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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 60: What would we do if we were starting a business in 2026
🎙️ Welcome to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️
Join hosts Clay Hepler and Justin Piche in this episode as they dive deep into the real state of the land business as we head into 2026. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, they’re unpacking what it truly means to thrive in today’s competitive market.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- The Shift in Strategy: Why Clay made the bold move to dismantle his entire dispo department after a thorough analysis of performance across land.com and Facebook.
- Market Insights: Justin reveals the slowdown in traditional Southeast markets and how evolving days-on-market trends are reshaping their acquisition strategies.
- Skills Over Size: Why the next era of land investing demands sharper skills rather than bigger teams, and how you can adapt to this shift.
- A 90-Day Blueprint: A tactical roadmap for both new and seasoned investors aiming for multi-six-figure revenues in 2026.
- Data-Driven Decisions: The exact data points they now use to identify winning markets and the rise of value-add land investing, including mobile homes and improvements.
- Mastering Lead Channels: Which lead channels are worth your time in 2026, and why texting and agent farming are outperforming PPC for beginners.
- Essential Tech Tools: The minimum tech stack every investor needs, including CRM systems and AI tools.
- Sales Skills Matter: How AI is changing the way teams train and why mastering sales skills is more crucial than ever.
- Creative Offer Structuring: Tips for crafting offers that close more deals and the dangers of hiring too many VAs too quickly.
- Scaling Responsibly: Why targeting $500K–$1.5M/year flipping cores is key before layering in value-add strategies, and how to leverage broker relationships and capital partners for growth.
Tune in for actionable insights that will empower you to rethink your approach to land investing. Remember, in this evolving landscape, the right strategies can transform your business and set you on the path to success in 2026!
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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 Piche, and we're here to show you how to win the ground game.
Good morning, Clay
Clayton Hepler (00:25)
What's up, dude?
Justin Piche (00:27)
It is the day before Thanksgiving 2025 and we're working as usual because that's what we do. know, team doesn't have today off, but they have tomorrow off. Although we do put a skeleton crew. Do you guys do that? Do you guys put a skeleton crew in to make sure that like marketing, like at least inbound leads are being talked to outbound leads are being sales leads are being talked to, et cetera.
Clayton Hepler (00:38)
Right.
Honestly, no. No, we shut the entire business down. I should probably do what you do, but we shut the entire business down.
Justin Piche (01:00)
Maybe I'm heartless.
We used to do that. I think now we have so many properties in inventory, and I know you do too, so it's like, I just don't, I feel like this is a time, the holiday right here specifically is a time where so many people are off and like searching the web and like hanging out at family functions on Facebook, looking at land and whatnot. I just don't want to let...
let things go for five days, four days without any responses. And so what we do is we get like a true skeleton crew, no outbound marketing whatsoever, just somebody who's monitoring all of like the things that we've sent out, all the cold calls, voicemails, whatever that we've sent out for the previous week that we're going to have calls come in. They're just kind of monitoring and following up with old leads and things like that.
And then for sales, it's the same thing. I want somebody on Facebook who's able to answer messages and at least capture people in the CRM. Because if they're like, everybody in the US is not working right now. So everybody could reply. This guy is selling land on Facebook. Of course, he can't reply over this.
Clayton Hepler (01:48)
That's fair.
For sure.
You know what's interesting, dude, lately, we've really looked at our Facebook versus land.com, which we have a premium, dude, I probably have 20, or sorry, like 60, 65. It's so expensive. On land.com.
Justin Piche (02:17)
Yeah. It is really expensive. I look at it every year.
I'm interested to hear your conclusions though, if you've analyzed.
Clayton Hepler (02:26)
Dude, my conclusions
is we're unraveling our Dispo Department. Because ⁓ after we look at all the time, energy and effort that we spend on... Like we looked at all of our leads over the last six months from land.com. We got two deals. Two deals on our contract. And we have a ton of properties on land.com. We've had hundreds of inquiries. Hundreds.
Justin Piche (02:47)
Really?
Clayton Hepler (02:56)
But two deals and then we looked at Facebook and We had a similar ratio and so I have two really smart and capable people in those roles and so I'm gonna find different like roles for them ⁓ But we're I mean this could change in six months right business is all about testing I think that's what we're talk about today about hey, what what would we do differently?
Justin Piche (03:05)
Really?
Clayton Hepler (03:26)
if we would have to start in 2026, but man, like, we're going to unravel the Dispo department and then we're going to put just one core guy that does all of our broker management, scouting, calling, so we can still have a centralized, I don't know, spreadsheet for how are we doing on all of our listings.
But yeah, man, we're unraveling the whole thing because we're like, this is not worth the time and energy and effort. It's so expensive mentally and it's so expensive team-wise that we're going to just kill it. Because we looked and 95 % of our deals get sold by agents.
Justin Piche (04:08)
Yeah, I would do the same thing if that were my ratio, for sure. I'd cut it. You definitely need somebody, especially when you have as much inventory and deal flow as you do. I agree that you need somebody to coordinate broker relations and get updates at a minimum and set expectations for like what is an update cadence on leads and property visits, offers, et cetera. Otherwise, that's gonna be you and it's a lot to deal with.
Clayton Hepler (04:36)
Yeah, and there's like, I think the benefits and the drawbacks of this is like, if you have a true dedicated dispo guy like you do, Brian, like he knows how to look at land, probably better than most brokers. And the way that we're thinking about it, like how do we prevent that from being a kneecap is we just talked to multiple brokers and we have a more strict ⁓ criteria for the brokers that we choose. ⁓
and certain things like days that we look at days on market and other factors, which I believe will make it such that it's not much of a handicap. ⁓ But yeah, man, it's just like a release organizationally, like having that department is just like, it was it's been a this year, it's been an absolute struggle for us. ⁓ We've gotten opportunities out of it. We've self listed made money. But it's just been a struggle. ⁓
It's just so much extra organizational resources that I would rather point towards different opportunities. ⁓ So that's like a very recent thing. Like that's like last week that we, I decided along with my COO that like, we don't think this is a viable 2026 strategy.
Justin Piche (05:52)
Yeah, love it.
Clayton Hepler (05:55)
So speaking about 2026 strategies, ⁓ I think everyone admits and sees that the market this year is not like it was the year before. And I don't think the market next year is going to be like it was this year. ⁓ And so today we want to talk about, if we were to start over 2026, what would be our structure to get to, let's say, a multi six figure or low seven figure business pretty quickly?
So let's build out a 90 day plan for anyone who's listening to this so that they can go and implement it into their business right away. You want to kick us off, brother?
Justin Piche (06:33)
Yeah, let's go, let's go. ⁓ I mean, there's just so many new tools that have come out. think AI is way more prevalent today than obviously it ever was. And that's pretty obvious, okay? Everybody can see that. ⁓ The other thing is competition has increased, you know? And it still feels like there's a lot of opportunity. ⁓ But I think the people that are operating at a high level are getting better. And then there's still...
folks that see greener pastures in land that are coming in, sending out a lot of marketing. And anybody who's been in this game for long enough knows that it's really an opportunity, being in the right place at the right time type of a business. Most of the sellers that we're dealing with are not folks that have to sell their land. There's not a lot of stress. There's not a lot of... ⁓
maybe systematic opportunity. ⁓ It's much more being in the right place at the right time, finding the right deal, talking to the right person. And so as a beginner coming in, if you aren't focused and you're doing a lot of things that we're gonna talk about that you probably shouldn't do later on, then you're not gonna have a lot of success and it's gonna be really expensive. ⁓ We've said this on multiple other podcasts. We talked about this after we went to the Denver event this summer. ⁓
that Summer Healy said, we're in the skill era and it's more true than it's ever been. So 90 days, rebuild, where do you start? You've got to pick markets. think picking your market, while I would have said in previous years, it's not that important. You can find deals in every market and that's still true. You can find deals in every market. But the amount of money you need to spend to find a deal in its given market,
is a lot higher and you can't afford to spray and pray and just send out mail everywhere or pick a whole bunch of places and just blast things out anymore. You've got to have a scalpel and you've got to analyze your markets incredibly well for things like demand, like true demand, days on market. What's happening with prices in that market over the short term, not like what's 22 and 23. Like what happened in the last six months in that market?
How friendly is that market to development, subdivides, et cetera? What builders are moving to that area? And so the first thing to think through in a rebuild plan is where are you actually sending marketing?
Clayton Hepler (09:09)
I think that's a really good point. was talking to someone who's gonna be joining the deal engines yesterday and he took a course from one of these guys that I always like to call out ⁓ on social media, the infill lot guys that are saying, hey, you make $2,500, $5,000 a pop for an infill lot deal. ⁓ And he was telling me, hey man, I did 10K my first month, 20K my second month and there's a lot of velocity of these deals because they're wholesaling 10,
five, $10,000 deals. And then he told me, dude, I found this market, okay, that a builder told me that he would buy every single parcel, infill lot, at market value. And this was one of the subdivisions that was not totally built. So he was a builder that was, his entire plan was to corner this specific subdivision, okay? And
buy all the lots and then bring in utilities. So he effectively creates his own comps. Which obviously if you have the capital to do that, that's like a great idea because you buy it at market value at 20K and then all of a sudden you bring utilities on and they're worth 50K overnight and you have a hundred lots. That's a huge play, right? So this guy, so basically I'm on this call with this guy about the deal engine. He's like, dude, I want to work with you one-on-one. I want to join the deal engine.
But I don't know if my success is replicable. I found this honey hole. I went from 10k a month Okay to 65k a month two months in a row Because he all he did was like dude I was manually texting in calling this one subdivision and I called everyone in the subdivision and I bought all these lots He's like dude. I made like a hundred and like 30k in two months and I spent zero dollars
Basically, right because he's wholesaling all these and and he doesn't get in there
Justin Piche (11:10)
Right, yeah, and not to mention,
if you're only code calling a single subdivision, like, you don't need fancy tools and software and team to do that.
Clayton Hepler (11:20)
Dude, you don't even have a CRM.
Justin Piche (11:22)
You don't have to have anything.
You just have a phone.
Clayton Hepler (11:26)
So it was really interesting and it goes to the market intentionality. I think the future of the land business is local and not local as like, hey, I live in Houston County and I only target ⁓ lots in Houston County. That might work, that might not. But statewide, like you're known as a person that owns a specific state and you can build a business with a series of different exit strategies in that specific area, but you got to know the right hot market.
in this state. Is there any like high level data points Justin that you would recommend for the market selection that you guys track whether it's a day zone market number, it's a sell through rate number that you think would be helpful?
Justin Piche (12:10)
Yeah, I think short-term price trends and days on market trends are things that you want to track. think days on market is probably the most important at this point for the types of parcels that you're looking at. And it's not necessarily like, are the days on market right now? It's like, what is the trend of days on market over the last six to 12 months?
A perfect example, right? We promised when we started this podcast, we'd talk about ways that we're areas that we have struggled and things that we've had wins on. And I think we've done a really good job of that. But one thing we've struggled with, especially the last half of 2024, is we've always been in the same general markets. We've expanded states, but we've been in the same general regions of the country.
And there's just been a shift over the last two years away from those areas that we target specifically, mainly the Southeast. So the Southeast is still a great market, but it has become more challenging. Higher days on market, price softening, demand softening. And if your entire business, like for me for example, we scaled substantially. We've got a lot of people, we've got a lot of outbound marketing in this one general region of the country. Well, that's a lot of overhead.
And when price softens, demand softens, and willingness to sell softens, and the willingness to sell softens when you can't offer as much because prices are lower and people are still stuck kind of in the past of what people were buying property for and how quickly things would sell. So leads to less deals. That's tough. That's tough for a business to handle when demand is substantially softer, deal flow is significantly less than it was in the past. And so we've done a ton of searching recently for,
Okay,
we can't look at things from a year to year trend anymore. We've got to get, what is this last six months trend of days on market and price? And where are the areas where that is shrinking and price is going up, even marginally, because that's the area where demand is and that's where we need to be.
Clayton Hepler (14:11)
like this, I want to add one thing here that I think I'm doing a of a lot of ⁓ internal processing about, right? Justin, which is ⁓
How do I add zeros to each of my deals? Because I can do fewer, better deals. ⁓ And I'm like really, really excited about in 2026 about doing some potential mobile home installations, ⁓ potentially some RV stuff ⁓ and those types of value adds. ⁓
doing some slight building, I think that's really exciting. And I think it fits into the greater trend of the United States, which is affordability, man. And so I think that the future land investor has his two to three markets that he decides or she decides like we're talking about here. And then they go deep, they go vertical in those markets. And so when they know that lots aren't selling at this number, they add additional ⁓
velocity to their lots by doing certain things, whether it's improving them, setting them up for what the local area really needs. ⁓ And man, like I think most people would be happy with quarter million bucks, half a million bucks a year, right? A lot of people net income, dude, that's pretty nice. You can live anywhere in the country at that level. And I think ⁓ if you can find these two to three markets at the beginning,
And then you can learn how to go vertical. This is what we're thinking about a lot in our business, ⁓ as well as in the land man community. Like how do we start to add additional value through some of these ⁓ slight building, slight improvements on lots? ⁓ I was talking to a guy that was a Clayton Homes, a mobile home dealer. And he was telling me about this little area in South Carolina that the lot.
to exit ratio is like really good. ⁓ So you buy these lots at a lower price and then you exit ⁓ when you put the mobile on them. There's like different FHA requirements with a mobile that's attached to the ground appraises like an actual house. And so he said he was doing like, he knew a guy that was doing 100, 200K profit per deal ⁓ in this little small little area in South Carolina. And he's done like,
six deals with them. It's like, dude, this guy's made like 800K over a year just doing this specific area. I think that's the delta, right? But how you stay alive is you keep flipping, right? So I want to move on to the next thing because we're going a little off on this one. It's pick one lead channel on Mastered, right? I think that there's a couple. I want your comments on one of these particular, but there's, I kind of think about
There's five made lien channels in the business. There's texting, cold calling, mail, PPC, and agent farming. ⁓ I'd like you to comment on PPC in particular, but if I was starting the business again, I'd probably double up a little bit. I would probably do texting and mailing. Disclosure, disclosure, make sure you check with an attorney before you do anything like this, because there are laws and regulations that you need to be aware of and the risks that you need to take.
⁓ And just neither Justin and I are telling you how you should run your business or giving you any things that you should follow. You should always check with an attorney, but that's how I would do it. Justin, I'd love to hear your thoughts on PPC and kind of what lead engine you would do and which one you would master.
Justin Piche (18:03)
Yeah, think if I was with the knowledge I have now and starting over I would I would probably be doing agent farming and texting ⁓ and then I consider mail but if we're saying one lead engine and mastering it again disclosure disclosure disclaimer, whatever, know check check with an attorney But I feel like texting is probably your best bang for your buck as a single lead channel That's somebody who's a solopreneur can spend time doing and get get some Delta there ⁓
Clayton Hepler (18:20)
Yeah.
Justin Piche (18:33)
PPC while absolutely viable lead channel for many many people
I think it's probably not the right place to start your entire business off of. And the reason is because it's hard to be specific in markets. It's much easier to do PPC on a general basis. It's hard to get and target the types of deals you actually want to do. And if you're focused, like what I would be focused on is a certain deal size in those markets. I would not be going after five, 10, 15 K profit deals at all. I think the churn.
of going after those is just not worth it. It's hard to scale that type of business because the systems and people and team required to manage the transaction volume you have to do to make real money at that level is so high that your overhead will balloon and you'll just be really stressed. So the model of doing a fewer bigger deals is better in my opinion for somebody who's redesigning a business. ⁓
So that's really my comments on PPC. you had no, if you had no way of mastering it or you're an expert at it, I think it can be totally valuable, but I would not introduce it as a marketing channel in a new business ⁓ that I was starting in 2026.
Clayton Hepler (19:47)
Yeah, I liked that a lot, ⁓ I was actually on a podcast the other day with a guy that does TV ads.
Justin Piche (19:56)
Yeah, I have a buddy, his name's Larry, who did that and it's a very limited success, let's just say.
Clayton Hepler (19:57)
and
Okay, that's what I thought. It was not going to be super successful and it's kind of expensive, but I think if you can exit with, you have an agent, a broker's license, you can exit with ⁓ that or mobile home flipping or info lots or what or subdividing. think you can actually, it can, you can make it work, but I hear you. That was just interesting. So I think a minimum effective tech stack at this stage is obviously a CRM, chat GPT.
some sort of outbound lead source and some sort of data source. Really good data. mean, the data that we have today, it's not like it was when you and I started, right?
Justin Piche (20:45)
No, it's better, yeah. It's better, I agree. I wouldn't, this is one place where I think a lot of new folks.
get hung up is like, do I do? Where do I go? How do I, what systems and software, what are, whatever do I need? I mean, there's still people running incredibly successful businesses bigger than both of ours with nothing but a spreadsheet and a cell phone. Like, like you don't need all these things, but if you want to scale repeatable, keep track of your data, have a great followup system, you really do need some sort of CRM. And I think followup is the key. We are looking, we are seeing regularly that the contracts that we're getting this month were from leads that were generated on average 45.
to 60 days ago. It's not the leads we generate this week that we're typically closing in contracts.
Clayton Hepler (21:31)
That,
yes.
Justin Piche (21:32)
Follow
up is super, super, super important. It's one of the things that new investors overlook constantly because they're like, I need new data. I need new markets. I need to send out these, these, these out, this outbound marketing. need to close them as quick as I can. And then need to move on to the next piece of data. And while that getting that machine moving where you're, you are getting new data and you are reaching out to new people, there's, there's, there's a higher maybe percentage of each of those people that you're going to reach out to turning into deals. And if you just start marketing to the same old data,
over and over over over again. But being able to follow up and nurture leads for a long period of time, mean, selling a property for $100,000 to a stranger is tough for people. Like, it is a barrier that you have to overcome, right? And there's enough people out there doing this that they have the option of choice. I mean, how many times have you, as your team, reached out to a seller and they said, I got another offer? And you know that that offer isn't probably a real offer. It's probably a letter. It's probably like another text that they, conversation that they were having with somebody.
or
a cold call they were having with somebody and said, I think we can offer 110, 120. So they'll be like, I got 120 offer, that's my price. I mean, it's a lot of work for our team to nurture that lead over several months and be like, okay, well, was that a real offer? You had a contract in hand, why didn't you go with that offer? know, things like that and build that relationship for them to come to the realization, you know, maybe they need to call that person back. It's not a real offer. Okay, I do want to sell, like what's your offer type of thing.
So things that we have written in here, honestly, what's the best new CRM you think for lay investors?
Clayton Hepler (23:07)
Honestly, I Stride is killing it.
Justin Piche (23:10)
Yeah, I mean I think Mike and Seth are both incredibly intelligent guys that are both land investors and work to build a CRM that really works for folks. I agree, I think if I was starting new and I needed a CRM, I would go with Stride. I wouldn't waste my time trying to build out my own custom CRM like I have done and spend all the money and time and energy. Because you don't really know what you need yet as a new investor, right? Stride does, Stride knows what you need.
Quick plug for AI, because we were just talking about this before the call. I use abacus.ai. abacus.ai is a multi-LLM subscription. So you pay $10 a month and you get access to all of the premium AIs with a lot of extra features. They have this cool tool called Deep Agent, which can perform substantially more complex...
things for you. I used it just the other day. I was looking for this is a plug or an inside. was using it for ⁓ figuring out all of my unreimbursed
business expenses from my personal accounts. So I'm trying to finalize my taxes and I want to make sure that I didn't have any personal charges that I put on my personal cards or personal bank accounts that were business related so I can try to reduce my income to pay less taxes. ⁓ And so I uploaded to Abacus, using Chat Sheet PT Pro in Abacus, I uploaded every CSV of every transaction for every personal credit card bank account.
Clayton Hepler (24:32)
What specifically did you upload?
Justin Piche (24:40)
Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast. Say thanks for listening. and I are talking about what would we do today if we were starting a business in 2026. I think there's a lot of good points for how to scale and how to think about the business today. If you guys are getting value from this, please leave a comment, subscribe, put on auto downloads. You know, that's the only metric we actually really see. And most importantly, make sure you comment that you are.
of Justin the most during this podcast. No, I'm just kidding. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
any place I could have possibly had a charge that wasn't directly through my business credit card. So was like 20 different CSVs and PDFs. And then I had it go through and analyze every single transaction and highlight likely business expenses. And then I had it break it down into like a 19 sheet workbook with different categories of expenses, with tables that I could select whether this was business or personal, if it's a split, what percentage was business or personal. So I could just systematically go
Clayton Hepler (25:15)
my god.
Justin Piche (25:42)
through these transactions. And it was like ones that are obviously not business, it puts them over here. Ones that are potentially business, it puts them here. And it was awesome. I mean it took a while, right? I had to upload it, I had to prompt it a few times. But then going into DeepAgent, DeepAgent was able to build out this like completely functional multi-page workbook for me. And it saved me a lot of time. A lot of time. ⁓
Clayton Hepler (26:07)
That's
an insane save.
Justin Piche (26:08)
The cool thing about
Abacus is that you can build out your own custom chatbots, given your own data, your own prompts, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff you can do with it. So whenever I talk to people about AI, if they want to use AI, instead of getting a ChatBT Pro subscription for $200 or $20, you can get an Abacus subscription for $10. And every person on your team that has their own subscription is also $10 to add. So it's just like a more cost effective and gives you access to.
Clayton Hepler (26:34)
And it's
pro for JetJPT.
Justin Piche (26:37)
Yeah,
yeah, Chappity, ⁓
Clayton Hepler (26:40)
Wow,
dude, I'm dropping $200 a month on the pro version of JetGBT.
Justin Piche (26:45)
There, so with ChatTBT, I think there is one, they have the operator, ChatTBT operator, which I don't think Abacus has access to. So if you use operator where it actually can control a web browser and like do tasks on the web for you, which ChatTBT operator can, I don't think Abacus can do that. It does do web searches, it can pull things, but it can't do like a live.
like clicking type things. So that's what ChatGPT Pro, $200 a month gets you that advocates can't. But access to the Pro AI model, ChatGPT 5, et cetera, that's all on there. Claude, the highest Claude, everything is on there.
Clayton Hepler (27:20)
Okay.
Okay, we can leave a link down below for all this stuff as well. If you're starting out on texting, we recommend Smarter Contact. And then the data source, what data source do you recommend?
Justin Piche (27:37)
Yeah, mean we're using Land Insights. Land Portal's making a lot of strides, so it's tough to say. I think they're both really good. I think they're both really good, but I don't want to go out and say one versus the other. I think you can't go wrong with either of them, but I do see all the updates Land Portal is making, and they're really impressive. I also see what Land Insights is doing, and they're also impressive, they're, Race, it's a race.
Clayton Hepler (28:01)
Race, race, it's a race.
It's like chat between Claude, right?
Justin Piche (28:07)
I think the decision for new investors probably comes down to more of like what's the cost. I think they're comparably cost, ⁓ comparably priced for what you get in each one, but the land portal offers ⁓ monthly fees, which for a newer land investor that's trying to control OPEX, I think paying like a lower monthly fee versus an annual fee is probably where they're going to lean to.
Clayton Hepler (28:33)
Yeah, we'll put it. We'll put all the links to all this stuff in the show notes. If you guys want to check it out guys. and you know, just heads up with advocates and all this stuff. We, we do get a slight, ⁓ affiliate, boots, but that helps Justin and I buy new hats because we're always wearing hats on these streams. ⁓ so I think, I think that, you know, the next thing for me is sales, man. think sales is the thing that produces money, right? Getting really good at.
Justin Piche (28:51)
you
Yeah,
so what skills do people need to have and build up for themselves as quickly as possible? So sales.
Clayton Hepler (29:10)
Yeah, think, yeah, right. Skills is the right way to frame it. Sales is huge. It's huge. It's a difference maker, man. It's the difference maker between an extra deal every month or deal every three months or deal every week, right? It's truly a huge, huge value add. One thing I'll say is you can get sales coaching. I have a friend, ⁓ his name is Steve Trang. He runs ⁓ Disruptors podcast.
He's got this amazing, amazing ⁓ sales manager that we're thinking about implementing in our team. ⁓ It's an AI sales manager. ⁓ And it's like, you know, you can do AI role playing. It's an AI lead manager and it's an AI sales manager. The lead manager is not that good for land investors. I've already talked to him about it. It's like, dude, I can't use this because it's mostly for house investors. But the sales manager sales feedback is absolutely insane. It's so good.
If you want more of a personalized approach, shout out to my guy, Ajay. He's amazing at sales feedback. But the objection proof AI and the objection proof AI is like freaking amazing. ⁓ I've looked at it and we're really heavily thinking about putting it into our ⁓ process. So that's another AI thing that I think that, look, the more that you train with AI, the better you get.
There will be a difference between those who use it and those that don't. And specifically with sales, man, it's like huge. So I would say that's a big skill. What's another one, man, that comes to the top of mind?
Justin Piche (30:51)
Yeah, I mean the next one we have written down here is comping accuracy and holy moly how important is this. It really is. This is a skill that only comes after outrageous numbers of repetitions and is hard in new markets. ⁓
It's one of the challenges and frustrations anytime you enter a new market with your team, which we're doing right now. And I literally was talking to my team at our team meeting ⁓ yesterday, talking to them about, we're going into these new markets. There's going to be challenges. If you give me a deal in rural Alabama or Georgia or whatever, I have done dozens and dozens of deals in those areas. So I'm a backup for the team. I know what this land is worth. I can look at a parcel very quickly without even looking at comps.
and the general ballpark for price per acre for most of the state. But when you enter a new market, you don't know necessarily what makes a good piece of land and what doesn't. mean, obviously there's the traditional things that every piece of land needs to have for it to be a good marketable property. But you don't know how much value this adds versus that, farmland versus timberland, slope versus not slope, some wetlands versus not wetlands. so being able to comp so that you can actually offer a good price to a seller, one that's
achievable and make money on it is so important. This is not something that I recommend any new investor just like outsource immediately. I think this is something you need to build up this muscle so that you can be successful. It's so important.
Clayton Hepler (32:20)
Yep.
I would agree with that. ⁓ Yeah. You know, when is the day that AI can do this? It's going to be far off, man. It's, this is like one thing that's really difficult to replicate because of the variability, topography and slope and ⁓ wetlands, FEMA. What are the neighbors look like? Right. I think that's why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Justin Piche (32:43)
Yeah, how's the access, where's utilities, like those things are so hard.
Clayton Hepler (32:49)
Yeah, so I would say after comping, I'd say offer structure is super important. Being able to structure wholesale deals, able to ⁓ double closes, being able to structure owner financing, ⁓ that's super, super important. And you can get a deal done that maybe you wouldn't normally sell or financing, you can get a deal done. ⁓ I think that that's a skill in 2026 that if you work on that, you're going to add an extra one, two, three, four deals.
Justin Piche (32:54)
Yeah, I agree.
Clayton Hepler (33:18)
to your bottom line in 2026.
Justin Piche (33:20)
Yeah, I agree. Just to like comments on that is when you, know, most new investors are coming in, we'll go through a course or something like that. And the course will tell them, hey, this is an offer template and just send this offer out. and if you take nothing else from this podcast, just know that there are a million ways to do a deal and you can overcome a ton of objections just through your offer structure.
and being able to customize it and be creative. And this is especially challenging for folks that have ⁓ overseas or less experienced negotiators, people that are actually making the offers, that they don't necessarily know what all the options are.
So if I'm talking to a seller and they have certain objections with the way the offer is presented, I know immediately I can do a million different things to try to overcome that objection and get a deal done that works for both of us. But if they don't have those tools, they might not know. And they're going to say, OK, well, we'll reach out in a few months and maybe things have changed. You'll lose that deal. So offer structure, super important.
Clayton Hepler (34:21)
Yep. Any other skills you think are super important? I'm going to add ⁓ management and leadership. I think everyone's seeing that we're talking about the skill era or whatever you want to call it, however you want to brand it. The ability to manage and lead people and get the most out of every individual team member and be the type of person that they want to work hard for.
be the type of leader that inspires action, that inspires people. Dude, that's a difference, Baker. I think team building is alpha. I think it will continue to be alpha. I was giving the example, I was speaking with Robin Sieve last week and I was like, look, like, do you think that people talk about competition? Do you think that Elon Musk, an accomplished entrepreneur, couldn't come into this business and take everyone's lunch money? Of course you could, right? Because he has the skill set. He knows
how to bring on people, he has the capacity. And so if you have a difference maker, I've even noticed it, and we talked about this last week, with relationships, you have one or two difference makers in your business. The who's are the ones that actually change your business, not how am I gonna do this better. So whether you hire a coach, a consultant, bring on a, I don't really recommend a partner, ⁓ but bring on the right person as a who.
I think that really changes your trajectory and your ability to lead and manage those people is critically important.
Justin Piche (35:48)
I agree, I agree completely. So what does somebody need to do? They're starting their business, they're redesigning their business, maybe starting as a solopreneur. How do they spend their time, what's their daily operating rhythm to start to get to 20K months?
Clayton Hepler (36:03)
Yeah, I think it's a tight ⁓ focus on lead gen and sales. That should be the focus. Marketing and sales, like six hours if they're dedicating six hours to marketing and sales. Everything else is a lot less important for me. ⁓ Getting the first deal if you're beginning or getting the next deal if you're like what I would consider to be the hustler stage was one to three deals per month. Those are the things that you really need to be working on for a daily operating rhythm.
Justin Piche (36:32)
Yeah, So generating leads, by far the most important. Generating and talking to people, negotiations, sales, et cetera. By far the most important to start with in the bulk of your time and day. Dear reviews and comping, you need to set some time aside for that. A couple hours a day too, maybe, of comping and reviewing deals. And then let's be real, guys and gals. If you're starting this business, eight hour days are probably just not gonna cut it.
If you want to build a business and this is not your hobby, let's just say, coming to this and saying, hey, I'm going to work four hour days because I only want to work a 20 hour week and that's what I'm starting this business to do and it's going to sustain me and my family. I don't know if we're there right now. I don't know if we're there right now.
Clayton Hepler (37:15)
Dude, let me ask you a
question. What are your days like now? How many hours you work?
Justin Piche (37:21)
I mean if you count the amount of time I'm spending doing things in the evening after kind of working hours, my core working hours generally are like 8.30am to about 4.30am to 5am. And I'm pretty like working the whole time. I typically don't even have lunch. know. It's so much to my wife's chagrin.
It is challenging with kids at home, know, there'll be little breaks, but generally 8.39 to 4.35 and then a few days a week I'm probably doing something in the evening time. Finishing something up, underwriting, building decks, like...
Clayton Hepler (38:00)
So you're at like
a 50 hour week.
Justin Piche (38:03)
Yeah, 45, 50-ish probably is what I'm working right now. Yeah.
Clayton Hepler (38:04)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, ⁓ I'm there or probably more. ⁓ Like, you know, so it just depends on the day. like it's right now, it's we started talking at 7.30 this morning, right? 7.45 with this podcast. So, yeah, I think that setting the right expectations with the amount of work that is required in order to be successful is important. And most importantly is like
Justin Piche (38:17)
Ha
Clayton Hepler (38:36)
the time that you actually spend doing the work that you're doing needs to be focused on the right efforts because you can work a lot and not have success or you can work a lot and have success. The more that I tie my time to things that get customers or clients, makes them worth more or decreases the likelihood of that not happening, the more money I make, the more conventionally financially successful I am. And so if I just audit my calendar, like,
If I'm not doing this man, like, what am I doing? Right? ⁓ Depending on your personality, you want to delegate everything else. ⁓ And at the beginning, the highest dollar value task, until very, very, maybe even the entire time that you're running this business, your highest dollar per hour task is talking to sellers and making decisions about marketing.
Justin Piche (39:36)
I think as the business is scaled and changed and I've worked on different things What exactly I'm working on during that time has changed right when you get the right people in place You've delegated certain tasks certain entire departments etc to to coos or operations managers etc Your tattoo your your what you're working on changes But there's a whole other level of complexity that gets added in and so there's different things that you have to focus on right I spent a lot more time focused on money fundraising
performance investors that I ever did before. I spent a lot more time focused on tax optimization strategies like what am I doing to like those things take a lot of time now that used to not and so
Yeah, mean, if I was talking about how much am I spending in the core business, it probably is something around 20 hours a week. It's focused specifically on the core flipping, lead gen business. And the rest of it is focused on developments, scaling, investors, finance.
Clayton Hepler (40:30)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, what would you not do again? Right? If you were to avoid the things, what would be the thing that you would avoid?
Justin Piche (40:41)
Yeah, this is probably, this
is important, right? What would I not do? I would definitely not do spray and pray marketing. That's not what I would do in 2026. We are out of the time period where everything is going up all the time and there's demand for land everywhere.
We're just out of that area. so being hyper focused on the data of where you're marketing to and what makes a good market and where you want to be, what market has inventory of the product type that you want to be doing deals in, right? Enough gross profit. Where's, is there enough demand in that market and focusing on those types of markets? ⁓ Less marketing, but more niche is absolutely where I would want to be.
Clayton Hepler (41:31)
Yep, I agree. I think that getting the team like a phantom crew of a bunch of people, a bunch of VAs that are not accountable to outputs, they're accountable to satisfying your emotional need of, hey, I feel this hurts. I'm a leader. I need a scale. I need a scale. Overbuilding the team, I think is a huge mistake that a lot of investors make.
Justin Piche (41:34)
Bye-bye, here.
I'm the leader. I've got a team.
That is so true.
Clayton Hepler (41:58)
I'm glad that you and I talking
about that dude because like when we were starting that didn't like people weren't talking about that. People were talking about scale, scale, scale.
Justin Piche (42:05)
Yeah, was like how do you,
scale, scale, scale. You get the people. there is some truth to being able to do more with more people. But you will run into walls, right? You will run into walls. And hiring just to get more ⁓ marketing out or be able to handle more deals, important.
But if you're not focused on the right output for each of those team members and you don't do it thoughtfully, then you're just going to be spending a lot more money than you need to be spending.
And I always justified this in my own mind by saying to myself, well, I need to build a team for the future business that I need. I need to have the people in place to be able to scale to the size that we want. And it worked up to an extent. then we didn't have the right processes in place. We didn't have the right marketing output. We didn't have the right KPIs that we were tracking to know, is this actually adding to net profit? Or are we just increasing our gross profit while increasing our expenses more than what our gross profit is increasing by?
Clayton Hepler (42:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, I was talking to a client the other day and we were talking about the theory of constraints, the goal by Eli Goldblatt, which he, and this is a book about the theory of constraints, and he talked about every time your business doubles, it completely changes. And it's really hard to conceptualize that as a land investor. Let's just say it goes from zero to 200K, 200 to
Justin Piche (43:08)
Yeah, I just think I agree with you.
Clayton Hepler (43:36)
400 or 500, 500 to a million, a million to two, and then two and beyond. At every level, the constraint changes, right? We've operationalized this in our business and I do a lot of thinking about this because what gets you to the 200K to 500K, to a million, to two, to beyond is very different, but it's hard, right? The people are very different. Like think about doubling your business when you go from four to eight.
or eight to 16. Like people are like, oh no, it's completely different, but the number seems so much bigger. And so it seems more substantial. But even when you go from zero to 200, 200 to five, five to a million, dude, you're doubling your business. And so I think that you and I both reflectively realized that the actual business that we want to build is half a million bucks to a million bucks in core flipping.
You're doing four to six solid deals per month, and then you're adding the true net profit rev, and comes from value added. So anything beyond, I believe, the $1.5 million mark when a pure flipping business becomes like organized chaos, and it becomes very difficult to profitably scale. You're laughing. You and I both were there.
Justin Piche (45:01)
Yeah, I'm laughing because
it feels so true. I want to make sure I say like, that doesn't mean it's not possible or even ⁓ totally plausible that people do this and do it well. It's just there's a lot of friction in the business the more people you introduce, the more markets. And really, I think the key to the challenge of that 1.5 plus is the amount of marketing that needs to go out and the amount of different markets you need to be in goes up so much that it just adds a ton of complexity into the business.
Clayton Hepler (45:32)
I agree with that. ⁓ Not to mention the amount of deals that fall out of contract, amount of ⁓ like we have so many deals in inventory. I know you do too right now. And like, are we checking with all of our brokers every week?
Are we making sure that we're holding? So then there becomes all these additional second and third order consequences that happen as a result of this. I saw this chart of like when an organization increases in people, the amount of communications between people goes up exponentially. Have you ever seen like one of those charts, it's like a bunch of people, like a circle chart, and then there's all these like arrows from one person to the next and the
there's an exponential increase in the amount of conversations that can happen between people. So in the case of our land business, if you increase the amount of deals that you're doing, there's an exponential increase in the amount of things that could potentially go wrong and could handicap you to scale. And we're in this business for net profit, not gross profit.
And so that's why I'm very passionate about the half a million to 1.5. And then you add on the value adds, you add on the subdivides, because for most people you can get to a one, two, three, four million dollar a year business with really, really healthy margins. As healthy as what you would have if you had a 40 million dollar a year business. ⁓ You know, if you're averaging most people get 10 to 15 % margins, right? Maybe a 30 million dollar a year business.
⁓ But you have these great net margins dude, that's and you get to express yourself creatively through value-add deals I just love that so I think that the over building the team too early comma also hiring really good people right like I I noticed that we have ⁓ focused on finding the best people and I hadn't always done this I used to just put a group of skeletons in you know skeleton crew if you will
into our team and it just made it so that outputs were more difficult. And I've talked about this in the past, the difference between a $60,000 a year employee and 120 or 80 or 100 is massive, but we don't think that same thing happens with global talent. And so it does, right? And so I'm just super aware of that.
Justin Piche (48:07)
you know, starting, like, okay, I am failing in this area. I am a bottleneck here. And so they're like, okay, I need to put somebody in a seat to do this. And if you don't have a lot of revenue or experience in hiring and you don't know, you haven't well defined what the output is that you're looking for and you don't have experience working with talent overseas especially, your gut is like, how do I find the cheapest employee to put in here? And so you do that. You post a job on onlinejobs.ph or whatever and you say, I'm gonna pay five,
to
six dollars an hour and you try your best to find somebody good. You get somebody who looks good on paper, resumes are just that paper, they're nothing more. And you put them in and then you maybe don't equip them as well as you should and they don't perform particularly well and you have turnover and that churn is really frustrating. I think
finding somebody who can think critically, who can solve problems on their own, they're going to be more expensive. But they're going to make you more money and they're going to save you a lot of headache and time and challenge. And so I would argue, do not go after that cheapest, kind of lowest dollar, put a butt in the seat type of mentality when hiring. Like you need to go after who can build this.
And I get uncomfortable with what you can pay that person sometimes to actually build something that is gonna scale and grow. it's definitely a difference in mentality.
Clayton Hepler (49:31)
That's a great point,
Joseph, I love that. So once you avoid the things that we're talking about, once you install the systems that we talk about, how do you go bigger? How do you go faster? So here's how worth it, give up going 5X, 10X in 2026. I will tell you that our big thing is getting better at highest and best use on every track that we look at.
getting really deliberate about that. And I don't think you can do that if you're doing like such high volume. It's really hard to look at everything with a discerning eye to say, hey man, I think this could be really special. We could do this with this, right? ⁓ I don't think you can as nearly as diligently, ⁓ you know, building better agent relationships, ⁓ transitioning to the higher value ads, and then better capital relationships with funders. ⁓
I was talking to my buddy Drew Haney, we might be partnering together on a big deal that we're doing, big subdivide. And building better capital relationships is, ⁓ I think it's alpha. What do you think?
Justin Piche (50:42)
I agree with all those things. I think the better way to scale your net profit is in value add and deal size than it is in volume. At least the return on brain damage maybe is the right, we talk about it all the time, return on hassle. Bigger deals, value add is a better way to scale than volume. And I agree with capital relationships.
That's something that a lot of folks who don't have a ton of money, especially at the beginning, or lot of relationships with people with money, don't have. They just don't have that when they're starting out. So the general model that most people start out with is using deal funders, giving up a lot of equity, which to be fair to everybody is like, think you should probably do that on the first few deals, especially when you have low capital resources and a lack of experience.
If it's your first 20, 30 deals, you're not going to be able to command, hey, I'll pay you 15%, 20 % return on your money. People don't trust you enough to do that. And frankly, you don't have enough experience to command that type of return.
So building up relationships with funders and then as you gain experience, nurturing capital relationships, showing people that you're trustworthy. and I were talking about this, know, last podcast I think, we were talking about the key people, talking about how do we build credibility with folks to actually give us money.
And the truth is we had huge track records of successful deals. We could just show them all the stuff that we had done and how many deals were successful, what the return was. And that is a lot of credibility to build those capital relationships. But you also have to be able to talk to people well. And you have to believe in what you're doing. And you have to find a win-win and know what they want to build those relationships. Very, very important to grow and scale. Because doing bigger deals, especially the ones that require
seven figures of improvements, bank loans, et cetera, you're just not going be able to do those yourself without those relationships.
Clayton Hepler (52:46)
Couldn't have said it better myself. Guys, you know, at the end of the Ground Game podcast, the gentleman's agreement is like, review, subscribe, give us a little thumbs up if you're listening to this tomorrow or whenever you're listening to this. ⁓ We always appreciate this feedback. It helps us continue to grow. ⁓ And yeah, that's it, Justin. Anything else before we hop off here today?
Justin Piche (53:09)
No man, have a great Thanksgiving to the listeners. I hope you guys all had a great Thanksgiving if this is posted on or after. ⁓ And we appreciate you guys.