hepler (25:04)
Yeah. So I want to kind of return back here for the decision matrix of like, when do you know it's the right time to go out on a limb and try something new, whether it's a marketing channel. One of the things I hear dude all the time is, okay, so if I want to get to a seven figure business, do I need multiple marketing channels or should I just do one? And how many people do I need? And then should I throw in rural subdivides?
Or should I just target flips? And there's no, right? You're laughing, you're laughing.
Justin Piche (25:40)
There's no, yeah,
I'm laughing because you can do one single deal and be a seven-figure lane investor. And you need no team at all. You don't even need marketing. So that's one option. It's not the normal kind of way to do it, but that's one option. And then the other is you have a huge team of people doing cold outreach and you just do a huge amount of volume and you're a seven-figure investor. I laugh because it's a really hard question to answer. What's the optimum, right?
Clayton Hepler (26:06)
Right, so if we're talking, thinking about this from first principles, really it's like you take the small steps in order to build the proof for yourself and others to take the next level, right? And so when you take the next level, whether it's too soon or too late relative to your goals, there's a lot of different factors, right? Is your business running by itself?
Do you need to be the person that's problem solving? If your business is running by itself, of course, you have more of an ability to step on your own and go after these new opportunities, these new shiny objects, and get out of your comfort zone. But if you're still the person that's driving, which is probably 99 % of our audience, right? 95?
is still driving the outcomes, the majority of the outcomes in your business, then it requires a view, an approach that is more considered. I'll give you a perfect example of what I'm doing currently. I have an operations manager that runs a lot of the day-to-day of the business. One of his big objectives this quarter is to really own all the day-to-day. Basically, I have no involvement
for transactions, for dispositions. We recently promoted our disposition manager to basically my disposition associate to manager to manage all offers, all conversations with brokers, all negotiations. And so I'm just running sales, basically. The goal by the end of the quarter is I'm just running sales. And so I have a lot of additional bandwidth. And so what do I do with this bandwidth? This is a question that many business owners
every quarter to think, should I add something new to my plate or should I focus on doing everything really, really good? If I can just do everything really good, then we can hit a million dollars this quarter. That's the philosophy. But we're adding one additional sort of similar symbiotic marketing.
channel for leads, right? It fits within our process. We can use the same people that we're using currently in our process to comp the leads. It requires a little bit of involvement for me, but eventually I can step outside of the position because we can basically offer on these properties. This is on market prospecting, right? On market deal flow, right? So is it much more difficult than off market, obviously, because
These people are offering market value. And so you have to find the value through underwriting and through, which is quite complicated. And so it's an experiment. And so how I think about doing this is allocating 10 % of my effort for the quarter, maybe 15, 20%. So thinking it through, because we're finalizing our Q2 objectives to going after this opportunity and building out the processes. So by the end of the quarter, someone could sit in this seat and manage this process, A to Z.
But that's, maybe some people think that's a shiny object. Not necessarily, right? It does serve a certain aim, right? It's not like I'm going out and doing like house flipping. But that's kind of an example of how I'm thinking about adding an additional revenue, maybe what others would consider shiny objects.
Justin Piche (29:41)
Yeah, that's a good example. Mine's kind of similar in the sense that I'm starting to work on more entitlement and horizontal development deals. And a year ago, anything with the word entitlement, if you had asked me literally a year ago, hey, Justin, are you focusing on entitlement deals? For those who don't know, sure everybody probably knows or most people know, entitlement is
At a minimum, the engineering required to get a final plat, a major subdivision approved. So basically it looks like the full major subdivision process, when most people talk about entitlements, they talk about what they're really referring to as buying tracks and then selling them to builders, selling paper lots to builders. That's what they're talking about. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said no. And the reason why the answer was no at that time is because I didn't have an underwriter.
I didn't have a project manager. I didn't have an operations manager. And a lot of those functions, ultimate decision making on acquisitions, managing contractors, managing surveyors, making the decisions on offer prices for small sub-divides, medium sub-divides, so on and so forth, all of that sat with me. And I just frankly didn't have the bandwidth to understand the full entitlement process and have those conversations with the county.
look at proposals from multiple engineering companies and prospects for builders and all of those other tasks that are required when you're doing different types of deals. at that time, I would have considered that a shiny object. And now, having filled some of those key positions in my business where I wouldn't say that it fully operates without me, I think I do make critical decisions on a routine basis, but the day to day does. The day to day does not need me involved with that aspect of the business. And so now I have
a whole lot more bandwidth to learn and be curious and invest time and invest money into these other verticals of the business that produce significantly more revenue. And I guess when I say get a handle on your business and when I said that earlier, that's really what I meant is the ability to have your team making the day to day business decisions, but also having your team have the ability to solve the problems that pop up from day to day.
Because every day, if every problem that popped up had to come to me to solve, I would not have any time to do anything else. I would just be helping people solve problems all day long. And frankly, this is another total aside, but this is a pitfall that a lot of business owners can fall into because it feels good to solve problems for people. you solve, when the buck stops with you and people come to you and they're like, hey boss, or hey,
You know, whatever I need this. I have this problem. Can you help me? And then you know how to solve it and you think it through and you give them the answer and they saw then they implement. It feels really good. You're like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. I'm getting all these fires put out like, but that's not the best use of your time. And as a business owner, having employees that you can both empower and upskill and give the decision making ability to try things to
Fixed problems to fail in some cases. That's when they really freeze you up to be able to look at these shiny objects and instead turn them into opportunities that cause you to step out of your comfort zone.
Clayton Hepler (33:17)
Right. It's a shiny, it's only a shiny object when, but maybe we define it here. It takes away from the core outputs of your, of your core business. Right. So in this case, you're not involved in, in, I'm neither am I. And well, to the extent maybe in a month or two, would be fully, but you're fully not involved in the day to day. And so what that looks like is the, your outputs, like you could not work.
Justin Piche (33:28)
Right, right.
Clayton Hepler (33:47)
Theoretically, of course, people have to come to you to ask questions about certain things. Happens to me too. But like my, for example, my outbound manager is managing the entire hiring process, the interviewing process, the onboarding process, the training process. I just said, we need this done, right? And he's like, okay, I'm gonna go execute it.
Justin Piche (34:14)
Yeah, and that's exactly what I mean. That's great.
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast as I usually do to say thank you for listening. If you guys are getting value out of this, you know, we're talking about shiny objects and stepping out of your comfort zone and scaling your business and sharing personal stories. If this resonates with you like review subscribe, leave us a comment below.
We want to provide value every week and the comments really help us deliver the content that you want. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Clayton Hepler (34:44)
if we're thinking about making a decision related to pursuing an opportunity in your business, right? First thing is the biggest opportunity is within the business. Like I heard that from a guy, a real estate investor, I forgot his name, but the biggest opportunity is the problem that's within your business. And most of the time,
In this example, you can have someone else solve the problem or you could solve it. What happens for lot of entrepreneurs, because we are, like Justin said, we're validated for solving problems that we want to stick and solve problems that we don't want to think expanding abundantly and get to the next level, which is chasing these opportunities, not shiny objects, opportunities. Shiny objects, as we're defining, is taking away from the core output.
The one lens that I would challenge, us, you and I both to use, right? Because we're just as, I was talking to another very well-known land investor last night on the phone and he said, well, you know how shiny objects are, right? He has a very well-known course and community and he's crushing it and he experiences it too. We all do, right? But if it's in alignment, and this is a reminder as well for me, if it's in alignment with where you're going, where you're...
Vision for the future is the mission of the business what you want to achieve then it's in alignment You know if I if I told Justin if I called Justin and said hey Justin, you know what man? I'm gonna add mobile home park flipping to my business I think he's a good enough guy. He would say clay. That's a great idea made in but in the back of his head He's like, why would he do that? He already has a successful lamb is this it wouldn't make sense. It would be Reinventing the wheel, right?
And so that's one thing that I would say for if it's an alignment with your vision, kind of where you're going, that's a good lens to use in order to figure out if it's shiny object or an opportunity.
Justin Piche (36:41)
Now real quick,
if you told me, hey Justin, I'm doing all these rural subdivides and I'm selling through my land and what's happening is that people are buying them and putting mobile homes on it. I'm going to figure out a way to put a mobile home on it or prep it better for mobile home so that my lots sell faster and I make a margin on those mobile homes or on the improvements. At this point I would say that's a great idea, Clay. I wouldn't say that's a shiny object.
But if you were starting to underwrite mobile homes and the cash flows on them and understanding and purchasing them from investors that already own these mobile home parks in order to increase the revenue and then sell it in the future on like a cap rate basis, I would probably say, come on, come on Clayton, that seems like a shiny eye.
So there's a nuance there because I think I would consider putting cabins or putting homes or kind of low lift things onto properties as improvements similar to forcing appreciation through subdivisions or through horizontal development. I think that based on what I know about your business, I think that aspect would align pretty well with what your kind of vision is for the company. So, but yeah, there's nuances there to it all.
Clayton Hepler (37:30)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (37:56)
Frankly, the only people that can actually decide whether or not the thing that they want to pursue is a shiny object that has a high risk of impacting their core business in a negative way is you is the listener is the person who's going to implement that.
that new process or that new chase after that new thing. And so I think what I just want anyone to take away from this discussion is it's worth the internal dialogue. It's worth the internal dialogue to understand the opportunity cost of whatever you're going to pursue, how it's going to impact your time, your ability to focus on the core business that you have if you need to focus on that or
the time that you need to focus on setting up your core business so that you can have the time to focus on these other opportunities.
Clayton Hepler (38:51)
Yeah, and sometimes like it's interesting. um, you know, I've coaches in my life. Um, and I also go to, um, therapy with my wife in a, in a very healthy, in a very healthy way. decided recently that, you know, like it's, it's important to continue to work on your relationship and we're, like, uh, the therapist kind of came in the first time we did our therapy session and she was like,
Like you guys are in such great shape, like I'm not sure why you're coming to us, right? And well, we said we want to hear a different perspective, right? We want to hear a perspective in a very safe spot, a very safe space that we can be vulnerable in. And sometimes you need that person, a third party, to come in and be a supporting person. That might be your business partner. That might be your significant other. That could be a coach.
that could be a group of people that you're a part of. There plenty of mastermind communities. But dude, sometimes it's like, if you put your ego aside, right in this example, and you just say, I just wanna get better. I just wanna be better. I just wanna improve my business. Because my goal is not to be the person that everyone thinks is the best. I actually want to be the best version of myself. And so, I would say the last point here is challenging the listeners.
You might know in your heart of hearts whether or not the decision is a good decision, right? As it relates to a new opportunity, getting out of your comfort zone, the shiny object. But sometimes you need to work, talk with someone else, whether it's on a quick phone call, an Instagram DM, a conversation in person, and they, and you present the thing to them. I've done this before. have like presenting something to someone.
And while I'm presenting it and verbalizing it, I come up with the answer, right? You're laughing, it looks like you know what I'm talking about.
Justin Piche (40:51)
Yeah. I'm I mean,
I know exactly what that's like. Exactly. I mean, there's just there's something to explaining something out loud to someone else that helps your brain. Try to see it from their perspective and get another perspective, even if they don't respond. mean, ideally, they respond and, you know, talk or speak wisdom into your life and look at it from from.
A heart that is only looking for what's best for you and helping you understand from somebody else's perspective what they think may be best for you. And it may not be, right? That doesn't mean they're always right, okay? But when you're having to articulate that, sometimes just a couple of pointed questions can point out a perspective that you didn't see and you can realize maybe that's not the right move for me right now.
Clayton Hepler (41:44)
Yeah, so I heard this incredible, know, Naval Ravikhan, sure, you know, listeners know I've talked about him before, and he has this really great mental model around like important decisions in life, okay? And one of the important decisions is who you spend the rest of your life with. The second one is where you live. And the third thing is what you do. What you do every day. I spend more time in
talking to my colleagues in my company, my employees, that I do talk to my wife on a day-to-day basis. And those three decisions are critically important. And people spend an hour, two hours, a week, a month deciding decisions that will impact them for five to 10 years. So one of the things that I've done to sharpen my thinking over time is a decision journal.
So if I'm making a decision, for example, to do an initiative, execute an initiative over a quarter, and let's say we're talking about the initiative that I was talking about earlier, which is the on market lead flow. I assume that a certain amount of inputs, Justin is going to get an output, right? So I write in my journal, decision journal, and there's a really great article about creating a decision journal.
by Farnham Street, which is just a blog. You can look it up. It's really great. It teaches you how to do this better than what I'm saying. But you make a decision in your business. You say, I'm going to do this thing, right? And I'm going to... You talk about what your present state is, how you're thinking it through, what you think is actually going to happen. And you can do this with another person too. They can talk through it verbally and then you could write it down. And then you think through what you think the outcome is going to be. And then in three months...
when you look at the outcome, right? Obviously, you gotta look at your decision journal. You can't just write it in there and forget about it. But when you look at your decision, you can say, I was so wrong here and here's why. And what that does is that builds a compounding base of knowledge that you have, that's hard fought knowledge that you've done over time. So if you're doing your Q2 priorities, this is gonna come out during that beginning of Q2.
I'd say this has been super helpful in my life. It might be helpful in yours when you're making decisions, creating a decision journal.
Justin Piche (44:19)
I like that.
I've also heard some folks use this discipline when deciding something like, and this is much smaller decisions, but deciding if they want to purchase something or maybe another way of saying this would be using resources for something is write it down and then wait a day or two and then revisit it. And I've heard people have a lot of success with that, especially when it comes to like, do you really need this thing? Because a lot of times,
And this can be, you talked about earlier, deciding to do things in your business from an emotional perspective and not really waiting to see if it's really the right thing for your business. you're making decisions based on emotions only and you rush into things without understanding the full opportunity cost and taking the time to understand the full impacts, that can be a negative thing. It's the same kind of idea with
this kind of decision pause on purchases, right? A lot of times we see something that we're like, oh man, I really want that or I want to do that thing. And it's easy to make a guess decision and click a button and purchase it and whatnot. But it's something else. You know, you really want something or you want to do something. let's frame it in the perspective of doing something in your business or chasing another opportunity or adding a vertical or whatever it is.
Clayton Hepler (45:30)
Yeah.
Justin Piche (45:44)
You know it's something you really want to do is if you write it down and you come back to it and you're still just as enthusiastic about it as you were a week ago or days ago or a month ago.
Clayton Hepler (45:58)
I like that. I like that a lot.
Justin Piche (45:58)
Do you visit your
is that how you maybe how do you when you're doing the decision journal? Is that something is that some part of the process writing it down and then coming back to it?
Clayton Hepler (46:08)
Yeah. So
to be fair, I'm not an expert on that. This is something that I've recently implemented and I'm sure I'll talk about it more in the future. But yeah, I will revisit. Like I made a couple of decisions. It was interesting. I started using it like in the fall and I laugh at it. I look at some of my past decisions. was like, well, that was a good decision or that was not a good decision. But it's really interesting. You can kind of see
your ability to predict what you think an output is going to be and the inputs that are required. One of the things that I really like, again, I'm going to cite Naval Ravikant, Justin is, he defines intelligence as the ability to get what you want in the world.
And that is an amazing definition of intelligence. If you think about it, if you really break it down, someone could say, I'm so smart, right? I'm super smart. But if you're super smart, if you really are that intelligent, then you would know how to be happy. You know how to have a good relationship with your wife. You know how to make the money that you need to make. Of course, there's luck. Let's not take luck out of the equation.
And if you're a spiritual person, there's a lot of other things, there are spiritual things that you have to consider, right? But if you're really smart, you should be able to get what you want out of the world to a certain extent, right? And I always like that. It's kind of pithy. know, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? If you're so smart, why don't you have the body that you want? If you're so smart, why don't you have the success that you want? And it's pithy.
And it's also very sobering. Sort of like, wow, that's, yeah, that's true. So I really like this.
Justin Piche (48:08)
There's a,
that's a good definition because there's so many aspects to intelligence, you know, and, the ability to get what you want out of life forces you to be good at a lot of things and be smart or intelligent about a lot of different things. You could be unbelievably smart at a certain discipline or aspect of life, but that's one piece of the puzzle.
So I kind of like that definition. I saw this, who was it that posted it? Robert Sterling on X posted this post and it said, the most unhappy people that you'll meet, the most bitter people you'll meet are millennials who were gifted and talented in elementary. saw that post? Gifted and talented in elementary and they were told they were so smart.
and they went to good schools and they got jobs and work in W2 jobs and middle management. And they are incredibly dissatisfied because they have a good enough life to have a nice home and then have a nice car. But they have not achieved this massive level of success of being the CEO of a company or having incredible wealth or any of that type of stuff. they see the jock from high school
who made terrible grades but was super personable and worked in team sports or worked in a team environment go on to start an HVAC company and it's worth millions and leads a huge team. And they're like, why can't I have that? I was smart, I was intelligent, I was gifted and talented. And I think, yeah, I mean, they were, they were smart, they were intelligent, they were better than their peers in a lot of ways as they were going through school, but that's just one aspect of it.
Clayton Hepler (49:47)
Ha! Ha!
Justin Piche (50:05)
Anyway, that made me think a lot because that was kind of me. I was gifted and talented program. I went through, good grades, went to a good school, started working for W2. I did, I I worked for Exxon, but I started to become unhappy because of the lack of ability to have control over the outcome of my work.
my life. was like I had to be there a certain amount of time and I had to do this certain work and the compensation was pretty set and there was no there was obviously an upper limit and a time limit on the performance and I was obviously much more ambitious than that.
Clayton Hepler (50:52)
And you jumped ship when you were 32, right?
Justin Piche (50:57)
Yes. Yeah, that's where I left. 32.
I made the decision, I think I made the decision when I was 31, but I was 32 when I actually quit, yeah.
Clayton Hepler (51:02)
two years young baby.
Yeah. Well, I hope this was beneficial to our listeners. As you know, there's a gentleman's agreement at the end of this and no shade on the women that listen to this podcast. We appreciate you too. Gentlewoman's agreement as well. If you got benefit from this podcast, please, please, rate, review, subscribe. Let us know what you think and put put down CLAYTON.
Appreciate you. Just another running tally. And if you got benefit from this podcast, from the green team, can let us know below. So as always guys, thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Ground Game. Justin, anything else before we sign off here?
Justin Piche (52:01)
I think you misspelled that name. It's J-U-S-T-I-N. No, nothing else. We'll see you guys next week.
Clayton Hepler (52:03)
Haha