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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 43: The 0 to 500K Bottleneck, Why Land Investors Stall… and How to Break Through
🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
In this episode, hosts Clay Hepler and Justin Piché share their insights from the recent 5280 Mastermind event, focusing on the evolving landscape of land investing and the strategies needed to thrive in a competitive market.
Key Highlights
Personal Updates:
Clay and Justin kick off the episode with some light-hearted banter, reflecting on their recent experiences, including Justin's move into his new home and the challenges of unpacking, as well as Clay's excitement over his son taking his first steps during a family reunion.
Scaling Challenges:
The hosts delve into the challenges land investors face, particularly during the crucial zero to$500K revenue stage. They discuss the importance of understanding financials, managing cash flow, and the need for clear KPIs and accountability to drive business growth while avoiding common pitfalls.
Vendor Management:
Clay and Justin discuss the complexities of managing contractors and stakeholders, sharing insights on effective vendor relationships. They emphasize the importance of planning for contingencies and the lessons learned from their experiences at the mastermind event.
Pipeline Overload:
The conversation shifts to the chaos of managing multiple deals simultaneously. Clay shares his experience of locking up 30 contracts in just two weeks and the strategies he implemented to streamline operations, including the use of checklists and effective communication.
Founder Burnout:
Listeners will gain valuable insights into recognizing and overcoming founder burnout. Clay and Justin share their strategies for maintaining balance while driving business growth, emphasizing the importance of prioritization and self-reflection.
Tech and Data Management:
The episode wraps up with a discussion on the significance of tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and leveraging technology to streamline operations. Clay and Justin encourage listeners to utilize data for informed decision-making, sharing their experiences with various CRM systems and the importance of a cohesive tech stack.
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Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.
Justin Piche (00:06)
And this is your other co-host, Justin Bichet, and we're here to show you how to win the ground
Morning, Clay.
Clayton Hepler (00:11)
Justin
dude, new location here man. What's going on? Are you in Dubai or something?
Justin Piche (00:17)
My house is done being built for the most part. we're in, we've moved in. My family has moved in. I think this is our car. Last night was my fourth night sleeping in the house. So.
That's exciting. I have an office, although you know, one thing I didn't think about is that my double office doors open up to the dining room where the family eats breakfast. And so I have I have a hunch we're going to hear some little screams and voices on the on the microphone before this podcast recording is through. But that's OK. That's OK. We'll deal with it. We'll deal with it.
But yeah, it's nice. It's beautiful. I mean, we love the house. There's a couple other big changes. Yesterday, I actually closed on the lot right next to me as well. So that is done. I now own that. So I guess I have two houses right here, although one of them is not is not livable by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, things are going good.
Clayton Hepler (01:01)
Nice.
Justin Piche (01:15)
lot of changes. I'm just tired. You know, I don't know when the last time you moved is, but man, it really stinks. Just unpacking boxes. Where do you put stuff? I don't even know. I need to hire somebody who can literally come and unbox everything and just like put it where it goes in its optimum spot. all the organizational things, you know? I don't know where we're going to find the time.
Clayton Hepler (01:20)
It does.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can imagine. Imagine if your wife was still working.
Justin Piche (01:38)
gosh, I know at least we have for us we had because when she was working and I was working the baby was we needed a nanny and so that that would have helped have somebody watch the kids or help pick them up but but now we don't we don't have that which is fine which is great but it is chaotic like my wife's in the middle of the day my wife is not putting boxes away right she's got kids to yeah
Clayton Hepler (01:56)
Right.
Right.
Justin Piche (01:57)
I was hoping what's new
Clayton Hepler (01:57)
⁓
Justin Piche (01:58)
with you.
Clayton Hepler (01:59)
Dude, my son walked over the weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, huge, huge deal, huge deal. Yeah, man, I was there, it was cool. It was in front of my entire family. we, like, we had a family reunion. Dude, there was probably like 15 people in this one room. And we were all talking. And Hess was like in the middle of the room, like playing around with my two other cousins, like little cousins.
Justin Piche (02:03)
Huge first steps. Dude, that's a huge deal. man, were you there to witness the first steps?
Clayton Hepler (02:29)
and he like got up and like took one or two steps and everyone was like, and then we, for the next like 15, 20 minutes, everyone was just there like looking at him, like holding things. So he would walk over to it and he would walk like three steps and fall, right? You know, like walk like five steps and fall, right. it like loses balance and it was dude, it's amazing. Now he's like fully like doing like the baby, like drunk walk, you know, like the.
Justin Piche (02:45)
Yep, yep, yeah. yeah.
yeah.
Clayton Hepler (02:57)
the unsure walk that you're like you feel like they're stomping through the ground.
Justin Piche (02:58)
my gosh, I.
Take videos of it. You're gonna wanna look back and like watch that little baby drunk watch walk in the future. We have a video of Nora after she just first started walking where she like walks around the living room and stumbles but like catches herself like three or four times and it's hilarious. If I can find it, I'll send it to you and it'll probably be very similar to Hess's walk. That's awesome, man. Congrats.
Clayton Hepler (03:20)
That'd be great, man. Yeah, so dude, that's huge.
That's obviously pretty big. Doing some restructuring internally in the business. And yeah, I we had a great month in June and now we're starting to close a lot of those deals, the deals we got on a contract. And yeah, that's what we got going on. And then today, you know, for our topic today,
One of the things we went to the 5280 mastermind a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, one of the things that people really brought up was like, you know, what are the right things to do at the right times? And it's people who have not only worked with individuals that are at certain revenue milestones, but also, cross them ourselves.
We hope this episode really helps you think through like at certain Revenue milestones the CEO's job is this because you'll hear like on a podcast man like a catch-all like You should just be doing this right and it's not really that helpful To define in the moment what's appropriate right because everyone's like you should hire a great talent I heard this I was reading this book the other day
How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, right? Pretty catchy headline by Brad Jacobs who is a great book, great book. But the guy's like hire incredibly, like hire the best talent. And you're like, if you make it a million dollars a year in gross profit, like you can't afford the best talent.
Justin Piche (04:29)
I haven't read it, but I've heard of that book.
Clayton Hepler (04:44)
Now you can afford a talent for you, but sometimes that type of feedback advice is misleading. And so what we want to discuss in this podcast is certain stages of our business where we know and where we've worked with clients in it, what you need to do in order to be successful or what we've seen to help people be successful. So you can take away some really clear action items. Anything to add man?
Justin Piche (05:08)
No, no, that's really well said. I'm excited to talk about this.
Clayton Hepler (05:11)
Yeah. So I think the first stage is like stage one, right? Which is zero to 500 K. Like that's a huge, that's a range that, um, I think 99.9 % of the land investors are in that range. Um, and you know, it's really learning about the business learning about what is this land investing thing, the blue ocean that everyone promises. Uh, and, what do you actually need to do in that level?
at that level in order to to win in order to drive revenue drive profit and and start to you know, put yourself in a position whether you're trying to quit a job, whether you're trying to, you know, make a little bit extra revenue or take this thing full time.
Justin Piche (05:54)
Yeah, this this range actually is one of the one of the first things that a coaching student says to me. One of the first things I ask to anybody who thinking about coaching or we're having kind of an internal call is what is your 12 month revenue target? Like how much money do you want to make in 12 months? And most of them start here. They say, oh, I want to make 500 K or something like that. I want to make 500 K. want to and and and
It definitely looks a little bit different. Getting to 500K is hard, but you don't need a bunch of support, a bunch of staff to get there. I think it's something that if you're really focused, you can get there without a huge team.
Clayton Hepler (06:35)
What would you define as like a huge team and where do you think people really mess up here?
Justin Piche (06:39)
I think it's pretty clear to any successful land investor that leveraging other people's time to get quality work done so that you can focus on the high dollar value add parts of your business is...
necessary from like an early stage. And the first thing is really lead gen, think, unless you're sending mail specifically, lead gen is the first place where it makes a lot of sense to pay somebody and leverage their time to generate leads for you that you can then negotiate with and close. And so I think it's totally reasonable for somebody to get to 500k on their own. And I think it's totally reasonable for somebody to get to 500k with
two to three VAs kind of at a low skilled level and them handling all the high skill work.
Clayton Hepler (07:24)
Yeah, yep. think where I see a lot of people in this range fall down, and we're going to talk about the core revenue producing activities here, is they try to hire that too quickly. I mean, every stage people hire too quickly. They try to scale themselves out of their core revenue driving activities. What do I mean by that?
At this role or at this level, like you're going to be doing all the underwriting. You're going to be doing all the offering, the crafting of offers, the getting sellers on the phone, closing them directly. You're going to be learning, setting up the systems, getting the right CRMs put together, execution and focusing on those revenue driving activities, which are.
You know, in our business, like the CEO at any level, you're going to hear Justin and I talk about this, but at any level, our roles as a CEO is to increase throughput in our system, which is decreasing cash conversion cycle time that takes from a lead from lead to sell, right? That's the throughput of the system, increase profit and decrease expenses. Right. And so what we do to do that is our role as a CEO, right? Whether we hire people or we are directly involved.
But at this level, you're directly involved in everything. The ⁓ also like the things that you're driving revenue is finding the right brokers, right? ⁓ That's a huge revenue driving activity. So I think that originally you're pulling the list, you're scrubbing the list, whether you're using a software or not.
Justin Piche (08:33)
everything.
Yep.
Clayton Hepler (08:50)
And then you're giving it to your team or having a VA do this for you. That's a huge revenue driving. Then getting on the phone with sellers, closing sellers. Then it's, you know, working, you know, working directly with brokers, real estate brokers to sell deals, and then creating the systems that allow that to be easier. I mean, on a very basic level, that's, that's what it is. Right. When you were at this level, was there anything that you launched?
Justin Piche (09:13)
Yeah, absolutely.
Clayton Hepler (09:18)
that was like messy, but you're like, Hey, man, this still makes money. Right? Like anything that you remember, you remember, right? Yeah.
Justin Piche (09:24)
Yeah.
man, I, one thing I remember, I was just thinking of this when you're talking about like hiring brokers. When I started getting into land investing, wasn't nearly, I don't think it was as common for folks to go like the realtor dispo route. I think at least what was being kind of taught in the circles was sell on Facebook marketplace, sell on lands.com, use brokerless MLS to get your listings, negotiate with sellers. So that was like one of the very first VAs I hired was a sales assistant.
assistant
that could list all my properties on Facebook. was literally my first hire was getting all the stuff that I had lined up and negotiated on the market and like conversations started with buyers to move some of this inventory, which is so funny because I wish I had just I wish I had just started going with brokers from the get-go would have saved me a lot of.
maybe growing pains pretty quickly. I could have focused more time hiring on like the acquisition side. So that's something I remember when I was at this level. I definitely remember really disorganized data. It was like a hundred percent blow and go, get marketing out, who cares? Like follow-up was terrible. Everything was terrible. It all about like get the initial marketing out, get the mail out, get the new calls in.
I was just very focused on negotiations and getting leads in the door, not necessarily like really good follow up. Because I was working a full time job at the time. I didn't have time to follow up. I just needed new leads teed up, ready for me to negotiate with every single day.
Clayton Hepler (10:42)
Yeah.
Right, right. And that's like at this stage, you, you, you, lot of the founder is the bottleneck at different stages for different reasons, but you're the bottleneck. And a lot like people are like, I'm not perfectly tracking KPIs. Like you should track your KPIs. You should know your core KPIs and you should track them every week. But getting out there and executing and bringing revenue is the most important KPI, right?
Justin Piche (10:58)
stuff.
Clayton Hepler (11:17)
And so if you're doing that and maybe your backend system is a little bit like a rat's nest, man, it's kind of okay if you're bringing in deals, right? Of course, that does not scale well. And so you need to balance that like a CEO should, which is you should have good decision-making, think it through, understand like what is actually producing revenue.
Justin Piche (11:25)
you
Clayton Hepler (11:37)
And the earlier you have KPIs, the earlier that you can make data driven decisions, which I believe is more important today than it's ever been. But the core part about this stage, the zero to 500K is staying in both sides of the sales cycle, right? Selling quickly, getting deals under contract, and then working with brokers to do so. And just like...
If you come in with a million dollars, you your situation is very different. Like we're talking to the person that has limited amount of cash, maybe 50 to 150 K in the bank and they can't just blow it right on like big strategic hires before they have product market fit. So, yeah.
Justin Piche (12:18)
Yeah.
I mean, I
also argue that in this business specifically, I wouldn't, even if you did have, let's just say you had a million dollars cash and you were starting a business from scratch in the land investing space. I don't know if, if before you've done all these tasks yourself, it's kind of hard to know what's the most important and how much work it actually is to do things and how things work together and how to kind of innovate in your own system.
of CRM and software stack and marketing output and lead handling and communication software and all the different things that work in your business. If you just jump the gun and hire from the get-go somebody to manage all that stuff, it's great. Don't get me wrong. It's great if you get a really talented person. And a good example of this is me hiring Brian pretty quick.
on the sales side of my business. Somebody who's really smart, who was able to build out the wholesale systems. But what it leaves me with now as a CEO is limited insight to all the inner workings of the sales system. No matter how much he explains all the systems that he's set up.
The ecosystem of it is huge compared to kind of what I had a hand in doing. And if I had let that happen on the acquisition side as well, because I hired somebody really skilled too early, that's fantastic. But then I feel like it leaves me maybe at a slight disadvantage when it comes to actually thinking through what's a better way to do it. I don't have as much insight into how we're doing it.
Clayton Hepler (13:36)
Yeah, it brings me to a point that I've been really struggling with internally and working with a lot of my clients on, is like, because our business is usually bootstrapped, right? We don't have a lot of VC funding out. People throwing millions of dollars at us to say, hey, know, scale this business, right? We, a lot of times, have to go at it alone. We have to build our systems that are
built natively by us and enhanced by other people. And internally, we had a department that we spun up. It wasn't as successful because someone else spun it up. It was Global Talent. And I had to rework this entire department. I had to get my hands on it. And I found that that was 10x more successful because I was able to get in than when I hired even a very high agency, high performance VA.
When you are thinking about adding a new department, mean, let's say at the zero to 500K, 500 to a million range, did you feel that you needed to get in on that department and when did you know that you could let go?
Justin Piche (14:39)
You work to constraints a little bit, so.
I think I had like really big visions of, I can still be involved in everything. And like, I'll get this person and like, we'll have all these meetings and work together and collaborate really closely to build out this department, like sales. But what ended up happening is I was really aggressive in scaling and I hired a good person and they proved themselves very competent right from the get-go. And then I trusted them to build out the sales side. And I just really wasn't that involved, right? I mean, I would be involved in like,
more of the acquisitions related sales items, like problem solving, deciding what to do about a property before we purchase it, pricing, like overall sales strategy. But when it came to executing like the mechanics of how we were listing and our automated followups and all the buyers list sequences and all the different stuff with sales, Dispo, no, I wasn't really, I was, I think.
I think maybe just having a background leading teams of people and having very clear roles and responsibilities and ownership spheres, just like help me be like, okay, this is their ownership sphere. Like I need to have some oversight and I'm here as a sounding board and I'm here to help problem solve and troubleshoot. But like, this is theirs, they own this. They're responsible for the outputs.
Clayton Hepler (16:01)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. was talking to one of my team members this week and I think a lot of things that people specifically like my clients do and when they bring on new people and I made this mistake as well was you don't have that clear ownership sphere and you have imagined someone has a certain amount of hours every single week that they can do, right? Their job.
Right, a transaction coordinator has 30 hours per week that requires them and they might have been an extra five hours a week of meetings or four hours a week of meetings and then they have an extra four to five hours per week of additional things, additional projects that they can do outside of their ownership, their BAU, business as usual. That's when they can get the strategic projects done, completed.
And I think where a lot of land investors mess up and specifically at this level is zero to 500K, they start to hire the VAs and then they don't have a clear understanding of business as usual, which is what are the actual outputs of this position because they've never done it. Right. And so they've never done the position. And what that looks like is they say, Hey, go figure this out. And.
you're going to give me the feedback of what you need and what you don't need. And they expect everyone to be like founder led principle, a principle mindset and have that really high agency of a founder. In reality, if you don't know the right questions to ask about your sales team, because you've never done sales, right? You might, you will not have the visibility that you need. So you either have to hire someone that's an extraordinary, U S base hire like you had with Brian.
Or you have to go in there, build it out yourself, understand BAU, business as usual, understand the actual positional outputs, refine it, know when there are breaking points, when people feel like their glass is 16 ounce glass, they have 18 ounces of water in the 16 ounce glass. And so you know when to pull back and get the most out of that specific person. But that only happens when you build it out. heard Lela Hermosy,
Talk about this, like she never would go into a department and she would never let someone else, but like, unless she was hiring like a really high quality executive, she would always go and understand the department, build it out herself and then bring someone on to execute those functions versus the opposite. And I think people do that a lot with global talent specifically in this range, because they're like, dude, I'm so overwhelmed to have a full-time job. I need this person to take over ownership of all this stuff when you as the CEO should be going in there and doing that.
This that's just my opinion that doesn't mean it's the right thing, but it's easier
Justin Piche (18:38)
That I don't,
I agree 100%. I think this is a huge like kind of smack in the face to a lot of folks who start hiring overseas talent early on in this range of revenue. This is like, this is really common. I've heard this story so many times. It's absurd where people have hired these VA's and then they're really frustrated with the results after a month, two months, three months. They're just like, I don't know. My VA's just can't figure it out.
I talked to them like, well, what training have you provided? What SOPs have you given them to execute on the tasks that they're supposed to execute on? He's like, well, I brought them on and I kind of outlined what their responsibilities were and they're just not doing it. Like, OK, but.
This is the crux of the problem, which is you don't know exactly what the responsibilities are. You didn't communicate clearly with them exactly what they were supposed to do. You didn't build them processes. You didn't give them an ecosystem of software to work in with a set responsibility or output that they were responsible for. You hired people and you told them to do pieces of your job that you didn't really understand well enough yet.
And they're not producing good results because they don't know what the outputs are and they don't understand exactly how to do the job, the, do the, what you've asked them to do. And they're probably a little scared to tell you that they don't know exactly what they're supposed to do. And so they're not producing what you expected them to produce. And I think it's. Yeah.
Clayton Hepler (20:00)
Yeah, and I see this
happen even more. There's the whole notion of smart, hungry, coachable. You get smart, hungry, coachable global talent, and you're like, this person's super high agency, they're smart, they're coachable, they can figure this out. But imagine this scenario, you're expected to perform a job function in an industry that you've never worked in.
and you're also giving this person additional special opportunity projects outside of business as usual, they're set up for failure. They're set up for failure. And you don't know when to pull back or when not to pull back.
Justin Piche (20:32)
Yeah.
Clayton Hepler (20:38)
It, you know, perfect example is I know in sales when someone is slacking, I know the number of people that they need to call per week as a lead manager, as an acquisition manager. And that's not even institutional knowledge. That is knowledge that has been institutionalized. Everyone knows what it is. Everyone knows what their outputs are. And so I can very quickly see, you know, who's, by looking at a sheet of data. But if you can't look at a sheet of data independent of the person giving you those anecdotes,
of this is what I'm feeling, this is how I'm feeling it, then it becomes really hard for you to make the best decision of...
what you're doing as a CEO. And this goes back again to the shiny object thing. You're solving the wrong problem. The problem that people, they hire these VAs before they're ready in these positions for these revenue driving activities and they stay at this specific revenue forever because they hire the person that they don't have a clarity of job because they haven't worked in it long enough. Like hiring, I got a client, dude, one of my clients came
on in December, we had our original strategy call, 30 minute strategy call. said, dude, you need to do this, this and this based on what you told me. He did it. He forexed his lead flow overnight because he fired a couple of people that were not, that he didn't have clarity on what success was like in that position. And then he got in, had clarity and now he's doing better than ever, but because he reversed what we're talking about here. And now he doubled his business or he's going to double or triple his business this year.
Justin Piche (22:09)
Yeah, that's incredible. A place I see this, another place I see this a lot for folks is Cold Outreach, Gen, cold calling specifically. I've seen this a number of times where folks will hire cold callers because honestly, cold calling is great. I really like it, obviously. I have a big team of cold callers and so does Clay, but they'll hire folks and they won't have any idea how many calls they should be making in a day or how many leads they should be generating.
that leads to unmet expectations. Cause I feel like a lot of folks just think cold callers are going to perform better than they do. You know, they're calling thousands. You know, they're making X thousand of calls this day or whatever. They're talking to 200 people or whatever that we should be getting more leads.
come to find out they're only calling 80, right? Cause they didn't set the folks up for success and set clear expectations and push their cold callers to get higher numbers of outbound calls and higher quality conversations. Probably because they didn't do it themselves at all. They never for a day got on and just cold called or a couple of days, try to get proficient and see what are the results of my own cold calling? How much work is this? How many leads can I expect somebody to get through? How many quality conversations does it take to generate a lead?
Anyway, just another kind of example of that.
Clayton Hepler (23:19)
Yeah,
so in some I think that the core revenue producing activities if you want to go from zero to 500 cave to 500 to a million right which is the doubling of your business Which is this stage is huge man you you if you're taking home 20 percent 25 percent all of a sudden you go from making a hundred K 150 K to 250 K in a year, right? It's just a couple of shifts here
If we're talking about the revenue producing activities, we're talking about the increasing of the throughput, increasing profitability, decreasing expenses.
We're making offers, we're getting into the nitty gritty of our business from zero to 500K and then painting the picture of what do I actually need? So the constraint that we solve for at this level, the zero to 500K is I'm getting the offers out there, we're getting lead generation, we're getting more consistent, right? And where people fall down, why people can't make the leap is because like we were talking about, they don't have the clarity on what the outputs of the position that they need to hire for. And so then they don't have the feedback mechanism.
So we're talking about we need the clarity. We need to get butts in seats. We need to do the things that were that were saying that we need to do unless it's like a basic admin position. But even then, right?
But then there's no feedback. So how the revenue producing activities from 500K to a million is getting clear on feedback loops, building the repeatable systems of the repeatable outputs and the repeatable systems. And then, you know, someone will bring on someone say, Hey, I'm hiring you to do 40 hours of work a week, which saves me an extra 30 hours or 20 hours a week. But then I'm not spending one hour reviewing what your
Suppose what your, what your outputs are. I'm not doing a one-on-one. I'm not holding KPIs. I'm not holding you accountable for anything. And so we say, we'll abdicate responsibility. So the revenue producing activity in this, instead of abdicating, we delegate. And when we delegate, we hold people accountable. So that, that delegation of
opportunities of marketing opportunities, maybe calling brokers, maybe delegating to people comping deals like we talked about. That's what we need to do at this level. Those are the core revenue driving activities. Never getting our hand off the pulse of our business, of the tasks that we were doing between zero to
Justin Piche (25:39)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting our podcast to say, hey, thanks for listening. One of the ways that we know you guys are getting value out of this podcast is by rating, reviewing, subscribing, and leaving comments to let us know what information you want to hear about. We love bringing you guys this free value every week. And we just ask that our listeners who are getting value, give us some feedback. And I'll back to you regularly scheduled programming.
Yeah, I want take a quick step back and ask you a question. What do you think is the best advice you could give somebody who's currently sitting in this zero to 500k stage, they haven't yet gotten to the 500k to a million stage? What's the best piece of advice? And I'll ask you this again when we get to the end of this 500k to a million.
Clayton Hepler (26:19)
The best piece of advice from zero to 500 K. Yeah, I would say.
Focus 80 % of your time on revenue producing activities, which is talking to sellers, getting marketing out, managing your marketing team, or sending out mail. So marketing and sales, think, the best piece of advice is spending 80%, 90 % of your time here.
And then the rest of your 10 % is like just tracking basic KPIs. I think you can build a duct tape business with those two core things and you'll get to 500k.
Justin Piche (26:58)
Yeah, I agree. I think my advice for zero to 500k would be find somebody, join a group of people that are doing this at a higher level than you.
I think that that's probably my advice. think that this is the hardest. I mean, there's hard things and we'll talk about this throughout this kind of series of scaling your business, but there's really hard things about every stage of revenue.
I think zero to 500, I think is particularly hard. This is where the vast majority of folks who start this type of business fall out and end up shutting down their businesses and going back to whatever they were doing before or something else. Because there's so many things that can go wrong and you don't know what all the things that can go wrong are. And you don't know all the things you should be looking for. And if you listen to this podcast, you're, think,
many steps ahead of folks who are starting this blind. But I still think joining a group of people who are constantly pouring themselves into improving and growing and scaling this type of business, everybody, I mean, you get to lean on the collective kind of curiosity of a bunch of people who are all working to be successful at this.
and in a community that's close knit, people are sharing. mean, like, when I joined LearnLand a long time ago, when I started my business, I mean, people would share everything that worked for them. They were just so generous.
And without everybody kind of working together and sharing things that worked and the things that didn't and helping each other out, it would have been a lot harder to do this. so I feel like if you don't both of those things, if you're if you're spending your time, like Clay said, focused on non revenue generating activities or hiring people too early or having VAs who aren't paid particularly well, you know, or paid a low dollar amount.
building out your processes and systems for you when you need somebody who can critically think and really, really.
problem solve, right? And design and improve, then that's not good. And if you're starting with kind of at a disadvantage, in addition to that, if you're kind of doing this alone and just kind of buying a random course that you saw advertised on Facebook really aggressively by some really big name that's been investing in land for 20 years type of a person, and that's all you have as a resource, I think you're also, you know.
It's like fighting with one arm.
Clayton Hepler (29:21)
I agree. Yeah. I mean, you you can, you kind of one insight, like you're one insight away from really taking your business to the next level. That's the purpose of the podcast, but like very much on a, you know, I've changed trajectories of my business based on a five minute conversation. And so if you can get in the rooms where those, conversations happen, man, it is, you compress time, you compress time.
and also probably saved myself millions of dollars of bad decisions, right? you know, in the world that we live in, the highest leverage thing that we have is like our knowledge. Like we can leverage, we can hire people with global talent so much easier. but if we know what to prioritize, man, why is it that people go so much faster than others? They just know what to prioritize. They know what to spend their time on. And that's what we were talking about at the zero to 500 K, but, that's, that's a great.
That's a great addition. So from 500k to a million, what else do you believe is kind of the core revenue producing activities that someone needs to focus on in order to really, really take their business to the next level?
Justin Piche (30:24)
I feel like this stage, there's a couple like really critical revenue driving activities that somebody at this stage needs to focus on. But I think the most, the one that my mind jumps to, maybe not the most important, but the one that my mind jumps to is really identifying where you are the bottleneck and getting really good at resolving that. And what I mean by that is usually it's hiring.
getting really good at hiring the right person to remove you as a bottleneck. This is under the assumption that you have been involved very heavily in all the processes that you have in your business. You know your business inside and out. And it doesn't mean it's perfect, right? Part of hiring a really good person is to take an existing process and output and make it better, make it more efficient, right? Scale it.
And so being really good at hiring talent and getting the right person in the seat to remove you as a bottleneck is one of the probably critical things about this stage.
Clayton Hepler (31:18)
I love that man, that's a great point. And I would enhance it by saying like, you still want to have, like we don't need all All-Stars. Like you want A players of course, high agency A players, but this business is like more of a McDonald's than it is a tech company. Right? Right? And so if,
Justin Piche (31:31)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Clayton Hepler (31:41)
The emphasis on zero to 500K, if you do the right things at that foundation, you'll break down, like a lot of people will stall out at 600K a year. And they're like, dude, I don't know what's going on. Well, you have to look back at zero to 500K. What did you do wrong? You weren't in all the processes, but you should be able to install someone. Essentially, like you're talking about the constraint here, you should be able to install someone when you hire them into the process and be like, hey, this is what green yellow red is. You're doing well in green.
You need help in coach yellow, red, you're in the red zone. You either need to reprioritize or let you go. Right. And if you don't have crystal clear clarity on that, dude, you can hire people that are much less of a expense to the company, but your systems prop them up. And that's how you have a more profitable enterprise. Of course you want to hire superstars, but if you have to rely on superstars,
in order for your business to succeed. This is something I've completely changed my mind on, completely changed my mind. That what matters more is the systems that support and the systems that support come from the clarity from the CEO of what the outputs for the position are. Because at this stage, you're not hiring a COO, right? I love that addition. That's what I would add to enhance that man, that that's a critical, important...
part of solving those constraints.
Justin Piche (33:05)
Yeah, I mean, that's a good, I agree completely with what you just said too. Cause like, first of all, it is really hard to find A players. And at this stage, you're not the best hire. Okay. Unless you have this extensive experience, like hiring people for whatever company you've started in the past and you're just the perfect judge of character. And you know exactly the skillset that every person you hire needs to have and what backgrounds lend themselves best. you do anyway, you're not going to be that person. Okay. You're going to be hired.
to remove yourself as a bottleneck and give yourself more time. Buy back your time. That's what you're doing right now. And you don't, you really don't need these A players in every role. A lot of the assistant positions that are kind of task-based, output-based.
they don't have to be the best person. And you probably don't want them to be the best person because you don't want to pay for the best person because your business isn't optimized or at a scale where the best person can really make a huge material difference on revenue right here. What you need is to give yourself more time so you can take a step back and focus on.
getting better at hiring, identifying ways to improve your business, scaling your marketing, and then eventually hiring those A-level players that are gonna take departments or the business to the next level for you, which we'll get to later.
Clayton Hepler (34:18)
Yeah,
we'll get to later. And I love that. Again, we think like there is a difference. I always make this analogy between a lead manager that's paid, let's say, a global lead manager, $1,200 per month versus $1,800 per month. Like there's a significant difference, but I find that in the sales position that actually matters, right? Because there's that output difference that is truly important. But for the rest of your business, you know, hiring
a increasing or hiring cost by 20, 30, 40 % because they're hiring the quote unquote A players for admin positions. It really bogs down your ability to scale. Let me ask you this man, what do you think are the key positions at this level? 500 to a million? And this kind of goes above a million, right? Because you and I were there kind of last year, right? I mean, you were a little higher, but
you know, million 1.52, right? Kind of still within the same ballpark. What are the key positions that you shouldn't skimp on? And what are the other key positions that you should rely on systems versus talent?
Justin Piche (35:12)
Yeah
Yeah. Let me me clear like maybe frame this by saying.
There's a lot of different ways to get to a million in gross profit. And if you are somebody who's focused only on like a development or two or three in a year and you have low transaction volume and you're doing all on market stuff, this probably looks a lot different for you. But if you are more of the traditional kind of land investing, land flipping, you know, starting to do land development type model, then this more applies to you. We're talking maybe average gross profit per deal in the 20 to 50 K range. So you need a decent number of transactions to get
up to a million dollars. For me at this stage, the most critical, there's three, three most critical positions that you want like the highest level talent for. Acquisitions manager, dispositions manager, transaction coordinator. For me, those were the three pieces that I really wanted to be, that I focused really heavily on being really, really solid. And the rest of the stuff,
cold outreach. At that time, we didn't have a lead manager. We do now, but we didn't at that point. We just had our acquisitions manager comping and negotiating with everybody.
But for cold outreach, of course you want the best people you can get, but you don't, but you have a balance, right? You have a balance between paying somebody $10 an hour overseas to cold call, paying somebody US $25 an hour to cold call, or paying maybe somebody a little bit less than that to cold call. And I think in a lot of cases, that's probably the right move as long as you have a really good negotiator. But anyway, those are the three, those are the three like really high level, like people that I wanted to be high level.
Clayton Hepler (36:51)
Can you break down, yeah,
can you break down the key outputs? How do you know if someone's great in let's say transactions at this position and then I can go into acquisitions? ⁓ How do you know, what's a green, what's a yellow for this position? And are you hiring local, globally, and what's your dollar per, your base pay and stuff like that?
Justin Piche (37:03)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So for for let's start with transactions. I think the mark of a good transaction coordinator is it's like a circus juggler. It's like if you if you go to the circus and somebody starts to juggle and they can juggle like three things and you're like, wow, look, I can probably do that. You know, that's that's that's fine. That's that's easy.
But then you double your transactions, the number of transactions you're doing in like three or four months, because you're scaling your business. And they're now juggling four balls. And you're like, OK, well, that's a little more impressive. I've never juggled four balls. And then you...
add another, you double your transactions again in another like three to four months. you know, maybe you were doing, maybe your first year you did 10 deals, your second deal you're doing 40 or 50 or 60 or something like that. And your transaction coordinator, you look at them and it looks like they're juggling three still, but they're really juggling five now. That's a mark of a good transaction quarter. And it's really like,
For me, was, do we have all of our closing docs and everything lined up? Do we like ready to go for me to sign at this point? I didn't have an assistant at this point, so I was still going and signing all the closing docs. Do I have like multiple weeks of closing scheduled and like on a calendar so I know when I need money to be where and when money is coming in? Do I know immediately when there's title issues? Are we communicating with the buyers, the title companies,
on our kind of schedule. Like, are we just getting things under contract and not contacting a a seller for two months? Oh God, I hope not. We've done that before and it's not, it never really works out very well. People end up selling the property to somebody else and you're like, oh, but I had it under contract. they get really frustrated because they have no updates on the process and things like that. So it's like little, it's a bunch of little things I feel like that make a transaction coordinator good.
Attention to detail and the ability to manage a ton of different communications and a ton of different kind of task lists is really critical for transaction coordinator. So that'd be green.
Man, I don't really know what yellow would be. Maybe like every once in a while you miss something or every once in a while, like the day of, they're like, oh, actually you need to wire 100 grand today. And you're like, oh God, that's snuck up on me. I wish you had emailed me a week ago or two weeks ago to let me know, hey, this closing has been scheduled. Here it is. This is about how much you're gonna have to wire. We're waiting for final HUD, so on and so forth. And then red would just be like, you don't know what's going on.
You know, they're doing things like they're getting docs in the right order. like, you know, most of your transactions are lined up, but you just continually drop the ball. And probably the biggest ball drops are like communications with the seller.
Clayton Hepler (39:40)
Yep.
Justin Piche (39:53)
I mean, red would be obviously, you know, not bringing a contract to title quick enough. It's like four or five weeks have gone and you haven't even opened up title yet or failing. It depends on what your transaction coordinator's responsibilities are. You know, that's another kind of thing that, but I think that's enough
Clayton Hepler (40:08)
look, an acquisition manager, a good acquisition manager is going to be closing eight to 10%, seven to 10 % of the offers that they make. That's it. That's the huge mark, right? That is the one thing, right? Seven to 10 % close rate. Okay.
Uh, they should be making 25 offers per week. They should be having, uh, an hour in a half, at least two hours of talk time per day. Um, that's, those are the metrics that you need to track. Right. So you know, yellow is, and then kind of last thing for green is like, are you on top of your tasks in the CRM? Like, are you actually
Justin Piche (40:36)
you
Clayton Hepler (40:53)
following up with people, right? That you go from green who's high performer to yellow if you're not following up with tasks, if you're absent minded. Because you might be a good closer, but if you can't do the little things, the attention to detail, which salespeople are historically are not good at that, but we have to coach them up to be good at that. But if they're consistently not doing that, you know that there are a lot of balls that they're dropping.
Justin Piche (41:17)
Yeah, for sure. ⁓
Clayton Hepler (41:19)
And
so the yellow is I'm dropping balls and then it becomes like a conversation of look, you need to have attention to detail. And if you don't have attention to detail, then we have to have a different conversation. Right. Um, and then. I mean, red is like, you know, you're, you're lower than 5 % close rate.
Justin Piche (41:25)
you
Clayton Hepler (41:40)
you're less than an hour of talk time a day, you're less than 15 offers per week, you're making excuses at the lead. Like whenever I start to hear like, the leads are bad. That's a telltale indication that this person is not a killer.
Justin Piche (41:50)
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree. Maybe to enhance or add some more things to discuss on this topic. For cold outreach teams, there's a very clear output. Like you have a clear output. You know what your team is supposed to do. If you're texting, then it's a certain number of texts and leads generated, whatever. If it's cold calling, it's a certain number of time on the phone, a number of dials through and how much time you spend waiting or how much time you spend ready.
Acquisitions managers are usually the first hire that land investors make where they don't have like a really clear easy to track set output.
And intuitively you think, okay, well they're negotiating. And so like sometimes they're gonna have days where they crush it and we get a contract or two and then they're gonna have periods of time where they don't get any contracts. And that's normal because that's what I experienced when I was doing all my negotiations.
And so they don't set up kind of clear output expectations for what the acquisitions manager is doing. Like you mentioned a few, said, probably the easiest one to track is like the amount of time they're on the phone each day, right? Talk time, how much time are they spending following up, talking to people or starting initial negotiations with people. And so...
They'll go weeks and get really poor lead performance, really poor contracts and be super frustrated. And I've had this conversation, honestly, there's one investor that I had this conversation with so many times. And it turns out...
He had no tracking system for his, for what his employee was doing. And eventually he switched to follow boss. And so his employee got in follow boss and follow boss has a lot of tracking built in. So if you don't know this, your, your follow boss can, can track exactly how many minutes on the phone that your team has been or spent. Your follow boss can track the number of calls and it can track the time of when people were getting, were getting on the phone. And so he pulled these data reports from what his, what his acquisition manager was doing. And it was.
like nothing. Like all day. Not a single thing from from like 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. all the way to like 4 p.m. and then all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity at 4 p.m. where he like just kept calling and calling and calling and calling for like an hour and tried to get his numbers to some his average numbers for the whole day up to some reasonable time.
I saw that data and I was comparing to what my acquisition manager would be on the phone, how many calls they would make, like how many comps they would do, how many properties or whatever, you know, all the numbers that she had. like, man, this guy is stealing your time. He's stealing your time. He's not doing anything all day long. And he kept saying things like, man, I'll message him and...
Clayton Hepler (44:22)
Yeah.
Justin Piche (44:27)
He like won't reply for like 30, 45 minutes and then he'll come back and reply. like, Oh, I was in the bathroom and he'll randomly. Yeah. I had stomach ache. Oh, we lost power. And he would randomly like miss days and be like, Oh, my, relative died or my, which, know, if that's true, I'm sorry. Like that's that, you know, obviously give people off if their relative does, but, uh, you know, power outage or my kid was sick or whatever, just like nonstop excuses. And they're impossible to validate, but what you can definitely
Clayton Hepler (44:50)
Right.
Justin Piche (44:57)
can validate is the output. Like what are they producing?
Clayton Hepler (45:00)
Yep.
Justin Piche (45:01)
So for me, Dispo Manager, when you think about, when I think about hiring department heads, I think about what would I do in this position? What decisions am I responsible for as, as my role in the CEO over this department? And how do I get somebody that can make those, that I can empower to make those decisions?
That's kind of what I like to think about for an office manager or not acquisitions manager, obviously, but somebody who's in charge of the operations of your acquisition and this manager or somebody who's in charge of the operations of your sales and dispositions. And so the mark of a like a really high quality dispositions manager is just that, like they not only are capable to make those decisions, their judgment, but it's really like more of like a judgment thing. Like I feel like.
Green is having the judgment to make decisions on dispositions that are in the best interest of the company. And you as a CEO, looking at those decisions and saying, yeah, that was really good. That was good. I would have made that or maybe I wouldn't have made that, but this is a totally valid and legitimate decision to make.
If you're the one negotiating on the Dispo side, every contract or making the decision for every contract, you don't really have a Dispo manager. You have a sales assistant. If you need to make every decision and talk to every realtor and make the final call on every offer, then you don't really have a Dispo manager. You have like a high, probably a highly paid sales assistant. So that's, I think that's the mark of a good.
disposition managers is that you trust their judgment and that they're able to make these decisions and make the right decisions for the benefit of the company.
Clayton Hepler (46:29)
I heard the other day Justin that a good decision manager manages the transactions as well, the transaction coordination. What do you think about that?
Justin Piche (46:39)
Yeah, know, transactions is, I think what we've done is really pushed transactions to dispositions over time. I think at first, because it touches both acquisitions and dispositions, it's like, it's both of those things. It kind of was its own separate department really under me. And then I hired my assistant and then I tried to like move transactions to her.
to my assistant, which she does, she needs to interact really closely with them because she's the one signing all the documents and needs to like schedule her time around going to getting documents notarized, et cetera. But a lot of the outputs are owned by this stuff, by dispositions.
Like all everything, lining, getting all the documents in order and everything being executed properly and organized for Dispo to list and sell properties is really important. And so over time, Transactions has moved more and more under the purview of the dispositions manager. I think that's a fine place for it to sit. I'd say right now it still doesn't like fully sit under Dispo for us. And I think the main reason is because
I don't know if we have like the bandwidth to fully add transactions to sales. I think it needs a little bit of focus, but when it comes to like driving meetings, our acquisitions TC meeting and our dispositions TC meeting, my sales manager, Brian, is the one who leads both of those meetings because he's the one who cares the most about what properties we have coming to market and how to balance and manage his team's time.
Clayton Hepler (48:01)
You're
saying your disposition manager manages your acquisitions meeting?
Justin Piche (48:06)
our acquisitions TC meeting. That means that we already have the property under contract. And so the acquisitions team is basically done. It's now in the pipeline to go to sales. And so what do we need to do? So we have our project. Yeah, this is interesting. So when a property gets under contract on the purchase side for us, it enters into kind of our, obviously like purchases TC dashboard. So we were tracking it and we see what step it's at and where it's going, whatever.
So every week we have an Acquisitions TC meeting, which is run by our dispositions manager. And the only reason it's called the Acquisitions TC meeting is because it's focused primarily on the newly under contract properties. And then our dispositions TC meeting is focused purely on the properties we have under contract to sell to other people.
And the reason why the sales team manages it is because we're in, and why we have project management on there and acquisitions on there is because we need to figure out what we're going to do with this property. We need to decide what our disposition strategy is. We're deciding to spend money on these properties, whether that's soil tests or surveys or marketing or improve, whatever other improvements may happen. So that's why we have project manager and sales because sales is the one saying, Hey, this is what I want and need in this area, in this market. They're validating and
verifying the price we're paying for it. They're determining if we're going to double close and pre-market and that obviously kicks into a different pipeline of actions that need to happen at a different timeline than if we're going to take title and close or if we're not going to list until after we've fully purchased it. And then the reason Acquisitions is on there is because they're new contracts. And so the output a lot of times from some of these meetings is, you we thought this was a good deal because you comped it at X.
we counted at y which is lower than x and therefore you either need to renegotiate or you need to get set expectations for a double close or something you know and that's why so that's what the whole team is on it.
Clayton Hepler (49:53)
So the director
of sales is also on that meeting. Or your director of acquisitions is also on the acquisitions TC meeting.
Justin Piche (49:56)
Yeah.
Not the
director of acquisitions, the acquisitions manager is actually negotiating, is on the call. Somebody who's whoever's going to go back and communicate with the seller, the outputs, we want them to be like involved in the discussion and understand the background.
so that our managers don't have to take another period of time to go explain to them why this decision was made so they can be adequately equipped to renegotiate the price. It's an hour meeting. It's an hour meeting once a week and we're able to move through it pretty quick.
Clayton Hepler (50:25)
Yeah,
yeah, that makes sense. so we understand green, yellow, red. One, one last thing is, what can be systemically supported versus like individual contributors supported. know, you got a high powered eight acquisition manager, this is managed transaction management. I think a lot of the admin functions of the business can be systemically supported like.
Justin Piche (50:40)
Yeah.
Clayton Hepler (50:49)
data management, right? Pulling data, scrubbing data, filtering data, know, tracking KPIs, outbound messaging, general, you know, I would say I would add one more thing. Like if you're going to get an executive assistant, you want a high powered executive assistant, right? That's one thing I would add to this level, but anything else that's not underneath those, the sales function.
Justin Piche (51:03)
Yeah, I agree with that.
Clayton Hepler (51:10)
general admin, can be, it can definitely be systemically supported. Do you have anything else to add Justin for that before we wrap up here?
Justin Piche (51:19)
No, you know, think, yeah, no, not really. I think that's a good way to say it. I mean, that's not to say that there aren't other roles that could that need to be, but at this level, those are the roles that we, know, ones we just discussed are probably the ones that are really critical to be a players. And it's okay to have people who are adequate, who can do the job well enough in other positions. I mean, you may want to change that as you scale, right? And as you have the revenue.
profit to support higher paid staff, you may find that there's value in certain other positions being A players. But I think at this stage, it's acceptable to have good people who are good enough in those roles.
Clayton Hepler (51:54)
So next week we'll go through one to three million dollars system systematizing and delegating your business going from a Hustler to more of an architect, right? So we'll go through that next week Guys, as you know the gentleman's agreement at the end of podcast if you have benefit from this if you get benefit from this Please rate review and subscribe. Let us know what you like and appreciate about the podcast. It allows us to keep it ad free
Every single week and we appreciate you guys until next week Justin anything that I'm in
Justin Piche (52:25)
That's it.