Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster podcast, episode 175.

So today we're talking with Ryan Love. And I met Ryan not long ago at the Land Unconference Inner Circle in Minneapolis. And I wanted to get him on the show because there's a few things about him that struck me as really good conversation material.

So a little bit about Ryan. He's a pretty young guy, he's 23 years old. And he started into the land business right out of college after learning about it through a friend.

And this guy hasn't wasted any time. He started in April, 2023. We're recording this in November, 2023. He's done 23 deals. He has four people on his team.

And today we're going to figure out how he was able to get so far so fast.And we're probably going to pick up a lot of other interesting things along the way.

So Ryan, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Ryan: Awesome. I'm doing great. That was, I think, the first introduction I've ever gotten and likely the best one as well. So thank you, Seth. It's an honor to be here. I might be the least qualified person to ever be on the show. I don't know. I appreciate you having me.

Seth: We will decide on that shortly here.

Ajay: Well, Seth keeps letting me back on the show. So I think you're good, Ryan.

Ryan: Oh yeah, if I'm good here, then I'm good, huh?

Seth: Well, Ryan, why don't you just, I mean, beyond what I just said there, I was correct in all those facts, right? I didn't mess anything up.

Ryan: Yeah, that was all correct.

Seth: So take us back. When you discovered the land business, how did this all come to fruition? What made you decide that this was legitimate and worth jumping into with both feet?

Ryan: Yeah, so I first discovered the land business in college. One of my roommates was working in the land business. And so we'd talk, of course, and he would tell me, like, Ryan, I just made $20,000 on a deal. I'm like, no. Like, you're lying. Like, there's no way, just thought it was completely impossible to be doing what he's doing. So, I guess it took me a while to think that it was possible.

But anyways, I started. In school a bit, like shadowing what he was doing a bit. So he was doing some deals on the side. He was working with Sumner Healey before he had started the whole LIA program and everything. So they were working together. He was teaching them how to cold call the ins and outs of the business. And then he would get back and I'd be like, teach me how to make a mailer and everything.

So I started there in college doing a little bit part-time. It was pretty hard. I was going to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo studying mechanical engineering. So the class and the work there was probably one of the harder colleges and programs I could find. So it was definitely challenging trying to do this and trying to really start out as I was going through college. So that was a bit difficult there and I was just working through it.

I'd also get to summer and at one point, I had sent out like, I don't know, when I first started, I sent out a couple thousand mailers right before going into an internship. And then I was working at an oil refinery doing some complex work that required a lot of thought. And then I would get home and try to figure out how to comp a property and almost lose my mind. And I was just like, I can't do it. I can't do it.

And so I stopped for a bit and then gave it a couple more quarters at school and planned it out a bit to where I knew if I took a lot of units in these next two quarters, my last quarter, I'd have a lighter quarter. And that way, I could have some time to devote some more time to land and then get into that side of things.

So the last quarter, I had an easier load and was able to do it on the side a bit more. Still not with much success, mostly just burned money on mailers, which is fun. So yeah.

Seth: Man, you're not the kind of guy I would party with, I don't think.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely not that fun. But I learned along the way. And so I graduated in April and I had until August. So I had four months until my job, which I had lined up working for one of Chevron's refineries in El Segundo in LA.

So I had four months to really figure out like, hey, is this going to work? Is this not going to work?

So the first couple months were definitely stressful. I was down on money and I was pretty down at one point and I remember my roommate Ron walking in. He's like, oh man, are you going to send more mail? And I'm like, I don't know. And he's like, what? I'm like, oh, I'm almost like, I'm kind of running low on money here, Rylan.

He's like, what? You're making money. You're making money. Keep sending mail. I showed him my bank account. He's like, where did it all go? And that was just a bit concerning at that point. I had bought a property and that's where a lot of the money had gone. It's taken a while to close and everything.

So it's a very extended time period. And I didn't really recognize that or know how long... It's kind of like 3 to 4 months out in advance. All the money you're spending now is when you're going to get it back. So right at the start, I burnt through a lot of money, bought a property I probably shouldn't have bought and was just getting really low in the bank account when I should have just had it funded. But we didn't have the same connections that we do now.

Seth: Well, that's a really good issue to talk about in terms of the lack of money. I mean, when I think of where I was at 23, I hardly had a few cents to rub together. Making a real business out of this that required any amount of capital, even though it's a reasonably small amount for land. But even so, I just didn't have money.

So how did you do it? Did you have a bunch of cash just sitting around? And when you do run out of cash, what then? Do you get funding from other people? Or how do you keep paying for your mail? Help us understand that.

Ryan: Yeah, so I mean, I was very fortunate and privileged to have my parents helping me out until college ended. So I didn't really have, like, they pretty much allowed me to save all my money from whenever I was working outside.

So yeah, I've been able to save up that money, which I know a lot of people just aren't able to do. So I'm super grateful to have parents that allowed me to do that. If they would have known that I would have started a land career with that money, they probably would have made me pay for my own school.

Seth: I don't know if you're comfortable sharing, but like how much money was that? Like how much did you find useful to get started?

Ryan: Yeah, so I started with around $30,000. And so yeah, I've been saving it since high school. Yeah, whatever job I worked, I would save most of it.

So yeah, at the time, Rylan checked in on my bank account, I was down to around seven or eight. So I was definitely burning through it for a time. But buying property and everything and email.

Seth: When you mentioned a property you probably shouldn't have bought on this first one, So, why do you say that? Was there something like, did you overlook something or did something go wrong or was it actually good but you were just surprised at how long it took or what happened there?

Ryan: Yeah. So, one of the first properties I bought was in New York. And I don't know if either of you have worked in New York or heard about New York.

Seth: I've heard about it.

Ryan: But whatever time it takes to close a normal deal, you just have to double that time frame. So, I bought one for like $9,000 in New York, I think it was around… I mean, it was a good deal. ended up selling for $24,000, I think. But it was just all the money was out for so long.

Ajay: Yeah, you shouldn't have bought that, man. I hate when $9,000 turns into $24,000. I'm teasing you, of course. Yeah.

Ryan: I mean, you know it's going to close, but in your mind, it's like there's just like I'm running out of money in my bank account. And of course, too, it's like this job's coming up that I have to take. I have to make a decision soon, like whether I'm going to take this job or not.

So, that was just like... My roommate had offered to fund it and he thought it was worth $30,000. So, I was like, oh, I want to keep all the money. I was just greedy. So, that was a mistake there.

Seth: Yeah. There is something psychologically very difficult about that.

I'm sure probably most land investors out there can relate to this on some level. You don't know when it's going to end. When will this thing sell? What is taking so long?

This is really kind of a weird analogy, but when we had our first daughter, we tried to do a home birth and problem we ran into was my wife went into labor and it was called “Failure to Progress.” It's where labor sort of starts and then stops. And it starts and it stops. And this happened for four straight days. So none of us slept for four days. It was awful, just truly awful.

And eventually, the midwife was like, you know what, there's nothing else I can do here. Let's go to the hospital and see what's up. And we went there and eventually found that the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck three times. And that's why, you know, our daughter wasn't coming out. because she literally couldn't. But thank the Lord for modern medical advancements. Our daughter was born just fine.

But going through that process, I remember it was like one of the hardest things I've ever had to live through, just not knowing, is it gonna be another hour, another hour, another, like when is this gonna end? And in hindsight, you look back, it's like, oh yeah, that was fine, it was okay. But when you don't know the future, when you don't have the benefit of hindsight, man, that's tough.

Do you have a better way of coping with that now, Ryan, or is that just something that happens on every day? Like you just have this nagging, how am I going to survive this thing?

Ryan: No. I mean, now it's a lot better. I have enough money. I've done well enough to where I'm not really stressed about money. I mean, obviously, everyone wants more. But right at the start, I was like, okay, I'm really far down. And at this point, I'm at a point where I'm not too concerned.

And I'm also doing a lot more double closes. So, the money's not out very long. If it's out, it's out for a day or two. So I'm keeping most of the money instead of having it all in inventory. I could imagine with someone who's buying all their deals cash, if having it all in inventory right now, I'd probably be thinking the same thing. But it's nice to have some money in the bank.

Ajay: Absolutely.

Ryan: Even though it's not doing much, but it's nice. It's a good comfort.

Ajay: Right. Especially as the market does what it's doing. I think when you're starting out in business, especially.

I know when I was in college, you watch enough of Uncle Grant, right? Good old Grant Cardone. And what does he say? Cash is trash, which is just not the mentality to have in a land business when marketing is very capital-intensive. If you're using direct mail, you got to drop thousands and thousands of dollars very regularly. And then if you're self-funding your deals, you're buying your own inventory, you don't actually know what your inventory turnover cycle is. You don't actually know when you're going to sell that property.

So you could... I remember early in the land business, I'd be like, oh, this is awesome. I have 130 grand in the bank one month. And the month after, I'd have like $35,000. And it's just like this massive swing. And so I actually don't fund almost any of my own deals anymore, unless they're just smoking deals. I'll work with either debt or equity partners, or I'll double close, like you guys are mentioning.

I also need to ask, is your old roommate Rylan Loader? Is that that Rylan?

Ryan: Uh-huh.

Ajay: Yeah, I just met him out in Vegas. Super nice guy. He's crushing it. So that's cool, man. That's probably a fun little party house you guys had.

Also, Seth, I have to commend... I feel like you've got so many different birthing stories. Didn't you have the world's biggest head or you were a giant baby or something when you were born? I feel like you told us when we interviewed Dave last year. Am I making this up?

Seth: Uh, no, myhead is not that big, but my body was huge. I was 12.

Ajay: There was something cause you were like, you were like a special birth, right?

Seth: Yeah. I was born at the Northwestern hospital in Chicago, the one downtown.

And I remember my… I don't remember, but I was told my birth was a, like a literal experiment. Like my parents got a discount on my birth because my mom had diabetes. And it was like this experimental procedure they were using. So everything was fine, sort of, depending on what you think of me.

But yeah, the thing is, because it was an experiment, I commonly go around saying that, yeah, I was born at the Northwestern Experimental Hospital. I kinda was.

Ajay: That's incredible.

Seth: That's my story.

Ajay: All right, sorry, I didn't mean to get us off-track there. Bring us back, Seth.

Seth: Yeah.

So, next question on the list, Ryan. So you've done 23 deals to date, worked at this since April of this year, it's now November, so you've not even been at it that long, which I'm amazed by, but help us understand.

Have your deals evolved or changed? What did the first ones look like? What do they look like now, in terms of the size, how you find them, how you fund them, how you close on them? I'm hearing double closings a little bit. So just, are you intentionally steering the ship in a different direction in terms of your strategy of how you close on these things? Or what have you learned so far and how have you intentionally changed things?

Ryan: Yeah, so I've definitely very intentionally changed things. I think as a lot of people, I think everyone talks about this, but starting out with very small deals, buying for 5,000 to 10,000, selling for 15 to 20.

First deal was in Costilla County, Colorado. don't share this market with anyone. It's kind of a hidden gem. So don't go posting about it or anything.

Seth: Your secret is safe with me. Don't worry.

Ryan: Okay. Thank you. Everyone listening, don't mail there. That's all me.

So yeah, I started off with 5 acres there, bought for $6.5k, sold for $13k. I think I came home with a little over $3,000. And at that point, I was still down on money for mail. So that one didn't feel too great. but it's still the first one.

And then a couple other similar ones. One big one for me was just breaking even. I think it was, again, another county. Don't share with anyone, but Teller County, Colorado.

Seth: Oh, it all makes sense now. This changes everything.

Ryan: And yeah, so I bought that one. I think that was the one I finally broke even on. That was a big step for me. I was down up until that point and then had come back to even. Or like close to even, maybe not even even, just like close to it. And that was a big one.

So yeah, but anyways, now the deals that I focus on are pretty much anything I'm targeting. There's still a couple old leads that trickle in, but I'm really targeting $30,000 in spread from buy to sell. So I'd be fine with buying for $100,000, selling for $130,000. I'd be fine selling for $200,000, selling for... At that point, you want to go a little bit higher just because the commission is probably like $240,000. That's what I'm looking for when I'm double closing.

And I don't really want to go anything under $60,000 like market value as far as what I'm targeting.So, most of them I'm double closing now. At the start, I was funding it, having my friends fund it, which was not ideal. It definitely takes a lot of explaining and then they're just checking in with you every week like, Ryan, how's the property looking? I'm like, I don't know. I hope it sells.

So don't do that. Yeah. Now, if I need… there's a lot of people... I use one person to fund. He doesn't like spreading his name out there too much. He wants to work with a couple guys. But I also don't need funding for too many deals. So if I do, I'll go to him.

But if not, I'll double close. And yeah, targeting market values are around $60,000 or higher. So yeah, that's how it's changed. Again, going from small to large.

Seth: Under what conditions will you not double close? Just like buy the thing outright. What does it take for you to say, I could double close this, but I won't. I'm going to just buy it outright. Or maybe I'm just trying to figure out what the box is in terms of when it goes that way versus another way.

Ryan: Yeah. So what I'll do is I'll just start with a really low cash offer. If the property is $60,000, I'll probably start with like $25,000 cash or we should go up a bit in numbers. So there's more of a disparity there. But maybe if it's $100,000, maybe I'll start with like $45,000 cash.

And then they're like, what? No, my property is worth... We need more. So I think that's a good strategy to anchor them pretty low in pricing.

And sometimes they'll just say yes. When they say yes, you're just really happy because it's like a super good deal. And then at that point, it's like, okay, I'm good putting my money down or I feel confident having a funder putting their money down.

And then after that, if they say no, then I'll say, hey, we structure deals in another way and then explain what a double close is and why we can offer more money if we give them that structure of a deal.

Seth: Are you always able to find title companies who will do the double close with you?

Ryan: Yeah. So in the states I work in more, I have it pretty set. And then, yeah, I can normally find someone who will be able to double close.

I mean, some days, it's not really important for me that it closes two times in the same day, which would be like a double close. I just want to know that someone has put down earnest money for the property.

I don't care if it closes in two weeks, right? It doesn't technically have to be a double close. I just want to know that someone, hey, they're putting earnest money down. They're serious. I know we have other calls. Even if they back out, we'll take the earnest money and re-market the property.

What I can't have is just buying a property that I think is worth $40,000 and then it turns out it's worth nothing because you didn't do your due diligence or something happened. A whole number of things can happen, things you can't even think of.

Seth: Has it ever fallen apart on you? I know you mentioned that one deal where you considered it a win to break even on it. Have you ever lost money or have you ever done the double close where it's like, okay, close the A to B transaction and then the B to C transaction falls apart?

Ryan: No double close has really fallen apart on me yet. That's been pretty good. But again, I've done 23 deals, right? And probably like 15 of them double closed.

So I mean, at some point, I'm sure it will not work. But I think you can be safe about it.

Ajay: Ryan, we do quite a few double closings. Tell me about a deal where you thought you were going to make a lot more money than you actually did.

Because you know, sometimes you underwrite these and you're like, I'm going to make $30,000 on this double close. And then you get the HUD. And for us, like we've got one closing, I think this week or next week, we thought we were going to make $40,000 on this double close. We got it under contract for $105,000 and we thought it was worth $145,000.

And so there was a 40k spread and he was going to take home a little bit less than that. We had two buyers fall through an extension with our seller. So the only offer we were left with was one at $107,000. So we have a $2,000 spread, had to make it an assignment instead of a double close, and we had to work something out with the buyer agent so we didn't get eaten out of that. But it was like, I think, on the HUD, it literally ends up being like a $2,100 fee to us somehow.

And so I'm sure if you've done 15 deals, you had to have gone through some. Tell us about a time like a deal did not go as planned and what did that assignment fee end up looking like?

Ryan: I haven't had a double close that has gone that way.

Ajay: He said, I'm not as bad as you are, Ajay. Our double closings are a lot better.

All right, good stuff. No, I mean, that's fine. It's, you know, I'd hate to say like a matter of time, but like if you do enough transactions, you'll hit one that skunks and you'll have to come back or comment on this and let us know what happens there.

Hey, I hope you never do though, Ryan, You seem like a really sharp guy. So I just hope you continue getting these deals where you think you're going to make $20,000 and you do because I wish they were all like that.

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, there's some like where we haven't gotten... We'll put earnest money down for all of them. And there's some if you don't get a contract signed or if it's earnest money.

So I mean, that's the thing about double closing, right? I'm not too concerned about it either way. I have had one deal if you want to hear the worst deal. I mean, I'm going to lose a couple thousand.

Seth: Let's hear it.

Ryan: Yeah, it's one at Colorado Mountain Estates, Teller County, don't blow it up guys. I had bought one there, half-acre lot. And I think it's just the setbacks. It's a little steep towards the back and it's a weirdly shaped lot. It's kind of a wedge lot. And so I think the setbacks push it where you can actually build further back than I would have imagined.

I'd done so many deals there. It was like, I was like, I know it'll sell but there's like thin margin, like I'll just buy it. And yeah, I'll probably lose a couple thousand but it's a good learning experience.

Seth: Yeah, I've actually had similar uh-oh moments with those kind of wedge lots, and it's usually the setback issue. It just kind of screws up how much space there is, if any space, to build anything.

Ajay: I think one of my best deals ever, I always joke, is one that I actually broke even on.

So this is kind of a funny story. The second lot I ever bought was off of another investor, and I thought he was just a sucker. So funny looking back on this stuff. Again, it was my second deal ever, give me some grace. But I won't name him.

He's present in a lot of the communities. And I've met him and chatted with him. And I always give him a hard time when I see him. It's super fun.

But it was this half-acre lot in a secondary Orlando, Florida market. I had sent him a blind offer for like $4,200. He wanted $4,500. Bought it, threw it up on the market for $30,000. Actually got an offer from Miranda Homes, and then found out there was an issue with the zoning and we needed a variance. The variance wasn't accepted and so basically the lot was useless, right?

And I think this guy knew that. It's fine because… And I was chatting with him, he was telling me, hey man, I know you're newer to this, you should really check out the Facebook groups. And I'm like, dude, I am, I think at the time I was 22, 23, and I was like, who is on Facebook? Because I deactivated my Facebook account late high school, early college, sometime and then, because young people don't really use Facebook.

Well, sure enough, it is a networking hub for land investors, where I then got plugged into community and met all my coaches and friends and got plugged into things and went to events and all the things.

So, really funny, because I bought this lot for 4,500, I ended up selling it to some guy who wanted to dirt bike on it for 4,500. But if I hadn't bought that deal, I probably wouldn't be here today.

I don't know, that sounds way too dramatic. But I wouldn't know half the people that I know now and I think I'd be living a very different life. So I have that gentleman to thank for scamming me into buying that lot.

Seth: I was thinking of sort of a similar-ish thing, just hearing Ryan's story about how he was roommates with Rylan and just these little interactions we have with people.

I mean, I don't know if you knew him before you were roommates or it was just like dumb luck or what, but it's just crazy how these little things happen where it's like, man, if that thing hadn't happened, like my life would have gone in a completely different trajectory and probably would not be as awesome as it is today.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely super grateful for Rylan and again, like you said, completely different path If I didn't go to that same school and live in that same dorm room freshman year, just like, I'd probably be in a normal job whatever I was gonna do, you know, engineering. So, really grateful for him, huge shout-out.

Seth: So, try to think of any other unique things that you're doing about your business that most other land flippers aren't doing. And I don't know if I can keep saying that because I feel like a lot of land flippers are doing things way different from each other now. There's so many different directions you can go and different ways you can market now.

But, you know, I'm hearing double closings is kind of a big deal for you and then using funders when you need to. I don't know, does anything else stand out as like, I do this and I don't know many other land flippers who do it this way?

Ryan: Yeah, so I don't know how unique this necessarily is, but definitely one thing that I try to focus on is just not really worrying about the disposition, so I just pass in every deal that I get to a Realtor.

I think eventually maybe it makes sense, but for now I'm working on just building the best team possible to get contracts signed and that's all should be all my focus every day getting contracts signed and then after that transaction coordinator, Realtor. And then just don't worry about it.

I have properties that are on market. I don't really know what's happening with them. But I don't... Maybe I should check in a bit more. I get some updates every now and then. But I just want to focus on getting contracts signed and all that. So I would say that's unique.

Maybe one other thing that I guess may be unique or strength, I guess, would be systems. I'm always trying to build new Zaps and automate that. I have one for automating contracts and pushing my leads through a funnel where you just do it with a click of a button, uploads the contract. And then from there, once we get the contract signed, it sends updates, updates tasks, updates the stage. So the leads are in different spots.

So I'd say that's maybe the other unique thing about it. Trying to think, do either of those sound unique at all?

Seth: Well, it actually made me wonder, and you sort of just told me a couple. But are there any other really helpful Zaps in your business?

Sometimes I think about this, it's one of those things where there's probably millions of different brilliant ways to use Zapier, but I only have so much of an imagination. I can only think of so many ideas on that. But anything else come to mind beyond those that are like, oh, this was a huge deal to have this zap in my business?

Ryan: I think contracts is probably the biggest one, but I have a bunch of other smaller ones. For example, I think there's probably a way to do this with a better platform, but I have all my Google meetings after I record them. I probably just need to use Zoom, to be honest. But it automatically organizes them based on the title of the meeting.

So that was one thing where I don't want to be going through and clicking each one of those. Anytime a lead gets put into our CRM, it's normally through a zap. Yeah, that's another. like every launch control gets funneled through zap, mail leads get funneled through PATLive, and then to a zap.

So yeah, those are really the only things that I can think of. Again, I'm not doing much on disposition. So there might be some other ideas that you could have there.

But I think getting familiar with Zapier is a huge thing if you're starting out. You want to be familiar with that platform because you just run across some small, unique things in your business that maybe other people haven't solved. And I'm sure there's other ways to get around it. But that's kind of an all-in-one platform that you can get super familiar, super automated with.

Seth: So for the Zap thing for like PATLive, for example. So do you give the PATLive caller a Google form where they fill out the person's information and then when they submit it, where does it go through Zapier? Like what different apps are working together?

Ryan: Yeah, so it goes, when PATLive fills out the form, I've done this from the very beginning, they fill out a Google form. And then from whenever there's a new response in the Google form, that's the trigger in Zapier.

So once they fill out the form, new lead gives me state, county, APN, and then maybe a lot of acreage. And then from there, it'll zap to FollowUp Boss immediately and like fill out all that contact information. I have tags for state and county that I use for the contracts as well. So it automatically fills those out if they give it to us.

So, yeah, just straight Google Forms to follow us.

Seth: Are you using like PandaDoc or something? Or what contract digital signature software are you using for that?

Ryan: I'm using SignNow. I'm not sure if that's the best one, it's just what I use. I think it's the, maybe the cheapest one.

Seth: Cool, no, that's awesome. Yeah, I think they're all the same concept for sure.

Ajay: So just real quick, in terms of a zap that's been really helpful for us. We have... We've linked DocuSign, which is what we use instead of SignNow.

No particular reason besides we just thought DocuSign communicated a level of professionalism just because I feel like all the big boys use it. I don't know whether it's true or not. It's a story I tell myself. Do with that what you will.

But we linked DocuSign to both Slack and OpenPhone for contracts that we don't get signed live, like on the phone with sellers. Every time the seller opens that contract, our team immediately gets a Slack notification and an OpenPhone text message that says “XYZ just opened this document.”

So now we know they're looking at it and we're gonna call them and get on the phone with them and try to get the contract signed. So for all folks who are struggling to get their contract signed, that's a good one that's been really helpful for us.

Seth: So the goal is to call them while they're looking at the contract?

Ajay: Yes.

Seth: And you can say like, “I see you're looking at the contract, sir…”

Ajay: Okay, so we're never that. Yeah, we're never that weird.

Ryan: Maybe no contracts, but a couple restraining orders, perhaps.

Ajay: Seth, you're so funny at these voices, man. You always crack me up with that.

So, you know, again, we try to be nonchalant about it, right? But it's just like, a, “Hey, Ryan, I'm just wanted to touch base.” Like they don't know we've looked at it. They're going to think it's a coincidence, right?

I'm not going to call it out. We're going to get on the phone with them. They're going to see it's us. They're going to answer the phone. But we just, I'll tell you when we looked at our business, I talk about this frequently, but we really core focus on like five or six metrics.

And those are, and I'm always going to repeat them when I get an opportunity to, because they are the most important thing I think for most acquisitions is your raw leads or your gross leads (whatever you want to call them, but leads that come into your pipe), your net leads, how many of those did you actually speak to on the phone or communicate with or whatever?

Of those, how many are you making offers on? Of those, how many are you getting accepted? Are you closing well between the phone call to getting an offer accepted? Then of those acceptances, how many actually signed the contract?

And I remember, this is probably back in April or May, but I remember I was looking at our numbers and we had gotten six contracts verbally accepted and three signed. And I was like, so you're telling me if I figure out this one problem in my business, I can double it. Like this is a process gap, is what this is. We're not setting expectations, we're not selling well, how do we close the gap?

And for us, it was those notifications, right? And then we get on the phone with them. And then something we do a lot is we now get our contracts signed live on the phone.So as soon as somebody says yes, our acquisitions manager will populate a contract because they're templates, right? You just pop in the info you need.

You can set all that stuff up in DocuSign to make it real easy, I think. I'm not doing it day-to-day anymore, but I always tell myself it's easy and I tell the team it's easy. But they're getting it done, so it's easy enough. And then we just walk them through it, right?

“Hey, I noticed you haven't signed yet. Did you have any questions I can answer about the contract?” No, I don't have any questions. “Great, if you don't have any questions and we're aligned in terms of terms, can you just go ahead and click this button and click that button and then boom, we're signed.”

Yeah, we're not that creepy, Seth. Hey, I see your look. Again, man, you're good at the voices. But it was a good little process, Phil, for us. It's helped us get a lot more signed.

Ryan: Yeah, I listened to your interview with Mera. I heard about that. I'm going to start implementing that. I thought that was pretty brilliant. Just stay on the phone, put them on hold. So yeah, that's a great thought.

Ajay: I can't say I came up with it. I didn't spearhead the whole these metrics and this process. I stole all this from house wholesalers and then made it my own. But you do enough of any process enough times it becomes your own in some way.

Thank you for that compliment. I will take the brilliance that you've given me. Zap, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Seth: Well, I was just thinking, because I know you do a pretty good job of tracking this stuff, Ajay. Do you have some kind of a, could one come up with a series of zaps that starts by tracking the top level? Like, these are all the names we pulled from DataTree or PropStream or wherever. And then these are all the ones we mailed out. These are all the ones that responded. These were all the ones we sent contracts to. These were all the ones that said yes. These were all the ones that closed.

Like could you set up a series of spreadsheets that just kind of tracks from one to the other with Zapier or something? That's the issue I have with tracking this stuff is like, I can't do this manually. I don't want to go back and do all that one by one by one. Is that what you got to do?

Or do you have some kind of system of zaps or something that's just like, snap your fingers, there you go. Here's the numbers you need to look at.

Ajay: Yeah. Like I wish I had a really good answer for you, Seth. I have my team track it manually, which means like they're subject to some error. But over a long enough time horizon, it all kind of averages out.

There are some of those that you could certainly automate. My contract signed and contract sent, you could definitely have automations for that. I think gross leads, you could easily have an automation. Every lead that comes into whatever your CRM is could be populated.

I think net leads, maybe you could track people that pick up the phone on OpenPhone or whatever dialing system you use?

The tricky one that I think would be offers made and offers accepted, like you kind of need a manual touch there. Otherwise, how do you track that?

But I do think you could get the other four metrics in there if you wanted to engineer it. Ryan, you're an engineer background, man. Where's your brain go on this? That's what you're wired for, right? Is this kind of stuff?

Ryan: Yeah. As far as contracts, offers accepted. So whenever someone sends or accepts an offer, you're going to send a contract. So that's how you could track that one. I have a zap that it could pretty easily... Whenever a tag gets added, you could just add to a tally.

As far as the rest of it, I think Google Sheets is really powerful in tracking all of that. I just have all my employees fill out... They each have a set of KPIs. They're filling it out each day. And then it's populating red, yellow, green. So I think a lot of it, I do manually. You could automate some of it to an extent, and there's always room for more automation.

And then, also getting that into like, I don't have this yet, but I want to have like a weekly scorecard of everything. But it's only daily right now. But I want to have the big ones, like probably you have Ajay, you know, set up there. Still working on it.

Ajay: Well, if you already have the daily metrics, you could probably just create a couple of functions in the spreadsheet. And it would like that's how we do it is we have them input it daily. But we have the weekly metrics automatically spit out because we just have all the equations linked up and stuff.

Ryan: Yeah, that's what we have as well. We have a weekly section, but I want to format it a bit differently. Like the score, I think you've read traction from what I've heard. Yeah, like I want to have that exact scorecard in there. That's what I'm working on.

And those are a bit different than like each KPI. So yeah, it's a matter of how fast my Google Sheets guy will work because I'm not figuring that out.

Seth: So I'm looking at you, Ryan, and I see you're 23, I've seen you come pretty far in a pretty short amount of time, and I'm trying to diagnose, why is this true?

Like, what are you so good at? Or, why are you able to do this when a lot of people can't even get started? And if they do get started, they don't last past their first campaign. Did you just kind of get lucky here and there? Could you attribute it to that? Or, do you just have the stick-to-it-iveness where you're gonna make it work no matter what?

What would you say is your unfair advantage, for lack of a better word? Like, why were you able to make this happen when a lot of people have not been able to?

Ryan: Yeah, so I think there's like pieces of all that to what I've been able to do. I think the biggest like luck factor was living with Rylan and having him help me out. So it's just like, we lived together for the past 2 or 3 years, probably getting close to 3 years now. So that's been super helpful and very lucky. Living with another person who does this, we're going back and forth.

And he's pushing me to send more mail even when I'm almost running out of money, which most people don't have.

Seth: That's actually huge.

Ryan: Yeah. Storming into each other's rooms when you're on your phone. It's like, “What are you doing on your phone? There's money to be made. Get back to work!” And then he'll come in in my room, I have a whiteboard right over there and I remember one day he wrote down like, “Ryan's Launch Control $25,000.” And he wrote, Rylan's Launch Control $50,000.”

And at that point, I was like, oh man, I got to get him back for this one because he just upgraded his plan. So we're always competing.

And I think that would be the most lucky thing and super grateful to have him.

The other thing that I think has contributed to it a bit as to why a lot of people don't succeed is a lot of people get into this when they are a bit older and there's more risk involved. So, right? I don't have a house I need to pay for. I pay my brother for rent and we get a pretty solid deal. And then I don't have any pets. I don't have a girlfriend at the moment. I don't really have, like, no one's counting on me. So I really have no risk.

And I've spoken to some other people, right? If you have like a family, like you're looking at paying for your kid's college and everything that just starts to add. More and more layers of risk and I just don't have any of that.

And I guess that would be the second component, not having risk. First component being having Rylan.

And then third component, I'd say I've always been like working really hard for something like my entire life up until land. It was always like college school, like getting super good grades. I got like a handful, maybe five Bs in college throughout the whole thing. So I was like always like super dedicated. Other people weren't as focused.

And I wasn't always like the smart, I was definitely like towards like the, especially at Cal Poly, I was towards like the lower end of like people who were smart in the class. So I always had to work harder and like put in more hours. So I think that also contributes to it a bit.

So I'd say those three things.

Seth: Are you measuring smarts by the grades you got or some like assessment test or how hard you had to work?

RYan: Some of those people in those, a lot of them were just really naturally like, didn't have to study, just really high IQ people. And I never considered myself one of those, especially in comparison to them. So I felt like I always had to work a bit harder.

But working harder led me to where I can transfer that, what I was putting my energy there. It's a very easy transition from there to now. It was just all focused on academics to now it's pretty much all focused on business.

Seth: I can sort of relate to that, Ryan, in that I also had to work really hard and I also felt like the least smart person and my grades were also terrible. That's the one thing we were different about.

Ajay: I think those that did really, really well in school and honestly had that high IQ are typically really bad entrepreneurs a lot of time.

There's a rare breed, like you'll get an Elon Musk that's actually brilliant, but I think a majority of entrepreneurs that I personally know that are sub $30 million a year, because that's more my circle, aren't that IQ of 170-plus or whatever.

I think those folks just tend to overthink everything and not take action. And this is probably like the worst compliment I've ever given out is to my, one of my really good friends, who Seth, you know, really well, Peter Nukasani.

Peter, if you're listening, I love you, brother. I tell him and I say this to his face and around other people, this isn't like a behind the back thing, but I tell him he's a classic under-thinker. And because of that, he's going to go a lot further than most people.

So it sounds like a backhanded compliment and I don't mean it in a mean way, but because he doesn't overthink things, he just gets things done. Like he doesn't over-engineer process. He doesn't over-engineer inputs, you know? And so he's just phenomenal at executing. Like he sets his mind to something and does it.

And so anyways, Ryan, it seems like you're at least one of those folks that doesn't overthink it and you'll take action and you'll get the results and get it done. So it ends up becoming an advantage when you jump into entrepreneurship.

Seth, would you agree with that?

Seth: Oh yeah, totally. I would totally agree with that assessment with Peter. And I remember, I might have even told him that when we were hanging out last.

Ajay: Oh really?

Seth: Yeah, I have the curse of overthinking things. Like it really screws me up bad sometimes and I envy how he can just, it almost feels careless but like it works for him. I mean, he gets way farther than most people do because in one way or another, he's not letting this overthinking thing trip him up. But yeah, I would agree on that.

So Ryan, is there anything about this business that you think has been particularly hard or do you struggle in any specific way or has there ever been a time when you're like, I don't know if I'm going to make it in this. Tell us about some of the hard stuff.

Ryan: Back four or five months ago, it was definitely a bit stressful. And there was a point where I was still maybe close to breaking even on money, just for your reference. I had some good potential deals, but you know how it is. It's always so far out that it's like, okay, you can't really count that as money in the bank.

And then, so I had a conversation one night with my mom and both my parents are engineers and not really entrepreneurs at all. They're very safe, don't like taking risks and of course, they want the best for me. So she's like, this job's coming up in 2 months that I have to make that decision.

So she's like, oh, are you going to take the job? I'm like, I still don't know. I kept telling her like, I don't know. We'll see how it goes. And then I remember that night, there was just like a pretty big argument on the phone and...

Yeah, after that, I was like, oh, man, I'll just try to do it part-time at work. And I was feeling pretty down. And Rylan was in the other room. And I came in. We were sharing the same room at the start when we moved to Florida, right when I graduated. So I walked back in and our room was so small. And our desks were right next to each other. It was pretty funny.

But I walked back into the room and he could tell. I think he might have heard the conversation and then like saw me walk in all down and I just remember like being like pretty sad about it. And then Rylan like gave me this huge pep talk. And yeah, I think he stole a couple like quotes from Hormozi, who I didn't know at the time, but he was just like saying like, oh, like, don't take advice from anyone who you don't want to be in their position.

And that was like, that really hit me. And I was like, of course, I love my mom and everything. And she likes the job that she does. And I could see that it was probably a job that I wouldn't like. I mean, if I were going to do engineering…

The hard part for me was this was a really... Working for them was like a super great experience, super great company. But I don't know if that's what I wanted to do. But if I were going to do it, I want to work for them.

So that's why it was tough because I've worked so hard and kept my grades good, all this, and spent multiple summers interning. And then it's like, okay, like I have to take this job in a couple months. Are you going to take it or are you not? So that's why there was like an extra amount of pressure on me.

The reason why I think I decided not to is just like a lack of control. You know, when you work there, you'd come home, you'd hear your parents talking about which like boss they had. Like sometimes it'd be great. It's like, oh, my boss is so great. All this, like I really enjoy working for him and everything's just running smooth. And then you hear about them getting another boss who's borderline abusive. And it's like, you can't control that.

And then also working in engineering, it's just been a super, white male-dominated thing for a super long time. So being a white male going into that field, it's like you start to think that they do a great job of hiring diverse people and pushing them into positions.

But then you start to think, selfishly. I think that's a really good thing to do. But selfishly, it's like, I don't know if I'm going to get left out of the equation somewhere if that's what I choose.

So all those things were sort of going through my head. And after Rylan had gave me the pep talk and everything, I decided right after that, I don't care. I'm just going to do it. If I run out of money, I run out of money. It doesn't matter that much to me.

So that was the moment when I knew, okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to push through. I don't care if I have to be down money for a while, but I know… I see how successful he is. And so I'm like, if he can do it, I know I can get... I can be half that successful and I'd be fine with that.

So having him to look up to is super great as well.

Seth: Hearing you talk about him, it almost kind of makes me wish I had another land investor friend right here in town. I could get together with them or invite them over here in the same tiny room and we could work back-to-back and just be plugging away in the same environment. Not in each other's business necessarily, but just there for each other. It would be super helpful.

I got plenty of people I could go out of my way. Like, let's schedule a Zoom call for two weeks from now and talk about it. But I said, no, like I just I want somebody right here, right now who just like, gets me.

From what you're saying there, it almost sounds like that could almost be the difference between you winning or losing at this is having somebody else to support when you when you're about to fall apart. I don't know if that was your situation or not, but I mean, I could totally see that being the case for a lot of people.

Ryan: No, guaranteed, because I have a lot of that same energy of like being very secure with everything I do, like always having some savings, always like being insecure. And he's a bit of the opposite way so when like I wouldn't have made it there's no way I would have made it without him so.

So yeah. And if you need someone Seth to live with, you can leave the family. Come to Florida.

Seth: I've been longing to hear about that.

Ajay: Quite the offer, Ryan, I will say. So my COO, my partner, Ben, my business partner in the land biz, actually moved out to Texas with me. And so he and I are living in the same house until I get married in June.

And Seth, everything you're saying is absolutely right. We were doing this across the country for a bit where I was in Chicago and he was in Tacoma, Washington. And then when I moved to Texas, he was like, dude, I'll move to Texas.

And so I was like, I have a third bedroom. Why don't you come crash until you get somewhere? And then he moved in and it was just awesome.

And this is going to sound... People are different, but I love working. And I work most hours of the day. And so we're just always working now. It's super fun. The amount of times I've walked out of my bedroom at 8 p.m.

And I'm like, Ben, you doing anything? And he's like, no, what's up? And I just start whiteboarding. We have a three foot by five foot whiteboard in the living room.We just go at it for like two and a half hours. It's just been really, really fun.

So getting to do that, like…

Seth: That sounds so awesome, man.

Ajay: Yeah, it's not as much competition like you're talking about when mastering Rockefeller Habits. If you guys have listened to that one, I think it was Charles Schwab in the factory used competition to incentivize teams to move forward. That's what your story about Rylan putting the 50k texts up on the whiteboard makes me think of.

So we don't necessarily get that, but maybe we should. Maybe we should engineer some competition in the house. I need to find some people to compete against. It's tough, though, because I feel like I make friends with everybody.

Seth, do you have any recommendations of people I could make enemies in the next couple of months?

Seth: Ooh, I don't know of anybody that you would be enemies with. I mean, I've never seen you like butt heads with anybody. It seems like you can get along with everyone I know. So, yeah, I don't, unfortunately. But I'll think about that.

I'll ask around if you want me to. I'll put some on the Facebook group and see if anybody…

Ajay: Makes me want to butt heads with somebody.

Seth: Oh, yeah.

So, Ryan, I know it's fairly early still in your land investing career, but where do you foresee this going? Like, I feel like now more than ever, it's really hard to predict what things are gonna look like in one or three or five years, but if you could map it out, how do you foresee your land investing business evolving?

Ryan: Yeah. So I have some bigger goals that I set for myself. And that would be like one year, three year and 10 year. Next year, I'd like to do $3 million in revenue, which would be about triple of what I'm doing.

But it's been the past like three or four months that I've really taken off. So we'll see how it goes. And I would like to do like a million out of that profit. All this is like super high goals that like could potentially happen but definitely something to reach for.

And then 10 years, just the number, I guess, would just be 5 million, like basically 5 million profit, 15 revenue. I don't know of anyone really doing that. But I mean, 10 years is a long time. So you got to shoot for something high. And see if you get there.

Seth: Cool, man.

Ryan: And I think to get to those bigger numbers, it's probably going to be a team of like 30 to 40 people.

I really am interested in running good teams. And I think that would be a really fun challenge for me. It's just like, how do you motivate that many people all to move in one direction to a common goal and still make it a good place to work?

I guess those are the goals. Got them on the wall. We'll see if I rip them down in a couple months.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome, man. So if somebody is listening to this and they have maybe been sitting on the sidelines for a while. They've seen the land flipping business and like, I don't know if that's for me. I don't know if I should do that. Or maybe I am going to do that, but I don't know what to expect.

Do you have any words of advice for people in those positions?

Ryan: I think one of the things that you have to do, like this, what I realized is that you can't really do this at a high level part-time. I guess there are some people who can, but I think especially starting off, if you're not full-time, it's going to be very, very challenging to see any success.

And you know, that distance where you see your money come back is just gonna get extended and extended. And I think you're just gonna get discouraged and discouraged.

So as hard as it is, I think that if I were to do it again, it's like, okay, either like commit to it fully or don't commit to it all. I think doing it part-time is super challenging.

And then, I mean, if you're gonna get into it, you know, and you're… It depends what stage of life you're in. But if you're young, find someone else, again, who wants to do it. And then push each other and always have someone to bounce ideas off of and all of that because that's worked super well for me and Rylan.

So also, one other thing, Costilla County, Colorado. Pour all the money in there. It'll come back soon enough.

Ajay: It'll come back at $99 down, $99 a month for 3 years.

Ryan: You also don't work in those super, super like, I don't know, I don't even know what to call them, Colorado, Arizona, maybe you'll find success there, but do bigger deals and places where there's less people sending mail.

Ryan: Your first deal in New York, what made you pick New York at all? Like why did you go there of all places?

Ryan: I don't know. I think I was just scrolling around on a map and landed on New York.

I still do that to this day. I'll just pick... If I run out of places that I like in a certain state, I'll just randomly pick a new state. I'm not doing any analytics on population growth or anything. My theory is there's good deals in every county. You just have to find them. If it's a worse county, lower demand, then you'll be able to likely get a better deal because lots of people are mailing there.

I think a lot of people starting out... And I guess this tails off our last conversation, a lot of people starting off will analyze counties for hours and hours. And at some point it's like, I don't really care. At this scale too, with how much I'm sending out, I can't be that picky. I don't spend that much time on pricing. I have someone else pricing, you know?

So just don't get too caught up in pricing and picking counties as well.

Seth: So I don't know if we really did talk about that. What are you sending out? Is this direct mail, texting, something else? What are your marketing methods and what's working for you?

Ryan: Yeah, so I started off with mail. That's how most people start off. And then I moved into texting a bit.

And texting was good for a while. I got some really good deals. But it seems like it's slowly fading away. I've seen like less than half the leads coming through than I was before with text.

So I'm switching more to mail and just trying to do the same volume that I was texting now like switching over to mail. So I'm trying to send like 20,000 a month in mail.

Seth: And are you sending like blind offers or neutral letters or what exactly does your mail look like?

Ryan: Yeah. So I send all ranges. Again, I don't have statistics on it. I think that would be a good thing to track in the future. But all range offers, that'll be the same with text and with mail.

And I think that's just a good way of saying, Hey, if it's market values, $100,000 will offer anywhere from $30,000 to $70,000, something along maybe $35,000 to $65,000. So basically saying, like, Hey, we're going to be paying below market value.

So that's why I like the range is that they sort of get that idea for the most part. And you have to qualify them a little bit less.

And then blind’s hard because people do get it in their head like, “Hey, you offered me $20,000. like, where's my $20,000?" And so that's a bit difficult as well. So I just figured range is like, that's how I would do it in my head and it makes a lot of sense to me.

So yeah, just having a range there. We'll do that for texting too. Like if people are interested in our offers and hey, we can pay between this and that. Are you interested? If they say yes, then we'll push them to FollowUp Boss, get them on a call.

So that's the method. I'm not sure if it works. And I'm not sure if you should take my advice. I've been doing it for six, seven months. I'm in no position to be giving advice.

Seth: Well, everybody is a teacher on some level. And you certainly know things that a lot of other people don't.

Ryan, appreciate you sharing all your story with us here today. As we kind of wrap this up, I wanted to close with the three closing questions that we sometimes ask of people.

So question number one, what is your biggest fear?

Ryan: I guess something that I would be fearful of, and I've heard a lot of people warn me against it, is just putting too much time into a business like this.

And I know that sounds like a little weird, but I have been working with everything that I have. And I know some people, I feel like, I really have truly put like everything that I have into this and just working some really crazy hours.

So I mean, this is a time like people looking back, you're not I'm not going to care when I'm 80 that I made an extra $40,000 because I like squeezed one more deal out. So I think just being very, very conscious of that and being ungrateful for where I am and always trying to shoot for something bigger. I think that that would be something that I'm fearful of and try to take steps away from that.

So overall my plan is like I started doing it full-time in April. I think after April this like I'll put everything that was my plan when I went in like let me put everything in I can for a year see where I get. And then I think in April, we're gonna start, me and my roommate, Rylan, I'm gonna start traveling around a bit and just like rewarding ourselves for how much we did put in because if you don't stop and you just head down for too many years I'm fearful of that.

Seth: Cool, man. So what are you most proud of?

Ryan: I think I'm most proud of my discipline. I think that would be what I'm most proud of. And I guess I value myself on that a lot. And just in the business and like working out. I'm very focused on working out, staying in good shape too.

So I think I'm most proud of always having a desire to improve. That's been over a range of things. When I was younger, I didn't get into the GATE class in my elementary school and I was so... I remember my parents told me I was just shaken up about it.

Ever since then, I was like, I want to be really good at school. And then I wasn't that good I was good socially as a kid. My brother was super good socially. And then I was like, I want to get good socially. So let me study and let me try to get out of my comfort zone and go talk to more people.

And yeah, I think just that desire to improve and discipline there is what I'm most proud of.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome, man. I think it's actually really cool to see anybody who's not born with some inherent gift, but they figure out how to do it anyway, or even get some of the way there.

I mean, that takes a lot of work when it's not just handed to you at birth and you have to struggle through it and figure out how do I make this thing work on a social level? I can totally relate to that too.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, it's tough because it has to be every day, just continuous, continuous.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely, man.

So last question, let's pretend you just got $100 million wired to your bank account and you're not allowed to stay in the land business, but you're free to do anything else you want to do.

What would you do for the rest of your life?

Ryan: I don't really like the idea of like getting that much money. I really like earning things and I think that would like completely like recircuit everything. It would make everything that I've done so far, it would feel more meaningless. And I think it wouldn't motivate me to do anything more.

Ideally, I'd give it away. But who knows? I'd probably keep a couple millions of stashed in case I go broke or something.

But yeah, I wouldn't want to stop working and just go sit on the beach all day because that doesn't sound fun, right? Someone needs it a lot more than I do.

Seth: Any idea who you would give it to?

Ajay: *points to himself*

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. Maybe my brother, see what he gets into. He'll probably get a… No, Ajay, we're going to start it out.

Ajay: I've got some ideas for you, Ryan. Don't you worry, man. I'm sorry.

Ryan: No, Ajay, you like the challenge too. You wouldn't want it. You'd want to keep working.

Seth: You're totally right. I know what you mean when you say it would kind of recircuit everything because, I mean, it totally would. And I think what's going on there, in me anyway, is like I've put a lot of my value in what I'm able to produce or like generate as a person or value I can bring to others.

And like if that's all, like if that capacity is neutered or taken away or whatever word you want to use, like what now? Like what is my purpose? Where does my value come from if it's just like done already?

So it's kind of a trip to figure that out.

Ryan: Yeah, I talked to Rylan a lot about this a lot, how we're like the guy in the Greek mythology, I forget his name, that pushes the rock up the hill every day.

Ajay: Oh yeah. Prometheus?

Ryan: That sounds right.

Ajay: Or is Prometheus the one that got eaten by birds?

Ryan: I can't remember. One of the two, but anyways, I feel like there's some value into pushing that rock up the hill every day, and maybe you don't have to do it every day. But without doing that, you're just going to be lost. And it's not a very exciting or fun life to live.

I think living a life where you could make a million dollars on your own is way more like you're way more proud of it. You're way more interesting. Like there's more respect given to you than like just winning a lottery or any of that.

So just that challenge, I think, is like what attracts me to business and everything. So I wouldn't want to live without the challenge.

Seth: Well, it's interesting because it makes me wonder that statement there is made with the assumption that you're making X number of dollars. What if that number of dollars was cut in half? Would you still like the challenge?

What if it was cut down to 25%, 10%? What if it was nothing? What if you made no money? Would you work just for the heck of it? Makes me wonder how much of this is money in the reward versus the actual value of the work itself.

Ryan: Yeah, I was going to say, it's tricky. As you keep going lower and lower, everything's going well right now. But I mean, even if like at this, I'm sure if I had a family, I'd want some sort of safety net.

But at this point, I think, maybe it'd make a more interesting story, right? You start losing money, what are you going to do? You have to pick yourself up. I think that's a more interesting story than someone who just started with $100 million and went to the club every night and got lost and all that.

Seth: Well, I'll tell you, I mean, yeah, running REtipster for as long as I have, totally different business than land, but even seeing it play out in the land, too. You do this long enough, you will have to reinvent yourself.

The stuff that you could just take for granted at one point, like it doesn't work anymore, or it doesn't work nearly as much as it used to. So I think that's a story everybody has to survive through at some point. Especially in this rapidly changing world we're now in.

Ajay: Absolutely. Well, I know, like Seth, the first time you had me on, I was just coming out of a season where I was 100% into like Florida infill lots, you know, and I saw when interest rates shot up and builders got real scared and how they tightened up that there was an element of risk in the business.

And there's a theme with me that anybody who's listened to enough of my interviews knows that I don't like when other people have control over my business, which is why I continue to modify it. And to your point, reinvent myself in the business.

And so I've seen what happened. And God forbid, it happens again the way that it did. But I see some folks I talked to who are 100% all-in on just these small assignment fees to builders, $2,000 to $5,000 to $10,000 assignment fees, these tiny infill lots, and that's their entire business model. And I'm like, dude, I hope you're not carrying a lot of overhead or debt right now, because you could get wrecked in a heartbeat. One thing changes at the Fed level. And I hope it doesn't happen to them, but I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen to me by engineering on a different side.

On the flip side, though, what's really interesting is when you're thinking about the challenges, Ryan, you're talking about, you like the challenge, you like problem-solving, and kind of the build of it all, right? At some level, money is just the success metric of business. It's just a consequence of good business.

And so Seth, when you start asking the question, like, okay, what if it were cut down to nothing? It's like, well, then what's the success metric? How do we measure who's winning and who's losing? Because I think most entrepreneurs you talk to, they like winning, but they hate losing, right? Almost every entrepreneur I know hates losing 30 times more than they love winning.

Winning feels nice. You know, I've gotten six figure wired into my bank account. And I'm like, that was cool. But you know what motivated me more was the thought of losing like a four grand assignment sometimes, which is like illogical, right? But it's how your brain is wired. Like a pain aversion is something I use a lot to actually motivate myself, because we as humans fear losing something more than we want to go get something or whatever.

But anyways, last thing I'll say is just like $100 million dollars is so much money to deploy as well. Like if you dropped it into my bank account from a sheer business sense and you were like, can you go put this to work?

I don't know that I could. That's so much, like I'd stick it in a Treasury account, and it would spit out $5 million a year. That's kind of wild when you think about it. Like, Ryan, your three-year goal is $5 million net. If you had $100 million, you could just stick it in Treasury bonds and you'd be there, man.

I'm sorry. I'm all over the place. But just a couple of thoughts rattling around my brain as I hear you two smart guys talking about stuff.

Ryan: So dump it all on mailers. Dump it all.

Ajay: I'll send out 40,000 mailers every day for the rest of time.

Seth: When you say that money is the success metric, so I would agree, but I'm wondering why? And like, should it be?

I know when you're talking about like a non-profit, for example, it's almost like they're ashamed to make money. Like a lot of them go out of their way to publicly tell everybody, look how much money we're not making. You know, look how much money we're not saving here, we're just giving it away to the community, or whatever their mission is, and understandably, I mean, that's why they exist or should be.

But it does make me wonder, like, on one hand, I totally get it and totally agree, like, the money is why we're doing this. Should it be? Like, what if the money were cut in half or cut by 75% or whatever, but you were achieving some great good in the world? Is that okay? Would you just keep operating, making hardly any money or operating at a loss to serve that mission?

Or when I look about land, I don't see a huge mission, per se, for the most part. but it's not like people are gonna die if they don't have their land or something like that. But, any thoughts?

Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. Got tons of thoughts. I do this thing where I play ping pong in my brain. Like I play both sides and figure out somewhere in the middle of where I wanna settle in on an argument.

So first the question, should it be the success metric?

And I think to properly answer that, you'd then have to ask yourself the question, what's the alternative? Because if impact were the consequence, well, how do you quantify impact?

Is it like by the amount of people you touch? Because now it's a numbers game. Like what if I go around high-fiving as many people as possible, right? So like there needs to be some sort, right? It sounds silly out loud, but there has to be some quantifiable, measurable result that's tangible at some level. I don't know what that substitute would be.

What I do know is money can buy freedom, money can buy options, and money can pay people, right? Obviously, I think the three of us sitting here are all aware that impact and money can go hand in hand, right? And so I know I like to give to some charities and churches and pay my staff and be generous with bonuses at times and do all those things.

But I don't know. It's just like, unfortunately, the answer to my question is another question of like, okay, if it's not money, what would it be? And if it is, how do we make that measurable, right? So it's really interesting. Really interesting thought.

Ryan, what are your thoughts?

Ryan: Yeah, I agree with what you said at the start too. It's like, if not money, then what is it?

I think there is a sliding scale to where it's like, okay, at some point I'm trying to save up money and want to have a family at some point, right? So that'd be a goal.

But at some point, where does that end and where does greed begin? I think there's a line in there and you go too far down one way when you could be using that money to just do better things.

But as you're making more money, that's the most influential thing there is to do good in the world. So I think with more money, you could have a more positive impact.

Ajay: I agree. And it's something I go back and forth on a lot.

So greed, I think, don't quote me on this, but I think can be defined as the love of money. So you love the money itself versus what it can do. I think I've shared my faith here on REtipster before. I think we're allowed to do that. Seth, feel free to tell me no if not.

But I'm a Christian and I think something I think about a lot and actually that I've been challenged by a friend of mine, somebody who I now consider a mentor, JD Hill. He's getting really cool stuff going in land. But the idea of being a good steward of money.

Because if me, Ajay, and Ryan, and Seth are all given gifts and blessings and talents from God, and we use those, and now all of a sudden you have half a million dollars in the bank at 23, right? That's pretty cool. How do you steward that well?

Is it by paying people well and creating a good working environment? Is it by taking care of your parents in early retirement? Is it by buying a Lambo?

You know what I mean? Like, what does it actually mean to be a good…

Seth: It's that one, for sure. Yeah.

Ajay: Not a trick question, guys. But you know, it's how do I do good with this money?

And then I struggle sometimes when it comes to like tithing. You know, especially as an entrepreneur, your income is not always consistent. And so I don't have good financial systems where I do give regularly and I'll go and like not give for a while and then go give a $20,000 lump sum randomly.

And I'm pretty sporadic with that, which makes me like a hit for a lot of these non-profits I do donate to because they're like, Hey, we saw this large sum came in, and now I'm on like their annual fundraising lists, which is a whole other conversation.

But the point being, I struggle sometimes in trusting God because I am like, well, I know how to multiply this, right? It's like, no, you were given gifts and you were given blessings and you're being a good steward. But that is separate from trusting that God can do more with your money than you can.

So I don't know how we ended up on this, but being a good steward is what I want to fall back on. It's not really ours.

Seth: Yeah, well, it was a good question. You said, if not money, what else? And we were trying to figure out what else is there and what else does matter and that kind of thing. And yeah, I mean, I would agree.

That is the best or the better, or the way to handle that conversation in terms of what's the next step. But then you gotta decide, okay, why does that matter? Like, who is that serving? What's the point of that? Does that matter eternally or even a few years from now? Or does it just make me feel good?

And we probably won't find the answer today, but good stuff to ponder. And I hope the listeners out there or pondering it as well.

Ryan, thanks again for coming on the show and talking to us. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Great to meet you at the Unconference thing a few weeks back. If people want to learn more about you or connect with you, you don't have to share anything, but if you want to, is there a way they should do that?

Ryan: Thanks, Seth, for having me on. I appreciate it. I had a lot of fun with you and Ajay. So I appreciate you having me on.

And yeah, if anyone wants to connect with me, ryan@longhornlandholdings.net, that's my email. We have a funny little YouTube channel, me and Rylan, the Home Office Heroes. Go like and subscribe over there. And some good content there. It's basically us on the couple of days a month where we do take off and have some fun. So go check us out there.

And yeah, if you have any double close you want to partner with or need my advice, want some charity work, I'm always there.

Seth: Cool, man. Thanks again. Appreciate it. And let's stay in touch.

For the listeners out there, if you want to see the show notes for this episode, it's REtipster.com/175. If you want to go ahead and text the word FREE to the number 33777, you can stay up to date on all things happening in the world of REtipster.

Thanks again, and we'll talk to you next time.

You're listening to the REtipster podcast. Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma here, and this is episode 174.

And today, we're talking with a good friend of mine, Chris Johnsen. So I met Chris earlier this year when he decided to fly out to REWBCON, where we hung out together for a few days in Phoenix, along with our friend Peter Nukasani, who was also there.

And funny enough, Chris, Peter and I have actually become pretty good friends. We got together again a few weeks ago in New Orleans to make even more memories together. And I've wanted to get Chris on the podcast pretty much since I met him because I recognized immediately that he has a great combination of a successful track record as a land investor, along with a very interesting story about how he discovered the business and how his business has evolved since he got started.

And this guy is killing it as a land investor right now. He's an action-taker and an all-around great guy to know. And on this episode, we're going to learn everything we can from Chris's experience in the land business so far.

So Chris, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Chris: Wow, what an intro. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Seth. Nice to finally meet you, Ajay.

Ajay: Yeah. Likewise, Chris. This would be fun.

Chris, why don't we get started here with you? Just letting us know your origin story. So how did you first discover the land business? What were you doing before you discovered land? Just tell us about that first few months or first year or so in the business.

Chris: Yeah, so I was an electrician for 15 or so years. Right out of high school I started doing electrical work and maybe for twelve years, I worked for large electrical companies. And then in 2018, I quit that and started my own electrical business. And I did that for about three years. I kind of fell backwards into land investing.

I had a lot next to my house that wasn't for sale or anything, but I wanted to buy it just to make sure nobody moved in next to me. So I kind of just figured out how to use the assessor's website, find the owner's name. I ended up contacting her and buying the lot from her directly and I didn't really realize you could do that. And a couple of months later, somebody had offered me money for the lot, which was a good bit more than what I paid for it. And I guess a light bulb kind of went off.

So I still didn't know that land investing or land investors were a thing. I ended up going to the county next to mine and using their assessor's website and manually clicking on parcels and writing down their phone numbers or screenshotting them. And then I would call and text people for a few weeks and I finally picked up six acres that I was able to buy for 15,000, which is all I had to play with. I had $15,000 in like a spare savings account and pulled it out. My wife was on board, surprisingly.

Anyway, I bought that six acres for $15,000 and a few weeks later I sold it for like $38,000, made a little over $20,000 on it. And I realized that's a lot of electrical work that you would have to do to make $20,000. My last year as an electrician working for myself, it was me and one helper. I probably did around $100,000 that year and maybe took home $65-ish thousand. So to make $20,000 in one flip, I realized, like, there's got to be something to this.

And that's when I did a deep dive online and found REtipster and binged the podcast. I've never taken a course or anything, but I just listened to all the podcast episodes and read the blogs and just took a bunch of action. So I started cutting my electrical days short. I would work from like 6 a.m. to lunchtime doing electrical work and I would come home, play with the kids for a little while, and then go back out to my office and for like three or four hours a day just call and text people from my personal cell phone.

And after the third deal, I basically told my wife that I was just going to go full time with it. And after the third deal, I had made enough money to where it made sense and she was on board with it. I think I did 40 flips in 2022. Probably averaged like a $10,000 profit on each one. Obviously, I didn't do that with my personal cell phone. I started using text messaging software and I only do text messaging, so I was using Smarter Contact for my text messaging software at first and now I use Launch Control. But that's what I did to do my first 40 or so flips last year.

Seth: Yeah, that's really fascinating, man. I'm sure this happens, but I don't know of any other person I can think of who discovered this land business on their own, just totally independent of anything they read online. It's not like they saw some ad or something. It's like, hey, I can just do this. And they put it together and then they kind of go backwards compared to most people, where then they kind of figure out this education stuff that's really cool.

I wonder if there's a lot of other people who do it that way. Or even if they do discover they can do this. Like then making the next leap of figuring out, oh, and I can make an actual business out of it by doing this again and again. So I thought that was pretty unique about you.

Ajay: Talk about a leap of faith too, right? Like, Chris, you trusted yourself to do this over and over and over again. I know everybody's family is a little bit different. I'm kind of curious, what was that conversation like with your wife when you said, hey, I'm going to go do this full time? Because I know that's a conversation a lot of people in this community have where it's like, hey, you know, this semi-consistent thing. I guess you were already running your own business, so maybe we were used to hunting for income at some level.

But what was that conversation like?

Chris: Yeah, I think she just trusts me from the other business. When I told her that I was quitting my well-paying electrical job to start my own business, she had the same worries, but I made it work. And she realized that it was a good idea. And I think she thought the same thing about this one. It's not like I just shut my electrical business down immediately and jumped full-time into land. And then when you get those checks for $10,000 to $20,000, it just changes your mind about things. And I'm glad I did.

Seth: Yeah. It is kind of crazy how you start thinking differently about money once you see what kind of money can be made with this, because know what you mean. Like a lot of people, when they look at this idea of being an electrician for themselves and grossing 100K, taking home 60 or 65 or whatever it was you said, that's not a bad life. You work for yourself, you have some kind of freedom and autonomy. But it's probably really hard to imagine going back to that after you have discovered what you've found so far.

Chris: I always say that I can do it just because I know that I have that to fall back on. But yeah, it would suck. It would definitely suck.

Also, I brought home $65,000, but I probably shouldn't say this on the Internet, but there's a lot of cash that goes around in the electrical business. Making a good amount of stock money too, which doesn't happen as much in land.

Seth: Yeah, totally. So in that first year, actually, I don't know if you said, when exactly did this all happen? Like, what year was it when you did this first deal on your own and then you kind of decided to try to when you discovered REtipster and tried to make it into actual business? When did that happen?

Chris: Yes, so I started texting off my personal phone probably in February of 2022. And then I think I bought the first piece in March of 2022 and then had it sold by April. And then that's kind of when I got those next two or so deals, probably by May-ish. And then after that, I didn't do any more electrical work.

Seth: So this is like not that long ago we were recording this November 2023. And I know the first time I met you in May of this year, 2023, it seemed like you were doing really well back then.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely blessed. I don't know, my business looks a lot different than a lot of people's, I think a lot of land investors. I don't work with the profit margins that a lot of people do. That first one, that was a typical deal. I mean, that wasn't a typical deal for me, where you make more than 100% return. Usually I do… Well, now I'll do bigger deals.

So just as an example, I don't have any kind of deal cap because I double-close so much. I guess that's kind of where you're getting at. The 40 flips in 2022 would not have been possible if I didn't discover double closing, because at first I was just using all my own money, which was only $15,000, but it ended up being $30,000. I'm sorry, $38,000, which I put into like four more deals, which ended up making me around $50,000.

And I just kept working my way up. But then I just got capped out after about 15 to 20 deals, and my title agent told me about double closing, and I started doing that for probably 15 of the last 20 deals in 2022. So basically, it's just wholesaling. But they were all true double closes. Yeah.

Seth: And when you're doing these double closings, is this using single-source funding where the end buyer’s funds are paying for the A to B transaction and the B to C transaction so you don't have to have any short-term cash involved? Or are you getting some kind of transactional funding to pay for those in the meantime?

Chris: Yeah, it's a true A to C or whatever it is. I then use the end buyer's funds to pay the seller, and then they write me a check for the difference.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome.

Chris: Which sounds awesome, but it's also way more labor-intensive on the selling side versus a lot of people's strategy in this business.

Seth: How do you mean? Like what's more labor-intensive about it?

Chris: So I'll get a property under contract, and I will immediately list it for sale on Facebook. And then at this point, I know a lot of Realtors, but at first I would get it under contract, I'd get it listed on Facebook. I would call local Realtors, surveyors, just anybody I could think of that might know a land buyer or buy land themselves in that county.

Last year was a lot easier because stuff was selling a lot faster. And I might buy for 60% and sell for 85%. So they sell pretty quickly, too. I sell most of my stuff on Facebook, but anytime I get a larger property, I'll still list it on Facebook, but I'll start making some phone calls and really trying to drum up leads for buyers in that county. And I'll usually put the contracts out 45 to 60 days to give me a little time.

Chris: For how long, Chris?

Chris: 45 to 60 days on the contract. I can usually sell them pretty fast. I've bought a few that didn't sell as fast as I thought they would, but I've still ended up selling them at some point, even if I had to purchase it. But yeah, most of the stuff I sell within 45 days.

Seth: Yeah, that's pretty good, man. That's really good. Did you end up like, I guess whatever markets you're working in? Did you do a ton of research to find, okay, I'm only going to work in these places because they're growing like crazy? And is that why they're selling so fast? Or is that attributable to your effort that you're putting into putting them on Facebook and pounding the pavement, so to speak, and searching high and low for these buyers?

I'm just trying to figure out because that's a huge advantage when you can consistently sell properties that quickly, you're not waiting around for six or nine or twelve months for everything to sell and you can actually do this double closing stuff. So, I mean, have you tried to replicate this anywhere else? Or have you just been doing this in one market that you kind of got lucky on or that you searched really hard to find where properties sell really quick?

Chris: No, I literally went through every single county in Mississippi last year and probably hit every single landowner in Mississippi that's over five acres. It doesn't matter what county it is in, I'll buy it if I can get it cheap enough to where I think I can sell it pretty quickly.

And even if I can't, I've been doing some options lately. So I'll put an option deposit of maybe $1,000 down, but if I can make 30 grand on the flip, it's worth sacrificing the option fee if for some reason it doesn't work out. But I'm usually pretty sure it's going to work out before I buy it or before I put it under contract.

Seth: How often are you just buying things outright and just taking title and waiting for them to sell?

Chris: Probably 25% of the time. That's only when I buy something that I guess I'm trying to squeeze a little more profit out than what I could get. If I wholesaled it, I try not to ever do it.

Seth: Yeah, until recently. And maybe this is still what you're doing, but I know you were just using texting to find deals, which was another somewhat unique thing. Most people I know, they at least start with direct mail and then maybe migrate to texting or something like that. But from what I know, I think you've always been doing texting, and direct mail has never been a thing that you've done.

Is that accurate? And if so, how have things been working for you now that the texting game has changed so much?

Chris: Yeah, it's definitely changing. I still only do text, but I just signed up with Landcaller. I do feel like there's going to be some opportunity in rural Mississippi because a lot of people don't text. So I'm hoping that's like a new revenue stream for me.

But yeah, I do all texting right now. I use Launch Control. The new regulations definitely affect me because before, when I was using Smarter Contact, there was none of that “text YES to opt in” or “text STOP to opt out” messaging. So I could basically just sound like I'm just a guy. I'm just a guy trying to buy your land. And they would call me.

And I'm pretty good at just kind of feeling out the person and I guess mimicking the way they talk or just knowing what these people want to hear. I feel like I'm pretty good on the phone way. And it was a lot easier when somebody thought they were just selling to just a person, which I am, just a person. It's just me and I have one part-time employee. But when you text stuff like “text STOP to opt out” or “text YES to opt in,” it just looks so much more corporate.

Ajay: Yeah. So we were 100% text message up until October this year. It’s funny, Seth. We mentioned direct mail. We got back into direct mail right before kind of the big shifts with Launch Control and the mandatory opt-out messaging and AT&T punching everybody in the face. Maybe I shouldn't say that here, but we were 100% text message, five on staff, two of which were 100% dedicated to texting all day. And so it was a really unique time.

I'm kind of curious to see what you're seeing, Chris, on the text front, because we just decided I'm extreme. I think anybody that's been around me knows that, but we decided to just pull the plug on it. I said I don't like my business being subject to regulation in this manner. And we just stopped text messaging altogether. I redeployed my texting team to be scouting for some on market subdivide opportunities and we dropped 25,000 mailers. Like the moment we got a whiff of things changing and the stuff that’s been coming in, the lead quality is drastically different. Like, generally folks that come in through mail are much higher quality versus a text message lead, as I'm sure you're well aware of, Chris.

But I'm curious what you've just been seeing the past few weeks as you're gearing up with you only have your texting leads to play with. What's that stuff looking like for you?

Chris: It's hard for me to say about the last few weeks. The same as last year during the holidays, things kind of slowed down for me last year and it's kind of slow for me this year. And I don't know if that's a holiday thing because I haven't been around long enough to know that or if that's just like a mindset thing that I need to deal with.

But I'm still getting decent responses from text messaging, but, yeah, the quality has gone down. The good thing is now the people who really want to sell are going to text you back, because the people who just thought I was just Joe Blow would text me back out of politeness, and these people aren't going to text me back unless they're really interested in selling.

Now, most people want 110% of market value, but it's still a good lead source, I think. But I can't compare that to anything. I've never done direct mail and I'll report back in six months about our cold calling and let you know how it goes. Do you do any cold calling?

Ajay: Was that a question if I do any cold calling, Chris?

Chris: Yes.

Ajay: Man, this is a loaded topic. I've tested out, I want to say, five different cold calling vendors in my time as an investor. So here's a little bit about me, just I'm going to share myself a bit. I don't know if you're familiar with the enneagram, Chris. It's a personality assessment. I am a type 7, which is an Enthusiast. I have reverence and love for life, but I'm a wing 8. I'm a Challenger, which is like a control freak.

And the thing I struggle with, with cold calling in my business is that I lack control. And here's what I mean by that, is you kind of have two different routes you can go down when it comes to cold calling, right?

Number one is in house. Number two is outsource, right? And so if I am in-house cold calling, meaning I have staff that's cold calling that are my employees or contractors or whatever, well, now I have to QC. I need to quality control these staff members to make sure they're doing the right things. They're asking the right questions. They're driving the right leads forward, because you want to control some level of qualification. And if you don't, on the flip side, I lose control over what those conversations look like, how quality they are, who my caller is.

I really like controlling certain variables. We find that women tend to convert better than men, and so I'd like more women on the phone sometimes, and it's stuff like that. So I like a lot of control in my business and I feel like I don't get control over time of day, certain verbiages, the way things are pushed, the level of quality of the leads, versus just, hey, here's somebody with a pulse that said they're interested in selling their property, right?

And now it's another form of high-touch type marketing, similar to texting, which we know how to convert really well. But long story long here, Chris. We currently are not doing any cold calling, and that's by choice. I know it works. We've made six figures cold calling. I'm an advocate for it, for people that want to run that type of business. I've tested a lot of the different channels and decided that it's not a channel I want to be actively working right now. Does that answer your question? Sorry, that was a long one.

Chris: Those are all the things that I'm kind of worried about, too. I think it's going to be very labor-intensive, which I'm worried about, and we'll see how it goes. I really wanted to filter down my list a little better, but Landcaller, they have you give them a list of 10,000 properties, which is a lot of properties, especially if you're doing any kind of filtering for what you need. I think that's like 20 or 30 counties’ worth of data for them.

So they're going to be all over the place too. No county is the same, and when you have 30 counties, that's all across the state. So I know it's going to be very labor-intensive, but if it brings me a couple of deals, we'll see how it goes.

Seth: I've actually had this conversation with a few people over the past week about cold calling, specifically about the pain point. Seems to be like finding that person who's really good on the phone basically like a great salesperson. And that's hard. This is a common thing in any business where sales is important, which is literally every business, is finding that rock star salesperson who isn't the company owner, yet they know how to convey the value and have these conversations.

And with verbal communication like that, there's so many ways for it to either get screwed up or just not be done as well as it could be. And I'm sure you guys have heard about Air.ai at this point, right? And listeners out there, if you haven't heard of it, just go to Air.ai and you'll kind of get the idea. But it's this artificial intelligence, cold calling, sales calling software that does a surprisingly effective job. So it seems, according to their demos at talking to cold leads and getting them to convert in some cases.

But even if it doesn't do a great job, it's AI. It's not a human, so it can go like 24/7. It doesn't require all of the maintenance that a human being requires, but the downside is that it's very expensive. I don't know exactly what the price is. I've heard like 100 grand or something to get it set up. So it kind of prices out a lot of smaller land investors like us who just don't have that money or aren't willing to spend that money.

But the interesting thing is I don't know if either you guys are subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, but ChatGPT, not long ago it unveiled this new thing where you can now, like if you have the app on your phone, you can just verbally talk to it. And when it replies to you, it sounds stunningly real, like a human. Like there's pauses for breaths and it has all the normal… Like, if I didn't know any better, I would probably think I was talking to a human.

So I have a feeling this kind of technology is going to get way cheaper a lot faster than a lot of us might think. So just because Air.ai might be super expensive today, I'm willing to that in the next year there's going to be probably a lot of other companies coming up with this technology for a lot cheaper.

And I was just talking this morning to Tim Krause on Facebook Messenger and he was telling me he's been using ChatGPT to do like cold calling training where you get on ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I'm a land investor, I'm sending out direct mail to people who want to sell their property,” blah, blah, blah. Just explain what you're trying to do and ask it to do role-playing with you as one of these motivated sellers. And you can pretend you're talking to somebody on the phone about selling their property.

And I haven't tried this yet, I literally just heard about it an hour before we got on this call. But point is, I think this kind of technology is going to come pretty quickly in terms of price going way down and just becoming more widely available. And if it does, that's a huge deal because that's a big potential pain point of finding a great human being to do the job that now you don't need a human being for anymore. So I'm excited to see where that goes.

Ajay: Yeah, so that's super interesting. I actually had my poor executive assistant, her name is Kaylee, she's a rock star, but I had her spend like an entire week looking up different conversational AI platforms to see if we could implement this. And there were some more affordable options—that don’t exist yet today—but there were some affordable options on the horizon is kind of the sentiment that I got. Like everybody we talked to, there's a lot of appointment-setting AI out there. So, hey, if you just want us to message and email and text and DM people, they're setting allegedly an alarming amount of appointments, which could be good if you wanted to go like cold traffic to a call with a lead manager, for example.

But from what I understand, one of the big vendors we chatted with was WooSender. I'm not advocating, I've not worked with these guys yet, so I don't have testament, but we took a couple of calls with their team and they said they were going to have a semi-affordable conversational phone option. I think it was December and I feel like anytime I've talked to a tech company, they're always a few months behind whatever the goal is. So probably sometime in Q1, it'll actually come out.

But allallegedly, one of their biggest clients is the Army. They use them for recruiting. And so I'm like, all right. I mean, if that statement is true, I trust this company a bit more, I think, and so super interesting, but I think you're totally right, Seth, and there's an element, like, in any business, where more vendors and more competition makes things more affordable to end users. So I think you're totally right that over a long enough time horizon, we're definitely going to see prices come down to where the average Joes can afford some good old conversational AI in our back pockets.

Seth: Yeah. Or even if you eliminate this whole need for an audible voice to be talking, which is huge if you can, but what if we just limit this to chatbots and that's it? I saw Rocket Print’s QR code you can put on postcards where it generates a text message and sends it to your number so that they opt in and then you can talk to them freely because they just opted in and it's not a cold text anymore.

But what if you get one of these sales chatbots on that platform where now we're back to just texting and it's fine because they opted in and you don't even need to worry about the human element. I mean, they've got chatbots out there right now for that that are doing a fairly effective job. There are a lot of options out there that are available today and will get way better as time goes on.

Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. That's fascinating.

Chris: That sounds like a really good idea. Who knows where AI is going to go next in three to five years? It's going to look so different than what it does now.

Ajay: Yeah. Have you guys seen the Terminator? I think that's probably a pretty good picture of what.

Seth: Yeah, I feel like every other AI conversation I have, somebody mentions Skynet and how it's going to become sentient and take over and nuke the whole world.

Ajay: Yeah, it may happen, it may not. I think we've had this conversation before, actually, Seth. I'm like, man, I just really need to not think about things outside of my control. If it happens, man, what am I going to do against a nuclear AI? I'm just one dude. I'm going to keep flipping land until I can't, you know what I mean?

Seth: Sounds like a healthy way to think through it, which is not the way that I do it.

But back to Chris. So, Chris, when you consider the things you're good at, what do you think is your unfair advantage in this business? I know I've heard you say, you're pretty good on the phone, which I actually find really interesting because you don't sound like a slick salesperson to me. You sound like just a very normal guy who's just kind of down to earth and you are who you are and maybe that's why you're so good on the phone.

But would you say that's one of your unfair advantages. Or is there anything else that you think you're just naturally good at that has lent itself well to your success at this point?

Chris: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that benefits me, just being on the phone and sounding like a regular guy. You could tell a salesman as soon as they pick up the phone and just by their demeanor. I can tell a salesman. Maybe not everybody can, but I just feel like it helps to say, “Yes, ma'am,” “No, sir,” just be a regular person.

Besides that superpower, it's probably like having a good family around me. There's no way I could do what I do without having a great wife. And my mom and dad are close. My in-laws are close. Like, we have a lot of help with the kids, and I have great kids, so I feel like I have a leg up on some people by just that fact.

But as far as superpowers go, I don't have any superpowers. I'm like a regular guy that's literally in construction for 15 years. So I don't think you actually need superpowers in this kind of stuff.

Seth: Well, I don't know, man. It requires a person to take a lot of action and be intentional about the way they're living their life to get where you are. So I'm sure you do have something that allows you to get here. Maybe it might not seem that special to you, but when you think of…

Actually, that's a good question. How much time do you spend working in this business? Like, how many hours a week does it take for you to run this business where you're making multiple six figures a year?

Chris: Probably an average of 30 hours a week. I mean, that's actually in my office, like, working. I send text messages and emails from my phone while I'm out, but, like, actual office time, maybe 30 hours a week.

Seth: Okay, and then you have a team, I'm assuming, or how many people are on your team and what do they do?

Chris: I have one part-time employee, and she does a lot of administration stuff. She does kind of like my bookkeeping. We have a thing called The Deal Sheet, which is just an Excel file that keeps track of everything. She handles that, she handles coordination between sellers or buyers and title companies.

She was my title agent at the title company I used a hundred times, so they ended up closing down her branch. So I ended up hiring her part time. And she also now works for the clerk's office in one of the counties that I do work in. So I kind of have, like, an inside scoop there, too, which is pretty cool. But it's just me and her.

Seth: I know we've sort of talked about you mentioned in passing the acquisition and sale price, but what are your average deals? What do they look like? How much are you buying for? How much are you selling for and are there any deals that stick out as like this one was amazing. Like this was the biggest or the coolest deal I did.

Chris: Yeah, my deals are kind of all over the place, so it's hard to give an average. I guess if I had to give an average, it'd be like buy for 50, sell for 70-ish. But those averages are just kind of whack because here's a deal. Let's see. I bought for 341,000, sold for 384,000. So I made…

Seth: Double closings, right?

Chris: Yeah, double closed it. But it throws my averages way off.

Same thing here's one that I bought for 320, sold for 355. So I made 35 grand on that one. But they were all double closes. But yeah, my average profit this year for 2023 is probably closer to 20,000. And I'll probably do the same amount of volume, about 40 by the end of the year.

As far as the deals that stick out, a few months ago, I bought 70 acres with the intention to subdivide. I think it was like 345,000. I thought I could break it up and sell it for around maybe 550,000. I thought I could make around 200,000, but it was going to take a bank loan and probably four to six months to sell everything off. But before I got the bank loan, I had another investor approach me.

And he basically just bought it from me wholesale. And I made 100 grand on that, bought for 345, sold to them for 445, and just got in and out and then deployed that money into other deals instead of waiting around for the subdivide.

Seth: Yeah. So this whole double closing approach that you take, so it kind of changes things. It does change things a lot in terms of how much you can offer for properties and that kind of thing.

So a few questions on that. I'm assuming you're getting like just a straight up simple purchase agreement signed with X number of days or months to get the thing closed. Is that accurate? Like, how much time are you giving yourself to find that other buyer and make it happen?

Chris: Yeah, usually 45 to 60 days. It's just a regular purchase agreement. I have like a semi-escape clause in there. And if I feel like the person is going to be complicated, I'll just say the earnest money is non refundable and I'll sacrifice the $500 to $1,500 to them if I feel like they're going to try to sue me or something if I don't end up buying it in the end.

Seth: Yeah. And how often does this not work out? Like what percentage of the time do you sign it for? 45 to 60 days. And it's like, oh, couldn't make it happen. And why not make it 180 days? Why keep it there or even 90 days or something like that.

Chris: Most people that want to sell are like, looking for that's. The reason they come to me is because they want the cash quickly, I guess, or they say yes because they're ready for that money, most people. So I don't think they would go for them.

That's probably just limiting beliefs, but I would imagine a lot of people would push back on 180 days closing time. That's kind of ridiculous.

Ajay: Can I chime in here? So, Chris, we do quite a few double closings on our team, and I honestly will say it's a little bit of a limiting belief. Something we do to gauge whether they'll go for a long closing time is set the expectations before you even make the offer.

So my acquisitions manager, Veronica, she's phenomenal at this. She'll be like, “Hey, did our lead manager, Nikki, have a chance to say much about the company and what we do?”

“No, not really.”

“Okay, got it.”

Like, we're specialized in extremely simple transactions. We want things to be so easy for everyone to do. Typically, how this plays out is we're going to have this conversation should we come to terms. We're going to go over a really simple agreement today. Typically, it takes us about X amount of time to get this done, and we'll insert either 90 or 180 days, depending on the deal, depending on the location, depending on the price, all that type of stuff. But I think her de facto is 90. But we've done 180 before.

And you just set all those expectations up front and then people aren't surprised later on when they see it in the contract. But if they are going to be surprised, it'll be addressed right then and there.

So something that's worked really well for us is why does it take 90 days? Well, typically we want to get some tests done and we may partner with another investor, and so we may need to market the property and blah, blah, blah. And if they're okay with that, great. And if they do need the money, they'll tell you, hey, really, I'm just looking to get this done in the next 30 days. Got it. Now I know I can only offer them a flip price, though. It's going to be really hard for me to double close with 15 margin in a compressed timeline, unless my market's really hot or I'm really good at marketing.

But I'll tell you, you'd be surprised at how many sellers will go for 90 days as long as you just set the expectation up front.

Chris: Yeah, that's a really good point. I actually do that sometimes as well. If it's just like a crazy good price, I'll put 30 days on it because I want to close it as possible.

Ajay: Yeah, you don't want to lose the deal.

Chris: It's like, is this really a deal? Let me just test it out. Yeah, it's always a little bit longer. I've just never gone all the way up to 180 days. If it gets past 45 and I haven't even got any nibbles on it, I pretty much know that it's not a deal at that point. I would assume if I'm doing like 400-acre farms or 1000-acre ranch, I would go a lot longer just to give my agent time to market it.

And at that point we have a clause in our contract when an agent has to market it to just give me the right to do that. But I try not to send that purchase agreement too much because that definitely scares people off when they see that power of attorney or that you're going to be marketing the property to other people. I guess on a larger property, that's probably not as big of a deal. But when you're person to person trying to buy it from somebody and you tell them that you're going to immediately go market it, it's kind of off-putting to them.

Seth: I think it is a little bit in how you explain it to them. If you just kind of explain like, this is normal, this is how we network with their nationwide list of buyers across the country and we do this and we did that, and the goal is to get you the price that you want and just kind of, I guess, salesmanship, sort of. I hesitate to say that because I don't really consider myself good at that either. But I think it can be verbally conveyed in a way if you just kind of know how to frame it right.

Ajay: Yeah. And I would also say, I think some of the best advice I ever got from one of my coaches, Jenny Hudsmith, she said to me, it's only a big deal if you make it a big deal, you know?

And so when we're conveying things if in our subconscious, in the back of our head, we're like, oh my gosh, this is like this big old thing and like a big deal, it's going to convey that way. But if you're just like, “Hey, you see, in clause eight we have an assignment marketing clause in case we shop it around with some retail partners or investors. This just allows us to do that. Just need to legally be able to show folks the deal and market it with your permission.”

Something to that effect. More casual. I'd polish that a bit. But if you don't make it a big deal kind of exactly what Seth just said, I find that sellers will surprisingly just go with it. I can't remember the verbiage you just used, Seth, but it was really good. Something to the effect of if you just frame it up right.

No, I mean, you're a salesman if I've ever known one. Seth, you sold us on coming here.

Seth: I was wondering, Chris, a lot of land flippers will follow this idea of buy for 25%, sell for half, or buy for 40%, sell for 60% or 80%, that kind of thing. It sounds like you're not necessarily adhering to that. Right? Like, if you see a property that the market value is 400 grand, given that your money is not getting tied up in this thing ever to begin with, you're just double closing it. How do you decide, okay, this is the offer I'm going to make to that person. It'll be this versus the market value.

Chris: Yeah. I use LandWatch for a lot of my comps, and if I don't feel comfortable with that, I'll make calls to local Realtors and just kind of explain what I do. And some of them want to hear from me, and some of them don't want to hear from me. But I do feel like people abuse that a lot with Realtors. They're calling them all the time, asking them for comps, and then never talking to them again. So I try not to do that.

But I've also worked with a lot of Realtors that will sell my off-market properties if I put it under contract, they'll bring a buyer. I'll still pay commissions to them, and they're okay with the double close. It just depends on who the agent is, and you got to explain that to them.

I feel like more and more agents are kind of getting on board with all that creative investor stuff because they have to now. They can't just slap something on the MLS and have it sold in 20 days.

I honestly don't even remember your original question. I just went off on that random tangent.

Seth: Yeah, mainly just trying to figure out is there a standard you're following in terms of if the property is worth X amount, say, $100,000? My offer to them is going to be this, so that I have this much of a delta through which to make my money.

Is there some model you're trying to follow, or is it just kind of whatever feels good based on your conversation with the seller? Or are they getting close to market value and you're just marking it up to 20 grand or something like that? Or how do you think through that?

Chris: I wish I had some kind of formula to follow, but it is almost like a gut feeling at this point. I'm sure a year ago, I would have been a lot more data-driven and, like, hard evidence on the stuff that I put under contract. But now I've pretty much sold a property in every county in the state, so I know how long stuff takes.

And I subscribe to all these Realtor mailings, and they'll send me an email when something's available, and then when something goes under contract and I can't kind of see what's moving in that area, but yeah, it's just a feeling. If I think I can make 25 grand on something by putting it under contract and selling it pretty quickly, I'll do it. I think I did one that was like $8,000 a few weeks ago. So I'm not too good to do the smaller stuff either, because it pays the bills.

Seth: Yeah, interesting. So I wonder if you were to try to do what most land investors do or land flippers do when they're doing this blind offer thing where they're making offers for 40% of market value or something like that.

I don't know, do you think you'd struggle at that because you're just not used to doing that? You're used to giving sellers a lot closer to market value and what they want and that's how deals are able to happen. They'll probably severely limit what you're able to do if you were only to do these.

Or like, what if you did start way lower and then when they scoff at it, then you bring it up because you've got that margin baked in there anyway. Like you're ready to go there, you're just not starting there.

Chris: Yeah, I always start with 40% to 50%. The number of people who go with that is very slim. I could have just done the great deals, but instead of doing 80 deals to date, in 18 months, I would have done like 25. It doesn't make any sense to me.

I don't know, the amount of deals that I've bought for under 50% might be 20 to 25 of the 80 that I've bought. And the 80 that I've bought have been way more revenue than the 20 that's 20 smaller ones that I was able to buy for 40% of market value and flip it.

Seth: Yeah. You know what's interesting to me is it feels like with the way you run your business, how the phone is a big part of it and texting has been a big part of it, both of which can be very time-consuming and kind of mentally taxing in different ways. And yet you're still making tons of money and you're working 30 hours a week.

How does that work? Part of me would think, oh, man, Chris is a slave to his business. Like it kind of takes so much time, but it's not taking so much time. Seems like it's fairly laid back, if anything. So how does that work? Do you just only limit yourself to certain phone conversations that you know are going to be high value? Or maybe it's because the conversations you have, you're always willing to offer so much so they pan out and end up happening a lot more often than not. Any thoughts on that?

Chris: I don't really look at it that way. I send maybe 2,000 to 3,000 texts per month and then out of that I'm able to get two to three deals.

Seth: And this is you sending all these texts, right? You don't have an assistant doing it?

Chris: My assistant does help me on it, but I mean, it's Launch Control. You send a couple of batches, he might send 300, 450 a day. Yeah, I'll send them at 9 in the morning, and I'll sit in here until about lunchtime responding to people. After that, after they've been responded to, like, you know, the three or four that are actually serious. And then you can continue the conversation either that afternoon, tomorrow, or whenever.

Usually I'll tell people, hey, can I check the property out and get back with you tomorrow or the next day? And they'll say yes. And then that'll give me enough time to make some phone calls or get on Land ID and do my due diligence and come up with an offer that I want to offer them.

Ajay: This is so interesting, Chris, because I feel like I know. So there's like two types of investors that are in Launch Control. I feel like there's the ones that are in it themselves, and then there's the ones that wouldn't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

And what I'll tell you is, unfortunately, I'm part of school number two. I sent out a batch of probably 200 or so just to get a lay of the land and then immediately hired people to do it all for me, because I was like, I don't want to be in here.

I will tell you, though, every investor that I know that is willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it, like, you're talking about converts at a way higher rate, because we have built an assembly line, which was awesome. We're not actively doing it now, but when we were, we built an assembly line that had very, very regular deal flow, but our conversions were probably a quarter of what yours are.

And I think a big reason for that, Chris, is you're just always going to respond with a level of urgency and specificity that somebody who isn't an owner, frankly, just wouldn't more often than not. Like, I know, Jaren Barnes's wife, she is somebody who, similar to you, rolled up her sleeves and pretty similar conversion rates. They would get a deal for about every one, text messages or something crazy. And I'm like, how are you doing that?

And it's because she's not afraid to roll her sleeves up. So I just want to commend you and praise you, Chris, because, number one, not a lot of people are willing to do it, but more importantly, number two, the ones that are can really get ahead. So you got a really cool personality to be willing to get your hands into it and really just crank, man.

So, anyways, just wanted to point out that there's just a huge, huge... I think, Seth, you asked a good question. There's some uniqueness and superpower in what you're doing, Chris, to be able to show up at that level, always have that urgency, treat these leads well, and convert them very regularly.

Chris: Yeah. I appreciate it if you would have seen what I was doing for work three years ago, you'd realize why I don't mind this little bit of work that I have. This is nothing compared to digging trenches and crawling around in attics, crawl spaces, and running wires. So I'm super grateful for this opportunity.

Seth: So I'm curious because it sounds like you're a very important individual for your business, which is very common. I'd say most land flippers are in that same boat. But, say if you were tasked with the goal of tripling your net income by this time next year, how are you going to do that? What would be your plan for making that happen?

Chris: When I was at the Land Unconference a few weeks ago, this is the thought that just kept coming through my mind. Like, how do I scale this? It's impossible to scale what I do now without some drastic changes.

So I don't think I'm going to make any drastic changes this year besides subdividing a little more and going for a little bit bigger deals. Like, stop worrying about these $8,000 to $10,000 deals and don't do anything under $15,000 to $20,000 and try to do the same amount of volume.

But if I wanted to triple, I guess I would bite the bullet and hire somebody for $80,000 to $100,000 a year just to be like, an absolute rock star, which I don't know how I would find them. I'm sure I could figure it out, but I think that would be the way to go. Keep my $40,000-something employee, hire an $80,000 employee to kind of replace me in some of the things that's probably a good salesman but doesn't sound salesy, and then just see how we could all mesh together.

I would also have to figure out, like, double closing is great, but when you're trying to do a bunch of double closing really fast, that's going to be so overwhelming. So I would figure out how to raise some capital or partner with people with money to scale up as well as doing bigger deals. Also do double or 1.5 times the volume. I guess that's how I would do it.

Seth: Yeah.

Chris: I don't know that I want that, though. Not immediately, anyway.

Seth: You wouldn't want to triple your income or net income? Of course I'd want to triple it, but I don't know if I'd want that headache right now, and I don't think that I'm in the position to do that right now.

And I'd like to grind for one more year, do bigger and bigger deals, get into some subdividing, possibly look into entitlement. I didn't even know what entitlements were six months ago. So it's just a whole different lens to look at these land deals through. I've always been too wholesale-happy on these subdivides, and I've been wholesaling them, but this year I'm going to do a few of them. I'm in the middle of one right now.

I bought 40 acres for $60,000 in Little Town in Mississippi, and I got that split up into five pieces. I bought for 60, I should be able to sell for, like, 175-ish, or I could wholesale it for 120.

Ajay: These entitlement deals are super interesting. Chris, just to boil down what you said, I think Alex Hormozi says, when you’re scaling a business, there's two options: you can do more and you can do better.

So more wholesale would be more, bigger deals would be better, subdivides would be better, entitlements would be better. Both of them result in more money.

I will say it's just so interesting. We are currently underwriting our first entitlement deal right now that I think I don't want to jinx it, but I think we're going to be able to do. The price is within the realm of possibility, and we've already gotten, like, preliminary engineering studies done, and we even got a verbal from the city and the county that the plat should get approved. so a few more stars need to align. we got to get some stuff in writing, but it's this really pretty lot about an hour from Dallas.

We actually drove to it on Sunday. Today's Tuesday, so two days ago, we drove the property and just paper lots, like, just doing entitlements. There's potential for, like, a seven-figure spread on this. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, you're telling me I could make how much money in one deal?

But there are a bunch of contingencies. You might have to sink $10,000 to $40,000 in due diligence for it to lead nowhere. And you're contingent on these builders basically being end buyers. It's a very different business model, and it takes so much longer. So you could send out a text batch today and make $20,000 in a month to 45 days.

With these entitlement deals, it could be somewhere between six and 18 months before you make any money. So it's a different game. But it's been really interesting to think through as you're thinking about getting into subdivides and entitlements. What does that look like baked into your existing strategy?

Chris: Yeah, it's a good addition. I wouldn't want to do that full time because I don't know that much about it. But I agree with you. And then, once you make seven figures on something, your brain is going to be broken.

Seth: Chris, I've got a question for you. What would you say has been the hardest part of this business for you? Look back the past year and a half you've been doing this. What are the biggest challenges, the struggles? Has there ever been a point where you didn't know if you're going to make it? Does anything ever tempt you to quit this business? Tell us about the hard stuff.

Chris: Yeah, I've never been tempted to quit. I'm a worrier like you are, so, I mean, every couple of weeks, I'm worrying about something. There are times in this business where you don't do anything for a month or two, and it is scary, but if you look at it over a long enough time horizon, you realize there's nothing that's going to beat this. So just chill out. Just like me in the holidays right now. I'm sure everybody's feeling the same way. Nobody's worried about your land, right? So have a good holidays and chill out.

Seth: I think I've heard this every year, by the way, in terms of the holiday lull, it's not an uncommon thing.

Chris: I was kind of freaking out last year about it. This year I've decided to just enjoy myself, appreciate what I have. But yeah, I struggle with like, “nobody does it better than me”-type syndrome. That's why I'm struggling a little bit to scale.

Seth: Yeah, I'm very familiar with that.

Chris: My biggest problem was scaling. Like, how do I scale with my limited amount of money? Then I realized how to do that was double closing. And now I'm back to my biggest problem is how to scale, which is that there is no trick to it anymore. I've got to start offloading some stuff that I personally do. And then also staying focused. I called you Saturday about a random warehouse that's for sale. I need to stop doing that kind of stuff and just focus on my land business.

Last year I was considering or my plan was do the land business, buy one or two long-term assets every year, and then by the end of ten years, I'll have a bunch of either rentals or commercial rentals or whatever I end up buying. But I'm really just trying to stay focused on my land flipping this year. Do a little bit bigger deals, do some subdivides. Don't go chasing something every time you see a potential deal that isn't land.

Seth: So you're thinking next five to ten years from now, you want to have like X number of, I don't know, triple net lease, commercial properties, rental properties, or something like that?

Chris: Yeah, I have two residential rental properties right now and I hate them.

Seth: Sounds like a good future plan to keep getting more of those!

Chris: That's why the warehouse was so appealing. Like a triple net lease just sounds super appealing to me, but it just seems riskier. I mean, you have one tenant in this massive warehouse, if he goes under, like, you're just screwed. And you got to wait around for the next guy to move into there.

But if you can get a five- to ten-year lease on it and you basically just get checks every month and you're not worried about the maintenance or the stupid phone calls, that just seems like where it's at to me.

Seth: Yeah.

Chris: As far as like, ten years, I don't even know. I feel like AI is going to take over by year five, and everything's going to look so different that I can't even plan ten years ahead right now. Especially for the land business. This is going to look so much different in five years with all the technology that's coming out. I just hope that all the inefficiencies are still there in the market so the little guys still have a chance to make some money.

Seth: Five years ago, for the first time ever, I put together free mastermind groups for people in the Land Investing Masterclass. And one of those groups is still alive and functioning very well today. And I was invited to sit in on their five-year anniversary mastermind meeting. It's really cool to see that that was working out, but these are all really high-level guys who've done awesome things and was talking to them.

I like to ask these kind of questions sometimes, kind of because they're ridiculous questions and just because it makes people think a little bit. But if you saw the writing on the wall and, like, a year from now, the land business is going to be destroyed, like, it's not going to work anymore. Nothing is going to work. You have to figure something else out, diversify, get your money into something else, figure out some other business. What would you do?

I feel like we've had these conversations a few times, Chris, where it's like we sort of are implying that five years from now, things will not be anything like they are today. Who knows how the land business will continue to work. So, like, if you had to speed up that learning curve and figure out something else really quickly, what would you do?

I guess, Ajay. That's a good question for you, too. I'd be curious to hear your input.

Ajay: Yeah, my answer is going to be boring, guys. I'm such a nerd. I just love business so much. I would get into either mergers and acquisitions as, like, a brokerage. Like, I would broker businesses, or I would just start a private equity company and I'd start buying them myself. I just love the game of business so much, and I love working with really strong operators. That's what I would go to.

And I think business, regardless of industry, will always exist. Kind of agnostic, right? And there are good principles. I think we were talking about how everything is sales and marketing. Right, Seth? And so if you understand that stuff, you can provide value in any business vehicle.

So yeah, that's where I'd go.

Chris: You sound like you've been listening to a lot of Alex Hormozi.

Ajay: Always, man. That guy is always in my ears.

Chris: I just love his podcast. Like, the way he breaks stuff down, it makes it so simple to understand business. I feel like I've got a master's degree in business just from listening to his podcast.

Ajay: No kidding.

Seth: Yeah, I think he's, like, one of the highest value YouTubers I know of in the business world. Every video is just so good. I don't know how he does that, how he finds the time. For me, it takes a solid week to make a five-minute video that nobody's going to watch, but he just whips out these things day after day, and they're awesome. He's got great books and everything.

But what would you do, Chris, in terms of if you can't do mergers and acquisitions like Ajay, what are you going to do? Or maybe you can, I don’t know.

Chris: I already picked it. I would do something similar, but I wouldn't even know where to get started with what Ajay's talking about. I would probably start a couple small businesses, and just with the amount of business knowledge that I've picked up over the last year and a half, just from doing this kind of stuff, I feel like I can scale them a little bit better.

Like, even if it was an electrical company or some kind of service company, because I feel like there's a huge shortage of service companies out there that are worth a crap. I'm sure if you guys have had to call an electrician or literally any kind of tradesman, you know that you got to call like eight different people and the people aren't going to show up, and there's just all kinds of problems. So I feel like any decent construction or service-based business should be doing well right now.

Seth: Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I see this all the time, and it's probably true in any business, like you mentioned, Chris, but in self-storage, it's a big deal. Take something like grocery stores or consignment shops or anything. Fill in the blank. There are so many businesses out there that are run by people who just don't understand marketing. They don't understand how to get their name out there, they don't understand how to use social media. There are just so many missed opportunities. It's kind of painful to watch.

And you could step into pretty much any existing business and find all kinds of ways to boost sales pretty quickly just by turning on different things that have never been tried before. So that is kind of the cool thing. Once you have run a business like this, it's kind of like the ultimate resume builder in a way, in that all of a sudden you have experience with all of these highly relevant things that pretty much every business needs. As long as you have some of that knowledge and have this go-get-em attitude, you can get a lot done in pretty much any business operation out there.

If you're looking at somebody who's looking at getting into the land business today in the current environment we're in, what would be your biggest word of advice for them?

Chris: Yeah, there's definitely no better time to get in than right now. I don't think it's going to get that much better in the future. So I think there's still a ton of opportunity out there, and I would just start. Everybody says it or thinks that you need a bunch of money to start, you really don't. I did have $15,000 to buy that first piece of property, but if I didn't have that and I would have done a little research, I could have wholesaled that for 25, no problem, and made $10,000 off of using Google and my cell phone.

So if they want it bad enough, just start. Sacrifice two, three months of your life or your evenings and do something like I did. Or if you have a few thousand dollars, look into actual marketing, send some direct mail, pull some data, get some cell phone numbers and text them from your personal cell phone. There's opportunity out there, especially if you're stuck in a $40,000 to $60,000 job and you hate it. And if you just want to make some side money, you can do that with just a few hours a week and your cell phone and a couple of hundred bucks. I really think there's some opportunity to make chunks of cash like that for people.

Seth: Yeah, for sure.

So I want to ask a few non-business-related questions, sort of just to learn a little bit more about you. Maybe our audience can understand more of where you're coming from and how you think.

So, question number one, and I know we've talked a little bit about worrying, which you and I are both very good and skilled at doing. What is your biggest fear?

Chris: I would say just losing my family or just not being able to provide for my family. I love my kids so much, and I just enjoy the age that they're at right now and just not being able to… or just saying or doing something wrong that negatively affects them one day.

I worry about that a lot. I worry about going to heaven. Am I being a good Christian? Am I too worried about money? Am I too worried about worldly stuff? That's the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.

Seth: Yeah, I know what you mean, man. There's a lot of stuff like, you just don't know what you don't know. And I know that living on earth is hard. There's so many opportunities to screw stuff up. I mean, it'll just happen to you. And I'm very familiar with that. So I totally get it. I appreciate you sharing.

So question number two. What are you most proud of?

Chris: Kind of the same thing. My kids. This business that I've built, the business that I built before that, my dad was self-employed and my grandpa was self-employed, my uncles are self-employed.

And I just always knew that I wasn't going to work a nine to five for the rest of my life. And so I'm super proud of just being able to get out of that because I have a lot of friends that have those 40 to 60 hours a week jobs that they hate, and it's hard to even talk to them about it because I don't want to make them feel bad for having it. And I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. So we don't even talk about work anymore because I don't want them to feel like I'm better than them or anything because I was in that situation, like, less than two years ago.

Yeah, definitely proud of my family, proud of my kids. My son just got done with his first soccer season and didn't score a goal all season until the very last game. I was like, man, I've waited for that for a long time.

Seth: Wow. Did he do, like, a celebratory dance or anything or what was that like?

Chris: No, he's too cool for that. He's four.

I don't know how many people know this, but I was, like, getting choked. I'm the coach on the field, and I was, like, getting choked up a little bit. Like, all right, pull it together. Just a soccer ball. I can't imagine what I'm going to be like at his graduation.

Seth: Oh, I know, man. I think about that all the time. I can't imagine my kids getting married. My kids, like, moving out of the house, going to college if they go there, just all that stuff. I mean, just them going to preschool was a little bit of an emotional ordeal. Yeah, I hear you.

So last question here. Suppose you just got $100 million wired to your bank account. You're not allowed to stay on your current career path, so you can't continue doing land or real estate on any level, but you can do anything else you want for the rest of your life. What would you do?

Chris: I've thought about this question so many times after all your podcast episodes. I haven't changed it recently. What I would do is I guess it's a little bit real estate-related, but not really. I would buy a huge piece of land and start, like, a sports complex. I just think that would be really cool to have.

I play a lot of soccer. I play a lot of pickleball now because I'm getting old.

Seth: That’s what you're supposed to do when you get old—play pickleball, right?

Chris: Yeah, pickleball is so much fun. You guys don't even know.

Ajay: I play some pickleball. I love it.

Chris: Really? We'll have to get together sometime.

Ajay: Let's do it.

Chris: But yeah, I would start a big sports complex and soccer fields, indoor pickleball, tennis, baseball fields. Just try to bring something to do for young people in this area because there's a handful of sports stuff around here. But I just feel like there's a lot more room for improvement.

And when kids don't have anything to do, it's like, when they get in trouble. So you raise kids through, like, junior high and they don't have any kind of extracurricular activities, the chance of them getting in trouble is, like, way higher.

But I think that's what I would do. I just love sports. I love hanging out with kids and coaching and stuff like that, so I would do that.

Seth: Yeah. That's interesting. I wonder if most of humanity's problems boil down to people not having productive things to do with their time, or just maybe not choosing the productive thing to do, but there's something healthy about just staying busy with something that's constructive in some way. Cool, man.

Well, Chris really appreciate you coming on the show. It's great to talk to you. If people want to find out more about you, is there anything they should do? You don't have to share anything. It's not obligated, but in case you want to, now is your chance to do that. Any thoughts?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, they can reach out to me on Facebook. I don't have a big social media following or anything. I literally did this because I feel like you're my friend and I've made tons of money and you've changed my life. So I feel like if nothing else, I didn't even buy your course, so I felt like I owed you.

Seth: Well, I appreciate it, man.

Chris: I appreciate you having me on. And they can reach out to me on Facebook if they'd like to. Or I guess we could put my email in the show notes, if you want.

Seth: Absolutely. Maybe I'll find your Facebook profile and like that. Would that work?

Chris: Yeah, that'll work.

Seth: Yeah, me and Chris talked about this ahead of time. It's like, you can either give me a quarter million dollars for all your success, or you can come on the podcast and we chose this. That's worth even more than the money. I'm just kidding.

Awesome. Well, for all the listeners out there, this is episode 174. If you want to see the show notes, you can go to retipster.com/174. If you're listening on your phone, go ahead and text the word “free,” F-R-E-E, to the number 3377.

You can get on the REtipster email list. Stay up to date with everything that's happening in our community. Thanks again, everybody, for listening, and we'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? Seth Williams here. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 171, and today I get to talk with some old friends, Jaren Barnes and Drew Haney. Guys, welcome. How you doing?

Drew: Hey, guys. Doing well.

Seth: Yeah. So something I appreciated about preparing for this episode was that I didn't have to do much preparation because the conversation flow so freely with these guys. I don't have to think too hard. I just know something good is going to come out. So I don't have a whole lot of pre-scripted, pre-thought out questions, but I mainly just want to find out what's going on with you guys, what's been happening over the past year.

I know, Jaren, you've had some big new developments with the Land Maverick Society and everything that you're doing there. And Drew, you're also playing an integral role in that, in the podcast, and you guys are working together a lot. So I just wanted to find out how it's going, what you guys are doing, and what you've learned over the past twelve-ish months. So where do you want to start?

Jaren: Well, I guess I could kind of give a summary of what Land Maverick Society is. You helped give me some very strong feedback on the importance of being able to clearly articulate what we do and who we are.

So the Land Maverick Society, in a nutshell, is a community that provides everything that you need to get started in the land business and then to scale to a 100K/month model. We have kind of an ecosystem, when you buy into it, that includes training through the Land Maverick Academy, strategic partners like Supercharged Offers to handle the marketing, Pebble REI to handle the lead processing system. I have a sister company called Virtual Outsource that also provides a bunch of outsourced VA solutions and scaling automation tiers of service.

And then we have Rooster Capital, which is Drew, who is exclusively the funder for the Land Maverick Society. We fund deals between 15,000 to 250,000 per acquisition for a 50-50 split, and we buy at. So that would be a market value of 30,000 to 500,000. And we will fund deals that are more expensive than 250,000 per acquisition, but we're normally doing a 60-40 split in our favor because there's more capital risk.

So in a nutshell, that's who we are. It includes a lot of really nifty kind of perks, I guess you could say. I give out my cell phone number to everybody in the community, and I'm pretty much outside of Saturday I'm just a text away for anybody who has any urgent needs. So direct access to me.

We have kind of a video database called the Land Maverick Academy. But really the big value is the one-on-one training that you can have with me. So I walk you through everything from picking a market, sending out the mail, getting started with Supercharged Offers. When you subscribe to the Land Maverick Academy, you also get a build out a carbon copy of my Pebble environment. It's based on the starter plan, but it's like six months included.

So when you sign up, you get six months of Pebble included in your membership and all that. So it's pretty much like everything that you need to crush it as a land investor.

Drew: And I just want to brag about Jaren for a little bit. I did some research, and from the competitors that I pulled, he is the most affordable one-on-one coach by less than half. So I've told him multiple times to increase prices. He refuses to, and he's doing a great service to the land flipping community. So thank you, Jaren.

Seth: It sounds like this is one-on-one coaching, right? Or is it group coaching or both?

Jaren: At this stage, it's one-on-one coaching. Yep. So Tuesday through Thursday I have availability on Calendly, and maybe by the time this launches, it's going to be a different scheduling link. But people can jump anytime on my calendar.

If I don't show availability, I intentionally bookmark the ends of the week, Monday and Friday to do makeup sessions or to squeeze people in, and I walk them through every step of the process.

Seth: Yeah. So it sounds like this is just like one-off coaching calls. Or is this like a six-month engagement or twelve months or what does a coaching relationship look like?

Jaren: Yeah. So it's membership-based. I would look at us not necessarily as kind of pigeonholed as a coach. I would look at us as a membership to a mastermind or a community, and then coaching is a footnote of that. That's a part of the full suite of services and value we bring to the table.

But to answer your question, it's an annual membership. So on the front end, there's a larger cost, let's say. I don't want to necessarily timestamp myself and throw out numbers because that may change in the future. But then the annual membership renewal fee is $5,000 a year.

Drew: Does that include access to you, Jaren?

Jaren: Yes.So as long as you're an active member in good standing, you have direct access to me, like forever and ever.

The long-term goal for us as a community is to be partnering with members of the Land Maverick Society. So our goal is to fund 40% to 60% of all of the people that we are training and are part of our community. And again, we have resources in place to help them not only get started, but then to scale to 100k/month model.

Seth: So basically you're paying for this annual membership and whether you use Jaren or not directly, like what? I want access to you that's available. That's just part of the package.

Jaren: Yeah. And I would very much encourage people to, at least in the beginning for sure, if they're getting started to meet with me, if not once a week, several times a week, in order to get a strategy going and get a game plan and what have you.

A lot of, in the beginning, especially the bulk of one-on-one training sessions, are revolving around running comps. Running comps and due diligence. I actually call back sellers with people, so I showcase how the conversation works. All that.

Seth: Yeah. Is there a particular thing like you just talked about, running comps, calling back sellers, picking markets, that kind of thing. Is there any particular line item or task that you find people need the most help with? Like a place where people get the most stuck the most often, or is it just kind of all over the place?

Jaren: It's mostly comps, yeah. Market research is pretty straightforward, at least initial due diligence. We run through Land ID. We have a six-step checklist within Land ID that we run through each time.

But comps is more of an art than it is a science and you have to develop a feel for it. I actually had somebody who is in our community come from kind of the luxury real estate world, and she was one of the top performing agents in her market, but really struggled to wrap her head around land comps because it's kind of like you get to kind of a certain amount of surety and then you just kind of go in the direction of being conservative. You just kind of merge conservative.

We verify comps and as we go through the process, we get land specialized agents to come in and provide list amounts and stuff. So as we move through the pipeline of processing leads, we do have lots of checks and balances in place to ensure we're not making a mistake. But on the front end, we do try to call back our sellers with an offer in hand. And we're able to do that about 80% of the time with online resources, 20% of the time we have to loop in an agent before we make an for.

Seth: Yeah. Interesting.

Do you ever get calls or just people who want your help because they're doing the direct mail thing and the responses just aren't coming back or the deals aren't coming out of that? And if so, are there any typical problems that you see that there are things that are going wrong? It's like, okay, fix this problem and then you'll start to get those responses.

Jaren: I think a big key, at least right now at the time that we're recording, is pulling from First American Title data. So when I first got started in the land space, I was actually working with you at REtipster when I ran this comparison.

The two leading competitor data service providers were DataTree and AgentPro 24/7. AgentPro 24/7 pulls its information from Black Knight. DataTree pulls its information from First American Title. AgentPro 24/7 evolved into a company called Sitex Pro, and then the market share, when that happened, went to a company called Prycd. And Prycd pays for API access into DataTree. So they're getting First American Title information secondhand.

And what that translates to is there's what I call kind of like an “artificial saturation” taking place where if you just diversify where you're pulling your data from, you'll get a competitive advantage. So pulling from PropStream, Versium, Supercharged Offers, kind of anybody that's not First American Title, is going to give you a competitive edge.

And we've seen it across dozens of different land companies that I've helped kind of oversee in the evolution of, I guess you could say, when I first ran a comparison between AgentPro 24/7and DataTree in Citrus County, Florida. In AgentPro 24/7 there was say 30,000 record counts, but in DataTree there was only three. And there's other places within DataTree where they had more information available. But the majority of the land investing community is targeting the same owners over and over again, those, say 3,000 owners that are registered in the First American Title database.

For Citrus County, Florida, there's going to be an artificial saturation and then there's going to be a big missed opportunity for the 27,000-odd, at least at the time when I ran, were not registered in the First American Title database. Beyond that, there's a lot of house wholesalers that also pull from First American Title information. David Lecco, we've actually interviewed him at the REtipster Podcast together. The entire DealMachine operation pulls from First American Title Information. There's also a company called REI 8020, REI-something, that's like a big lead provider in that space. They also pull from First American Title data.

So people that are registered in that database are just getting hit fairly often. It creates kind of this artificial saturation where if you can just pull from a different database. And again, I'm not mad at DataTree. It's just that fact that most land investors are all collectively pulling from that source that creates this artificial saturation where if people just pull from something else, I've seen it firsthand, overseeing different land investors getting started in the land business, DataTree, they'd have lackluster results, and they come to me, why is it not working? What's going on? I say, just pull from somebody else.

And then it's back to… these days we're seeing about one deal for every 3,000 units of mail, sometimes 3,500 depending on the market. If it's a Florida or parts of Texas, Colorado, that can even be 1,000 units of mail. But generally, in most places, we're still seeing about 1,000, 3,000 to 3,500.

Drew: And another thing I want to add is that I think a lot of people, especially newer land investors, they don't have a big enough sample size. So they'll send out 2,000 mailers. They won't get any responses or any deals from it and they'll get frustrated and think it doesn't work, where in reality you need to send out significantly more, maybe 20,000 mailers to really understand what's working and what's not.

So a great example, everyone knows Dave Denniston, he mailed to Wisconsin, multiple counties in Wisconsin for the first time, didn't know what he was doing. Out of four counties, three of them bombed. One county he picked up, it was actually Door County, Wisconsin, where my parents lived. He picked up a parcel for 80 grand and then once he owned it, he sold it in one day for 200. So let's say he spent ten grand on mailers, then it's totally worth that profit was totally worth it.

And I think a lot of people aren't willing to try large numbers because they're afraid where in reality you just need a larger sample size to see the results.

Jaren: Yeah, and if you're going to grow a land business and really treat it like a business, you probably need somewhere in the vicinity of 20 to 50 grand to really do it right. Now, those that are just getting started and they want to just take some savings that they have and start using land as the vehicle to generate more working capital. That totally makes sense. But you're probably going to be a part-time investor, kind of a side hustle type of situation before you're able to really grow until you get to that point of having 20 to 50 grand plus.

Seth: So several questions came up as you were talking here on your comment there. About 20 to 50 grand. So what do you think is like the minimum viable amount now? At what point should you not even be considering getting into land because there’s not enough money.

This has changed over the years, obviously understandable. Things have gotten more competitive. It takes more to get the data and the mail and you send more and depending on what kind of marketing mediums you use and all this. But what do you think the current amount is? Like, “Have at least this much ready to go or don't even try.”

Drew: I think you can start with $0. I want someone to try it. So go on Facebook Marketplace or go on Zillow and make a thousand offers at 50% of whatever they're asking, it's impossible to not get a deal. And I still haven't had someone try it. How long would it take you to make 1,000 offers? Maybe 40 hours of work.

Seth: These would all be like assignment offers.

Drew: Yeah. So you'd need to get it under contract, I guess.

Jaren: Or a partner, a funding partner.

Drew: You would need to have someone holding your hand or you would need to have a contract. You can't just start off knowing nothing.

But once you have it under contract, you can go onto all the Facebook groups, find someone to assign it to or find someone to fund it, and then boom, with almost no money, just a bunch of sweat equity, you have a deal under contract and I still haven't… I've told that probably to five to ten people. Nobody's done it yet. Nobody wants to make a thousand offers.

Jaren: I would answer that question. I completely agree with Drew's assessment there. You can get started with no money. You can get started, partner with somebody. You can use Facebook Marketplace and Zillow or online, different directories to his point, and just sit there and really strategically have a game plan of getting out a thousand offers.

And you're probably going to get a deal. You probably end up getting a deal within your first 250 offers. So within 1,000, you're probably going to get more. But I really think it boils down to the type of land business you're doing.

If we were to talk cheaper deals, because again, our buy box is a minimum of $15,000 acquisition. When I first got started, I would routinely buy stuff for 2,500 to 15 grand, that was kind of my starting point, that is a very different response rate in terms of units of mail you need to send out, I guess deal-to-unit ratio, what have you. And if you're doing red ocean, I guess that's know Travis King is dubbed the red ocean, is kind of the cheaper stuff, that's very different. You could do a blind offer campaign right now, and if you do Mike Ferreira's strategy, you're going to have more deals than you ever want. But he's buying the stuff that's not buildable, that has crazy elevated property, that's landlocked, troublesome stuff that nobody really wants. But he has an ecosystem that he's built out in his business to consistently sell those through his buyer's list.

So if you have a model that is able to get dumpy property and sell them on terms, that's very different, you can do a blind offer direct mail campaign, you're going to have a crazy response rate. It's going to be very different. But if we're talking like our model where we try to buy kind of more, I guess blue ocean, as again, Travis King kind of coined in the space, where we're buying 15,000 up to 500,000 as kind of our go to buy box, it's a different animal. And you're going to have a different conversion rate in terms of your marketing efforts and what have you.

So I think if I were to advise somebody to have a certain dollar amount in terms of getting started, I would probably say a minimum of $10,000. And you probably want to do cheaper deals. You might be starting off with kind of doing one-off direct mail campaigns or different marketing efforts. Get a deal, have that deal sell, and then take that capital and then reinvest it in your business to develop working capital. But I think that's probably the bare minimum that I would suggest people have.

I mean, again, if you got hustle, you can put the pieces together. There are people you can partner with. You can literally go to Facebook Marketplace and sit there and make offers all day if you want to 80-20 it just, whatever they're asking, just have like a templated script that says, “Hey, I'm an investor in the area. Would you take this amount for your property?” And then just cut the list asking price in half. And it's a numbers game. As long as you get that out there, you're going to get a deal at some point.

Seth: Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying, Drew, about the way to do it for no money by just sort of pounding the pavement, digitally speaking, reminds me of the comic I just saw this morning. It was of two different tables with two guys standing behind it.

And above the tables, there were signs above them. And one of the signs says, “Hungry to win.” And there's a huge line of people at that table. The other one says, ‘Hungry to do what winning requires,” and there's nobody lined up at that table. So kind of made me think of that.

Going back to what you were saying, Jaren, about the DataTree issue. So I almost wonder if the data is either right or it's not. So it makes me think, like, is DataTree wrong? I know the filters are different among different data sources. I almost wonder if it's more of a misunderstanding of how to use the filters, or maybe I don't know what the answer is, and I don't know that I wouldn't even know how to begin split testing this in a reliable way among multiple markets, seeing what everybody's doing and how they're filtering it to know for certain what the issue is.

But is there like a secondary or alternative data source that you recommend instead of DataTree? And if so, where are you sending people?

Jaren: Yeah, so my hypothesis—don't hold me to this, because at the end of the day, I don't know. But my hypothesis behind why there's discrepancy in different databases of data collection agencies, let's say, is because certain counties aren't digitized. And certain counties, you, literally, if you want to get an update of property ownership, have to go manually to the county and pull all of that information manually. And whoever, in terms of the data collection agency, goes to that specific county first is going to have the most up-to-date information on those counties.

But it's a grind. I mean, Costar is one of the largest data collection agencies and providers in the commercial real estate space. And they take it to such an extreme that they literally hire a pilot to go back and forth across the United States, taking aerial snapshots of the ground to cross-reference their database, because there are people like me out there who don't pull a permit and notify the county that they put a fence in their backyard. So they take the aerial snapshot and then cross-reference the database in order to get the most accurate information that they can.

Nobody has a monopoly on all the data. We like that, by the way, because the discrepancy in the market is what gives us the ability to buy property at $2,000 and sell it higher. We don't want a centralized system of data information. We like that because that's why we have an opportunity as land investors. But I think that's probably what's going on there.

But to circle back to your question about who I recommend, I really like Supercharged Offers. From an 80-20 standpoint, they are more expensive, but you're buying into an ecosystem, essentially what Supercharged Offers is.

Seth: You're talking about downloading lists from Supercharged Offers and like doing your property research to them?

Jaren: So actually just becoming a full-on client with them. So Supercharged Offers will provide you data, they'll scrub the data, they'll do your branding for your website, they'll set up your letters, they do everything. You pretty much just say, here's my market criteria and list criteria, and then they take it from there.

So from an 80-20 standpoint, I like working with them a lot. At least at the time we're recording this video, this podcast, they have really solid property data information, but they're a little bit limited on the ownership demographic side of things. So if you wanted to target things like senior owners, pre-probate inherited property, there's some limitation there. I do think that they have things (actually, I know that they have some things in the works because I talked to them quite a bit) that will kind of remedy that and give us a lot more options in terms of ownership demographics to target.

But from an 80-20 standpoint, in our model, there's really three core skill sets of a land investor. We're experts at running comps and due diligence; we're experts at talking to motivated sellers on the phone and handling negotiations; and we're experts at finding, managing and vetting land specialized agents. Outside of those three core skill sets, it's noise and a distraction, and as much as possible should be automated or outsourced so that we can focus on what we do best, which is making offers and getting deals done.

So Supercharged Offers, from a system standpoint, is really a solid route to go and I would probably say 95%-plus of our community use them to process all of their mail and marketing, because when you buy into them, you are essentially buying into a fractional acquisition marketing department for your land business. So it's all on the acquisition side. But if you build out over six months with them, they do have some on-demand options where you can come and just do a one-off campaign and stuff. But if you buy into them, they will literally build everything from your website.

They do retargeting ads now they're actually starting to provide cold call leads in addition to direct mail leads. Like, it's pretty cool what they bring to the table. And they actually care about their clients, so they routinely meet with all of the people that they service on a monthly basis, sometimes twice a month basis. How's it going? What are your results like? And if you're not getting results, they work with you to try to figure out how to get things moving. So it's like buying into a fractional team, and that's why I really like that.

That being aside though, I think that the north star of getting deals is targeting pre-probate senior owners and inherited property. Anything that you can do at a principal level to target that demographic over and over again, you're probably going to have the best source of deal. PropStream allows you to easily do that.

Now there's limited data, just like there are with all different data service providers. In certain areas, they might not have any pre-probate leads registered, but in the areas that they do, it's very convenient because you know that you're targeting property that's in the name of the recently deceased, so you can actually go in and specifically target those demographics and really get a competitive advantage.

I really like PropStream from that standpoint. It's pretty clunky, since it's made for house wholesalers and there's some issues from a user interface standpoint, but all in all, those are probably my go-to for data service providers.

But I would say and highlight your recent review on Versium, because I think Versium probably would win the cake. I haven't used it personally, so I can't vouch for that, but it seems to be pretty phenomenal, especially when you couple how cheap it is to get like emails and phone numbers and all that. So if Supercharged Offers didn't exist, I probably would be pointing people in the direction of Versium.

Drew: I want to brag about Alicia a little bit. So her team did ibuyland.org. She completely redesigned that. So if you guys want to check that out, that's a good sample of what her team can do.

Also, as Jaren mentioned, you pay a premium per letter, but you get all kinds of data analytics and you get a consultant. Alicia meets with you personally. Is it every month or every three weeks? It's pretty often.

Jaren: I think with us it's on average like twice a month, but it varies client by client. If somebody's doing low volume, I think it's at least a once a month.

Drew: She helps—she's a consultant—you figure out, okay, if you're not getting the results you want, what are some potential pitfalls? Because she runs her own land business as well, and she knows she can help identify very quickly, along with Jaren as the coach, what is not being executed properly.

Jaren: Exactly.

Seth: Yeah, interesting. So Supercharged is basically just kind of handling the marketing funnel department for your business. Like they just deliver you warm leads and then it's up to you to close on them so they don't have the conversations for you, but they have all the mechanisms in place to do the lists and the mail and the ads and whatever that consists of to get those deals coming or those leads coming your way. Is that accurate?

Jaren: Yeah, I would say for everything outside of SMS marketing management, which Virtual Outsource, a sister company of ours, can fill in the gap there.

Drew: And then if you use Realtors, you're outsourcing the last 50%. So really, you only need to master 10% to 50%.

Jaren: And if you work with the Land Maverick Society, the deal funding aspect is also outsourced with Rooster Capital through you, Drew. We're putting an ecosystem together. We're putting a templated model for people to get started, learn how to run comps, do the business, but then all the pieces are in place to actually scale.

Drew: So if you can comp land and talk with sellers, you can run a land business?

Jaren: Pretty much, yeah. And I can train you how to do that.

Drew: I remember I used to have to chop up Excel spreadsheets and it was very frustrating. Now you can pay a small premium, outsource all of that.

Seth: When you say comp land, does that include due diligence in that? Is that also what you mean?

Jaren: Yeah, so I would say high level, how to use LandID practically in order to run initial basic due dIligence. But then at some stage, after you get a purchase agreement in place, you've had an agent opinion of value in place. You want to call through the county and walk through a series of questions, maybe multiple different county departments. Like if you have to verify, see if there's a perc test on file.

Depending on the circumstances of the deal, you might have to call a couple of different county departments. But yeah, high level. There are checks and balances as things heat up towards the finish line. But yeah, we will walk you through A to Z on all that, man.

Seth: So if you could figure out a way to outsource the comping, due diligence, talking with sellers, I mean, you can basically just do nothing, right? Is that the idea? Is that where this will eventually lead to?

Drew: That's what I've done that with Land of the Free. So if you go to Western Arizona on Landwatch, you'll see my cheesy smile there on slot number three. But that business is 95% outsourced. I pretty much host a weekly call with my team, make sure that they feel valued and taken care of.

I handle any fires, I put out any fires or problems that come up. But the day-to-day is totally outsourced with very competent employees that really love what they do.

Jaren: I would say, from a educator standpoint, you're probably better off for a long while still being involved in your business. I know that to do what Drew has accomplished is very sexy, and he makes it look really easy, but it's hard, and you want to make sure that you have systems in place and really good people on your team before you let go of the reins, especially in the beginning.

I have had people come to me and be like, “I don't want to be hands off from the beginning.” And we've tried to bring on VA Filipino-based lead managers and has not worked very well. You need somebody probably Stateside who at least is a driver, and pay them well and compensate them well, make sure that they're incentivized to do a good job for you and happy to be on the team. But I would very strongly discourage people from being super hands-off, at least for the first long while, maybe six months, a year, year and a half.

Drew: And paying them well is extremely important. My general manager of Land of the Free makes more money now than the job that I left. My salary was less than what she makes now. And so when you pay them well, they feel valued. They'll ride with you to the gates of hell and back and absolutely love every minute of it.

Seth: So, Drew, it sounds like this business that is 95% hands-off, just from what I hear you saying. It sounds like it's a smooth sailing, well-oiled machine that's just kind of churning out deals, and you just kind of check in every once in a while to see how it's going.

What was hard about getting into that point, just going off what Jaren was saying? What were the biggest challenges, and how did you do that? I mean, it's kind of like the Holy Grail that everybody wants.

Drew: So it's not perfect. It's more like a used car with tires that are almost falling off. But it works, right? It's like a ten-year-old Honda Civic that gets you from point A to point B. Our systems are not perfect. A lot of our systems don't talk to each other, and the communication between different databases is done through the employees.

But I think the biggest thing that people struggle with is letting the employee you hired potentially crash the ship. And if you don't let them potentially crash the ship, you're never going to have time to build a new ship, a different ship, right?

So I've built two, maybe three businesses now, depending on how you see it, and I would have never been able to do that if I didn't trust the employees on the first business to manage the day-to-day. They can send money. I still have to approve it, but they buy stuff without me knowing it, I don't even know.

I asked them the other day how many parcels we have. It turns out we have 130, which I didn't even know. And so the potential is that they ruin it. but that's such a small risk, and most problems can be solved with an apology or with money. And so usually, they make it better than what you did. Right? So my employees, they care more about their job, their specific little niche, than what I did when I was doing that job. And so they make it better, they make it more smooth, and they really master their area of expertise versus me. I was so spread thin that I couldn't do it as well as they're currently doing it.

Jaren: I want to chime in there, though, because I have the benefit of knowing you personally, Drew, and you are a really good leader when you want to be. And I think the key to accomplishing what you've accomplished is really strong leadership. People need to be willing to follow you to hell and back, like you brought up earlier. And a lot of business owners, for one reason or another, they don't know how to inspire their team. They don't know how to get the best out of people.

But you do. You can turn it on when you want. So I do want to highlight that from a practical standpoint, you can't just go out and hire any random Joe Schmo off the street and think that it's going to thrive. From day one, Drew has been really good at getting one.

Just kind of blessed to get good people, but then massaging those people into the role that they are into today, being able to kind of run shop for everything. So I do want to emphasize that don't go out and just hire some random person on Fiverr or HireMyMom and think you're going to get what Drew gets, like, the same day.

But if you can develop those leadership skills and encourage and inspire and provide an incredible opportunity. People will die for you. It's true. They will go to the nth degree to serve the leader well if the vision and mission is very clear and you're taking care of them. Like Drew's point, his main person at his red ocean business makes more money today than she ever has.

Drew: She makes more money than the job, the W-2 that I quit.

Jaren: Yeah, exactly. You see, it's important to make sure you provide that for people. I don't want anybody listening to be like, okay, I just got to go hire some random person and then just give them the reins and then see you later. It doesn't work that way. You got to be able to lead them well, massage them into the position, and probably do it in increments where you say, okay, this person, I'm going to give this amount of authority and responsibility and then increase it over time as they continue to perform well.

Drew: And I would say generosity is big part of it. So giving them an uncomfortable amount where you actually wonder, is this too much? Am I paying her too much? And am I too nice? For example, every employee at year one of their first year anniversary, they either get a vacation on the company or they get, like, my second employee, she just hit one year, and they're going to rent out an Airbnb the whole weekend. And her friends are coming and they're going to have a party. And that's all going to be paid for by the company.

Each employee gets, as long as it's legal, gets an AR-15 paid for by the company. Because one of my employees lives off-grid and is actually a security device, they get treated quite well. And the thing is, you need to treat them like family, because really, they're putting food on your plate, not the other way around. Right?

So I would say two things that have helped me was the US army putting me in charge of 45 soldiers at age 22 and then also doing books that most people see as unnecessary, such as “How to Win friends and Influence People.” Just the basics of learning how to take care of people. I think those books are often overlooked. Everyone wants to jump to the strategy. What's the secret sauce? And in reality, the secret sauce is being a good human being and taking care of people.

Seth: You mentioned earlier, Drew, that your business is running like an old used car where the wheels are falling out off like a ten-year-old Honda Civic type thing. So why is it running like that? What should you be improving that you haven't? And why haven't you made those improvements so that it's not running like a brand new Mercedes? Just out of curiosity.

Drew: Because I've put forth C-level effort and I'm getting B results and I'm happy with that. So it's a sweet spot right now, even the general manager, she'll agree with me that there's so many imperfections in our system, but it works. And it's the type of thing where, what takes more effort, to improve it or just to keep it how it is?

Seth: So I just wonder, could you actually make more money or would there be an impact to revenue if you made those improvements? Or is that why you're not making them because the improvements wouldn't result in making more money?

Drew: So there's a million improvements we could make. The question is, do I want to work more than 5 hours a week? So a great example is: we currently have (and I'm not going to name the name) a loan service provider that we are not happy with. But the question is, do we continue living with the quirks of this software program or do we switch all of our 60, 70, 80 notes?

I don't even know how many notes we have, but let's say if we have 70, 80 notes, is it less work to deal with the frustrations of this current provider we're using, or is it less work to switch them over to a better provider, but have maybe 20 to 40 hours of work on the front end? So there's all kinds of little decisions we could make, When we post land for sale, all we do is put it on land.

Seth: So along those same lines, Drew, I know you've got this funding operation with Rooster Capital, so you've got that, you've also got your own land business. How do you decide and prioritize, “I'm going to put my capital to this business instead of this one”?

It seems like, not necessarily conflict, but sort of, because if you put it towards one, you're not enriching the other one. So how do you make that call on which one you're going to prioritize?

Drew: I just do a lot of praying. It'll be very common where it'll be a Saturday I'll have twelve grand in the account, and by Tuesday I need 200 grand. And I don't know how it works, but it always ends up working out where everything that gets funded needs to be funded. So far, fingers crossed, we have not dropped the ball yet on not funding a deal.

So I don't have a good answer to that. I just know it always works out, and it's been going very well so far with both companies.

Seth: And then back to the leadership question. So why do you think you're a strong leader? And when you talk about paying people more in this kind of stuff, how do you decide what's enough? How do you justify, “I'm paying you this dollar amount because of this, like this is a data-backed number.” Or is it more just like. “Well, it's more than I made at my previous job, so it must be pretty good. Here you go.”

How do you nail down, like, okay, this is a generous amount, and it makes sense because of this, and therefore, you are happy and you want to keep working for me. What are you doing to make people go to the front lines for you?

Drew: Yeah, I don't think I'm a very strong leader in terms of convincing human beings to take the hill and attack the machine gun nest and risk their lives. I think I'm an okay leader in that category.

Where I think I am good at is I truly care about people. So, if you're listening to this and you have a team, have you visited each one of your employees? Because Jaren and I went to the Philippines and visited his team. I've met each one of my employees multiple times. I just hired an executive assistant. She lives in Houston, and I'm seeing her next month. So do you care enough to go actually see them? And then also, are you casting a vision that people can buy into?

So, we run for-profit companies where we're trying to put food on the table for our families. What is the vision? Is the vision just to make money, or is it to make everyone we interact with, to make their day 1% better? Because I tell my people, even if we don't do a deal with a seller or a buyer, we want to make sure their day is better, and we want to sow goodness into their life. That's a vision people can get behind.

And then the second question. So, Land of the Free has three positions. One is to buy, one is to sell, and one is an admin support position. Two out of those three are commission only. So they only get paid when they perform. And so those variable costs really help the cash flow, where your overhead is actually quite low because they only get paid when the company gets paid, essentially.

Seth: What are those positions? Is it like a sales position or acquisitions role? And then what is their commission like? What do they make?

Drew: Yeah. So, the first position is an intake manager. She takes the football from the zero yard line to the 50. So she does the mail campaigns, she answers all the phone calls. She buys all of our properties. We're still doing self-closings in Land of the Free. And once the ball gets to the 50-yard line, we own the property. Then the sales manager takes over, takes the ball from the 50 to the end zone, and she lists it. She answers buyer leads, she sells it, she gets it under contract, and we transfer title. We have an administrative support position.

So those first two positions are all about making money for the company. So, buying and selling properties, anything that doesn't fall into those two buckets, the admin support does those tasks. So, downloading photos, uploading photos, ordering photos, anything to do with that.

The intake manager is 125 flat fee when she buys if it retails under ten grand, $250 flat fee if it retails over ten grand. And then when it sells, she gets 4% of gross profit if it sells cash. If it sells on term, she gets 2% of gross profit. So, when I used to have that position, I would take one to six hours per acquisition on average. So that position makes anywhere from 30 to 200 an hour if they're as efficient as me.

The second position, which is the sales manager, she's also currently my general manager, that is 10% of gross. If she sells a $15,000 property, she makes $1,500. She sells it terms, it's 5% of gross. So if on terms, she sells it for 18 grand, she would make $900. And then the admin support position is $15 an hour.

Seth: This is kind of going a slightly different direction, but it's in reference to what we were talking about earlier in this conversation about Jaren, how you're using Supercharged Offers to pull the list and basically do all the marketing for you.

And I'm wondering… I mean, it sounds like it's working, which is awesome, and that's probably the most important thing. But when I think of outsourcing the list pulling function to somebody else, that's a lot of trust I'm putting in that person to understand what I even want and where to do this. And I'm curious, how much guidance do you have to give them? And then how much do you even have to pay attention to what they're doing?

Are you even kind of aware of what's happening, or is it just a matter of, like, “Well, leads are coming in, so it's working, and I'm outsourcing this anyway. I don't have time to hassle myself with that end of the business because I'm paying them to do it.” So do you even have to pay that much attention, what's going on? Or do you have to police them to make sure that they're doing what you want them to do?

I say this from the standpoint of somebody who has a hard time letting go and just trusting people to do the right thing. So how do you handle that?

Jaren: I think a lot of it boils down to who Supercharged Offers is as a company and the integrity that they have. I wouldn't just go in the direction of anybody, but because I have tested the waters with them, not only in our company, but also in kind of overseeing the evolution of a lot of other land investors getting started in the space. They are very detail-oriented, almost to a fault.

For a long time, even back in the day when I worked here at REtipster with you, Seth, I remember you interviewing them, and in my head, I was just like, oh, they're an expensive direct mail company. And that was how I checked them off in my head, because on their website and a lot of their branding, they're almost overly detailed on all the things that they can do.

So why I say that, why I highlight that, is whenever they provide you the direct mail list before mailing out for approval, they have something like nine different tabs on the bottom that walk you through systematically all the different checks that they have done with the data. They also send it to you for a review. And I have people who I've worked with who are much more detail-oriented, who have, on the rare occasion, caught a couple of things that maybe were some mistakes or some, I guess, missing criteria, stuff like, for example, using assessed value as opposed to market total value in their assessment of kind of trying to project certain dollar market value on the property that they're targeting.

But at the end of the day, when you're a business owner, you got to kind of weigh the 80-20 of it all. And instead of being so bogged down on data and focusing on, are they doing it right to the nth degree, just getting to good enough and then having somebody who's like…

I wouldn't even say good enough, I think they're exceptional at what they do. Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. Direct mail is still direct mail. The nature of the beast is sometimes you do everything perfect and you don't get any leads. So that does happen. But all in all, they are very detail-oriented, and they actually set a specific number on the letter that tracks all of the calls. So they know at their level they will forward it to whatever number you want to use, Open Phone, Pebble, whatever, but they actually track every single call that comes in.

They also have a number of other checks and balances in place, like they use inform delivery. They have a system where they can track all the way to the point where the mailman takes it from the post office and is in route to deliver. They can't track if the mailman chucks it out the door or not, but they can get all the way to that point. So when they say deliverability rate within their dashboard, it's as accurate as you can possibly get. So there's a lot of things that they have in place to actually ensure the quality, and it's pretty phenomenal in that regard.

So, no, if you are more detail-oriented, you want to make sure that you want to have all your I's dotted and T's crossed. They are available for feedback, for pushback, for dialogue, brainstorming, which is phenomenal. I don't know any other data service-ish provider, I guess technically I think they white label with somebody that they pull that they keep close to their chest.

Seth: DataTree? I'm just kidding.

Jaren: No, definitely not DataTree. But they really do a lot to ensure quality and they're very detail-oriented and they're an open book too. I don't know any, I guess, direct mail processor that will use that as a term that would do this level of care and detail for their clients.

Seth: So how much time do you spend scrutinizing what they do? Is it like after every campaign you're like, okay, let me review where you get how you filter the list and what you said in the mailer. So I provide the criteria that they target and I work with the Land Maverick members to figure that out. So we'll do market research together. We have kind of a standardized criteria that we target and we customize member by member based on what their goals are and so on.

But at this stage, because I've been working with them for, I don't know, a year and a half or something, and I've repeatedly seen dozens of other clients and I've done the in-depth checks and what have you, I kind of just trust their system. I tell obviously the Land Maverick member to make sure that, to cross-reference stuff, walk through things with the staff there. But at this stage, I kind of just trust them to do their thing because they haven't disappointed people. Send enough amount of mail, and that's a big key. Gone are the days of sending out 2,000 units of mail and getting a deal. I think you at bare minimum need to be no less than 3,000, 3,500. But as long as you send out ample mail size within one to three campaigns, you're off to the races.

And sometimes things you do on the front end. Maybe your letter is off or maybe you use a weird logo or maybe you would be better off not using a picture as opposed to including a picture on your direct mail letter. There are some things when you're first getting started to kind of tweak and refine, but that's more on like a coaching land operator side as opposed to Supercharged Offers.

Seth: I can say that actually I noticed this with REI PrintMail when I was talking to them a few episodes back. There's a huge benefit to taking this portion of your business, whether it's just direct mail or like all of it, like every possible acquisition funnel and just being like, if something's not working, just say, look, this isn't working, figure it out. Why is this not working? Give me suggestions or what can I do to make the warm leads come in as opposed to just being completely on your own, when you're kind of just like guessing around and poking around in the dark, you don't really know what's not working.

But with something like Supercharged Offers is where they're doing this for, I would presume many different land investors. And they kind of have their hand on the pulse of like, we know that this is working and we can track these results over here. You know, you've made it big as a boss when you can just yell at somebody, “Figure it out!” and hang it up. So if you're able to just say that to Supercharged Offers, it's kind of a nice luxury to have.

I don't know if that's exactly how it works, but is that how it works? Like, if things aren't working, can you kind of just throw it in their lap and tell them to figure it out? Or what of that process is on you to figure it out versus they will step in and figure it out for you?

Jaren: So I think it's not as extreme as you just figured out, but it's more know or if they're in one of their review calls and Alicia is running in and says, hey, your conversion rate's a lot lower than what's average or what we should expect. I think we need to kind of go back to the drawing board and assess a couple of things. And then they'll give different template options for different mail pieces. They'll think through. Maybe we readjust the logo or maybe we use a local number.

But where I think I step in as kind of a coach and lead educator at Land Maverick Society, that's where you can kind of get to that point of like boss level. Just go figure it out. Between me and Supercharged Offers, we kind of get you going.

Drew: Jaren, are most of your students, they're receiving the calls and they don't use PAT Live or an answering service. Most of your students are receiving seller leads themselves?

Jaren: Yeah. So I recommend people, especially in the beginning, to have everything go to a pre-recorded voicemail. This is how I learned the land business from the REtipster Masterclass. And I think from a workflow standpoint, it's best to have everything go to a voicemail and then try to call back people with an offer in hand. Especially when I'm training people and I have to meet with people to run Land ID and run comps before generating the offer amount, it's a lot easier to manage that way.

Now there are people who kind of, I guess, quote-unquote, graduate or evolve in their land business that will handle the calls, take some calls live. I do think that with texting you kind of have to like you're generating leads and you have to have that kind of initial filtering between the noise and actual qualified leads.

But on the fence about PAT Live, I think PAT Live can work very well, but you have to do a lot of massaging. You have to be very intentional to review the calls of the call reps and to give a lot of feedback. And I have seen people come to me and be like, “Jaren, I don't know what's going on. Six months ago, all my leads dried up.” And I was like, “Oh, really? When did you start using PAT Live?” And they’re like, “Oh, six months.”

Again, I'm not saying anything negative on PAT Live.

Seth: Kind of sounds like you are.

Jaren: No, I mean, because there are people who get it to work, but the key is you can't be lazy about it.

To your point about how detailed do you need to be with a third-party person? In regards to the conversation we had earlier on Supercharged Offers, it's very important to make sure that if you use PAT Live, that you are all hands on deck in the beginning and that you're auditing calls and providing feedback and ensuring the lead quality or the process quality, I guess you could say.

Drew: And then getting back to that very quickly is extremely important. So in my business, I instruct my team, you need to get back with seller leads within 24 hours, ideally within a few hours. And with buyer leads, we need to answer within 10 minutes or we need to respond within 10 minutes.

And then I was in Travis King, I'm in one of his group coachings right now because I just love, never stop learning. I've spent close to 100 grand on education and it's never going to stop. So I was in one of his meetings yesterday and he was saying, if you don't feel like you are great at converting seller leads, the way you can make up for it is just by being more consistent than your competition, by following up more, being more prompt. Because a lot of the competition, you can test them out. So message your competition, pretend like you're a buyer or seller lead and see how long it takes them to get back with you. Usually it's multiple days in a row.

Seth: Well, I was just going to say, for anybody who listens to these podcasts consistently, you're probably noticing. What I've also noticed is that this follow-up issue comes up again and again and again.

Everybody who's making this work consistently says that how important follow-up is. That's kind of what wins this game. I've even heard, I think we were talking with Ajay mentioned this in the last episode about how if they look at the number of contracts that they send out and only half of those are getting accepted or actually closed, there's some kind of an issue with follow-up. Like you can spend nothing more on marketing and just improve your follow-up process and double your business, potentially.

And a lot of people, I get offers all the time from people, and when I try to follow up with them, they don't answer the phone, they don't call me back, they don't respond to emails and do anything. It's like people have this idea that if I just push these buttons on the computer, money will start flowing in my bank account. But it's like you're flushing money down the drain, like you're starting a process and not closing the loop. It's like, why would you do that? That's crazy. But a lot of people just unconsciously apparently think that.

Drew: So we all have that skill inside of us. So think back to your childhood before texting was a thing. How did you get to play with your friend? You had to pester them. You had to call them five to ten times and figure out when they were getting home from soccer practice. So what I would do is I would call my friend every 15 minutes and just wait till they got home. Right? And it drove the grandma nuts because the grandma had to deal with seven-year-old Drew calling all the time.

Think of it like that. We all have that skill set inside of us to follow up almost to the extent where we're annoying the seller lead. But we've all done it in the past and we can do it again.

Jaren: I want to say how important that is. I want to very strongly emphasize what Drew just said because I run into a lot of different personality types. And the people that are afraid of bothering people, whether me as a coach or seller leads or even canvassing for land specialized agents, they struggle. You got to get rid of that. You're in a sales-oriented business. Even though it's weird because we're buying property, it's still sales. And I promise you, you got to throw that out the window. If you're bothering somebody, they're going to tell you to go kick dirt and then you can not con them anymore. But until they say that, be very aggressive.

And I do want to say there is a line there because you don't want to be, like, calling every 15 minutes like seven-year-old Drew. But twice a day follow up, three times a day follow up. Ajay Sharma's famous double dial, where you call him and then what goes to voicemail, hang up, call him again. All those things are really important for you to be successful.

And I do want to circle back a little bit to the PAT Live conversation. I think a lot of why PAT Live may struggle or why there may be an issue there is because people are responding to a letter and they're expecting you to be familiar with the property already and to have an offer in hand. And when you call into a call center and they're gathering property details, that really kind of jars the seller lead.

And I just want to say, principal level, you're going to be far better off having an offer in hand as much as you can before reaching out to the seller leads because that's going to streamline things. I would not really approach the initial call for gathering data. You can get that data on different software websites and different platforms. You want to call the seller to build rapport, number one, and then to talk about your offer amount. And I really strongly encourage people to frame the conversation around the offer.

Seth: You guys know Joe Roberts from Landcaller.com?

Jaren: No.

Seth: Yeah, I interviewed him a few episodes ago. He really gave me a very good, clear understanding on how they do cold calling.

Anyway, it's basically a cold calling call center, but the process they follow. It's episode 168, if anybody wants to listen to that. So basically it's a three phone call process. And the first phone call is coming from that call center because that's the lowest value task because you're going to call lots of people. Some people won't answer, some people won't be a warm lead. But basically that first call is to establish is this a motivated seller or not.

The second call, that's then where you jump in as a land investor, and that's where you're building rapport and you're figuring out specifics of the property, getting any questions answered. But that offer is not made on that second call.

You then come back on a third call, and that's when you make the offer after you've built rapport, after you kind of know the person and the situation, and it's kind of been through a lot of this filtering screening process already, and you're much more likely to get a positive response. And even if the answer is no, it's not like a “I hate you” kind of answer. It's not like what you'd get with direct mail because you sort of know each other already and you're humanized very much more.

And going through this three call process is something that pretty much no other land investor out there is doing right now. It's very unusual for somebody to go through all those stages, but apparently it's working really well for the people that are doing that. And it makes wonder you generous saying, like, with that first call back, like have an offer ready. Do you think it would help to, I don't know, build rapport first and then have a third call or any thoughts on that?

Jaren: I don't think it would be beneficial. Obviously, it's working for them and I'm not questioning their success or any of that, but I probably would shy away from that depending on how quickly those three different calls are taking place. Because while they're building rapport, I would come in with a strong offer day one, and we're talking numbers again. You have to be good at the phone. That's one of our core skill sets as a land investor and good at building rapport and what have you.

But if I come in and I'm just as nice or equally as nice and I have an offer ready, they're going to proceed faster with me than with that other person. Of course, if they have stronger rapport with me, it's a competition. I get all that. But Ajay actually had an epiphany in his land business talking to my wife, Asia. He was taking too long to get offers out, and after he heard that my wife can comp and get back with an offer within about 15 minutes of analysis, it was a complete pivot in his business. You can talk to him about it.

But we were actually, I think, indoor county at our famous retreat between Ajay, Peter Nukasani, and Drew and me. And that was a big shift. And I think that from a KPI standpoint, you really should double down on offers made and really focus on getting more and more offers out. Statistically, the more offers you make, the more deals you're going to have. And maybe that's an oversimplification, because you have to factor in variables like making sure that they're accurate and so on and so forth.

But Ajay even has kind of highlighted past mastermind groups and things we've been a part of. He has this system in place where he offers his VAs, get to, like, 70% accuracy, and then goes 20% down, and then 20% above cuts it in half, 50% on the dollar, and then that's the offer range. And on the rare occasion, they have to go back and renegotiate.

But having a simplified system that allows, whether they're Filipino-based VAs or other people on the team, to get more and more offers out. So over the long run, even if on the rare occasion they have to go back and renegotiate or lose the deal because they offer too much, it still gets them getting more offers out.

So I would personally beg to differ, respectfully, to that guy.

But, I mean, it depends on how many. If it's day-to-day, if it's lead comes in and then you're calling, like, three days in a row, sure, it probably could work, and it probably would be good. And he has the results for us. I could be very wrong.

Seth: Do you guys do cold calling at all?

Drew: I do want to clarify real quick the equation, because you went through that real quick. So let's say Ajay's team, they're 70% sure the parcel is worth 100 grand, then they go 20% below that (correct me if I'm wrong, Jaren), they go 20% below that. So 80, then they offer half of 80. And that, statistically, they found, is a sweet spot for getting enough accepted contracts and also being safe enough.

Jaren: I could misunderstand, but I think they also do the high range, too. So they would bump up between 80 and 120. Ajay, I wish you were here to clarify this.

Seth: Yeah, man.

Jaren: And then cut that in half. So it would be 40 to 60 would be your offer range.

Drew: Oh, I see. Okay, that makes more sense.

I do want to brag about Jaren for a bit. He's one of the few people I've met in this business that truly cares about every single person he interacts with. And so there'll be plenty of days where I know he's extremely busy, but he knows that I'm stressed out or bothered about something in my personal life or even professionally, and he will take the time to help me work through it, and he does that for his students as well.

So thank you, Jaren, for who you are as a person, and I'm excited to hang out with you.

Jaren: Thank you, Drew. I really appreciate the kind words, and I really love working with you. You know, I think that you are an incredible human being. You're one of the really leading with generosity, really caring about. Know the feeling is very mutual.

But I really want to highlight Seth before we jump off since we're loving each other right now.

Seth, I owe you. So Land Maverick. Society wouldn't exist without you, who I am today. I look in the past of my life, and you're one of the key people that really mentored me and smooth out the wrinkles, as they say. And I think the entire land investing community is better because you and REtipster are here. And honestly, none of this be here without you.

And, you know, I kind of feel weird talking about all this stuff on the REtipster podcast, because in a lot of ways, I feel like it's a baby of the REtipster Community. So just really appreciate you.

Drew: I'll never forget when you spent time hung out with me in my car when we were waiting for that river cruise to start. It was like having a celebrity in my car for a whole hour and we got to hang out.

Seth: That was fun, man.

Drew: And, Seth, you're always willing to spend that extra moment with someone when you know it will really impact them. So thank you for that.

Seth: Yeah, I appreciate both you guys, and thanks for highlighting the good things about each other as well. It's good to just hear the mutual love and appreciation. And I can echo the same thing as Jaren.

I know in our time together, I mean, you're absolutely a very caring person, and I've seen you show that love to me and a lot of other people. It's unusual, but it's a good kind of unusual, for sure.

And Drew, we've interacted not as much as me and Jaren have, but in our interactions, I've seen you to be a great leader in the cohort that we were in. You had a lot of great things to say, and I almost felt like you were a better leader of the room than I was. You just kind of knew how to control the tempo of the conversation and when to interject and when to comment and when to let people talk. And I don't know if that's something you were just born with or if it came from the army or what, but you could probably write some kind of leadership book at some point if you wanted to. That'd be interesting to see. If you ever do that.

Jaren: You're the best at navigating human psychology compared to anybody else that I've ever met. You are the absolute GOAT. You're great at that leadership influence. You're fantastic.

Seth: Thank you, gentlemen. Awesome.

Well, again, if people want to check out Jaren and Drew, are there specific websites or something they should go to or what's the best way to learn more about what you guys are doing?

Jaren: LandMavericks.com for me, Drew, what about you?

Drew: Just find me on Facebook. Andrew Haney, send me a message. Love to talk with you.

Seth: Do you find that people search more for Drew Haney or Andrew Haney?

Drew: I need to figure that out because I'm usually called both names and I need to brand myself as one. I think Drew Haney sounds better, but Andrew Haney is my legal name. And so we'll see.

Maybe by the time this airs, I'll be Drew Haney on Facebook. Maybe find me as Drew Haney.

Seth: Cool. Well, thanks again. Appreciate great to hear your insights and the updates on what's going on in your business.

And again, I'll have links to a lot of the stuff we talked about. Supercharged Offers, PropStream, DataTree, all these different things in the show notes. The REtipster Podcast 171.

Thanks, everybody. I'll talk to you next time.