Seth: Hey everybody, welcome back to the REtipster podcast. This is a special episode because instead of doing a one-on-one interview, we're bringing together a small group of active land investors for a roundtable conversation about what's really happening in the land business right now. Mike Balcom, the co-founder of Stride, is joining me as the co-host today. And the timing for this is also a little unique because as of this month, it's been about one year since we first launched Stride CRM. Over that time, we've had the chance to work with a lot of land investors across the country. And one of the things that's become really clear is that the market has changed quite a bit. Some things that used to work don't work the same way anymore. And at the same time, there's new opportunities starting to emerge for people who are willing to adapt. So for this episode, I wanted to bring together a handful of investors who are actively in the trenches right now. They're also conveniently all using Stride CRM to run their businesses.

Seth: And these folks are doing deals, testing things and adjusting their strategies and figuring out what works right now. So the goal here is not to create a highlight reel. It's to have an honest conversation about what's working and what's not and what people are doing to stay competitive. And since we've got several voices in the room here, we're going to keep things moving around in kind of a consistent order. The investors we've got on the call today are Katie Desmarais, JT Olmstead, Shelby Wengreen, and Arturo Paturzo. So to start this off, I'd love to just go around the room and have each of you briefly explain what your land business looks like right now. What kinds of deals are you focused on and how would you describe your current niche today? And we'll start with you, Katie.

Katie: All right. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Seth and Mike, for having us all on. Super excited to be here. My husband, Brian, and I, we started our land business back in September of 2023 with the help of Mike, of course, our original mentor and strategist to help us get off and running. Always super appreciative for that. But as of today, our land business, we have a team of 10, including Brian and myself. We primarily focus on flips where we can add value as well as subdivides. So that's currently what we've really been tackling, but also looking to expand over the next couple of months into a more robust double close strategy as well.

Seth: Awesome. JT, what about you?

JT: Yeah, I think right now, as far as what my business looks like today, it's evolved a lot over the years. And so currently we are around a team of 10 as well, kind of mix of sales and operations. And we're primarily focused on kind of the same thing we've been done from the beginning. And it's been a lot of things have changed in the last year quite a bit. But we've kind of circled all kind of full circle and come back to primarily focusing on flips when they make sense and really looking for just standard, easy to execute, like minor land divisions. We fund those are kind of the two bread and butter repeal[?] processes we can do across the country.

Seth: Great. Shelby, what about you?

Shelby: Yeah, I'm Shelby. I primarily focus on flipping rural vacant land as well as some light value adds and minor subdivides when it makes sense. I come from a much smaller team. It's me, an acquisitions manager and a VA, but overall still using Stride and love it. Awesome. All right. How about you? What's your business look like right now? Hi, Seth. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. So I've been doing this since 2021. I'm Italian. You can spot from my I pretend to have an Italian accent. Right. And I also have a day job. I'm an active duty Navy officer in Italy. So my business is, I would say 70% flips.

Arturo: And 20% minor and the plot[?] exempted subdivide and the 10% entitlements, even if, as you said, I am not in love with entitlements, but I think that that's why there is not a lot of people doing that.

Seth: Yeah. So I know change is a common theme that I've been hearing from a lot of land investors over the past year or two. So I'm curious, how has your businesses all changed over the past year? And if the answer is it hasn't, that's fine, too. I'm just curious, have you found it necessary to, you know, change the deal types you're going after or the markets or strategy or team size or anything like that? Start with you, Katie. Sure. No, that's a great question. So I would say a little more than a year ago, we were much more flip heavy and reactive at times. Today, we are much more structured as a team, running multiple strategies in parallel, much more intentional with like our lead routing and the deal types. What we've really built out is dedicated acquisition roles sort of all throughout the process from first conversation to closing and added in a lot more support around disposition because we were so acquisition heavy and we had so many different deals under contracts and getting through because we do a ton of value ads, getting through all of the due diligence.

JT: Getting the right title company, the right agency. Place, getting the engineer actually completed, engineering actually completed, and getting it resold and across the finish line became sort of a bottleneck for us. So we really started to expand on our Dispo support and then certainly our marketing infrastructure and how we're utilizing our CRM, right, to do a lot of the work for us from an automation and an AI standpoint. So we're we're no longer really looking at something as like, is this a deal? We're really asking ourselves like, what type of deal is this going to be best suited for between our multifaceted marketing and our multifaceted dispo? Oh, very interesting.

Seth: Uh, JT, I know we were talking offline a little bit about how your business has changed over the past year. What would you say are some of the biggest changes for you?

JT: Yeah. And honestly, it feels like we entered 2025, uh, doing the same thing we've done forever. And by the time we got to mid 2025, we realized that it wasn't working. It just had stopped working. And so when that realization came, I feel like I've rebuilt my business every 60 days since that point, uh, basically trying to figure out what is going to work. Like if the previous strategy like no longer is executing like it needs to and things just aren't working as they have, then what is it going to look like now? And just, you know, transparently, that has changed a lot for us. We just keep testing new versions, new marketing strategies, new like lead funnels, where we want to go. So at the moment, we've kind of circled, gone full circle, as I mentioned earlier, all the way back to what we've been doing since the beginning, which was when a flip makes sense, we will do it. But we are then consistently looking at, OK, how do we make this deal? Or does the steel[?] fit our box, I should say, for a minor land division? Because we've done enough of those that we know what a good MLD looks like. And so they just make for easy plays to force appreciation. And I think that's the big shift for us is we've kind of, especially recently been, and think more along those veins, instead of just attempting to find value, as I would describe it in the past, we're moving more towards plays that are focused on adding value, right? We're forcing that value. Shelby, how about you? Yeah, great question. A year ago, I was kind of casting a wide net and mailing a lot of different areas, kind of being broad with my approach. And most deals I was getting back were somewhere in like the $9,000 to $12,000 profit range.

Seth: I started realizing that I really like making more money per deal. So I got more intentional with my market selection and what kind of deals I go after. So now we're kind of targeting like $20,000 plus deals. And we start looking at every deal as if it were a flip. And if it doesn't fit that buy box, then we expand into other avenues like double close, subdivide or a value add to force appreciation or just get it at a price that makes sense.

Seth: Awesome. Art, what about you?

Arturo: Well, for us, the change is continuous. It's very tough to, you know, I mean, you change something and you already need to change it because things go so fast. And so to assess, adapt and win, we try to take decisions in the fast way, the fastest way, even if it's not the perfect decision. So before we were a little more careful about what we have to do here. We were thinking we're losing time. Now we try to decide the start. We have changed the deal size. Now for our standard flips, we go from 50,000 market value and up for we had like we were starting from a 30,000. Market value. The team has grown up one year ago, actually February, 2025, I hired my first acquisition manager. It was me and was my generalist VA. Now it's me, two acquisition managers, the VA that works now into Dispo, a disposition manager and transaction coordinator, and an office manager for the physical office that I have in the US. And this, of course, This includes also, you need to train the people. So you need to change also regarding how you manage these people. It's not just like the operations per se.

Seth: Another thing that we changed, and I think really, I suggest everyone to do it because even if we started just actually one month ago and we didn't buy anything with owner financing, to use owner financing to buy is really a game changer. I mean, we have a lot of people. Normally, it's like Shelby, we start with a cash offer and then double close. If it doesn't go, we go with the owner financing. And the reason why it's so effective, I believe, is because it's always a solution for someone who is not in a rush to sell. The difference with double closing is that you have skin in the game.

JT: So the seller sees that you are putting money. And if you don't, you know, if something happens, you default. He's keeping the down payment. He's keeping the installments that you've paid. So we found it to be very appealing. Besides, it's also a good strategy to buy a minor subdivide and, you know, partial release and this kind of stuff. Underwriting has become extremely important. I also have an underwriter, actually, I forgot to mention. He's Egyptian that is doing quite a good job. And we are in the process to hire a project manager for our minor subdivide. So I would like to take myself a little bit out of the business, stay on the business and see the other working. I don't know if it will be possible, but that's the goal. With that buying with seller financing, is that usually a solution in the end because you're like paying them full market value? Or like, why is that such an effective thing when other things don't work? Not normally. I mean, we are pretty successful with our double closings because you can offer a higher offer compared to the cash price. We generally, depending on the price point.

Seth: We can arrive offer like, you know, if you have a piece of land that is $600,000, I can arrive to offer $450,000. I mean, I'm happy with $150,000 profit on double closing. The problem is that when you go there, sometimes we also offer non-refundable EMD on the double closing. The problem is always when they ask, what if you don't close? I mean, what is your skin in the game?

Seth: And there is a lot of people that has been burned by wholesalers. I don't want to talk bad about wholesalers. So I think that you buy on your financing, you gave them a down payment and you pay like a monthly installment of that and you explain, hey, this stays with you if it happens that I don't sell because I'm very open. Whether it is a double closer and financing, I'm very open. I don't hide anything. They know exactly how it works. So they know that I'm going to market the property. They know that I'm going to sell. Parts of the property in case it's subdivided. And so I found this to be quite appealing on a seller that could be a little bit skeptical on double closings. We're kind of getting into it, Artis, telling us something that is working for him right now, but for the rest of you, what is actually working for you right now, in 2026, to generate deals? Like which marketing channels are working for you, which lead types, which markets or strategies are really producing results, Katie?

JT: So I would say, and this kind of goes in with the like what has changed, what's working for us is that we were previously focusing externally a lot from a marketing perspective and multifaceted. So sending out messages, having folks calling. And a big shift that we did this past year was we actually brought all of those folks internally into our CRM to focus on all of the leads that did say yes at some point. Because if a business owner is very defined on what qualifies a lead for their company, those should only be what is entering into your CRM. And so what's working is a really, really strong and intentional follow-up cadence. Because if we think about the amount of touches that we were able to do two, three, four, five years ago, we are doing exponentially more today.

Seth: And so by really reworking those old leads, you know, sellers who were previously maybe too high, people who didn't convert the first time, people who, yes, then ghosted us and putting a lot of our power into people who at least gave us positivity at one point and entered our CRM. We have now created a hybrid follow-up between automations within stride, whether it's texting, emails, call reminders for tasks, plus the human touch. And that has allowed us to, yes, increase our marketing over time because we have had to to really stay current. But by coupling that, we're taking advantage of leads that we essentially have already paid for and nurtured so far. So would you say, like compared to a few years ago, you're just hitting them a lot more frequently to get a deal?

Seth: Correct. Yes. So the amount of follow-up has increased, whether you're triple dialing them for two days and then double dialing them for two weeks. But then coupling that with some of the automations in the AI technology that we have has allowed us to still focus on the human touch, but also support us in that follow-up because it's taking way more follow-up today to get people back on the hook. Yeah. What percentage of those touches would you say are human versus just automated? So it depends on where they're at within Stride. So if they're in our seller leads, they're receiving, I would say, 90% communication from a human, somebody on our team. But once they move to our cold leads, they are essentially receiving almost almost pretty much everything is coming from an automation of some sort until we get a favorable response. And then we go back to them as a team. Yeah. I'll just mention Mike Balcom is also a master at this. He's taught me a lot about how to think about this the right way and like when to automate it versus like a human touch. We actually put together a blog post a few months back, really trying to crystallize this. And pretty much all that came from Mike is he's the genius in that realm more so than me, but...

JT: I am real quick on this, Katie, out of curiosity. So you have 10 new leads in your pipeline. Okay. How many of those 10 leads, assuming all these 10 leads are eventually going to become a contract, how many of those are becoming a contract the week that they come into your pipeline? And what percentage is actually done on the follow-up side of things, would you say? I would say out of 10, you may convert zero to one in the same lead. Let's just be real.

Seth: That's only 10 leads. So it could be none in theory, right? So the majority of the people that we close are not necessarily going to be on the week that they're coming into the CRM. And for that first 30 days, they're only receiving a human touch. Thereafter, if we don't hear for them or they say they're not interested, we determine that they want over market value, then they'll move to our cold leads where we can use systems to support us on leads that are not top, top priority.

JT: Well, I can't believe it. It's been a whole year of Stride. We've come a long way to celebrate our one-year anniversary. We've got some pretty awesome new things to talk about, right, Mike? Absolutely. I can't believe it's been a whole year already. Yeah, no kidding. So one of the huge things we've been working on is mail. So you can now send direct mail from right within Stride. All the mail you want to send, it's right there. What else we got going on? Oh, wait, there's more. I also heard you got one of the best masterminds in town and you're actually opening that up to all of our stride users, as well as even putting them in little pods, like their own miniature masterminds, which I actually heard rumors that you've done this before with some people from our tipster and they're still meeting to this day, even though it's been years and years. Yeah, it's true. Done it before and don't do this a lot, but I'm doing it again. That's unbelievable. I know too. We also got some stride perks going on there. So we started to actually build relationships with some of our biggest service providers out there to actually just offer bigger discounts to our users, things you won't really be able to find anywhere else. And we got a brand new affiliate program going on where if you're a Stride user and you refer someone, we'll give you your next month free in Stride. Well, hang on, hang on. That's like 300 bucks we're giving them, right? I mean, yeah, it pretty much is. I meant to run that by you first. Can we afford this? Let's talk about the stuff where we just go public with it, Mike. Come on.

Seth: We're here now. So, and let's not forget either about our project management. We also built this out. This is something you won't be able to find anywhere else. It's almost like having Notion within your CRM. So it's actually a really good way to just manage all these deals, whether you're doing subdivides, value adds, or you need to do things that aren't in the everyday business, like updating your LLC docs or anything like that. It's incredible how far we've come. That's amazing. So 2026 is going to be an amazing year for Stride. If you're not already a member, probably want to check it out. There's a lot going on and it's going to get even better. Be sure to check out stridecrm.co and let's get back into the episode. JT, anything working for you particularly well this year? Yeah, I wish I would definitely echo everything that's said by Katie and there, y'all. It's like, why? Follow-up is the end of the game for sure. I would say that I wish I had a clear answer right now on what is the best marketing channel that seems to be delivering for us. Transparency, I have no idea. That's what we're actually trying to figure out for us, is what is the best marketing channel that's going to deliver? We've tried several things.

JT: Obviously historically we've done a lot of mail a lot of blind offers as we saw the yield on that get worse and worse. We kind of cycled through various different types of strategies we thought would fit well with our team dynamics and our sales funnels that we hat at the time. Right now, we are currently doing a lot of cold calling and kind of have a lot of our leads are almost 100% cold call right now, kind of funneled through our sales system. I would say the thing that is for sure working for us is really understanding our sales numbers, right? Our marketing numbers, what is our cost per lead, right? What is our cost to acquire a contract, Right. Like really dialing that in and tracking that well has like brought to the surface a lot of things that we thought we knew and then clarified things were like, oh, it turns out we had no idea what that actually cost or, you know, how long it actually takes to get this lead. So we're still working on that actively. Right. Like the higher fidelity we have, the more data we have on our sales funnel, all the way from lead generation to close, like the better we are at being able to understand what where we're failing at different parts in the process and how we can shore them up. That's huge. I think that's something that as things work less and less, you start to realize more and more the importance of that, of actually understanding, like, where is it breaking?

Seth: It's nice when everything just kind of works. You don't have to pay that much attention, but yeah, the importance of clarity goes up and up. Yeah, the level of sloppiness is a lot more acceptable when things are great. The harder they get, the less sloppiness is acceptable. Shelby, what about you? What's working particularly well for you this year? Yeah, I'd say what's working and what I've changed the most in my business is just being intentional, like Katie said. Treating this more like a business and less like a side hustle and upgrading my tools, investing in tools that make my life easier, or surrounding myself with people who are doing bigger, better things than me has made a huge difference. And not only the way I think about this business and I view it, but also my consistency. And Shelby, did this used to be a side hustle for you? And then it became full-time or? Yeah, it kind of started as a side hustle back in 2023. I quit my job in 2024 and like I did it, but I just kept doing, like I joined a course, the course said do this. So I just was like, well, they say do this, let's do this. And I didn't really think much more outside of that. But this year has really been like, let's strip it down. Let's figure out what's working, what I enjoy about this business, what I don't, hire out what I don't, and really figure out how I can take this and make it a business that I not only make money from, but enjoy doing. All right. What about you? Anything working particularly well for you right now? Well, I can tell you what didn't work for me, for sure. That's our next question. We can get right into that if you want to.

JT: No, that was because I didn't do it the right way. So shame on me. At the beginning of the last year, I was doing mailers in big volume. I was pretty close. I mean, I was talking with Pete Rees and was fascinated by his volume, his approach. Made sense to me, you know, big number game. Everyone said that. And actually it didn't work. So I made a, I mean, my revenue was great this year, but profit wise, because of the marketing cost that I paid the first four months of the last year has been like severely badly affected. So I started to do cold calling and it's going pretty well. I use land caller. Now this last month they underperformed, but you know, it can happen. They're working on it. So cold calling is doing pretty well. I do only cold calling. I try not to mix too many channels. I try to keep it stupid simple. The next question on the list is what has stopped working for you, if anything? Like, is there anything that was going fine in 2025, working great and just boom, it's just broken or it's significantly underperforming compared to the way that it used to be last year? Anything come to mind? What about you, Katie?

Seth: The easy deals. Yeah. Like, they're just so, they're fewer and far between. Like, you really have to work the deal more now. You know, the, like, one-touch marketing, you cast a net, people respond, you jump on the phone, you walk them through the contract, they sign, and you're off to the sunset. It's just not happening. So really, you know, expecting those, like, immediate volume conversions. For us, we are really focused on how can we make more money but do less? Like that is really our goal. And so the amount of contracts that we are getting signed, we're just being more specific and pickier in what we want those margins to look like. So we're doing a lot more project management than we were like your traditional flip process. Us really trying to rely previously on those like deep discount deals we just don't see those as much as we did and we get them but we work for them like follow up is queen jt what uh stands out in your mind is like this used to work doesn't work anymore yeah i would say the easy tip of the tongue answer for me on that is just blind offers so i i love blind offers frankly and i i've loved them since 2018 when we started doing them and um and i still love blind offers if i'm being honest but the yield just wasn't there. And I think there's still a yield to be had with blind offers. It's the strategy just has to change. And for us, we started to step away, trust mother avenues before we circle back and do it again.

JT: But I think that the, I would say if I summarize that even further, I would say it's just blasting out marketing and praying that it works is not going to even, no matter what the volume you're willing to send or spend the yield, if you're not tracking it, you're not, you're stacking it. It's just not going to happen. The thought I had the other the days I was kind of mulling this scenario over was that, More and more, we are looking more like houses, right? Whereas in houses, you can't just send mail to every house and hope that they will sell you their house. You will go instantly bankrupt. So, but they are very intentional about their list stacking and strategies to make sure they get high yield out of the market they spend. In the past, that didn't matter for us. You could just send anything with any price on it and you would make money and it was insane.

Seth: It feels like that error has passed. And so we are now at the point where with the level of marketing fatigue that's happening in the market, you have to be intentional. You have to know who you're talking to, exactly what you're trying to buy, the strategy on how you're going to exit. If you don't have that level of intentionality around what you're doing, then you're just going to have to do it differently or go out of business. Yeah. It's interesting that idea of just blasting out marketing and praying. Isn't that always a thing to some degree? Maybe like less so when you've filtered your list further enough and you're more confident about something, but can you ever get away from them? Or is that always just part of how this works? Yeah. Like in my opinion, I think that there is a certain level of statistical probability, right? And when you're trying to touch everyone and hope that any of them will work out with very little intentionality, then you're just saying, Hey, I hope the math works at some level, but the more you stack things in your favor, the more you strategically cut out the lower yielding portions of the marketing, then the higher you're going to get a response. Now, I mean, you can take it to the nth degree and say, hey, I'm just going to pick like five people and spend all my time getting those five people, but you better make like $5 million in each of them where it's going to be a tough business, right?

JT: But you can go tighten it all the way up or all the way out. And I think the all the way out used to work pretty much. As long as they had landed, it was okay, you'd buy it. But now you've got to be more and more intentional about, hey, are these people motivated enough to sell, right? And do they have the right kind of property and have I pre-filtered it all? Does anything come to mind for you in terms of like, these are the things to stack, like this information specifically. The thing that has to be done now that didn't have to be done even three, four years ago was that you have to understand the property you're trying to buy before you market to them. It used to be that you say, hey, mail every five acre in this county and you'll be fine. But now you need to look even more intentionally to use the data that exists that didn't exist. It was not publicly available years ago, but now you can use platforms like Land Insights that say like, hey.

Seth: You know what? You could just instantly filter all the things that you don't want. And then every single click, you're intentionally cutting out more properties you don't ever really want to buy anyways, and therefore reducing your marketing spend and focusing that yield, right? Because it's really coming down to that. What is the yield on your marketing spend? And if your yield is not high enough, like the business doesn't function. Like if you're operating on 1.2X yield on your marketing, you will run out of money, right? You have to market in much higher yields. And that doesn't happen with broad marketing today. Yeah. I mean, do you think it's possible to overfilter to the point where it's like, you got nothing anymore? And like, how do you know where that line is? Like when you've done it enough, but not too much. I think over filtering is not actually a thing unless you, I think it's not a problem unless you are capping the size of your business, right? Because you can super over filter, but you're just limiting how large your business can realistically be. If you're only marketing to the same six people, you're just accepting the fact that one of them hopefully will get to you. They'll accept your deal that you follow up with after three years of follow-ups. But if your goal is just to have a side hustle where you spend very little time and very little money and just have super high yield in what you do, then hyperfilter is great for that.

JT: People ask me like, hey, I just want to do this very little time. I'm like, yeah, then you need to super focus your list. You need a super, super focused list and just work the most motivated, the most qualified leads. Don't spend time on the edges, just to super focus, super qualified leads. But that will limit you. The total adjustable market of that group is so small that you can only get gay dick without focus. But if you're like, yeah, I want the business to be larger. I want to have larger gross profits, whatever, larger profits, then you have to expand your view. And that's where the expansion comes in. It just has to be strategic. So when you think of like qualified lead and then motivated seller, those things are almost kind of opposed to each other in some ways. Like you can get all the motivated sales in the world if you're looking to just buy a bunch of garbage property everywhere. But if you want like the good stuff, it's like, well, the motivation is probably gonna be a lot lower for that. So when you're trying to filter this stuff, which one are you leaning towards? Is it more quality property or is it more motivation? I think the thing that we have data for is the quality of the property. The data is readily available to identify how good the property is that you are attempting to purchase, right? That is where the level of data allows you to say, just don't try and mail the stuff or call them or whatever for properties you don't want, right? So that's where we can get much, much, much more focused.

Seth: On the motivated seller side, there are signals you can apply. And that's where you start saying, okay, how many of these lists do I stack? Every single one shrinks my market, shrinks my market. And is that okay? And, you know, depending on what your goal is, it's totally fine, right? You'll go to a hyper-focused list. But every time you cut out a group, you're cutting out people who wouldn't have sold to you. Right. But they're just, but you're making a value exchange. You're saying like, Hey, I know that only whatever, making up numbers, 5% of these people would consider my offer if with this quality, but with this quality, it's 10%. So do I drop the 5% and then cut that out of my marketing and only focus on the 10%? Maybe you do, or maybe you don't. It just defines them how big you want your focus to be is from a business perspective. I guess it leads me to a new question just off the cuff. I guess the whole group can chime in of this, but when it comes to like finding these deals.

JT: Like how much of it do you think is how well you've filtered your list versus just like how good you are on the phone? Every time you cut out a group of properties, like you're totally cutting out opportunities if you're good on the phone with them, like if you can actually address their issues. But if you're terrible on the phone and you just say, here's my offer, that's it. Then yeah, you're probably not going to get them anyway. But any thoughts on that? Yeah, that makes my short thought with that and to the rest of the group on that. But my short thought is like, the answer is yes to all of the above. Like every single part of the funnel matters. You can have the most qualified leads coming into you and you have great follow-up, but if your sales process is absolutely terrible, then you will not close any of those leads. So you do have to pay attention to each point in the funnel. If you were like a master at sales, could you send mail to everybody and get a lot more deals? Yeah, I think it's solely possible. It's just, I mean, yeah, maybe that's the part of the funnel that's amazing for you and you're just really kind of not so good at the other parts. So. So I mean, to your point, JT, if you just got really good at sales and maybe you are, I don't But is there an argument to be made for that? I don't think anybody I know would call me good at sales. But the reality is that you can have the part you focus on. I don't know a single person who's got like the perfect business, right? They're like perfect data execution, perfect follow-up execution, perfect sales process.

Seth: Typically, it's a mix of like imperfect humans and execution. So some people are just killing it on the sales process. And then that makes up for the fact that their follow-up is a little bit weak and they don't do as good as the data scrubbing. Some people are like, I got it. The data is fully dialed, right? So we have super qualified leads coming in the door. so our sales rest is kind of weak and you know and the follow-up's okay you know so or but the best of obviously you can get really good at all of them it's fantastic but that's that's kind of the gold standard, Yeah. Part of me wonders, do I just accept that like, there's always going to be some gap. Something's going to be kind of limping along in my business. I just have to decide which battles to fight or like, it's like, no, get good at everything. Like be a master at all of it. Or is that just unrealistic? I don't know. What do you think?

JT: Anybody can chime in on that. I don't think it's necessarily unrealistic. I just think you have to be realistic at how excellent you are in what areas. Same thing I tell my team members because we do a ton of cross-training. So I'm like, OK, listen, you need to be excellent at this, but you need to be good at X, Y, Z. Right. And so I think that just to be reasonable within your business and eventually delegate out those responsibilities to people that you expect to be the experts in those areas, I think that that is a reasonable way to accept that you're able to get to that highest level. But as maybe a solopreneur or solopreneur with, you know, two global talent, three global talent, It is very difficult to keep all those plates spinning at all times without yo-yoing back and forth and sacrificing one part of your business for another.

Seth: So I think a lot of that has to go into your org chart, how you delegate, how you train your employees. We focus heavily on sales within our business with automations and follow up and what the touch looks like and what we're qualifying, due diligence, how like that is really a major focus in our business. But to JT's point, what he was talking about, so we cast a wider net. We don't filter our lists much because we're relying on the fact that we're going to do a solid enough job to get them on the phones, get them hooked.

JT: Do our thing, loop a bunch of times, negotiate them, anchor them, and get those contracts signed. So we're giving ourselves the opportunity to be amazing and excellent at the sales piece while relying on the data to give us enough leads to do that. We'll filter out. Obviously, we don't want something on the side of a cliff. So we look at slope percentage, want to make sure it's not covered in wetlands. Sometimes we'll look at access, but sometimes we don't. Maybe that's part of our strategy on a list that we're pulling. So we try to be as intentional as possible without overlooking things that may honestly just be too complicated for other folks that we'll tackle because we like the value add, the project management, figuring out variances with the counties. Those are all solutioning things that Brian's great at within our business. So that creates opportunity for us that otherwise we wouldn't have if we did narrow our filters. So I think you can kind of look at it both ways, depending upon, like JT said, like your team size, what your goals are within your business and what you truly have bandwidth to support and execute effectively. So Shelby, I don't think we got to you yet about what has stopped working in your business. Is anything like broken that was working well a year ago, but it's not so much anymore?

Seth: Yeah, I would just echo what Katie and JT said. It really comes down to being intentional. Like I have a very small team and like what Katie was just saying, you have to figure out what works for you and the lifestyle you want inside of this business. And so for me, I want a small team. I still want to be a mom. I want to live my life. So having automations that can go out and fill that communication gap that I don't have a full-time employee for is super helpful right now because when a new lead comes in, they get a message, Hey, we got it. We're going to review it. We review it. Hey, you, we want to talk more or Hey, this property didn't fit. Our buy box or stuff like that. So I think really just being good at all the areas you're realizing, hey, you can't just slap something together and have people run to you with purchase agreements anymore. You have to be way more intentional and finding ways that fit you and your lifestyle and your business that fit that mold. And Art, I know you were kind of in the middle of talking about things I think that weren't working for you. Is there any last things you wanted to finish on that? Well, it's just the, I mean, I echo JT and Katie. So essentially you must be very intentional.

JT: Spray and pray doesn't work anymore. It was easy when I started. And also like a couple of years ago, you know, you made an offer 50% of market value and, you know, you get it accepted. Now you have to do something different, which means you need to have the right tools. So you need to have the right people. And especially I am also very, very, I mean, I prefer to have like a killing sales team on the acquisition side instead of a killing like underwriting team or a killing. Even if we are very, very careful about underwriting. But if I have to pick one, sales are way more important. And also about marketing. You know, I can have like marketing not perfectly tuned in. But if there is a size person that jumped on the phone and can.

Seth: Can talk with the sellers and create empathy and work with them to close the deal.

JT: That is great. And also, this is connected to what I was mentioning before.

Seth: The BBB was not like something that I did just because. It's because there was people that wrote, is D&D an investment scam on internet? And when you have the name of your company and scam that starts to go on internet it's bad because people start to look at your name and so now we've worked and the things should be now at the bottom but is I had many deals I think that died for that reason so the sales approach to the seller I think doesn't work anymore it's more a consultative approach that you have to have with the seller now I've known a couple people that that happened to them in different businesses the word scam got associated with them and they dealt with it just by making a youtube video saying is xyz business a scam and it's just a video of them saying here's my business is a scam not really this is what we do and they just kind of talk about themselves and make themselves look real and relatable and kind of just addresses that right off the bat anybody looking for that mail is super easy because they have the name of your company the address they they can write everything cold calling is more difficult because there is a cold caller most of the time. They don't even pronounce correctly the name of my company, but that is another problem, which plays well in this case. But with mailers, I think it's a big risk. I know one of the things that is making things harder for a lot of people is kind of just like the overall lead quality.

JT: Have you all noticed any changes in the quality or behavior of sellers compared to a few years ago? Like, are they more educated? Are they more skeptical? Are they harder to convert? Like, do you sense that there is a lot more competition and they're getting hit by a lot more people or is it something different that's making them respond differently to these offers?

Seth: Katie, what are you seeing? I think that there's like three key things that we've seen change over the last year or so. Price awareness is certainly one. I feel like sellers are much more educated on what their property may be worth. And it's not just because they, you know, talked to a neighbor who sold a couple of months ago or they got an appraisal. Now it's, you know, they asked chat GPT.

JT: They went on Claude, right? They use some type of, there's just so much more access to information today. So I think that price awareness is certainly one. I'm noticing that we are seeing a lot more shopping between who they're going to go with from a buyer perspective. So a lot of times we're not now just negotiating with the seller. We're negotiating with multiple entities and we don't know who they are and we don't have all the facts at that point. Which is why sales, as I mentioned, is so important in order to understand, like, what is their main objection? How do we isolate and overcome that? And I'm also sensing more hesitation. I think with the amount of content available, what people are seeing from people, AI perspective, there is a little bit more hesitation of like, are you a real person? Is this real? Et cetera. We've really been very specific about how we use our tools and resources and how we add that human touch so that we are ensuring that we are coming across as authentic as possible. Is it kind of boiled down to just being like a likable person or like, is it specific questions you're asking? And like, how do you overcome that whole thing when you're fighting against entities that you don't know what's going on.

Seth: Yes. It's through questioning, right, from a sales perspective. So a lot of folks here in different, you know, sales groups that are teaching, you know, how you isolate and overcome some of those objections, but really being able to ask them specifically, you know, do you have other offers at this time? Getting in and understanding, like, what is the price on that? What is the timing on that offer? And then you need to think about, you know, how trustworthy are you coming across? Are you giving them the feeling that they are going to be certain that you're going to be able to get them across the finish line? Are your terms good enough to beat out the competition? And I think a lot of that is going to come from that rapport building and that trust. The Better Business Bureau, great idea. I was on a group call last week and somebody else brought that up and said, hey, this has been a game changer for me. You know, I was able to get accredited. I'm using that, not just my website, because anybody can build a website today. You can build it in Claude on a weekend, right? So how do you set yourself up in a way that it's not just you saying, hey, I'm credible. Someone else is adding credibility to you.

JT: Referrals of folks that you have worked with. You really got to go deep to overcome that trust objection that a lot of people are running into. I wonder of all the different boxes you could check.

Seth: BBB, making a video of yourself, just being good on the phone. Offering a video call so that they can see you face-to-face, screen-to-screen, and match that with your website. Sending them a FaceTime, like a recording to them. Hey, you know, it's for you. Just check it in. Wanted to make sure you could put a face to the website. Right. So some of those things, taking those next level intentional steps will help you overcome some of that. But I think that there is some, is this real? Is this a scam? And so overcoming that just takes a little bit more effort these days. So Katie, with somebody like yourself that has a big team, like are you expecting your team members to do that stuff? Like get on a video call? Or is it you that's having them do that? No, not typically. It is myself. So anytime that I do not have a seller sign over the phone during the offer presentation from one of my team members, I will reach out to them myself and ensure that they have that additional layer of support and that they feel as though. I just want to make sure that you understand who you're working with. I understand just as well as you do that this is a very serious and professional real estate transaction. It is important to me that you understand and are comfortable with who you are going through this process with so that I can support you and we can get to the finish line together. And so taking that extra step is, I feel like people are very receptive and appreciative towards it. It's not going to work every time, but I think that'll set you apart.

JT: Very cool. I'm curious on this, Katie. I know you talked about before, you talked about like the easy deals aren't here as much anymore. You used to do a lot more standard flips. Now you're doing more project management. Do you feel like some of those project management deals are easier for you to get under contract for your team to source? I know your team definitely specializes in sales as a whole, but do you feel like those are less competitive deals people are going after? Because some of the numbers you guys do are very large. Yes. You know, where I feel like there might be a lot more competition in that buy for 20 to 30, sell for 50 to 80 range. What do you think on that? Sure. And I think this goes back to like the list pulling and how you are, you know, using your filters. So ideally for us, I mean, we are looking for a market value at at least 50 to 60K in order to give us room to be able to do improvements, but still offer a healthy number. I think when you have a plan for a property and you're able to articulate that to the seller and they understand the amount of work that's going to go into making their property not just buildable, but have a vision for it so it can actually become something, they start to realize, wow, that is a lot of work. Those are a lot of funds. I don't tell them, hey, the perk test is going to be, you know, $800.

Seth: Then we're going to bring in some gravel and that's going to be another $3,000. You don't need to sell with logic, but we have to put them in a place where they go, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm not even using this property. Please, here. You can take on the stress, the risk, take on those funds and they'll work with us because we understand that, you know, for the most part, as of how our business sits today, we take title to all of our properties. So they've got a bird in hand with a buyer and we've articulated what we're going to create here. There's no surprises. I love it. That's gold.

JT: So JT, what about you? Have you seen any specific changes in the behavior of sellers or what's your read on the market right now? Yeah, obviously I would echo a lot of the sentiment that Lekay just expressed. I think that in general, we have definitely seen that the conversion process is becoming a lot more challenging for a myriad of reasons, many of which have already been named. I would summarize some of the additional ones is a little bit differently, just saying like, you know, sellers are highly opinionated. About their property. And that's always kind of been the case, but it seems like it just keeps going up and up about their opinion on value, their opinion on the state of the markets.

Seth: Additionally, we've seen this kind of cyclically over the years, but we've seen that recently, there's a lot of hesitation, like at a macro economic level, right? People are just like, well, I'm hesitant to make the decision now because I'm not sure about this or that or what's going on around me.

JT: And so we see a little bit of that kind of like gun-shy nature to actually pull the trade or sign contract and move forward. So as, you know, as Katie was mentioned, good sales process helps to overcome that. Um, but it's just another thing we got to fight in the process of the conversion. Is there some like trick phrase you're supposed to use for people like that? Like to, to get them to move or, uh, anything come to mind the sales wizards in the room?

Seth: Yeah. I wish there was a magic, magic phrase. Please tell me what the magic phrase is. I think if you can lead on the uncertainty of the future versus what we know to be true today, you can create some doubt. Shelby, what about you? Have you seen any notable changes in just the way sellers are behaving? Like do they seem more educated or more skeptical or anything? Yeah, I would say all of the above. They are definitely a little bit more skeptical, but you also have to think about it as if you're in their shoes, at least for people that I'm marketing to. We do cold calling. They're getting a phone call from someone they've never met, they say, yeah, I get a million of these phone calls. How do we stand out and be different from everybody else and build that personal relationship? Also, some of these sellers have been burned before in the past and they have that nasty taste in their mouth from something somebody else did that you have to overcome. So I think that's where sales steps in. And if you become good at sales and you try to master some of those skills, you can really set yourself apart from the competition. Yeah. Are you pretty good at sales, Shelby? I was not, but I've joined Ajay's community and I feel like I've gotten pretty good, not to toot my own horn or anything. You probably have. It wouldn't surprise me.

JT: Thank you. Art, what do you think about that? I mean, I don't know how often you are on the phone yourself with sellers, but is this ever an issue that you encounter and like having an Italian accent and that kind of thing? Does that ever like make things harder or does it not really influence anything? Nowadays, I don't talk to sellers, although I always, like Katie, I have actually, I have all the leads that are worked by my two acquisition managers. They are in a stage into the CRM. I don't know if I told you, but I use Stride as CRM. And there is this stage that is called work in progress. And so they essentially work As long as they are inside here, they receive a drip campaign, it's automated email, if they provide email, of course, where they receive four kind of newsletters. I spent some time doing it, so I made them nice. One is roadmap to closing, so you know what to expect from now on. And in the meantime, in the time that they are there, they also talk to their acquisition manager, which is one person. I have one person associated to each seller.

Seth: The roadmap to closing the seven questions to ask to a buyer and the one of the question is would you be open to a video call and if they say you know yes it's like i have my guys jumping in but they give myself available in case the seller wants to talk to me directly another email is the types of offer that we make so they know exactly what to expect so cash offer double close offer, owner financing offer, everything is explained in detail and how we evaluate land. So we say how we determine the market value. We are not going to say that, of course, how we generate our offer, but how we determine the market value, everything is explained. So the absorption rate and the explaining in very simple way, you know, like a fifth grade kind of guy and the days of market and the wetlands and the access and all these.

JT: By the end of the time that they receive these four emails, that do not arrive to everyone, because not everyone provides email, but it's one of the things that the call caller asks. They have a clear understanding generally of how we work, how we operate. It builds trust because the seven questions are, for example, one of the things is that I suggest them to ask, are you accredited to the BBB? Are you open to do a video call? Do you always use title companies, things like that. And of course we say, yes, we are accredited to the BBB. We always use title companies and we're open to video calls and so on and so forth. So essentially, follow-ups is a big, big thing when it comes to create credibility with these sellers. Because as the other three were saying, they are more and more skeptical and educated on that property. So then it's all about relationship with them and create the right environment. Since we're all using Stride here, is there anything that stands out to all of you in particular that has helped you run your business more efficiently? This could be like organization or follow-up or lead management or automation, any of these things. And if the answer is nothing, that's fine. Just be honest about it. But does anything stand out as like, this has been particularly helpful about Stride. Katie, anything come to mind for you? For us, it's the automations, for sure.

Seth: Being able to, for example, when a lead comes in to Stride, it's going to get assigned to a certain person just by where it's going. That assignment then automatically is going to trigger the type of communication method that we want the frequency that we want whether we want them to get notified emailed texted whatever it may be um something that has been super helpful for brian and i and this is to shelby's point talking about like what do you want your like actual life to look like like how you create your business to support your lifestyle we're on the go we are always working but sometimes it looks like we're never working, but we are always working. And the CRM has given us the ability to be in the know at any given time without having to be sitting in an office staring at our computer to get stuff done. For example, is anytime that a lead is cleared for review, I get a text message. This lead's cleared for review. That means, okay, well, let's pull it up on our app. Let's take a look at it. Let's keep things moving here. One of us might have to step away for a couple of minutes. It's having automations where a lead comes in, it goes through our call sales funnel. We decided at this point.

JT: It's a cooler lead. But now we've got text automations that go out. We've got voice memos that go out. We'll have an email that goes out. And you can set all of the different cadences from a time frame perspective, pick your templates, personalize them, et cetera. So that's just a tiny bit of the support that you can get from the system for like real life examples. There's just so much more that you have the opportunity to take advantage of, whether it's the internal calendar, which we love having the calendar settings. And it's similar to Callandly. So like block the time for everybody and whatnot. Like that has been amazing to have. And so much more. The smart list. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I almost forgot about the smart list. Amazing. So being able to set up your list and quickly auto dial through them with the manual dialer, the amount of time that we're saving is amazing without having to have an external system to dial from. So those smart lists have been like a big, big game changer from a time perspective as well. I could keep going on and on. But yeah, some of that stuff kind of crazy. Like if you set it up right, it can serve you for years to come. It's amazing.

Seth: It's just a matter of like setting it up, turn the automation on. Exactly. Yeah. You definitely have to be, I feel like today's key word has been intentional. So you definitely have to be intentional about how you want the system to support you, for sure. But if you are and you take the time to do it.

JT: You will reap the benefits in the long run. And don't try and eat the elephant all in one day. Do it in bite sizes and add layers over time. JT, what about you? Has Stride been helpful to you in any particular way? You know, I think there's obviously several things I enjoy about Stride, but I think the thing that comes top to mind for me is really centers around data aggregation. The ability for us to take originally what was like several disparate systems and then consolidate all of the information into one centralized system has been huge. It was kind of the goal from the beginning was like, hey, we've got all these different things. We're already like not only like organizing, keeping track of the bank for like, let's just consolidate everything into one. So we have one central system that has all of our all of our data, all the calls, all the texts, everything all in one spot. And so we love having that. And the thing that I undervalued until the last couple of weeks was the fact that the API accessibility in the platform to that data is bananas. Like it's not, the API is not perfect, but the fact that we have such a high level of API integration for the system that lets us access our data has made the orchestration layer of AI that we're building around it, like incredible. Like it is without that level of access directly into the centralized data, we would not be able to accomplish half of the things we're accomplishing right now with AI. Yeah. I know what you mean with the API thing. I don't know how many of you are using cloud cowork, but you can get the API and hook it up to that. And it can basically like be an employee that just like pokes around your system and does whatever you need it to do. It's pretty awesome. Shelby, what about you? Anything come to mind how Stride has been helpful for you?

Seth: Yeah, of course. I'd say the top of mind is probably organization and automation. Before using Stride, I was using Airtable and a million other systems and a Frankenstein patched together Zapier. And now everything lives in one place. It's easy to keep track of. I don't have to go track things down. It just all lives exactly where I need it to be and makes my life simpler by just having one place to look for things. It's great to hear.

JT: What about you, Art? Anything come to mind? Yeah. So I come from another go high level CRM that was not specific for land. And I can tell you by my own experience that the learning curve can be pretty steep with high level CRMs because essentially what you can do on GoHighLevel CRMs is actually there is nothing that you can do, in my opinion. I mean, it's it's really incredible. You just need to know how to do it. So the first thing, besides the flexibility, the possibility to do everything virtually is the support. I mean, the support that you have is unmatched. And I talk about Lucy. I talk about the guys that jump 24-7 on a Zoom call, the support from you guys. So everything is great from a support perspective, which is what I was missing the most. It was not the only thing, but what I was missing the most with the other system that I had before. Automations are a good.

Seth: Great thing that allows you to save a lot of time. I have four automations. One is for when the people talk to the call caller, but then my acquisition manager is not able to reach out to them. Then they go into a drip and for two months until they respond, they receive an SMS, emails every week, like a bunch of them. And when they respond, they go automatically in the work in progress stage and they start to be worked by my acquisition manager is notified and they start to work the lead. Another one is the one that I was mentioning before, the automation into the work in progress stage, the four emails that I sent. And I have another automation for the cancellation of contracts. So when a contract is canceled, it moves into a stage is contract canceled, automatically they receive the email and also the SMS in case they don't have an email.

JT: And also I have the last automation that I have is to ask a review. So once that we close, there is always an email and there's an SMS going out asking them for a review into the BBB. And the last thing is phone numbers. I mean, you can buy phone numbers that are super cheap. You can buy local phone numbers. That is a great thing. I call my sellers only from local numbers. I mean, not just in the state.

Seth: So each acquisition manager has three phone numbers, and I love that. That's it. It's a great idea. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, you're right. Numbers are super cheap. It's almost disposable. Like you could just do it right now. So I work in Ohio. They call from the higher number. And once they just start to use that number, that number is attached to the profit, to the lead, to the opportunity. So always call from that number. Great ideas from this. I think it's so fascinating to hear this because you have Art over here bragging about his four automations he has in his platform.

JT: Katie was one of our original members of Stride. And I remember working with her way back in the day, like a few weeks after we launched. She probably has close to 400 automations in hers. And then you have JT over here, probably with no automation, just because he's connected the API to Claude Code or something. He's using the MCP on that side of it and running everything that way. It's just, it's so fascinating to hear how different so many people are using this platform in such a variety of ways. It's cool. It's cool to hear. and seth unfortunately we probably need to make a video on connecting the api to Claude Code and the power of the mcp that can go on it because it really is amazing and intimidating to a lot it's a huge unlock though when you realize what you can do i wouldn't say it's like idiot proof but like once you get past that it's like holy cow this is like a whole new world now well i'm curious if somebody's listening right now and they feel like the land business has gotten harder lately what advice would you give to them is there anything lately that you've learned or any realization or maybe if somebody's even looking at this from the outside and they're like thinking about getting into land investing, any advice you'd have for them?

Seth: Katie? I have two. I would say the first one, this is a writer downer. So I would start making decisions. And this is something that we changed drastically this past year from an owner operator perspective is we started making decisions based upon facts and not feelings. And what I mean by that, and I think somebody mentioned it earlier about, you know, let's just not, you know, put it all out there. Let's really understand the ROAS, the marketing that is working or that's not working. And we have really nailed that down so that when we decide what markets to go into or what type of marketing channel or how much marketing, where do we want to pour gasoline, where do we want to pull back? We're making those business decisions based upon the facts. So if you don't know your numbers, you're going to be making decisions just based upon how you feel. And if your business is struggling, you're probably not feeling that great.

JT: So as you try to get over a hurdle, Really understand your business's financials. Get a bookkeeper. Work with somebody. Learn how to do it. Do something. Use Claude. Do something so that you can make those decisions based upon facts, not feelings. And the other piece of advice that I would be is, you know, if your team is struggling, train on sales.

Seth: There's a lot of really great groups out there. Land Closers Academy with Ajay. There are resources available to support that. At the end of the day, you have to be able to talk to sellers, build rapport, overcome objections, and have enough dials and enough talk time in order to even be able to talk to a motivated buyer to try and get a contract signed. So if you're going to invest, invest there, but make sure that you understand your business from a high-level perspective first. First. That will be my advice. What about you, JT? The advice I give to someone who's struggling, frankly, like you've struggled a lot this last year, so I've been thinking about it a lot. I think the thing that's kind of carried me through and I think is helpful in general is like kind of the word of the day we already identified, it's like intentionality. You have to know what is it that you actually want from the land business? Do you actually know what you want your business to be? Do you want it to look like, to act? What do you want your role to be? And how much are you willing to sacrifice to make that happen. Because if you're not clear on that and you keep burying your head in the sand and hoping that it works out, that's when disaster, like in a tidal wave, comes up from behind you, right? So as long as you have radical levels of honesty with yourself and candor with your team and the people around you.

JT: Then you can get the feedback to understand what isn't, it really isn't, isn't working and really understand where you Want it to be long-term. And that should hopefully help clarify what steps you need to take now to get to that goal. But if you don't have that clear vision, you don't have a true understanding of your current state, then you're just going to keep wandering around blind and then hopefully not fall off a cliff. How many months of bad performance do you think it takes before you can identify, here's your problem, something needs to be addressed? Is it one month or three months or six months? When can you actually say, okay, something's got to change? From my perspective, it's hard to answer carte blanche because if you have a business that only does five deals a year you might just have a bad quarter you know what i'm saying like and that's just how it goes and you have a great quarter next quarter if you have a business does 25 deals a month then you'll know when something went bad because you have a high level of fidelity because it's just like continually changing you're like oh we only did 10 something happened but in general i would say that understanding your business business cadence will answer that question right? Like how far is, is too far when you're like, well, either because historical loans change, uh, seasons change, right? Like your focus change or your marketing cadence changes. Like there's so many knobs and dials happening at the same time.

Seth: It's difficult to just point to one single thing. Cause it's very unlikely, especially in the businesses, size of businesses that we run that we're holding, like all other things are steady. And we're just turning one knob to see what happens. Like that's just not just how it works. We're usually like flipping dials non-stop and like turning everything like did that work no can't try to get like we just keep changing stuff and so yeah did it work i don't have to tell sometimes um but i back to my last answer which is like if you know where you want to go what the goal is like you're just going to either keep working through it uh or decide that maybe it's not the right fit you know you find something something a better version of it or a different opportunity person yeah something comes to mind i remember when i was talking to kieran shiel about this how many variables do you change at once to like see if something is working? And I was saying like, do you just change it all? He's like, no, no. Like you don't want to change too much because if you change too much at once, like you're not going to actually know what's broken. I was like, oh yeah, that's true. But that kind of stinks too because like, what if a lot of stuff needs to change? Like I got to hurry up and get through this testing because that's the frustrating thing when stuff stops working. It's like understanding which levers to pull and it's a tricky thing. JT, I'm curious on this. You've been in this space for a very, very long time. You're someone actually I really look up to in the space. And I'm going to pose this question to everyone here.

JT: What do you think your unfair advantage is? While you talk about giving advice for investors struggling, I think Katie's would be the gift of sales, of course, and training her team on that. But if I'm wrong, Katie, correct me. But I'm curious for you, JT, something I was really looked up to and admired about you. I know you have a background in software.

Seth: I stole one of your ideas about manually scrubbing every single property. A while back, you built out something amazing on that. You know, and just did it for your team. So now as I think some things have been a little more even with new tech and software coming out there, what do you feel is your unfair advantage in the space? That's a question for me to answer right now, given the state of my business. I think that for me personally, and therefore like the business collectively, I think our unfair advantage still comes in our ability to leverage technology intelligently. And we tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve before, you know, Land Insights or when all these other platforms came out and had all this data, we have like built our own platform to do that. We're like, you know, we, we've like built these, we're look ahead, we see the problem. We're like, yeah, let's get ahead of it. And let's, and to build our own systems to do that. So we're kind of always ahead on the tech edge. I think that still continues for us. Like right now with the drop of Opus 4.6 at the beginning of February and its ability to understand secondary and tertiary effects and changes, it basically was a massive unlock for its ability to do intelligent coding and development correctly at like kind of at scale, you know, not like a big scale, but like a small to medium scale like we're talking about.

JT: That unlock was so substantial that I have been working 14 to 16 hour days for like the last three weeks because there's so much opportunity right now with that unlock that it just blew the gates open, right? And I think that taking advantage of those kinds of opportunities is something that we're particularly good at and I'm personally suited to, to be able to like build out platforms. Like, I mean, in the last two days, I built an underwriter that collects 75% of our underwriting data in detail for all of our properties that come, we pull on a contract. Like my, I've taken basically the underwriting time for my underwriter for our due diligence process from probably three to four hours to like 20 to 30 minutes. Right. And like doing that kind of stuff is what helps us stay ahead on competitively. And I think that is something that everyone will have within their grasp soon, which I love. Right. But I think that that's still riding that front edge of that wave is something that, that we have. Shelby, what do you think? Any advice for investors who are struggling right now? What would you say to them or anybody even getting started? What should they know? Yeah. I love what Katie said. You can't improve on what you don't track. So keeping track of numbers is awesome. And Stride is a great way to do that and automate a lot of those number tracking. What I always tell people is there's literally nothing special about me. I just never give up. I'm brutally honest with myself and I surround myself with people who inspire me.

Seth: Anybody can do it. That's the formula. That's a powerful combination. A lot of people can't do one or all of those things. There's a lot to be said about that. Art, what do you think? Any advice you'd have for people who are struggling right now? I would like to say to people like, you know, coming into this wonderful niche that is all the rainbows and unicorn, but it's not. I mean, frankly speaking, now it's not. So I wouldn't suggest them not to enter this niche because it's still a lot of things can be done. As I think it was discussed in the last roundtable, the fact is that those that are still operating today are very smart operators. So they need to know who their competition is and they need to be laser focused on one thing. I would suggest one marketing channel, probably not even that, probably, you know, just try connections and something like in the line of what the JB said in the last podcast. You know, create connection and start to work with someone, get familiar with the environment of the space, and then do your first offer. And there is a lot of noise. When I started this, I started with $5,000. I bought like the REtipster masterclass and also my first campaign. And I got 10 properties in Arizona from that.

JT: You cannot start with $5,000 nowadays. So it's very, very difficult that you can do that. So you need to set the right expectations, be very, very focused and just roll up your sleeve because you are competing with people who knows what they do. I'm curious, Art, on this. If we could jump ahead five years, do you think right now you would be saying, wow, this business is so easy.

Arturo: You know, if I could go back five years I would be blasting out so much more mailers or cold calls. You know, in retrospective I could say a lot of stuff. Of course. So I don't know, probably, probably yes. It's possible. And it's also — and this is again what JT said in the last podcast — you know, we are spoiled. I mean, we're spoiled in the sense — no, the — we know how it was, we know how it is now. People that jump into this business now, they don't have any idea of how it was like four years ago. So they start at this starting point. But, you know, because you see, you know, people doing this minor subdivide and there is this tendency in our space. And I understand the reason why a lot of us do it — to, you know, share our victories, share our victories in the land space. But nobody sees like the bad and the ugly of it. So set the right expectations is the right thing. I would probably suggest them to look at the Mike Ferreira podcast. But yeah, not to just kill the spirit, just for them to be ready to work.

Seth: Well, thanks again, everybody, for being here. Appreciate you taking the time to meet with us and share your wisdom to the whole REtipster community. If you want to check out the show notes for this episode, go to retipster.com/264. I have links to everybody's stuff in the show notes there. We will talk to you next time.

Seth: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the REtipster podcast. I'm Seth Williams. Today, I'm sitting down with someone a lot of you may already know, and that is Callan Faulkner. So, Callan has been on the front lines of helping entrepreneurs rethink how they operate, how they scale, and how they use AI, not just as a tool, but as a point of real leverage inside their business.

Since the last time we talked with Callan, things have moved fast. A year ago, AI felt like a cool tool. Today, it feels more like an operating system for your entire business and the gap between people who get that and people who don't is getting wider fast. I personally went through her Automate to Accelerate course last fall and started implementing a lot of the stuff she was teaching in my own business. Everything from building custom AI systems to experimenting with things like vibe coding and now even Claude Cowork.

So today, I want to go deeper, not just into what AI can do, but what's actually working right now, what's changed, what's overhyped, and how to think about this if you're trying to build something that makes a real difference in your business or life. Also very important, if you want to check out the show notes for this episode, go to retipster.com/263. I'm also going to be putting on a private session of my own showing people how I'm using AI and the ways that's making the biggest difference in my life and business, but this is only available for people who want to sign up for Callan's upcoming Effortless Business Bootcamp or Automate to Accelerate course. If you want to check that out and be part of this thing I'll be doing, just go to retipster.com/A2A. That's the letter A, the number two, and the letter A.

So let's get into it. Callan, welcome. How's it going?

Callan: Thank you, Seth. I'm so excited. We've had many conversations about AI, but this is the first time where you've been through my full experience. So I have a feeling this one is going to be even better than all the ones before. So I'm super glad.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Totally. So like I mentioned, a lot of people listening to this have at least heard of you if they haven't talked to you personally or taken your course in the past. But I'm just curious for people who maybe don't know who you are, three or four people out there. Who are you? What is your background? Tell us just quickly about the experience you had in land and how you pivoted to the AI education space. Just give us the rundown.

Callan: Yeah, I love it. Well, for those of you that I know, I miss you and sending you guys so much love. For those of you that I don't know, my name is Callan Faulkner. I've been in tech automations, building efficiencies for the last 16 years. I started my career doing CRM implementations for Fortune 5000. So I would go in to big companies, hospitals, manufacturing, hospitality, everything in between. And I would look for Excel docs, I would look for handwritten notes, I would just go in and watch people work.

And I would find so much inefficiency. And what I've found out about myself is that inefficiency is my worst nightmare. I hate it in my house, in my life, in my business, in my home. I remodeled my house and the whole thing was about the flow and the kitchen and putting the garbage can and the spice rack in the right place. So I am just obsessed with making things feel easy.

So the story goes, I was in this technology world. It was very toxic. I worked for just some not great people. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I don't I don't like technology. I'm going to leave. And I listened to podcasts on land investing, as many of us did. And I said, well, people are making money doing that. Why don't I drop everything and go into land investing? So I started my land investing business in mid 2020, went through a program that many of you know, and started that business up.

Within about 30 days of being in that business, I started building Zapier automations inside of Follow Up Boss. I started at the time, actually, I was in Pebble really deeply, I was building all the automations inside of there, I started building DocuSign out. And then we eventually went to PandaDoc because it had a better Zapier flow. And people were watching me and saying, what in the actual blank thing are you doing? I was like, I am automating my entire business because I don't want to do all this manually.

And back in 2020, it was still, it was, people were still mailing contracts to sellers. They still were not fully on board with any of these automations and nothing even close to what, what you guys have now, Seth with Stride. So I became kind of this tech girl for land investors. I found Launch Control in, at the end of 2022, I was like, why are we sending mail when I can just send a text? Why can't can we start doing some AI cold calling? You know, obviously, there was less regulations back then. So I kind of started doing that. I started a company called REI Optimize. We were building efficiencies, building CRMs and doing lead generation for land investors.

At the time, my business was amazing. We were crushing it. But I still was doing everything. I still was the bottleneck. I still was documenting every SOP. I still was the person that people called when they needed to figure out how to answer a seller's question. I still was the one that was called when we had a complicated title deal and they needed help working out the steps. We were still relying on, deeply relying on our attorneys to look at the subdivision code and tell us what was possible or not. In July of 2023, I saw ChatGPT for the first time and I was in the middle of a few entitlement deals. I was in, obviously, you know, had four VAs doing lead gen who were calling me every single day asking questions and I realized.

This tool is so much more than writing emails. This tool could be trained to think like me, to write like me. And I mean, just at the time, obviously documenting SOPs, but then putting all of our SOPs in a custom GPT and then giving my VAs this place to go. So I started to realize I can be successful with the automations and the efficiencies, but I still am the bottleneck and the humans are still the bottleneck. So that started my journey. I ended up shutting my land business down and REI Optimize down in 2024.

And I went all in on AI coaching education. I now run the fastest growing AI education business in the world called the Uncommon Business, which is absolutely insane to say. And we teach founders, leaders, and humans how to build, train, and deploy AI systems to double their outputs and increase profits and run the business that they dream of.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome. And it has been so cool to watch Callan grow over the past really since I knew her. I feel like every single year, she's exponentially better at everything she's doing. She's just gone up like a rocket ship. A lot of people that I know as well are just sitting there with our jaws on the floor. Like, how is she doing this?

On one hand, it's kind of a no-brainer. She's a genius. She's a very good communicator, but it's cool to see somebody who really extracts their own potential like that and just shoots to the moon. So it's been really cool.

Callan: Thank you, Seth.

Seth: On the whole AI front. I mean, since ChatGPT became a thing, it seems like it's just been going like crazy. Just not just ChatGPT, but like everything in the AI world, just all these exponential growth, just new things every single week that you could never even imagine doing the week before. And I'm wondering, what do you think has changed the most in AI over the past maybe six to 12 months that people aren't fully grasping yet?

Callan: What has changed the most... In the last three months. I think in the last three months, we've had more change than in the last 12 months combined, especially with Claude. If you guys don't know what Claude is, it's the biggest competitor to ChatGPT. I am using it pretty much exclusively. I really don't use ChatGPT at all. I really am frustrated with ChatGPT. I think their product is half as good as what Claude has come out with and we can talk about that more later.

I used to be very hesitant to use the word AI agent because agentic AI or an AI agent is saying that AI is working without human involvement to complete a goal. And I think parts of that have been possible in the past. For example, with a custom GPT or with a Claude project. Amazing results. Before we started recording, we were just talking about Seth has a sales Claude project that we teach in our program that knows everything about your product, knows exactly how to handle objections, knows exactly how to respond to a text or an email with the best foot forward. We're shifting beliefs rather than explaining tactics. It is your best sales rep, but it still has required a human touchpoint or pretty significant development with N8N or Zapier or Make.com.

And people have created AI agents with N8N, but you're not a non-technical marketing manager is not spinning up an AI agent in N8N. That's just not a reality. You're hiring an AI developer. You're doing a significant amount of training. So I've been hesitant to say like, you're building an AI agent.

Okay. So now I'm, Claude has introduced a program called, well, let's just, there's multiple programs inside of Claude, but we'll talk about the benefits. The payoff is Claude has the ability for you to train it on a skill. So let's say, for example, are you writing SEO blogs?

Seth: I mean, yeah, I do write blog posts from time to time, not as much as I used to, but yeah.

Callan: Okay. So let's say this is an initiative for you. Let's say you want to step in you want to start showing up on ChatGPT when people are searching for the best land coaching the best land training I want to get into real estate investing we want you to start showing up and notice I said ChatGPT there's SEO which is showing up on search engines now there's GEO which is showing up on AI search engines so let's say that Seth is sitting back it's one of his quarterly rocks he wants to start showing up better and we're in AI we're talking about it.

And it's like, you know what, Seth, you need to start posting three times a week, very valuable information. And Seth will go in and he'll say, okay, I don't know exactly what kind of posts I should be writing. Can you go out and do deep research on exactly, you know, be a world class SEO, GEO blog writer for real estate coaching businesses. And for or for even better for real estate software for real estate CRM for land investing specifically, what should I be writing about? How long should the post be? What kind of links should I have?

Think there are tons of things I don't even know about what's possible there. Go build me a guide on what I should do. So it goes out, does all this research, it builds you exactly how to build this blog out. You can now say, Claude, I want you to train yourself on all of these things that you just told me. I want you to train yourself on being the best SEO, GEO blog writer, and I want you to add it as a skill in your database.

It will go boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It will train itself on a skill. Now we've been able to do that right in the past. We've been able to train it on this skill, but now we can have this skill be scheduled. So when you go into Claude now, there's a new little section called scheduled tasks.

We can now in plain English say, Claude, every Friday morning at 7am, I want you to go out and run the deep research prompt on understanding what's happening in our industry, going on Reddit threads, pulling this, this, and that. Take all of your research. And then I want you to run the Claude skill to write the SEO, GEO blog post. And because Claude is connected with all of your various apps, the next level is you could actually train it to say, once the blog post is written, I want you to Slack it to me.

When I give you the thumbs up or say comment, yes, you have to wait for that. Once I say yes, and it's approved, then I want you to log into my WordPress with this login, with this password. And I want you to go to click on this button, this button. I want you to add this, the meta description that came from your skill, the meta tags that came from your skill, paste the blog and publish it. That has not been possible before.

Seth: Now. I'll just say, I started using Claude Cowork, I think three, three weeks ago. And it is insane what it can do. Like, I mean, it's, it's like having a person that you can like let into your accounts and it'll just like do stuff for you. And it does it pretty good.

Callan: I've been very hesitant to use the word AI employee, but we now have over 50 AI employees working inside of our business that are managed by the humans. And a new, I mean, this is probably the last six months I've been saying this to every human that works for me. The human's job is no longer to do the job. The human's job is to train people and deploy and retrain AI employees that do the job. And obviously there's times when there's strategic things and things that require intuition and, you know, feeling into your body and knowing what the right choice is. But that's also why I believe this is going to be one of the greatest spiritual awakenings of our time, because intuition and being so connected with your body in your mind has never been as important as it is now.

Seth: With this whole AI agentic thing, where like an AI employee, for example, where do you think the guardrails should be with that? Like, what are the real risks of having an AI agent just take control of my computer and go act like me on the internet? Like, how do you say, no, don't go this far? Or at what point am I being stupid with this? And at what point am I being smart with how I use this technology?

Callan: This is how I think about it. And I want to give you guys a little backstory before I answer this question. ChatGPT is owned by a company called OpenAI, and they were the first ones to start. They were the first ones that came to market. There was a group of leaders working there in the beginning that were all building together. Two of them were seeing what was happening inside of OpenAI, and they were very frustrated with the data security. They were really turned off by the lack of care around data.

ChatGPT. So they left and they started their own company called Anthropic, which owns Claude. So when Claude started, the entire purpose of Claude being started was to be the safest and most trustworthy large language model on the planet. If you go to trust.anthropic.com, you can see all of the different compliance and the different pieces of information. I am not in a business that requires compliance. I'm not in the financial world. I'm not in the healthcare world. I don't deal with social security numbers.

So my use case, also a lot of our real estate investors, you guys listening, we're pretty good. We don't have a lot of data that I'm concerned about. But the golden rule for me is, would I feel comfortable uploading this data into any cloud, into the Google cloud, into the Amazon cloud. I trust Anthropic like that, but I also know Anthropic so deeply and I've been following them and using them for three years. So my rules is if you're dealing with social security numbers.

Let's not. We don't, you don't have to. At the end of the day, I do feel comfortable with Claude. If you are any bit of risk oriented, I would not. Here's what's coming though. In the next three to six months is Claude is going to introduce something called bring your own key. And what's going to happen is you will open up a Claude instance. Claude's going to hand you a key, an encryption key. You have to save it on your side because the fear is, let's say that you get sued and the person suing you is going to go to Claude and say, give me all the records of every communication you ever have with this person.

Legally right now, Claude has to do that. So I do say like, if you are talking about tax strategy or things that you're doing and you're not exactly sure if you're going to do it or not, just understand that these records could be shown in a court case. So that is where my mind goes about what I am speaking to or not. And I'm obviously... For tax strategy wise. I am doing some big plays of investing in construction equipment and all these types of things. And I'm totally fine if a court subpoenas my records. But if you're not.

The bring your own encryption key would mean if you got subpoenaed and they went to Claude to say, give me the records, they say, no, we can't because Seth is the only one that has that key. It's his environment. So that's going to change a lot about security.

Seth: Well, so when I'm thinking about a real estate investor or a land investor, I could probably get this answer just by asking our community, but in your opinion, what are like some good use cases for how they should be using what's possible with AI right now? Because this is really easy for me to think of stuff when I think of REtipster or Stride CRM. When I think about like real estate specifically, though, I know like researching markets can be super useful when using something like deep research.

Claude Cowork. I had it researching properties on Zillow the other day for me, although it was kind of annoying because Zillow makes you like push and hold a button to make sure there's actually a human there. Like I think they've just always had safeguards in place so that agents and stuff can't go crazy on their websites. But aside from that kind of thing, like what are some of the most obvious or even less obvious use cases that a land investor or real estate person should be using AI for?

Callan: I'm smiling because I used my Claude this morning. So I have one real estate deal, land investing deal that I'm working on. It's been the absolute deal from hell. It's an entitlement deal in Florida that we've been working on for four years. Oh my God. It's unbelievable.

So in that deal, there have been 12 contracts, 25 meetings. We're talking to wetland environmental groups. We're talking to engineering groups. We're talking to our buyers, multiple different multifamily potential buyers. We're building offer memorandums. We have calls about 50 different easements on the property, both utility and not. We have calls with the title company.

I do not have any mental bandwidth to carry any of that. And I don't want to. They talk about all this stuff. And I am like, I have my Granola transcript tool running. So what I have done is I have loaded into Claude Cowork every single contract. The last 25 hours of transcripts with the sellers, the environmental group, with everybody, with everybody. I have trained a Claude skill to know every single detail about this deal. It has every single contract this morning.

They were wondering that we were on the call, literally on the call two hours ago. And they were like, well, what happens if one of those sellers walks away from the deal? They're asking me, oh, what do you expect? What do you want me to do? You want me to go read the contract? I'm not going to do that.

No, I go into my little Claude. I'm like, I want you to be a world-class land use attorney right now, you know, you know, everything I pay you a thousand dollars an hour. I want you to slowly take a breath and read every line of X's contract that you already have. I don't even know where it is, but you have the Google Drive link, you know, where all the contracts are. It found, this is in Claude Code, by the way, because Claude Code is like Cowork on rocket fuel. It found the two line items that we needed within 15 seconds.

I brought it back into the call. I said, hang on one second, because y'all are so lazy. You don't have any AI trained on this entire deal, but I do, obviously, because I'm a genius. And I brought in, I said an addendum and in the addendum 6B, 16B, it says, blah, blah, blah. We have the right to sue for damages, which are at this point over six figures. Once we hit over the six figures mark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh my God. Great. Wow. We have that to stand on.

You guys listening and land investors work so hard to hold all of these details in your brain. And the reality is a lot of us have no experience in land investing. I didn't. I had zero experience in land investing. I didn't know what a setback was. I didn't know how to do due diligence. I didn't know what zoning was. I mean, I like kind of knew, but I didn't know. I didn't know anything.

So I have this real time for every single deal that I was working on a full blown AI brain that holds all those tiny little details. And then when I get on a call with an engineer, we do not end that call until I go into Claude and I say, here's the transcript so far at give me five more high impact questions that I'm not thinking about right now that I would regret not asking delivers me five questions.

And then the, I did that this morning. We were on the phone with our engineer and it gave me, gave me the five questions. And I was like, oh, by the way, what is the timeline on the, on that easement? Oh, by the way, what is the final, like, what's the cost estimate to get this from this? Oh, by the way, is there possible to do this? And he's like, wow, it's a really good question. I'm like, yeah, obviously I'm a land expert.

I'm not, but because I've trained this tool and I use this tool so much daily, I'm able to offload the thinking, the pattern recognition, the remembering to Claude. And my job is to stay intuitive, keep the relationship with the seller, keep their relationship going with my broker and really stay, let them do the work. And I just keep it moving.

Seth: Yeah, that was one of my biggest takeaways when I was taking the Automate to Accelerate this past fall. So Callan teaches this thing called the Brand Guardian. And it's got this giant prompt that you start with. And it basically starts by asking you a bunch of questions about you and your business and who you serve and what the products are, why people do or don't buy them, who your competitors are, just like all the stuff. I think it took me like well over an hour to like tell the things about my business.

And then it comes back to you and provides this giant overview, kind of like a knowledge base of the entire business. You can take this and then create what I do as a Claude project. But it's basically like this brain that thinks like me. And what's great about this is like when a question comes up, when I need to write an email that sounds like me or whatever, whatever the thing is, I can throw it at this Brand Guardian. And like, it just kind of says what I would say, because it knows everything it needs to know.

And the beauty is from there, Callan also teaches this sales wizard, which is a separate thing, but it's related to the Brand Guardian, where you go through a similar process and it understands like, what exactly is your product? And like, why would a customer want it? Tell us some success stories, some testimonials, like, all the different things. And now you have like an actual sales agent that can answer sales questions.

And I was able to take this and we set it up on stridecrm.co. There's a little widget in the lower right corner where customers can now click on that and start asking it questions about what can Stride do? Here's where I'm coming from. Here's what I want it to do. Can I do that? Or I'm worried about this. Like, is it really going to be able to help me?

And it will answer truthfully, whether it can or can't do it. And it's literally at the point where like, we could have hired a human to do that, but we kind of don't need to anymore. And you can even call this thing up on the phone and talk to it. And it sounds quite real and quite human.

And it's just amazing. And I mean, it's one thing to have these tools in place. I mean, that's a big enough deal. But I think the, one of the bigger takeaways that I had is that, oh, if I can do that, then I can probably do this too. And this idea of having AI interview you and ask you the questions is a huge revelation because there's a lot of things that like, I don't even really know what to tell the thing, but I want it to tell me what to tell it. And when you just have to start answering questions, it makes it a lot more digestible and easy to get the information out. So.

Callan: 100%. Yeah. I think we miss that. And I also think as a land investor, there is a, I don't know why it's like this, but land investors don't invest money in in A players, I don't find. And so we rely on people that maybe haven't been trained very well, maybe they they have not had a lot of experience.

And so what happens very quickly is that these people rely on you to do the critical thinking. And then they'll call you those Slack you and they'll say like, hey, I'm not gonna, you know, hey, there's this big title deal. And I want to talked to you before I, but absolutely not.

With this tool now, you can train AI. You can have it interview you. Maybe you have it. If I was doing this again, and I actually showed this last summer at a land investing event. When I first started doing land investing, I was investing in Pahrump, Nevada. And one of the reasons why I was so good at it was because there's all these secret rules in Pahrump, Nevada about water rights. And I just so happened to find the best realtor in Pahrump, Nevada. She knew everything about water rights. You could buy land on one street and that next street over does not have water access because they're running out of water there.

So I interviewed her for like two hours and she kept training my team and training my team. Now at the time, I wasn't recording the training. But if I was doing this again, I would get on the call with the realtor. I would throw her addresses and she would talk out loud about how she was comping them, where she was going, what she was looking for.

I would bring all of that transcript into Claude. I would train it on a skill for Pahrump comping. And what I would have our virtual assistants do, if I was doing this again, is say, hey, I want you to invoke the Pahrump comping skill. I'm comping a piece of land in Pahrump. And in that skill, you train on all the links that they need. You train it on the step-by-step process. You train it on everything they need to look for. And AI just guides them through the process. And if they get stuck, they say, I'm stuck and I'm freaking out. I'm really overwhelmed. They don't know what to do next. And AI will guide them.

And then as you improve it, your job as the leader is to continuously improve that skill. And so when you learn something, you'll come back into Claude and be like, oh my gosh, I just learned this thing. We accidentally miscomped this property here. And the reason why is XYZ. Can you update the skill with this new information? So that my team obviously has all this latest information.

So again, your job as the leader is to train your humans. Ideally, your VAs are building this AI employee for you. But again, that's where critical thinking has never been more important. Personally, on my team, I do not have a single human working for me that doesn't have like a management ability or a leadership ability because every human on my team manages and trains AI employees. So it's really changed who I'm hiring and how I interview them.

Seth: Yeah. I think that is going to be like the future superpower that everybody needs is a critical thinker because like everybody can get like answers with AI. And I think it's enough that like, if you know nothing about a thing, it can bring you up to that at least intermediate level, but it's kind of hard to bring somebody to that expert, actually experienced level. I mean, maybe with some things, but I mean, there's all kinds of stuff in the land business that like, you just can't speak with authority unless you've been there and you've done it. And this is probably true for pretty much any profession, right?

Callan: But that is why as a land investor, your genius in a particular market needs to be documented and trained in AI. You need to go into Claude right now and say, I've been investing in Spring Hill, Florida for the last three years. I have learned so much about this market. I don't even know where to start. I want to build a Claude skill that knows exactly how to comp, exactly how to do subdivides, exactly how to know if it's a great entitlement situation.

Can you interview me with a series of 20 to 30 high impact questions? And maybe I even do some fake comping. You give me some parcel numbers or addresses, and I will comp it live in front of you while I'm talking so that you can start to extract the frameworks and the IP that I have that I don't even realize that I have because that's really what's happening right is like people these experts have these ways that they do comping or you know I've been telling Ajay I'm like you have ways that you sell that you can't even communicate because it's just so natural to you and AI for the first time can in plain English say okay this is how Jeremy does comping in Waco, Texas.

He thinks about this. He thinks about this. He thinks about this. And it's not going to be 100%. But if we can get your VAs 90% there versus 40% there, we're dramatically decreasing the energy it requires for Jeremy to run the business.

Seth: Yeah. I almost got to think we all have monetizable IP in our heads that we just haven't really thought about actually packaging it up right or even clarifying what that is.

Callan: Every person. So you have so much that is in there. Even how, even how you do this podcast.

Seth: Oh my God. I was like, do we need to have an identity conversation? Oh my God. Maybe, maybe offline.

Callan: So one of the things I do after every coaching call, even after this conversation that we're having right now, I have a Claude skill. It's basically a prompt on steroids. And it says you're a world-class framework and IP developer, and you find secret frameworks and knowledge that is buried inside of transcripts that the speaker doesn't even know exists, please review this transcript to extract any piece of framework that could potentially be a piece of IP or go in a chapter of a book and extract it and put it into a Notion database called Callan Framework.

So my team is constantly. My AI team, every framework or every transcript, we're pulling out all the frameworks. We're also pulling out all the stories that I told because now for every single keynote that I do, or even when I'm teaching, I always try to tie it back to a story. Now when I'm just spitballing stories, it's being sent into a database. That's more for me because I'm a content creator, not as necessarily as important for a land investor.

But I think the biggest issue is land investors are doing way too much work by themselves. They're going into their little basement office and they're comping deals for two hours before dinner. And they're not training an AI as they go. And that is how they just get so bogged down. And a lot of us left our W-2s to have more time. And this business starts taking way more time than our job. And we're making less for most of us. And that is what I'm really passionate about is like, it doesn't have to be that way.

Seth: Yeah do you think AI is making us dumber in any way like I I almost have a hard time thinking of things now without consulting AI first even if it's just like like if my wife says I love you Seth and I'm like hang on I gotta ask Chatty Patty like like what am I supposed to say or Claude I'm sorry Claude how do I respond to this you know but like seriously is there is there a point at which we're relying too much on AI or do you think like no it's all upside.

Callan: For sure. No, I think there's always too much of a good thing. And I think, you know, I'm dating a person that is extremely grounded. Very connected to a higher power, very connected to herself. And she is constantly reminding me. Do not forget to meditate and pray today. Do not forget to be with yourself and be in your own thoughts. And did you journal today?

Because, and she's totally right. When we forget, and this is where I think the spirituality part comes in, and I know it's a little bit woo woo, creator and a higher power, or you can call it your highest self, I don't really care, is trying to talk to you every single day, trying to send messages, trying to give you pings. But when we cover it up with all of this, with our work, with our ambition, with our ideas, with our goals, with our dreams, which are so fun, but it's too much of a good thing. We miss the messages.

And I think if the biggest example I give is the decision to shut my land business down and go all in on AI. If I had brought that decision to AI and I had told it what my financial goals are and told it what my dreams are for my life, it would have said, absolutely not under any circumstances should you shut your land business down. You're showing me these numbers. They are great. And so is your land consulting business. You are making great profit, great margins. Maybe there's a way to keep that going while you also do the AI business.

But intuitively, I knew in my gut, every time I thought about my land business or my consulting business, there was like that physical, like almost nauseous sensation in my gut. And I just said, I cannot look at the data. I have to go with my intuition. And there is so much sunk cost. It's not even funny, but I'm going to. Move completely away from that. And now, I mean, you've seen the trajectory. It's like, because I listened to myself, probably higher power that was communicating with me, I was able to 10X my revenue, my growth potential, put myself on a rocket ship.

So I 100% there's too much of a good thing about sourcing our decisions to.

Seth: Tell me, honestly, do you feel like you have more time and mental bandwidth because of AI?

Callan: Oh, yes. Even this deal this morning, I'm like half paying attention. They're like, oh, God, what happens? I'm like, me, me, me, me, me. Or the other day, they were like, my broker reached out to me. This is before I got him AI trained because I was like, I cannot work with you if you don't go through my programs. He was like, hey, do you mind going through all 12 contracts and blacking out the price so that the potential buyer doesn't see what you paid for the land?

That would have taken me like 90 minutes to go through and like put little black rectangles. I went into Claude Cowork. I was like, hey, here's the 12. Can you grab all those 12 contracts and put a black triangle over every single one in the contract? It took 10 minutes. Yeah. Download, send. No energy spent. Zero energy spent. Zero mental bandwidth spent. I feel so many of these things could have ruined my day. And to be honest, I probably wouldn't even have done it. I would have procrastinated it.

And then the feeling of the procrastination around that one stupid task. Like even last week, I have to refinance my mortgage. And as entrepreneurs, our... Finances are not great for a traditional mortgage lender because they're looking for a little W-2 employee that makes a salary and mine is not like that.

That task would have taken me probably five hours because they asked for so much documentation. I gave Claude Cowork access to my downloads folder. I gave it access to Google Drive. I also gave it access to my CPA's portal, not the actual documentation, but they could see the names of everything. And I pasted the lender email and I was like, go find the documents. It came back with 28 out of 32 of the documents.

I said, go grab all of them, create a folder on my computer called Callan Faulkner Financials, be a world-class file organization expert and organize those documents, create the folders for them. I uploaded that folder into Google Drive and I said, write an email back to the lender with all the questions answered. It took me like, it's 25 minutes. And a lot of it was just me waiting for Cowork to go do. So absolutely yes.

Seth: Yeah so I was talking to a handful of people about this a couple weeks ago. And I was realizing that like since AI became a thing I don't feel like I actually have a whole lot more time or mental bandwidth because I just keep filling it up with other stuff. I'm at least 10 times more productive than I used to be so like that is definitely true but maybe that's just my own problem like I should actually use that bandwidth.

Callan: This is what's happening. Let's this is actually more of a spiritual conversation. What's happening is, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I'm like you. A lot of land investors are like us. We get a lot of dopamine hits from our business and from our work. We have a drive in us that is unexplainable to someone that doesn't have of this innate drive for achievement. Most drive for achievement comes from trauma somewhere.

It comes from maybe in your lifetime, there wasn't money. And you now are in this place of like, I never want to have to worry about money. So I will do whatever it takes to gain money, whatever. I went to a day with Ed Mylett and he was, he's, he's very honest about this. He's like, I went way too far with my money. He's probably worth like half a billion dollars. He's like, it came from a dark place of like why I have this much.

So what I, what I would say more so is I think we all love business. I love business. I love what I do. I could do this all day long. What I am working on right now is what is my identity outside of this? If everything was stripped away from me, the Uncommon Business, every business accolade, every achievement, every financial achievement, do I still think I'm worthy? Am I still someone that I think is worthy to be in the room, worthy to have the friends that I have?

I put a lot of my identity and a lot of my worth on my achievements and that's the toxic side of my Enneagram. So long story short, we just keep filling it with more stuff because we haven't stepped back and said, what is my ideal day? I was talking to my friend, Macy. She's like, my ideal day is working from 9am to 2pm. And the rest of the afternoon, I picked my kids up at school and I do not work.

And like that, stopping at 2pm is next level. Like for me, I could not, I don't have kids yet, but I'm also like, I don't even actually did this exercise with Claude a few days ago. Like, what do I love to do outside of work? Like, yeah, I love working out, but that's not, I love like trail walks. I love being with Nicole, of course, but this business gives me so much dopamine that it can be like a drug that I have to reel in.

Seth: I should totally have that same conversation. I got the same problem. I don't know if it's a problem. Maybe it is. Like, it's kind of a blessing. I see. It's like, it's amazing thing that you can enjoy your work that much. Because I've had times in my life when I hate my work. I know what that's like, too. But yeah, you can definitely go too far with it, I think.

Callan: But it's like if we're 100 years old and we keep this pace, are we going to regret missing? Let's just say we know 100% we're going to be worth $10 million on our deathbed, whatever, more money than you could need is the number. That's an inevitable. Or even if you had $10 million right now or $20 million, put the number or whatever you feel really safe with. What would you do every day?

Seth: I mean, it would probably still be work. It just wouldn't be motivated by money. Like I could do it for free, but it would still be some kind of work, I think.

Callan: Yeah. And then it's like, is that what you're doing because you've tried everything else and you've, you've really, really thought through like, think about, I mean, anything, anything, let's say it was possible that you guys could be traveling the world or you could be, I don't know if some people love tennis pickleball, they love whatever they love being outside. And I agree with you. I'm like, I still think I'd be doing a lot of this, but I probably.

If I already had like 20 million, I probably would be doing this four hours a day and I'd be psycho about what I'm actually spending my time on and everything else would be delegated. And I would do, I mean, I'm doing a lot of traveling. Obviously, we're living in Costa Rica for three months, but that's how I'm trying to live now. And then I'm also trying to find passions outside of this.

Which is it's gotta be hard like does does keynoting count.

Seth: Like so I am part of another AI mastermind right now and just yesterday someone was saying that we've gotten to this place where it's not so much a question of whether something is possible anymore. The people in this mastermind have ideas of like yeah I want to start this community or make this software do this website or this and that so it's not a question of like whether you can do it it's more a question of whether it's worth your time and effort to set it up. Would you agree with that? And if so, how can you actually assess whether it is worth it to set something up?

Callan: We had this conversation yesterday and Uncommon Leaders, they were asking, if everyone's saying software is dying, should I not get GoHighLevel? Should I not invest and build my own?

Okay, here's the reality. So in our business, we are scaling like crazy. We are growing at a pace that I've never seen. I think a lot of it obviously has to do with our infrastructure and our team. Our humans in this business are A players. I do not hire anything else. They're freaking amazing.

Seth: I totally agree. Every human I've interacted with in your organization is amazing.

Callan: Thank you. So we have decisions to make. So let me give you guys an example. One of the things that I've told my team is I always want to try to create a moat around our business. A moat is how are we different from every other AI education business in the world. And so when we are making decisions about what we invest in and what we don't invest in, a lot of it is increasing the enterprise value of our company and making us different and more effective. So.

I have recently built a software. It's a client software where we have over 7,000 active clients right now between Superhuman Work, Automate to Accelerate, everything that we do. And one of the things I wanted is to prevent customer churn. When someone buys a program, they forget that they bought it and they don't log in. And then they're like, hey, can I get a refund? I never did this or I'm not really using this. And it's just because they're not putting in the energy and effort and no one guided them to it.

So we built a database where every single customer touchpoint is tracked. Every time Seth, you log into our member portal to watch a video, it sings a bing, sends it into Baserow. Every single time you log into Slack and write a message or even like something, bing, into Baserow. Every single time you come to a Zoom call or even chat in the Zoom call, whether it's the affiliate call or a coaching call, bing, all that data is there.

We built a software on top of that with an AI agent that is constantly tracking the bottom 20% of our client base. And the AI agent is kind of like a sales, trained a little bit like a sales rep to reach out to them. It reads their onboarding form. It gives them the video that will give them the greatest value to watch, hold their hand, ask them questions. How can we support you? Do you want to get on a call with one of our customer success team? How can we activate you? Our churn has decreased like crazy because of this software because people are being activated and reminded of the power of the program and everything's personalized.

Now that that is so valuable for my business. I absolutely despise Slack.

Seth: Yeah, me too.

Callan: There's so many things I want to change. We're having discussions internally of should we rebuild Slack? Okay. It's probably 100 hours, I would say. I don't have a big enough business reason right now to justify the 100 hours. I also don't have a big enough build team. So you have to weigh the pros and cons. Do you have 100 hours of time? Do you have an AI build team? Are you okay with things breaking and you become a software company? You know, becoming a software company is a whole thing. You have to have people that are always ready to fix.

So absolutely, it's possible for us to build Slack, but it is not prioritized right now because it's not going to move the needle enough for me to make that decision. And we have so many other priorities.

So one of the things we've been doing is every time someone has an idea for an AI internally, also, if your people are not bringing you ideas for new AI employees, new AI skills, new AI workflows, they are not trained enough. They should be bringing you ideas every single week and it should be a part of their quarterly performance review. They do not get their bonuses if they are not automating themselves out of their job. At least 50% of their job should be completely automated by AI in the next 12 months. And if you've never given them the opportunity to learn this skill set, then obviously they have no ability to do that. But that is what I'm super passionate about.

So yes, of course, anything's possible. We can build an app right now that replaces Slack, that replaces Thinkific, that replaces Launch Control like you absolutely could.

Seth: Yeah isn't that create like a weird mental conflict for employees if you're telling them to automate themselves out of their jobs like won't they want to not lose their jobs or like how do you make them feel comfortable like do this but you're still safe because of this like how do you fill in that gap.

Callan: Such a great question Seth. 100% it's the opposite of what it's the opposite of what they've always been told. I'll give you my copywriter for example so we do have a full-time copywriter on staff. I wouldn't even call him a copywriter. He's a messaging strategist. He knows our offers inside and out. And when at his last role, he was doing a lot of the writing. He was a writer.

I have told him, your job is not to do the writing. Your job is to train AI to think like you, write like you, grab transcripts, immediately pull out the messaging that you would over and over again. And then we tweak and refine from there. As you start to refine that, not only will you get bonuses, you will be promoted. And now we're going to move you up into more strategic.

I want you looking at the actual offer. I want you looking at like, is this offer even right for our clients? I want you solving bigger problems around our messaging. I want you doing, having AI provide you with the deepest research on what our clients are, not our clients, but our ideal clients are saying on Reddit. What are they saying in Facebook groups? And you coming back to me and saying, this is how I'd actually change curriculum and change your pitch based on this, this, and this.

He doesn't have time for that, right? Well, he didn't have time for that. If he's just doing the writing all day long, And you think he has time to like go up a level or two levels in his thinking? Absolutely not.

So what I'm training my all of my humans to understand is that every job that you're in right now is completely temporary. And my job is to get you out of the mundane, out of the doing and up into the training and into the thinking, because I don't want to have to be the only one that's thinking about how to improve this business.

Seth: Well, so on that, so you're teaching huge groups of people with wildly different skill levels when it comes to AI. Some people sign up because they know nothing about it. Some people sign up because they're like kind of experts already. They just want to do better. So like, how do you make that work? How do you help beginners and advanced users at the same time?

Callan: It's kind of like, many of you may not know who Joe Dispenza is. Let's just say Tony Robbins. Many of you know Tony Robbins. He has this experience called Date with Destiny. He brings 2,500 people into one or maybe 3,000. And he does four to five days of like pure emotional work, identity work. It's like asking, how does Tony to transform 3,000 people. Some of them have been to Date with Destiny five times, and some of them have never thought about their emotional well-being in their entire life. And all of them leave changed.

It's the exact same thing that we do. What we're doing is first and foremost stripping back all of the bad habits that we have developed when it comes to AI. And the truth is that when you were given ChatGPT for the first time, you were never trained or that you were never trained to think about it. And you know as well as I do, when you leave Automate to Accelerate, it's as much of a, mental, like a brain rewiring than it is like an actual skill set that you are given.

So the first thing that we do is we teach people to think about their thinking. Because if you go into AI or Claude right now, and you start typing in there or using WhisperFlow, ideally, and you haven't actually thought about what your problem is, you are not going to get the answer that you really need or desire, you're going to get a different answer. So a lot of it is the process. It's like, no matter where you are, I will retrain you on how to get answers faster.

And then what's happened, of course, then we move into like actually training AI to think like you talk like you write like you projects are step one, this next round of A2A is going to be freaking insane, because we're going to show how do you put Claude on top of your entire Google Drive or your entire OneDrive and give that the entire knowledge base. How do you build skills? How do we schedule those skills in the office hours? That's where we will break out between like, I'm just getting started and I'm ready for the next level.

So there definitely are people who are like, even for us, we have like a dedicated computer in our office. That's always on. That's like always running into a beginner's like, I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear about the Mac mini. I don't want to hear about the agentic things running overnight, I'm still trying to train AI to talk like me. Perfect. So then the support we go to these different places.

But the truth is like when you're building the sales wizard, even advanced, the most advanced AI people, like even other AI coaches are in our program and they have never trained AI professionals. The way that we do it. And it's because it's all rooted in like actual training methodologies and human training. And we're just using it over in the AI world. I think that's what makes it really special.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Yeah. It is interesting looking back on it. Like so many of the most important things I learned, I mean, there was like the Brand Guardian and the sales wizard, those were very tangible things, but other things were, it was almost like I absorbed it through osmosis like the WhisperFlow thing. I actually use Aqua it's the same same concept or like Granola or the vibe coding thing like just it's not that I was like doing it alongside of you guys but just like saying oh that's a thing that I could do it's exposure.

Callan: Exactly and we were talking about this offline. What we're doing is we're like imagine you're learning how to cook. Even if you're pretty good at cooking, like I'm pretty good at cooking, but every time I do a cooking class, I'm elevating and so is the beginner. Because as I go through Automate to Accelerate, every single week we are building and you're watching other people solve business problems with AI. That's also a big difference in my course versus others.

Many AI coaches, I put them in quotation marks, are content creators. So they are not actually using their solutions inside of a business. And one of the things I preach is if we are sharing a win or sharing an AI solution, it has to be something that solved a pain point or a bottleneck inside of a business. If it didn't, I do not want to hear about it. It's a waste of my brain space.

And so when you're cooking, when you get to see like, oh, she made carne asada. She made egg roll in a bowl. He made this really beautiful pesto veggie lasagna. Your brain, when you sit down to make dinner and you're like, wow, I'm really hungry. You if you've been watching other people cook not only do you feel more comfortable cooking yourself because you've seen people use all different tools in the kitchen you saw her use the immersion blender and he used the Vitamix to do this thing and she used her flat top grill you're like whoa I didn't even realize there's all these things I could use you also feel more confident because you've seen so many dishes be cooked and that is I would say there's a lot of great things about the Automate to Accelerate, but one of the top three best things is seeing everyone else's wins.

Like one of my favorite examples of a win. Are you an Uncommon Leaders?

Seth: I'm not, no.

Callan: Okay. So Uncommon Leaders is a group after Automate to Accelerate. And Jennifer is in that group. She runs a company called Gigawatt Coffee Roasters. And when she was thinking about getting into Automate to Accelerate, she was such a pain. She would she sent like 20 question emails of like, have you worked with coffee roasters? And what do you think? How could I use AI for coffee roasters? And I'm like, I have no idea, Jennifer. I have no idea how you're going to use AI.

To be totally honest, I know nothing about coffee roasting. I don't really know much about e-com. All I know is that you're going to be hungry and you're going to need to cook food. The equivalent is you're going to have business pain and you're going to do stuff manually in your business. And you're gonna wish you had an AI skillset to build AI employees to do it.

So here was my, it's like one of my favorite examples. She does farmer's markets and she sends her people to go to the farmer's market. They do them every weekend. At the farmer's market, they have a piece of paper and you write your name and you write your email and you write your phone if you wanna stay up to date with the vendor. She used to manually put that into a Kit, her marketing. She would still like use AI to like take a picture and then extract the text off the picture. But the problem is that AI would think the email was spelled wrong, even though her name is Jennifer Jackson.

It would think that it said like Jennifer Jensen. And it's like, no, her name is Jennifer Jackson. So obviously. So she went into a chat. She gave it the picture. She pulled all the text off and she said, look, I need you to be smarter. If her name is Jennifer Jackson, her email is probably jenniferjackson at gmail.com. So if you think it's misspelled, like go pass through their name just to identify anything that might be wrong.

Then she connected Claude to Never Bounce because she turned that connector on. She sent all the emails out to Never Bounce checked all of them brought back the ones were validated because she was getting email deliverability issues when she was bringing in emails that weren't validated and land investors you guys should all be doing this before you add those skip traced emails into your Follow Up Boss or into your Stride which Stride is the one you should be using because it has GoHighLevel on the back end and it's the best one you need to be validating the emails or else your email deliverability is going to get effed.

Then she validated the emails and then she connected Claude to Kit and she auto sent all of the contacts over and added it. Then at the end of the chat she said build a Claude skill so I never have to do this again. Now after every farmer's market her people come back they take the photo they put it into Claude and say run the after farmer's market content dump skill beep beep boop boop boop goes out to Never Bounce they're Never But Never Bounce brings it back in, gives it the validated list, goes out to ConvertKit without her doing a thing. It takes five minutes.

It's the best example because she would have never known to build it until she was sitting there doing it manually saying, why in the world am I doing this? And because she saw us doing this over and over again in Uncommon Leaders, the tricks of building a Claude skill, the tricks of doing the connectors, and there's all sorts of things that she's learned, she was able to cook her own meal. To solve our business pain.

Seth: That's amazing. So I want to talk really quick, just so we don't miss this. So you've got this Effortless Business Bootcamp coming up. It's like a three-day thing in April, followed by Automate to Accelerate. By the way, if you want to sign up for either one of those things, I actually am hosting a separate session for anybody who signs up through my link and only those people. Go to retipster.com/A2A. So that's A, the number two, with an A. I'll have a link to that in the show notes as well, retipster.com/263 if you want to check that out.

But explain for us quick, what is Effortless Business Bootcamp? And then what is Automate to Accelerate?

Callan: So the bootcamp starts on April 21st. And what we are doing is for the first time ever, we are really showing under the hood of our business. And we have over 50 AI employees inside of our business. So day one is going to be, it's really the new rules of business. Everything has changed. If you do not have like what it's really, what is an AI employee? When, when do I build them? What kind of humans should I be hiring? What should their skill sets be? What is the reality of where I'm at and how do I dramatically increase my profits, and minimum double the output of my humans? How do I do that?

Day two is under the hood. So we're gonna go through my different departments, finance. Operations, marketing, and show live the AI employees that work inside my business, share my screen. This is not a PowerPoint presentation. This is actually showing inside of Claude, inside of Perplexity, what the AI employees are doing and how they run inside the business.

Day three, we have trained two AI employees that everyone is going to hire, in quotation marks, and you are going to practice getting your AI employee added into your environment. You're going to see how they run a task. And this is really like seeing this new business model in real life and watching these AI employees operate.

Seth: So this is going to be like, it's going to be totally different from the fall because like we didn't really talk about AI employees hardly at all back then, right? Because it's a newer thing.

Callan: Yeah, no, this is why my business is difficult to run sometimes because everything changes all the time. But this is why you this is why I have like people are like, I already did the bootcamp three months ago. I'm like, dude, it's, that's not old news. Like everything you learn inside of a project is the basis for like this next step. And there, there still are amazing things you can do with the project, but yes, it's going to be new.

And then at the end of the bootcamp, I will talk about Automate to Accelerate. That is the 12 week live training with me. It starts on May 12th, me and my entire team. That is where you learn the skill of building AI employees and teaching them and training them and when do you build them and how do you build them and the exact science of implementing AI employees into your business. And the entire thing is all about making sure every human that works for you has this skill set because land investors are not taught this enough.

You guys hire humans, their job is to build your business. Right now, most land investors have humans doing the work and not building the systems. And so I know that might be hard to think about because I know a lot of the people working for you are like very much doers and like task rabbits. That will not exist. It already does not exist in my business. I do not have task rabbits.

Seth: Yeah, sure. Maybe a couple people that are like ordering flights and like some of that stuff, AI can't really do yet. But for the most part, humans aren't going to be task rabbits. They're going to be running the AI employees. So that's the next step. This is a massive skill in the years to come. We're talking like hundreds of thousands, millions, potentially, when you think of what this can do for you without having to hire a person, or even just doing new things that you never even really considered because it wasn't possible. But now it's suddenly achievable by anybody who learns that how to do this stuff, right?

Callan: 50% of white collar jobs are going to be taken over by an AI employee. I say it in that way because it's not that the humans are not going to get a job. Let's take the COO of a manufacturing firm, for example. The COO of a manufacturing firm right now is spending his or her days reviewing Google Sheets. They are very much in the weeds. Maybe they're doing vendor contract reviews. They're in the weeds on process documentation.

Let's, let's go 10 years out just to be like way in the future. They will have AI employees that run all of those numbers and present them a gorgeous chart. That's at a fifth grade level every morning. They will have AI employees. I mean, there are, we, we already have a lot of this. So this is what you're going to see in the bootcamp, but just at a whole nother level, 10 years from now, they're going to have AI employees that do all this nitty gritty stuff.

Their job is gonna be walking into a board meeting. Sensing the tension in the room and being able to diffuse it within the first five minutes. Their job is going to be the ability to sit down with the CEO founder. That founder is having a mental moment of like losing it. And they're able to communicate the right language to bring them down a level and to get them back settled down.

These skill sets that the COO has 10 years from now is not any, it's a little bit of what they're doing right now, but that's probably 10% what they're doing. That's going to be 90%. What they're doing and the rest of it's going to be building AI employees and managing them and their systems.

Seth: Yeah. It kind of leads into my next question, which I think the answer is going to change to this over time, but there's actually three different questions, but it's all kind of getting at the same thing. So I'm just going to ask all three questions and hopefully I'll kind of get what I'm getting at. So first of all, if someone is worried about losing their job to AI, what should they be doing about that right now? And then also what is AI still bad at right now? And then where do humans still matter the most?

Callan: If you are worried about losing your job, I'd actually be worried too about other land investors really getting these AI employees in place. What do you do? You learn how to effing do this. You learn this skillset. You get your butt and Claude and you live in there and take some trail walks and please spend some time with your partner and your spouse and your family while you're doing it.

You figure out what makes you happy and what regulates your nervous system, you start to work on yourself. You start to learn how to do critical thinking, start journaling, get a spiritual practice. I am not kidding you. People that have a spiritual practice and understand how to build AI employees and have done the work on their nervous system and have released trauma from their body will be the most valuable human beings on planet earth. And they already are. These are the people that I am hiring.

They've invested in themselves. They're eating clean. They're taking care of themselves. They understand how to build manage deploy AI employees like it is their job because it is and they are not fearful of this they are so excited. If you are running a company right now it has been never been more important to start building a personal brand around yourself or someone in the business because people need a reason to work for you they want to be expanded they want to grow the right people.

A players, most A players are already in a job right now. They're usually not on the market. And if they are, they're gone within five days. So part of what I'm doing is obviously learning this skill set. That's a non-negotiable, but I do want to give you some other tips is, is building a business and a brand that is so high frequency. People are so excited. I have people coming to me every day saying they'll work for me for free because they just want to be a part of what we're doing.

I mean, even this affiliate program is a great testament. It's like people are like, I just want to, I want to be in your aura. I want to feel what you guys are doing. So investing in yourself, in your own mind, in your own emotional wellbeing, in your own nervous system, your spiritual practice. And yes, and please, please, please invest in your AI skillset. Your second question is really good. You remember what it was?

Seth: What is it? What is AI still bad at right now?

Callan: Yes. You know what AI is so bad at? Is saying, I don't know the answer to that.

Seth: Yeah, that's very true.

Callan: It tries to answer everything so fast. And that's where the human intuition comes into play. That is where the human is still responsible for reviewing all of AI's ideas, its thoughts, its opinions. And the human comes in and says, is this really, really, really true? Is this really, really, really what my audience needs to hear? Is this really, really, really what the seller needs to hear? Is this really the deal I want to do?

Again, we're not outsourcing the decision to AI. We're using AI to aggregate all the data together and present us our options. And the human is, at the end of the day, responsible for the decision making. So again, decision making skill set, critical thinking skill set, training your brain.

Like my investment in my brain health, I'm about to go spend $16,000 to do 40 Years of Zen. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's in Austin, Texas. It's Dave Asprey's program, but it's a brain training program and it's equivalent. In five days, you do like 60 hours of brain training. It's equivalent to 40 years of meditation is like how it trains your brain. Because as a leader...

I need to have the most regulated brain. I mean, I set the standard. So if I'm making rash decisions and I'm highly emotional, guess what my entire team is going to be? I get angry. I'm setting the standard that my team's allowed to get angry. So culture, brain health, nervous system.

Seth: Yes. Yes.

Callan: Really bad saying no. It's getting way better at math, but it's still making math mistakes. I'm very, very impressed with Claude Code. I have Claude Code deployed on my computer inside of Microsoft Visual Studio and it found one I had three different Excel docs each one of them had seven tabs for finances it was like your numbers are wrong and I was like be a forensic accountant why are the numbers wrong and it zoomed into one cell and it was like that formula is off. Oh my God.

Seth: Yeah so if you guys are doing writing numbers on deals, please put them into Claude Code. I wouldn't use regular Claude chat to run numbers and math. Yeah. Claude has been doing this thing. I think it's like last week or something. It became a thing. You probably know more than I do, but you can like ask it, explain how exponential growth works or like make you a chart. So it doesn't just respond with words. It like gives you visuals right on the screen. It's really awesome. Brand new last week.

Callan: Yeah. I mean, it's always been able to do these kind of like interactive artifacts, but now the beauty of them is at a whole nother level. Oh, a cool tip for you. You can train a Claude skill to know your colors, your iconography, your logo, everything. So you can just invoke the REtipster or the Stride brand skill at any point. So if you're building anything now, I am so impressed. It used to not be able to really build great social graphics or PDFs or whatever with my actual brand. And now it is really good.

Seth: I'm going to totally check that out. It's great to know. Thanks for telling me. So.

Callan, awesome to talk to you as always. Before we wrap this up, I just have a few selfish questions. I think people will benefit from hearing your answers as well. But like I mentioned, myself and a lot of other people in the land space have just been amazed at how fast you've grown, how much you've scaled, what you've turned this business into since you pivoted from land. And I'm just wondering, how do you do this? How do you grow so fast? Is it the subject matter, which is really hot right now? Or is it your raw talent? Is it the systems? Is it hiring the right people? Or is it something else?

Callan: I think it's a combination of multiple things. Number one, I am following truly my soul's deepest desires. I love this. And I will be totally honest to say, I got into land investing to make money. I never loved land ever. I just thought that's how people made money. I'm money motivated. That's why I started it. From a law, from the laws of the universe perspective, that is never going to work.

I have a friend, I think we all know him, Josiah Ronco. He loves land. He loves it. He wants to walk it, talk about it. He could do it all day long. And that's why his land business is thriving. He's one of the top land investors I've ever seen. I've seen or the hood of his business and I've seen hundreds and his crushes because he loves it.

So number one, do you actually love your land business and your real estate investing business? Or are you doing it to make money? I think it's a really important question to ask yourself because it's very easy to fall into the latter camp.

The second thing I did is I hired the best people that I have ever met in my entire life that already had businesses that they shut down to come run this business with me. And I pay them.

So Kinsey already had a business. She was crushing it, making a lot of money. She was doing very, very well. And I saw her talent and I saw her drive and I saw her ability to run a company. And pretty much right away, I was like, I can't go another day and like not do this with you. And I think most people will be very scared of paying people a lot, bringing in A players, giving up control.

She essentially is the CEO of our business. She does all of our hiring. She does what we have a recruiter, but like she does all the one-to-ones with the people in our company. She is managing the KPIs. She is managing the book. She is my integrator that has freed me up to be the true visionary, the thinker, the framework developer, I'm creative, I'm able to have a mastermind with, you know, women that are cumulatively doing 50 million in revenue and learn everything from them. She gives me that ability.

Same thing with Carter. He was running AI at a Fortune 500 company. Everyone was like, are you serious? You are going to bring him on? Like, can you afford that? Like, I cannot afford not to have this level of person because at the time I was doing all the AI curriculum myself. And I brought him in, we've set up an amazing plan for him.

He's worth every penny. And I think if I told you cumulatively what I pay my leadership team, most people would be like, what in the world? But that is how we quadrupled our revenue and stayed at 50% margins. We made 50% margins in our business last year. And I'm still paying people and paying myself very, very well.

So I think we dramatically underestimate what happens when you bring A players in. Because if you pay someone $300,000, they most likely will bring in $3 million of value. Like it's exponential growth.

And then just having a bad blank program. Like we are, our clients are obsessed. It is just a, the, the energy once people start to get in and go through it is so life-changing. And every time we just double down, we surprise and delight constantly. And I have people only focus on customer success and making people as happy as possible.

And I think if you guys listening to this as land investors, we are not in our land investing training taught how to build a world-class business. We're taught this like very linear skill of land investing, which we obviously have to have. We have to know how to read subdivide regulations. We have to know how to, you know, we do a little, we learn a little bit of sales. I don't think we're really taught how to build a hundred million dollar business in any of these programs.

So I would really encourage you guys to get involved in some of these programs where people are doing eight, nine figures and learn from them. Because there's just a difference between running a land investing as a hobby and actually building it so that it can come to be to 100 million.

And I'll leave you with this. My mentor, Alex Hormozi said, I went out and visited him this in December. And one of my favorite quotes is the fastest path to 10 million is often the slowest path to 100 million.

So what he's saying is there are so many ways to, I mean, there's a million ways to make a million dollars. We know that. There's probably like, I don't know, 100 ways to make 10 million, but there's really only a few ways to go to 100. And I'm not sure if that's really what people's goals are, but even if it's not, even if I never hit 100 million in my life, it's totally fine. But I do want to make decisions in my business to set myself up to even have the opportunity to go to that place.

Seth: So, yeah, he's so brilliant. Like every time I see literally anything he says about anything, I'm just like, whoa, like, oh, he's just so smart.

Callan: So that's he's so brilliant. Yeah, actually, when I got out of that, he pitched me on the day in person with him. And I was like there is no way I'm gonna pay a hundred thousand dollars to spend one day with this guy and I'm I'm doing it in June because one sentence that he says could make me a hundred thousand dollars one sentence and I'm also training myself like two because now we have some of these team transformation packages that are that are bigger investments like well I'm not investing in myself in this way no one's ever gonna invest in me this way but yeah he is he's genius. If y'all are not listening to him, do.

Seth: He's amazing. Yeah. Well, Callan, thank you so much for gracing us with your presence. It's great to talk to you as always. People want to check out either the Effortless Business Bootcamp or Automate to Accelerate. I'll have links to both of those things if you want to help support REtipster. And if you want me to invite you to the special little session I'll be doing for you, retipster.com/A2A. It's another way you can get to it. You can also check out the show notes for this episode, retipster.com/263. Callan, thank you so much. Wish you all the best in your, the upcoming courses and the future of your business. And hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Callan: I love it. You're the best. Thank you.

Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. And today I'm talking with Cody Cuvillier, a land investor who has built a full-time operation while serving as an army officer and Apache helicopter pilot. Over the past few years, he's grown his business from a side pursuit into a team-driven company. And he's doing it with a level of discipline and structure that I think a lot of us can learn from.

We're going to talk about the moment he almost quit in 2025, how he 3X'd his lead flow, and what daily KPI accountability actually looks like inside his team, and how he's scaling toward a $1 million gross profit goal without blowing up his margins. So if you're trying to build something steady and sustainable in the land business in 2026, this conversation is going to be worth your time. So Cody, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Cody: Great, Seth. It's amazing to be here. I remember back in 2019, driving to Fort Rucker when I was stationed there listening to this exact podcast. I think at the time it was you and Jaren. So that may remind you if it's been a while.

Seth: Yeah, you've been following for quite a while. I appreciate that. Thanks for listening. I was glad to finally talk to you in this format.

Let's start right there. Tell me about your military background. Are you currently in the military or you were in the military or what's the situation on that?

Cody: Yes, I was active duty from 2014 to 2022 and I graduated from West Point and then commissioned, and I went to flight school at Fort Rucker. And then I was kind of stationed at a few different places during my service and got to fly Apaches, which is pretty awesome. And I was very lucky to do that. No longer flying. Currently serving in the California National Guard in more of an administrative role right now, which is a part-time weekend role.

Seth: Do you know Joe Roberts at all?

Cody: I do know Joe Roberts. We connected at Ajay Sharma's event last year.

Seth: Because he was a helicopter pilot too, right?

Cody: He flew Cobras in the Marine Corps, which is like the Marine Corps' version of the Apache. Honestly, I should say the Apache's the version of the Marine Corps because the Cobra's been around since Vietnam.

Seth: So if an Apache and a Cobra got in a fight, who would win? Which helicopter is better?

Cody: I would say the Apache, but I'm sure a Cobra pilot would tell you different. So it would depend on who you're talking to.

Seth: Should that concern us that we're still using a helicopter from the Vietnam era? Like, shouldn't they update these things?

Cody: They probably have, but I don't know. It has been updated a million times. Yes. It's not the same helicopter that it once was. It was kind of just like the Honda Accord, but they just keep making it a new version. You just keep making it better and better.

Seth: What did flying an Apache helicopter teach you about pressure and decision-making that translates directly into running a business? Anything come to mind?

Cody: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is preparing outside of the cockpit. I mean, honestly, there's only so much you can do outside of the cockpit, but the more you study and the more you plan for your mission and the more you have a kind of know where you're going to go, what you're going to do, exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to execute under pressure makes it a lot easier when you're actually in that situation to be able to make that decision quickly, which I do think can be related to business as well.

It's like how much time you put in on the front end of studying and making your SOPs and doing all that work can translate really well when you need to execute or hire somebody or make a quick decision in your business. So the more background you have and the more you, the time you take, the better.

Seth: Yeah. It's all kind of a tricky thing. Like the study is essential, but like there comes a point at which like you just need to start moving. There's these things, emergency procedures in the Apache and kind of every helicopter has these and they've changed a little bit since I've gotten out but basically you have to memorize them completely so then the idea is you know them so well that when you're in an emergency you just know exactly what to do like a second nature so those types of things like a way you can prepare I don't know how that can translate to business I don't think there's anything in land that I can think of that I need to memorize word for word maybe a script I guess and you're trying to talk to a seller. So.

Yeah. Well, like when you're learning how to fly a helicopter, like what does that process look like? Is it like book study or like, are you getting in a flight simulator, like a video game type thing, or especially with something that could really go bad if you do it wrong? Like when do they trust you to like get in the cockpit and actually control stuff? Is there like a driver's ed instructor right next to you who can hit the brakes and take over if they need to, or how does that work?

Cody: Oh yeah. There's definitely a driver's ed instructor there for the whole time you're in flight school. There's someone who could save your life if you do something. So that's always good because I've definitely done some pretty dumb things when I was learning. But yeah, it's a mix of everything. So it's kind of surprising. You get in the aircraft really quick.

And obviously I went to flight school 12 years ago, so it may have changed slightly. At least the airframe is different, but you get in pretty quickly and it's a guy's right there to help you save you if you mess up. So it's a mix of all that together, simulator in the aircraft and also a lot, a lot of book studying, a lot of book studying.

Seth: Do you have to know how to fly a plane before you can do a helicopter or they just put you right in the helicopter? Like, is that a totally different thing?

Cody: Yeah. The army just does right into helicopters. That's the primary aircraft of the US army. But if you look at like the Air Force and Marines and Navy, they all learn on fixed wing first and then the rotary wing pilots will go rotary wing after. So honestly, kind of nice. I wish I could have gotten some fixed wing time into, but can you use this helicopter pilot experience in the real world at all? Like, could you go fly a helicopter right now if you wanted to, or is it not the same thing?

I mean, it's based on experience and how many hours you have. I think in general, Army commissioned officers get less hours than our counterparts in the other services because we have warrant officers and they're like the primary flyers. So I could, but I just didn't get as much hours in the helicopter that I probably would need to be competitive to get a job, I guess you could say. But if I want to just go rent a helicopter, I could. I probably would want someone there to help me just because I'm not trained on every single helicopter and there's differences.

Seth: Sure. Yeah. I can't go rent an Apache. Unfortunately, that's not something I can go do in the United States right now is go rent an Apache. Bummer. Yeah, it's too bad.

So looking back on your military time, are you glad you chose that path? If you could talk to yourself from 10 or 12 years ago, would you recommend that to yourself? Or would you recommend it to your kids? Or did it hold you back in any way? What are your thoughts looking back on your choice to go down that road?

Cody: I do not regret it. I always wanted to fly. And I think it was a really fun time of my life. And I definitely would do it again. I don't know. I feel like if I think about my kids doing it, it makes me a little nervous because I know that and helicopters are, I mean, generally safe, but they're more dangerous than fixed wing. And obviously, there's the whole aspect of joining the U.S. military. And do you want that for your kids? I mean, I would be honored if they served, but I think part of me wants to keep them safe as any parent would in out-of-arms way.

So I think that's kind of the thing I struggle with. My wife is 100% no, so she's probably going to be part of that decision. But we don't want to push our kids too hard.

Seth: How did you and your wife meet?

Cody: When I was studying at West Point, I did a semester abroad in Brazil. And we had a mutual connection with my aunt and my wife's sister. My wife's dad was reaching out to me a bunch. So eventually I met her in Brazil. I was supposed to be like, they're supposed to be like my sponsor family that my aunt set up. And I ended up, I guess, stealing his daughter away from him in the long term.

Seth: Where in Brazil was this?

Cody: This is Rio de Janeiro. Okay. So I was there for studying at the military engineering school there for six months.

Seth: Yeah. I was lucky enough to go to Brazil for about a week when I was in high school. I was in like a special choir at my high school. We got to go down there. We went to Recife, which is not Rio, but I loved it, man. Like it was one of the coolest trips I've ever been on. It was very hot though. I remember being like, I couldn't believe how hot it was down there.

Cody: Yeah. I think that's the Northeast of Brazil. I haven't been there yet, but I've heard it's quite, quite hot, but it's also beautiful. The beaches and stuff.

Seth: I don't know if you made it to any beaches out there. We did. Yeah. It's, it was, I remember the water was like bathwater. It was like really warm. Which is nice in Michigan here when you get in Lake Michigan it's just like ice cold like it's just shocking so that's what I'm used to so when you get into bath water in the ocean it's like wow what is going on.

Yeah. West Point isn't that like a hard school to get into am I correct and when I think that like how did you get into that is there something special about you your story that I ask myself that every day.

Cody: No actually I didn't get in my first try when I tried to get in out of high school.

I applied for all the service academies, or at least three of them. I applied for Air Force, Navy, and West Point Military Academy, and I did not get into any of them. So then I went to just a local community college in my town and reapplied the next year to all three. And I ended up getting into West Point, and I was super pumped, and I went. But yeah, it is difficult. You have to get a congressman's recommendation. So you have to go interview with your local congressman. And yeah, it's a pretty extensive application process.

Seth: Congrats, man. Sounds like you've had an awesome military career. So let's talk about land investing. When and how did you discover the land business? And like, what made you think this was something you could work into your active duty military life?

Cody: I originally didn't know about land. I just kind of knew about single family fix and flips and wholesaling. And I was stationed in what used to be called Fort Hood, Texas, which is about an hour north of Austin.

And when I was there, I had this plan of like, oh, I'm going to go buy this house near Austin for $250,000, which probably would have been a great investment today. This was back in 2016. And I ended up finding out someone in my company was really into single family home flipping and purchasing and stuff. So I got into single family homes and did a few deals in Austin, or excuse me, in Killeen area, did a few deals. I was really excited about moving into commercial family. We got, I guess you could say deployed, but we were in Germany for nine months. And I was doing all this research and reading a bunch of books on commercial investing.

And then I came back and went to kind of Captain's Career Course, which is what the army sends you to before you become a company commander to get trained up on that. And the army said, hey, by the way, you're going to Korea. I said, oh, well, how am I going to flip houses there?

And I've heard a few podcasts about land. And it was just something I never really was gravitated toward. But as I learned more about it and researched more, I learned it could be a remote, something you do remotely, which was very appealing to me as someone who had no idea where they were going to be in the next two to three years or less, especially if I deployed or something. I didn't want to be in the middle of a flip.

I think that was another thing is not having to manage a flip or all that back end on when you're doing single family or commercial real estate investing. I could just have a piece of dirt and worst case scenario just sits there. So that was appealing to me too. I think that's what got my wife and I interested in moving into land investing. So that's what we did in 2019. We paid for a course back then. There wasn't as many people offering courses in the business. So we paid for kind of a group course and did it and started flipping desert squares in Nevada and Arizona, as I'm sure a lot of listeners have done that before too.

Seth: Tell me about your first deal or two. Did you just immediately go for the desert square cheap stuff out West? Was that kind of the story or how did it start?

Cody: Yeah, that's what we did. I honestly, looking back, I wish I would not have started that way, but I think it was kind of our comfort level of not knowing if this land thing was going to work. We did not start trying to double close or wholesale. So we were kind of straight up trying to buy and then resell. And we had some money set aside from our single family home investing. So we just were buying desert properties for, I don't know, $500 to $2,000 cash and then hoping to flip them for like three to four X, mostly owner financing. And that's what we did. But the scary part was I think we bought 12 deals before we sold one. So there was a point where my wife and I were like, are we just burning money?

What are we doing here? We just bought like $25,000 worth of land in the middle of nowhere that we definitely don't want personally like is this going to work that was eventually we sold one and then we sold all of them but it was it was kind of a the beginning was a little scary for sure.

Seth: Yeah I can totally see that the first accepted purchase agreement you get is like such a thrill and it's easy to kind of get carried away before you realize oh wait you gotta sell this stuff too none of this really works until we prove that works too.

Right did you have to sit on any of those for a long time or did they sell like within a few months?

Cody: I think they sold within a few months. I think enough of them sold in a few months for us to kind of get our money back. So it was like, okay, we're, and we had very little to no OPEX because I mean, at the time we were sending maybe 500 to a thousand letters a month, which if you do that today, you're, unless you're extremely targeted and know your market extremely well, you're probably not going to have the same results as I did back then in 2019. So our OPEX was super low. So it was not at the time I was like, man, we're burning all this money on mail, but now it's a whole different game.

Seth: Well, it's interesting the time you started because you've really seen, I feel like most of what there is to see historically. I mean, you kind of got into it when it was quote unquote easy or easier. And then you saw the huge uptick during the COVID era. And then you saw when things got harder. So tell me about like the evolution. Like I'm assuming you probably graduated to bigger deals at some point. And like, what do things look like at the peak and what do they look like today? Like what version of land flipping are you currently running?

Cody: Yeah. So moving from 2019 to 20, probably 2024 or 25, we really did not change much. And the reason was I got really busy in my role as a company commander in the army. And then my wife, we had our twin girls in 2020. So at the end of 2020, so she was running the business full-time and that completely stopped when we had twins to manage. And then I got out of the army in 2022 and then we moved out of the country for two years. So I was kind of running the business full-time, but not really because I was trying to travel and enjoy time with my kids.

So over that time, we had moved into other areas. We tried a little bit in Washington, Texas, and we started to move into bigger and better deals and a lot less volume in terms of the number of deals was shrinking. And we could get by by doing, I guess, part-time effort and getting decent results. I mean, we weren't making a ton of money, but it was enough to sustain us while we were traveling and living abroad, which is honestly pretty great. And we moved back to the U.S. in 2024.

And my son was born in 2024. So we have three kids now. We bought a house on 20 acres in the Sierra Foothills in California, which is like our dream house. We didn't think it was our dream house. We just fell in love with it. And then we realized, oh, man, we have to make some money. We can't just do this part-time job forever and expect to live well in California with three kids.

So I kind of realized in early 2025, I need to really change things. So, and that was, that was when, so early 2025, starting out, I was, I was only doing SMS and I was seeing about two to 4% response rates. I had two team members and not including myself. And it was just a struggle. We had a good 2024 because we got lucky on two deals, which when you have no OPEX or very low OPEX and you get one to two deals, that could be great. That could make your whole year. And I came off 2024 cocky, like, oh yeah, I'm going to crush this thing. I got a pretty good year. Not really understanding that that was just probably lucky and luck in the sense that the amount of marketing I was doing did not merit the amount of I made on those two deals.

It was, it was, and just to kind of, so the listeners can hear it. It was one of those lucky deals you always hear on podcasts, which is I bought for $150,000 and sold for $350,000, which is like an incredible deal that I, they're pretty rare. And like, I didn't have to subdivide. It was just an easy flip.

That was what I was coming off of 2024 to 2025 thinking I could, you know, repeat that five times in a row. So, you know, I don't know what it is about that, but it is so easy to get kind of cocky and arrogant, even when, you know, it was kind of luck. Like, I don't know, at least for me, my brain just like gets to this place. You're like, oh yeah, I got this figured out. I'm okay today. So I'll be okay forever. But it's like, it never works that way. It's like, you can never really get complacent. You always have to constantly keep plugging away to stay on top of things. At least that's my theory. That's been my experience.

Seth: It's almost like if I'm feeling safe, it's because I'm not thinking correctly. Like don't ever feel safe because the world is always changing it would you agree with that?

Cody: A hundred percent agree so like I'm in a I'm in class at Berkeley right now I'm doing my MBA there as a part-time program and my teacher always says like as soon as you make money you have this sign on your chest that says take my money so that's what happened in land I think in during COVID times is you had all these wholesalers who were seeing like wow look at all these land investors making all this money and then they get a lot of influx into the business because you saw so many people making money with very little OPEX.

So I think we always have to be kind of thinking about how can we improve our business. And probably when we need to be thinking the hardest is when we're making the most money because that's when people are going to see how successful this niche is and try to adapt into it or jump into it.

Seth: So Dave Ramsey's got this quote where he says, you have to tell your money where to go, or it will leave you. And I found that to be really true. Like when the money is coming in, well, like you have to really be intentional about like putting it somewhere, putting it to work in like a long-term buy and hold property, or I mean, even like a 401k something, but like, don't just let it sit in your bank account and think you can just blow it wildly on whatever you want. because like it will not always be there.

Like something will change or life will get harder. I think a lot of us have come to that realization over the past couple of years.

Cody: Totally agree with that.

Seth: When you were traveling over two years, I think you said, was it 2022 to 2024? Where were you guys going? Where were you in the world?

Cody: So we went to Brazil where basically we went to my wife's parents' house for around nine months. We weren't planning on staying that long, but some things came up that kind of forced us to stay there a little longer, but I love my in-laws, so it was great. And we stayed down there because during COVID as well, we had this long stretch of time where we didn't see them a lot. So and Gabby and my wife had seen her, I guess, a big portion of her family had not met our daughters yet. So it was an opportunity for us to go down there and really spend time with her family and her friends down in Rio.

So that's where we spent a lot of that time. And then we also went to which our ultimate plan was to go to Portugal and stay there for six months to a year. And we ended up doing a mix of that. So we went to Portugal for a few months and we went to Cape Verde, Africa, because their primary reason is they speak Portuguese. So it was kind of an easy transition. And we stayed at kind of a nice resort. It was amazing. And then we went to Barcelona for probably around two months. And then we did a transatlantic cruise from Barcelona down to Rio with our families. We flew them out and did a sweet cruise. It was actually cheaper to do that cruise than to fly back to Brazil, which is pretty nuts.

Seth: Yeah. That sounds like a ton of fun, man. Do you speak full-blown Portuguese?

Cody: I do, yeah. I was studying Portuguese when I was at West Point, but honestly, being married to my wife has helped a ton. Her English is amazing, but we try to speak Portuguese together in the house.

Seth: I assume your kids are bilingual too then?

Cody: They are, yeah. I speak to my girls in English because I don't want them to have some terrible Portuguese accent like me. I have a white guy gringo slash Rio de Janeiro accent, which is kind of weird. I don't want them to develop that.

Seth: That's what a cool Brazilian accent sounds like right there.

Tell me how this worked when you're traveling, especially doing like a transatlantic cruise or being in Brazil. Like did that slow down your business at all? Or were you able to do everything just as if you were in the US? Did anything break in your business during this time when you're international?

Cody: I had never really, I guess, run my business like a full-time job yet, even though I think at the time I thought I was doing running a full-time job. But the hardest thing was the time zone difference when I was in Europe that was pretty rough so I'd like work late afternoon into really late evening time and then wake up late which is kind of tough when you have kids so I'd wake up late and my wife would be like okay here you go and the that was that was the toughest thing is the time zone and then also putting people in place that can kind of run the the back end or get contract signed or I mean not contracts get deed signed and things like that was something I had to plan for ahead of time and then sending wires being able to send wires when you're out of the country was something I had to figure out.

Those types of things were the biggest learning points for me. But I don't think I had enough operations going on for me to really be overwhelmed with that. And maybe it was a good thing at the time. I think it was probably a good point. We were living abroad. It was actually very inexpensive for us to live in these different places relative to the US. So I didn't really need to make as much money. So we were profitable. I think we, I don't know, we probably were making between netting between 70 and 100,000 a year, which was fine for us to live abroad. And I think I had a team of two.

At the peak of my abroad. So I had a person on SMS and then I had a person who was more of like my acquisition manager who was also foreign based.

Seth: So remind me, were you totally out of the military at this point when you left for this two year stint abroad? Or were you in the national guard at that point?

Cody: I stayed in something called the IRR, which is like inactive ready reserve. So I was kind of just in this limbo state where I wasn't sure if I wanted to rejoin or not. I was almost jumped out completely. And I had a few mentors in the military that told me, hey, just, just stay in this. Cause you really, you have no obligation. You just kind of, you float around until you decide what you want to do. And so I stayed, I stayed there until I got back and decided to join the California National Guard. So I didn't have any military obligations while I was abroad.

Seth: Did you get paid anything for being in that limbo state or not really?

Cody: No, no, not at all.

Seth: That's too bad. It would have been nice.

Yeah. So am I remembering right? Did you say there was a moment in early 2025 when you almost quit? And if so, what was going on in the business at that time?

Cody: Yeah. So I was coming off that good 2024, right? Because I had a few good deals and I was kind of feeling great. And then rolled into January and I still had my team of two thinking I was crushing it. And one of my texts, my texting, because I was texting at the time, my response rates were down to two to 4%, which is pretty atrocious for anybody that does SMS out there. And I was getting maybe 15 to 25 leads a week, which is not a lot.

Seth: How many texts is that per week to get that many leads?

Cody: Man, I don't... I could just do the math, but I'm lazy. It's maybe like 500 a day or 500 to 700 a day at the time. And this is your two team members who are doing this for you? Yeah, I had one full-time SMS person. The other one was more of my acquisition manager. Yeah.

And I thought that was a lot. I thought it was sending a ton. And the thing is, the difference between mail, if you're doing direct mail and you're doing SMS, maybe 25 leads would be pretty solid if you were doing direct mail. I think the lead quality would be a little better, depending on the type of mail you're doing. With that kind of direct outreach, cold call SMS, you really need more volume. So I didn't know that. And so having very few leads. I wasn't converting any deals. We weren't getting anything signed. I didn't really have good processes in place for my acquisition manager to really know how to negotiate a deal.

And I was seeing all these people in land leaving for other things. I feel like a lot of people were leaving in early 2025 or late 2024. And one of the things I saw was messy title or distressed acquisitions is same thing, different name. A lot of people went that route. And I thought, maybe, hey, this is what I need to do. And so I bought a course thinking, hey, this will just be an add on to my business. So I was trying to add on to my business when my business was broken. It's like, hey, you probably should fix the business first before you try to add something to it.

So probably about halfway through the course, I had reconnected with a few mentors who aligned me with some really high level land investors who were doing really well. And it kind of reset my perspective. And they were all getting a massive amount of leads per week. It had bigger teams, better systems. And I was like, oh, no wonder I'm not doing well.

I'm doing like, I don't know, a fifth or a sixth of the work that they're doing. So why would I expect to have the same results as them? And that was what really kind of changed my perspective. Like, okay, do I want to run away? Do I have to relearn this whole new business? Or should I just go deeper in the one I already know?

Seth: So is that kind of what convinced you not to quit was realizing like, it's not that it's broken. I just have to work harder, like just do higher volume?

Cody: Yeah, I think that was it was just kind of understanding that it's not that I suck or that I'm unlucky. It's just I'm not doing enough. And so when you have like a math formula, I need to do this amount of marketing to get this amount of overall leads. And then of those leads, I'll probably make offers on half. And then if I make this many offers, my conversion rate should be X. Like it's easy to kind of start plugging and playing to know what your top level marketing needs to be for you to get the certain amount of deals you want to get to. And that sounds a lot easier. I had to do that over the course of a year or so.

Seth: So you went from under 20 leads per week to around 70. Was that just by doing more? And was this texting that you did more of? Or did you do something different to increase that lead flow?

Cody: I did cold call and texting.

So I increased texting, which was, and I changed platforms because I think I don't really want to call out a platform for doing it the wrong way. I think the biggest problem was I was on a platform long enough, not really having good processes in texting. So once you get down to that 2% to 4% response rate, that probably means your numbers or your company is being flagged for something as spam or something. So jumping platforms and kind of rebuilding up my reputation was important. So I was able to get my response rates up and I increased my volume on SMS. I didn't increase any employees there.

And then on the cold calling side, I thought it works really well to match cold calling and texting up. Some people pick up the phone. Some people respond via text. So I built a team of cold callers. And that was probably the majority of my year was trying to figure out why I could not have success with cold calling. And I had some issues that came up with basically some employees on the team that were doing cold calling for me that were saying they were calling, but in reality, they were hanging up on every single person they were talking to.

And that was, it took me two to three months to figure that out. And I hired a consultant to help me build my call center team and all that, which is to find out that it was like two people that were preventing me from being successful because they were pretending to work was tough.

Seth: So you said you built your own cold calling team. So how many people is this?

Cody: Last year was four. I currently only have three people on the team now, and I'm probably going to get it back up to four.

Seth: Gotcha. And you're currently doing both cold calling and texting right now? Is that the current situation?

Cody: Yeah, that's what I'm doing now.

Seth: Have you used Stride Sales Coach? I don't remember if you were part of that or not.

Cody: Yeah, I do. You do. Stride Sales Coach. So I use it combined with, I'm in Ajay Sharma's program. I'm sure, I think he's one of your sponsored coaches. Yeah, yeah.

So that has been pretty awesome for my acquisition managers to have like the live aspect of getting call reviews and also listening to other people's calls and having a structure to follow on a script. That's been really critical for us having better conversion this year and last year, but then also putting it, our calls into Stride Sales Coach to get those, that automated review is really nice because then my team could go and do it and they don't need me to review their call or they don't need to wait for until a week later to get feedback from a live call with Ajay or his team. So having the AI to implement is pretty helpful too.

Seth: That's awesome. Did it make a big difference to get involved with Ajay and learn from him about how to handle these calls the right way?

Cody: That was critical for a few things in the business. I think having a script, which he offers for free, and then his actual course is for free as well, was just following that and having structure.

Has changed my conversion completely. Also hearing people on his calls and knowing what a good closer sounds like was something I didn't know. I thought I was a good closer. And then I listened to what actually good closers and good salespeople sound like. Oh, I have a lot. I have a lot to learn.

Seth: Yeah, that is hugely helpful. Seems like the two could kind of work well. When I say the two, I mean, Ajay and then Stride Sales Coach. Ajay, in terms of just understanding, like, what does a good call even look like? Like, what do you say? How do you say it? How do you double and triple dial and what's good follow-up look like? And Stride Sales Coach is like the manual pain in the neck thing of like having to actually listen to every call and like figure out is this good or not. It just kind of does that and grades it. So you can kind of like educate yourself about how to do it right and actually like stay on top of is it being done right or not. Would you agree? Like do they work well together in that sense?

Cody: I think so. I think there's a lot of things that you can get that you kind of need to hear live and like the tonality of how someone says something or how fast they speak. Or if you're like mirroring someone's energy, then that's something you have to get on kind of a live call recording. And I'm sure someday AI is going to be able to figure that out. I mean, we have AI agents that kind of sound like real people. So we're probably not too far off from that.

And then having the actual words you say analyzed by AI is helpful to see if you're actually following the structure. If you're listening to certain parts of the call, maybe they talk about a critical life event, which could be retirement or a kid moving out of the house or a death in the family or something and maybe you missed it and you didn't mention anything about it on the call. It's like that's something that that Stride Sales Coach could pick up on.

Seth: Would you say that the cold calling, like is that the bigger deal between the two in terms of cold calling versus texting? Like if you could only use one of them, is that what you would stick with?

Cody: I kind of get somewhat even amounts of leads from both. I probably do need to go analyze which leads convert more and which convert better. And I don't have an answer for that on this call today, but I think honestly having a balance of both is critical. And honestly, looking into this year, I want to get back into direct mail. Which has been something I've been nervous to do. And I know a lot of people are having plenty of success with it, but when I get back into it, it won't be how I did it.

You know, in 2019, it'll be very targeted on certain types of property, which will probably be like larger acreage, big road frontage that you could potentially either flip or do some sort of value add development on. Because I think that's where you'll get the most ROI on your direct mail, at least for what I'm seeing and what I'm going to try to do in my business this year.

Seth: Yeah, there's really easy ways to sort that way now. Didn't used to be that way. Now, when you say 70 leads per week, what does that actually mean? Like, are these sellers calling you back or are they text replies or form submissions? Like what is the quality of these leads?

Cody: So the quality is not great. I think normally, so we call them our gross leads. You could say like the amount of people who've expressed interest in selling their property is really kind of the only thing we're screening for is someone who is interested in selling in the next, you know, 60, 30 to 60 days. And then they, and then we have lead managers who call them up and ask some call every we have one thing we do too now is everybody gets a scheduled appointment so if it's a cold call or a texter we will schedule that person that leads appointment with our lead manager and then do a handoff of like this is you're going to be talking to this person on this phone number so then there's a higher chance of our actually getting a show at that appointment so then our lead manager will call them and ask them a few qualifying questions.

They'll ask for asking price and just a few key details about the property. And if they're still, we're interested in making an offer on them, then we'll schedule them with our action manager or one of our action managers and do the same type of handover. Here's the phone number. Here's the appointment time. So to try to increase our show rates.

With those people. Probably about half of those leads get scheduled. So probably 35 of 70 will get scheduled.

Seth: So like of the 70 come in, what percentage of those actually end up being closed deals? Is it that 2% to 4% or is it something different?

Cody: Man, I need to do the math on this. But so we're targeting my goal for my extra demanders is to get about two signed contracts a week on average. And I think I need to increase my leads for that to be the norm. I think now we're probably two to three total where I want to be like four to six total. So I think I need to increase to about where each of my action managers have five appointments minimum per day. So that's 10 appointments total for the business for them to actually be able to convert enough to do that.

Seth: So how many people are currently on your team? Did you tell me that?

Cody: I have eight people on the team right now and it's very acquisition heavy. It's pretty much all acquisition. And that's something I need to work on right now is, is bringing on a transaction coordinator or someone on the dispo side to help me with that. Cause I've, I've been leaning on agents a lot as some people do when they're, when they're building on the acquisition side.

Seth: Do you think that's okay? Like, could you just lean on agents and have your business work that way or do you need to sell some of those things through your team internally?

Cody: I do think a lot, there's a lot of really successful people who do that, who only just rely on agents because they think the ROI is higher. I think that there are some deals, I think having someone who is in a transaction coordinator role who kind of manage all the closings could also manage the disposition for kind of the lower price parcels that may not make as much sense for an agent to post, probably.

Anything under $60,000 to $70,000 maybe be better to sell. But internally, and especially the deals where you're looking to sell owner finance, because if you're selling owner finance with an agent, you have to pay the commission out still, and you're only getting a down payment. So a lot of times you're walking away with nothing if you're paying the commission out on the full price and you're only getting a small down payment. So I think for the seller financing deals or owner financing deals, I mean, it's nice to have that department or at least somebody who can post some properties for you.

Seth: Are all of your deals still just straight flips? Like they ever do improvements or subdividing or anything like that?

Cody: I'm starting to get into subdividing this year. And it's not something it's because I never wanted to do subdividing. I just never had any deals come across that I think were, could be used as a subdivide. And I think the more volume I do, the more potential subdivide opportunities I get. I'm not actively I know some people actively look on market and really only target that. We do majority flips, but we have two active subdivides we're working on right now. I'd like to increase that to maybe one to two a quarter. So four to six a year would be really cool to manage for 2026. And the rest just being flips, most likely a year.

Seth: Somebody just left a comment on a recent podcast interview I did, episode 260. and they said, non-value-add real estate investing is dying. Do you think that's true? Or is it just maybe it depends on the markets you're working in? I hear this said all the time where somebody will make some bold statement like, this is how it is in the land business. Well, it's like, that's how it is where you work, not necessarily where I work. But what are your thoughts on that? Is that along the right lines or is that just totally wrong? Because it sounds like you're doing a lot of just straight flips still.

Cody: I would say I would change that to non-value-add investing is harder than it used to be.

Seth: There you go. I'm thinking it gets harder every year, but I do think it gets harder regardless of value add or non-value add, right? Because there's more people in the market. There's more people trying to get deals done and it's just going to get harder and you have to adapt. You have to adapt with the every year.

So I think saying I will never do a flip because I'm only going to do value add. I mean, that's fine. Some people have a lot of success, so I don't want to knock it. If you're only doing a few deals a year and making a lot of money on them, but I think if you're sending out marketing like I am, which is a lot, and a lot of land investors are, to say no to a flip that could make you 50 grand, I feel like that'd be weird to me. I'm not at the point where I'm making so much money where I'm going to be like, no, I'm good. I'm going to wait for that $200,000 deal. I'm not there yet. Maybe one day.

Cody: Do you sense that the margins of these straight flip deals are getting thinner? When you just look at your average straight flip that you're doing.

Does the work to profit ratio so is it getting worse and worse or is it not really? You just kind of have to send out more marketing to find them. So one thing we changed in our business and it's kind of aligned with, so we have a few different prices we offer to people. So we'll do like our flip price, which maybe in 2019 was 30 to 40% of market value. Now my flip price offer is roughly 50% of what we're offering. And then on bigger deals, which is like anything over $70,000, I'm willing to accept like a 75% return on, which is less, right?

Is one thing to think about on the flip price and then we have a double close price so like how much like which is a little higher of a threshold I think it's like 65 that will accept up to you and then one thing we recently implemented is a seller financing offer where if somebody's not willing to do it and they're stuck on a price right they really want a certain price will actually offer seller financing to everybody who's price fixated and like classic person who's like, oh, I'm not in a hurry to sell. I've had this property for years. I just want to get X dollars.

So we'll always offer them a seller financing price now. So we will offer tiers of offers. And I think having multiple exit strategies and multiple acquisition strategies for properties is critical in how the market's changing. It's getting more competitive.

Seth: What kind of KPIs do you track with your team to make sure that they are doing what they're supposed to do and on the right track?

Cody: On the cold call side, I probably track too much, honestly but the the biggest thing is that just by the person is I'm looking at talk time and leads pushed per day is kind of the biggest thing I'm looking at to make sure they're actually engaged throughout the day and then how many overall connections and every calling platform is different so I don't really want to steer someone the wrong way but how many actual conversations they had per day how much how much time they talked on how long they talked on the phone and then how many off how many leads were pushed it's kind of the big three texting I look at how many actual texts we sent and what our response rate was, what our delivery rate was, and then how many leads we actually pushed.

So that's the big thing. And then the lead manager side, I'm looking at how many appointments were scheduled, how many were attended, what his overall talk time was, and then how many appointments he scheduled for our action manager. And then on the action manager, it's the same thing. So how many appointments were scheduled, how many attended, how many follow-up calls did we do? And that's another thing on the lead manager side, how many follow-ups were done, what's overall talk time. And then it's offers made, contracts sent, and contracts signed.

So that's kind of a summary of kind of the whole acquisition pipeline of what I look at. And recently, I don't know if I could get into so I actually didn't use to track that, but one thing I got into recently is I actually have them fill those out. So my team members fill those out. And then in our daily huddles that we have now, they actually brief those to me, which they probably actually hate.

But, so something about, I don't know, having to brief something to your boss that just, you know, makes you have to absorb a little more accountability than maybe you would if you're just filling out a spreadsheet when you actually have to look at someone on Zoom and be like, hey, this is how many calls I made yesterday. You kind of own it a little more. So that's something I recently implemented the last few months.

Seth: Is that like a weekly meeting you're doing with people where they have to come to the table and talk about what they did?

Cody: So I used to do weekly meetings probably pre-2025. And honestly, those weekly meetings probably turned into whenever I feel like it meetings.

So last year, we implemented daily huddles. And the purpose of those was just to kind of me identify any issues in the business or communication problems that I could fix as the boss quickly instead of having to wait another week for someone to bring it up at our next weekly meeting. I have probably expanded that more than maybe I should have. So now every day we'll actually jump into KPIs on a daily basis to try to see if there's any trends, that are happening. I'm not scrutinizing someone day for day. But if I see someone on the cold call team far outperforming someone else, I'm like, hey, what did you do differently yesterday? And we need to share with everybody how you had so much success. So it's more of a constructive meeting than, hey, this person's awesome and you suck. It's not really how I like to run them.

Seth: Oh, I shouldn't be doing it that way. I guess I got to change how I do things. I don't know. Maybe I was in the military, so that works too. Do you like have any way that you incentivize your team to like do more calls or close? But like, does it make any financial impact to them if they do this or is it just, yeah, it's just your job. So just do more of it.

Cody: Last year, I've been trying to something I've been trying to figure out how to do it the right way. And I think I'm still figuring it out. But I created some incentives for the lead generation team of like, if you hit this many leads or this many leads per month, then you get a this much bump. And it's like a tiered system. So I think the biggest bump would be like $100 and it goes down from there for a certain amount of leads pushed for the cold callers and texters.

And then one thing I also implemented, and I know a lot of people do this based on like annual gross profit, but something I'm doing this year, and we can talk at the end of the year and tell you how it goes, but I'm kind of implementing quarterly bonuses depending on gross profit in the business. It's all salary tiered based on how much they make in the business for every month that they work.

Seth: That's a tricky thing to figure out. I don't know if you do it based on the global revenue of the business. Because what if person B over there had nothing to do with the revenue going up? But they did make a difference over here. Should we all be anchored to the same number? Or do you complicate the heck out of it and have everybody measured on something different? I don't know the answer either. When you figure it out the right way, I'd love to hear about it.

Cody: Exactly.

Seth: Yeah, there is a book called Profit Works. Tried to listen to the audio book a couple of years ago. That's all about that. All these different ideas you can use on how to actually bonus or financially incentivize people based on things that actually matter to them. Not in a way that's going to set them up to just expect money for no reason next year. Like a Christmas bonus or something. But like actually have it tied to something meaningful that they can change. And I remember hearing some good ideas, but it also got really boring. I couldn't like stay focused on this topic. I feel like ChatGPT might be a good idea now. If you could really tell the details, you could probably get some good ideas there.

Cody: Yeah. I mean, my biggest concern with implementing like bonuses for leads pushed was just getting an influx of very bad leads. And that's what I told the team is if I see an influx of just terrible leads and we increase leads by a ton, but they're all bad, I'm just going to end this.

So do not abuse the system.

Seth: Yeah. It's a multifaceted thing. Like it's not just a black and white, make this one number go up. It's like, well, but what about this and that and that? Like it all has to work together for it to work. So I hear you. Then you have to have good data for people to get on the phone with people or have good response rates. So it's out of some of their, some things that are my control and not theirs. So it's tough.

Let's talk about your tech stack. I know you're a Stride CRM user. Do you Stride for any of this phone call stuff or when or why did you realize that you even needed something like Stride?

Cody: Yeah. So I was using Airtable for forever and I always wanted to jump to a CRM. Not always, I guess over the last year and a half or two years, I wanted to jump to like a real CRM. I just had never had one. And I'm sure you could build Airtable better than I did. But my level of knowledge, that's where it was. And as I was growing and increasing the amount of leads we were getting, I just couldn't keep track of everything. It was just too hard to stay organized and create a system that everyone could manage.

And so I was out looking for a CRM and I was talking to a few different people in the land space about different options out there. And a few of them had mentioned to me, oh, well, Seth Williams is making a CRM. You may want to check that one out. It's for land. I was like, oh, well, that's perfect. I'm a land investor. Look at that.

So I figured anything you attach your name to would be a good place to start. So I made the leap and the painful process of transitioning all of my data over, which was what I was scared of. But I got through that. And now we primarily use all of the calling and stuff we do in the Stride now is from our lead managers and our acquisition managers.

We're not doing any cold calling or texting through Stride, which we tried at the beginning. And that was dumb. And we got blocked by, I think, Twilio for a while. So we have figured out how to do it the right way now, I think, at least for the next few months. And we're doing only scheduled calling and follow-ups.

Seth: Yeah, and this is a common question, just so people know what Cody's talking about. You can text through Stride, but you don't want to do bulk texting, like an auto-dialer, sending out thousands of texts at a time or your number will get shut down. That's why you would use something like Launch Control or Smarter Contact or something else that's actually meant to do that. So if that's what you're looking for, that particular use is not what Stride is for.

How long did it take to migrate everything over?

Cody: I honestly think it was pretty quick just to get a 70% solution of like, can I use this just to ongoing with the data I have while I'm importing the old stuff? I think it was probably two to three business days of back and forth with support I mean, I did spend probably an entire day talking to like a little support bubble and sending Loom videos back and forth with the support team. Like, hey, how do I do this? How do I do that? And I still do that, but I don't have to spend a whole day on it anymore. Yeah. It was pretty quick, maybe two to three days to be able to use the system. And then obviously I've learned over time of how to use it more effectively. And I'm still learning. There's a ton of things that it can do that I have not taken the time to implement in the automation side and things like that.

Seth: Yeah. There's actually a new thing that's, if it's not there yet, it will be soon. It's like this Ask AI. Like I actually just used it yesterday. I was kind of blown away. It was automatically sending email notifications whenever a conversation came in. I'm like, I want to stop that. So I was asking it like, how do I turn these off? I was expecting it to tell me where to go to do it, but it said, would you like me to turn that off for you?

And I was like, yeah, do it. And I just did it. It was like this Claude Cowork type thing where it just like does it for you. So you don't even have to know where to go to do it. You just have to know what you want and it can do it for you, which is a pretty huge deal because I know the pain of having to learn anything, just the mental calories you have to burn, even if it's not that hard. Like you still got to think about it to do it. It changes things when like it'll just do the thing.

Cody: Yeah, I think there's also like a new project management tab, which I have not explored yet, but I think it could be pretty useful for some of the subdivides that I'm working on right now.

Seth: Yeah, you should check that out. I've not used that myself that much yet, but we got a handful of people asking us for that. Those more complex projects where you need to get a bunch of different parties involved and track things from one to the next.

Pretty awesome. So like, what does Stride do for you exactly? I know you mentioned like phone calls and that kind of thing. Like, do you use it to track your KPIs and do you do any like automated follow-up or like, what would you say are the most useful things that you do use? Because I know it can do a ton and most people don't use everything I can do. I'm just curious, what's stuck for you?

Cody: I probably use it more basically than a lot of people because I'm not coming from another CRM. So I don't know what I don't know. But I think the biggest thing for me is just having all of the data revolving around that lead in one place. So I can go in and I could see the conversation that the lead manager had and what they talked about. I can go see what the acquisition manager talked about. And then the action manager, before they jump on a call, they're not looking at condensed notes that were typed out that probably missed 50% of the conversation. They can go and actually read the transcript or listen to the call. It sounds super basic, but that has been really critical for me of just having one area to go and look at everything about the lead.

And then you can also save contracts in there and save everything. So I mean, I do have other systems that we use, but I really just use Stride now for managing everything involved in the acquisition and disposition side and everything about the lead and the agent we're using and everyone involved in transactions just in there now.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, that's really what a CRM should do, especially like it's usefulness should compound the more people you have on your team. Cause like, you don't have to like ask anybody what they're doing or what they did. Like it's just all there.

Like there's a running record so you can just know it. And when you're calling somebody like notes, you'll know what happened in the past. You can look at the transcripts. If you got that turned on.

Cody: Yeah. I've enjoyed it so far for sure. So yeah. And appreciate you being one of the early adopters of the first hundred people to sign up. So it's been great to have you in there.

Seth: I was lucky for sure. It was like around, I guess the stars aligned for, me being sick of Airtable at the same time and trying to grow. Timing just works out.

Cody: So you have said to stop comparing yourself to the guy who's scaled to a million in 12 months. So what do you think is the danger in that mindset?

Seth: I do think there's part of it is it's good to hear stories about the guy who's scaled in 12 months because sometimes that really motivates you. And like, if this guy can do it, I can do it. So you can get some motivation out of that, which is nice when you're feeling good, right? It's awesome. The problem is when you're four to six months into your growth phase of your business and your OPEX is exceeding your profit that you're bringing in, it's really hard to look at that guy and feel, yeah, I'm going to be there soon. Sometimes you get pretty down in the land business when it's cyclical.

So just knowing that everybody's on a different path. And if it takes you five years instead of 12 months, does that really matter? I think the biggest thing is just staying in the game, learning and getting better, growing your business at the pace that makes the most sense for you and your family and your lifestyle and protecting your net profit along the way, because a lot of the guys who grow that quickly, they are spending a ton of money, which is not really sexy to talk about on podcasts.

If you're doing that much in 12 months, it means you have invested a ton in a team very early and you are doing a ton of marketing, which is a huge OPEX expense at the beginning of your business. I would say that's probably the normal case. I think it's pretty rare someone who has no money grows in 12 months to a million dollars. I think someone you really have to invest a ton. So knowing that I think it's okay to like, I'm going to take, you know, two to five years to do this. And I'm going to grow smartly and not blow up my business by increasing OPEX to a point that I can't keep up to it with the gross profit that I'm bringing in from the business.

Cody: It's a very good point. Very true. I think most of the time when you hear people growing, like just going super fast, a lot of money is being spent. Like you just kind of has to in order to get the lead flow coming in.

Seth: Do you think a person can scale too early or too quickly? How fast is too fast? Maybe it just depends on how much cash you have to burn.

Cody: Yeah. I do think there's education behind it too. You don't want to scale too soon. I think you want to know the basics of land investing. You want to know how to find a deal, how to analyze a deal, how to underwrite, see if it's a good deal, get a contract signed, get it into escrow, all that stuff, how to sell a property. You want to know the basics first. You don't want to like, okay, I'm going to scale this in three months. And you don't even know how to do a land deal. And all of a sudden you're trying to hire a team of 20.

So growing slowly gives you the benefit of making mistakes and those mistakes not costing you tens of thousands of dollars. You can hire on a small cold call team and try to grow that or a texter. And that's different than, I'm going to send $20,000 worth of mail in my first month. Maybe you should ease into that.

And another aspect of it too is knowing that every change you make in your business is probably not going to show up on the bottom line for probably three to six months or more in some cases, depending on what you're doing. So, it may feel like you're lighting money on fire for a while, when in reality, you're just not going to see the results of what you're spending money on for three to six months. So having a good amount of OPEX, I guess, money in the bank to spend on OPEX is nice to have in that scaling, which most people don't have that when they first start a business. They're starting with very little money. So growing that over time allows you to feel a little more secure when you're ready to scale to a certain size.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, aside from just the knowledge of what you're doing, it sounds like maybe just a certain cash cushion needs to be there. A friend of mine runs a marketing agency.

He hires all U.S. people locally. And every time he's hiring somebody, he tells me like, yeah, I'm basically just, I've got 50 to 60 grand that I'm going to light on fire here. Like it could be a total waste and I have to be willing to accept that. To some extent, I think he's right. Like you just don't know until you hire somebody and hopefully it works out. And it might not. I'm sure it's obviously probably less money if you're hiring somebody overseas, but whatever that amount is, just kind of realize like there's a bit of a runway and it might not work.

And hopefully we're not letting $50,000 on fire when we're just starting out our land business. But yes. I mean, what do you think should be true before you hire your first person? Is it like you need X amount of dollars? You need to be able to maybe say you've done 20 deals or something like you've proven the business model, like you know what you're doing. You're using Stride CRM. That's probably the most important thing right off the bat. Is there any like checkboxes where it's like, I wouldn't recommend you hire somebody until this and this and this are true?

Cody: I feel like you need to know every aspect of the business pretty well. I think maybe that takes five to 10 deals. I don't think it takes a ton. I think the biggest mistake I made, and I think a lot of people make when they bring on their first hire, it's like you bring someone on and you give them maybe two to three days of really intense training where you go over each thing once or twice. And then you just send them off to be your magical employee who's going to do everything correctly.

And then over time, you get upset at them because they're not doing it the way you wanted them to do. When in reality, you did not train them. You didn't create the SOP for them to know how to do their job. You didn't give them the daily check-ins they needed for the first few weeks. And then you didn't give them the weekly meetings or the open line of communication they need to really succeed.

So I think a lot of it, why it's good to hire a small first is because you can make all those mistakes with one instead of five to ten. And, you know, like hiring one, you'd be like, okay, let me just get really good at hiring this person, getting them really good at this specific task in the business, which whatever you have them doing, if it's texting or cold calling or lead management, giving them very like hyper-focused tasks in the beginning is I think critical compared to just like what I did. It's like, hey, I'm gonna hire this person. Then I ended up firing them because I'm like, this person's terrible. And then two years later, I'm like, well, it's probably me that was terrible. It's probably not them.

Seth: Yeah. If I remember right, you're targeting a $1 million in gross profit in 2026, right? And we're in the middle of March, 2026 right now. So the year is almost a quarter of the way over. What has to go right operationally for this to happen?

Cody: I think if I maintain what I'm doing now, I can get there with, which is around 70 to 80 leads a week. So like consistent marketing, consistency on marketing is really critical.

And then consistency on conversion, I think is the two biggest things. And I think if I keep just stay where I'm at, it will work out. But I already am identifying kind of bottlenecks in the business I need to fix. So I feel like every time I'm feeling good for a couple of days, I find some problem that I need to fix.

So I mean, theoretically, if I don't do anything different and just kind of keep doing the same, we should be kind of set up based on the amount of pipeline gross profit we have from last year and the beginning of this year. Deals drop off all the time. And if you lose one or two big deals, it's like, oh, wow, my pipeline just shrunk significantly. So getting those consistent contracts in is going to be critical.

Seth: Are you taking title to all these properties or are you double closing them or something? Or how's that working?

Cody: I'd say the majority we're taking title to. Probably 80% to 90% we're taking title to. And then we'll try to do double closes on some properties if we think the market can support a quick close like that.

Seth: How are you funding these things? Like you just using your own cash or do you use funders or loans or how does that work?

Cody: Yeah. So I, I primarily funded internally myself for a while. And I think that's the benefit of growing slowly is you can do that and just leave. And I don't, I haven't pulled a ton of money out of my business. I pay myself a modest salary. And then I just roll everything back into the business besides for what I pay myself. So that has allowed me to really, I guess, compound my money really well over the last five years.

But I also, last year, I started getting into bank financing, which honestly, I never even thought about when I was doing $2,000 desert squares. But when you do bank financing and something I realized, you can get 100% cash on cash return, but maybe you're not buying for 50% market value. You can be buying for maybe 60% to 70% market value. But if you use a bank loan and it's a good market or maybe a property you could subdivide, all of a sudden, you're doing 100% cash on cash return on a property that you're buying at 70% market value. So that's something that has opened my eyes to different ways to make a deal work on those bigger dollar amount deals where you're probably talking in the 150 plus sale price range.

Seth: What's been your secret for getting bank loans? How many deals have you closed with bank loans at this point?

Cody: Only once. I'm not that cool yet, but I've closed one and it's been good.

Seth: Is this one where they're collateralizing the property or how much did you have to put down? What do they need to see to get comfortable with this?

Cody: Yeah, I basically had to give them a net worth document about my life and what I'm worth and how much I own of everything. They did an appraisal of the land, which luckily came in way more than I was buying the property for. So I think it came in at like $300,000. I was buying it for $200,000. I think I only had to put so I ended up actually on this one, there was two options. If I closed it out right with my money and then refinanced, I could have gotten a loan.

I could get financing on the 80% of the appraisal value. So I could have actually pulled money out when I refinanced, if I would have refinanced with it. Whereas if I got the loan before I closed, then I would have just gotten 80% of my contract price. So I'd have had to put $40,000 down.

Seth: Nice. Was it hard to find this bank who would do this for you?

Cody: I definitely leaned on local land investors who had done this before. What I started doing was calling farm credit unions. And as you probably know, because you've been to land for a while, I don't really like land investors very much. So I got denied by like three or four farm credit unions before I figured out, I don't think these guys are going to loan me any money.

Seth: So the one that you did work with, was it one you already had a relationship with or you would just refer to them by another land investor you knew?

Cody: Yeah, I was referred to them by another land investor who's used them a lot. So that helped kind of knowing someone who had done it.

Seth: Yeah, I actually had a separate conversation. We've talked with this a handful of times, but one particular one where we focused on this was episode 192, retipster.com/192, where I talked with Jay and Daniel about how they get bank financing for land. The whole point of that conversation was to really dive deep into like, where do you find these banks? What do you got to give them? What should you expect? So if anyone was interested in that, you can check out that episode too.

Well, awesome. So as we wrap this up, thanks again, Cody, for talking with me. As you continue to grow, is there anything that still makes you nervous? Do you feel like you have this all figured out?

Cody: Definitely do not feel like I have this all figured out for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm always nervous. I'm always thinking about where's the market going to go? How is this going to look in one to two years from now? And I think what makes me feel better without worrying too much, maybe it's like the natural helicopter pilot in me. I always think about what is going to go wrong before I get into this aircraft.

I think just always improving your systems and relying on the basics of like consistent marketing, going over KPIs with your team, holding them accountable, like just doing simple business practices well over time. I think we'll be able to weather kind of any storm that comes up because even if something happens, I don't know, five years down the road, and I don't think this will happen, I think. But like maybe land if land investing does end or this value that whatever that comment was the value add investing is the only way and non-value add is dead if you know how to build a good team and a good business that'll translate to whatever but you want to pivot to whether it's messy titles or single family homes so I don't think that's going to happen with land I think we have plenty of people have been buying and selling land for for years but I do think between now and maybe five years from now I'm sure things will change in terms of how we operate but people are still making money.

Seth: Have you done any messy title things since you were kind of toying around with that idea or did that not really become a big part of your business?

Cody: I completely ignored it and just went all in on land because I thought it was kind of a shiny object that I was looking at. So I didn't want to manage two businesses at the same time.

Seth: Whenever you have to change your business in like, you just don't know what's going to work. Like maybe it can work, but it's not going to work for you. Like maybe you're just not cut out for that or it's not what you enjoy. It was interesting, your comment earlier about how it didn't make sense for you to do that when like the fundamentals of your business were broken.

I almost wonder, like, is it okay to do that if the fundamentals of your business are broken, but you don't need those fundamentals for the other thing you're going after? Like, maybe it's a question of that, of like, if you're going to do messy title, maybe you don't need to be texted a bunch of people and having a higher lead flow because there are different types of leads. I don't know. Did you ever think about that part of it?

Cody: Yes, I wouldn't have the problem of needing to, you know, do mass outreach, but I would have to either do it myself or train a couple people on how to do those types of calls and how to intake. And it would just be relearning the basics of the business. So there would still be that, you know, three to six months plus time where I'm not making really any money. So I figured, why not lean into the thing I know how to do and just improve on the things that I'm not doing extremely well on.

Seth: Pretty much everything I've ever tried has ended up being harder than I thought it was going to be. It's almost just like, like, just assume it's way harder than you think. And maybe it's just a question of which battles are you willing to fight? Because you're going to have to slog through something. It's just a question of what that is. I know the messy title thing, it is certainly easier in some ways and certainly way harder in other ways. And maybe you're well-equipped for that or maybe not.

Cody: I totally agree. I think if you just focus on one thing for long enough, you're going to be successful. I think the problem that a lot of real estate investors have, and I definitely have had, is like, well, let me try this. Let me try this. Let me try this. Before you really can narrow in on what you're going to be really focused on your business and take it to the next level.

Seth: When you're reaching for every new shiny object, that's the that's the tough place to be. And it's weird how you can actually be very good at something you hate doing. I think the magic is to find the thing where like you're good at it and it's actually kind of fun. Like it's not totally miserable to do the thing. I think it was Andre Agassi, the tennis player. I mean, he was like best in the world at one point. And he was saying, like, I hated playing tennis. Like I did this because my dad wanted me to. It's like, wow, interesting. You can be the best and not enjoy.

Cody: Well, I think as long as you choose land investing and you go all in, I think there's a correlation between liking something and being good at it. So I think the more you practice something and you start getting good at it, you'll probably eventually start liking it.

Seth: Well, Cody, if people want to reach out to you for any reason, you don't have to share anything. But if you want to, now's your chance. Is there any place they would get a hold of you?

Cody: Yeah, you could reach out to me on LinkedIn. I don't really use social media much. That's probably what I use most. If you add me on Instagram, I probably won't see it. I think I posted in like 10 years, but Facebook maybe or LinkedIn. And if you could put that maybe in the show notes, Seth.

Seth: I can do that. You know, I actually don't know that many land investors who are like super active on LinkedIn. What do you get out of LinkedIn?

Cody: I don't honestly use it a ton. I think I used it more so because when I joined Berkeley, a lot of the people I work with there, go to school with, they use it and they're a I don't know, school that are more active. I feel like it's a more productive social media for my brain than, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn or Instagram.

Seth: Yeah. It is interesting when I was in the banking world and when I was taking my MBA, like everybody was on LinkedIn, like that was the place to be. But in the land world, for whatever reason, tons of stuff is happening on Facebook. I don't know why it worked out that way.

Actually, one other thing I was going to ask you, so you're getting your MBA at Berkeley. Why are you doing that? Like, is it just like a self-improvement thing or you don't need it for your land career? I don't think, or is it going to help you in some way for that?

Cody: Yeah. I mean, I always thought I wanted a degree and I do have the benefit of having the GI Bill for my military service. So part of it is just, I've always wanted to go to grad school and get my MBA. And then part of it was to build credibility. I think down the road, if I ever do bigger development deals and need more funding, having like a Berkeley MBA, West Point military service, and all this experience and land just can help build a resume for funding bigger deals and doing bigger things in real estate.

Seth: Cool, man. Well, it's certainly not going to hurt you at all. I know when I got my MBA, it was kind of a similar thing. It's like, like I knew intellectually, like I don't need this for my career, but like it was a box I wanted to check. And I did learn a ton through it. Some things I wasn't even planning to learn, but inevitably you'll learn a lot, that kind of thing.

Well, Cody, again, thanks for being on the show. If people want to check out the show notes for this episode, then go to retipster.com/262. And Cody, it's great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Cody: Yeah, thanks so much, Seth. This is amazing.

Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is Seth Williams from retipster.com. Today, I'm talking with Henry Yoshida, the CEO of RocketDollar. So Henry's career is an interesting blend of Wall Street credibility and entrepreneurial risk. He spent 10 years at Merrill Lynch. He built a venture-backed robo-advisor called Honest Dollar, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs. And now he leads RocketDollar, a company helping people invest their retirement accounts into alternative assets like real estate, startups, private deals, and more.

He is a certified financial planner and a licensed real estate agent. He holds an MBA from Cornell University. Today, we're going to talk about his journey, but more importantly, we're going to unpack one of the most underutilized tools in real estate investing, which is using your retirement accounts to buy real estate. So, Henry, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Henry: Great. Thank you very much for having me, Seth.

Seth: I know we talked about where we are in the country, so it's kind of nuts, but it's already like in the mid-80s here. Henry is in Austin, I am in Grand Rapids, and the climate is very different between where we're at.

So I'm curious if we wind back the clock a bit, what originally pulled you into the world of retirement investing in financial services?

Henry: It was almost by accident. So, you know, you talked about where I started my career. So it was Merrill Lynch in the year 2000.

People recall so I'll probably age divide the audience here but there was a big concern there at that point called Y2K so people thought that you know when the year 2000 was going to happen that the internet bubble would burst and and for the most part actually there was a pretty severe recession in the stock market at that time and since I was starting right out of my undergrad days at Merrill Lynch I was supposed to go try to find individuals to open accounts with Merrill Lynch manage their money. But there was a three-year decline in the stock market in 2000, 2001, and 2002.

And quite frankly, the way that I learned to survive was actually switching my focus inside of Merrill Lynch from individual clients to small business owners and helping them set up a starter 401k plan. So that's what kind of led me down this path of now for 25, 26 years, becoming an expert in tax advantage retirement plans. So it started with group plans for small businesses, then went to large plans for large businesses, and then back down to IRAs and 401ks for individuals.

Seth: Did your time at Cornell teach you anything about finance that turned out to be kind of incomplete or just not true in the real world?

Henry: A lot of it depends on maybe who you might have as the professor. So I think that the philosophies, what they choose to teach you, teach you different things. And we had good finance professors who I think they were correct in certain parts where they would tell you how to use leverage to basically increase the net equity of the real estate you own. A lot of real estate people in your community would know this, but.

You usually are going to build the equity before you build the cash flow. You know, you have to kind of plant the seeds for the equity. The equity grows, the equity then transforms into the cash flow. But, you know, if you start out in real estate trying to get great cash flow, right? I mean, you'll never get started, first of all, because I talk to folks. I'm sure Seth, you do too. They say, hey, I want to get into real estate and I want to create and replace $120,000 a year income.

And then they work out that a decent property, single family rental property, might only cash flow for them if they have leverage against it. $100 to $500 a month. So then they started working out the math that now I don't think I want to own 200 to 300 homes. So I'm going to do something else to go replace this cashflow and so forth.

So I think that some of those lessons I've learned, but you know, what's funny is I actually concentrated more in my MBA studies on the marketing side. So I really thought that being able to clearly articulate what you wanted to do and what you wanted to sell or what you wanted to present. Actually, then I think those were the biggest takeaways I'd had from my in graduate studies more than the actual nuts and bolts of the numbers itself.

Seth: Somebody told me a few years ago something that kind of stuck with me. He was saying that you make your money in your business and you preserve it in the market, not the other way around. Some people kind of get that backwards. They think they invest in real estate or the stock market and that's how you get rich. It's like, no, no, you need your cash building machine. And once you make the money, then you just make it multiply in the market. Would you agree with that? Or is there anything misguided or not complete about that statement?

Henry: I think that's true for sure that, you know, a lot of these vehicles that you might invest in are a way for you to preserve wealth and or perpetuate wealth or cash flow in a way that might outpace inflation, which would be you accumulating money and then not doing anything with it. Right. If you actually do nothing with it, then it's eventually going to end up. Being worth less than the buying power that it would afford it over time. So yeah, I think that's a very, very fair statement for sure.

Seth: I hear a lot of people citing this stat that, you know, you look at, you know, nine out of 10 billionaires and they all have a lot of real estate in their portfolio. You know, it's a, yeah, that's true. But like real estate wasn't their cash machine. Like they had a business that made them a ton of money and then they parked their money in real estate.

And sometimes I'll hear real estate investing educators use that without mentioning the other part that like it was actually a totally different business that made them most of their money. I think it's an important distinction to know if you're teaching people that, you know, you can just get rich just by buying raw properties. I don't know. I mean, maybe if you're really good at finding seriously undervalued deals or something, but I just curious your thoughts on that.

Henry: Well, but even if you do, even if you are really good at finding a seriously undervalued deal, right? I mean, there are basically three prongs to how you make money. Unless since you, since you mentioned real estate, let's just use real estate as an example. Okay. So my finance background leads me to think that, okay, if someone purchases real estate, there are three levers in terms of the way you make money over time in that particular property.

The appreciation of the property, the pay down of the debt, which then increases your equity over time. So hopefully that's being done by tenants and not yourself. Otherwise that would defeat the purpose and kill essentially the third one, which is the cashflow. Okay, of those three, typically let's say over a longer period of time.

I would bet that the one that has no cap, two of the three that have no cap are the cash flow and then the growth of the price appreciation. Okay. The one with the cap is actually the equity pay down because the most you can get out of that is that you eventually just pay down the debt to zero.

But over a 10 year time period, you're probably going to find a distribution to where 60% of the gain you made in equity or wealth actually came from the price appreciation of the property. The longer you go, so 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it's going to be a higher percentage. But let's just say anything over 10, 12 years is probably going to be 60% from that price appreciation. Another 20%, 25% may come from the debt pay down because depending on how much leverage you started at, and then it gets paid down to maybe zero if it's been long enough.

And then the third one is the cashflow increase. May have started at only 100 bucks. And then as you have no debt against that property, maybe it goes all the way up to, I don't know, 1,500 a month net operating income, like a net income after all operating expenses, for example. So So, you know, that being the case, that one grows that the other 15%.

So like when you look at your distributing out this 100% proportion of the three ways you make gains in wealth, it's usually the price appreciation and there's no upside. There's no cap on that. I mean, it could go forever, right? I mean, you're in Grand Rapids, I'm in Austin, Texas, Austin has been a highly appreciated market. But for people who listen to you in Los Angeles, right? They all know someone who's 65 years old, who bought a home.

$118,000 in Los Angeles is now worth $1.18 million.

Seth: You have an interesting background in that you are a certified financial planner and a real estate agent. So you kind of understand both worlds to some degree or to a lot of a degree. Do you think traditional financial planners misunderstand real estate? When I think of like one of the financial planners that I have, who basically just tells me what fun to put money in, he's like completely blind to my real estate portfolio. He doesn't even really know it exists. It's not even part of the picture. Like, is he really even a financial planner if he's not actually looking at the whole plan?

Henry: Well, I mean, I think that if you're really going to label them, it'd probably be that they're an investment advisor, but specific to, let's say, traditional or packaged investments, right? Index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, and maybe stocks and so forth, but they don't see that whole picture, right?

But I think there's more and more. There's a new class of financial planners slash advisors who I think take into consideration the holistic. Now, they may, this could be a little controversial, but there's a little bit self-serving that they don't include the rest, the other part of the picture, because you do not pay any of the money for management fees on the real estate part of your investment portfolio set to your financial advisor, right?

The best that the advisor could hope for is that they become the place where you decide to park money as you harvest it. So you built a rental property portfolio, you have 10 of them, you decide to sell three, pay down the debt on the remaining seven that you own. And now you're creating significant cashflow in excess of what you need or want to use to live on a daily basis. And that excess now gets sent to your financial advisor to then be distributed into the stock market as opposed to additional real estate.

At this point, you've kind of hit the peak, let's say for your personal preferences of how much you want your portfolio to be worth or the size of it from a real estate standpoint. So now you're looking for another bucket to park it. Like you said, the stock market itself or real estate is not the money-making machine. It's where you divert the money to, to make sure that it keeps up and exceeds the rate of inflation or the cost of living on those dollars. So the short answer to your question is that...

Yes, they're myopic. I wouldn't say it's that they're clueless, but it's probably more rooted in self-serving interest that there's no economic incentive for them to consider any part of that. Right. Because when you meet them, they'll say that, Seth, you got debt. You shouldn't have debt. You own, let's say, 10 properties. You should sell all of them and then let me put the money into a fund for you. There's a reason for that because that's the only way that they're going to benefit financially.

Seth: You know, I can't stand that, but that's just how the world works. Like, if I go to my doctor, you know, some other advisor, it's like the recommendation is probably going to be something that serves them in some way.

Henry: I mean, that happens in the medical profession, right? You go to the doctor and they are recommending that you get some sort of like, you know, medication or try this. And I'll single out one part of I don't know if it's like medical, but let's say it's something related to medical care. But it's dentists, right?

I mean, the funny thing is you could literally go to a dentist, one dentist for a year. And at that point, let's say you fix everything and your teeth are perfect. I'd be willing to bet money that if you go see a new dentist, they're going to find something wrong with your teeth that they want you to charge you for. I'm just going to go out on a limb. That may be controversial. You may have dentists that listen to you, but no one's teeth are perfect to any dentist the first time they see a patient.

Seth: The next time I go out and buy a brand new car, the first thing I'm going to do is take it to one of those instant oil change places just to see how many things they say are like worn out or filters that I have to replace. And I'm like, ha ha, joke's on you. This is a brand new car. But I can almost guarantee they're going to find something, right? That'd be good online content, by the way.

Henry: Yeah, maybe I'll do that.

Seth: So let's talk about RocketDollar. What is this? What was the original idea behind this when you started it? Tell us a little about that.

Henry: Well, my own sort of life journey took me to sort of thinking about this. So the economic circumstances in the macro environment are what got me into retirement plans when I was in my early 20s, just graduating college. And I'd become pretty well known, pretty knowledgeable in these tax-advantaged account spaces. So one of the things from, you'd mentioned the company Honest Dollar.

The digital role advisor that was eventually acquired, the assets were acquired by Goldman Sachs. You know, one of the reasons why that company actually didn't work from a continued operating standpoint was that we were not actually targeting with that particular product, a large enough value client. So the end client was someone who didn't have a lot of dollars to save. It was just helping them get started.

So, so in finance terms, we call that lifetime value, right? So the lifetime value, the customers that we were targeting with Honest Dollar didn't really exceed the acquisition cost of acquiring those customers. So customer acquisition cost, CAC. So that learning forced us into selling that company and the assets to Goldman Sachs.

And then that started a reflective journey for me of thinking that, okay, I'm this person now at this point, this is 2016. I'm about 15, 16, 17 years into basically being a person from a career standpoint who is a mile wide and only one inch deep or a mile deep, an inch wide, and only one particular area in retirement plans. So where can I stay within that particular realm yet go after a customer segment with a product I can create where the value is higher, there's not a lot of competition, and I could acquire the customer from a value standpoint in a way where it was less from a customer acquisition cost standpoint and that kind of led me to.

I had raised venture money I wasn't seeking it but venture money was offered to us for Honest Dollars so in that process I'd met a lot of venture capitalists private equity folks startup entrepreneurs who were raising funds angel investments and so forth and it's kind of hit me that a lot of these people actually want to do these deals but the only monies they had because they spent let's say 10 years at Amazon or 15 years at Microsoft and so forth where they had these gigantic 401k plans that they couldn't access.

They'd since left, right? They left Microsoft. Now they're doing this startup or they went to a much smaller company. They got burnt out working for the 100,000 employee company. So they decided to go work for the 200 employee, much smaller company. They have access to that plan, but it's not liquid to them from the standpoint of being able to do anything outside of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

So I started looking it up that people actually were doing this. There were famous people, founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, Mitt Romney, who was a U.S.

Presidential candidate, current senator, U.S. senator. These people did not know each other, had completely different circles, yet somehow figured out a way to access their retirement accounts to go do private investments. And it kind of dawned on me that it's the ability to do this exists within the IRS code. The ease of doing it from a regular person standpoint did not really exist.

So that's what led to the creation of Rocket Dollar and meeting all these people who wanted to do private deals and said, look, I would love to do this deal, but I don't have $50,000 sitting around. The irony is I got $550,000 sitting in my 401k because I worked at a company with a great match for many, many years before switching jobs a couple of times since then. But the first job I had in my career, I spent a long time there and I got all the money.

But the only thing I can invest in there are stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Or even worse, if they never took it out of that company, they only have choices of 18 to 22 mutual funds to go into. So they think it's locked up. And I've started realizing that I could create a company called Rocket Dollar. The name implies that you can go further and farther and do different things with your money than you could do.

I had named the company car dollar or bicycle dollar or jogging dollar and so forth. That's hence the name. And that's where the idea came about was just meeting all these people who wanted to get into private deals and telling me that they had access to the deals. They knew about the deals. They knew the deals were great, whether it's real estate, private equity, venture, angel investments and so forth. But then the caveat then telling me that they just the irony is they have money in one account. They can't use towards that investment, but they know about the deal.

And then I sought out to solve that problem by starting a company called RocketBeller, And that's what we do.

Seth: You mentioned the ease of getting the money into RocketDollar so that you can then use the money to buy real estate or do whatever kind of deal you want to do within the limits that are allowed. But how easy is it? Like if I have a bunch of money in a traditional IRA and then a solo 401k over here and then a Roth IRA over here, which of those would actually make sense or which of them could I bring into RocketDollar to start working with there?

Henry: So technically you can bring all three of those in. It's just that you would open the same like kind account at Rocket Dollar. So Rocket Dollar itself, we're an IRA provider, no different than a Fidelity, Vanguard, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Edward Jones.

LPL Financial, Raymond James, wherever your planner might be or wherever you decide to manage those, quote unquote, more traditional investments. So if you have a traditional IRA over there that you want to transfer funds from, then you would need to open a traditional IRA with us at Rocket Dollar. Same thing if you have a Roth IRA, you need to open a Roth IRA to keep the account.

And then you mentioned solo 401k. So for those in the community that don't know, that's a one person or very small business 401k plan that you set up. And if you want to roll those funds over, we have either a solo 401k product that you open at Rocket Dollar, except ours allow you to do private and alternative investments. Or if you're going to terminate the plan in any way, then most likely it's going to be with the type of money that would be traditional. So it's never been taxed. So you'd roll that in to our traditional IRA at Rocket Dollar and then access it.

And the part of the question you asked about is how easy is it to do private investments and get money into these accounts? Well, the way that we do it is and it's easiest for me to speak in terms of analogy, which is that we have created a methodology to where our technology technically opens up a trust entity in the name of the account holder. And that trust entity allows us to then open a bank account. That bank account is inside of your IRA, whether traditional or Roth here at Rocket Dollar.

And because it's a bank account and because it's inside of an IRA and we automatically do this with our technology, once cash goes in there, it has the treatment and the shield of IRA dollars. So then if you have a private deal, let's say real estate's a great example, you need to make a closing, you need to go buy this property and you need to go disperse $150,000. Well, you're operating and just wiring the money from the bank account that's nested inside your IRA to do the deal probably no differently than how you do that deal now.

Now, the caveat I'll mention, though, is that if you use these funds for real estate specifically, the IRS rules do not allow you to have leverage against it. So most of our all of our customers who are doing single family property rental buys, they're buying the whole house because they had this five hundred thousand dollar old 401k.

Now they're going to buy two two hundred thousand dollar houses in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. They would deploy all 200 and 200. So hence, high cash flow, no leverage because it's inside of an IRA. And then if you don't have that amount of money, what we see a lot of our customers doing is actually more real estate syndication. So they would then be doing $25,000 investment into the syndication. We're processing those kinds of deals day in and day out.

Seth: So it sounds like if I actually wanted to access my retirement money to use as a down payment for something, that's not what I can do here because you can't have leverage against it. Am I following that?

Henry: Yes. You don't, you don't do leverage.

Seth: Gotcha. So is the assumption that everything with RocketDollar is all self-directed stuff or is there any stuff that's like, no, I just want to throw money in there and you invest it for me. Have that kind of thing too, or is it?

Henry: Actually, we're working on some particular products in the private space where we might offer packages or we might offer access to, I would say like the more broad market type of private investment.

So let me define that real quick for you. The private investment world, and I did see this after the Honest Dollar deal. The other reason was that I started realizing that private investments were actually becoming a bigger and bigger part. And then history also shows that your largest, most sophisticated investors. So think of your college endowment funds, your retirement pension funds for the entire state of Michigan or the entire state of Texas.

For example, or multi multi billionaires or just billionaire family offices, for example, those people do not, you know, call a financial advisor and have 95% of the money in the stock market and maybe a couple of rentals here and there. They typically had a percentage over time and the Yale endowment fund was actually the sort of flagship. So it was run by a gentleman named David Swenson for almost three decades. He passed away now about five years ago, but very famous pioneer in the investment management world.

And he had said for the entirety of his reign, heading up the Yale endowment fund, that they were 50% in private investments and only 50% in public. So it's always a 50, 50 portfolio, which is very unusual to a retail investor. But now that's starting to become more and more available, more and more known to retail individual investors. So people want to do more and more private. And because of that, some of these giant private equity firms are creating versions of their funds.

That are accessible through intermediaries but technically still private funds they invest in things like private credit real estate infrastructure infrastructure being things like you know the private part of funding things like bridges airports highway construction and so forth but we're working on a deal to make some of those available because right now every deal we have is what we call like a BYOD like a bring your own deal people find out about the deal let's say, through a syndication that someone's putting together or a real estate investor who's putting together deals or a founder who's raising money or a small private equity fund who's raising capital and willing to take small investments in 50 to $100,000 chunks from IRA investors or just individual investors.

So they have that deal. They become a customer of ours. But again, after that, they start to reach out or wonder like, what else could I do? Because at the end of the day, hey, I did bring over $100,000 from this old 401k. There's another 450 there. I need to leave some in the stock market, but it's gone up for a long time, much higher than what I originally put in from a principal basis. And I'm kind of worried that the bottom could drop out because I've seen this now in 25 years, right?

There've been actually, you know, people don't realize this, but there've been 30% drawdowns in the S&P 500 about six to nine times in 25 years.

Some are sustained over a couple of year periods. Other ones only last for three to four months. The most recent being, actually there were two. And the funny thing is people remember when I bring it up, but they don't remember it just in regular day-to-day living. So one was when the pandemic started, March of 2020. We had a 30% plus drop in the S&P 500. And then the other one was Liberation Day last year, April. We had a big drop. You know, that's when we threatened to basically tariff the entire universe.

Seth: Why do you think most Americans don't realize they can buy real estate in their IRA like this? Is this like a lack of education or is it like a structural incentive problem in the financial industry?

Henry: So structural incentive is a very politically correct way of saying it. But I think I'll be a little more direct and say that the largest providers of IRA accounts, brokerage houses, financial advisory firms, broker dealers and so forth. On the one side, they provide these types of accounts. So we'll use Fidelity. They're the biggest. Vanguard's number two. Let's just use Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab.

On the one side, if we were to go to any of their three websites right now, it's very easy for us to open a Roth IRA or traditional IRA on their digital platform. But the other half of their house actually is in the business of manufacturing packages, investment products. The package is being wrapped around public stocks, so mutual funds, index funds, right? VTI, VOO, very famous, you know, S&P 500 index funds covering total stock market and S&P 500, respectively. Those are manufactured by the other half of Vanguard's house.

So when you open an IRA at a place like Vanguard, they don't really want to let that customer then go out and buy a single family home in the greater Grand Rapids, Michigan area because there's no financial incentive for them to do so. But if they were to purchase VOO.

A product that they package and distribute, you know, it's a win-win for both sides of that house. So, you know, I kind of liken it to where Costco is going to sell Kirkland Signature and then have incentive deals for the other products that they offer from brands, but they're not going to offer, you know, great value products from Walmart on the shelves at Costco.

Seth: I once had a self-directed Roth IRA with a different custodian. And I remember I would use it to buy and sell land. I mean, it was great in the end because I would make a ton of profit And it was Roth, so it was post-tax. And of course, I can't touch it until I'm 59 and a half. But I remember it was kind of a pain.

Henry: In Roth, you can, by the way. So I can tell you a little bit about that in a second. But continue your story. I'd love to get into that.

Seth: But one of the things I remember is that when I was trying to tell the company, hey, send the money over here to this title company so we can close, I had to fill out this direction of investment form. And it felt like a big hassle to do that. Does RocketDollar have a way around that? Because it sounds like, from what you were explaining earlier, do I have checkbook access? Like I can just write these checks myself or tell the bank to send the money somewhere. How does that work?

Henry: So you do have checkbook access for being able to do it, but to do those investments, but you still have to have the direction of investment because the funds itself, if you wanted to get them back to yourself or redistribute them somewhere else, they need to get pushed back up to the IRA level to then get pushed out.

We have these DOIs sort of pre-filled out inside the system. So we've thought about that and tried to remove the friction. So because it's in an IRA and you get the tax advantages, it's not quite as easy as moving cash around in your Venmo account to your friend, for example. And it's also not quite as easy as just a traditional bank account. But it's not as bad as, I think, what you experienced with the old self-directed custodian.

And then, Seth, if you're interested on the Roth one, this could be good for people to know. But the Roth IRA itself is very different than the traditional. So the basics here are that the Roth IRA, you pay tax upfront on the money that you put into your IRA. So let's just use a simple example, $10,000 or $5,000, because that's under the limit. So if someone is eligible to open a Roth IRA, you can put $5,000 in today. The money you put in is your after-tax money.

If you open a traditional IRA and you put $5,000 in, you could then ask your tax advisor to take a deduction for the $5,000 contribution. So you have not paid taxes on the $5,000. The $5,000 goes into two investments. Both of them grow because they're the exact same investment to $15,000. So 200% return, $15,000 on your initial five.

If you're over 59 and a half, like you mentioned in the traditional and you take the money out, you will pay tax on the amount of money that it grew, so the 10,000 that it grew. In the Roth, you paid taxes on the 5,000 initial ones, so whatever it grew to, the 15,000, if you wanna take all of it out, there's no taxes due on the entire 15.

The additional part that most people don't talk about, people know that what I just explained in a Roth at a general level, enough to be able to have this conversation with their tax advisor. What a lot of people don't know about the Roth is that when a Roth IRA is established, any monies that you put in there, because you've already paid tax.

Technically you can take back out at any time you want with no penalty because you've already paid tax. So it's already after tax money. So if you put 5,000 in each year for 20 years, that's 100,000 in principle. You could take 100,000 out of your Roth IRA.

The other one that a lot of people don't know is that once a Roth IRA has been in place for five years, you can still also take money out of the IRA to back to yourself. So you can take money out of it.

Seth: Is it only the principle you can take out then? Like the original mob, but not the growth? You couldn't take the growth out till you're 59 and a half?

Henry: You could take out the growth, some of the growth. So you remember, you're just removing it from that shield. So the Roth is more flexible in terms of what you could take out.

So I just wanted to, you know, kind of give people this caveat that it's a lot more flexible. And then, you know, just from a more historical financial trivia standpoint, it's actually named after a late U.S. Senator who came up with the idea in the late 90s, thinking that it was more accessible.

Now, before you do all that, though, a lot of people who I think like might see you or might see me on a show, they may not be eligible because there are income restrictions. So basically in this one, like a lot of the incentives that you might get from the IRS for certain things, if you make too much money, you phase out and you don't get to do these accounts.

So roughly if you file jointly and that income is over 250, this isn't the exact number there's phase out ranges, but I just like to use round numbers to make it easy for people. If you make over 250 and you file jointly, can't start it off. If you make over 150 and you file single.

Can't file for, I can't do a Roth either. So those aren't the exact numbers again, but people don't, if I tell the exact ones in the phase out ranges, no one will remember.

Seth: Let's say I do this with RocketDollar. I set up a self-directed IRA of some kind. What kinds of investments can I put that money in? Is it like literally anything? I know real estate is an option, but what are examples of things that I could not do with that?

Henry: The easier way to think of it is that the first one is that ever since 1974, when ERISA, Employees Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the law was created. That's what established IRAs in historical terms. At that time, the code only wrote that the investments that are specifically excluded from being held in an IRA are life insurance and collectibles.

So life insurance, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. Collectibles, I sort of try to put it in layman's terms as a show-me asset. So you can't put things like the artwork that you hang, famous valuable artwork, a collector's baseball card, a hobby car, an antique car, for example, you can't own those types of things like show me type assets inside of an IRA. So that being said, by virtue of elimination, if those are the only things you cannot specifically own an IRA.

Everything else that's an investment can be owned inside of an IRA. OK, now, the bigger caveat is that the investments that you own, you just can't have a personal interest in them. So there's a you can't buy a property and then using your IRA and then lease that house to your brother or your daughter or your father, because, you know, the idea is that you probably won't evict those people.

Ironically enough again another trivia is that it's weird if it's a direct step relative left right so that sibling up is parent down is child but if it goes diagonally so like mother-in-law is a good example that's actually allowed so I guess the theory is that you know maybe you wouldn't cut a break to that person at least in the IRS's eyes but those are called prohibited transactions because there's a personal conflict and so that using that same thinking line that That also prevents you from investing in your own business that you operate and run and.

Like buying the shares of your own business and now for anyone and this is even in the traditional investment world it probably makes sense to where whenever you open an investment account online they always ask you questions like do you work for the SEC or any other financial regulatory agency.

And are you a 10 or more shareholder of a publicly traded company and I always think to myself the answers are always no for those questions for me and then when I get to the 10 one I always think to myself, I wish, I wish I was Elon Musk and own 16% of Tesla, you know, and so forth. I mean, why would I be filling out this form myself if that were the case?

Seth: Yeah, man. But there's a reason why they ask those questions is so they have it recorded in their database that there's a company that you might control. And if you happen to have an IRA there or certain accounts, you can't invest in them without getting specific approval. There's a rhyme and reason to it why they ask you those questions.

What are the most common account structures people use through Rocket Dollar? Because there's something called direct custody versus checkbook control.

Right? What's the difference between those things?

Henry: The direct custody is appropriate if you're, if you got referred to us just to do one particular deal. So let's say it's a deal that you want to do, but you want to tap into some of your retirement dollars. It's the only thing you plan on doing with your IRA. The direct custody is that one that you were, you were describing where the custodian in our case, our backend custody, we're the same company, but we name it Digital Trust basically is the one who oversees the account for the benefit of Seth Williams or for the benefit of Henry Yoshida.

So when we want to make that investment is Seth, you would be sending us those investment docs at Digital Trust. We would do a one business day review just to make sure it's eligible to be held in an IRA, not to evaluate the merits of the investment. But we do that and then we give authorization and say, hey, it's good. And then we basically will fill out those subscription docs as the custodian, but for your benefit. And then when you authorize us, then that money comes out from our omnibus account. It's your money.

But we disperse it and we sign those subscription documents for you because we're the custody of the funds for your benefit. And that's the same as your traditional IRA at Fidelity. If you read the fine print, technically the name of that account is your Fidelity Trust Management Company, FTMC or FMTC, Fidelity Management Trust Company, for the benefit of Seth Williams' traditional IRA. That's the technical name of the account. It's not your name first.

In the checkbook control one, what we custody at Digital Trust is just that entity. That entity is able to create the bank account. So then you operate that bank account. But when money leaves the ecosystem, us, a DOI is required, but we have one that's automatically filled out.

So I tell people that the checkbook control is better if you plan on doing multiple investments over time and you just want the ability to be a little more agile and quick. And real estate deals, direct real estate deals usually require that because it'd be hard to communicate to the custodian that I need funds dispersed on X date because my closing is on the day following. It needs to be in the escrow account and so forth. So that's difficult because you're relying on an outside party to go do that for you.

But with the checkbook control, you can basically go into the integrated bank portal, set up the wire, make sure it's there. And when you show up to the closing, the funds have already arrived. And so we're closing.

Seth: So that direction of investment thing is that needed just so that Rocket Dollar can make sure I don't mess something up because that way that's required.

Henry: It's required because technically the money has to pass through the IRA part of the account to make sure it maintains that treatment. So it's more for that purpose, because if you were to send it directly, then it'd be hard to track that, you know, it really wasn't IRA money. So it stops in one place first.

So it's very similar to a real estate transaction. So if I were to kind of speak.

I think in a way that your audience understands that when you and I or anybody listening to us right now on your show purchases a property, we don't technically send the money directly to the person we're buying the property from, right? Like we both agree to send it to one particular place. They settle the funds. And then they disperse out the end.

So we send our down payment up. The lender sends their part up. This is a non IRA transaction, obviously. It sits there. And then at the closing, those funds then get distributed to the seller of the property. We're never sending the money directly to the seller. There's an intermediary in between.

Seth: So the direction investment, it's not like there's somebody saying, nope, I'm not going to do it because this isn't right. It's more just like a technicality or.

Henry: Yeah, it's just a necessary step. So it's like before you can exit the house, you have to walk through the hallway. It'd be impossible to go directly from bedroom to front door. Like it's physically not possible, right? You have to walk through some hallway or some in-between space.

Seth: I got you. Unless I guess it's the matrix, right? And then I guess the door opens you're immediately somewhere else. As you're talking, I'm trying to think of some way that that's actually possible, but I can't think of anything.

So what types of real estate deals work best inside one of these retirement accounts? Like do you have any examples or common types of real estate deals that you see your clients doing with this?

Henry: I think it depends on the type of account. So syndications, becoming an LP and a small real estate fund, those can be done just fine with a custodial account, even if it's actually more than one. Those are fine. If you're operating a direct property yourself, I think the checkbook one lends itself much better and not on the front end.

So I spent a little bit too much time probably talking about how the mechanics might work of a checkbook account, buying the property on the front end. But think of the ongoing after the first purchase, which is that now you're going to have multiple payments coming in in the form of rent. And then you'll have to disperse payments for operating that particular property. All that money has to come in and out of the IRA itself.

So you'll hopefully have 12 months and 12 different rent checks, right? Assuming no vacancies coming in. So that's 12 transactions right there. And let's say that you have, you know, routine maintenance that you might apply or bills that you pay or property taxes, like, you know, inside the checkbook account, you're effectively operating a bank account to manage transactions. So it's fine. But remember, the thing is that if you ultimately sell the property, you'd need a DOI because it would go through a different step.

The idea is that if there's a lot of transactions and a lot of sort of manual work involved and one where it'd be really hard for you to rely on a custodian to disperse funds to pay for the property taxes on X date exactly.

Then the checkbook control one lends itself better for operating a direct property. And the custodial one really works when you're, quite frankly, just more of a passive investor generally in any deal, whether that's real estate syndication, becoming an LP in some fund, whether that's a real estate fund, venture fund, private equity fund, or just an angel investor in a small company.

So those are very passive, right? So you don't really expect payments to keep coming in and out.

Seth: What I hope people are taking away from this is specifically in the land investing space. Henry, I'm not sure how much you know about land flipping, but one of the biggest hassles or roadblocks that we land investors have is funding deals. Because a lot of times it's not impossible, but it's harder to get a traditional bank to just finance a land flip when you're buying land and doing nothing to it and then selling it for more. Banks want to see that you're improving the property in some way, or they want to see that you have some massive net worth to secure the money that they're lending to you.

So what a lot of us have to do is if we want to do the deal at all, we have to find a funder who basically partners with us. They come in and they fund the whole thing. And then when it's all done, we have to split the profits with them. And some of us just see this as well. That's just how it has to be done.

But they may not be thinking of the fact that like, hey, I've got half a million bucks in my 401k or IRA or something. That's just untapped money. It's ready to go. And I could use that and keep all the profits. And especially if RocketDollar makes it particularly easy and quick to get it over there and make this happen. That's a big advantage. I think a lot of people, it's not even on their radar that they can do this.

Henry: Yeah. And that's one thing that people don't know. But I liken what you said. You mentioned earlier, you just said that a lot of people may not know this. And I was thinking that there's been phases in just recent history where a lot of people don't know this, there's a lot of the.

People didn't know that this market existed or this business existed type of moments. I would say, especially in the last 25 years, we're now a quarter of the way through the current century. And I was just thinking to myself, well, maybe like private folks offering car rides in the form of fancier ones like black cars. That's existed actually since the 1980s. You watch movies.

I mean, I was just thinking to myself that I watched Die Hard again around Christmas time, right? Because it's kind of a joke to watch it at Christmas time. Well, Argyle is like a black car limousine driver. And that existed then.

And those are a lot of times personal cars. Well, now Uber sort of exists. And now it's more just mainstream that you would take someone else's private car to get from point A to point B. And the same thing, calpsurfing.com existed for 15 years before Airbnb ever started or threw up their website and so forth.

So what I tell people is that the ability to invest in private assets using an IRA has legally been allowed since 1974 has actually been used by certain people, certain very powerful, wealthy.

Connected people like billionaire venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and people who ran for president and used to be the governor of Massachusetts. And now, you know, the consolation prizes, they're a sitting United States senator. These people did this. And now it's starting to become more mainstream with platforms like a Rocket Dollar that now someone can just go access 150,000 or 200,000 of their old 401k or IRA to go do a land deal, a private investment and so forth.

So I just think that it's at the tipping point where probably five to 10 years from now, and I've said this before publicly, that when you ask someone about their IRAs and what they do, they're going to start referencing it as a, oh, you know, I like to split it up. So I keep my traditional stuff at a place like Vanguard, but then the other

half of my money in IRAs, I'm always going in and out. I'm doing I'm doing private credit deals, I'm doing land deals, I'm doing real estate deals, or I invest in late stage private technology companies and so forth, it'll be a 50-50, which, and maybe it even tips over more because you think about the last 10 times you went to the airport.

Went to your hotel from the airport. What percentage of those was a friend of yours picking you up at the airport? And what percentage did you just hire a car?

Seth: Nine out of 10, probably. I mean, you know, every time for me, one of your friends, I got to pick you up sometime, you know, I'm too nice. We got to make them do that.

Henry: Okay. Yeah, yeah, probably. That's, that's true. It's a hassle now, but you get the point, right? Like it was, it was a period where it was like, no one knew about it. Then there was like this little gap period where it was maybe 50, 50. And now it's like 99.1 or 90, 90, 10. And IRAs haven't even gotten to the 50, 50. I think the 50, 50 would be 10 years from now. And then I think that there's a possibility it might be a majority, 15 years and beyond.

Seth: I got a couple of friends where whenever we're talking about retirement stuff.

Their whole mindset is like, I don't want to think about it. Like, I just want to throw money over there and let it grow. And somehow magically I'll have more money. This idea of them having to be active in the process and put the money in retirement and then keep working to fine deals. I mean, they could certainly make a lot more money that way. But for somebody who just doesn't want to do that, it sounds like RocketDollar probably is not for them. Is that accurate or am I missing anything?

Henry: It isn't for them unless they basically do it one time and they've committed to just doing a bunch of syndications or partner deals. So that's one thing. Or they wait until someone like us launches the ability for them to go into package deals. Then the question becomes that I got a bunch of money here. I don't want to deal with it. But.

I'm comfortable with it being in the public stock market, the S&P 500, where earnings are largely driven by the top seven companies today, all in the same industry and technology and so forth. Five of which have major contracts that created most of those earnings in 2025 by doing a partnership with a company called OpenAI, who's not profitable. You could leave it there if you're comfortable.

So it's a question of where you're comfortable having this park money, because if you still want to be passive, you could open up a Rocket Dollar account, get it over there. No differently than you moving your old 401k and rolling it over to an IRA, Fidelity, or Rocket Dollar. And then once it's there, maybe you go talk to someone and say that, hey, I want to go into only XYZ syndication deals or XYZ passive investments. So then maybe tap your network to go find like five different storage property deals, land deals, and real estate or apartment multifamily deals, syndication deals. You're not owning, operating anything.

Seth: Where do people most often get themselves in trouble when they're trying to use retirement funds to invest in real estate? Like what are some other common issues or what would say are the biggest problems people don't even think about when they get in trouble?

Henry: I think that they don't realize about the leverage one that you can't use leverage. And then two, just avoiding that you do any prohibited type of transactions. You know, you kind of have these properties, you got to make sure that they're very separated.

So one of the questions that we answer a lot in our inbound calls are that.

Hey, this is And you know, what if I use it to go buy a property and operate as an Airbnb, X percent of the time, and then other times I use it? Well, you can't use it at all. Like this needs to be a pure arm's length. Investment for you.

So I would say that it's just if you kind of keep in your mind that you get certain things from the government, you get the tax deferred treatment or tax free growth, depending on if it's a Roth or traditional for decades and maybe even beyond your lifetime to a certain extent, right, by being able to pass these down to your beneficiaries.

But the one caveat the government says is that you cannot use any of the money in the account for the privileges that we give you and the tax deferral advantages that we give you, you can't have any personal connection to it.

There's no conflict. There's no prohibited transaction. So just keeping that in mind and remembering it is the big thing.

Seth: When you look at RocketDollar 10 years from now, what problem do you hope is going to be permanently solved?

Henry: I think, so the big one for me is that someone cracks the code on a way, and I think that this would have to be a government-driven thing, just like how the tracking in the stock market is standardized because there's a government and financial regulatory division that oversees that.

So I know that probably a lot of private investment folks don't want to do that, but I think that what would really open it up is if there was a reporting structure and a centralized database that only the government would sponsor because there's no financial incentive for a private company to do it to where it makes it much easier to track so if someone needs to transfer the property from one provider to another even if it's private inside of an IRA it's easier done so when that code gets cracked it's not a way for government to play big brother and know what everyone's invested in it actually creates the ability and the network and the transaction movements that's probably necessary to allow it to become really, really big and become the majority.

Private investments are already the majority by market value, but it's concentrated and held by a very small number of people. So the N of the people who own it is small. The absolute value is actually larger than the public investments.

Seth: What do you think the chances are that the government is actually going to do that?

Henry: I actually do think that they will do it like somewhere down the road.

So, because if it, if it is the majority of the investments out there and the reason why is there is an incentive for the government to do this. So there's not an incentive for private company, but the incentive for the government is that if the ability to distribute the holdings of private investments is more broadly held by people that actually creates more economic output.

And then selfishly from my side, if it were easier to deploy the, the $46.8 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts right now. And I just told you that the only way you keep those tax treatment is you have to go into investments. You can't buy stuff for yourself. You can't buy your vacation home. You can't buy your dream car.

What do you think would happen if even 10% of $46.8 trillion, and this is only U.S. Money, got distributed? And I also tell you that roughly 70% of all the money in self-directed IRAs goes into real estate by dollar value. What would an extra three, three and a half trillion dollars of money going into United States real estate being held not by one wealthy company or one wealthy individual, but being held by, you know, let's say tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people. That's a huge win.

Seth: Yeah, that's a good point. I never thought about that. That makes sense, though.

Henry: Yeah, it's a big, big win. That's a seismic shift in how wealth is held.

Seth: Well, given where you're at in life right now, all the different companies you've started and worked for.

If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of financial advice about building long-term wealth, what would that be?

Henry: I think it might be. Oddly enough, it might be just maybe having a little bit more of a safety net before taking the risk. I think there were points in my life for sure where I probably cut it a little bit too close to the bone and didn't start early.

You know, I worked at Merrill Lynch out of college. I was making good income, but I didn't really have anyone to tell me the basics of just save more in that 401k plan. So I describe and I see a lot of people today who had that great corporate job, accumulated that two, three, five, six hundred thousand dollars in their 401k. But I squandered a lot of those years myself.

So this is someone who's had a CFP through all that telling you that I should have done like 10% when 10% of my salary coming out of college was a lot more than the zero I made eating ramen as a senior in college. But instead, I probably just did like, you know, some sort of the minimus amount, like, you know, only one and 2% and so forth. So looking back, even the basics would have made a big difference for me back then.

Seth: If we looked inside your retirement account right now, would anything surprise us?

Henry: You know, I have a pretty good base of just traditional index fund investments. Pretty much like a barbell strategy. I think it mirrors what I think these institutional people do. So it's private investments in one half, and then it's public investments in the other. And then I kind of missed the crypto train. So that's not really my thing.

Seth: Yeah, me too. It's okay. You're not alone.

Yeah. Well, Henry, it was great talking to you. For the listeners out there, if you want to check out RocketDollar, you can use the REtipster link. It's retipster.com/RocketDollar. And if you use the code REtipster at checkout, you'll get a $100 discount.

And you can also check out the show notes for this episode, retipster.com/261.

And Henry, any last thoughts you would leave us with?

Henry: Just be open-minded. Just understand that I think that private investments are where you're going to generate a lot of your returns. I'm not necessarily advocating that you need to make those investments using your retirement funds, but... Don't discount. And I think that the days of just sitting in an index fund for 20, 30, 40 years, like our parents did, may not work. And I know that people have said that over the years, and they've been proven wrong, but the world is fundamentally different now.

Seth: Do you think the perfect balance in an investment portfolio, what percentage of it should be just sitting in the stock market versus in a private thing? Is there some ideal we should all shoot for, or is it just too much of an individual question to where they know that?

Henry: It's probably individually adjusted based on wealth and age, but I'd probably say a rough rule of thumb might be somewhere between 50% to 65%. So this goes on the backs of the old 60-40 portfolio, except the difference is that that 60-40 portfolio that everyone always heard about growing up, the balanced portfolio, was 60% equity stocks, 40% bonds.

Well, the problem is that, you know, bonds themselves underperform and now they're completely correlated to the actual stocks and the corporations that they, they're basically the debts instrument of the same companies who issue stocks.

So 60% goes into equities and now probably there's a better opportunity to split 40% and something that's private that you're comfortable with. And that could be passive investments and that can go into things like infrastructure and private credit.

But if you're more comfortable and this is more your thing, that 40% should be somewhere real estate. If you don't want to be active in it and don't want to be doing things like flipping land or fixing toilets and rental properties, then go into passive funds or syndications that might do that part. But you need something that's actually going to zig when the stock market itself zags. And bonds did that for many, many decades. They don't do that anymore.

Seth: Henry, thanks again. Great to talk to you again. Check out retipster.com/RocketDollar or the show notes retipster.com/261. Thanks everybody for listening. We will talk to you next time.

Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast.

Today, I'm bringing back a guest you may remember from a few years ago in episode 162. It was called Stealth Wealth Strategies from an Undercover Millionaire Land Investor. He goes by JB.

And the last time we talked, his business was firing on all cylinders.

Direct mail was working great, deals were flowing, margins made sense. And like a lot of people back then, it felt like the playbook was pretty clear. This time, things are a little bit different. JB and I recently had a long private conversation, not for the podcast, where he and I were just talking pretty openly about what's not working anymore, the emotional toll of questioning a business that once defined you, and what happens when the strategies that built your success start kind of breaking down.

A lot of people are feeling this right now, but very few are willing to say it out loud. In this episode, we're going to talk about what JB is actually doing now and why he's walking away from things he once swore by and how he's thinking about risk and scale differently and some of the uncomfortable questions most land investors are asking themselves in private, but never on a microphone on a podcast like this.

So this is not a hype episode. This is not a here's the next shiny strategy episode. This is an honest conversation about adaptation and humility and what it really takes to survive when the market stops rewarding the old rules. So let's jump into it. JB, welcome back. How's it going?

JB: Seth, it is great to be back with you. You're awesome. So I cannot believe that it's been, I think you said 162, three.

Seth: Yeah, that was August 1, 2023 was when that last one was published. Wow.

JB: Again, you do great work. I was super excited to catch up with you last month and agreed to do this. So this will not necessarily be, like you said, the shiny object in Rainbows and Unicorns, but... There's still some opportunity in land if people know what they're doing and they're a good operator.

Seth: Maybe you can just bring us up to speed for those who are not going to go back and re-listen to episode 162. What did your business used to look like and how has it changed?

JB: Started in 2016, did my first deal in 2017.

And then, you know, when you've got a W-2, you can roll everything back into the business, dude, it was rolling. It was great. In 2019, I quit my W-2 job, went on, had six figures, seven figure years. It was extremely successful. Things were great. And then you hit about 2013. If anybody was in business during COVID and then they hit 22, 23, they start to see, I think, a lot of the things that we were running into.

Seth: When you look back at the version of your business that was working in 2017 to 2021, 2022, what's the first thing in your mind that clearly does not work anymore today? Or it could just be it works not nearly as well as it used to.

JB: I was only direct mail and blind offers.

And really, my business was built on helping people. What I would do is I'd say, okay, yes, you can send an offer for $40,000 and you can sell it for $100,000. That would happen. But a lot of what we focused on was I sincerely wanted to help people. So if you had affidavits of ownership, back taxes, liens, foreclosures, judgments, quiet title lawsuits, I would talk to people's financial advisors. Hey, are you for real? Hey, is this a scam? And really sincerely try to help people work through that because what they needed was A, someone with the expertise. B, someone who was honest, who wasn't going to screw them, and C, a rich uncle.

Hey, I've got this piece of property. I haven't seen it in 10 years. I want to offload it. I'm tired of paying the property taxes. I don't live in that state anymore, but I've got these issues that stop me completely from conveying it. And they need somebody to come along and write those checks. That's really where my business focused was. You hear about house flippers. They go in and they change the toilets and the carpet and they repaint it and they do the roof or whatever. I rehabbed the paper.

If you fast forward to where it is today, we have come into a new and different land investing industry where it is much more mature. It has been kind of found out and there is a lot more competition.

When you and I spoke, you were like, hey, are you interested being on the podcast? And I said, Seth, I'm happy to do it. They may not want to hear what I have to say.

Seth: That's exactly why we need you on here. People need the truth.

JB: Yeah. As I mentioned a minute ago, today we're talking to two different audiences. One is you're either thinking about getting into this or you just got into it. Or the second audience is you've been doing this a while and look, I live in a vacuum. I work from home. I'm self-employed. I know some of the other people in the industry, but I don't really talk to them.

Maybe it's just me, but everything I kind of hear and read. It's not just me. So those people also, if you're struggling, this might be for you. So we looked at it and said, hey, it's not what it used to be. Coincidentally, the very day that you and I got on the phone, I got an email that morning and it was sent to my work email address. It was BCC'd to land investors. And it said, 30 of you contacted me recently to buy my property through direct mail or whatever. I'm emailing all of you, what is your bid?

I'm out. I didn't even respond. I'm not in business to be in an auction scenario. When you do that, you're not getting value, most likely. The point of the story is that's just kind of the world we're living in now. I've had letters where it's like, okay, I had 52. Not an exaggeration. I'm not picking a number. Hey, we had 52 of you guys contact us last year. It's the first of the year. We're ready to sell. Send us your offer. That is not a sustainable business model. We have to be honest with ourselves and address that.

Seth: I've heard this said countless times over the past year, but this idea of you need to treat your land investing business like a business. Like this is not a hobbyist thing anymore. And it makes me wonder, do you think today's successful land investors, are they competing on skill or are they competing on who is willing to accept the worst margins? Or maybe both.

JB: It's all of the above. Okay, so you had an episode, and I'm going to call it famous because I've heard it referred to in other podcasts you've done where you had a bookkeeper that said 40% of his customers had gone out of business or shut it down. Now, it was a small sample size. I want to say he had 50 or 60 customers.

But that is a telling number. So you had another recent episode where it was episode 250, where you brought in five leading minds in the industry and basically went down and asked them the same questions. This one was good enough that I sat down and I took notes and I had a different page for every one of those five guys. And when you'd ask them a question, I'd write down, so I want to know what number one, what does he think? Number two, what does he think? And I kind of saw some patterns of the five, three of them said... Their business is evolving to subdivide level deals. And the low number was a minimum of $300,000 on the buy side, up to about $5 million. And that's where I'm headed. And if you want, we can kind of walk through how I got there and what we're doing today.

Seth: Marketing, texting, cold calls, RVM, which is ringless voicemail, PPC, which is pay-per-click. Then you've got direct mail. Within direct mail, you've got a neutral offer, you've got a blind offer, you've got a range offer. And you said you've always ever just done direct mail or have you done anything else?

JB: I tried cold calling. I did not get a deal out of it. I contracted with a third-party provider that does that for 90 days. It failed miserably. And there were a lot of promises about, well, you'll get leads and you'll get deals and all that. And one of the problems we've had today, when I say we, I mean the industry, oh, you'll get leads. Oh, you'll get deals. What is the profit margin of that deal? How many people are doing a double close?

If you're new to this, you need to look at that and say, hey, they're going to tell me that I'm going to get leads. They're going to tell me I'm going to get deals. How many of those are double close? Because a double close margin might be 10% or 30%. Well, if you spend a significant amount of money buying data, scrubbing data, mailing table, talking to people on the phone, answering those return calls, all that for a 10% margin on a double close, I've done one double close in my life. The problem with double close is the margins are much, much tighter and you have no control. What happens if you're about to close and your seller says, oh, my next door neighbor didn't realize I had it for sale, and he's going to pay me $10,000 more than you are, and you've already gone through title, you're about to close next week. Or you paid to list it on whatever listing service, MLS, land.com, whatever it is. You spent this money, you burned time, you did all this,

and you do not control that asset. So for those two reasons, small margins and lack of control, I have avoided double closes. And when gurus today talk about margin or talk about we give you leads and deals, what is the definition of your deal? Like I said before, I sincerely want to help people. I'm going to write a check. I understand the legal structure of all the problems that we have to deal with to help you get this done, get the title clean, all of that.

Today, is it the last guy who called you? So there's basically three reasons why someone might be more likely to get a deal over me if we're talking to the same seller. Number one is they pay more, which goes back to what we just talked about. Margins are tighter. That hurts. Number two, they just happen to call on the day that you decide to say yes. Or number three, they spent the time...

To consistently, persistently call you over and over for weeks and months and develop trust and rapport until you finally say yes. I'm not trying to talk somebody out of their property. I have a service and I have a checkbook. If my service helps you and my checkbook helps you, then it's a win-win for all of us. I help you clean up your issues. I help you cash out fast and you can go spend it on whatever you want to spend it on. And I get the property. Everybody's happy.

We kind of ran into a come to Jesus, a road to Damascus moment, if you will, of what are we really doing here? And can we continue to do this? There are people who are doing, let's say they'll pick two marketing channels. It'll be texting and direct mail. And it appears if you listen to podcasts and all that kind of stuff, they are succeeding with that. And I have no doubt of that. I just think it is harder. And I think there are fewer people that are being successful doing this. And by the way, you and I talked about this.

How many podcasts have started for land and then failed? How many gurus have gone out of business? I know you did a podcast one time. The number I want to say was over 50 gurus that were doing this. I have no idea it was that many people. That is nuts.

Seth: I think it's more than that. But it kind of depends on what you call a guru. There's lots of people that like are a coach in some way, shape or form, or they're trying to make a name for themselves and have some platform and that kind of thing. There's a lot of them.

JB: So look, I'm not doing this to be self-serving. I'm doing this to help others in the industry, to pull back the curtain and say, here's my business and here's what I'm saying. I'm cynical.

And the question I always ask is, why is that guru doing this? Are they being magnanimous? Are they being altruistic? Are they self-serving? And they're selling a service.

And so they're going to sell, hey, the money's great. Here's my case study example, my success story of a great client I had, and they're making a lot of money, and they quit their job. There's no doubt that's true. But I would heavily scrutinize before I would write a check, because why are they doing it? They're doing it to make money.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. What did the timeline look for you? Like we talk about when things were going great, when we talked in 2023, and my sense is you started to see things working less and less well as we got into 2024, 2025. Sounds like there were just a lot of signs of like increased competition. At what point did you stop thinking like, yeah, this is just a rough patch versus, okay, something is fundamentally broken here?

JB: The deals are drying up. And there's the term ROAS, return on ad spend. How many pieces of mail do you send before you get a deal? And when you see that number increasing from like 2,500 pieces for a deal to 3,000, to 5,000, to 8,000, to 10,000. And then the United States Postal Service has increased the cost per stamp. When you're sending tens of thousands of letters, this impacts you. This makes a difference. Your marketing spend is going up.

And yeah, I did go, I said, all right, I'm going to go try cold calling. Didn't get anything that I would define as a deal. And so, okay, you're doing direct mail. You're trying, again, it could be neutral range, blind offer, whatever.

This gets painful because you look at your bank account at the end of the month and you've spent 10, 20, 30 plus thousand dollars on marketing or more. And what have you really shown for it?

Seth: Can I ask with the cold calling, it's going to be enlightening to some people. How much money did you spend on cold calling? And like, how long did you try that before you just decide, okay, this doesn't work? This isn't going to be the answer for me. Just curious how deep you got into that before you decided to go back to direct mail.

JB: I used a land calling service. I hired them for 90 days as part of their service. They sold the data to you as well. And I want to say it was $10,000, $12,000. It was not a small number, but you know, no, I've got budget and I'm willing to try something else because direct mail was slowing way, way down. And the sales pitch was you will get a deal or two a week and you'll get a few leads a day. And I got nothing. I got the classic, the same thing you would experience with postcards. Sure. Absolutely. I want to sell you my property. It's worth a million dollars. Send me a check when it's obviously not worth that.

And, you know, I'd go back to the vendor and say, this is not what you told me. All my other customers are doing great. You know, I don't know why you're not seeing this. And I started asking, let's define what a deal means. And then I started to realize it would be more like 10% margin on a double close. Well, that is not my definition of a lead. That is not my definition of a deal. That is not the business I'm in. And it was, well, you just need to put them on a ticker where you would call them every week or every month. And then for six months, that lead would turn into a deal. No, no. That's not the business.

I mean, like I said, my business is I bring financial and legal expertise on how the process works, what it takes to get you out of your problem, help you. I'll pay for everything and write a check at the end. That's my business model. So it doesn't benefit me to pursue a $5,000 gross profit calling you twice a month for six months. So that was the experience.

Seth: I ask because I know a lot of people who do only cold calling and they kind of swear by it. It's like the lifeblood of their business because direct mail stopped working for them.

And there's probably many different reasons for this. Maybe it has something to do with the agency they're using. Maybe it's their willingness to chase down deals that they otherwise would not have to work as hard for, for direct mail leads. But it just makes me wonder how much do you think it hurts you to have the experiences of the good times when things came easier? Like if you got into this today without any past experience, without knowing how much easier it used to be, do you think that would make it easier for you to stomach these harder experiences? Because you're just like, this is just how it is. I got to work harder.

JB: Yeah, I do think so. Because you literally have to unlearn what you've learned. You've learned, hey, this works. Now that doesn't work, but you still pay money like it does. You're still investing in marketing like it does. So now you've got to go backwards to go forward to learn, hey, this isn't working like it used to. And then your gurus will say, hey, you need at least two marketing channels. Again, I'm not saying that these marketing channels don't work, but here's really where we came to.

I had three choices. Option one, quit. To set the tone, I literally would make a seven-figure top-line profit. I had some great years. I mean, God bless me, and there were good things happening. And when you see that number in your tax return go down year over year, there's a problem. So option one, quit.

Option two, I need to stand up a much different organization. I need a team. People who are scrubbing, people who are mailing, people who are maybe pricing if you're doing blind offers or range offers, people who are answering inbound calls, people who are managing a call team, someone handling texting. This takes overhead, headcount, time management. It's not the world I want to live in.

I did some soul searching and I looked at it and I said, okay, if you get a blank piece of paper, where would you want to be? I said, okay, I want to be a billionaire. I'm not saying that's the goal, but anybody would say, of course, that's a great goal. But let's say you want to be a millionaire or a multimillionaire, and you certainly want to have freedom. You don't want to work for somebody else. You want to drop your kids off at school. You want to make sure you're the little league coach. You want to have that freedom and security in your bank account. And the boss can't fire you. You can't get laid off. You know, the term riff, riff is reduction in force, it's a fancy way of saying he got laid off.

Okay so if you want to be a millionaire do millionaires sit around and debate what we just talked about? Well I don't know there's cold calling, well texting might be good, which of the direct mail should we do.

They don't do that. They just go do deals. And how do they find those deals? A lot of times it's on market. And that's what we've evolved to is all my deals are big deals now. And I think if anybody has been in this a while and they know what they're doing and they've kind of saved their bank account and didn't go buy fancy cars and beach houses and all that kind of stuff. Just for me, that's what we did.

And so that's what we're focused on is buying on market. And that was the change was buying on market subdivide deals and definitions. A minor subdivide is I take it, I chop it up with a survey, I sell the pieces. A major subdivide is there might be zoning involved, plaiting involved, that kind of stuff. And we're not afraid of doing dirt work and we're not afraid of running utilities. We know what we're doing. We know what we're talking about. And today we've got close to 5 million in inventory in land deals.

And I don't regret the decision and I sleep better at night. And here's the changes I made was number one, I fired my data provider. I used to spend a ton of money on data. I don't do that. I fired my VA scrubbing. I don't do that. I significantly decreased mail. So, you know, again, I'm spending $20,000, $30,000, sometimes more. You know, of course, you'd have a month where you spend $10,000.

Seth: How did that feel?

JB: That felt awesome. I laid off my transaction coordinator. I had someone whose only job was to talk to sellers, answer questions, deal with title companies, do all that.

There were no offers coming back. The mail was not working. And so, you know, when I did all of that, I basically stripped out that cost. It felt fantastic.

Seth: So you said a couple of things there. You said, first of all, you fired the data scrubbing. So you're doing less of that and you significantly decreased the amount of mail. Usually people decrease mail because they're scrubbing stuff out. They're making their list smaller. So how did you scrub less and decrease mail? Explain that to me.

JB: Yeah, great question. So there are three data providers. I can name the one that I used to use. I'm not trying to disparage them. They were great. It's just the business changed. So I had a national contract with them, spent a ton of money with them every month. I let them go. One of the things that I have found that I like is the Land Portal. That is a good platform.

The Land Portal buys its data from the exact same data provider that I had. It's the same data. And I got on the phone with that data provider. Again, I won't name them. And I asked the guy, hey, dude, you know what the land portal is? And it was my account rep. And I said, you know what the land portal is? He says, oh, yeah. And I said, okay, I've compared the two data sets. Your data looks exactly like their data.

Are they buying it from you? And he said, well, I can't answer that. And I said, you can't answer that because you don't know, or you can't answer that because you will not disclose. You can neither confirm nor deny. He said, I can neither confirm nor deny. I said, all right, tell me what I need to know. So I get the same data, but I don't have that national contract. I mean, I was paying less per record than you get through the land portal. But I do like the land portal.

And again, if we're going to only do large subdivide deals, what am I scrubbing for? That means I'm doing a neutral letter that is very professional, very warm, and not in your face, low ball, all that. You have a thousand acres. I would like to buy that from you. If you're interested, here's kind of my resume.

We would love to talk to you. We're serious. We're professional.

So there's a limited number of tracks that are 100 acres or 200 acres or 500 acres or 1,000 acres. So now you're not mailing to those all the time and you're going to do 2,000 pieces every couple of months maybe. So does that answer your question?

Seth: Yeah. Well, part of what I'm getting at is you said earlier that you only do big deals now. So what, by your definition, is a big deal? I think it kind of just answered it. Basically, 100 plus acre tracts of land. Is that accurate?

JB: I've always gone by dollar amounts, not acres. So by dollar amounts, what's the big deal? $300,000 to $400,000. That's the acquisition cost?

Seth: It would be a low-end acquisition cost.

JB: I mean, we'll look at anything. If it underwrites and makes sense, sure. I'm just not mailing for $50,000 deals anymore. And then on the high end, I mean, we closed on one in December. It was a little over $2 million on the buy side. And we have the ability to write those checks. We have the banking relationships. We have the equity. We have the expertise. And we'll go anywhere in the country that it makes sense. And that's really our business model today.

Seth: So the play is to go after these larger parcels, and there's just fewer of those to go around. And there's also probably fewer players who even have the cash to buy those kinds of properties in the first place. I was just trying to confirm what kinds of deals you are not doing anymore, and what specifically you are going after, and how you've been able to decrease that competition. Like basically how you're able to survive as it's getting so much harder.

JB: Well, you know, I just mentioned that just under $5 million in inventory.

And half of that is equity. And part of that equity number is some profit and some what I've put into the deal for bank financing. So you've got a $75-25 or an $80-20 deal. I'm writing a check for half a million or $600,000 or $700,000. So some of that is there. But Seth, if it took me the year to sell those, our projection is we make over a million.

Seth: Do you think it'll all sell within a year? Is that a realistic expectation, you think?

JB: Well, we took bets as a team. My director of development, who handles all the dirt work and putting in utilities as needed, that kind of stuff. And then the agents that I work with, I'm like, all right, guys, my butt's on the line. I'm the one writing the check. Y'all are just part of the team. When do we think these are going to close? And, you know, they'll usually say in six months we'll be out. I'm more like, I think it'll be a year because I have to be conservative. I'm the one who my name is on the loan with the bank.

And by the way, my goal was and is to help people in these scenarios. So I'll tell you a story. The deal that we did that we closed on in December that was over $2 million. One of the things that I will do that land investors will shy away from, which will help differentiate us from the market, from competition, is if it has a building or buildings on it, we will buy those happily. I had the ability to underwrite them, insure them, fix them, whatever it may be.

Well, the one that we closed on in December, the woman was a widow. Her husband had just passed away. And they were doing some improvements to the property. They just added onto the house. This was not expected for him to happen. And he passed away. She said, I'm moving back to be with family. She listed it with a major brokerage. And part of our offer was we toured the property. We met her. We toured the house. We drove all over this thing. It was a massive ranch. And part of our offer was we will pay you this amount of money, but we will also let you live there for free. You have had a traumatic event in your life. We understand this is troubling for you. You will live in this house rent-free.

Until you can move at your pace and your convenience. We're happy to do that. We see what she's going through and some other investors are going to say, all right, on closing day, you better be out because we're coming. That's not who we are. And I'm happy to help people in those situations.

Seth: Yeah. Now, how many of these bigger deals are you aiming to do each year? Like how many transactions does this equate to?

JB: How much money do I have? That's basically it. And we've talked about doing partnerships, LP, GP stuff, pulling those together. We've worked on that and we have the ability, we have the expertise, we have the reach, we have the relationships. If you gave me 10 million, if you gave me 50 million, I would go do as many deals as A, it makes sense for. So don't go buy a deal just to spend money. And B, you've got budget for and if we can meet those two criteria, we'll do it.

That's the go-forward plan. So when you talk about making these big uncomfortable moves like, you know, canceling your data account, letting your VA go, dialing down the direct mail, canceling services that once felt essential.

Were any of these things hard to shut off, not logistically, but just mentally? Like just letting go of the way things used to be? Like, I just have to use this thing. Like, that's how the business works. It almost feels like losing part of your identity to shut down what used to be an essential service. But I think just psychologically, it's a big shift, I think, to say, no, we're cutting off this thing that we used to rely on. We're going a different direction. Was that hard to say no to any of those things?

Seth: No, the opposite.

JB: Okay.

Seth: It was a relief and it was super easy because there's a realization. If you want to do 5 million in a year, top line.

And you're buying a $25,000 track, you need a hundred of those. That is two per week, including the week of Christmas, the week of Thanksgiving. That is two per week. That is a team. And everything that I do is super clean. Every line of business I have has its own bank account, its own LLC, everything, and its own P&L. And my CPA audits those. And I have a P&L and a balance sheet every month that they send the financials back to us.

And I'm looking at those financials for my land business. And the bank account is going down. The sales are not good. I'm spending more in marketing and overhead than some months I'm bringing in in sales. You're waking up in the middle of the night saying, OK, I quit my job to do this and the ground has shifted under my feet. I've got to figure this out.

So your question is, I feel bad. No. And when I talk about a transaction coordinator, that was an American. So I'm paying American prices for this with paying Social Security matching, all that kind of stuff, paying for data. I'm paying for mail. Prices are going up for postage. I just removed a significant number that was costing me in expenses every month.

And I just added a bunch of inventory. Like you go and you buy a large ranch and you chop it up. And now all of a sudden your balance sheet goes up because if you mark to market, all right, here's what I have it listed at. Now we're going in the right direction. It was like, oh, thank you. This is a relief. I'm out from under the expense and we've got more inventory and now we've got a plan.

JB: So I think what's going on there, I'm sure you'd probably agree. The reason it was easy to let that go was because it had become a big pain point and it's easy to chop off something that hurts. I think what's hard to do is to preemptively see it coming before it hurts and get rid of it before it's a problem. Would you agree?

Seth: Well, well I'm too stupid to see it coming.

JB: I am too. I think most of us are. It's very difficult to see that. I'm out in the ocean like oh this is great, I'm playing to the waves, everything's fine, you know, I did not see that tidal wave coming that just bounced me on the bottom of the ocean. I didn't feel good.

And then here comes another one. It's like, okay, we kind of need to figure this out or get out of the water. And no, I didn't see it coming. And it's kind of hard, I think, for anybody to see it coming. You got to figure it out and react to it or you're out of business. And that's any business you want to be in.

Seth: Yeah. I know the thing that everybody used to say, and maybe some people still say it, just send more mail. I know. When you hear that, what goes through your head now? Like, do you think this is a way that people just avoid having to reimagine the business? Like, is it just lazy thinking now to say send more mail?

JB: It used to be the answer. The answer used to be just send more mail. Now, what does that mean? That means two things. One is either A, just send the same quantity you did last week, last month. This batch didn't work. The next batch will. True. Or send more mail, meaning send more than you sent in the last batch. That typically worked. But now when you're talking about how many people are sending more mail.

There is a blizzard of paper out there in people's mailboxes.

And I used to be the guy that could come along and say, sure, here's a check for 50 grand. Thanks. Now there's 10 of me in their mailbox on any given week. And I'm exaggerating, but it was a relief to move away from that and I think send more mail. When I got into this, one of the reasons I sent mail when I ever started was, there's no way this can be true.

I'm going to send a letter to somebody that doesn't know me, and I'm going to offer them $50,000 for a $100,000 piece of property, and they're actually going to do that. And half the reason I did it was, I'm either going to prove this, that I'm right and they're wrong and this does not work, or this will be life changing. It was the latter. It was life changing. It was amazing.

But now there's so many people sending those things out there and from the seller's perspective they have more competition for their property and the seller's market in their mind typically trails two years behind what the market actually is because their data is anecdotal. So what do I mean? Well, my neighbor, half a mile down the road, he sold his 20 acres for X amount of money. That's what it's worth. Okay, when did he do that? Oh, it was around the time of COVID.

That is not the world today. Oh, you're just trying to rip me off. You don't understand what things cost around here. No, the world has changed. So in their mind, it's worth more than it is in a lot of cases, and they have a lot more competition.

Seth: So when you make offers now and those offers get accepted, what do those offers look like? Is it 50% of market value or are you having to offer more? Like what does a successful deal look like?

JB: I used to price at about 35% of my found comp. We all do this. You go on, you look, and what are the listings and what's in the area and what's the same quality, literally comparable? About 35%. I moved that up to 50% to 60% and still struggling to find deals. I've been doing subdivides for a few years as a side business, but not core business.

And then, again, as you study your financials and you look at your deals, you start to realize, I'm making more money over there and working a whole lot less than I am over here with what I used to be doing, sending direct mail. And again, I tried cold calling. That didn't work. Okay, we got issues here. You go where the most profit is, and it was subdivides.

So to answer your question, we price higher. I would probably say 50 to 60%. And we still struggle with those, finding them.

Seth: Do you ever offer even more than that? And if so, like what has to be true for that deal to work?

JB: I mean, you'll find this interesting. A couple of times I've said, screw it. I'm looking for a subdivide. I'm going to send a blind offer at full price. A blind offer, full price, but they're large subdivide deals. I got either people mad at me.

Or silence. I got zero deals and I was at full price. I knew what the market was and I got nothing. That was a couple of years ago. And so you're constantly A-B testing on your marketing. We'll try this, do this, try this.

What is the number one major hurdle when you are calling, texting, emailing, whatever it is, mailing people? What is the number one hurdle? I believe the first number one hurdle is, do they want to sell to you at all? Do they want to sell at anybody at all? Now, think about that. I did 1,000 texts, 1,000 cold calls, 1,000 direct mails. Pick a number, 90, 95, 98, 99% of them don't want to sell at all. If it's an on-market deal, we have removed that hurdle completely.

Because that's one that I struggle with is I don't want to convince you to do this. I'm not trying to con you. I know if you list it with somebody, I can underwrite it. I can see the numbers. There's value versus price. Here's what you think the price is. Here's what I think the value is. Here's what I think I could do with it. Here's what my cost would be for development. Boom, let's roll because I know you are a willing seller and way over 90% are not a willing seller to begin with. And we're just wasting marketing dollars chasing those.

Seth: Could the strategy very well be just make offers to on-market properties on the MLS and just skip direct mail altogether?

JB: I don't know. I would say there's two things there, FSBO and AI.

FSBO, F-S-B-O, for sale by owner for people that are new to that term. There are times when people will go for sale by owner and they'll drop it on Zillow. And they're kind of ornery and nobody can tell me what to do. I'm smarter than everybody else. And you can sometimes find an on-market deal with a for sale by owner. So Redfin, Realtor.com, Zillow, probably not Land.com. You could potentially find some there, yes.

The second is AI. If there's somebody out there who can figure out how to scrub MLS, scrub Land.com, and pull the delta of here's this listed and here's what it's worth. Here's what the market's going for on closed deals. Those two would be, I think, approaches. The problem is, can you build a repeatable, dependable business model? Your thesis is, I'm going to find for sale by owner on Zillow. Can you support your family doing that? I don't know. Is there enough there? Or can you support your family just finding through AI online stuff? I don't know the answer to that.

Seth: As you've had to pivot and change things, you basically just come to this realization that the way things used to work isn't working that long anymore. How hard is it emotionally to question a model that once made you very successful, especially when your identity is wrapped up in being, I'm the successful millionaire land investor. Like, I know what I'm doing. I'm confident in this space to suddenly like, I'm not, I don't know what I'm doing. I have to totally rethink this. I know there's the side of it like, I'm rethinking this because I have to. But the other part is just like, I don't want to let go of who I am or who I was. Tell me about your thought process with that.

JB: I think I said it in our first podcast and I'll say it again. I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'm not. There's so much that I don't know. So because I have that self-deprecating, sincerely humble, like there are people way smarter than me doing this. Question everything all the time. And it is okay to be wrong because the goal is not to be a guru. The goal is not to have people look at me, look how smart I am. What is the goal? The goal is freedom. My goal is freedom.

Money doesn't buy happiness. Money does buy freedom.

If I want to not get up tomorrow, I don't get up tomorrow. If I don't want to go drive in traffic tomorrow, I don't do that. So if that is your goal, then you work backwards from there. So you have no problem saying, I admit I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I admit that it's okay that if I make changes, my goal is freedom. There's no one defined path to get there. There's no one market niche or one marketing approach, figure it out.

And remember, again, there's times I'm waking up in the middle of the night like, this is not working. We got to pivot. And we basically studied our business retroactively. We went from a forensic accounting approach. Let's look backward. What is working? Let's identify that. And it was subdivides. I don't think I'm saying anything that the smart guys out there don't know. Like I said, you had episode 250, three of the five guys, that's what they're doing.

That's where they're headed.

Seth: So I know when we talked about a month ago, you had told me that you couldn't in good faith recommend land investing today the same way that you used to. And you're not the only person I've heard say this, by the way. I think a lot of people have that thought in their mind, but I'm curious under what circumstances would you recommend this business? Like what kind of person would they need to be or what would they need to do or not do in order to make this business work?

JB: Again, what is our goal? Our goal is freedom and we don't necessarily want to be a land investor. We want to be an investor. I love land and that line of business for me will never stop. But I think it was you. Go back and listen to episode 250. A lot of value, really good. I don't know if it was your question. One of the guys made the comment of, if you had 30 to 50 grand, where would you put it today? Well, first of all, that's a lot of money.

Most people can't scrape that together today. So you're telling me the table stakes to get in this business is $30,000 to $50,000? Really? My comment to someone would be, if you've got $30,000 to $50,000 sitting around, and we can talk about the things I would ask a guru before I would buy into that, maybe you take $30,000 or $50,000, and you have a career change, and you go sell real estate. And you say, I'm going to live on 30 to 50 grand. I'm going to learn the industry from the inside.

And I've got that amount of money for 30 grand at five grand a month. I can live for six months until I get a couple of deals and get rolling. One of the brokerage houses that I worked with, that broker started out selling land in the eighties. He's probably worth over a hundred million dollars today. I mean, he has a multi-thousand acre ranch. I mean, this dude is rolling. He's one of the top guys in the industry. Are you in land? Are you selling land? Are you investing in land? Yes. All of those things are true for him. He reached freedom, success, anything he wants in life, but he didn't do it through arguing over do I text or cold call.

That's number one. Do you go find deals for investors like me, for example?

So let's look in marketing. That's data, mail, or cold call, and or texting. That's a VA. That's whatever it is. I spend $5,000, and I find a deal that I buy for $6,000, and I sell it for $10,000.

That's a good margin, right? I bought it for $6,000, sold it for $10,000. We're talking Desert Squares, Maricopa County, whatever. I spent $5,000 in marketing to net $4,000 in profit. Is that worth it? That is not a sustainable business model. Or the exact same marketing dollar of $5,000, now you go buy a $60,000 deal and sell it for $100,000. The problem is everybody's going for that band, that buy for 50 or 60, sell for 100.

So maybe you bring in deals for other investors. Maybe you question, hey, I want to be invested, but maybe it's not land. Maybe it's an SBA loan and you go do contractor garages or self-storage, which you and I are both in self-storage. And two others, I'm a neophyte and an idiot when it comes to AI. So the goal through marketing, cold call, direct text, is to find deals. Can you use AI to figure out how to find deals in a different way? Again, either things that are FSBO or things that are on market.

The other one, you had a guy on one of your episodes, I thought it was an interesting concept. He's basically doing mobile homes. And you're hearing that more and more today. And if you look at our country and our society.

Starter homes, first-time buyers, if you look at that economic data, the cost of a first-time home has exploded.

It's not so much about the quality of the product, the asset. It's about market. And your first home could be $400,000, $500,000, $600,000.

Most 20-something-year-old people today cannot afford that. But they might be able to afford a mobile home.

Now, as near as I understood it, you can't go buy 10 acres and drop a mobile home on it and give it septic and all that because it kind of kills the numbers. But if I'm a mobile home dealer and I make 20%, 30% on the mobile home, I can pretty much buy the acreage on market. I buy an acre or two that's already zoned, and I get it for 90% of list price, and I drop the mobile home on there, and I make 30% margin on that. Now you got a deal. Now you got a plan.

That's not something I've gotten into, but believe me, I did some soul searching and asking the same question you're asking me now. And it's hard for the person who's sitting in their car right now, listening to this on their drive to work, flipping between podcasts of different gurus selling their coaching and their program and their tools and their data and everything else who have their next case study of here's my success story.

There are people doing it. I just would be really careful. I would question everything. I would make sure you've got enough money to lose because you're going to spend some money up front on marketing. And the first deal I ever did, it took me almost a year to figure out pricing. And I paid $10,000. I sold it for $25,000.

So I knew when I purchased that $10,000 track, I would. I was willing to lose that amount of money, and I viewed it as if I were purchasing a stock that goes bankrupt.

I took some money from my investment account, and I said, okay, just view it like a stock that you've lost. You gain and lose money on stocks. That happens. Okay, great. That's the way I looked at it, but it's harder. I think if I were advising my son, like, what would you do? I think it'd be more likely to go learn from someone that's been doing it like me, like some of the others, maybe bring them deals and shadow them because that's where the deal is today. It's in the larger subdivides. And you could have success in mail and all that. Are you going to continue to have that success a year, two years, three years, four years down the road? Are you willing and able to stand up that team, pay for those people, chase those deals? I don't know.

Seth: So when we talk about your revised strategy of going after these larger deals now, what do you say to people who hear this strategy and they think, well, yeah, that works for you, JB, but only if you already have money like you do.

JB: That's fair. I didn't start out doing multi-million dollar deals. I needed two things. I needed to grow my stake. You go to the casino or the poker table and you've got your stake. I need to grow that. And I need to learn enough. You know, Gordon Gekko said a fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.

And people are going to lose a lot of money and you've got to be darn careful what you're doing. So you need to learn. How do you learn? You can pay a guru. You can spend marketing. Or like I said, you can go work in real estate, shadow a big player. I'm not saying that's the only road. And I'm not saying that any of these marketing channels we've talked about are bad. I'm just saying it's a lot harder. And if direct mail was still killing it like

it was five years ago, I'd still be doing it.

Seth: So it sounds like the answer is start small, grow your stake, and then eventually you will have the money.

JB: Yeah. So let me help the new person. What would I do? Go be a real estate agent in land, go find deals. You know, that's one of the things these gurus sometimes they're like, yeah, go find deals. Well, I can't afford that one. You know what? I've got a funding business. It's just for you. And you end up just being a deal finder for the gurus, right? But you can bring it to me or maybe some other people and you can say.

Okay, maybe I'm invested. Maybe it's sweat equity. I brought it to you. I just want to sit in the background and learn. And it doesn't cost anything. And that's when I'm thinking, okay, is there an AI tool? There's somebody smarter than me out there that can go look at the country and say, where is there a high demand? Where is there a mispriced asset and go find that. How much does that cost you? Not very much. You spend some time to develop some sort of AI, some sort of prompt. You know, prompt it okay, look for this and this and this or this, not this, boom, go.

You've mentioned this AI thing a few times. Have you been doing this at all or have you tried like chat gpt deep research to pointedly ask exactly what you want to know and tell it to go to work?

Seth: I'm embarrassed to say that I am not doing any of that. The only AI I'm leveraging is what's on the LAN portal. They've got some good tools there.

JB: I would strongly encourage you since, I mean, you seem to understand what you're looking for. And I think you might be shocked at what Chad GPT Deep Research or really any of these deep research tools can find. Like it is... Almost breathtaking. Like I can't even believe how much information it pulls back and how accurate it seems to be because it's spending a lot of time doing this stuff. And I'm actually a little embarrassed. I haven't tried more of exactly what you're talking about because I know it is capable of a lot. I'm probably going to do that as soon as we hang up here is go see how far I can get with it.

JB: Well, you know, maybe that's your next episode and I get 5% of that business.

I believe that this is potentially possible to use AI leveraged in this manner. I'm not willing to go pay someone $10,000 to teach me how to do that. But I would like to learn. Seth, I don't even know what question to ask. I don't mean the prompt question. I mean, there's Claude and Grok and Chajubiti and there's all these other ones. Which one is better and why? And then once you get into it, you know, I can go on and on about this. I'm just such a dummy when it comes to this.

I'm not even smart enough to ask the right question, but I know there's an opportunity there. I just don't know what it is yet.

Seth: A big way to do that is to ask Chad GBT or Grok or Claude, ask me what you need to know so that you can build the right prompt. Like interview me, ask me what I'm looking for. I'll tell you. And then we can build the prompt together. So like, I'm with you. There's tons of stuff that I've built that like, I don't know how to build it. But I kind of have this vague idea what's in my mind. Maybe AI can help me bring more clarity to this and then we can build it. It's like literally just... Whatever you can articulate, however clumsy it might be, just do it. And you'd be shocked at how much further AI can bring you.

JB: It has been on the back burner. I'll have to move it to the front burner because I'll admit, once you buy a very large subdivide and you get it going, you get a lot more time on your hands. Yeah, yeah. So I've got time to spend on this.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. So one thing I wanted to get into before we finish this is tell me about your self-storage business. I know the first time we ever met, I think it was in 2023, if I remember right, I was telling you about the self-storage business. You decided to pursue it. To my knowledge, you've bought two facilities. Tell me the quick story of that in like three or five minutes. How did you find them? How's it going? Are you looking to do more? Let's hear about it.

JB: Love self-storage. It's great.

And as I've said over and over, I'm not very smart, question everything. The goal is to be successful. There's no plan. There's no path. Just figure it out. It really kind of goes back to owner financing land deals.

So I seriously consider, do I want to go that path? Well, if you do that, you're taking money off the table and you don't, like if I put a hundred grand into something, that hundred grand I cannot flip on land deals. It's kind of tied up, and now I'm getting this $1,000 a month or whatever the math is. And so I always make deals compete against each other. I make niches compete against each other. So multifamily, I want you to compete against an RV park. I want you to compete against whatever.

I had a really good year, wrote a massive check to the IRS. I said, I've got to shelter some cash here. So with a self-storage facility, you get the depreciation. If you do an owner financing on land, you don't get the depreciation. If I have a self-storage facility, every three months, six months, a year, I can raise rates. Owner financing land, I cannot. And they can come pay me out anytime they want. And there's a finite sales price for that owner financed land.

So self-storage, let me get this straight. I can continually increase the size of the payments. I get the tax depreciation. I get the appreciation of the asset because in owner financing land, the number is the number. Whatever you sold it for, you're done. Now, okay. And so I really started looking at this.

Purchased two. They were both found through direct mail because that's what I knew. I said, okay, send a neutral letter, make a list. I've stood up the system and the business to be able to do direct mail marketing. I said, let's go try that. Bought two. The first one was phenomenal. I had it for two years.

I bought it for 1.3. In December, we cashed out refi it for, it's worth about 1.8 now. But just to be conservative, we refinanced it for 1.7. So in two years, I've enjoyed the depreciation. I've enjoyed the cash flow. I pulled out from the refi more than I ever put in it to begin with.

Which was the plan all along. Fantastic. And again, I had looked at, do I really need to do owner financing of land? I'm not sorry that I went down this path.

The second self-storage facility we bought about a year ago, it was just okay. And really the fault was probably mine. I had another asset I was selling. Somebody was just blowing me up to buy it. I was going to make more than 3x my money on it. I needed a place to park it. I was going to 1031 it. Okay, great. We'll do that.

Again, I was helping out the seller of a second facility. It was a mom and pop shop. The dad had gotten dementia. He was having some issues. He had been running the business. And I'm like, sure, I'll buy this. Okay, fine. That one was just okay. We sold it last month and basically broke even on it. It was too small. It was a very small facility in a very rural town. It was basically too small to be worth our time.

And, you know, God bless those people. We helped them out. We helped out the buyer of the other property. We got out from under the loan. We freed up that equity. We know what we're doing with land. We kind of figured out, okay, the land business of where this needs to head, which is subdivides. We know what our buy box looks like for the next self-storage facilities, plural. And so that was the smart business decision. Cut loose, break even, get out from the debt, pull out the equity. Now let's go do more land deals and more larger self-storage deals.

Seth: I mean, is that where you see your preferred future going? Is like shifting a lot more over to self-storage and less from land or not necessarily? Like you kind of want to do both.

JB: What's the highest best returner? You tell me the one where I double my money and you tell me the one where I make 10% of my money. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to pick the one that doubles my money. Would you rather double your money once or do 10% year over year for the next 30 years? Your question is posed that I only get to double my money once. Then no, I'll take the 10% for 30 years. But the question is, can you have a sustainable, repeatable business model where you can double your money?

You know, the ranch we just split up, we're going to more than double our money. We're going to kill it on that one. That is awesome. So, you know, let's pick a number. You pull out a million dollars in profit. Now you've got some budget to be careful for six months until you find really the right one. I think the realistic, truthful answer to you is all of the above.

You know, you give me $2 million. I'm going to take a million and go buy a $2, $3, $4, $5 million land deal or two or three. And then I'm going to take a half a million or a million and go buy a self-storage facility and do both at the same time. They both have benefits to the business.

It's really interesting, this conversation, because some people make tens of millions from real estate, hundreds of millions from it, not because they're working that much harder, but because they're just having different conversations and thought processes every day. You know, we were talking about how, you know, a massive developer has very different thoughts and conversations in a different normal day's work from like a land flipper who's working on small rural flips. It makes you wonder, are there ways that you could fundamentally change your normal to fight bigger or more important and more profitable battles each day?

Seth: Well, like I said before, the conversations that those multimillionaire people are having, are they debating texting versus cold calling? Maybe, but just at a much larger level. They're not. Now, they might have an employee in their business that's having that conversation, but it's not them.

JB: I get up every day and I question everything.

Am I doing it the right way? Is there a better way to do it? What is the best, highest, most efficient return on my time? Am I making $10 an hour or $1,000 an hour? What is the best return on my time? Because that's the most valuable asset. I'm giving you a terrible answer, but I would love to have those conversations. And so now, do you just do more million-dollar ranch subdivides? Or do you do major subdivides? So you go into, I don't know, Indianapolis, and there's a hot suburb of Indianapolis, and you buy some acreage, and you do quarter-acre lots, and there's 2,000 rooftops, and you put in all the infrastructure, and you make a killing.

Maybe there's a risk reward on that. It takes more time, takes more capital investment. It takes a really sharp pencil on underwriting because you'd go bankrupt doing that. I've worked with developers in the past that I've partnered with and they kind of rolled their eyes before I got into land. And they'd say, you know, the guys who really make the money in development is the land guys.

I'm a big fan of Sam Zell, as an example. And he made a killing. He tried development and hated it. Great book, Am I Being Too Subtle by Sam Zell. Go read that. And he basically said he got burned on development. I think it was a Vegas casino or some hotel. He's like, I'm never doing this again. And he just said, I'm going to buy on-market deals that are mispriced. And I'm going to be so big that there are very few people that can call to write that check and I'm going to go do it. And I can already see, I see the asset, I see the market, both geographically and the market meaning demand. And that's how he made his money to become a billionaire.

Seth: You had mentioned earlier that as things started to change, one of the options of what you could do was quit. I'm wondering, did you ever think about quitting land flipping as things started to change? Or what would have to be true for you to walk away from land entirely? Not out of failure, but just out of clarity.

JB: No, I don't know that I would quit. I loved land. It's been extremely lucrative. I know when you buy right, the returns are amazing. You also said that it's not about being a land investor. It's about being an investor, right? So I mean, I guess the math would have to stop working.

Seth: Yeah. But again, when I retrospectively looked at my business, the math still worked. Okay. Where? Subdivides. If somebody wants to sell me a piece of property for $50,000 today, that I know I can list tomorrow for $100,000. I will do that. All of us will do that. It has become much, much harder to find that seller and get them willing and able to sign the closing docs. And, you know, as I've mentioned on here, if you've got 10, 20,

30, 40, 50 land investors contacting the same seller, you got a problem.

JB: Any business, service or product, you have to constantly change in question. And there's two different things. Are you doing this as a side hustle and you love being a dentist or whatever it is you do for a living? Great. Or do you make your living as an investor? And I joke with people all the time. I don't gamble. I don't sports gamble. I don't go to casinos. Why not? I gamble at my desk every day.

I risk capital to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I risk my family's future every day.

So you got to change. You got to be ready. And I think a lot of us, if what I'm seeing is correct and what I'm hearing is correct, just from the outside looking in, it's not just me. Others have felt this. And so if you're listening to this and you've been in it a while and you've felt the struggles... It's not just you. If you're successful and you have no idea what I'm talking about, God bless you. Good for you. If you're a new person, buyer beware. Caveat emptor. Make sure you understand what you're getting into when you get in with a guru or buy a program or whatever, because it's not as easy as it used to be.

Seth: That was another thing you mentioned earlier, questions you would ask of gurus?

JB: Yeah, I wrote some things down, you know, I was preparing for this. When you and I spoke a month ago, you had a great comment. You said, when was a coaching course written? Was it five years ago? Was it five days ago?

And there's a bunch of questions I would ask gurus, like really critically thinking. When was it written? And I kind of used like, okay, within the last year, that's good. But use AI as maybe a BC/AD kind of marker. Okay, but was it before AI or after AI? Has it been updated? If this coaching course has been updated, when? Was it five years ago? And when did you update it? I would ask any coach, what percentage of your customers, your students fail? How many fail last month? How many failed a year ago? Is that number growing? And conversely, how many of them graduate? You know, how many of them were like, hey, dude, I don't need you anymore. I've got this all figured out. I'm moving on. Thanks.

What is the average profit margin for your clients, your students, their deals? It used to be 50, 60 percent. Is it 10 percent today? Is it 20 percent? What's the definition of a margin?

Seth: Yeah. What is a lead? Oh, we're going to get you leads. We're going to teach you how to find leads. What does that really mean? Is that a willing seller at a price that I'm willing to pay? Or is that just someone who wants to talk to me? I think that question is probably most relevant for cold calling agencies and even texting agencies that do this on your behalf and claim to bring you back leads. I think that's really who that's aimed at.

JB: Well, yeah. And like postcards, you know, the first thing I ever did was I heard this guy had a really interesting concept. His name was Seth Williams who had a podcast back in 2015, 2016. You've been doing this 10 years, by the way.

Seth: Longer than that. Yeah.

JB: How long have you been doing this, brother? Seriously.

Seth: Started land in 09, if that's what you're talking about.

JB: You mean land or REtipster?

Seth: REtipster. Yeah, REtipster was started in late 2012.

JB: Congratulations, dude. You've had longevity. And that speaks to the value that you bring to the community. They got to ask those questions. What's a lead? What does that look like? The other thing is these coaches will say, all right, well, we'll finance it for you. We'll help you. Well, that's a good thing if you don't have the money, but it's a bad thing if all you're doing is spending marketing dollars to give somebody else the deal.

There's a bell curve to this. If it's a $5,000 or $10,000 deal, your cost per deal might be a number. If it's a $100,000 purchase, your marketing cost per deal is exponential. I mean, it's expensive to find those. Like they'll say, well, we'll give you leads. We'll help you get, you know, whatever. Be specific.

I would ask a guru, is it a double close? What percentage of the deals that your clients do are double closes? And then just ask yourself, are they being magnanimous? Are they being altruistic? Are they trying to help their fellow man? Are they just self-serving? They're selling a product and a service. And I look at these land gurus.

So in 1848, gold was discovered in California. In 1849, there was the gold rush, which side note, that's why the San Francisco 49ers are called the 49ers. And they've got gold in their uniform and their helmets and all that. It's the gold rush. That's where it came from. Do you want to be the guy that's going out there digging around in California and one out of a thousand is going to go back into town on his horse and he's got a gold nugget and I'm rich?

To me, the gurus are the guy who's sitting in town saying, I will sell you a shovel and all thousand people come through, buy a shovel from him. And oh, for an extra cost, I will teach you where to find, where to dig. And they're just sitting there getting rich for all these people who have dreams because the reality is not everybody who pays money for a guru, a coach is successful.

And that's kind of the way I look at it. So, you know, those are a ton of questions, hard questions that I would ask.

Not saying there's not value, but be careful.

Seth: Great questions. I think if you were to seriously go out there and ask a guru that stuff, I think to several of those questions, they won't have the data because they don't keep track of who finished the thing and how are they doing and what are their margins and all this stuff. It's impossible to keep track of all that. And of the few things that they will have the data for, they probably will not be honest or they're going to somehow frame it in a way that makes themselves sound better, like it's on them, that kind of thing. And to that end, like I do think about, you know, how many of your students were successful.

That is a data point. It's worth considering. But at the same time, like whose fault is it that they were not successful? Like, is it the teacher's fault or is it the implementer's fault? And it could be either because if the teacher has given out bad information, and then obviously they're going to struggle. But what if the person implementing is just a terrible implementer, as most people are? I don't know, it's hard to draw like conclusive information from that.

JB: 100%. And, you know, the 80-20 rule, probably 80% of the people who do any business fail. They're not organized. They're not efficient with money. They overspend. They spend money on the wrong things. They don't know how to run a business. Yeah. And so that's the cohort that you're starting with. There's no question about that. You know, and maybe it's not the student. That's a problem. Maybe it is or is not the coach. Maybe it is or is not like direct mail is not working like it used to, but they're still selling direct mail.

Right. But the interesting thing is, whether or not the student is successful, the guru still makes money.

Seth: Your shovel seller analogy. I've heard that before. It's a good one. There's nuance to that, too. Like, is there value in being able to buy a shovel? Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. So, like, just by nature of the fact that somebody is selling the shovel doesn't inherently make them evil or wrong or like, yeah, you're a swindler. But if that shovel seller is knowingly telling people stuff that they have not verified themselves, or maybe they even know it's wrong, but they don't care. They can still make money. That's when I think you're getting into that villain territory. I'm not at all saying that these gurus are evil. I'm not accusing anybody of anything.

I'm saying they make money whether you're successful or not. And the sales pitch is going to be, look at all my successful customers. See, I had one of my podcasts. I know you add value. This is not a sales pitch for your stuff. You know what you're doing. But students just need to be careful. And to go back to your question on the majority of the students, they're not cut out for this to begin with.

You start asking all these questions and the guru, conveniently, the coach, doesn't have the answer to it. What they do have the answer to is how many of your customers, your students from three months, six months, a year ago are still with you?

They're still paying you. And if they have dropped off, is that because, I mean, you use the term they graduated. You've got a great relationship with them. You talk to them on the phone. Maybe your partner in doing deals, whatever. Or is it because they just dropped out and they got frustrated? They couldn't have heard anymore. The coaches have that data.

JB: Well, I would think the sign of a successful coach is if their people are not paying them anymore. Like, you shouldn't still need me to function in the real world.

Seth: 100%. But the coach will know that. You know, I've had 10 people or 100 people, whatever their number is, who have graduated, and I still talk to them, or I know why they left. I know their website. I know they're doing business. Versus the people who, there was a couple of very difficult conversations that the guru and the student had where the student says, this isn't working, this isn't working, and they finally stopped paying.

And life happens. You have a baby or you change jobs or something and you just can't spend time on it anymore. But again, those are just the questions that I would ask and be really careful. I don't know what coaching costs these days, but beyond the cost of the coaching, it's the cost of the marketing and standing this up. If you're going to text or cold call, my understanding is you have to have somebody ready to deal with that. If you've got a regular job, who's going to handle that? That's an expense.

JB: Yeah. I almost think there's a ton of value, whether you have a coach or a course or not, whatever it is, there's a ton of value in getting a lot of your information from people who are not coaches and don't have anything to sell. Like they're just real people in the trenches with you. Maybe they're doing something a little bit different than you are, but like, you can just kind of keep your ear to the ground and hear like, okay, what's working for you over there because maybe there's something I can glean from that. Tons of value in that and I think part of that is masterminds, you know, going to events like we can actually rub shoulders with real people and have real conversations and not just what you might hear from your favorite podcast or guru you know.

Seth: Yeah, well in the land conference you and I went to they stopped it. They rebranded, refitted, relaunched, and I think they're doing something a little bit different now with less land. There was another one that doesn't exist anymore. He shut it down.

JB: Oh, that's true. And I've had people contact me on our last podcast a few years ago. I gave out my email address and had people email me. And coincidentally, I have a call this afternoon at 4.30 with a guy that I used to work with in my corporate job who reached out to me on LinkedIn looking for investors. And they do multifamily partnerships, syndication stuff.

And then we got to talking and, you know, here's kind of what I'm doing, whatever. And so now he's bringing me deals for review to help him out. I'm not giving him a penny. Super nice guy. I'm happy to help. I'm not involved, but I'm happy to help him out. So the one he sent me today might be a deal. I kind of like it.

Seth: Nice, man. Well, JB, thanks for talking again. If people want to connect with you again, you don't have to give anything up. I know we're calling you JB for a reason because you don't want to put your name and face all over the internet. But if somebody wanted to connect with you somehow, is there a way they could do that?

JB: Yeah. You know, I figured out for myself a long time ago that I'm pretty introverted and a loner. I don't need attention. I don't need to be on Instagram and all that, but a couple of ways. So the website for my company is bcpland.com. So that's Bob Charles Paul land.com. And it's set up in the classic way you would of here's an FAQ and here's if you've got a deal, being able to fund deals. There's a component there. And the email address is service at BCP land. The other thing I tried to do just to add to the community and just did it for fun. And if I can help people, great, is they can follow me on Twitter. So it's America Land Baron.

And to be clear, you take the word American, you remove the A, and you get the redneck version of America. So it's at americalandbaron.com.

Seth: I'm going to link to that along with your website and several other podcast episodes we mentioned in this conversation in the show notes for this episode, which is going to be at retipster.com/260, because this is episode 260. JB, as always, great to talk to you. I'm glad you're still doing well, even through all the changes over the past few years. And hopefully we can do this again and check back in at some point and hear how things are going.

JB: Yeah, I'm happy to do it. And one thing I would add, you know, thinking through this, you were talking about what can people do?

To start out. I'm to the point now where I would partner with people. I would put together partnerships with bringing investors. I would pay finders fees. I would bring in partners with sweat equity. I mean, we talked about some of those things. I would do that. I mean, if people have deals they're serious about, I'd consider them. I have people reach out to me on Twitter saying, what do you think? And here's my underwriting. Here's what I expect. Boom, good luck to you and then go away. I hope I'm not inundated, but you know, if I can help people, they can reach out.

Seth: Yeah. That whole thing on partnerships. So I don't know if you're talking about like on a per deal basis or like setting up a literal business entity with a partner, but I will just say I used to be kind of anti-partnership just in general. I just sort of wanted to be a lone wolf and do my own thing. But over the past three years now, all of the best things I've done have came about as a result of partnerships, basically finding somebody who I kind of feel like God just dropped them into my lap. It's not like I was some genius and went out and found like just rubbing shoulders with the right people over time.

And just finding amazing people who are so much better at what they do than I am. And they enable me to do things I would never otherwise be able to do. So I totally understand the apprehension people have about not liking partnerships. But I'll just say there is absolutely huge opportunity there if you can very carefully scrutinize and find the right people to partner with.

JB: So you talked about the evolution of the business, of my business. And I talked about trying to sincerely help people. That could be investors. So maybe you don't want to, or you don't have the time, you don't have the interest, you don't have the expertise, whether it's JB or it's Seth or it's whoever it may be. Great. That's another way that people can play in this game.

And as our business has evolved, even though I'm blessed with a nice little stack of chips, I'm blessed with the fact that let's go bring in partners. That is where my business is going. And if I can do 10 of these deals and have 20 million in inventory, and somebody makes a return that is much better than they would ever see in the market, we've gone to some conferences. We're actively starting to look for those partners. We're working in that direction. I 100% agree with you. Partnerships is the next phase of this for the guys like us.

Seth: JB, thanks again. Great to talk to you. For the listeners out there, again, show notes, retipster.com/260. Thanks again for listening, and we will talk to you next time.

Seth: How's it going? Welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is Seth Williams, and today's conversation is going to be a little bit different from most of the interviews I've done. I'm talking with Mike Ferreira, someone that longtime listeners might recognize from way back in episode 44. Mike was an early member of the REtipster club and a full-time land investor, and for years, one of the heavy hitters in this business.

And Mike had what a lot of people chase. He had volume, cash flow, predictable income, and a system that worked really, really well until it didn't. And this episode is not about celebrating wins or flexing deal numbers. It's about what happens after a nearly decade-long run of success in the land business when the market shifts, warning signs get ignored, ego creeps in, and the same strategy that once printed money starts destroying it.

So Mike is being unusually transparent about what went wrong from failing to pivot to selling the wrong kind of product for too long to the personal fallout that compounded everything. So if you've ever assumed that success means safety or that success is forever, this might make you think differently. And that's kind of the idea. So, Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. How's it going?

Mike: Hey, Seth. Yep. Happy to be here. Looking forward to sharing my story in the hopes that others don't fall into the same trap that I did in just hoping to save other people from the fate that I experienced.

Seth: Yeah, of course. And I'll just say it's very rare that I hear anybody even talk about something that didn't go well in the business, even if it's like a single deal, let alone what we're going to get in here to today. And I'll also say that I did not prompt Mike to do this at all. He asked me if he could come on in the hopes of helping save other people from future grief and hassle. So, Mike, thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it.

Mike: Yep, happy to do that.

Seth: Just to give people a recap, for those who have not heard episode 44 or maybe who are not familiar with you, just help us understand, like at the height of your land flipping business, what did it look like? How many deals were you doing per year? What were the typical properties you dealt with? How was it actually what your business consisted of?

Mike: My land business evolved, and it evolved in a very similar way that the early 2000s, pioneers or developers, business models evolved. I kind of sealed my fate by reading an old out-of-print book called The Great Land Hustle by a guy named Morton Paulson. And this book explained and outlined all of these different subdivisions that we see now, a lot of them that are still paper subdivisions, whether they're in Florida or Arizona, New Mexico, these big companies the way they started out is they developed land with the sole purpose for people to build houses on it.

They put the infrastructure in, roads, full utilities, down in places like Port Charlotte and North Port in Florida and other places around the country. And the demand was so great that they would just sell out. I mean, it was just gangbusters business. They would sell out. So then they figured, well, you know what, what if we just make the lots and put in the roads, but we don't spend all that money on the infrastructure. You know, people can do well in septic, eventually we'll run power to the area. And they did that.

And it's all like crazy. And then somebody said, hey, what if we just plait out the lots, forget about the roads, sell them as investments? It's going to be high margin and it's not going to cost us a penny in development. Let's just do that. And it worked. There's still evidence, areas in New Mexico and, like I said, Arizona and still in Florida. There's miles and miles and miles of all these lots, a lot of them with no access even. And from the 70s when they did it, still to this day, there's just nothing there.

That's kind of how my business went. I started near me in some areas that I knew there were lots and people were building, and I was flipping those kind of lots. And then I started getting into cheaper and cheaper land without utilities and still maybe some access and I tapped into a market where I would just sell on terms like $99 down, $199 document fee, low monthly payments and I looked at everything by margin like, not deal size, but percentage margin. So, I would make at least 7 to 10x of what I paid for a property, plus I charged sky-high interest of 16% and sold via land contracts.

And somehow, over time, it just devolved to the point where a large percent of my business was completely inaccessible lots. Some of them wetlands, some of them in the middle of the green swamp in Polk County, Florida. It seemed to work out great because, first of all, nobody in their right mind were nailing these people. And I could buy land for 500 bucks an acre and sell it maybe for 4,000 bucks an acre, plus get that interest.

And my business just blew up. I wasn't interested in getting a bunch of VAs or whatever. And instead, I decided to automate. So I had everything automated to the point that someone would go on my website, usually in the middle of the night for whatever reason. Maybe they were drinking. I don't know. They would check out to purchase the property. They pay their down payment and document fee. I had it automatically set up so their contract would be there, they'd electronically sign the contract, and the deal would be done.

And my wife at the time, who was helping me with the business and was a partner and the CPA for the business, all she had to do was copy and paste some information, put it into QuickBooks Online, they'd be set up on an auto debit, and that was it. Yeah. And it was the same type of properties I sold over and over. So I was basically copying, pasting the same ads and just putting a little different detail. It was easy. It was just ridiculously easy.

Seth: Who were these people that were buying these things? And like, why were they so okay paying so much for wetland property that they couldn't use?

Mike: In hindsight, looking back and to my experience of what ended up happening, these were people who could not afford any other kind of land. They could not afford a nice property, even with owner financing. These were the people who were living paycheck to paycheck, people who bought their cars at the Pay Here Car Lot, the people who would get the payday loans. It was those people. They were just happy for the opportunity to own something, anything.

Seth: Were they in the U.S.? Like, did they live here?

Mike: Most of them were in the U.S. There was kind of a higher percentage of immigrants. A lot of Haitian immigrants for some reason, Hispanic immigrants, and then just a lot of good old boys with a pickup truck type of buyer.

Seth: And why do you think they were okay with this? Like they just didn't understand what they were doing or?

Mike: That's hard to say. I thought I was being a good guy because I disclosed things in the ad because I put all the details of everything in the contract. It wasn't like the old days where it was scammy, I guess you would say. I thought I was being a good guy because I disclosed everything. Now, in hindsight, I realized part of it was people don't read. If I put a Facebook marketplace listing and I have all this in paragraphs of information, anyone selling land on a place like Facebook knows, you could put one acre lot in the title of the ad, and people are going to message you asking, how big is the lot? Because people just, they don't read.

Seth: Yeah, that's very true, though. I found the same thing. I think a lot of it was they weren't reading. They didn't realize what they were buying, even though it was in writing.

Mike: And then the other part, I said they just wanted to own something, whether it was a cultural thing, which I think some immigrants from other places, it's a cultural status to own land in the United States. And so they got something. It's all they could afford, so they got it.

Seth: So it sounds like this whole thing was working great for a while. If we rewind to the moment where things started going wrong. So not when everything collapsed, but when the first cracks appeared, what were the warning signs?

Mike: The warning signs were that, of course, sales started slowing. My buyers list, which was like the heart of my business, which consistently, if I would do an email blast on a Friday afternoon with a bunch of properties, I would sell at least 20 properties over the course of the weekend. And then that number started declining. And also, I started getting more replies to those emails saying, hey, do you have this? Do you have that? Like, request for better property, which I just kind of stupidly ignored. And also, I started seeing a higher number of unsubscribes because people were getting sick of the same crappy properties being slung at them over and over and over again.

Seth: How did these people get on your buyers list that was the heart of your business? Did they sign up for it through your website or like, had you called them before? Like, who were these people?

Mike: Whenever I put ads anywhere on Facebook or anywhere I was doing advertising at the time, my goal was always to drive people to the website. For one thing is I was spoiled and I didn't want to talk to them. So I wanted them to go to the website and learn everything they could there. When they went to the website, there would be a pop-up to join the buyers list. And they did. My buyers list grew to, I don't know, where it ended up 6,000, 7,000 people on a buyers list.

Seth: When did these warning signs start happening? Like, was this a result of something happening in the market? Or what do you think caused this shift that you chose to ignore?

Mike: I think part of it was general economics. These people, typical customers of mine, reasons for their default when they would communicate about it would be something as simple as their truck broke down and they couldn't pay anymore. Or I'd get a call from like a buyer's girlfriend. Well, he's in jail and can't make his payments. I got a lot of those.

Or people would finally, because like I said, they wouldn't read the ad or the contract. And they finally, maybe a year later, would try to get to the property or wanted to do something with the property and found out that what they wanted to do, they couldn't do. Then they would walk away.

Seth: What percentage of all your sales ended up being seller finance like this? Like, was it most of them? Is that kind of what you wanted people to do?

Mike: Like 99% were these owner finance.

Seth: And what, if anything, did you do to like qualify these people? Was it kind of just like, hey, if you have a pulse, you're approved? That kind of thing?

Mike: Almost all of my customers I had never had any contact with before they made the purchase. I would wake up in the morning. I had new customers. Never recognized the name. They hadn't messaged me. They hadn't emailed me. They hadn't called me. So that's why I thought, what a great way to do business, because I really was not a fan of talking on the phone a lot, if I could avoid it. So it worked great for me.

Seth: Was there any like fraud that you encountered? I mean, it sounds like the perfect environment for fraudulent transactions if they're just kind of doing it in the night and if there's no title company involved. I assume there wasn't. But ever encounter that or?

Mike: No. Well, I did it via land contract and I didn't record the land contracts. So there was no way that they could defraud me.

Seth: So like what was your default rate when you were doing it that way?

Mike: During the good times, it was about five a month. And I didn't care about that. But as time went on, it started climbing. I can't even say exactly what the rate got at the worst, but it was significantly more than that. 10 to 20 maybe in a month at the worst part.

Seth: And it sounds like that's normally not a problem if you can fairly easily resell these things and the constant line of buyers lined up to get it. But when the default rate goes up and the properties become harder to sell, is that kind of when things started falling apart?

Mike: That's what happened. Not that I ever wanted anyone to default. And I would try to work with people so that wouldn't happen. But when they did, it was golden free money for me. I would just turn around and put the listing back live on my website, sell it again from scratch. And there's properties that have gone through their seventh or eighth buyer. At this point. I mean, owner financing can be great. It's a wonderful tool. Don't get me wrong. But I learned that making a sale with owner financing is not a sale. You haven't sold the property. You haven't sold the property till you've gotten all your money.

Seth: It sounds like throughout this process, you kind of stopped being teachable. You kind of felt like you had it all figured out. Things were going well. Was there a moment in time at which you realized, oh, all right. I've got this all wrong.

Mike: It happened. And then I would kind of get ready to make some changes. And then I would slide back to my old ways. One interesting part was, I forget what it was, but there was a panel of people, a presentation. You were on there and Eddie Speed was there. And Eddie Speed made some comments about junk land. I know exactly what you're talking about. I remember this. Yeah. One comment was he referred to people who sow junk land as bad players, and that kind of hurt my feelings a little bit.

But he also said they're the first to go down the drain or however he word it when things turn. His comments about it really got me thinking a lot. And I thought, I'm setting myself up for failure if I keep doing it this way and the market turns. I mean, this guy, he's been around. He's the old timer and he knows his stuff and I should listen to it. I thought about it for a while and I was going to change, but things were still going good at that time.

And in my mind, I guess I thought I was such a genius for having this completely automated land business that I barely had to touch. I didn't make a change. Then when I started feeling a little more pressure that this was not right and I wanted to make a change, I actually tried to be teachable temporarily, and I shelled out some money, and I actually paid our mutual friend, Jaron Barnes, to teach me some new ways, which is funny because I taught him some stuff when he started in land, like some tips of some things, but I paid him.

I said, Jaron, you know, I want to get into doing better land. I want to get out of the owner financing, and I like the idea of how you use realtors for selling and my direct mail is not having the punch it used to be I want to learn the texting and all of this so he taught me stuff and you know got the launch control going and then I was dealing with all these phone calls I had to make and these people who weren't serious and like wanted sky high offers and everything.

And then there were some realtors I tried to reach out to that were completely non-responsive. In my head, I was like, the heck with this. You know, I won't just go back to my old way and I don't have to have this kind of aggravation. And that was a big mistake. I should have stuck with that and I should have listened he tried to show me a better way to do it and i just was too stubborn i look back it's all about ego.

It's all about ego and a lack of humility. Nobody who knows me, who would interact with me, would ever in a million years say, oh, Mike's an ego maniac. He's an egotistical person. He lacks humility. They would never say that in a million years. But it was inside. And I don't quote the Bible much or anything like that. But the thing that sticks out is pride goes before destruction. And that was the heart of the whole thing.

I lacked humility in my heart and my ego was running the show even though I didn't let anybody in the world outside see it. I thought I knew everything. I thought I'm the OG of the land business. I still had so many people contacting me to pick my brain and get my words of wisdom. I got carried away with it all and I was not teachable. I was not changeable.

Seth: Yeah, that's a really tricky thing. I think I've heard it said things like pride and greed are talked about in the Bible like way, way, way more than other sins like adultery or murder and things like that. And part of the reason is because pride and ego and greed can be such like covert things that you don't even see in yourself like it just kind of happens to you you don't see you're not even aware of it you know whereas like something like murder and adultery like you know when you're doing it nobody's oblivious here.

I'm wondering if i'm you how do i notice when pride is taking over in real time is there some question or test i can put myself through to be like Seth you gotta hit the reset button like you're not thinking clearly. You are inebriated by the drug of pride. How can you step back and reevaluate? Like, how do you know that?

Mike: That's a good question. And I wish I knew that in time. For me, it took getting absolutely crushed. The first podcast I did with you was Zero to Rockstar. And I went Rockstar to Zero. And I wish it was to Zero because I discovered that it doesn't stop at Zero because negative happens. And negative goes a long, long way. So I went from basically being a millionaire to being a couple hundred grand in debt. It sucks.

So it took a forced feeding of humble pie for me to get it. And I guess that's what I needed. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's made me a better person. It will make my future business dealings a lot better. It's been an excruciating road but I know it's probably in some ways the best thing that could happen.

Seth: There's clear evidence of you eating that humble pie, because if you hadn't, I know you wouldn't even be here right now. I just don't know many people who would even be willing to talk about this publicly. Failure is a private thing that we hide. Like nobody wants to look like a fool. And this is a big reason why the older and older you get, the harder and harder it becomes to try new things. Because nobody wants to look like a fool when they're older in age. You know, that's something young people do. I just think it's unique and I admire you for being willing to even talk about this stuff.

Mike: What adds to it is over the years, there are people that were brand new in the business that would come to me for advice. Or even sometimes they'd happen to be coming through Sarasota and we'd meet for lunch and they'd kind of pick my brain and they were all excited about their new venture. Some of them are killing it today. Yeah. And I'm busted. If that doesn't humble you, what would?

Seth: As you've watched other land investors pivot into better land and bigger parcels and sub-divides and all kinds of different stuff people are doing now, was there any story you were telling yourself about why you should stay put? I mean, have you thought about trying those things at this point?

Mike: This point, I am definitely a lot more open-minded. And I've really stepped back from it altogether for a while. I was just licking my wounds. I went through a divorce in the process. It didn't have to do with the business collapsing or finance, but it kind of co-occurred. And between the business going bad and a very unpleasant divorce with a wife who was also my business partner and my CPA, I got crushed and I was depressed for quite a while, to tell you the truth. I was in a depression, and you don't really get very creative or productive when you're in a depression. So it took me a while to work through that. I loved the business, and I hated being away from it.

And I love the community that is around the land business, which is unlike other niches of communities. For example, my previous business, which was a gold and silver business, is not a community. It's a snake pit. You know, they're not all helping. It's not kumbaya, let's help the new guy at all. It's, you know, who can we stab in the back first and make sure our business is on top. So apologies to anyone that's still in gold and silver business, but that's the truth.

Seth: Well, you mentioned the divorce situation with your wife, who is also your business partner, your CPA. I'm wondering, do you recommend that people work with their spouses or family members or friends, or is that just a terrible idea? Like with what you've experienced, would you ever do that kind of thing again?

Mike: I know a lot of people work with their spouses in this business, so I certainly don't want to scare anyone. But the way I did it is all I focused on was buying and selling, acquisitions and dispositions. I paid almost zero attention to the numbers, except periodically taking a cursory review of numbers that were shown to me. And I don't recommend that. That's all I'll say on that matter.

It seemed like it worked for a while, and I wouldn't give it a rule of thumb that nobody should do that. But I think there's the saying, trust God, but tie your camel or something like that. I forget the saying, but trust, but verify different things. Treat it like any other partnership to a certain extent and just keep your eyes open, make sure everything's going the way that you think it's going. That's about all I better say about that.

Seth: I mean, I understand what you're saying because my wife does my bookkeeping and, you know, looks at a lot of the numbers and it is a huge luxury that I completely take for granted sometimes that like, I just don't think about that stuff. Like I don't have room in my brain for that stuff to occupy space. And sometimes I think like, man, if she wasn't there, like I'd be paying a heck of a lot more money to a bookkeeper or something. Like it would not be nearly as easy as it is right now.

And I'm wondering for you, if, and when you ever get back into this business, how much harder do you think it's going to be to do this without her?

Mike: I'm going to do the business completely differently and I'm going to eliminate some of that. I don't see myself, at least for this foreseeable future, going back into owner financing. Not that there's anything wrong with owner financing and it's great and it has its place, but I feel burned out with that and dealing with the customers. I never was a fan of wholesaling, partly because there's some other groups, other educators that lean heavily into owner financing. And in those groups, it seems like the majority of the discussion is different how to fake your way through and be deceptive to the seller, be deceptive to the buyer, how to word things so you don't get in trouble, but it seems like you own the property and all of that. So I never really liked that.

However, I realize now that there's a space for someone who is completely ultimately transparent doing that kind of business and that it could work. So that's what I'm looking at as my next step to get properties under contract and do assignments, maybe some double closes, but deal more with other investors instead of the retail buyers. I think that would be more enjoyable for me.

That can be quite a relatively simple business, and I think that's going to be my springboard of getting back into it. And then as I get more up to date on all the new exciting things that are going on in the land business, all the new great tools that are out there that weren't there when I was doing it last, I'll get into more things, maybe the subdivides and all of that as well. But one step at a time.

Seth: You know, again, if and when you get back in the land.

Mike: Oh, I'm getting back. I've definitely gotten back.

Seth: So when you get back in the land. Yes. Just trying to narrow down any specifics, if you have them clearly enough in your mind. What do you absolutely refuse to do again, even if it means slower growth or less cash flow? And what kind of things will you insist on being true? Like, we have to do it this way. We will never do it this way again. Anything come to mind?

Mike: Obviously, no more junk properties. The rule of thumb that's going to be for me going forward is I won't engage in any business where any of the other people involved in a transaction aren't doing better than I am. In the deal. I don't think that would be a bad way to do business, so.

Seth: I know when you've learned a certain way of doing things, it can be very, very difficult to unlearn those established norms and go at it from scratch. Do you think you have it in you to relearn stuff?

Mike: Absolutely. I have been humbled. I've been humbled now for sure, and I've become teachable again. I'm looking at it with fresh eyes. I'm looking at it with a beginner's mindset, but I'm also taking the valuable knowledge that transfers over from over a decade of doing this and in applying it to new ways of doing it.

Seth: When you look back at the whole collapse that happened, I don't know if you've thought this deeply about it, but do you look at this as like a punishment or a correction or preparation for something? Or do you think there was any deeper meaning behind it? Or I don't know, any thoughts with that?

Mike: When I was at my lowest point with this emotionally, I know it's not true, but there were times I told myself that God was punishing me, that perhaps I was a bad actor. Perhaps I should have put all the bad stuff in the front of the listings and not, you know, in there. Or perhaps I just shouldn't have done it at all the way I did it when it was at a certain point.

And I think you know, and most people know, you don't have a punishing God. God may feel that way sometimes, but that's not really the case. It was a lesson. It was a very intense lesson for me, life-changing lesson.

Seth: It's interesting how some people look at that. I don't know if it's so much God punishing as much as it's just like letting people learn from what they're doing wrong. Like he doesn't have to come in and hurt you. Like you're going to kind of hurt yourself and figure it out that way. Basically just like, I'm not going to step in and save you from what you're doing wrong. I'm going to let you do that.

And it's not that the warning isn't there. It's just a matter of, will you heed that warning? And I think the pride and ego thing, it's probably the number one culprit that just gets in the way of that. Because when Steph is going well, it's like, why would you listen? You know?

Mike: Yeah.

Seth: So what parts of this business do you think don't work today? Like what part of the business from five years ago do people need to just completely forget? And what is still very true? Anything come to mind?

Mike: Ultra-low-end properties. I have proof. Even though I went through everything with the divorce and I turned over the assets of the business to my wife, and now she's the sole owner of that LLC. Despite it all and the conflicts we had, since she knows nothing about selling, I told her that I would set up a website, not my brand that I had, but I would set up a website. And when she got defaults, I would post them on a website and I'd post them on Facebook. And I would do that for her because otherwise she would not know what to do. So I just recycle those things and they're not selling. Very rarely is there a sale. Very rarely is there any interest. I would not recommend anybody to do the cheap, low-end properties.

Seth: What do you think this shows us about who actually bears the risk in seller financing?

Mike: Seller. The seller bears the risk. Because even if it's a good property, and even if, say, you transfer a title, so you don't have to deal with some of the nonsense that goes on when you're doing a land contract, like someone moving a rusted-out RV onto the property and having code enforcement issues. If that property is destroyed in some way, which happens, I guess not a lot, but it happens. It's happened to me. And you go through the court and get the property back, you're stuck with whatever's gone on.

And also, it's not guaranteed, especially in today's market, it that you'll be able to resell it for what you sold it for before. So you might have paid more for it than you can sell it for, possibly. I'm not saying it's all bad. I still think it's great, but kind of have your eyes open that it's not perfect.

Seth: You know, the whole discussion about pride and ego, do you think that is ever a good thing? Like, does it ever serve your business in a good way to have that? Or is it just kind of all downside?

Mike: Any ounce of that is just pure negative. There's ego that obviously serves people. And with ego comes an air of confidence. And an air of confidence makes deals happen and makes sales happen. Nobody wants to buy something or do business with someone who shows a lack of confidence. So there's got to be a way to separate and have confidence because you're competent and do away with the ego part, which is just false.

Seth: I think in the world we live in, ego can bring about good results on paper in terms of like getting you the deal or making the money or doing the thing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what's good eternally or long term. There are things that I can do that I get what I want, but it's not good for me. You know, there's all kinds of things that I want. They're awful. So it's probably good just to acknowledge that like ego can serve you in an earthly way, but that doesn't mean that's ultimately what you want long term.

Mike: Absolutely. A hundred percent.

Seth: So right now, to the best of my knowledge, you're kind of scraping by with side hustles, which is a massive contrast to your previous life. If you look at this process like a refining fire that kind of burns away impurities, flaws, and imperfections. What do you think this has burned away? And what are some of the good parts from this that have risen to the top?

Mike: It's burned away anything in my business dealings, whether it was or wasn't, would even seem slightly different. Shady. It has burned away anything that didn't prioritize a win-win attitude in business. I mean, even my interest rate I charged was 16% and people never questioned it. So I thought that was all great. But really, is that what I should have been charging for interest? No, that wasn't right.

Seth: What do you think is the right amount of interest to charge?

Mike: Well, that's a good question. I don't know. I guess it depends on the situation, but not 16%. I can say that. Maybe, I don't know, 8% maybe? I don't know. I don't even know anymore. I haven't really pondered that. It was usurious even though it was legal. In Florida, 18% is the cap. And I thought I was a good guy because it was just 16%. And I wasn't a good guy for charging 16%.

Seth: That's always the tricky thing to me, because like, where is the line? Like, when does it become wrong? Or like, is it wrong for you, but not for me? You look at a bank, like they're never going to really ask themselves these questions. Like, they'll stop short of what the law tells them they can't do. Like, they're in it for the money.

Mike: Yeah, well, Chase will charge me 30% with a smile on a credit card. You know, it's ridiculous.

Seth: And like, is the onus on the consumer? Like, is it up to them to decide this isn't right for me? I shouldn't do it. Or is it your fault? Whose moral responsibility is it to make those decisions and figure that out?

Mike: It depends. I think that's all part of the target buyer too. My target buyer was in a weakened financial position. My target buyer had no other options if they wanted to own land flat out. At the time, it never occurred to me that I was taking advantage of people, I didn't see myself as that guy. I didn't go out with the intention of doing that. But now with the soul searching that I've done over the past couple of years, that's what the end result was.

Seth: Well, even when you look at the acquisition side, this is what we do as land flippers for the most part, is we run a machine that makes discounted offers to people, knowing that the offer is less than their property's worth. And it's not that we're hiding that fact from people, like we're being upfront about this is what this is. You don't have to sell it to me, but if you want it to happen fast and for cash, this is your option that I can give you.

But some people will look at that and be like, that's immoral for a land flipper to make a low offer. Whereas we would look at that and be like, I'm just making an offer. You don't have to say yes to it. It's up to you to decide for yourself. I don't know how well you segment the people that you bought from, but I certainly never went through to understand the financial situation of the seller. Like I just made them an offer and let them decide. I didn't try to like make the moral judgment based on, well, okay, you know, you have this much on your balance sheet, so I'm gonna make a higher offer because of that. It's like, this is what makes sense for me. But I wonder sometimes about like the ethics and morals behind that. Do you think that's ever questionable what we do or?

Mike: I think on the buy side, it's a little bit different. And I'll give you an example. There was a time I ended up with an extra vehicle. I had a Ford F-150 truck in great condition, and just a few years old. I didn't need it anymore. I had other vehicles, and I was very busy. And I just wanted to get rid of it.

Now, I could have listed it, on the internet. And I could have had people come in and look, taking up my time, test driving it and going, bickering back and forth about price and just have to deal with the phone calls and the emails and all that. But I just didn't want to. So I brought it to the dealer. They made me an offer. I knew the offer was a lot lower than I could have gotten if I took time to sell it on the retail market, but it was so convenient and it freed up my time to do other things that I just took it.

So the way we do things is also a convenience. It's not having to deal with realtors and back and forth, everything that goes along with that or waiting forever to get it sold. You can see some decent properties. You go on Zillow, you see they're on the market for 500 days or something. Well, that's not really doing very much good to those people either.

Seth: Do you think your pride and ego will ever come back? I know things are kind of in the dumps right now, but say you figure out the new version of the land business and you kill it for five years straight, making millions. Do you think you're immune from this coming back and becoming a problem again?

Mike: Hopefully, if every morning and every night I pray that it doesn't, it won't. That's about it. That's all I can do.

Seth: Yeah, I ask this because I've had very similar stuff in my life. Many times I can point to where pride came before the fall. It was terrible, just awful. And usually it solved my pride problem for a good long time, but it did not make me immune. Like it could just as well come back or maybe pride comes back in a completely different unrelated area in life.

I like what you're saying about as long as you pray it won't come back. It probably won't because you're being conscious of it. But then there comes the moment when you stop praying for that. Because like it's not even in your mind anymore. Like that's how insidious it is. Like it just takes over when you don't even know.

Mike: Well, I'm going to give it a try. If it does happen, hopefully someone will call me on it. And there's one other thing that's slightly unrelated. And maybe it's related in a way. My first interview with you at the very end, you asked for some advice. And I said, live below your means. And I gave examples how I see all these boats and I really want a big boat and I'm not going to do it. You know, I had a larger house in the past. I'm going to stay in a more modest home.

And over time, because of ego, that exact advice that I gave, I no longer followed. Bought the boat. The public beach here was suddenly beneath me. So I had to join a place called the Longbow Key Club, which was a private beach. Where you sit in your little cabana, they bring your food and drinks to you right on the beach. And the Ritz-Carlton here also has a private beach called, yeah, join that one. And spent money, like spoiled my two kids rotten. Just spoiled them, give them whatever they wanted, not earned, just blew money unnecessarily.

That when the business collapsed and the divorce happened, and I lost everything. Part of it was because I had my boys, my teenage boys, half time. I wanted them to have the same quality of life that they were having. And I didn't want disparity between mom's house and my house. So I spent, I kept up that same lifestyle. I mean, I got rid of the boat, got rid of the memberships, but still way higher living expenses than was coming in.

And that's what destroyed me. That's what brought me from zero to a couple hundred thousand dollars below zero. And it's going to be a long road back from that. And so I just want to reiterate that no matter how good your business is doing, nothing lasts forever. Buddhists always talk about impermanence. You never know what's going to happen. And so I implore everyone, live below your means. You don't need to be in a Lambo unless you've got so much money that a Lambo is just a speck. Just be modest.

Seth: Is there anything that you wish you would have done with the money you had made back when you made it? Like maybe invest in something more long-term or unrelated to the land business?

Mike: Yeah, well, hit it. That was a joke. Yes, absolutely. I look at that and now it's all wasted because I don't have any of that anymore. So that was all money just flushed down the toilet. Because I never thought I would be in this situation. I would have invested it safely and wisely.

Seth: If you were to rewind the clock five years back and put that money into the perfect asset? Like, what would you do? Just put it in the stock market or like buy a building or know what you know now? What do you think you should have done?

Mike: Up until a few days ago, I wish I had kept all the gold and silver that I had sold. That would have been nice.

Seth: You still have any of that sitting around?

Mike: No, unfortunately. I sold ridiculous loads of silver at 30 bucks and thought I was doing great. Yeah. So that just...

Seth: And what's it at now?

Mike: I think it went up to, what, 114, but a couple days ago it crashed back down. I don't know what it's at now. I get so disgusted with it, all 75 maybe, but it was well over 100.

But I would have diversified theoretically into some very safe things and then some with a little bit more risk and maybe some rental properties or something. Although rents are slowly ticking downward where I am in Florida. So anything would be better than just blowing it.

Seth: Do you have any people in your life who can challenge you and call out your pride if they see it? Like you have an accountability partner? Have you ever thought about that?

Mike: Yeah, I'll tell you a personal thing. Wasn't planning on sharing it, but it's okay to air it. I'm a recovering alcoholic. I've been sober coming up on 29 years.

Seth: Congrats. That's awesome.

Mike: You know, there's a community around that and where I share my innermost thoughts with. There's people in that community that would say, hey, jerk, look what you're doing. You know, there's people who call me out there and some other people close to me would.

Seth: That's a tough thing, because like, even if you've got an accountability partner, you can still hide it from them, too. You know, I think pride is something that kind of bleeds through a little bit. Like it just kind of shows in your behavior and things you do, but it's important to invite that kind of thing into your life at some point because like if nobody can call you on anything you're just a danger to yourself you know there's things that other people can see in you that you'll never see and you'll just choose blindness to so yeah i think everybody should have that on some level. Yeah.

Seth: So if you had to design the most dangerous land business model possible, one that looks amazing on paper but implodes under stress, what would that include? Is it basically the land business you used to run? Or do you think it could have been even worse than that?

Mike: I can't imagine it getting worse than that, to tell you the truth.

Seth: Yeah, marketing to people who have no business investing in land is definitely dangerous. And when you say no business investing, is that just because of their financial situation?

Mike: And how do you even know that? Like, how do you know their financial situation if you're not pulling any reports or anything like that?

Seth: Well, I think a $99 down payment. It attracts a certain kind of person type thing?

Mike: It does. Low down payment, low monthly payment. That's who it's attracting. Somebody who's savvy, knows what they're doing, wants to make a smart investment, wants to buy a place that they can build on or retire to or whatever. They're not the ones who are buying the $99, $100 a month or whatever it is, squares in the desert or the swamp or wherever they are.

Seth: Yeah, it makes me think like these existential questions like, is it foolish or ethically wrong to run a business that sells people impulse purchases? Like, for example, my first job out of college, I worked for Pepsi. Pepsi's entire business is selling impulse purchases and things that are generally not good for you, but it is a multi-billion dollar business, probably even higher than that. So like tons of money to be made.

I don't know many people that would look at Pepsi and say, that's an immoral business. I mean maybe not like the most essential business out there but when i look at like selling cheap land to people who probably shouldn't be buying it but it's like hey if you want to spend the money okay go for it is it a similar thing in any way?

Mike: It is because it absolutely was an impulse purchase like i said a lot of them it would be two three o'clock in the morning they're buying land so they're either drunk or have insomnia or whatever they're doing and also the people that i they did from time to time communicate, like maybe they'd send me one of those, is this available Facebook message? And I'd send them to the website. And then a minute, two minutes later, they've paid, they filled out in their information, they've scrolled through a six-page land contract as if they're scrolling through the terms and conditions of an Apple update. They electronically sign and it's done. They didn't even read the contract. It's obvious they didn't read the contract because nobody would be able to read that fast. So it was an impulse. It was a poorly thought out impulse.

Seth: When you look at your current situation, what do you think is harder right now? Is it rebuilding capital or rebuilding confidence?

Mike: My confidence is coming back. I definitely, even a few months ago, I would have for sure said confidence because it was still kind of at a base level. It's coming back as I start researching all the latest and greatest ways to do land. And capital, you don't have to have capital to get started in this business. We all know that. So, rebuilding capital can happen without having a lot of capital.

So, I guess the confidence thing would be the more difficult. If I get into wholesaling or find a good deal and find a funder, then I'm not putting a bunch of capital. I'm just paying for the tools. And there's some great tool. I've been reading about your Stride and I've been looking at Land Portal and all this stuff that didn't exist. Yeah, it is pretty great.

It's exciting again to me because I'm seeing all these new things. And just a fun little side note, I use Grok all the time. That's my favorite AI. And when I'm doing some research on land and stuff, guess who keeps getting reference? REtipster. Go consider joining REtipster. And I'll see all the little citations of REtipster. REtipster. Grok knows Seth.

Seth: Sounds like Grok is doing it right. Grok is on your side, Seth. That's great to know. Yeah.

When you think about restarting this, what fundamentals do you think you will just totally think differently about, other than obviously the quality of the property? That's a given. But like, will you go about the acquisition piece in a different way?

Mike: I think I'm probably going to give texting another try. I know some improvements have been done in the programs for that as well. I think I'm going to try it that way again, because again, now I'm looking at it differently. I used to think it was just not necessary to talk to people. And that's what turned me off about texting, because I had to call them and talk to them. And what a spoiled little brat I was. Because I can talk to people. And when I have talked to people, it's always gone well.

When I sold better properties, it was requiring me talking to people. And if I talked to somebody, it was a good chance they were going to buy or they were going to sell. Because I could have a good rapport with them. Now that my ego is out of the way and I'm not above anything, being on the phone a considerable amount of time. I'm going to try that avenue first and then maybe go back to letters.

Seth: Well, it's kind of a big realization, I think. It's one thing to say, yeah, my business fell apart, doesn't work. I'm going to restart again. But it's another thing to actually put your finger on the thing you're going to do different. And I think what you're saying there in terms of just being willing to talk to people, not running from it, but leaning into that, if that was all you did, that seems like a huge 80-20 needle mover. Because when you're not fighting that anymore, when you just accept it, this is just the reality of it, and you know it's going to go better, it's like, man, that'll probably make a huge difference, just that alone.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.

Seth: Mike, again, just want to thank you for doing this. If somebody is listening right now and they are killing it in land and they feel untouchable, what is one sentence that you would want ringing in their ear after they hear this episode.

Mike: Nothing is certain in this life but change. Whatever you're doing, it's going to change. The market's going to change. The way you're doing deals is going to change. The technology you're using is going to change. Change is inevitable. You've got to be willing to change, and you've got to be willing to be teachable and learn new things.

Seth: Is change something that you have been good at historically in your life? Or are you one that kind of tries to resist it? Obviously, in the previous situation, there was a reason to resist it because things seemed to be working well. Also, why change? But like, aside from that kind of thing, like you change pretty easily or?

Mike: Yeah, except for that, I was not bad with change.

Seth: Awesome. Mike, thanks again. It's awesome to talk to you again. Awesome to have you open the kimono and be willing to share all this super vulnerable stuff that most people would never talk about. If people want to reach out to you, is there a way they can or should do this?

Mike: Yeah. There's a couple of ways. I'm on Facebook. I'm in the REtipster group. I'm in the REtipster on your website. And also, I just have a placeholder website that has nothing but a contact form for right now. They can just go to floridaholesaleland.com and they can reach out that way. And at the time of this recording, it's not really a website yet, but just the contact form and anyone who reaches out through that form, I'll get right back to them and say hi.

Seth: And if anyone wants to check out the show notes for this episode, it's retipster.com/259. I'll have links to everything we just talked about there. Mike, thanks again. And all the listeners out there, we will talk to you next time.