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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 31: The Backbone to 10x Your Land Business
🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
In this episode, hosts Justin Piche and Clay Hepler explore the critical importance of project management in scaling your land investment business. They share insights on how effective project management can serve as the foundation for significant growth.
Key Highlights
Personal Updates:
Clay begins the episode by sharing his recent family gatherings and the joy of hosting, highlighting the importance of relationships in business. Justin discusses his latest project involving an electric bike, setting a lighthearted tone for the conversation.
Understanding Project Management Needs:
The hosts discuss the signs that indicate it's time to enhance your project management approach. They explore the challenges investors face when juggling multiple projects and the necessity of effective coordination.
Transformative Power of Project Management:
Justin and Clay emphasize how strong project management practices can revolutionize your operations. They share personal stories illustrating how these strategies have enabled them to focus on growth and strategic initiatives.
Creating a Culture of Ownership:
They highlight the significance of fostering a culture of accountability within your team. The hosts discuss how empowering team members can lead to better decision-making and improved project outcomes.
Utilizing Project Management Tools:
The conversation shifts to the tools and software that can enhance project management efficiency. Justin and Clay explain how leveraging technology can streamline processes and improve communication.
Long-Term Planning for Success:
The hosts encourage listeners to think beyond immediate project needs and consider the long-term implications of their management strategies. They discuss how effective project management can lay the groundwork for future success and scalability.
This episode is packed with practical advice, personal anecdotes, and actionable insights that can help you master project management in the land investing space. Whether you're an experienced 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)
Welcome to the GroundGate podcast. This is your cohost, Justin Piche.
Clay Hepler (00:04)
This is your other co-host, Clay Hepler, and we're here to teach you how to win the ground game.
Justin Piche (00:22)
Alright, Clay. What's been going on? Easter weekend? Last weekend? Did you guys do anything fun? Egg hunt?
Clay Hepler (00:29)
Dude, not yet. I mean, my, my one year old, not really at that level yet. We did host a bunch of family, which is really fun. We're the hosting house now. So all the family comes over to our house. So that was really great. Um, got some really exciting stuff. Um, a big hire in the works. Um, and, uh, or at least at the beginning, I don't want to
spoil the fun for the listeners. So in a couple of weeks we'll know a little bit better about really, really high level hire that's gonna be coming on. I think it's gonna be another big business mover. It's interesting, when you get to a certain level you start to think about the biggest changes in the business aren't about new systems, they're about new people. And...
Justin Piche (01:01)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (01:26)
That's where it leaps, I've noticed the biggest leaps in my business have come, not from me having some amazing idea, some original idea, it's when I put the right person in the right seat and that accelerates the business. so, early on, you don't have that ability. Then you start to realize you get a better hire, another hire, whether it's you hire someone to come in, a sales coach,
a marketing coach, a scaling coach, whether that you actually bring a person on, it's always a people thing, dude. It's always a people thing. You you were talking about that deal that you have with Buck and that's a people thing, man. You would never have that deal, but it's just the relationships. this game is a people game. I know the listeners are probably, you know, my gosh, some other guy on a podcast talking about people, right? It's just so cliche. It's like true.
Justin Piche (02:07)
.
It is.
Clay Hepler (02:25)
And so, yes.
Justin Piche (02:25)
Yeah.
Yes. Well, that's awesome. Man, I got this one thing going on. It's totally un-business related, but it'll make for good banter. I have this electric bike. It's called a Rad Wagon and it's awesome. My wife bought it for me for my birthday several years ago and it's a cargo bike, cargo electric bike. And on the back, instead of cargo, I just have two bike seats.
Clay Hepler (02:35)
Okay
Justin Piche (02:51)
And my youngest is now 15 months. And so she's totally old enough to ride on the bike. And so I've started attaching a tow behind trailer as well. So I've got like a tow behind trailer and two bike seats and I can cruise around like wherever I want to go in this e-bike. But lately, because of all the weight, it is just really slow and the brakes kind of suck. And it's just like not ideal. And I love projects. I love like improving things and like fun little projects. I could spend a little bit of money and
do something really fun. Well, I sent the bike to the shop last week to get new hydraulic brakes installed and they need to replace the chain or place like I said, basically just get like a full tune up on it. And then I also bought a new motor, like a mid drive motor that goes, that's like a crank motor that's way more powerful than the existing motor. I've got all this stuff in my garage and this Friday, a buddy of mine, one of my best friends is, ⁓
for his birthday, he wants to go on a critical mass ride. I don't know if you know what critical mass is, but it's like a huge group bike ride. So it's like 25, 26, 28, something like that, miles through Houston. And there's going to be hundreds, if not more, bike riders all going on it. So I just called the bike shop today. It's not ready yet. I was expecting to be ready today, but maybe tomorrow. And then can take it, install the new motor, get it all hooked up, and be ready to cruise with my new souped bike for this.
for critical mass. My wife, my wife was like,
Clay Hepler (04:16)
Dude you're such an engineer. You're such an engineer. I love it.
Justin Piche (04:21)
she goes, is it worth just selling this bike and buying a new one? Like, are you going to spend so much money that you might as well just buy a new bike? Like, no, no, no, this bike is great. Plus I want to tinker with it. So even though maybe financially it would make more sense to like sell it and buy something a little bit faster and beefier, I really like the bike. And so I'm going to.
I'm going to just soup it up and have fun with it instead.
Clay Hepler (04:48)
That's cool, man. That's really cool. Yeah. I remember a couple of years ago, I went out to visit my cousins in Huntington Beach and they had these awesome e-bikes, just incredible e-bikes. And we took them from their house, which was a couple of blocks away to all the way to the beach and then drove all around Huntington Beach and went to the ⁓ Equinox in Huntington Beach and then went swimming and it was so awesome.
But I had never used like an e-bike before then. They're awesome. Like they're so much fun.
Justin Piche (05:21)
Yeah, there I mean there there's
there's so much fun we when we were in Europe last summer we rented we went to this incredible mountain and went mountain biking and we we we rented e-bike mountain bikes and had trailers for the kids. So I had a trailer with two of the kids behind me and my wife had a trailer with the other one behind her. The people the people there like these Europeans looked at us like we were effing insane with tow behind trailers.
Clay Hepler (05:47)
haha
Justin Piche (05:49)
like flying down like rock slopes with these kids in the back. They were just like these freaking Americans are just nuts. But it was the most fun day that I can remember in a long time. It was it was awesome. I still it's just I think it was combined. was just an incredibly gorgeous day. Some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen in my entire life and probably will see in my entire life. And then mountain biking with the family is just really, really, really fun. Would not.
Clay Hepler (06:15)
Nothing like that, you know, the Houston
mountains.
Justin Piche (06:17)
Yeah,
yeah, I know. Yeah, would not have been able to do it without the e-bike. I mean, it was a lot of weight with the kids behind you and like some pretty solid slopes. At some points, if you like slow to a stop, zero percent chance you're starting again. You just had to walk the bike and these bikes didn't have a throttle at all. So it was all pedal assist. So even like walking the bike up with the weight, like, you know, putting your arms up and like, like trudging up the slope was pretty tough. So I was always trying to get as much speed on those.
you know, uphill is getting the gearing right so I wouldn't have to stop and the wheels wouldn't slip.
Clay Hepler (06:49)
That's funny man, that's funny.
That's good. Well, speaking about e-bikes and engineering.
Justin Piche (06:58)
No. Yeah. Well, hey, it's a prod.
You know, my bike is a project. And speaking about there's a segue and speaking about projects today, we're going to talk a little bit about project management in the land business. Now, when you're initially kind of flipping or you're wholesaling your signing and stuff like that, you're probably not really improving properties. You know, your projects may consist of you get the deal.
Clay Hepler (07:02)
It's a project. It's a project.
Justin Piche (07:23)
And then you have a series of tasks that need to happen for you to get the marketing in order and get the property listed and get, you know, field buyer leads. And those can all kind of, can, you could call those projects. But when I'm talking about project, what I'm talking about here is, is improvements. And this can be as small as managing a improvement project on a flip where you are doing some clearing work and installing a culvert and putting in a driveway. And it can be as large as you're doing all the horizontal development for a large residential subdivision.
So that's that's kind of what we're going to dive into. ⁓ And I think this matters because as you scale, as you level up, as you handle more and harder development deals, there's a lot of plates spinning. And in my personal business, in my business, this is a huge issue. I found myself in probably like in middle of twenty twenty three. I had started doing subdivides kind of mid to end of twenty twenty two.
And then by mid 2023, I had 10 or 15 simultaneous projects of varying degrees of challenge and difficulty. Most of them were pretty small. Two of them were a little bit larger with hundreds of thousands of dollars of improvements putting into them. And at the same time, I'm trying to manage my team. I'm trying to continue to scale marketing output. It's just a lot. And project management is so critical to these deals moving along, because, you know, if you can't manage a project well,
Especially once you've bought a property, you've got a lot of holding costs. And if you're using bank debt with like I do on a lot of these bigger deals, that's extra interest charges, right? That you have to pay as you hold that property and it's not ready to sell yet. And so kind of in the middle, middle of twenty twenty four, I decided, hey, I definitely need a project manager and hired one. And it has been a game. She has been a game changer for my business because now we've got
30, 30 subdivides in varying stages of development right now. And I'm able to handle more. Like people bring deals to partner on and I'm like, you know, I have, I have a project manager who can actually take this deal and start running down all the different items that need to be run down, put together a Gantt chart, figure out what's the least timeline for development and just stay on top of all these tasks that have to happen to get this project ready to list. And so that's what we're to talk about today. So I think there's
A couple things to maybe touch on at first. think there's the four phases of framework for any kind of project. We're going to talk about some project management tools. Most of them will just touch on and highlight as some most people probably have heard of a lot of these. I'm going to talk a little more in depth about Notion, what I use to manage projects. I'll ask Clay what he uses as well. And then as usual, we'll talk about team building tactic.
Let's jump into the phases of development projects, the four phases of development projects.
Clay Hepler (10:23)
Yeah, yeah. And before just quickly before we jump in this here, I think this is going to be relevant. The phases are going to be relevant whether or not you have a project manager and into bringing on this person, which we'll talk quickly about. There is a there's a certain level of like, how do I know when I should bring on this person? What should I pay them? What states I'd pay? What's international pay? Things like that. We're answer all those questions later on in the later on in the episode. So
⁓ For example, I'm going to use an example of a deal we recently got on our contracts. You can understand how we're thinking about the discovery, feasibility of the project. So we got a deal on our contract. think initially ⁓ this is going to be really good deal. And so how we do it, just so you can be different, is we're going to call local brokers to get a lay of the land.
Right? We're going to figure out, okay, we're going to do the market research and call these brokers. At this point, I do it for the majority of our deals. We have a transaction coordinator who does also assist in calling the brokers and kind of finding the brokers for me. But I'm still calling the brokers, having the conversation with the brokers. So we have this 200-ish acre parcel, 20-acre lake, just gorgeous, gorgeous subdivide. So we're doing the market research.
Justin Piche (11:18)
you
Bye.
Clay Hepler (11:44)
Discussing with the brokers who's the best surveyors who are the best dirt movers all the people that we need to execute the project We're having those conversations including the people maybe depending on the size of your project You might be thinking about utilities whether that's a soil test whether that's a you know testing for a well ⁓ It depends on the scope that the type of project that you're doing, but you really want to figure out at this point Worst case best case scenario
Justin Piche (11:58)
you
Clay Hepler (12:12)
What are all the variables that we have, whether it's utilities, road frontage, ⁓ market, dynamics, ⁓ velocity, all these things in order to create a budget and a plan for the feasibility of this project, right? So Justin, do you have anything to add to that?
Justin Piche (12:28)
Yeah.
Yeah, so this first phase I would call the discovery and feasibility. So you've identified your site that you're planning on running a project on, or you're at least trying to figure out if it's the right site to run a project on. Maybe it's a deal you got under contract. You did a quick and dirty kind of Excel or Google Sheets underwriter. It looks promising. You've got it. You've set an initial kind of rough budget, and now you've got it under contract. So now it's time to go into feasibility. a lot of the things that you basically everything you said is a part of feasibility.
Some other things that matter is, hey, the first thing I always look at first of all is utilities. What's the utility situation? So water, sewer, electric. A lot of the sites that we do projects on are septic. And so with the septic site, you need a soil test, soil analysis. There's different phases or levels, I guess, if you will, of soil tests. You can get a whole site kind of survey map, soil survey map that shows you what types of soils are across the property and which are likely to
pass for are suitable for septic or not. And you can also do basically just dig holes on each potential lot and do a specific septic test or per test on each lot, which is sometimes what we do as well. So that's one thing. And then the other is, of course, market research, right? You want to make sure the product type that you're creating, A, is desirable, B, has a good sell through rate. And that helps you estimate the project timeline, right? I would call the project timeline all the way through development through last lot sale.
So getting, and that's a huge piece where I think a lot of people miss and certainly what I missed when I was first doing these larger subdivides was rosy or rose colored glasses on how long it would take me to sell out of X number of lots of inventory. I just grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take me to sell out of these developments. And so when you're pitching to investors, I mean, that's a huge deal. How quick are they going to get their cash back? And then what is the IRR of the cash invested?
Right. If a project takes a year and you're making a 200 % return, fantastic. But if that same project takes four years, okay, that 200 % return starts to not look as attractive when you account for time. So that's part of your market research. ⁓ The way I kind of do this is I use a Google spreadsheet or Google Sheets as a quick underwriter. I have ⁓ just an underwriter model that essentially doesn't account for time at all. All it is is accounting for estimates of cost and
Estimates of sales. It accounts for, you know, closing costs, realtor fees, has some overages in there, some contingencies in there, and then it spits out essentially a return on cash and I'm able to update, you know, how much am I paying my investors? How much am I taking as like a management fee? So on and so forth. And that's the first my first kind of step. Then I have to verify all of those numbers. So if I had planned on digging wells, well, I got to call some.
well drilling companies and understand, is the water here good? What is the average depth of these wells? How much does it cost to dig a well and account for probably a test well on most places? If it's wells, I usually will drill at least one test well to be able to tell all the other lot owners, hey, I drilled a well here. It was 300 feet deep. It cost me $12,000. That's how much about it'll cost you. And we got good water. So that gives a lot of people that gives people confidence. If it's utilities along the street, public utilities, that's a whole different.
ball game, you've got to understand if the water line has capacity to serve. And one thing I actually had to do recently on a project that I think is going to not work out is this is a project in Texas. ⁓ I was initially trying to do a 34 lot larger subdivide, larger lot subdivide on 200 acres. And I talked to the water utility company that has water lines all along the street.
They have a six inch and a four inch along the southern street, which I was hoping would be big enough. But the county has passed new fire regulations that require eight inches lines everywhere. And unfortunately, the I as the developer have to do more than a mile, about nine thousand feet of offsite waterline improvements to the tune of more than a million dollars of improvements. And that in itself didn't necessarily kill the deal. So then I up.
the lot count substantially to 94 lots and re underwrote. And the cost didn't change drastically of the water line install because I mean, the interior did, but the exterior was about was the same. But then the road and detention requirements got so, you know, so high that it basically is going to kill the project. So I have a meeting tomorrow with the the utility company and the county engineer to just kind of discuss options. But I think I'm going end up killing it. But that's an example of feasibility. Right. We got under contract. I'm going to lose some probably about three grand of
non-refundable option money, but I'll be able to cancel ideally before I lose 20k of earnest, know, and that's part of that's part of this part of this process So that's first the next stage After you kind of do term and feasibility is your actual sketches and drawings now early on in these projects You really really need to get the county involved most counties, especially for major developments and even from
Clay Hepler (17:45)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (17:48)
I want you to bring them your site plan before you do anything. So you can set up a meeting with a planner or the county engineer, depending on who is kind of in charge of this in that county and literally just draw sketch. A lot of times I'm using land ID for larger lots of divisions, know, sub 20 lots, sub 30 lots. I'll just use land ID to sketch. If it's a higher density, I've got a guy in Columbia that can put together a sketch plan for really cheap and he'll do.
just a sketch plan of the property that I can bring to the county and use that. And they will tell you kind of what you need to do. And oftentimes we'll recommend surveyors that you can work with that can help move this project along that they've enjoyed working with before. So you've got the feasibility, you've got your design and entitlements. Anything you want to add on design and entitlements?
Clay Hepler (18:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So
we just, actually just got off a call with, um, a, uh, a town zoning commission or a township zoning commission. Cause I'm going to be going out to a city in next month to, um, go in front of the zoning board to rezone a parcel. Right. And it basically created, um, get a conditional use on this parcel to rezone it to have smaller lot size that are not conforming to the zoning code. Um, and.
Like Justin said, can submit the, a lot of times you can submit a sketch plan, but sometimes again, this is like county by county, township by township, city by city. Unfortunately, there's no one size fits all. And so they required me to, they wouldn't look at a sketch plan. They said, you have to submit this in front of the board. And so they required a concept plan. No, I could have done the survey, but I'd rather spend the $900 instead of the $8,000 on the survey to
Justin Piche (19:14)
you
you
Clay Hepler (19:32)
put together a concept plan so I could submit it to them so that next month when I go in front of the zoning committee that they'll say, like, this looks good, this doesn't look good, we're gonna pass this. Now this is not a major subdivision, but this is a conditional use application so that I can do a minor subdivision. Technically it's a major subdivision, but we're not bringing any utilities or anything of that sort. again, this is all county by county, but we have a deal that we're working on right now.
Justin Piche (19:46)
you
you
Clay Hepler (20:02)
that is requiring non-engineered site plans, but just a concept plan that a surveyor can put together for you.
Justin Piche (20:09)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast to say thanks for listening. Clay and I are talking about project management today, a bit high level. If you guys have any tips for how you manage projects, put them in the comments. We'd love to hear. And if you're getting value, please like rate, review five stars and subscribe. Thanks. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Yeah, that's a lot of yeah, that's kind of the first step in a lot of these different developments is a concept plan. We often use surveyors to do it. You sometimes we try to save a little money and get a concept plan before hiring the surveyors to make sure that it will work for the county, you know, before paying U.S. survey or rates or U.S. engineer or civil engineer rates on a site plan because I can get pretty expensive. This design and entitlements phase, though.
This can be a long slog, right? It can be months and months and months in some cases. And the project that we're talking about that I'm working on in Durango, it's probably gonna be 18, 19 months before we're finished with the engineering design entitlements, et cetera. And there's multiple things to manage through that process. And so having a ⁓ way to track your project, set milestones, set reminders, it's critical. Now, once you've got the entitlements or approvals,
And this is for obviously for minor major subdivides exempt subdivides. You basically skip this step. You still have to design, but there's no entitlement. There's no counting approvals, right? You get a surveyor, you decide what your lots of splits going to be. You get them to survey it and give you the survey generally write a meets and bounds legal description for each lot. And then you can start doing the improvement work that you want to do after the, and if you're doing a major development, then once you have it entitled, once you have it like kind of the subdivision plot approval, final plot approval, you can move into the construction phase.
A lot of people stop here, right? A lot of people who are doing small lot entitlements are selling paper lots. You get through the county approval and you sell the paper to an end builder. And that's great. You know, most of us are not going to be developing those, you know, three, four miles of road, water infrastructure, sewer infrastructure type projects. We're generally going to do the entitlement, pay for the engineering and then sell those paper lots to a builder or developer. But in some cases, if you are doing the horizontal development,
And especially on smaller projects where you're just doing small improvements, that's when you're getting your contractors out there. You're getting your dirt work, your clearing work. You're getting your driveway installer rock coming in there. If you're installing utilities, maybe you're working with a utility company to come in and bring a power line or set up a gas meter, set up a sewer tap or set up whatever. And all that needs to be coordinated really well so that you're ready to sell as quickly as possible.
Clay Hepler (22:49)
that, one of the things I've, one of the mistakes I've made in the past is before I get the, the property, uh, like foreclosed on the property or before the property is properly rezoned, doing all this stuff ahead of time. I haven't gone so far to put the road in and the utilities, but starting to do some of these.
⁓ whether it's moving, like moving electrical lines, like, Hey, I'm to do it before closing. This might seem like a no brainer, but I know people have done it. I've gotten surveys before closing, that were like, not, not just, ⁓ meets a balance or not, not a boundary survey, but like literally serving out the lot. And I made that mistake before. So in an effort to be help everyone out, it's this.
happens after you close. Now, if you are doing an entitlement, you might be doing it like if it's an extended option agreement, and this is what's required by the builder or the developer, you might have to be during but a lot of times your construction, your clearing that happens after you actually close on the property.
Justin Piche (23:36)
you ⁓
you
Yeah, yeah, I'm not I have not done any improvement work to properties before taking title to it. I have done a lot of surveys and a lot of subdivision surveys before closing on the property, but I made mistakes where I haven't engaged the county, have done the survey and then have lost quite a bit of money on surveys. So that's a mistake to avoid. But if you engage the county early on a site plan before surveying and they are bought in and they explain the process and they make it clear that you will.
get this approved if you dot all these I's and cross all these T's then I'm much more comfortable spending the money on the survey ahead of time so that I'm ready at closing to record this plat and get rolling on sales for the lot. So after you got your discovery feasibility you got your design entitlements you get construction clearing and then you have your sales and dispositions. So on sales and dispositions this is this is one of those things where it depends on what you're doing. All right. If you're selling to builders the sales and dispositions
Clay Hepler (24:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (24:50)
piece starts at the discovery and feasibility. Like you're starting actively searching for builders as you're determining the feasibility of the site. If it's a development that you're taking all the way, maybe you're not building roads. Maybe it's a simple plot, you know, simple plat or simple lots. But I'm generally not marketing heavily until I buy the property, close on the property and then launch my marketing campaign for the lots. You know, I've had some success with.
Clay Hepler (24:53)
Yep.
Justin Piche (25:15)
pre-marketing on Facebook and pre-marketing on lands.com before actually closing to get kind of a list of buyers or builders that want to purchase lots before we close. then as we once we close, we can negotiate those contracts. ⁓ But it can take a long time to sell. I think a key relationship here is your broker. Like who are you going to have list this property? You know, I'm for self-dispo. We do a lot of it. But on a multi-lot development where you may be selling pieces to builders or just on the retail market.
Having an exceptional broker that actually has a marketing budget is key here. It really is. It helps a lot.
Clay Hepler (25:52)
Yeah,
yeah, I would say that depending on the size of the subdivision that you're bringing to the market, you also have to be aware of ⁓ absorption rate, market absorption rate. So when you're in the design phase, if you don't engage with the broker, like we're talking about here, the one that you're going to be using, they might say, you know, so you might look at your development and say, hey, two to five acres are going to are the highest price breakers. So I'm going to do only two to five acre lots. When in reality,
It might take your subdivision much longer to sell because you don't have a diversity of lots. So when you bring it to market and some of these more rural market, the velocity is not there. And so even though you might get a higher price per acre, it could take twice as long to sell these lots. And so that's when you engage with your broker and your disposition strategy starts at the front end. It starts when you're doing the, the, the pre-marketing, the discussion with the brokers, the discovery because
Justin Piche (26:31)
you
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (26:47)
If you if you bring something to market that's the market doesn't want it might look good on paper Justin, but it ain't gonna sell. So that's that's something that a lot of people should be aware of.
Justin Piche (26:54)
Yeah.
One quick tip that we do as well, especially on exempt subdivides, is we will get the survey done and get, I'm not, let me take a step back. I'm not a huge fan of letting people just pick their acreage. Some surveyors will say, well, we don't have to get this final subdivision.
kind of survey done. can market and brokers will do this too. We can market this property as like five to 10 acre tracks and let people come and kind of pick how much acreage they want and then sell them specific pieces. I don't really like that. It's hard to market and it doesn't like let people know like what is the final product? What are they buying? They have too many choices. So I like to set the property boundaries of a really desirable property type, but I don't necessarily record the survey until the first lot sale right before the first lot sale happens. So I let
That way I can let buyers kind of combine lots or slightly different, know, get a different piece of the property. And I haven't spent all the money to set the pins and record the survey yet. So we can adjust lot lines a little bit if need be. But then I survey, but I mean, then I record before the survey or before the first lot sale happens.
I'm going to take a little step back and say, I hired that project manager in middle to end of 2024. Her name is Geraldine from Columbia. She's a civil engineer. I used hire with near to find her, which isn't one of those hiring sites that basically sources people for you and you pay a fee based on their first year salary, et cetera. Normally I just post jobs and hire people myself without using services, especially for like
co-callers or other kind of lower level positions on the team. But for this specific position, I wanted to make sure that the candidates that I was vetting were qualified. So I was comfortable paying a fee to somebody to vet candidates, pre-vet candidates and provide people who had the background specifically that I was looking for. It saved me a lot of time. It gave me a smaller list of much more qualified candidates to choose from. And it was really worthwhile. And Geraldine came with
⁓ property management and project management experience. She was a civil engineer, so she understands like CAD, she understands how development should lay, and she was really quick to understand subdivision regulations, felt comfortable talking to county engineers and surveyors and all that kind of stuff. So she really fit the bill. The first project that she managed front to back was a small subdivide that I did in North Carolina, Richmond County, North Carolina. It was an exempt subdivide.
30 acres, ⁓ three lots, 10 acres each. And from project inception, my acquisitions team got this property under contract. Jay and I looked at it together. I had her pull up the subdivision regulations. We determined what was the right lot split based on the way the parcel laid, which was just an exempt three 10 acres. She sourced the surveyors. She got three or four different bids.
picked the best bid, the person, had the surveyor do the boundary survey. All the while she's hiring or vetting contractors to do driveways and about a half acre of clearing work, bush hogging, driveways, clearing work on each individual parcel, lining that up to commence upon the purchase of the property and then following up and executing. This is a pretty easy project to manage, right? It wasn't a huge lift for her to do. But when we closed the project, she was ready to go with the contractors the next day.
get all the clearing work done, and then was able to hand it off to the sales team to get the marketing package put together. And we sold that lot, all three lots to the same buyer, interestingly enough. Didn't even need a subdivide, but we still had a value with the subdivision. We were able to ask more because it was three separate lots than we would have if it was just one 30 acre parcel. ⁓ And it was fantastic. It was fantastic. That was kind of a quick and easy one. But maybe let me talk about one that.
Clay Hepler (30:42)
Oof.
Justin Piche (30:59)
This one that I told you that's about to fail. I think it's going to fail.
So this project, this other project that I'm going to talk about real quick is one that I think is going to fail. We'll find out for sure tomorrow. Um, this is that one that I had initially planned on 34 lots and then went up to 94. So the beauty of having a project manager and the beauty, and if you're doing this yourself, this is, you know, you doing this is it really is a bunch of different puzzle pieces and followups that you have to fit together. And so Jay,
my project manager was able to run down each of the key aspects that we needed to understand. The first of course was utilities. So she was able to engage the utility company, get connected with their third party engineer. We had to pay a fee for them to do a water availability study analysis and basically make a recommendation for what line improvements and they even like budgeted it out for us. So we were able to take that budget, put it back into our underwriter and see how that impacted our return on cash for the lot.
velocity we were expecting to create. Then she went and talked to the accounting engineer to determine detention requirements and got a rough calculation for detention. Went and talked to earth moving companies to determine what is an average price per cubic yard moved of dirt for detention so we could budget for that. And then she got multiple road bids for the length of road and the type of road that we would need, know, rough bids to underwrite into the project. And all of that without me having to do.
anything but say, go go go do this. And, you know, unfortunately for this type of project, the end sales price of the finished lots just doesn't end the purchase price of the property just does not it will not justify the doing the deal. think I think the total project return on cash over three years is expected to be somewhere around 50, 48 to 50 percent, which just isn't doesn't meet my investment criteria. It needs to be up around 100 plus.
for me to want to move forward with the project. Just too much risk for that much inventory. How do you manage, what software do you use to manage projects, Clay?
Clay Hepler (33:04)
Yeah, so.
I currently use Notion, although I hate Notion. I think it's a horrible project management system and we're trying to get away from it as soon as possible because I think it's, know that you use Notion. And ⁓ it's like, so we currently use Notion. But.
Justin Piche (33:20)
I love it. Yeah, we have different opinions here, but that's okay.
What do you
hate about it? I want to know.
Clay Hepler (33:33)
It's not built to be a project management system. It's built to be like a repository of data, SOPs, like a Wikipedia. so like ClickUp is more, or Asana is more of a project management based software. And so although you can with, if someone who's a really good notion architect, build it out that way, that's like not what it natively does. And so it's pretty clunky to build out or it's very expensive to build out.
So the average land investor, having to build this out, ⁓ it takes a lot of time, and it's expensive. And you can get that plus more native integrations of project management through a much cheaper tool.
Justin Piche (34:05)
you
So some of the ones that popular ones that folks use are Asana, ClickUp, Trello. Trello is kind of pretty customizable. I don't know how good Microsoft Project is, but I know a lot of corporations like to use Microsoft Project. I do use Notion for a couple of reasons. One, my Notion is completely integrated from acquisitions through dispositions. And so when we're working on a project and we set a project budget or timeline,
Those things feed into the sales. They get captured data from the acquisitions. They feed into the sales. They feed into transactions. We're able to see all those updates across all those different dashboards. So each team knows when things are happening, when things are coming. And my budget and my ledger for each deal is able to be tracked. So all my financials for each deal can be calculated all the way through on sale. So when we sell a property, for example, and we input
the gross profit or the gross receipts that we get from the HUD. All of the costs associated with the project, all of our budget, and then what our actual costs are, are all there. We can see how we perform versus budget. And I do pay somebody to develop and spend time building out Notion so it's a little bit more effective. And so maybe I've been able to overcome some of those issues that I think most people trying to build this out themselves would have, which is it is tough.
Clay Hepler (35:39)
Of course, dude.
What I'm saying is it's not that it's a bad system. It's not the core design of the system, but you have it so integrated with everything that I completely get it. Do you mind giving our listeners a range of how much a system like that could cost? Maybe it's not what you paid, but something like that, building it out, fully integrated.
Justin Piche (36:03)
man, the whole CRM or jet. my gosh. Thousands and thousands of dollars for sure.
Clay Hepler (36:07)
Yeah, I mean
Yeah, right.
2025. I don't know how much you but like
Justin Piche (36:14)
I think
I'm about like 15K, 10 or 15K into the full notion development right now.
Clay Hepler (36:16)
Okay, 50.
Right. So not that it's a
Justin Piche (36:23)
Which is a lot more expensive
than an out of the box solution. But to be clear, that's a whole lot more than just project management. The project management aspect is a really small portion of the overall CRM. ⁓
Clay Hepler (36:36)
Yes, yes. Yeah.
Justin Piche (36:38)
What I got a question for you. Maybe kind of
changing topics here. What do you think makes what characteristics make an exceptional project manager? What are you looking for in a project manager?
Clay Hepler (36:51)
That's a really good question. number one, proactive execution, someone that is their orientation is getting ahead of the problems before they even occur, removing barriers, challenges before they even become barriers and challenges, ⁓ detailed, very detail oriented, ⁓ meticulous in how they approach all their tasks. So of course,
Detail oriented is this is my, this is an orientation, but meticulous is more of an action for me. I think confidence in communication is vital. If we're talking about someone that's a, ⁓ like international team member, global talent, they need to be very confident in communicating with people specifically. For many of our listeners, they're, primarily rural land investors. And so the confidence in communication is, is really important. And then data driven.
Justin Piche (37:25)
you
Thank
Clay Hepler (37:48)
Right? So data, they're driven through.
This is the project. They're, they're, they're more that analytical mindset. Those are the high level for me. What I, what I do to be like the characteristics that a good project manager would have, would have growth mindset, growth mindset.
Justin Piche (38:04)
Yeah. No,
I agree. I agree. I think I think maybe just what
Clay Hepler (38:13)
look at that.
pretty close to the notes here.
Justin Piche (38:17)
Yeah, pretty close
to my notes on the podcast. That's right. Yeah. You need somebody incredibly organized that can see the big picture, right? They understand what the goals of the development are, but they're, but they're not just high level. have to be able to get into the nitty gritty details and map out a project from start to finish. They can't be like me. I'm not the best project. I mean, I'm pretty good project manager, but I also like to keep way too much in my head and not enough on paper. need to just keep it rigorous notes.
Clay Hepler (38:21)
huh
Justin Piche (38:45)
tracking dates, reminders. It's critical. Right. And that's the problem I kept running into is that I like to keep things in my head. And when you have too many things in your head, things will fall out. You cannot keep them all in your head. It just isn't possible. I'm like one of those people that used to never use a calendar, but now because I'm so busy, I just live like live with my calendar. I cannot, I need something. If it's not on my calendar, it's not going to get done. ⁓ but you need somebody, you need somebody who's like just like that, just super organized master communicator a hundred percent.
Clay Hepler (39:08)
Right, right, right, right.
Justin Piche (39:15)
They're communicating with all kinds of different people. They've got to be able to talk to the government officials at the county all the way down to, you know, Joe Blow with his backhoe, you know, coming in to do some work on your property. They need to be able to communicate well to all different levels of people. ⁓ They've got to be able to see the pitfalls in the project, you know, quickly. Like you said, at the problem, see the problems before the problems happen or mitigate the problems before problems happen. And they've got to learn. Right. Every deal is different.
Clay Hepler (39:46)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Piche (39:47)
I have yet to do a deal that is just that follows the exact same path as another deal. Maybe if I had two identical sites right next to each other in the exact same county, you know, some months apart, that would probably be the only situation where maybe I could just say, ⁓ let's use the playbook we just use. But otherwise, there's something different, some different county requirements, some variation on wetlands or the lay of the land that's going to require this extra step or whatever. So they have to be able to learn and improve all the time.
to handle these projects. So I agree. I agree.
Clay Hepler (40:19)
Yeah, one
last thing I would add to this, Justin, that's an amazing point there, is ownership, Ownership.
Justin Piche (40:26)
Yes,
my goodness, 100%. That may be the most important one. I think I don't know how we almost missed it. But yes, ownership, right? They've got to treat these projects like their own. They are their own.
Clay Hepler (40:35)
It's like, it's right, right, right,
right, right, right, right, right. You imagine like someone, I imagine someone that you throw a bunch of cars up in the air and someone that doesn't have ownership, you're like, find the whatever card, someone that doesn't have ownership just like stares up at the ceiling and, you know, wait for the cards to kind of come down. But someone who does ownership is just like grasping the cards, you know, just like, this is mine. I got this, right?
And for this position, like you said, if it's in your head, it's not that like you need to know, even if you're not maybe some project, something happens in your day, but you have tomorrow is the day that we need to get the concept plan into the County or we, we, get kicked the next month, which gets us out of our saw, you know, our due diligence period, which ownership of the outcome of the end state. All right.
Justin Piche (41:30)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
I'll get I'll get regular updates from Jay all the time on projects. Just message me while we were on this recording this podcast asking me about some work that we're doing on a project. It's not a subdivide, but it's a we had to get an easement established, which took almost a year. We finally got it legally established, got the easement from the other property owners. And now we have to clear and bring in a ton of fill because the easement that
Clay Hepler (41:48)
Okay.
Justin Piche (41:58)
We are able to negotiate is through some mucky area So we got to bring in a bunch of fill to make a path Traversable by a car or truck and so it's just a small project, right? It's maybe 20 grand of total work That's gonna have to go into it. But she's just messaging me. He's like, what do you think about this budget? For it and I just like that. I'm like get it done. She's like absolutely on it. So done like that's it That's our communication now. She's gonna go she's gonna
Give the go ahead to the contractors. They're gonna bring in dirt. They're gonna bring in tractors. They're gonna move everything around. They're gonna clear the path. I'm not gonna touch it again. I'm just gonna be ready to sell it when she's done with that work.
Clay Hepler (42:35)
Good job, Jay. G J.
Justin Piche (42:36)
And one thing I also
would recommend for anybody who decides, hey, I, know what? I've got a lot of projects moving. I want to hire somebody who specifically is moving these forward, taking ownership and pushing these things forward. Always weekly updates. Jay sends me a weekly project management update. It has bullet points, highlights on every single kind of project we have concurrently working. And then it has a section on
These are the critical items. Here's like the critical dates. These are the critical items. And here's what I'm working on this week. It's on Monday. This is what my priorities are this week. So I can review it. I can see where we're standing. I can ask her any questions with deals that maybe are moving slower. If your priorities aren't right, based on what I think, I can give her feedback on them. I don't have to give her direction. She tells me what she's doing. She gives me the report and I can review it and then provide feedback as necessary. And that's super helpful because
When you've got a lot of things moving, if you don't have clarity on what is actually happening, it can feel like nothing is moving to you, even though it is. You just don't know what it is. So that goes back to that master communicator, right? That project manager has to both be able to communicate to the people outside of your team that they're hiring and working and getting bids from to move the project forward and also to you internally. And in some cases on some of these JV deals that I have her running, they're communicating with the other stakeholders, the other investor who is my partner on the deal.
Clay Hepler (43:55)
Yep. Yep. Yep. That was a great team building tactic, Justin. So, mean, recap, we covered ⁓ the four phase framework. We covered a little bit of a case study that Justin was doing. A high level tool for software tool for project management. Key traits for project manager and a little team building tactics.
as everyone knows at the end of the podcast, gentleman's agreement is if you've gotten this far, we appreciate it. And we appreciate rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the podcast. Let us know that you are getting benefited from this. This is the only way this grows. not, we don't have ads, and the way that we grow is through you guys of showing your appreciation. And so, five star review, rating, reviewing, and subscribing is what we appreciate. Thanks guys.
Until next week, Justin, anything before we leave? All right. See you next week.
Justin Piche (44:47)
That's it. We'll see you guys next week.