The End of Easy Land Deals w/ An Undercover Millionaire Land Investor

Stride CRM automatically records and transcribes every seller call.

You can search by keyword, review calls instantly, and never lose important details again.

Forget paying for separate call recording your transcription apps.

Stride does it all.

Visit stridecrm.co and see how much time and money it saves you.

Hey everybody, how's it going?

This is Seth Williams.

You're listening to the RE tips to 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 last time we talked, his business was firing on all cylinders.

Directmail 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,

you know, I was just talking pretty openly about what's not working anymore.

The emotional toll of questioning a business that wants to find you.

And what happens when the strategies that build 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 wants to 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?

Seth, it is great to be back with you.

You're also, I cannot believe that it's been, I think you said one,

62, three.

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

Wow, again, you do great work.

It 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 and rainbows and unicorns,

but there's still some opportunity in land if people know what they're doing and they're a good

operator.

Then you can just bring us up to speed for those who are not going to go back and

re-listen to episode 162.

What are your business used to look like and how has it changed?

Started in 2016, did my first deal in 2017.

And then, you know, when you got a W2,

you can roll everything back into the business.

Dude, it was rolling.

It was great.

In 2019, I quit my W2 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.

And 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.

I was only direct mail and blind offers.

And really, my business was built on helping people.

What I would do is that say, okay, yes, you can send an offer for 40 grand and you can sell it

for 100 grand. That would happen.

But a lot of what we focused on was I sincerely wanted to help people.

So if you had evidence of airship, back taxes, leans, 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 I'm going to screw him and see 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 room for

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, you should be able to podcast.

And I said, Seth, I'm happy to do it.

I may not want to hear what I have to say.

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

Yeah, as I mentioned, I've been able to go 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 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's morning.

And it was sent to my work email address.

It was BCCED 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 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 have 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.

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's 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?

It's all of the above.

Okay, so you had an episode.

Now, 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.

You had another recent episode where it was episode 250 where you brought in five

deleting mines 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 businesses evolving to subdivide level deals.

And the low number was a minimum of 300,000 on the buy side up to about five 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,

marketing, texting, cold calls,

RVM, which is Ringless Voice Mail,

PPC, which is paper 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?

Have you done anything else?

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.

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 data,

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 a per 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,

NLS, land.com, whatever it is.

When 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, to 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 in the day that you decided 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 spending 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 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 in direct mail.

And it appears, if you list a podcast 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 we're doing this.

I have no idea it was that many people.

That is nuts.

I think it's more than that.

It kind of depends on what you call a guru.

There's lots of people that 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.

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,

that they make 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.

Yeah, for sure.

What do 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 start thinking like,

yeah, this is just a rough patch versus,

okay, something is fundamentally broken here.

The deals are drying up and you know,

there's the term row as return on ads spend.

How many pieces of mail do you send before you get a deal?

And when you see that number

increasing from like 2500 pieces for a deal

to 3000 to 5000 to 8000 to 10000.

And then 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 bond offer, whatever.

This gets painful because you look at your back again

at the end of the month and you've spend 10, 20, 30 plus

thousand dollars on marketing or more.

And what have you really shown for it?

Can I ask what the cold calling,

it's going to be lightning 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.

I used a lane calling service.

I hired them for 90 days.

As a part of their service, they sold the data to you as well.

And I want to say it was 10,000, 12,000 dollars.

It was not a small number.

But, you know, 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 say you my property.

It's worth a million dollars.

Send me a check when it's obviously not worth that.

And, you know,

it'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, 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.

I asked because I know a lot of people who do only call

time and they kind of swear by it's like the life blood of their

business because direct mail stopped working for them.

And there's probably many different reasons for this.

Maybe that's 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.

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 I hear, you know,

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.

Okay.

I have 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 touch,

return and 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 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 multi-millionaire

and you certainly want to have freedom.

You don't want to work for somebody else.

You want to drive 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 rift, rift is reduction in force.

It's a fancy way of saying you 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 sub divide deals.

And definitions in minor sub divide is I take it, I chop it up with a survey, I sell the pieces.

A major sub divide is there might be zoning involved,

plating 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.

But 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, 30 grand, sometimes more, you know,

of course you'd have a month where you spend 10 grand.

How did that feel?

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 off that cost.

It felt fantastic.

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 decrease 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.

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 just the business changed.

So, I had a national contract with them.

Spend 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.

Can I ask the guy like, hey, dude, you know what the land portal is?

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 you 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, I tell you 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?

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 tracks of land.

Is that accurate?

I've always gone by dollar amount side acres.

So by dollar amounts, what's the big deal?

Three to 400,000.

That's the acquisition cost would be a low end acquisition.

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.

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 is getting so much harder.

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 7525 or an 80 20 deal.

I'm right to check for half a man or 600 or 700 thousand.

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.

Do you think it lost sell within a year?

Is that a realistic expectation you think?

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 agent said, I work whether I'm like, all right guys,

my butts on the line.

I'm the one riding the check.

Y'all are just part of the team.

When do we think these are going to close?

And they'll usually say in six months will 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 wasn't 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 have the ability to underwrite them, ensure them, fix them, whatever it may be.

Well, the one that we 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 have it.

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.

Yeah.

Now, how many of these bigger deals are you aiming to do each year?

Like how many transactions does this equate to?

Hey, everybody.

Quick break here just to let you know about something that could make a huge

difference in your land business.

Did you know that you don't have to go it alone when it comes to funding your deals?

If you've got a property under contract but need the money to close,

we offer flexible land funding options over at

retipster.com forward slash funding.

Whether you need us to cover the entire purchase or just extend alone to get the deal

across the finish line, we got options for you.

It's quick.

It's simple and you can keep more deals alive instead of letting them slip away.

Just head over to retipster.com forward slash funding

to submit your deal and find out more.

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,

canceling your data account, letting your VA go,

dialing down the direct mail, canceling services that once felt essential.

One of these things hard to shut off, not logistically but just mentally,

like just letting go of the way things used to be.

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,

note, 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?

No, the opposite.

It was a relief and it was super easy.

Because there's a realization, if you want to do

five million in a year, top one,

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.

You know what I mean?

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 in 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, okay, I quit my job to do this.

And the ground I shifted under my feet, I've got to figure this out.

So your question is, I feel bad?

No.

And when I was talking 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 an 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 the 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 got where inventory and now we've got a plan.

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?

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

I am too. I'm also sorry.

It's very difficult to see that.

I'm out of the ocean like, oh, this is great.

I'm playing in the waves. Everything's fine.

You know, I did not see that tidal wave coming.

They just bounced me on the bottom of the ocean and I didn't feel good.

And then here comes another one's like, okay, we kind of need to figure this out or get out of the

water.

And now 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.

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 re-imagine the business?

Like, is it just lazy thinking now to say send more mail?

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.

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 ten 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 $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 in their 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 about that?

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's 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.

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?

I used to price it 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 co-calling that didn't work.

Okay, we got issues here.

You know, 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.

Do you ever offer even more than that?

And if so, like what has to be true for that deal to work?

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 at 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.

Now, it was a couple of years ago.

And so you're constantly AB 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 it anybody at all?

Now, think about that.

I did a thousand texts, a thousand co-calls, a thousand direct emails.

Pick a number, 90, 95, 98, 99 percent of them.

Don't want to sell it 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, less roll because I know you are a willing seller.

And way over 90 percent are not a willing seller to begin with.

And we're just wasting marketing dollars facing those.

Could the strategy very well be just make offers to on-market properties on the MLS

and just skip direct mail altogether?

I don't know.

I would say there's two things there.

Fisbo and AI.

Fisbo, FSBO, 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

the silo.

And they're kind of on-ranny and nobody can tell me what to do.

I'm smarter than everybody else.

And you could sometimes find an on-market deal with a for sale by owner.

So redfinrealtor.com, silo,

probably not land.com.

You could potentially find some there.

Yes.

The second is AI.

If there's somebody out there who could 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 silo.

Can you support your family doing that?

I don't know.

Is there enough there?

Can you support your family just finding through AI, online stuff?

I don't know the answer to that.

Well, 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

I want anymore.

How hard is it emotionally to question a model that once made you very successful?

Especially when your identity is wrapped up and being,

I'm the successful millionaire land investor.

Like, I know what I'm doing.

I'm confident in the 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.

Like, tell me about your thought process with that.

I think I said it on our first podcast and I'll say it again,

I'm not the smartest down 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 figured out.

And remember again, there's times I'm waking up in the middle and I 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 subdivided.

I don't think I'm saying anything that the smart guys out there don't know.

You 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.

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?

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 or 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 to $50,000.

Really?

My comment to someone would be if you've got 30 to 50 grand sitting around

and we can talk about the things I would ask a guru before I would

buy into that.

Maybe you take 30 or 50 grand 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 can get a couple of deals and get rolling.

One of the brokerage houses that I work with, that broker started out selling land in the 80s.

He's probably worth over $100 million 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 or 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 out of text or call call.

That's number one.

Do you go find deals for investors like me, for example?

So let's look at this.

If I spend $5,000 in marketing, that's data,

mail or call 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.

That's a good margin, right?

I bought it for $6,000.

I sold it for $10.

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 $50,000 or $60,000 or $100,000.

So maybe you bring in deals for other investors.

Maybe you question, hey, I want to be investor, 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,

co-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 fizzbo 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 $40,500, $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 by 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 less price.

And I drop the mobile home on there and I make 30% margin on that.

Now you got to deal. Now you got to 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 got enough money to lose because you're going to spend some money up front

of marketing. And the first deal I ever did, it took me almost a year to figure out pricing

and I paid $10,000. That's older for 25.

So I knew when I purchased that 10,000 R-track, I was willing to lose that amount of money and

I've 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, 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.

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. That's fair. I didn't start out doing

multi-million other deals. I needed two things. I needed to grow my stake. You know, 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 Gecko 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 darned careful of what

you're doing. So you need to learn how do you learn? You can pay a gear route, 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. So it sounds like the answer is start small, grow your stake.

And then eventually you will have the money. Yeah, so let me help the new person. What would I do?

Go be in 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 just for you. And you end up just being a deal fund or 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 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. They can go look at the country and say, where's

there a high demand? Where's there a misprice 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 GBT deep research to pointedly ask exactly what you want to know and tell it to go to work?

I'm embarrassed to say that I am not doing any of that. The only AI I'm leveraging is what's on

the land portal. They've got some good tools there. 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 chat GBT

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 what is capable of a lot.

I'm probably going to do that as soon as I hang up here is go see how far I can do it.

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 dollars 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 quad and grok and chat GBT 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. A big way to do that is to ask chat GBT or

grok or cloud. 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 with some of 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.

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 sub divide 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.

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.

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 thousand dollars 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 multi-family, I want you to compete against an RV park. I want you to compete against

whatever. At a really good year wrote a massive check to the IRS. I said, I've got to shelter

some cashier. So with a self-storage facility, you get the depreciation. If you do an owner-financing

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 I 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 to, they will 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. But to the first one was phenomenal.

I had it for two years. I bought it for 1.3. In December, we cashed out, refied 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 it into 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. Something 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 the second facility. It was a

mom-and-pap 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,

a land business of where this needs to head, which is self divides. We know what our buybox 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. 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,

can't want to do both. What's the highest best return? 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

a year for the next 30 years? Your question is posed that I only get to double my money once.

They know 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? The ranch would just split up.

We're going to more than double our money. We're going to kill it on that one. That is awesome.

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 get me two million. I'm going to take

a million and go buy a two, three, four, five million dollar 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're talking about how a massive developer has very

different thoughts and conversations and a different normal days 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?

Well, I got said before, the conversations that those multi-millionaire people are having,

are they debating texting versus co-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. 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 bucks an hour or a thousand bucks 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 majors 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 quarterbacker 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. It takes more capital investment.

It takes a really sharp pencil on underwriting because you could go bankrupt doing that.

I've worked with developers in the past that I've partnered with and they've 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 kill and

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 in 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 they can call to write that

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. You had mentioned earlier that as things started to change, one of the options of

what you could do was quit. Mundering, 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. 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. 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. Any business, service or product, you have to constantly change

in question. And you know, 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 living? Right. 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 in door, make sure you understand what you're getting into when you

get in with a guru or a bioprogram or whatever, because it's not as easy as it used to be.

That was other thing you mentioned earlier. Questions you would ask of gurus?

Yeah. I wrote some things down, you know, it 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 BCAD 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 failed 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,

did I 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?

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 for that same day. 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. He got a podcast back in 2015, 2016. You've been doing this 10 years, by the way.

Longer than that. Yeah. How long have you been doing this brother? Seriously.

Started the land in 2009. If that's what you're talking about, you mean land or art tips there?

Art teacher. Yeah. Art teacher was started in the late 2012.

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 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 five or 10,000

hour deal, your cost per deal might be a number. If it's a hundred thousand dollar 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 or double closes? You know, and then just ask yourself, are they being magnanimous?

Are they being altruistic? They're trying to help their fellow man? Are they just self-serving?

They're selling a product in a service. And I'll look at these land gurus. So in 1848, gold was

discovered in California. In 1849, there was the gold rush, which side note that 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 by 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 where 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. 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

the 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 is giving out bad information, 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. 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 have 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. Your shovel seller analogy, I've heard that before, it's a good one.

There's nuance to that too. Like, is there a value in being able to buy a shovel?

Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. So like, just by nature of the fact that somebody's 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 what'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 that 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

you're partnering on deals, whatever, or is it because they just dropped out and they got frustrated?

They couldn't have earned you more. The coaches have that data.

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. 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 know, you have a baby or you change jobs or something and you just

can't spend time learning more. 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 your co-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. 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.

They're just real people in the trenches with you. Maybe they're doing something a little

bit different than you are, but 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, your guru, you know?

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.

All that's true. And I've had people contact me on our last podcast 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 and syndication stuff. And then we got to talk. 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 you sent me today might be a deal. I kind of like it.

Thanks, 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? Yeah, you know, I figured out for myself a long time ago that I'm

pretty introverted in 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. That's Bob Charles Paul land

dot com. And it's set up in the classic way you would have 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 bcpland. The other thing I tried to do just to add to the community and just did it for fine.

And if I can help people great is they can follow me on Twitter. So it's America land bearing.

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 miracle land bearing dot com. 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 our e tipster.com forward slash 2 6 0 because this is

episode 260. JB, as always, great to talk to you. Glad you're still doing well, even though all

the changes over the past few years. And hopefully we can do this again and check back at some point

and hear how things are going. 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 there, serious about, I'd

consider them. I have people reach out to me on Twitter saying, what do you think? And I'll,

here's my underwriting. Here's what I expect. Boom. Good luck to you. And they go away. I hope I'm

not inundated. But, you know, if I could help people, they can reach out. 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 would 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 a huge

opportunity there if you can very carefully scrutinize and find the right people to partner with.

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 my 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 where

actively starting to look for those partners. We're working our direction now. 100% agree with you.

Partnerships is the next phase of this for the guys like us. JB, thanks again. Great to talk to

you for the listeners out there again. Show notes are e-tipsure.com forward slash 2 6 0.

Thanks again for listening. We will talk to you next time.

If you're just getting into land investing or even if you've been at it for a while,

there is one uncomfortable truth that nobody tells you. And that is, you are always one bad

property away from losing thousands. Most beginners miss the big red flags like the zoning traps

and the access issues and title problems and they don't even realize this stuff until it's too late.

That's why I built a free 5 day email course called The Land Buyers Survival Guide.

It's designed to walk you through the exact due diligence steps every successful land investor uses

to avoid land mines and buy with confidence. You'll learn the 21 red flags, how to value land

without guessing, how to analyze photos and maps the smart way, and how to check if the seller

actually owns the property outright before you buy it from them. Just pick up your phone, maybe

even the same phone you're listening to right now and text the word free F-R-E-E to the

number 33777. I'll send you lesson one right away so you can get to work and protect yourself

on your next deal and invest with clarity instead of fear. Again, just text the word free to the

number 33777 and I'll get that first email in this free 5 day course to you instantly.

Thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you next time.