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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
Espiode 58: Fewer Mistakes = Bigger Profits: The Real Key to Winning in Land
🎙️ Welcome to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
Join hosts Clay Hepler and Justin Piché in this exciting episode of The Ground Game Podcast, your ultimate guide to mastering the art of land investing, team building, and land development. If you're interested in a raw, transparent look into what it takes to build a seven-figure land investment business, this podcast is for you! In this episode, Clay and Justin dive deep into:
The Overlooked Truth in Business:
Clay and Justin break down a fundamental yet often overlooked truth in business: you don’t need to do more things right — you just need to do fewer things wrong. They discuss how this mindset can lead to greater success in land investing.
Avoiding Costly Mistakes:
The hosts explore strategies for avoiding bad buys and poor hires, emphasizing the importance of discipline in your investment decisions. They share insights on how to resist the temptation to overbuild or complicate your projects.
Staying Sharp During the Holiday Slowdown:
As the year comes to a close, Clay and Justin discuss how top operators use the holiday slowdown to tune up their systems and strategies. They highlight the importance of preparing your team for a strong start to 2026.
The In-House Dispositions Debate:
The episode tackles a hot topic in the land investing community: Is having an in-house dispositions team worth it? Clay and Justin weigh the pros and cons, discussing when brokers might outperform in-house teams and why.
Focus on Profitability:
Clay and Justin emphasize the significance of focusing on profitability rather than busywork. They share how elite operators think about net profit and the impact of maintaining a streamlined approach to business.
Winning by Doing Less:
The episode wraps up with a powerful message on how to win by doing less — but doing it right. Clay and Justin provide actionable takeaways that will help you refine your approach to land investing and build a sustainable business.
Tune in for a no-fluff conversation on focus, profitability, and building a land business that lasts!
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Clay Hepler (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.
Justin Piche (00:18)
This is other co-host, Justin Piche and we're here to show you how to win the ground game. Good morning, Clay. Yeah, it's still dark out.
Clay Hepler (00:23)
Little early over there. What?
Dude, so I'll tell you a little story. So Drew and I, Drew Haney and I have been, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was two ahead of him and then on Friday, he had messed up twice. And then on Friday, ⁓ as you know, my sister-in-law went into labor last Thursday, okay? And it was absolutely hectic because I was like, am I flying out on?
Justin Piche (00:35)
yeah, I want to hear the update on this.
Clay Hepler (00:58)
Friday? Am I not flying out on Friday? Because she had a 40 like six hour labor. Insane insane. And and and and she didn't do ⁓ an epidural until like the absolute end like to last like hour because like dude 44 hours of labor like that's that's medically concerning, right? Yeah, medically concerning. So so I'm
Justin Piche (01:07)
RUDE-
That's a lot. That's a lot.
Clay Hepler (01:28)
I'm like the whole day like scrambling. I'm with my son like trying to figure out babysitters. Cause you know, was like so, so sudden, right? That I didn't, that I had to like scramble, right? And I forgot to do my ice bath. And so, ⁓ he got, he now I'm up one on him, but dude, it was 30 degrees this morning. Okay. Woke up.
30 degrees. It was snowing. Like little like little, you know, sometimes you, you probably remember when you were in Washington, there's like little, when the snow comes down, but it's like not really snowing. They're like ice crystals coming down. was ice crystalline on me when I'm, when I was in and I'm like, I'm I, cause I, I was like coming out on my deck and I'm like, dude, I'm not gonna, I'm, I'm ahead of Drew. I'm not gonna let this happen. ⁓ so
Justin Piche (02:14)
yeah.
Clay Hepler (02:27)
If you're listening to this, Drew, I got your number, brother. ⁓ But it's been really good. Actually, it's been super beneficial for him and I.
Justin Piche (02:31)
He actually texted me, he texted me
the other day and mentioned that he slipped up and that you're ahead. He's like, you gotta distract. That's so funny though.
Clay Hepler (02:43)
It's funny man, he's a good guy.
Justin Piche (02:45)
Drew texted me the other day to mention that he had slipped up and that you were ahead of him. So he's honest.
Clay Hepler (02:53)
Well, dude, it's crazy. There's
money on the line here. There's money on the line here. There's money on the line here. So it's, it's, it's, um, it is, it's like a serious thing. Now it's not like going to bankrupt either of us, right? It's, but it's, but it's a, but it's a check, but it's a check. Like you don't, it's more than a steak dinner. It's more than, it's more than a steak dinner. Um, so dude, that's, that's
Justin Piche (03:06)
No, my gosh, of course not.
You don't want to write that check. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah.
Clay Hepler (03:19)
I had a great weekend with Hess, know, just like hanging out with him all weekend, just him and I. And ⁓ then, you know, I think I'll probably fly out at some point. I was supposed to fly out and then she got delayed on her discharge and she just got home like super late last night. And so I'm like to my wife, hey, like just tell me when I'm coming out, like, cause I'm flying out to Denver and it'll probably be at the end of this week at some point.
but I have everyone lined up like ⁓ this week so I can make sure that I can get work done. ⁓ So yeah, that's it. How about you, man? What's going on in your personal life? What's going on? Fun, interesting.
Justin Piche (03:58)
That's exciting.
⁓ man.
You know?
feel like we're in a pretty decent spot. don't know, my kids are doing really well. Kind of getting some plans together for the holidays and what we're gonna do. The yard next door, the sod's looking pretty good. About to get my fence installed. We had some brick pillars installed last week that looked really nice in the front. I got a...
Clay Hepler (04:28)
Nice
Justin Piche (04:38)
I got like a, because I've never had a gate in the front before. People have always, the like mail carrier or whatever has always been able to walk up on the porch and drop off packages. And my wife loves to order Amazon. If you're listening to this, honey, I'm sorry. No, we have kids, like, you know, a bunch of kids. And so there's always little knickknacks and things where it's just, it's so convenient to order something and have it delivered rather than going driving to the store with kids to get it. So, but I got one of those parcel boxes.
Clay Hepler (04:53)
You
Justin Piche (05:07)
as a mailbox that I'm gonna kind of like mount into the steel gate. So I'm gonna have the welder build a little mount and like stick, like put the parcel box kind of next to the pillar so somebody can drop off parcels and they don't just get stuck out in the rain or stolen or whatever. I don't think we ever had any packages stolen here, but certainly wet packages from a random rainstorm.
Clay Hepler (05:30)
I know it's a serious problem in Denver. My brother and sister, my brother, brother in law and sister in law live, you know, the sister in law that went into labor now has a, has a baby girl. ⁓ dude, they get their packages like stolen. Like it's a serious thing. And I'm like, dude, what? But I don't live in, I don't live in a major city. So
Justin Piche (05:50)
Yeah, it doesn't really happen all that much here in our neighborhood. I've never had it happen and we were a lot of things to be delivered and I leave them for like a weekend or whatnot. So I don't know. Maybe it's just not the area people like to come to do that. But
Clay Hepler (05:58)
Okay.
So dude, want to just before we jump into our topic today, I have something that I think is like was super interesting and for listeners is beneficial. It's more of a reminder. But I was listening to this podcast from an investor called Howard Marks, who has a multi, multi, multi, multi billion dollar ⁓ capital investment firm on Wall Street called Oak Tree Capital Partners. And he is known as a
Justin Piche (06:15)
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (06:32)
one of the greats, like one of the great investors of the era of kind of the boomer era, right? Kind of the older greats, the Ray Dalios, he's in that camp. And he writes these memos to his shareholders, right? The people that invest with him specifically. And he had this memo that I just felt was like super pertinent specifically for land investors was it was something along the lines of
Less losers, more winners. Right?
Clay Hepler (07:04)
It might have been fewer losers. think that's the grammatically correct version of it. Fewer losers, more winners. But ⁓ I would say for a lot of land investors, we want to get things right all the time. We want to have the best CRM. We listen to this podcast. We listen to a YouTube video and we're like, dude, I want to implement this new thing. I want to change my sales process. I want to add an acquisitions meeting. I want to... ⁓
Justin Piche (07:10)
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (07:32)
change a marketing channel or whatever, right? ⁓ But a lot of the success, at least I've found when I really reflect back, comes down to doing fewer stupid things than it comes down to doing more right things. Fewer buying of bad parcels, fewer hiring of poor people, fewer poor management mistakes or resource mistakes. ⁓ And there's this great quote by Charlie Munger about, show me, he dies, so.
kind of funny ⁓ tongue in cheek, but show me where I die. So I won't go there, right. It's just sort of philosophy around protecting the downside is more important than the upside. There's this rush that I felt specifically early on, I think for ⁓ a very reasonable reason, which was like, I needed to make money very quickly. Some people are jumping corporate jobs. Some people are, ⁓ hey, I like I want to leave this I want
help with retirement. So I need to speed this up really quickly. But but also our need in the microwave world that we live in that I want instant results. But having the frame of dude, I want to build this thing so it's sustainable. So I can have this business in 10 years creates this really different approach to problems, which I think during this time of year, during the the end of the year where we're trying to stuff things in, hey, can I do one or two extra deals?
to make sure I can end this year on the note that I wanted to versus kicking them in next year or however you approach that problem. I think it's like a really good frame of mind. And I just wanted to share it with you and share it with the listeners in general because making fewer mistakes is one of the reasons why people, some people are more successful than others.
Justin Piche (09:21)
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. It is tough though, you know, it's tough to draw the line between mistake and too conservative. You know what mean? ⁓ sorry, avoiding making a mistake or putting things into place where you're not making mistakes. That line of fewer or none or whatever, you know, that's where people can really mess up too. Cause you could say, all right, well.
there's a risk that I'm wrong on my comps on this. And so like, I'm not going to do this deal. It turns out like you were just messed up, you know, and it was, it would have been a great deal. You just, never know. You're too conservative. You don't, you won't negotiate up a little bit, but the conservative, the other side is also true. You waste a bunch of time because you're not conservative enough. You get properties under contract. You can't, can't sell them because you don't have any margin on the deal and up losing money and due diligence and title and all kinds of stuff. Time waste time. And then the deal falls apart. So it's, it's really like,
It's tough, it's tough in this business, which is why it takes reps.
Clay Hepler (10:22)
To be,
yes, yes. And to be fair, like, this is someone who is a investor for a living, not a business owner, right? So it's kind of a different approach, if you will. So I completely concur with you, but it's still a very helpful frame to have. Because of course, if you have a tendency to be more conservative, like,
you underwrite a deal so that you're at 40 % of market value, like it's going to be hard to do deals.
Justin Piche (10:56)
Yeah, that's one of the biggest challenges to training also new people who are coming in to underwrite or to comp is, you know, at first I feel like a lot of people, they want to get the deal done, especially if if if the person comping is an acquisition manager or somebody doing a closer, for example, they want to get the deal done. And so they'll comp, they'll be not as great on margins because they want to get the contract. They want to get the contract. They want to get the contract. This is my experience. And then you give them feedback, right? You're like, Hey,
We're getting all these contracts and we think there's 30, 40, $50,000 a margin on these deals. But in fact, there's actually five or negative 5,000 or so. You come back and give them the feedback and then they swing way far the other way. They're like, oh, well, I got kind of this bad feedback. I wasn't doing a very good job. Good job comping. Now I'm going to make sure that we are in the money on every deal that we do big time.
And then that leads to like just no contracts and even businesses like mine, feel like which with experienced people that have been doing this for years now, we can fall into that trap of misprioritizing and being too conservative at times or not being conservative enough at times because we're desperate for a contract and we just want to get one on the books. ⁓ I think it's really important as a business leader, as an owner, right? As a CEO.
to make sure that incentives are aligned perfectly such that your team never tends to fall into one of those traps, right? You don't want to be reprimanding them in a too severe a way for getting properties under contract that they offer too much, they got them too high. And then conversely, you don't want them to be so conservative that they can't get good deals under contract, right? I always feel like it's a little bit better.
At least my philosophy is it's a little bit better to get more stuff in the pipeline that you might've gotten too high than it is to go to the conservative side and get less on our contract than you could have done.
Clay Hepler (13:03)
I, yes, ⁓ I would say that is ⁓ a helpful heuristic unless you have a pipeline that's full of crappy deals and then, but, as a general rule, what you're exactly exactly. That's right.
Justin Piche (13:11)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, then you need to adjust, right? Yeah. If you have a pipeline full of crappy deals,
that's a perfect time to say, okay, I'm not being conservative enough or or my negotiating isn't good enough.
Clay Hepler (13:25)
⁓ My COO said the other day, ⁓ like, emotions talk, numbers scream.
And it's like, it's like, man, that's so good. Right? Like numbers scream. And he talks about that all the time. Like numbers are like, what are the screaming numbers right now in our business? And like, whether it's like a pipeline that's too full or not full enough, which brings us to kind of the point of today that I don't know if you're experiencing this in your business yet, but like, there's this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I feel like there was 11 months to a land flipping year, right? And again, depending on where the majority of your team members are from, there could be a lethargic approach to the last month of the year, December, right? You know, of those that are ⁓ practicing Christians, know, Christmas is a really important time of the year, right? A very important time of the year.
And in you know, there are many other faith backgrounds that people have from international team members as well that during December There's a lot of there's a lot of really important holidays As well as Americans Thanksgiving, right and so dude like it's such a It's such a look for in my opinion that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas Especially if you're doing outbound texting or calling
or things like that, like people aren't picking up their phone nearly as much in my experience. And so my question for you is, you don't wanna lose a month of effort, right? You're basically paying someone for 11 months of effort, right? And then they go on a vacation for a month. How do you, these last couple of weeks of the year, how do you actually craft the narrative organizationally, culturally?
Justin Piche (15:11)
yeah.
Clay Hepler (15:35)
so that your team is pushing hard at this end of the year.
Justin Piche (15:42)
I mean, we, every month is kind of a new, like there's like competitions a little bit, you know, friendly competitions for leads and contracts and deals. There's, you know, coming off a couple of rough months. So we're coming into the end of the year with, you know, a couple of like, I, September was great. October was mediocre at best. August was pretty bad.
So like we're not performing as strong into the last quarter as we have in the past, at least for the size of team or at least for my expectations. So like there's a chip on the team's shoulder. So being able to motivate them by saying, hey, we got to go is will be helpful. It'd be pretty, I mean, plus they want to make money, you know, and their compensation is based on commit. Like a lot of it is commissions. So if we're not making money as a company of like as much as we need to, then their, their pay takes a direct hit. So that's pretty motivating to them.
I it is slow. last month is pretty slow. But honestly, it's really I find that January February for me a typically slower. I don't know. At least what I've seen is there's a lot of vacation. There's a lot of interruptions. Like it doesn't feel like you're operating at full capacity because people take time off ⁓ or there's you know, foreign holidays or whatever happens, know, US holidays, etc. But we still are just consistent kind of rolling through the holidays. We don't we don't really
change marketing too much. think my first year or two, I, I like stopped mailing or something between, I don't know, mid December and the second week of January. ⁓ but now we just keep kind of rolling through. We know it's going to be tight. We spent a lot more time following up, nurturing leads. We spent a lot of time, ⁓ cleaning up CRM, you know, any dead time. We do a lot of training during this time of year. You can't really have, you can't really, it's hard to pay a team for like 11 months. You know what I mean? Like
our guys like you can't. mean, you can't. It's like really. Yeah, that wouldn't really work. Right. Yeah. And in fact, if you have a Filipino team, like you're probably paying them for 13 months, you know, you're probably giving them that extra. At least that's that's what we've done historically is is, you know, give a big bonus at the end of the year, a bonus at the end of the year commensurate on performance for the year, because that's kind of what culturally they they're used to.
Clay Hepler (17:36)
No, no, you know you yes, you obviously can't do that. You know, obviously no you can't do that, right? Like absolutely absolutely
Justin Piche (18:03)
You know, been it's been interesting. But the see this last these last like three, four weeks in the Philippines. If you have a Filipino team like they're hurting right now, they really are with just incredible natural disasters that have occurred to the country over and over again. They've had multiple huge earthquakes. They just had a massive tsunami come through Cebu. And I think another one was like coming through like right now. I don't know. It's pretty crazy stuff.
Clay Hepler (18:31)
Yeah, I've
heard I've heard about that. So it's just been absolutely ransacked. Thankfully, I have no one on my team from Cebu. Do you have anyone on your team from Cebu?
Justin Piche (18:42)
Yeah,
like half my Filipinos on the team are from Cebu. So that's been rough.
Clay Hepler (18:49)
Wow.
Yeah. So I think that basically what you're saying is, dude, nothing changes for us. Like marketing doesn't change marketing. Like, is that what I'm hearing you say?
Justin Piche (18:58)
Yeah.
I mean,
my message, my message changes to the team. Like, hey guys, this is a time of year. We need to focus on making sure we didn't drop any balls throughout the rest of the year. Like let's go through all every old lead. Let's audit every single like failed contract, every single, you know, verbal yes without something getting signed. Let's go over every single one of those and reach out and follow up. And you know, we're doing that at least for the acquisition managers, right? Cause they're
that we are getting less leads this time of year, less qualified leads for sure. But the cold outreach team is still doing the same thing. know, it's a lot of like, it's a lot more, the leads tend to be a lot more, hey, not right now versus like an overt like get loss, no.
Clay Hepler (19:33)
Yeah, that's
Justin Piche (19:45)
Hey guys, Justin here to say thank you for listening. Clay and I are talking a little bit about how do you finish the year strong? I know it's something that's on a lot of our minds. So if you're getting some value out of this, leave us some comments. I'd love to know how you plan on finishing the year strong. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Clay Hepler (20:05)
So I have that same narrative like a lot of the times at the end of the year, it's really about cleaning out like during the year, it's we weren't a business as a sales and marketing business. So we're kind of always focusing on hey, front of funnel better front of funnel. But I like to take December and really look at everything that we've done this year and say, hey, where do we actually how do we actually win better, right? One of the the organizational ⁓ cadences that
We've been okay at not great is actually our, ⁓ like quarterly planning and annual planning. And so we're actually in the, I'm in the process of scheduling our annual plan. So I'm flying our COO in Pittsburgh and we're going to be doing a multi-day annual planning, ⁓ together, ⁓ in Pittsburgh for, how do we hit our goals for next year? and you know, mostly net profit goals.
Right? That's the most important. And also looking at like, what are the things that we're going to do differently reflecting on the year? So I like to use December as a month of like, look, we take the whole week of Christmas off. Like between Christmas, like Eve and ⁓ even ⁓ New Year's ⁓ Eve, we take all those days off. It's kind of a ⁓ 10 day rest at the end of the year so that everyone can really
rest and rejuvenate. I don't know what you guys do in your organization, but December to me is always about reorganizing, retooling, focusing on system growth. We're still getting deals under contract because one fallacy that I had my first year is like slowing down in that December time. Dude, that directly impacts Q1. So there's no excuse to slow down, right, or Q2.
There's no excuse to slow down, but we're really focusing on, like I've talked about in the past, you know, your 40 ounce cup for the 40 ounces per week. We're focusing on those extra 10 to five ounces that we have, or for each of our team members to focus on the system, to reflect on the year and really wrap our arms around, how do we hit the ground running in 2026?
Justin Piche (22:24)
Yeah, I think that's great. I think there's just too much variability in the market in terms of what people are doing culturally, different parts of the country, whether people want to answer the phone or answer a mail or whatever. There's also a lot of family members, people that are getting together and having discussions. so getting in front of them before the holidays, even if they're more likely to say no on average, you may be able to get past some of those decision-making
hurdles that plague multi-owner properties, know, airship properties during that time. But I agree. I think we just keep moving. We focus on things that we really need to focus on. We focus on cleanup pretty heavily. We focus on organization. We do our aerial planning. So just maybe a little bit less leads on average. That's it.
Clay Hepler (23:15)
Yeah,
keep business as usual. All right, let's see what else do we want to touch on here?
Justin Piche (23:23)
We could talk about I could share some personal wins. I could share some personal wins things that have been going on. ⁓ last Friday was was I feel like maybe the biggest the second biggest day of my land investing business kind of journey if you will. I don't know of just stress feeling like stress has been substantially lifted off.
I've talked about the Spokane deal that I've worked on which is my the biggest late. Well, technically the second biggest land purchase I've ever ever made now that I think about it because I did a deal with Ben that was a lot bigger but ⁓ But I bought this proper I this property under contract. There's been a hullabaloo at the bank trying to get everything organized The seller was unwilling to extend anymore. They'd already extended plenty of times. I paid for it a Lot of fairness money more honest money that I've ever had in any other deal in my life ⁓
And they basically said, the seller was like, hey, we're not going to give you a minute past 5 PM Pacific, Friday, December 30th or October 31st, not one minute. And we had, we had everything in line. Like the bank had approved, formally approved the loan. ⁓ All the money was there to purchase this property. ⁓ Title had run the title report. We were just waiting on the attorney.
to draft the documents that we needed to draft for the state of Washington. And we had a Texas attorney start it and then they kicked it over to a Washington state attorney. And that attorney, like, I guess they overnighted it or something because they billed me 11 grand to make some freaking deed of trust and some other random, I was like, what? But the bank, my bank, wired the money to close the deal.
One single minute before the wire cut off. And if they had missed that wire cut off, was literally like, I was like checking my phone every like 30 seconds from 3pm to like 3.30 waiting because I hadn't seen the wire confirmation email go through, go across yet on Friday on on on Halloween. One minute and if they had not.
wired that I would have personally lost like 150, 160K even though we were like there, we were on the finish line. The attorneys asked for us to extend the contract to mid November. That's what they said. And I got a guy called the attorney's office. It's like, I will pay for 10 attorneys, 20 attorneys to just like nonstop work these documents. I don't care. Like we have to get this done in like four days. Like there's no other option. can't, I can't get until mid November.
Cause there's also like a reputational risk. We'd already raised all the money from our investors, right? All the money sitting there ready to go. There's like this reputational. Can you imagine like how humiliating and like that would be not, just humiliating, but like, but like lack of trust on some of you, you know, a new, a new fun partnership working on these development deals. Yes. Our second, our second raise, we're going to these investors and you know, asking them to trust us and we know how to manage deals. We know how to find good deals. We don't operate deals. Like that's not in question, at least in my mind.
Clay Hepler (26:20)
Yep. Yes.
Justin Piche (26:39)
getting this loan lined up has been just the most chaotic, crazy, stressful thing. And it was was done. It was done. We got to close. We own the property. We're like starting on the certificate of exemption subdivide. We got the first listing up. You know, it's beautiful. So that was a huge amount of stress. And the other thing that happened, that wasn't it. That wasn't the only thing. The other thing that happened is ⁓ submitted.
Clay Hepler (26:52)
Beautiful dude, beautiful, beautiful.
Justin Piche (27:06)
the conceptual development plan to La Plata County, Colorado for the 200 something unit ski development that I've been working on with a partner, which has been.
Clay Hepler (27:12)
Yes.
Justin Piche (27:23)
Interesting and slower, much slower than I ever thought it would be a lot more involved. Holy smokes, man. I mean, I think in this business, a lot of us typically stick to minor subdivides and exempt some divides. And in the last kind of year and a half, I've done several early two years, I've done a couple of major subdivide smaller though, like by first 700 cell for
Clay Hepler (27:38)
Yep. Yep.
Justin Piche (27:50)
two and a half million. That's like kind of the bigger major ish subdivide of like souped and nuts completely sold out of all the lots finished. And then other ones I've done more other major subdivides that classified as major but they were just small like 10 lot 10 lots or five lots or something that you know a couple hundred grand but it's but you still have to do all the engineering. You still have to get through all this stuff. This is a whole nother level. I have never seen so many rules and things and
Clay Hepler (27:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes.
Justin Piche (28:17)
figures and just to get a concept approved by the county is my gosh it's nuts it's nuts so it was a long process to get all this stuff together
Clay Hepler (28:28)
And
that's why the profit at the end is so great, honestly. Like we're doing one buy for 750 sell for 2.2, but it's about 500 acres and we're just gonna do large 40 acre hunting tracks and like build a road in the middle of the parcel and call it a day. Like literally, do we have to rezone the parcel? Yeah, yeah.
Justin Piche (28:31)
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (28:56)
We got to go up in front of development committee, but it's pretty much like, Hey, this is conforming to this local areas, ⁓ jurisdictional regulations. And all we need to do is conform to them, meet with the development community. They've already basically stamped it, even though it's a large purchase price and a large exit price. It's not like it's going to be, it's not like what you're doing, right? It's, ⁓ it's very much a minor of sorts, even though it is under the major classification.
Justin Piche (29:25)
Right. Yeah, exactly. Like even my first kind of major up in Huntsville, well, Decatur, Alabama, Morgan County. I didn't have to build a roadster for that project. I built a lot of driveways, a lot of culverts, you know, I to get a lot of permits for that. I built detention ponds, six of them, which was crazy expensive. But it was major. I mean, I had to do engineering. I had to do sightline studies. We had to engineer the detention. We had to do a whole bunch of stuff.
It took a long time, longer than I would have expected, but not like crazy long. It was like eight months, nine months from like project start to plan approval. But it wasn't, it was nothing like, it was nothing like this one. Nothing like this one.
Clay Hepler (30:08)
Yeah.
So Justin, ⁓ I think I have one last thing before we jump off here. And this has been an internal ⁓ conversation and I want to hear your thoughts on it. Right. So we have developed a dispositions department internally and I'm to be very vulnerable with the listeners that can gain a lot of benefit from this. But we have found that ⁓ we've paid for the premium land dot com. Right.
Justin Piche (30:18)
Yeah.
You
Clay Hepler (30:36)
We have Facebook, have, we've looked at our stats and
95 % of our listings, maybe more, are on the MLS. We make money on the MLS. 95 % of them. ⁓ It's not even remotely close. And we have the premium, we have like 40 land.com slots. If you look at my land.com profile, we have like 40 deals online, or 40, 50, crazy. It's insanely expensive.
Justin Piche (30:52)
Mmm, wow. Yeah.
Clay Hepler (31:14)
We have looked at this and said, okay, so we're seeing that agents, picking the right agent is the alpha. This is what we're finding. And that is actually a skillset in and of itself that many people are very bad at doing, right? So ⁓ that becomes our alpha, we believe, in the dispositions, right? Versus controlling the transactions. Now, do you save money that way? To a certain extent, you do. You save money, but
if you listen internally that is, but the way I think about it is, for example, my COO is more expensive than my old operations manager by a multiple of about 10, right? But he is more than 10X better than this old operations manager, like more than 10X better. And so I'd like to hear your thoughts on that because we have found that there's a lot of
Justin Piche (31:55)
He
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (32:13)
a pomp and circumstance, an organizational drag with the dispositions department. It's not like we're shuttering our disposition department. We have really good team members there. And I know that you are a very large proponent of the dispositions department, but we found that brokers sell our deals.
Justin Piche (32:33)
Yeah. mean, I think first of all, you got to look at the data and look at the numbers and make a decision for your own organization. So I think you're doing the right thing, right? If 95 % of your listings are on there's listing, sell an MLS with a broker, then there's either something wrong with your Dispo team department, or there's something really right about your agents, right? And like that's your, that's what you do really well. It doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong with your Dispo team. Maybe you just have exceptional agents and great properties that sell relatively quickly.
⁓ So maybe just consider that. ⁓
You know, I think, I think that there's a couple ways to like the, I look at the performance of the sales team and what do I think we gained from having an in-house disposition team versus just going straight to, to brokers in all cases. It's a lot of the value comes in kind of the double close style properties from an in-house Dispo team. When we take title, I mean, we always list with agents, regardless. We are also selling.
but we always list with agents almost almost in every case. There's there's a few times we don't there's a few times we use on like lower dollar properties brokerless MLS type stuff rather than than than agents. But even I mean it's I don't know. I look it's hard to quantify maybe that's a good way of saying it. It's hard and if somebody has a way to perfectly quantify ⁓ the amount of time that you ⁓ save from.
Clay Hepler (33:48)
Yep. Yep.
Justin Piche (34:09)
having an in-house Dispo team, how much quicker properties may sell by doing both. Because we've never done just one or the other. There's properties that maybe aren't worth finding an agent, or there's properties in areas where it's very challenging to find an agent, and that's where having a great in-house Dispo team that can move that property quickly in a really tough, challenging market on owner financing or whatever, when an agent struggles for that, or there's not very many agents in that area, is really helpful. ⁓
If somebody knows how to quantify the exact way to determine if your in-house Dispo team is beneficial to your company or not, I'd love to hear it. I think mine is fantastic ⁓ and we can point to dozens of examples of places where the in-house sales team was able to move a property incredibly quickly and save us a substantial amount of money on ⁓ commissions that we would have otherwise paid to an agent.
that pay for the team. But we don't have like a 95 % of the MLS. We're about 45, 50 %-ish MLS sales. Maybe it's like 55 MLS, 45 off MLS sales. So it's very different numbers.
Clay Hepler (35:26)
My question for you
would be, ⁓ is that because you have such a robust Dispo Team? Or is that because the Dispo Team is actually effective?
Justin Piche (35:35)
Or is it because we aren't good at finding agents? You know, I don't know. That's a great question.
Clay Hepler (35:39)
Right, so
there's always obviously trade-offs and the worst thing to do is build something that has no incremental value in ⁓ your business. And of course I'm not saying that your sales team has no incremental value whatsoever, right? What I'm saying is like, you know,
Maybe the skill set is not about ⁓ building the highest velocity sales team. Maybe the skill set is finding the right brokers. then that becomes the focus versus like building out the infrastructure. We spend so much time ⁓ internally. By the way, we have sold a ton of deals and saved a lot of money by using our in-house CISPO team.
This is just something that I'm wrestling with as a business owner right now. Am I chasing down the right metrics ⁓ to do this? Am I focusing on the right, there's so much mental bandwidth that comes with building a dispositions team. Now we are funding a lot more deals. ⁓ Like people, we've gotten like three subdivides under contract to help fund. so do we have a competitive advantage because we have the in-house Dispo team.
Yes, of course we can do that. We can help to sell deals faster. You know, in tandem with a broker. But I just like, I'm wondering about this, know, as I've built out this structure of the ideal land business, right? Which is the half a million dollars to 1.5 million dollars per year with 50 % margins. I'm always looking at how do we get our team
Justin Piche (37:26)
Yeah.
Clay Hepler (37:35)
to work for the highest return on their time, right? There's this amazing equation called ROE return on employee. And I think about that, I think we spoke about that on a previous podcast, which is like, if a really good company has a greater than 500,000 or 200,000 return on employees. So if you have like 10 employees, you should do $2 million of gross profit. ⁓
That's like a very good return on employees or revenue of employee. ⁓ so I'm just constantly thinking about that. How do we build this, like this business that serves us? Not us serving it. You might have to have a care as person in that department that manages it, whether that's a TC Dispo hybrid or just a Dispo person. ⁓ but I want, I I'm thinking about like the, the, Frankenstein.
You know, like that new movie on Netflix my wife was telling me about it. The like, the combination of the perfect land business to get the most, to get the most bang for your buck.
Justin Piche (38:41)
think if you're managing a Dispo team yourself, what you said is it's a lot of like it's a lot of mental space and work and churn to create a Dispo team. And it is like, frankly, like there is a lot that goes on with marketing. I mean, God, we have 150 properties and inventory at this point, or maybe even more. It's ridiculous because of all these developments.
Clay Hepler (39:05)
Yeah, how many did the subdivide that subdivide?
many did you just add on Friday?
Justin Piche (39:10)
43. Well, we'd already had 15 of them. So 28 we had a 28 and 28 on Friday. It is. Yeah, it's a lot. So managing all that or keeping that organized like it's a lot and frankly at this point, right? If I was where basically where I was without a Dispo team, let's just say I was I was in the same spot generating the same number of leads same amount of inventory, etc. There's like a 0 % chance. I would have probably set it up.
Clay Hepler (39:16)
Cool. That's a lot.
Justin Piche (39:36)
Like I just wouldn't have the bandwidth to even give it enough thought to do it. It just so happened that early on in my business, I brought on someone to manage that side. basically once it gets under contract, what happens with the property? I brought somebody to manage that side of the business and Brian and he has grown the Dispa team and scaled kind of our operations and gotten it organized. And it's been great. It's been great.
Clay Hepler (40:03)
Yeah. Well, the goal of this conversation was really to give the like, we don't, I don't have it all figured out guys. You know, every day is like, we're testing, we're growing, we're learning, we're taking what the market gives us. And the goal here is net profitability. The goal here is, is my team making more money and am I making more money as a result of our efforts? That is the scoreboard.
Justin Piche (40:11)
Yeah, I agree.
Clay Hepler (40:33)
of this business. Let's not get like people headcount is not the scoreboard. Deals per month is not the scoreboard. The scoreboard is, are we making more net profit? And so
Justin Piche (40:47)
Without,
let me add a clarifier, without brain damage, Are you adding, without constant debilitating stress.
Clay Hepler (40:52)
Exactly. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yeah. And so that's the kind of the optimal, the land business that we spoke about in a previous call. like, we're, you know, that's the goal of the Ground Game podcast, right? To really share like, hey, like we don't have it figured out, man. Like we, every single day we're learning and growing. You know, do we know more than what we did last month? Yeah. Yeah. Right. But that doesn't mean market shift and we don't. guys, if you felt that this was a valuable podcast episode,
going into end of year and then this Dispo discussion. Please rate review, leave us a little review. If you guys here, if Drew Haley watches this podcast through, please give me a five star review as I'm one ahead of you right now and I will continue to be one ahead of you buddy. Hope to see you soon, man. But again, thank you so much guys. We appreciate you tuning in every single week. We appreciate our loyal listeners and hope to see you guys sometime soon. Justin, anything else before we jump out?
Justin Piche (41:41)
Hahaha.
The only thing I would know that's pretty much it. I'll be at the this weekend I'm traveling to Savannah for the land operators Alliance Event which will be exciting I'm speaking about probably some of these developments that I'm working on Haven't figured out exactly what I'm talking about yet But that'll be fun exciting and I'm gonna meet the I'm gonna meet Ron Appke Finally, I've never met the Appke brothers. I'm gonna at least meet Ron when I'm there on Friday
Clay Hepler (42:24)
Cool.
Justin Piche (42:25)
So we should be good.
Clay Hepler (42:27)
Cool deal,
Justin Piche (42:29)
Anyway, that's it. We'll see you guys next week.