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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 30: Why Operations Support is Essential for Growth
🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
Episode 30: Why Operations Support is Essential for Growth
In this episode, hosts Justin Piche and Clay Hepler explore the critical role of hiring the right operations personnel to scale your land investment business. They share their insights on how strategic hires can transform your operations and drive growth.
Key Highlights
Personal Updates:
Clay kicks off the episode by reflecting on his recent experiences with team-building activities, emphasizing the importance of camaraderie in business. Justin shares his journey of exploring new investment opportunities, setting a relatable tone for the discussion.
Recognizing the Need for Operations Support:
The hosts delve into the signs that indicate it's time to bring in an operations manager. They discuss common mental barriers investors face, such as imposter syndrome and financial concerns, that can delay these crucial hires.
The Impact of High-Level Hires:
Justin and Clay highlight the transformative effect of bringing in skilled operations personnel. They share personal anecdotes about how these hires have changed their businesses, allowing them to focus on growth and strategic initiatives.
Building a Strong Team Culture:
They emphasize the importance of fostering a culture of ownership and accountability within your team. The hosts discuss how empowering employees can lead to better decision-making and improved business outcomes.
Data-Driven Hiring Decisions:
The conversation shifts to the role of data in the hiring process. Justin and Clay explain how analyzing performance metrics can help identify the right candidates and ensure alignment with business goals.
Long-Term Vision and Growth:
The hosts encourage listeners to think beyond immediate needs and consider the long-term implications of their hiring decisions. They discuss how strategic hires can set the stage for future success and scalability.
This episode is filled with practical advice, personal stories, and actionable insights that can help you navigate the complexities of hiring in the land investing space. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, this conversation is essential for anyone looking to build a successful team and scale their business.
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Justin Piche (00:00)
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the ground game podcast. This is your co-host Justin Piche
Clay Hepler (00:05)
And this is your other co-host, Clay Hepler, and we're here to show you how to win the ground game.
I was talking to one of my private clients the other day, Justin, and he was telling me, I asked him, hey man, what's lacking in the land investment business? Like, where are people falling short, right? Of course, the reason why we've gotten such a great reception from this podcast is there's that middle ground that, hey, I'll make it 200K, I need to get to the next level. But a lot of what that is, dude, is finding the right people and putting them in the right place. So in this episode, I really want to dive into
bringing in people that can run the operations of the business. This is a couple of steps in, this is a couple of steps after, and we're not talking about your $5 VA to run your calendar. We're talking about someone that actually comes in and truly makes an impact, a hire that you end up saying your mouth agape. This is such a vital hire, and a lot of people never have that experience, and when you do, man, it changes your business. I can tell you,
first certain Justin. There is a time before and a time after one of my team members came in and I'm gonna talk about today and I hope he doesn't listen to this podcast because I don't want his head to get too big. no, Justin, what do you got brother?
Justin Piche (01:38)
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree that that I just had a call today actually with somebody who I sent you an email that is a land investor that's been in the game for a while. And, you know, I think obviously the first problem or the first kind of issue that I would say is, you know, increase outbound marketing. But then it's
Who do you have on your team? It sounds like you're doing everything. It sounds like you're doing everything. And it's just hard. It's hard to scale a business past certain thresholds when you have to do everything.
Clay Hepler (02:02)
Yes.
Yes. I want to talk about why people wait too long. Okay. There's a couple of different things, about like, I'm waiting too long. There's a, there's a financial I'm waiting too long, which we can talk about how you solve the financial. I'm waiting too long. There is a mental I'm waiting too long. We're going to talk, we're going to unpack that because a lot of people are messing that one up.
Justin Piche (02:31)
you
Clay Hepler (02:39)
And then there was an organizational, I'm waiting too long, right? So financial, obviously someone that is a operations manager is going to be a certain dollar per hour. A COO is going to be a certain dollar per hour. An integrator is going to be a certain dollar per hour. And sometimes, specifically in the early lambdas, dude, if you're making 600K top line, you might be bringing home
Justin Piche (03:07)
Thank
Clay Hepler (03:08)
50 % 40 % margins on that and so where do you pay yourself if you bring in an integrator? That's work. It's hard when you bring in a higher level
person, right? Then the second thing that's really hard is the mental I'm not I'm not worthy. I've imposter syndrome. I can't bring on someone that's better than me because Am I gonna tell them how to do their job if they're better than me?
Justin Piche (03:25)
.
Okay.
Clay Hepler (03:34)
Guys, we've all felt these thoughts. We've all had these thoughts and we
still have them to say, you know, if you hire a higher level people, you're going to feel these. This is natural. This is human and being vulnerable with the people that you bring in. We'll talk about that in a second, but being vulnerable. And then the last thing is the organizational. I don't feel that my organization is mature enough to bring this person in. I don't feel that, you know, my, my, my systems are screwed up. My processes are screwed up. I'm bringing an operations person on.
Justin Piche (03:54)
Thank
Clay Hepler (04:04)
and I want to make sure that everything's right when I bring them on so that they can run. Man, the reason why you're bringing them on is because your systems suck, right? So, you can bring them on sooner.
Justin Piche (04:12)
Yeah. I, know, one that I've, one that
I've, I hear a lot is I don't think I have the deal flow to support this person. Like I, they're going to bring them in. I don't have the deal flow to support. That's another, another big one, which, which oftentimes is true. Like I feel like that's true. You know, there's, that's a totally different discussion, but there's ways to, to improve deal flow substantially without a huge lift on your organization to
Clay Hepler (04:20)
Ooh!
Justin Piche (04:39)
you know, set yourself up to have enough lead flow to make to feel more confident hiring these people.
Clay Hepler (04:44)
So Justin, Justin, before we jump into the next part here, for you, what is a warning sign that you need to bring in an operations person to come into your business?
Justin Piche (04:58)
you are a bottleneck in too many places. I think that's kind of my first warning sign is like, you feel, you constantly feel like this needs to get done. This needs to be implemented. This needs to be tracked. Where am going to find the time to do all this? I just can't get it done. So things just slip and slip and slip. You know, you might set goals for yourself for the quarter and you find at the end of the quarter, you've barely achieved any of them.
And you think, man, if I just had more time to implement. Well, the truth is you probably are implementing and doing the things that you need to do to keep the business alive. But you don't you're not gifted either. You're not gifted in operations or you just have you're wearing too many hats and your attention is drawn to too many places. And so instead of moving the business forward through operations improvements, you are fighting fires and you're dealing with problems as they come up. And that that I think that's kind of the
the posture of a person who's in need of operations.
Clay Hepler (05:58)
Mm-hmm. That's a great dude. I couldn't have it better myself. Here's where I see people mess up, dude they listen to two guys on the internet on the ground game podcast and They say you know what man. I'm inspired. I'm gonna go do this. I'm gonna give it up I don't care if it's equity. I want to bring someone I want to scale this business, right? I want to scale this business, right?
And the reality is sometimes they don't need to bring in a COO. Their business isn't mature enough to bring in a
Justin Piche (06:23)
you
Clay Hepler (06:30)
They just need to bring in an ops manager.
So, what that looks like, man, is understanding where are you at in your business and like, really the task that you need to give to this person? So, let me ask you this, in your business, when did you bring on your first operations hire and why? What were the signs and how did you think about it? Compensation wise, output wise, everything.
Justin Piche (06:58)
Yeah, at first I hired about the first kind of high level operations employee in about eight months after starting my business. And it was my sales manager, Disposed Manager Brian, who we've had on podcast episode eight. He came and talked. And the reason why I hired him is because we had a lot of inventory and a lot of deals in the pipeline.
And I was very focused on continuing to scale the acquisition side of the business and all of the things that went into hiring realtors and getting marketing packages put together and negotiating with buyers, you know, especially tire kickers. It just drove me nuts. It's like, how am I going to spend all my time, half my time doing sales and dispo? We need this done because we've got a lot of great properties. We need to bring money back into the business, but I can't stop focusing on the acquisition side of it. I can't do them all.
I'm going to let something slip. either not going to put enough attention into the acquisitions, scaling different marketing channels and getting the right people in place there. Or I'm going to put, or I'm not going to put enough effort into actually bringing cash back into the business, which is again, one of the critical pieces. mean, we talk about the acquisitions pipeline being the engine and like the inputs are really important, right? Or the output of marketing so that you can get lead input is super important to scaling your business, but so is bringing money back in.
You've got to solve for that piece initially. The reason why it gets put on the back burner, I think on the Dispo side for a lot of folks is because it's secondary to getting an established lead intake pipeline and deals and inventory and deals to do and sell. But then once you've got them, you need to build out that Dispo side. And so for me, I just didn't have the bandwidth. I didn't enjoy it that much. I needed cash back in. And you asked another question about how did I think about compensation and all that? Well, at that point in the business,
I don't, I didn't have enough like income or pipeline profit to, I think, justify hiring an exceptional person. And so I was a salesman. I sold the potential to hire a really quality person. And I found somebody who shared my vision for what the company could be and was comfortable with a primarily commission, even though past performance, a business only been around for eight months.
We didn't even make money for the first like three or four months. They saw the potential. They saw the deal pipeline. They knew what this could grow to. And I sold them on me and the business, Brian, on me and the business to come in and grow it. And he was a salesperson, you know, before he worked various commission sales roles. But he, so he knew that if he performed, was able to grow the sales side, like he would make more and more money. And so we structured it with a base, a slow base.
3K or so base and then a solid commission so that as we scaled you'd make more and more money.
Clay Hepler (09:55)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Dude, a couple things you said about selling the dream. Look.
I think number one vulnerability is important. You don't want to false falsely sell someone of what the business is. Right. but also people, the reason why high level people come to you is cause they believe in you. I want to repeat that you sell people because they believe in you past performance of the business is super important, but
People over time, entrepreneurs over time have sold people on ideas in businesses that don't even exist. And so why can't you sell someone to change their life because of your conviction in your business and your output and you know who you are with your belief? Why can't you sell someone to come on on your business? And so there's two things that for me that are
Justin Piche (10:49)
Okay.
Clay Hepler (11:01)
important to consider when you're bringing this person on. Number one, there's the compensation, profit sharing, base salary, et cetera. Then there's the trust factor in you. Like how much conviction do you have? Right? And so this over here, right, for the YouTubers watching, the compensation is also directly tied to what you convey.
Justin Piche (11:16)
Okay.
Clay Hepler (11:31)
how you communicate, right? And so if you are bringing a new, bigger hire on Justin's old gut, this guy, I don't know if you had a relationship with him before, but he sold him.
Justin Piche (11:41)
It was
introduced through a mutual friend. hadn't met or known one another before, introduced through a mutual friend.
Clay Hepler (11:48)
Right. And so that's huge, man. That's huge that you sold him on the vision. He trusted you and man, he's, he's done a damn. He's had it. It's been a good, it's good. It's been a good bet. It's been a good bet for him.
Justin Piche (11:58)
Yeah, it's great. It's been
a good bet. It's been a good bet for me too. I mean, that's the best type of relationship is one where everybody's winning. But I agree. So, I mean, for me selling him, least displaying my conviction, I had burned the bridges. I had quit my W2. I made it very clear. Like I am all in on this business. Like this is what I'm doing, period. Like I'm not doing other things. And here's my goal. Here's my
one year goal. Here's my five year goal. This is where we're going to get to.
Clay Hepler (12:34)
That's right.
Justin Piche (12:34)
I mean,
you've got to have a vision, obviously, to be able to sell somebody. Right. If you have no conviction as a leader and no conviction on what you're going to do with your business, it's going to be hard to sell a high level person when you're early on. When you have an established business and you're rocking and rolling and you're pulling in a million or more top line, it's a little bit easier to sell someone. It's like, look at how we've done this last year. We need you to help us grow some more. You don't necessarily need to sell them as hard, but when you're early on and you're looking for that key player, you know. There's got to have a little something extra, I think.
Clay Hepler (13:01)
That's right.
That's right. That's right. So there's that, that there's the component of selling the person to bring on this person. The next thing is how do you know who to bring on? Again, that's, that's very context driven. A lot of times though, I find that
visionaries want to bring on someone that's the next them, right? And early in your business, you might not have the capital, the connections, or the clout to do that. And so you might want to bring on an operations person, maybe get a senior operations manager. Maybe you get just an ops admin that comes in and helps manage portions of your ops. They're not your $5 an hour VA, but they're not
three grand a month, like just as higher, four grand a month, that for a lot of land investors, that's a huge commitment, right? And so you don't have to go for the COO in order to get that number two. And what happens over time is you graduate into different stratospheres. And so maybe that ops manager, your ops admin can get into a different level, but they get to a certain level of they're managing a part of your business. And then there's another layer up, which
Justin Piche (14:00)
Thank
Clay Hepler (14:13)
It's the operations manager and then the other layer up is the integrator COO type. Right? So what are your checklists, Justin, for a high level operations manager? Like what are you looking for in someone like this?
Justin Piche (14:35)
Ownership. Number one ownership. I see I have two right. I have two main ops managers, one on the acquisition side and one on the sales side. And their job is to own the the Dispo as if it was their own business or own the acquisitions as if it was their own business. Analyze metrics.
make hires, decide on strategy. And I'm there to provide guidance and direction and set, you know, set the vision for the company and make sure that the goals of those individual organizations, those individual pieces of the business rather feed into the overall goal of the organization. But ownership is for me is the most critical piece. I am not hiring an ops manager or these. I would call these people a little maybe higher than they're kind of integrators for the sales and integrators for the acquisitions. But
I'm not hiring people to give direction at this level, right? You're not hiring somebody that you need to give specific tasks to. You're hiring people that are looking at the goals of the company and then creating the sub goals and managing the sub projects and moving the team forward to achieve those goals. And in most cases, they're the ones coming up with the goals, right? When we have, just, maybe just a quick aside, we just had our quarterly planning last week.
Clay Hepler (15:47)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (15:55)
Finally got around to it because we had to I got sick. We had to postpone it so on and so forth We finally finally got it done and I love quarterly planning meetings. I absolutely love them I used to kind of dread them because it's a lot of work. What do we get to focus on? But I love them now Because the team the respective department heads these folks bring the goals that they think are the most critical and my job as the CEO CEO is now to say well Here's the goals we set for the year and here's our five-year goals
how did these rocks that you're proposing move us toward? Which of these goals do they move us toward and how are they moving us towards these key metrics that we're measuring the success of our year in? And they're communicating that. if I push back, they have reasons why. It's great. It's like these people are thinking about what is most important to get done, proposing it, putting a plan together, and that is becoming our quarterly rocks for our company. And I'm not having to think about all these little details. Not that I don't want to think about them, but...
I have people in place that have ownership over their respective portions of the business. And yeah, that's the most critical piece.
Clay Hepler (17:03)
Okay. So the biggest thing when you're hiring this type of person is solving the principal agent problem. Julius Caesar said, if you want it done, go, if not send, right? Which is basically meaning people with, as Justin said, the ownership mentality, people without the ownership mentality, they are agents of the principal, right? So they are.
Justin Piche (17:07)
Okay.
Clay Hepler (17:27)
they operate on behalf of the principal. A principal operates on their own behalf. And within the context of a company, someone who has a principal thinking will operate based on the best, usually this is a profit sharing percentage or an equity, but having that tied into ownership on the best outcome for the business. And so that is so important, hunger. I want someone that's absolutely just
Justin Piche (17:42)
.
you
Clay Hepler (17:58)
hungry to go out there and just crush goals. I want a machine. I want someone that's just gonna be like, we're gonna destroy all of our competitors, we are gonna win. Like that's the person that I want in this role. Now, operations persons don't always have that like outward sales guy thing. Like I'm gonna go just crush everyone, but they have the thinking of let's solve problems methodically.
constraint-based thinking, first principles thinking, thinking about how do we build systems and then people, leadership built within them, whether it's through past leadership roles or a desire for leadership and being a learner, right? A lot of times, new investors, maybe you're younger, you might want to bring someone on with gray hairs, right? Whether it's experientially, they don't have physically gray hairs, but they have 15 years in the business, maybe they do. My ops manager has gray hairs.
Justin Piche (18:56)
I have gray hairs, man.
Clay Hepler (18:56)
okay.
Okay. I don't know, man. I'm not looking, I'm not looking, but that, that's the, that's the operator. I just, I do want to zoom in here real quick because our organizations are kind of different. Okay. So we, we, my organization is sort of a, a very conventional.
visionary CEO operations manager everyone underneath now each individual apartment has the people in it and actually we're gonna be bringing on someone that's a little more Sales sales focused, but I want you to tell the listeners What the difference in terms of scope for an acquisition operations person in a sales operations person in an effort to see maybe what
they need because you and I needed different things in our business. And I didn't need the I didn't need the and I'll tell you why I needed this person in my specific context. So maybe start with the acquisition. You've talked a lot about your dispositions guy, Brian, but what's the scope of your acquisitions person? How do you find? Why did you hire them? Why did you find them? What are they doing on their day to day? Is it marketing and sales? It's just sales like give us the give us the playbook.
Justin Piche (19:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's a great question. So the operations manager on the acquisition side has a few primary responsibilities. One is she's an exceptional closer and so larger scale deals. This is this is not directly related to ops. Okay, this is like a sub. This is like you, right? You this is me, right? This is somebody who's a good closer for your own business.
She replaces me as a US based closer for big deals, hard to get done deals deals what we need to nurture a long term relationship million dollar plus deals type of negotiator. So that's one aspect of her role. She's responsible as well for training training programs improvement for the team upskilling the team. That's a critical role that requires a ton of effort and energy and thought like how do you make sure your team?
is getting better every day. How do you measure it? What trainings are you implementing to improve them? So that's another huge aspect. Follow up and KPIs is the last one. the KPI, like one of the things that she is responsible for now, this is one of our quarterly goals is measuring each of our marketing channels performance, right? And this is something that everybody should probably do. And I'm sure it's something you do. It's something we've been not particularly good at on like a live
look at how well our marketing channels are performing. We've always been able to and always have looked back, you know, over the last six months, how has this performed, which is not particularly hard to do. But what I want is an up to date quarterly look at marketing channel marketing channels and how they're performing like financially to make decisions on budget and spend. So that's something that she's responsible for as well.
Basically anything that has to do with lead management and lead flow from, from basically after data, I have a different person who's responsible for data, although they work together closely to determine what markets to target and what lists to go after. But everything from initial outbound marketing all the way through under contract and all the processes and people inside of that scope are her responsibility.
Clay Hepler (22:35)
So in other words, outbound marketing, inbound marketing, direct mail, any outbound you have, tracking those KPIs, managing the people underneath them. Like, so if you have a, let's say, I don't know, you have a marketing associate, she's managing that relationship, she's managing the one-on-ones. Got it. Okay.
Justin Piche (22:44)
Yep, yep.
Yes, that's Yep,
exactly.
Clay Hepler (23:00)
So it's very,
if I'm kind of hearing you correctly, it's pre-contract, post-contract. And then the operations people sit between post is fulfillment TC, dispositions pre is marketing sales.
Justin Piche (23:20)
Yeah, TC is kind of TC project management are basically under me still like those are TC and project management are they're kind of in the admin function. We have like a I would break the business into three parts. I would say acquisitions, dispositions, and then like admin finance type, whatever the third part. And so I still manage for the most part the admin side of it. Now I have an executive assistant.
And she is really the one doing a lot of like the administrative work, signing things, following up with the TC. But when it comes to what it like, those folks kind of report up into me, TC and project manager and my assistant, and then my ops manager and my, sales manager, they all report into me. Those are the kind of, that's kind of way we have it. I guess there could be a future where I hire, you know, a CEO.
for the business that then manages the admin tasks and oversees those other folks. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I really enjoy kind of what I'm working on. I'm like, I like being like the hub of inform not the hub in terms of everything has to go through me, but being in the position where I see all the things that are happening. And that's kind of what I see TC is really like the hub, the center of the business.
Clay Hepler (24:22)
So, so.
Right, but we'll talk about my structure in two seconds here, but again, it depends on how you want to run the business, right? And it's all about highest and best use. just because Justin runs the business this way, guys, doesn't mean you have to run it the business his way or the way I run it, because we have different skill sets.
We have different orientations, Justin and I, have different skill sets. so also we might enjoy different things. And so you don't want to build yourself a prison, which a lot of investors do. They parachute into the worst positions or they pigeonhole themselves in a certain position and they can't get out because they made a wrong hire. So I want to just double click on one thing because this is really important.
Justin Piche (25:22)
Yeah. Yeah.
Clay Hepler (25:28)
So she.
Justin Piche (25:29)
Let me walk
back something real quick on the Dispo side. Recently, maybe like six months ago, I delegated ultimate decision making for purchase go no go on properties to sales to dispositions. That was a decision that I held on to for a long time. Like we get something under contract. Who's going to decide if we actually are going to close on it or not? For the longest time, it was me. And I'm sure it's a lot of our listeners, right? You want to be the one who's in control of where your money goes or
what deals you're actually taking into inventory. But something I did is I delegated that to Dispo. And the reason I delegated it to Dispo is because Dispo is the one gathering most of the marketing. They're doing pre-marketing. They're fielding buyer leads. They're seeing buyer interest. They're managing realtors and brokers. They're getting broker price opinions. And in the end, they're the ones who are the most qualified to determine
Yes, this is a good property based on the interest that we've gotten on our marketing based on what our broker feedback or realtor feedback or broker price opinion, whatever you want to call it has been. And based on the, the, the feedback from our buyers list, so on and so forth. And when I did that TC has fallen a lot more into sales. I don't think I've updated my org chart to say that TC direct boards to directly into the sales manager. But if I had to,
If I rewrote it today, I would probably say that that is in fact how fundamentally it works, maybe functionally reporting in through sales.
Clay Hepler (26:53)
Yeah, so kind of like what I was saying a little bit earlier, alluding to, okay, a little bit, okay. Pre and post, pre and post, got it. So that pre, one last question. The acquisition head, do you have acquisition managers underneath the acquisition head or is that person taking the majority of your leads? Here's why this question.
Justin Piche (26:55)
Kind of like what you said. Yeah post and pre pre and post. Yep pre and post contract
Yeah, no idea. have two
acquisitions managers under the ops manager. So have ops manager.
acquisitions managers and a cold calling manager and then everybody else kind of falls under them. I have two acquisitions manager. We've kind of talked about lead manager versus acquisition manager before. I don't have a I don't have like a designated lead manager. I have three negotiators one of which is the ops manager. So she has a whole bunch of other duties and the other two are negotiators and compers and everything. We do a lot of our pre we do a lot of qualification on the
Clay Hepler (27:33)
Lead manager.
Justin Piche (27:56)
front end, like the first outreach is more of qualification lead management. And so we're forwarding a whole lot less leads because we're qualifying them pretty heavily on the front end. and so we don't necessarily need a lead manager for that style. You know, if we, if we've, if we changed it up and redo, relaxed our qualification criteria, we would definitely need a lead manager and we would just structure the team differently so that we had somebody who was only like their whole duty was comping and pricing and qualifying before negotiations.
But we don't our team is not structured that way.
Clay Hepler (28:28)
And in both your AMs are international. Beautiful. Okay. So my organization at this point is an operations manager is running marketing, TC, head of Dispo, like on the top of Dispo, and he parachutes into pre and post.
Justin Piche (28:33)
Yes.
Clay Hepler (28:54)
Tasks to basically run them. The role of him is basically to run the day-to-day of the operations like I should not be Involved in the day-to-day of the operations and I don't want to be involved in transaction coordination I want my operations manager to actually do that That's the type of business that I want to build which obviously it's different than what Justin just said But the reason why I hired this guy is I want him to come in I would just be doing sales at this point and then he would run
primarily all of the other nuances and fix problems.
Justin Piche (29:29)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast as usual to say thanks for listening. We are talking about your number two this week. When to hire, who to hire, and the relief that we feel and felt when that person came into our business and if
You are somebody who's bogged down by managing literally every aspect. Please listen to the end. As usual, leave a comment, rate, review and subscribe. We really appreciate it. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Clay Hepler (30:00)
His role is to come in, make sure everything runs smoothly on time and also fix problems. And so that's, that's a really important nuance there. And we're probably going to be bringing on a, director of sales of sorts, not really sales revenue, something like that. We're thinking about it. And that person would just be in sales, just be in sales instead of sales and marketing.
And the operations manager would be in marketing at this point and just sit over all these. then whenever the marketing person needs help, hey, I need help with project manager, building out processes, transactions, whatever, the operations manager comes in as a support role to help this person and bring that strategic insight to help this person. That is how it currently looks in my business. It's a little different, but...
that's what, that's what works for us. And that's the type of business that I really wanted to, to build because my operations manager is an engineer. And so he knows, he knows, constraint, constraint theory. And that's how he applies to each part of our business and, has done a lot of stuff with data centers, logistics, shipping logistics and really knows.
how to make processes more efficient. And that's why I really wanted to hire him. So when you bring someone on like just Justin, it's not like a normal employee. You're not giving them an email address and giving them some SOPs, right? You're not just kicking them to the curb, right? This type of hire is...
strategic and requires a lot of a Raise standard in onboarding. So when I when I onboarded my operations manager, which one day you might be on the podcast I thought about learn the business Run the business Optimize the business 30 days learn the business 60 days run the business
90 days optimized the business. Unfortunately, has not, it has not been that smooth because of some hiring hiccups. but, but really it was, that was the point of the 30, 60, 90 and having that clear roadmap to this is what success looks like. and so we built this out. I built this out joint with him and then got his buy-in. so we're, getting, we're at the end of 60, we're going into 90.
And he's starting to run portions of the business. So we're probably 30 days behind. but I'm, feeling really good about him, him being in the seat. One thing I told my operations manager, and I think this is a posture that we all should have when it comes to hiring these higher level roles is I don't expect the person to perform for six months. They're full performance.
And I don't expect them to excel for 12 months that reduces pressure and that allows them to think long-term. Just like in the stock market, these public companies will make cuts to hit their earnings every quarter and, and, and hedge funds have to trade in and out every quarter in order to satisfy their investors.
If you create a incentive structure that focuses on performance over the long term versus coming in quickly and having to perform, it allows them to take that longer term view of the business and it's not as stressful, it's a better onboarding experience and it provides them the runway that they need if they're truly a high performer to hit their targets.
I'm speaking strictly in the sense of an operations person. A salesperson is totally different if you're hiring a high level salesperson and a lot of other roles. Because salesperson, if you're not performing by day 30 or day 60, get out of the seat. But with an operations person, it takes a lot longer to get integrated, in my experience. So that's my 30, 60, 90 roadmap.
Justin Piche (34:29)
Yeah, I like that when I had my latest ops manager, my ops, exhibitions, manager come in. The first assignment she had was audit.
Clay Hepler (34:39)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (34:41)
And I said, your job right now is to look, to have interviews with everybody on your team and to audit all the processes and identify where the issues are and what you need to improve, what we need to improve. That was the, that was the first assignment. And so that's kind of the learn and observe, right? And then obviously progressively get more duties, more responsibilities, training, training, development plans, and now full on process improvement, optimize.
Clay Hepler (35:10)
Yeah. And what was the time period Justin of that? Like what, what's the audit time period? What was the, what output were you hoping? What were you?
Justin Piche (35:15)
I think it lines. Yeah, no, it aligns
really well with the 30 60 90. I didn't define it this way. I wasn't as specific. I probably I wish I had been although I didn't in practice. This is exactly kind of what it what it was.
Clay Hepler (35:28)
Okay. So it was like 30 audit, learn the business, run it, optimize.
Justin Piche (35:31)
Yeah, yeah, first month, learn it, learn
it, it, it, optimize. Yep, that's exactly right.
Clay Hepler (35:35)
Cool.
When you bring someone on like this, the cadence is considered relative to the role seniority. If I am a career COO and you bring me onto your team, I'm going to think to myself, if you're trying to meet with me every day for two hours, that you're babysitting me, right?
You gotta use the logic here guys, right? Someone that's an operations manager that maybe is a new operations manager, maybe they need a little bit more handholding. At this point with my operations manager, we have a weekly one-on-one, top challenges, good things that went this week, good things that happened this week, bottlenecks, reporting on quarterly objectives. We bust through it.
Justin Piche (36:07)
Okay.
Okay.
Clay Hepler (36:32)
If we need to meet during the week, can, we're very, we have a good body knives. We have a good back and forth during the week. And if we need to meet, we do, but I'm not like, I'm not. Micro managing him, right? He's doing his own thing. He is a
career professional and that could be someplace that people could trip up man that they are taking the same approach to a $4 an hour VA that they are to a operations manager. And so I'm going to say, well,
Justin Piche (36:51)
you
Clay Hepler (37:02)
and it might put you on the bad, a first impression with this person.
How do you approach weekly rhythms with your team?
Justin Piche (37:13)
Yeah, I you know one thing I probably should do that I don't is weekly one on ones with the ops managers. I think that we have enough ad hoc conversations where I haven't felt it necessary yet. We have a leadership we do level. I mean we do EOS. We have a weekly level 10 hour and a half 90 minute leadership team meeting where everybody is in there and so that's where I feel like we get a lot of the updates and issue solving and you know follow up on tasks and all that kind of stuff together.
But I would like to, I probably should implement a weekly one-on-one with those two key roles. think that would be, that would probably be a little bit, a little bit helpful. But yeah, we in the level 10, we're reviewing KPIs for each independent department. And I mean, you know how level 10 goes. So lot of this stuff that you're covering in the one-on-ones we're covering in our level 10.
Clay Hepler (38:01)
Yeah.
Justin Piche (38:01)
But
I agree. I definitely agree on the like the way I'm probably way too far on the not micromanaging side of things. Like I really, really like to let people run with things and go. And when you get the right person in place, money. But it has bit me right when I've hired the wrong person where I didn't give enough direction because I'm of the mindset that that person should have taken ownership and been able to set their own.
direction and really what it was is just the wrong fit. Right. Get it. Want it. Capacity to do it. was just that the get it wasn't there or the capacity to do it wasn't there.
Clay Hepler (38:37)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (38:38)
But when they get it on it, capacity to do it is all right. There's no reason why micromanagement would be required.
Clay Hepler (38:45)
And let me add one thing to Weekly Sync, Recreate Rhythm.
When you are, this is a personal opinion, working with a strategic partner, an operations manager that is high level, COO, the acquisitions, a revenue operations manager, whatever you have, that weekly cadence is not only about checking in, it's not a status meeting, it is a bottleneck removing meeting. And so you can really come into the meeting,
with this is a problem and we can sit down and solve it. That's outside of the context of a company wide meeting, depending on how many people you have on a level 10, it's an expensive meeting, man. It's expensive hour and a half. It's a steak dinner or two, right? And so getting in that one-on-one cadence will allow you to be more deliberate about not only solving problems within their department or with a specific person in a very deliberate way, but also
Justin Piche (39:27)
you
you
Clay Hepler (39:51)
helping them hit their career growth goals. Like where are you, what are you trying to do? Everyone is trying to grow. And so I use my one-on-ones with my team to focus on how can I help you grow? How can I help you get to the next level? And that's the point of it. I really enjoy the one-on-ones too, but there are benefits and drawbacks to both. Cause if you're doing one-on-ones with everyone, you don't have time to do one-on-ones with yourself. You know what I mean?
Justin Piche (39:57)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, feel that. I feel that meeting overload can happen. I feel it often. It's one of the reasons. Yeah, I mean, God, right now there's all kinds of so many priorities in this business. It's hard to it's hard to balance. It really is. You know, I think anybody who's listening to here's us. And if you have the thought, man, Justin and Clay, they've got it all together. Throw that thought away. We don't. You know, we are learning just like you are. We figured out certain things that work for us and
I think we have a lot of things that we that have not worked and which is why we give advice on specific topics because we've tried it and it didn't work and we can at least explain why it didn't work for us. It doesn't mean it won't always work for you and hopefully steer you towards a path that will provide you less resistance and allow you to move your business forward faster. But we still deal with all kinds of issues. My biggest issue right now is just time. Frankly, the amount of time I spend in coaching calls.
in meetings versus the amount of time I need to spend managing larger scale developments. It's a tough balance, right? And then managing time with my family, my wife's expectations. it can be a little bit overwhelming sometimes.
Clay Hepler (41:32)
Well, you know, when you go to North Carolina for golf trips, it takes a lot of time out of your.
Justin Piche (41:38)
I cut it shorter. I'm actually I told my wife I booked my ticket earlier today. I'm flying out Sunday morning at 5 30 a.m. flight. So I've got to get up at like 3 15 or something at my house to make it on time. And then I'm flying back Wednesday evening. So I'm missing two rounds of golf. But it's OK because I'm still getting five rounds in. I think so. We'll be we'll be all right.
Clay Hepler (42:00)
Well,
one thing I want to add as in why people fail in this, this hiring, this position is they hire and they abdicate versus delegate. We think that when we hire a high quality hire that they do not need direction. That is incorrect. Right? They need direction because they need to know what a win is.
Especially when you're bringing someone on, they need to know what's a win in 90 days? What's a win in a year? Like how do I grow with this company? If I'm an ambitious person and I'm getting hired into a new company, I want to know what the owner, the founder expects. I want to know what my goal is I can go out and crush them. And so a lot of times there's no check-ins. There's no, it's just complete abdication. Okay, it's your thing now, go and do it, right? And delegating.
Justin Piche (42:35)
Okay.
Clay Hepler (43:00)
It's different, saying this is our goals
for the department. Of course, in the future, like Justin pointed out in his last Q2 roundup into building out those priorities, at some point you get to the point that the department is defining it, right? Of course, right? That's natural, that's natural. But the CEO still sets the tone, right? This is where we're going, and then they put in the, okay, I'm a specialist, I know.
Justin Piche (43:04)
you
you
Clay Hepler (43:28)
Sales better than Justin does. I'm Brian. So Justin, we gotta
do this this quarter to our goals. And you're like, yes, that makes sense, but we still need to know, we still need to give them the clarity. And people mess this up because they just say, go and do it. They have the emotional release that, I hired the person, bro, we're good, we're good. And the reality is, yeah, you're in a much better position, but you wanna support this person.
Justin Piche (43:35)
you
Okay.
Clay Hepler (43:56)
even though they might have more gray hairs, supporting looks like encouragement, coaching, feedback, and not just saying, go and figure it out, even though they can, but being there to be next to them is so important,
want to do a little bit of a debrief of Santiago. I wish he could be on this call. But Santiago was brought in about two months ago, two to three months ago. He's taken over KPI ownership. He's taken over accountability in our Dispo team, in our transaction team.
to a large extent, he'll be taking that over fully within the next two weeks on our outbound team. He's been starting to take over all of that. And he has a output in this quarter, which is 40 offers per week. He's helping with hiring. Organization-wide, we just hired a marketing associate data engineer. We're hiring a transaction coordinator to replace our transaction coordinator.
Justin Piche (44:39)
you
Okay.
Clay Hepler (45:05)
And so he's running a lot of those interviews. And then when he's like, dude, no, these guys are good. I come in and I'll do the final interview, but there's a couple of people in front of me and he's that buttress. He's the person in front of me
that's managing a lot of these. And then obviously taking over the finances P &L. So as of May, he's going to be the person that's actually taking over finances P &L, everything that you would imagine an operations person. TC, marketing, data.
Justin Piche (45:32)
you
Clay Hepler (45:35)
dispositions, everything after the contract, except for marketing is what he is going to be owning. and being that person that parachutes in and removes constraints versus me, which was, was owning everything. was owning all conversations. I was making, I had to make sure that data was getting out to our team or outbound team data was getting to this team. I was managing sales. was managing KPIs. I was, it was a nightmare, man. It was a nightmare.
Justin Piche (45:50)
Okay.
Clay Hepler (46:03)
And even though we were successful, I needed that extra help.
And so that's how we were scaling with something.
Justin Piche (46:11)
That's fantastic. It like I mean, how do you feel now that he's taken on these things? Like what do you feel now versus what you felt before he was in your business and has taken over these critical functions?
Clay Hepler (46:25)
That's a great point. I'm gonna give a caveat that he's not fully there, but he will be in like two to three weeks. Dude.
Justin Piche (46:31)
Sure, but you see the end point. You see the end point.
Clay Hepler (46:37)
I'm, it's a relief, it's a relief. There's this concept, I think I've spoken about it before about this mental radiation, right? It's the thing in the back of your mind that you're like.
man, did I forget to get the strawberries at the store? Dude, I'm like, I forgot to get the strawberries, the pretzels, the ice cream. I forgot the bread. I forgot the eggs and the beef. I forgot everything. I brought home like just some soda. Everything else I forgot. We're not having dinner tonight. It's just soda. And we were able to be successful with that because I'm a driver.
And so now Santiago is coming in and he's really helping out. Dude, he's bought in. I I really enjoy working with him too, which is super important. And he's bought in. I hope he doesn't listen to this Santiago, shouldn't get a big head yet. We got a lot of stuff to accomplish. But the relief that I feel now that he's coming in and he truly has that principle mindset and his compensation is tied to that by the way. He gets a percentage of the upside.
It's a relief that I can't even describe because I also hate KPIs. hate profit and loss. I like, I hate data. Are you kidding me? Like, I don't like it, but he's way better at it than me. So it's great.
Justin Piche (47:56)
Yeah. Yeah.
Fantastic.
Clay Hepler (48:05)
Any last minute dude, anything for you, any kind of relief that you've gotten from these positions? Maybe recently this new sales position. mean, this was a relatively, I remember in the fall you were talking about this person. How has this impacted?
Justin Piche (48:17)
Yeah, she started full time
in January. It's I mean, it's been it's been great because the we have a big acquisitions team and we we have a lot of marketing output and we have a lot of leads and deals that are coming through and a lot of the leads and deals are complex. You know, it's it's it's not terribly hard to do a flip. know, you find a property, you're like, yeah, I'll buy it. I'll sell it for more.
I'll line up a deal funder for it maybe and then I'm going to get a marketing package together. I'm going to sell this property. That's great. You know, maybe it's hard to find those deals consistently, but they're easy. They're very, very easy. We're now handling a lot of more complex and hairy deals. You know, deals with access issues, deals where we're trying to, we've got a great contract on one property and we're having to negotiate with the...
the neighbor or there's a development nearby and we need to talk, figure out who the developer is and get in contact with them, understand where their roads are going to terminate so we can see if our properties and entitlement potential, can we get access to, there's just all these like more complex problems on some of these deals and without an ops manager driving forward and making sure somebody's assigned to run that down. Like it's just too much for me. So it's been, it's been definitely a relief to be able to know that.
things are being worked and yeah, we don't get to everything, right? Yeah, there's things that get dropped invariably of any business, but we have more people and we have one much more focused person on improving those things. So it's allowed me to focus on other larger scale developments, which is really where, you know, I've kind of taken my own time in the business is focusing on much larger, longer term developments, raising money, raising funds. and I definitely don't want to shut down the business. Certainly not.
I really enjoy it. I enjoy running the team. I enjoy the benefit that the business provides to my team and their families. I enjoy being able to help landowners. I enjoy being able to get people into properties for a great price and offer on our financing. think there's just a lot of value that's created in this type of business. so without these critical positions, especially the ops manager, the project manager, the sales manager, I just couldn't focus on the things that I really want to. And
maintain the business. I just can't do them all. So it's just enabled me to do more and the team to do more.
Clay Hepler (50:43)
Yep, Well, dude gentlemen's agreement at the end of the podcast as our listeners know is if you got benefit from this guy's deep diving into hiring bringing that number to rate review subscribe leave a a Big clay you had an amazing podcast. I love this point, you know all that stuff down below and If you're on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe. We appreciate you guys Justin till next week
Justin Piche (51:09)
Until next week, later guys.
Clay Hepler (51:10)
Later.