Seth: Hey, Clay, how's it going? Welcome to the show.

Clay: Seth, it is a pleasure to jump on the show. I know I said this to you in our email, and you were super organized, and it's really always a pleasure to work with people who are on top of their stuff.

But, you know, we were briefly talking about this when we were pre-recording. And I remember a couple of things in my life that are significant inflection points, right? And when you get older, it's really interesting. Like when you're younger, I'm sure you can recall it like you're in third grade. And you're like between third grade, fourth grade, and you're like third grade summer. Like, that was incredible. And that little inflection point in your life is like a yearly thing. I'm going from third grade to fourth grade or I'm graduating high school, going to college.

But as you get older, it sort of changes. Like inflection points, they are just not there. I'm either a kid or I'm married. That might happen every half decade or a decade. So what I've experienced as I get older is that these inflection points become more pronounced and they're like really big shifts.

And the inflection point, the reason why we're having this conversation, the reason why I was able to pay for my wedding last year, the reason why I was able to build a land flipping business and where I'm at today is literally because of the REtipster Podcast. So I know I told you this when we originally met in Minnesota, right? In the fall.

Seth: That's amazing, man. I appreciate you saying that.

Clay: So in debt with what you've done with the REtipster Podcast.

Seth: That's awesome. Yeah. It's amazing to hear that. I mean, that's why I do this kind of thing. And I, most of the time, don't really know who's listening, what's happening, and if they're getting results, I just don't really know until people tell me. So I'm really glad to hear that. And thanks for letting me know.

Clay: It's really interesting. Like you do a podcast or you post on social media, as you know, very active on Twitter and you might get like a hundred thousand impressions. Or 50,000 impressions. You're like, oh, it's just a number on a page. But on the other side of the page is someone staring at their phone or connecting or maybe learning about land investing for the first time, or maybe learning about a new topic and land investing for the first time.

And so, even though it might seem like, oh, I might even have a thousand impressions. Like, if you were in front of an audience of a thousand people or 500 people, you'd be like, maybe shaking in your boots, right?

That's the impact that a podcast like this or social media, if you really share stuff, can really have on your life and someone else's life.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. What is your Twitter or X handle?

Clay: Yeah, I still call it Twitter, right? My X handle is @clayhepler.

Seth: Clay Hepler, okay. Is it still Twitter? Does it still say twitter.com in the URL or does it change to X now?

Clay: Here's a crazy thing. When I type it in, I type in Twitter, right? But it auto-reroutes, you know, like old websites will auto-reroute you to the new URL and it's actually X now.

Seth: Yeah. You know, X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it, I've never really understood it, but it sounds like you're really active there, right? That's like a big part of your business. How does it work? And like, how beneficial is it to be active there? Like, have you seen a notable ROI from your time spent there?

Clay: I've seen an incredible ROI from my time spent there. One of my biggest investors actually that invests personally in my business as a deal funder, I actually found through there. He flew up, we played top golf. He invests a lot of money with me.

What's really great about Twitter is that you could really share valuable information but you have to do it in a way that's readable and digestible. And it's not like on Instagram or TikTok and a lot of these shorts that you just digest information and are really quick, like quick tip, short hits, and they're not really that valuable. But if you have a true, well-written, well-thought-out Twitter thread, you can get so much value from that, right?

And so I, on Twitter, literally will tell people, this is exactly what I might do in my business. And I'll break it down and people get a lot of benefit from that. So I get a lot of impressions from that. I build a lot of connections from that and actually give back value to the land community.

And unlike, you know, the land community is still a really small community, but unlike Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, it's still very much dominated by just maybe a couple of people that are actually actively talking on Twitter because some people really like to write, right? Some people like to write versus to get on podcasts or YouTube or whatever. And so with Twitter, it's very beneficial in that way.

People reach out to me all the time and say, hey, you know, how can I get more involved? How can I learn from you? And so it's just been so beneficial for me and my business just to share exactly what's going on.

Seth. Yeah. I could be wrong about this because, again, I'm not the Twitter expert, but it seems like X. Yeah, I'll just call it X from now on, it seems like the right word. But it seems like X is much more text-based, whereas like everything else, like YouTube and Instagram and all this other stuff, you got to make videos or make really good images. But if you just are really good at putting it well thought-out thoughts into text format, it seems like that could win on X pretty well.

There's a guy I know (well, I actually don't even know him at all), but his handle is @StripMallGuy. And this guy puts incredible stuff out there. I mean, just amazing stuff that's worth paying for, like gold nuggets. Sounds pretty similar to what you do in terms of creating threads that get a lot of views and really deliver a lot of value.

Clay: What you can find is, in my opinion, it's easier to create a really attractive video, right? A video can be very attractive and very well-edited, and it makes it seem like it's actually more valuable than it is.

But when it's a written word, it's a pulling of your thoughts and just putting them into someone. Someone who's a really good investor, like Strip Mall Trent. I know that, right? The ball guy or whatever. Someone who's a really good investor can put together a pithy tweet or a pithy thread, and you're like, I've never heard this put in this specific way before.

Whereas with videos or Instagram, I find that more and more people lean on just churning out 15-, 30-, 60-second videos that are not actually quality. Again, that happens on X, of course, but the wheat is separated from the chaff, proverbially, on X because it actually is difficult to put together good content if you don't know what you're doing.

Seth: Yeah. I wonder, is it the kind of thing where, say, if you just have a long history of making posts that aren't that helpful, they're kind of worthless. And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, you put out just a value bomb.

Does the algorithm kind of say, well, historically, your stuff hasn't been that good. So we're not going to let people see this because it's probably garbage, too. Or can it actually recognize, hey, for whatever reason, there's an awesome post here. Let's let the world see it. You know anything about how that works?

Clay: I mean, the Twitter algorithm is a really interesting thing. And there's sort of like two worlds. If you're starting on Twitter, so first thing Seth, you could be someone who pisses a ton of people off. And so there's this guy who’s a very successful real estate investor business owner but he's very well-known for posting controversial content. And he has like 300,000 or 400,000 followers at this point because he will go after the woke mob social justice warriors.

And then that effectively breeds the algorithm to get a lot of comments and likes and retweets and all that stuff. And then also it's sort of valuable, right? And so you can play both of those games. I'm going to take a bunch of people off. It'd be very controversial, and of course we'll get the comments, the likes, the retweets. Or I can actually put together a value box.

But to answer your question about whether the algorithm realizes that and and understands that, I don't really know. All I know is that I will have days, like I had a post this past week that had like 100,000 impressions, which is a lot for my account. And then the next day I had posted at 269 impressions.

So I think that it really just matters how much you're actually interacting with other people's content, how much value you're putting in your threads or your regular tweets, which builds sort of this compound effect of people seeing more of your content. But as you grow, as you get more followers and you get more engagement, then those smaller posts that might've had 200 impressions might go up to 5,000 or 10,000 impressions, which will bring, kind of, create this exponential effect for all your other content.

Seth: Yeah. I saw this presentation about a week ago from Jack Conte. I think that's how you say his name, he's the founder of Patreon.

He did this presentation at South by Southwest, but it was really fascinating. It kind of resonated with me as a content creator because it was all about how we're undergoing what he calls the “death of the follower,” which basically means 10 years ago on YouTube or Facebook or wherever you were active. It mattered a lot who you were friends with, who you were following, who you subscribe to. Those sites would just show you that stuff because that's who you're connected with. And so they figured that's what you want to see.

But as Facebook has started messing with their algorithm and as TikTok has become a thing where they've done a lot of experimentation with like, “No, no, it doesn't matter who you're subscribed to. We're just going to show you what we think you're going to want to engage with based on other stuff that you've engaged with in the past.”

And we're sort of in this new world where, who you're subscribed to on YouTube or whatever platform you're on doesn't actually have that much to do with what you'll end up seeing because these algorithms know so well now what you're going to click on and what you're going to want to stick around and watch. And things like controversy and just various things like that get a lot of attention and they retain attention and it works, unfortunately, I guess.

So we're in this world where people, especially content creators, have this big push to try to make content for the algorithm rather than content that needs to be made for their audience in a way that sort of represents their art form. And I don't know if that's going to change anytime soon. I kind of think that is the new world that we're going to be in for a good long time because that's what's working and that's what's making money and ad revenue for these different platforms.

So it kind of makes me sad, but at the same time, like, I kind of get it, I don't know why they wouldn't keep doing that if it's working for them.

Clay: And I think that that is sad, but also it's just the reality of the world in which we're in. It's sort of like the land business now, which is different than when you started.

When it comes to Twitter or any social media, if you're posting, you have a purpose of posting. And so there's this great concept created by this guy by the name of Kevin Kelly, I’m sure you’ve heard of 1000 True Fans. If you have a thousand true fans and you have a course or you're looking for private investors or you're looking to build a community or whatever you're doing online or build a business, whatever the purpose of the content. Because people don't just post content for no reason, because it's hard work.

And so if you focus on the person that you're actually trying to serve. Why am I posting on Twitter? Why am I doing this specific thing? And focusing on that person, whether you have 500 followers, 5,000, 50,000, 500,000, it really doesn't matter if you aren’t achieving what you're trying to go for.

And it's hard to compare yourself to someone. I'm in the land niche, right? So I only talk about land. I don't talk about controversial stuff, not talking about either Gaza, Hamas, you know, that whole thing or whatever it is. I don't talk about that stuff because frankly, it doesn't really occupy my mind space and I'm focusing on land. If I compare myself to an account, maybe it has another decade of experience or maybe there's a bunch of accounts on Twitter that are just like general financial knowledge with hundreds of thousands of followers. And I'm like, why don't I have hundreds of thousands of followers? Well, that's because hundreds of thousands of people aren't interested in what I'm talking about.

And so I think that that's really important. Like as you're building your audience online to kind of know who you're actually going after, you're really serving them well and say, what would I want to know if I were in their position? Or how can I provide content or value to them based on my understanding?

And so that's what defines how I actually post on Twitter.

Seth: Well, now that we've kind of done a masterclass on social media and how to do that these days, why don't we kind of go back to the very beginning?

So land investing, tell me your story. How did you discover land investing? I guess you kind of already said that in the podcast, which is awesome. But when did this all happen? When and why did you decide to give this a shot and what were you doing prior to that?

Clay: Yeah. So my background is, I mean, I can go really far back. My goal in life at one point was to work for the State Department. And so I was working at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires in Argentina and doing some pseudo-job work there. And that's what I thought I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to work in the foreign embassy. I speak Spanish and Portuguese, losing the Portuguese, I speak German as well, but I'm losing that as well. It's like a muscle. So, you know, you sort of lose it over time, right?

I did that and I really didn't like it. And so I ended up taking some time off college. It was extended, never went back, joined a family chocolate company and learned about sales and marketing. And then when I was doing that, like sort of taking the entrepreneurial path, I fell into real estate.

So most people, you fall into the whole like the Grant Cardones of the world and the social media people that talk about real estate. and then I joined a company in my city that was like buying like a mother pot, got like 500 units. I was like, I want to learn about real estate. I'm gonna go work for someone, and learn along the right way.

At that point I was like, what would be interesting is if we could produce another revenue stream for this business, i.e, flipping and wholesaling. So I learned about wholesaling, flipping, built that business. First year we did 75 flips. And it was absolutely crazy. At that point, that was like three years ago, three and a half years ago. And then I started buying my own rentals, doing the bird method in my city. And I was buying rentals that were, you know, 1900 vintage, 1920 vintage.

You know, as a Michigan guy, a lot of these buildings, man, they got the box gutters. They got the cast iron pipes, sewer pipes, plaster and lath walls. They have boilers. And so you got to tear up the boilers to put in the duct work and rip out the plaster and lath walls and lead-based paint and just houses that were built and they're sinking into the ground. And that's what I cut my teeth on. And I started to acquire a bunch of units.

So we started brewing and that would have been two and a half, three years ago. started brewing while we were flipping. And when I say we, I mean, my wife and I, and we acquired a portfolio of rental properties.

But you know that what they don't tell you in BiggerPockets, and this is going to be a theme I'll talk about this very openly. Real estate is hard. Land investing is hard too. Like business is really hard. What might look like, “Hey, I have 85 units and I should be cash flowing 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 a month, I'm good.” Well, what happens if a $40,000 sewer line breaks? What happens if you have to rip off your roof that's four stories up on your 10-unit apartment building, which has box gutters and it costs you $70,000?

And so you might think you're making a lot of money in the rental property business, but the reason why there are tired landlords and why there's an absentee owner list that you can hit is because it's really, really hard, right?

And so long story short, I'm building this rental portfolio and just get my face kicked in, wholesale some stuff along the way, like a 20-unit apartment building, I was wholesaling a couple of apartment buildings and making enough money. And then, on Thanksgiving of 2022, the day before Thanksgiving, I get a call from my wife and she's bawling. I mean, she's completely bawling. And when you get a call from someone, in the middle of the day, and they're bawling.

Seth: It's not good.

Clay: You're like, what happened? Is there a death in the family? What's happening? And her company went under.

So I was building a rental property portfolio. She had a really good salary. I was building this rental property portfolio. And I was saying, hey, Kara, this is a long-term goal. We're going to build this rental property portfolio. We're going to use your salary. We can go to banks. We can refinance. We had the private lenders. We had all this stuff lined up and then we lost our job.

And I had a wedding coming up that year. I had to pay for my life. We had these massive, I talked about plaster and lath, flipping over rental units. I mean, everything that could have gone wrong went really, really wrong very, very quickly.

And so, along that time period, I found the REtipster podcast. I joined education groups and I went all in on land. And so that's what brought me to land. But I mean, the first thing was looking up like, how do I make money online? And I was like, I have the wholesaling house flipping experience. But I wanted to move to Colorado because at this point, we had a house in Colorado. And so I'm in Pennsylvania, but I had a house in Colorado.

And so I was like, we want to build a remote-enabled business. This business has to be remote-enabled. So I was going to build a virtual wholesaling company. Didn't really like how that worked. Didn't really like that wholesaling was sort of like baby switch. It's like the whole point of wholesaling was, hey, I'm not gonna buy your property cash and then like sell it to someone else. And that didn't align with me ethically. Even today, when we do a double close, we straight-up tell people we're gonna list this thing on the market.

But long story short, decided on land, went all-in.

Seth: Yeah so this was, was it mid-2022 or 2023? Or when was this?

Clay: So basically what happened was that I learned about land in the fall of 2022 and joined the REtipster Podcast and then went fully all-in in December 2022. I started sending some mail during that period.

Seth: Awesome. So, tell me about this first year. I mean, coming from the house wholesaling world, I'm sure that probably helped a lot, right? I mean, first of all, you know what hard work is, you know what risk is. Would you agree that that's a lot harder than land? Like, is that your opinion at this point?

Clay: It really depends now. So what I realized in the house wholesaling world, even though there is more competition, there was higher intent. And so there exists a motivation balance of land is higher margin, lower intent. Wholesaling is sort of higher intent, lower margin, more competition, right?

Seth: What do you mean by intent when you say that?

Clay: So perfect example. When you are working with someone in a house wholesale, there is an intent to sell. When I talk to someone that's recently broke, someone recently passed away, there's a divorce, their roof is leaking and you have to replace your furnace and your roof and you can't afford your mortgage or you have back taxes. There's higher intent to sell.

Seth: You mean like motivation? Would that be another word?

Clay: Yeah. Motivation, right? So there's higher motivation to sell. So what that means is that the sales process, although it's more competitive, is much easier.

Seth: I can see that.

Clay: Because you are a solution to these people's problems, right? And so when someone comes in, they're a motivated lead, the cost to acquire the lead is essentially the same and maybe lower, because there's a lot more and cheaper ways to get leads in wholesaling. But the motivation of the lead is so much higher.

I don't know if I would say that land is necessarily much less competitive because there's also a ton of things now in the land space with marketing that is taboo and you could get sued. And so a lot of the ways that people were reaching prospects was very cheap—texting, calling, various voicemails, etc. And those are gray areas. And so mail is sort of the only option if you want to be totally above the board. And it's very expensive. So scaling a house wholesaling business on an expense basis is easier than scaling a landfilling business.

Seth: Yeah. Would you say that the motivation or the intent is that true both on the acquisition side for houses and the selling side? Like it's just easier all-around?

Clay: My philosophy in the land flipping space is that there are sort of like two things that you really need to focus on, right? If you're trying to build a seven-figure land flipping business, or if you're just trying to build like a multiple six-figure land flipping business, you want to focus on market selection and acquisitions. I mean, everything else is kind of a moot point. You can take together a rocket ship if you know how to find a good market and you know how to sell and close deals, right?

Because a good market inherently creates demand on the back end. And if you know how to close deals and you build a good acquisition funnel, then you can effectively close the lower intent deals and bring in more revenue per mail that you send out or higher return on your ad spend.

I don't know where right now you asked a question and I kind of forgot what your question was. You might be asking…

Seth: No, no, it's… Your comment a minute ago about how direct mail is the main way to do it and make sure you're above board. So does that mean direct mail is your main way of finding deals right now? Or are you using something else?

Clay: Based on TCPA compliance laws. Okay. If you are texting a business in LLC, you do not need opt-in consent, period. So you could text LLCs, you can call them, you can do whatever you want. Because the TCPA (for those who don't know about the TCPA, it’s the Telecommunication Consumer Protection Act) protects consumers from unsolicited outbound marketing, like cold calling or texting or pre-host voicemails or whatever.

But businesses are not under that umbrella. So you can text businesses all day, RVM businesses all day. I mean, obviously consult with an attorney, but you're fine in that way.

Seth: When you skip trace these people, like skip trace an LLC, aren't some of the phone numbers that you get through that the owner's personal phone number? Or is it only the…

Clay: I'm not an attorney. So, you know, talk to your attorney about this, right? Like, this is not legal advice at all.

But, you know, technically, because it's a business-to-business transaction, of course, there's a human involved. But because it's a business-to-business transaction, you can do... This is what I understand, right? You can solicit directly.

How does this work? If you're going after self-storage deals, you can cold call people into the self-storage industry all day of the week, right? If you're, for example, a cold caller and it doesn't fall underneath the TCPA, right? Again, check with your attorney. This is all things that I've heard.

So I do a lot of direct mail, in other words. I market in other ways as well. I will text sometimes. I've done some cold calling campaigns. But it's mainly direct mail in my business.

Seth: What is your response and acceptance rate been on direct mail? And I just ask because I know direct mail, I feel like it's harder now than it's ever been for land investors, just in terms of response rates being lower. Or people who are doing well at it from what I've seen is because they're doing something different in terms of like, maybe they're whittling their list down in a different way or maybe their template looks different or just says something different altogether.

So I guess, first of all, how well is it working for you? And if it's working well, what's your secret? How are you doing that?

Clay: Yeah, so I'm going to drop an absolute bomb right now.

So I was on a call the other day with a seller. One of my acquisition guys said, hey Clay, can you get on this call to close this guy, right? So I like to get back in the seat sometimes too. I get on the call with the seller. He's basically questioning our credibility, right? So of course, a seller to question credibility, that's really one of the four things that they're gonna question, right? They're gonna have a discomfort with credibility, trusting us because there are a lot of scams and obviously the majority of our sellers, our seller archetypes are older.

So he's questioning our credibility, he's questioning our trust. He said, well, you're one of the 5,000 letters that I've gotten from Sanford, North Carolina. I said, huh, because a lot of people use virtual mailboxes in land

Seth: Oh yeah.

Clay: Right? I said, oh, that's really interesting. He's like, yeah, I just get everyone sends me letters from Sanford, North Carolina.

Seth: That's interesting. That's where Traveling Mailbox is, right? If I remember right.

Clay: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we don't live there. That's like a virtual mailbox. And I'm very transparent with people about the process. What that caused me to do is I changed to different mailers. I will change the mailbox, where the mailbox is located. So when I change where the mailbox is located, I have to be very aware there are two massive political parties in the United States: red and blue. And if someone in a rural South Carolina gets a mail from California, what are they going to think? I'll let you decide.

And so our mailboxes that we have, our virtual mailboxes, are in states that are very neutral. And so you can look up, this is what we did. We looked up the top cities that have sort of the best reputation nationally among people. And we tried to find mailboxes that were in those cities.

So if you get something from Las Vegas, for example, that's one of the ones that we use. People are going to be like, it's very neutral. Like when you hear Las Vegas, you're like gambling, good time, good food, maybe play. I mean, there's a lot of stuff, but there's never like, you know, “Those Californians, they have the 13% income tax,” or a negative connotation. There's no real connotations. For some people there might be, but on a national scale, there's little.

So we do those things to differentiate ourselves. We do things with changing out like who is the sender. We do things by changing out where we're sending it from and try to differentiate ourselves.

But here's one thing that I would give to the audience as another sort of nugget of thinking about direct mail. What matters is that you send it. It's not whether you try to make it super fancy or make it a yellow envelope versus a white envelope. If you get lost in the details, it's going to really prevent you from sending out enough mail to even be able to make a good enough investment decision on whether or not your mail is working to the best extent possible. So that's the first step.

Seth: When I hear that, I totally get that. And I feel like it used to be that simple, like truly.

But I've heard more than one story from people sending out 20,000 mailers and getting nothing. Or a hundred thousand mail and getting one deal from it, to the point where it's almost doesn't work. Like, it does matter that something is special or done very right about the list or about the mail; there's something like you can't just mindlessly just spray and pray.

And so I'm wondering, beyond just sending out the mail, is there anything else you know I guess beyond on the return address? Are you doing blind offers or neutral letters or how are you approaching that?

Clay: So when it comes to blind offers, it depends on the person who is receiving or sending out the mail, right? If you're sending a blind offer, the reason why I think they work historically was because they were a solicitation on intent. I would sell it for 54,000 or whatever. And so I'm going to call this person back because they gave me an offer.

But if everyone sends an offer within this specific range, what is the usability of that? It's not really that helpful, right? Because why we're sending a blind offer is because we want the person to call us back. So I will do range offers and also neutral offers, but I have a sales machine that can manage a lot of people calling in with neutral offers.

So I would say it depends on where you are in your business, whether you should send blind, range, or neutral. But really when we're thinking about building a direct mail campaign in general, we have to think about what would make the right person call me back? And also what can my acquisitions machine handle?

So if I get a lot of low intent sellers at this point in my business, maybe I'm early on and I actually only need high intent sellers on a relative basis because I don't have the bandwidth to manage and bring these low intent sellers through a long sales process. So in eight months or 10 months or two years, I can call them back and I can close them.

And so those are all sorts of factors that you have to think about when putting together a direct mail campaign.

And then also think about what is everyone else doing? Like if you just download a direct applied offer sheet on the internet, like do you really think that another a thousand people are doing the same exact one?

Seth: Yeah, for sure. I think you mentioned recently you got some $200,000 deal or something like that. It's like, what does it take to get a deal like that? Just in general, how many deals are you getting per X number of mails that you're sending out?

Clay: Okay. So that is a hard question to answer because we're constantly changing the target criteia. And in our target criteria, in terms of the markets that we actually go in, for example, we are only going to look at an acreage rate that's selling at above 50,000. So when I'm looking at a market, I'm going to look and say, hey, if five acres are selling for 10,000 an acre, then I'll target five acres. But if it's 10 acres that are selling for 5,000 acres on a county-wide basis, I will target that county and I will target 10 acres plus.

So on that level, that's how we actually target our markets and target the areas that we're going to focus on. And so for a larger deal like that, honestly, I'm seeing that it's, depending on the state, it's going to be 7,000 mailers, 8,000, right? To get a deal like that. But it's still a great ROI.

Seth: Have you ever gone after smaller, like, I don't know, sub $10,000 deals? Or has that never been something you've even messed with?

Clay: No.

Seth: Okay. And I guess, when you talk about the sales machine that you have, what does that mean? Are you talking about a certain number of people who are doing certain things? Or is this like an amount of money that you have to spend to buy these properties? And did this sales machine exist from your house wholesaling days or is this something you built up when you got into land?

Clay: So it's built upon that experience. Because wholesaling and flipping are a decade ahead at this point, right? Maybe five years at this point because a lot of land investors have gone to the masterminds and brought it into the space.

But really, it's about when we have a lead that comes through our system, how do we get them to a “hell yes” or a “hell no” as soon as possible? And that's sort of the philosophy of our sales process.

So there was this Harvard Business Review study that found that if you respond to leads within five minutes, you have a 377% increase in conversions. That means we prioritize speed to lead. That is the top metric that we focus on. When a lead comes in, we have to call that lead quickly. We track it. We track it every single week and make sure that we're reducing our speed to lead during our business hours.

Seth: How fast did you say? How many minutes?

Clay: Within five minutes, it's in.

Seth: Man, that's fast. So do you literally have somebody around the clock, like 24/7 just waiting at the phone to call these people?

Clay: No, not 24/7, but during the day, we sort of have different lead statuses. And when a lead comes in, we know that we need to prioritize lead statuses.

So we have two sort of buckets of people in our business, right? We have our lead managers and our acquisition managers. This is a very common approach. Setter-closer model. So we have our setters and our closers monitoring our inbox so that when leads call in, they call that lead right away. And during the day, they're on that screen.

Every one of my team members has two screens. I will buy them another monitor if they come on my team because the effectiveness of a salesperson when they have two screens is like double or triple, right? So every time I tell them, “This is exactly how you need to run your day-to-day as a salesperson in my organization in order to optimize your productivity and efficiency and allow you to get the most commissions possible. At any point, you're going to be monitoring that inbox. That inbox is like a religion. We need to make sure that we are following it and we are making sure we're refreshing our page and everyone is on it at all times.”

It is unacceptable for any lead to come in and be more than 30 minutes untouched during business hours. It's completely unacceptable.

Seth: No, I believe it. I can tell you the last realtor I worked with, I got to say it was within about five minutes-ish of me submitting a little web form online. And it says something, just the speed to respond. It's like, if somebody takes like a day or two or three to get back to me, they're basically saying you're not that important And if they respond immediately, they're saying, you know, you're very important.

And it's almost like a separate thing from the price, from everything else. Just that quick response, it goes a long way in terms of just communicating like you matter. And that just instantly kind of tees things up to go a lot better if you can tell a person that you matter from the outset like that.

Clay: And in addition to that, when someone calls in or reaches out to a business, like imagine, for example, it's the day before Christmas and your furnace goes out. And you're in Michigan, so it’s cold, you're freezing. You're going to call an HVAC company. And if that HVAC company picks up, you're going to be like, this is a great HVAC company. If they don't pick up, you're going to call another one. If they don't pick up, you're going to call another one.

And if one calls you back in five minutes versus 20 minutes versus two hours, your experience with that company and your trust in their ability to deliver value to you, even if you're paying more, or in this case, you're accepting a lower offer, you're going to have more credibility and trust with that person.

So that's exactly the philosophy that we have. When somebody calls into our business, we want to get on the phone with them as quickly as possible. We want to say, we want to get this person to a hell yes or a hell no, because the longer that they're in our pipeline, clogging our pipeline, the less amount of attention that we can give other leads that are calling in. So we want to get them to, is this person interested? If they are, let's get them an offer. We get them an offer the same day or whatever it is so that we can unclog our pipeline and convert more deals and get more deals under contract and sold.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. So since you started this business, how have things evolved? Like, what did your first year look like in terms of how many deals you did and the sizes of those deals and just the way that you handle things in general and how they work now? Like, are you doing more or less volume or going after the same kinds of deals or what changes have you made and why have you made those changes? Like, what lessons caused you to make the changes that you have?

Clay: Well, if I were to go back to myself, what I'd do is slap myself a couple of times.

Seth: Yeah, I think we all would.

Clay: So, I mean, last year, the fact is, I was building this plane when it was on the way down in the most competitive market that land investors have ever seen by far. Last year, there were more people getting into the business than there ever has been. The economy was humming along and there was so much competition. And sellers knew that their properties were worth a lot of value. I think that that's been adjusted this year, at least in my experience.

And so I was getting into the market during the most competitive time. And so I sent out a bunch of mailers. I was pricing everything. I was doing literally everything. So at the beginning of the year, I was sending out a bunch of mailers. I was calling agents. I mean, like during the PATLive thing, people go on to PATLive, I converted them. And I was building the basis of this process.

Halfway through the year, Seth, I started to implement other marketing channels. I started to implement texting and cold calling and I had a lot of success with texting, brought my first VAs on and I had not that great of a success with cold call. So I kept texting through the summer.

And I just stopped mail. Which was so stupid, right? Because mail is like this compound vehicle. Over time, people get your letters, they might get another letter, and then they'll call you back in a year, right? It's happening to us this year. And so I just kept texting last year. And then in the fall, added some other channels, ringless voicemail, and kept texting. And then the 10-DLC thing happened last fall and just knocked me for one. And then I started mailing again.

And then this year, we're texting a lot. We're sending about 60,000 to 70,000 pieces the direct mail a month. And so there's a lot of volume, right? And so last year, in terms of deals per month, we were doing anywhere between two to six in the beginning, middle, end of the year, it was kind of on the higher end. Can't really recall the exact number, but you know, it ended up doing over 50 deals in our first year, which was a really good feeling.

And so this year, the way that we've adjusted is we have gone back to our bread and butter. So going after parcels in different acreage increments, and we're hitting literally everything. I mean, everything from two acres to 250 acres, and we're hitting them direct mail, we're doing some texting, we're doing some calling. And at this point, we're over 10 deals a month on average; some months we’re 15, some months we’re kind of in that range.

Seth: So with all these different marketing channels you're using, do you have a default? Like we always start with direct mail. If they don't respond to that, then we send them a text or then we do this next.

Like, is there a certain sequence that everybody goes through or is it just kind of changed throughout the year based on how you're feeling that day?

Clay: Yeah. So we are texting people first in most cases, but we're still doing direct mail every month, no matter what, because it's just so reliable. Every single month, we're doing direct mail.

So it's sort of at this point, we're changing up our marketing, trying to be a little creative with things. I mean we're consistently getting out marketing every single month. There's no real sequence. For example, “fine, I need to text this person three times and then send a piece of direct mail.” It's just filling out markets and figuring, hey, what are our internal metrics that are really telling us that we need to hit this market in a couple of different ways?

But I love the philosophy that if you pick a market, you're in it for the long haul, at least a year or so. We hit markets, every market we're in, at least four times a year.

Seth: Now, when you say direct mail is so reliable, do you mean that it's bringing you the most deals or is it because it consistently works or does it return on ad spend the best with that? Or what do you mean by reliable?

Clay: I think that the return on ad spend for texting is probably higher. I think that direct mail, it's just expensive. But when I say consistent, I mean, people are calling us with direct mail. We're getting deal locked up. It's consistent.

Seth: Could that be because you're sending out so much of it? Like the grass is greener when you water it type of thing?

Clay: I absolutely believe that.

Seth: So then it's really not that much better. You're just spending more money on that. Or am I wrong?

Clay: You know, on a relative basis, we're seeing a return on investment of about six times on our direct mail at this point, which is pretty good. And we got some larger deals that are closing. So it's going to go through the roof with that.

But business is very simple. You send out enough pieces of mail in a way that's going to solicit someone in such a way that they're going to call you back and you have a good enough acquisitions machine, then you're going to make money.

Seth: Now, I'm curious with these deals that you're doing. Are you doing anything to them before you resell them? Are you subdividing or doing entitlements or cleaning them up or anything? Or is it just buy, do nothing, and then sell for more? What's your strategy?

Clay: So we're going to look at the best way for us to optimize value in whatever market that we're in, in such a way that it's not going to give us hassle. We're looking at ROI and we're looking on ROH, return on investment and return on hassle. Something can be difficult to execute, but if it's difficult to execute, it's got to be worth the squeeze.

For example, we're buying this 10-acre parcel in Arkansas, and we cut it in half. We sell it at 12,000 an acre. If we just sell it at 10 acres, we might sell it at 7,500 or 8,000 an acre. That's worth it for me. So I pay for a survey and I put a perc test on both the lots and I make 4,000 an acre more. That's a really good investment.

So it's really just a case-by-case basis. We are going to be getting into entitlements soon, but that's a market that is a totally different beast. If you want to get really good entitlements, you got to really know the markets and know the buyers that are actually in those markets so that you can provide a product that they're looking for.

Seth: So my next question here, before I even ask it, I'll just say, I don't even know how I would answer this, but I'm just curious. You mentioned the return on investment and the return on hassle, which I love that.

I'm just wondering, how do you weigh that? Like, what if the ROI is amazing, but the ROH is just huge. And like, even though the ROI would be amazing, you don't want the hassle. Like at what point do you default to, no, we care more about the hassle versus the ROI.

Is there any way, I mean, maybe it's just a gut feeling when you look at it. And sometimes you don't really even know that hassle until you start trying to do it. And then you realize, wow, this is a huge hassle. But do you prioritize ROI or ROH? If it comes down to the line and you have to make a decision one way or another?

Clay: If you have a… imagine you're drawing on a piece of paper and you have ROI on one end and ROH and they're sort of on the same line. If you have a tie between them, you're like, oh man, I'm not really sure.

The way that I think about it in my business is the cash conversion cycle of this deal. The reason why the lending business historically has been very attractive is because you're able to flip these parcels very quickly. And so if I want to take on a very big project that's going to have a lot of hassle, in terms of, “this is going to require a lot more of my time than I would have to take out of the core processes of my business,” whatever it is, I'm going to think about the cash conversion cycle of the investment, of my money that I'm actually putting into this parcel.

What does that mean? Every single month we update, how long is it taking us to sell all our parcels? What's our cash conversion cycle? So we can accurately predict if we send out marketing today, how long is it going to take for that marketing to come in? So we know how much to spend every single month on our market. If our return on hassle is such that our cash conversion cycle on this deal is going to take two years, it's going to screw up our cash conversion cycle and it's going to tie up a lot of our money, then we'll just say no. Maybe try to wholesale or find someone else that could take over, double close on it.

But we're always thinking about our cash conversion cycle. Because even if I make $500,000 on this deal, for example, but it takes me two years to make $500,000, and if I allocate that money elsewhere and I make $400,000 or $350,000, but I'm able to turn my money quicker in a more reliable manner, then I'm going to take that. I'm going to take that every single time.

So cash conversion cycle of our marketing cash is what really dictates our decisions, whether or not we're going to invest in something like that.

Seth: How do you know how quickly that's going to happen, though? I mean, maybe if it's a market, if you worked before with a property type, that would give you a good indication. Or maybe just looking at days on market on Zillow would be another way.

But sometimes you just don't know until you get into it. “This will probably work, but I don't know. We just have to try it.” Do you have a reliable way to estimate that? Or do you ever estimate that and end up being wrong?

Clay: That's the million-dollar question, right? I don't think that it's an estimate. Just like when you estimate, if you're buying an apartment building and you're saying, hey, I'm going to put granite countertops in and repose gray paint and some LVP (luxury vinyl plank) flooring, this is how long you think it's going to take for me to recoup my investment? And it creates the NOI by X.

It's the same exact thing here. It's totally projected. We're going to gather days on market data and it's going to be a gut decision, period. And I tend to be more prudent because those are the projects that sink people. And I have an eight-week-old kid, and that's my priority right now.

Seth: Yeah. It makes me wonder, when you compare the land business to the house business, when you think about the stress involved, the amount of money you can make, how well you sleep at night, your hope for the future, all these things. I mean, do you think that land is better than houses? Is there ever anything that you miss about the house world where you wish land would work like that? Like, how do you compare the two?

Clay: I think that the opportunity vehicle of land is 10x the opportunity vehicle of a house flipping business. Why? Because if you build a marketing machine in land, you can literally do anything. You can be like Seth Williams and build up a ground out self-storage development. You can re-entitle a property in 10x value. You can build a marketing machine and buy a really cool hunting trap in the middle of nowhere. And it's that your homestead that you've been looking for forever.

I think that the land business is a much better opportunity vehicle for someone to get to a higher net worth quicker. So I, 10 out of 10, would say that land is a better business to be in.

Seth: With that said, is there anything you like more about the house business? Is it just that motivation all around or the intent? Is that the main thing? Or is there anything else about houses where you're like, man, I wish land worked like that? Maybe finding comps?

Clay: You would probably want to know this better than I would, right? So I think comps is a big one. Like comparables is big. But actually, I like that because it makes it work in a less efficient market.

So if you want to scale a house flipping business, you can take the model that you're using, which is like PPC, Facebook ads, direct mail if you're using inbound marketing channels or radio ads or TV ads. And I could say, hey, I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I'm going to go to Detroit, and then we're going to go to Petoskey.

You didn't know I knew some of this.

Seth: Yeah, man, you're good. You've been here before?

Clay: And you can take that same model and apply it to different cities, and you can be successful in those different cities. In land, the fact is that you can build a reliable half a million dollar a year business off of direct mail. And the complications of that are not super difficult.

But if you want to scale, you just have to sell a lot more mail. Because PPC, in my experience, has not worked super well. Because PPC is for high-end sellers. And so you get rural interlots in middle of nowhere Arkansas that you buy for $2,000 and sell for $4,000. And that's not my game. And so I think that the scalability at that level, which is, I think, from like one to three million, I would say house wholesaling wins, but for three million-plus, land wins.

So at the beginning, land wins. In the middle, house wholesaling wins. If you want to go really, really big, three, $5 million a year business, I think that land wins because you have so many more tools in your tool belt like subdividing and developments that you can employ to get to multiple seven figures or eight figures.

Seth: We've kind of talked a little bit about this, but is there anything unique about the way you're running your business that other land manifestors aren't doing? Or maybe even looking at yourself personally, when you consider the things that you're good at, do you have anything that you would say is an unfair advantage? Like something you or your business can do well or different that others can't do or just won't do?

Clay: Okay. So there's a cartoonist. His name is Scott Adams. He's a controversial figure, I think. He created Dilbert. Dilbert is a cartoon that is very, very popular on a national scale. And the guys made a really, really good living doing what he's doing because he's good at storytelling and he's a decent enough artist.

And so he has this really, really interesting concept that if you are in the top 10% in two or three skills in the world, you can be an industry shaker. You can build a crazy successful business.

And I applied that same thinking to the land business. There are so many things that you can focus on in the land business. There are just so many things that are important. Am I going to send this direct mail piece? Am I going to do this?

There are two things that matter. And I only focus on these two things: market selection and sales. If you pick a good enough market, you can send out a bunch of bad mail, and you might get one or two deals. But your sales machine is good enough that you can convert the deals. and you pick a good enough market so it sells quickly. So you have a high cash conversion cycle. So even though you might get a lower return on your investment, you can scale quicker and have a better, more predictable business because your cash is turning quicker.

I'll give you an example of this, that if you and I are picking different markets, okay? And we have the same amount of money at the beginning of the year. And I find a really good market and then a really good sales and marketing machine. So I find a bunch of good markets, you and I pick 25 markets a piece.

You focus all your energy on your marketing. Hey, I'm going to build this awesome direct mail piece. It's going to be obsessed direct mail piece. It's going to be so, so good. And you sent out a bunch of direct mail. I sent out a bunch of direct mail. I picked the right markets though. And you might get four deals in your first mailer. And I might get two deals or one deal in my first mail. But I, because of my sales machine, can, over the period of a year, I can re-enroll these people. I can get back and talk to them again and I can convert them through good sales.

So that initial marketing, you might've gotten four people in your first marketing, right? Say there's a ton of mailers. I might've gotten one, but throughout the year, I might've gotten five people because my sales and marketing process is so good.

Let's use the same example. When you get those four parcels on a contract, it takes you a year to sell it, okay? In month one, I get the first one in a contract. I sell it in month three. Month three, I get the three under contract and I sell them in two months. And my money, even though you might've beaten me in terms of the marketing, getting those deals under contract, I win over a period of time. I make more money in my business, my business scales faster because I have those two things that really matter, which are market selection and sales.

So I wouldn't say I'm special. I would say that I focus on the most important things. We're ruthless and relentless about perfecting things like speed to lead, market selection. And that's why I've been able to scale the business to the extent that I've been able to scale it and work continually to be successful is because those are the things that actually matter.

Seth: So two big questions out there. You talk about finding a good enough market and then having a really good sales machine or sales team.

So just to recap what I think I heard you say, correct me if I'm wrong, but on the sales side of things, the way you can have this amazing sales machine is to reply really quickly. To consistently follow up with people and have maybe good phone skills so that when you're actually having these conversations with people, you can more effectively close deals. Is that most of it or is that missing anything?

Clay: I mean, there's a lot there, but I would say the news are some high-level things that are really important, right?

Seth: Yeah. And I did a whole three video series with Ajay Sharma, where he talks specifically about his sales team and their sales process and everything they go through.

It may or may not be similar to what you do, Clay, but anybody out there who's interested, I'll include a link in the show notes where you can check out that because I think there's a ton of insight. And if you're trying to figure out like, how do I create this good sales team that follows up quickly and consistently and says the right things, he explains a lot of that. So that's one thing to check out.

But back to the thing about the good enough market, a place where I can send bad mail and still get deals. So how do I find these places? Like how would you qualify or quantify a market and be like, yes, that is a good market. I can send terrible mail there and I'm going to get deals from it. What does that look like?

Clay: I don't know if I would say maybe I was being a little hyperbolic.

Seth: I might be exaggerating about what you said too.

Clay: What matters is that you pick the markets that sell quickly. You and I know of land investors who send mail to desert squares and they get a very high response rate. They don't seem to have issues with their response rates, right? They have high intent sellers, they don't need to have a good sales process, but no one wants to buy it on the back end, so they have to owner finance it to sell it.

That's an example of the opposite of what I'm talking about, right? So it's more competitive to get in because it's a faster moving market. When you get a property there, it's like a goal. And when you build relationships with the sellers over time, essentially, you're able to convert them over a period of 12 to 24 months. And so that's what I was talking about when I say you have good market selection. And really, what it comes down to is how quickly are parcels selling in those markets, period.

Seth: Yeah. And I know market selection is a huge topic and a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to perfect this. And I totally get why, because it's a big part of this process.

But I'm wondering when you find these markets where things are selling quickly and it's more competitive to get in, could it ever be possible that a market is selling too quickly or it's too competitive to get in? I know I've got a whole video on figuring out the sell-through rate or the sold-to-for-sale ratio, just looking at data from Zillow and Redfin and that kind of thing. This is what a lot of people do.

Is that what you do as well? And is there a certain ratio at which, well, this market is way too hot. We shouldn't even try.

Clay: I would say it depends, period. And what I mean by that is, what are you going after? What's the property type that you're going after? So if you're going after a certain type of infill lot, it's going to be more competitive. But in a major metro area, it's going to be more competitive.

So it really depends on what, number one, how much money you have, and number two, how long you have to wait and what return on investment you need to get. And so there are a lot of factors that go into how you should target a market.

But of course, if it's a more competitive market, you're going to have a lower response rate. So how do you adjust for that? Well, you might have to go after bigger parcels. You might have to have market intelligence on the specific market. I have a guy that I go after in lots in this specific area. And I know a guy that buys him for 25% above market value because he puts modules on them. When you get on that level and it's a very competitive market, there has to be additional value-add that you have.

It's like the analogy of turtles on turtles all the way down. It's the exact same thing in market selection because we need to know what skill sets do we have? What can we add to the market? I can attack a more competitive market if I have a specific set of skills that would enable me to optimize the leads that come through my phone.

Seth: So hypothetically, let's say we know we're going after properties between 10 and 20 acres. We want the value range to be $50,000 to $200,000. We have all this stuff figured out. We know exactly what we're trying to do, but maybe it's a new market. We don't have builders waiting to buy stuff that we know we can go to. So there's going to be a little bit of guessing involved in terms of how long it might take to sell.

So in that scenario, what would the sold-to-for-sale ratio need to be? Like, would you want to see for all the properties currently listed on the market, two have sold over the past year? Or like, I don't know, what specific metrics would you be looking at to say, okay, it's officially too competitive now. We can't do it because of this. Or is it not really that clearly defined?

Clay: I would say that if you're targeting those types of markets that are much more competitive, right? You have a sold-to-for-sale ratio is out of whack. Then you have to, at that point, do different things to attract your sellers.

The perfect example is if you're targeting, there's 15 of these specific types of parcels in the county. You know that you're going to have a really high ROI on it. Say it's an entitlement deal, right? Or you're looking to develop another self-storage facility, maybe not ever in your life. And so you have to, at that point, focus on how do I approach this person with a different type of marketing?

Again, as we dissect the market selection, this can go for hours. We can talk about it at a certain level, then you have to make a decision. Do I have to spend more time than focusing on the marketing?

Seth: Well, and that's another thing about market selection—like, this whole analysis paralysis thing is very real. And I'm wondering how much time do you spend evaluating stuff? If it's a totally new market, you've never been there before, like how much time would you spend on it? I mean, what is the real information you have to to know before it's just like, Hey, I don't, I can't figure out anything more until I just try it and see what happens. How deep do you go on that before you just start moving?

Clay: That's a great question. I am more of a ready, aim, fire guy. I will look at a market, try to focus on the pockets that are the most attractive in terms of the most comps that I could put together an offer for, or just say, I think this is a good enough market. I'm going to send a test mailer and then just go into it. At that level, it's very nuanced. And so I tend not to spend, after I say I'm committed to these 10 markets, I tend not to spend a disproportionate amount of time questioning myself.

It depends on, again, what type of market am I doing? Am I doing blind offers? Am I doing range offers? It's neutral. It doesn't really matter as much, right? Because if I pick the right market, I just send it. And then if you want to to make it more complicated, you do the blind offer. You say, how do I test my pricing?

Seth: I don't want to belabor this too much, but maybe think back to one or two or three deals you did, where it went really well. So in that case, like, what did you look at in that market to be like, okay, I looked at these things. I saw these results. Then I took this action. I sent out neutral letters or something. And then this result came back.

Can you think of any examples where it's like, this is literally what I did and it worked for me. I probably could have asked you this before we got on the interview. I'm sure this takes time to recall and think this through.

Clay: No, it's not a problem at all.

Seth: You don't have to say what the market is, by the way.

Clay: I’m not gonna say, or people are gonna hit it again.

So I hired this data analyst, he's a really smart guy, and we came up with… I'm just giving away the playbook right now. We came up with what we call “zip code clusters.”

So in a county, you might have 10 zip codes or seven zip codes or whatever, and different zip codes in different areas. So let's just say, this county, it's just a square county, it's easy. If people are watching this on YouTube, but you have a square county, and then you have a zip code at the top, and just say you have eight zip codes. And they're sort of, zip codes, they're blended in different areas. And there's a mountain range in the middle and then there's a lake at the top, right?

And you're like, how the heck do I price this? The top area, the top zip code and the bottom zip code might have a similar type of geographical feature. And so we can cluster those together and put together pricing on similar geographical features.

Now I'm not actually saying do a satellite view and like fly over the county. That feels like overkill to me. But what I am saying is there are tendencies for certain prices to be around the same, like, oh, this is 10,000 acre in this zip code, and this is 10,000 acre in this zip code, and this is 9,000 here. And we can all pull those together and use, those are like homogenous price based on what we believe to be a homogenous geographical area.

And so we just cluster the zip codes and we just send, maybe there's three or four different zip code pricings. And then on the highest level, we'll do a county-wide pricing. For the zip codes that don't necessarily sit within the homogenous pricing, let's say there's three ABC, countywide zip code pricing as well.

Seth: Okay, gotcha. And for those of you that listen who might not know, homogenous pricing just means the pricing is similar in the same general ballpark.

Okay, so looking back at your experience in land so far, what would you say has been the hardest part of this for you? Like, what were your biggest challenges and struggles when you got started? And what are they now? Is there ever anything where you're just like, oh, I hate this part of the business? Anything come to mind? Or not really?

Clay: I did luck in selection.

Seth: I hate this conversation.

Clay: Like the overhead in your business. Clay, if you could do one thing, what would you do? Sales. What do you do in your land business? I do market selection. I do coaching. I do leadership. Don't really do sales, right? So market selection is hard.

Here's what I would say in terms of when I started, what was difficult. I took a couple of courses and they left a lot to be desired. And especially during the competitive market that we're currently in, it felt like they were built for five years ago.

Seth: Oh yeah. That's very common.

Clay: And I took multiple courses. And it felt like they were both for five years ago. And I had two things going for me. I had the most expensive year of my life to this point. And I was doing this, and I had to make enough money to literally live.

So to say that my first year was hard would be an understatement. It was the single hardest year of my life. It was so stressful because as you know, in land, sometimes you get quick sales. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you're selling literally 14 days and make a hundred grand. Sometimes it takes seven, 10 times longer.

And so at the beginning, the hardest thing was sending out mail and saying, is this going to work? Because I took these courses and I was like, wow, what is the right thing to do? The question was, what's the hardest thing about your first year, right? So it was that. It was the inconsistency and the amount of stress and pressure that would literally take your breath away, right?

And so I just had to buck up and say, I need to do this for my family. So that I can pay for my wedding, so that I can literally live. And that desire, that burning desire in the hardest market ever enabled me to put it together, get it together.

And I would say the hardest thing now is that this business is difficult. There are moments when you say, hey, I'm going to make a quarter of a million dollars on this deal and it falls through. And so the mental game of land is really difficult, I would say. The mental game of any business is really difficult, but when you have six-figure paydays that maybe are not closing, there are title issues, or… we had to drop out of a deal that we thought we were going to make a lot of money on because two of the lots didn’t perk, we were subdividing it. We had to go back and say, hey, this is going to cost us X amount more. We need to reduce the price. And he ended up backing out.

There's a lot of stuff that in the land businesses is not all sunshine and rainbows. And so the way that you fight that is the consistency of like every month I'm doing a.

Seth: Would you say it's still fairly spiky? Just hard to know like, I'm going to have enough money or maybe like, maybe not have enough money, but just like knowing what your income is going to be from quarter to quarter. Is that still kind of a, just a tough thing?

That's what I hear from most land investors really. So I don't know if that, you found a way to get over that or not care about it or if it's somehow fixed in your business.

Clay: Yeah. I wouldn't be lying if I didn't say it doesn't spike. It totally spikes. One month, we might have the month of our dreams and the next month or next two months, there'll be no closings, right? And so I think it's very spiky. So a lot of people reach out to me on Twitter specifically or in general and say, hey, I'm going to quit my job and get land and I've been reading your Twitter or whatever.

And I said, do not do that. Build up enough reserves so that you can live and you have enough reserves in your land business. Because if you have to make decisions out of fear and you have to send mail out out of fear and not know when you're going to get this money back, your business is going to fizz out like a lot of land investors' businesses has fizzed out because they stopped being consistent. They say that I have to wait and I'm not sure because they didn't have enough money in the bank in order to push them through.

Seth: Yeah, totally agree. Very well said. Do you have like some kind of a long-term plan for this? Like where do you envision this business going in the next five years?

Clay: So I think of our business as a conveyor belt of opportunity. And so I could take it anywhere I want. I'm inspired by, have you ever heard of the Yellowstone Club?

Seth: I don't think I have. What is that?

Clay: It is a private ski golf development community in Big Sky, Montana. And those types of really interesting, cool developments are things that inspire me. You approach land with creativity and you approach land with the posture of, hey, I want to really maybe try to see the highest and best use here and get into development.

The vision for my business is to continue to bring opportunities in and convert them into the highest and best use. I think that it's really cool to have this great vision of I'm going to build this awesome community. But at the end of the day, you got to be realistic. We're doing this for money. We are transacting and building a land business so we can get the financial freedom and stability so we can take care of the people in our lives that we love.

And so the five-year vision is more focused on how do I retire my parents? How do I help my wife's parents retire? How do I build a future for my son that he looks at his father and he says, “I'm proud of what this man did.”

And so wherever that takes me through the opportunity vehicle of land is wherever it takes me. I'd like to get into some entitlement opportunities. I'd like to get into some more creative, cool stuff like the Yellowstone Club. But at this point, it's not really crystallized because there's so many different directions to go into.

Seth: Yeah, totally. We'll have to do another podcast interview once you create Yellowstone Club number two. That sounds pretty cool future case study we can do.

Clay: Wow. Right, I'll come back on. They had some issues lately. They got sued for dumping sewage in a local riverbed and they're like getting sued. So it's like not getting a good reputation right now, but the concept is really beautiful and it's creative.

Seth: So do you have any words of advice for new land investors who are just getting started right now in 2024 in this environment? I guess you said maybe, I said a minute ago, don't quit your job without some reserves and that kind of thing. But anything else beyond that?

Clay: That's a really important word of advice. There will be people in this space that will tell you, “You can build a multiple six-figure, seven-figure land-flipping business if you just quit your job and just do it. You go all in and go all out.” Like the make it happen mentality. That is total bullshit.

Because yes, you can make a half a million dollars on a deal. Yes, if you do an entitlement deal, you can make six figures, seven figures. Yes, you can build a consistent income stream that you can change the financial stability of your family in a very short period of time, but you do not want to do it out of the state of fear.

So what I would say is if you're thinking about getting into land, do it. If you're thinking about getting into land, work with someone or be around someone or be around a community of people who are realistic about what it is. Follow someone that's realistic about exactly what it takes. Because unlike it was a decade ago or even a half a decade ago, it's a competitive business.

Is there more opportunity? Is it a blue ocean still relative to wholesaling and house flipping? Absolutely. But is it all sunshine and rainbows? Is it going to be easy? Absolutely not. So have the reserves. Make sure that when you do it, you're fully committed. Make sure that when you do it, you know that if you're starting out the first three months might not look like you expect them to look. But if you commit to it in six or 12 months, it will. And that's what matters. But you have to have a long-term perspective whether you are or when you are getting into light investing.

Seth: What are you working on right now that's energizing you?

Clay: So the first thing is my business, right? You know, I'm hiring some new people that are really exciting to have into my business. And I recently got another executive assistant, which I think I shared with you, Seth.

Seth: Yeah, you do.

Clay: An absolute life-changer so that I can focus on my zone of genius. So building out people in my business and investing in them and helping them become better professionals is really cool. When you get to a certain level as a business owner, it becomes more about investing in other people and finding their zones of geniuses and encouraging them to reach them, than it is like you just being selfish and going out there like a gunslinger. So that's really exciting.

Number two is we talked We talked about Twitter a lot today. I'm going full on into the Twitter space and social media space. And I will be launching very soon a course called the Land Man Accelerator. And the Land Man Accelerator is going to be a course that's built off of the fact that I joined this business, I built this business on the way down during the most competitive market using outdated tactics. And so these are all the tactics that I've used to scale my business to where it is today.

What I would say about that, Seth, is that it's really not for everyone. It's not going to be for everyone. It's not designed to be for everyone. It's not designed for people who want to have a $100,000 a year land business or even a $200,000 a year land business. It's designed for people that arwhoally realistic, who are actually wanting to use this vehicle as a vehicle to set themselves up to where they want to go. So it's not going to be cheap. It's going to be a lot of personal one-on-one attention.

And if you want to get any information about that, you can join my newsletter and I can share that with you or follow me on Twitter. I'm pretty open about discussing that.

Seth: Yeah. How do we get on your newsletter?

Clay: Well, I can send that to you in the notes.

Seth: I'll put that in the show notes for this. This is going to be retipster.com/191 for anybody who's interested in that.

So when you say it's going to be one-on-one attention or personalized attention, so does it mean like there's coaching wrapped up in this too, or is it just a course?

Clay: Yeah, so it is a very intense course, you know, A to Z, zero to 190 days in all the channels and all of the documents and everything that I use in my business. It's a plug-and-play model and it's updated constantly. It's updated on a daily basis, all the modules and everything in that.

And then the coaching, the one-on-one coaching is we're going to get together every single week and coach, how do you look at deals? How do you take your business to the next level? How do you build businesses that's scalable? How do you reduce your cash conversion cycles, pitch investors, things like that, that are intangible, that you're not just going to get on a course and go through the modules and send out the mail and hope for the best. It's how do we take you from zero to a hundred in a really quick amount of time with a lot of accountability and a lot of orientation about around getting you to six figures.

That's the focus of the course, multiple six figures within 24 months.

Seth: Cool, man. Sounds good. Yeah, it's interesting. Just about everybody I know who has created a land course, something they all have in common was they learn from a really crappy land course that just didn't explain things that well. So it's like, it's easy to think, wow, I could do way better than that. And they probably can.

So, yeah, there's definitely, I think it's actually a pretty normal thing. A lot of course creators will make it in that point in time and it just stays in that point in time. So it doesn't get updated or revised or anything. And so it was kind of like a time capsule of things that used to work.

So totally, man, I'm excited to see what that's all about. And I hope it's awesome. I'm sure people will love it.

Seth: Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to share in this course is there's a document library that, this is like the direct mail piece that I'm using. This is like the way that we hire people. Do you want to hire an acquisitions person? This is what we look for when we hire an acquisition person. You want to build out a sales process that you can scale and use KPIs and track in order to make it succeed? Oh, this is how you build out a sustainable, scalable market selection process.

All those things that I'm doing in my business or entitlement deals. And as I grow, the library will grow. So it's really going to be a getting into my mind and getting into my world and replicating my business A to Z.

Seth: That's awesome, man. So whenever I can fit this kind of thing into interviews I ask three closing questions just to learn a little bit more about how the interviewee ticks and how they think and that kind of thing.

So question number one: What are some dreams you have let go of and what dreams are you still holding on to?

Clay: Okay, so one of the dreams that I mentioned this earlier in the episode that I let go of was the dream of working for the State Department. That was my raison d'etre for a long period of time.

And the reason why is because I was so enchanted by the opportunity to work for the United States government, to travel around the world. I was enthralled by it. And when I'd gone into that environment, this is not to bash the environment that I was in, but it wasn't meritocratic. What I mean by that, it wasn't, you put in X amount of effort and you can get an outsized return. It was basically you bid your time, you climb the governmental ladder, and eventually you could become an ambassador.

But what I found out is that ambassadors really are just people who pay a ton of money into a presidential campaign and get to be the ambassador of Zimbabwe or Norway or whatever it is, Russia. Obviously, for the bigger ones, it's a little bit more clout as well.

So that was a dream that I let go of. I would say that was not a hard dream to let go of because after I got into that environment, it really disenchanted me. And a dream that I'm holding on to is retiring my family. I'd have a very high level of loyalty to my family that had given me so much. They sacrificed through so much. They lost everything in 2008. And they're still, 20 years later, 15 years later, they're still having to fight through that. And it's hard to see your parents that way.

So the goal of the land business and everything that I produced, the land course, all these opportunities to create cash flow are really opportunities to help retire my parents, help retire my parents-in-law and set my son up for an incredible life.

So that's like this core-orienting North Star. I don't really think much further than that, Seth, because at this point, what matters to me is taking care of the people that I love in that way. And then beyond that, as it expands and I get to the level where I can pay for my family as much as I want, then it'll expand like a concentric circle, I think, to a different person or to different people or to a community at large.

Seth: That's a great one to keep holding on to, man. It's a very admirable one. I hope you're able to do it. I'm sure you will be able to pretty soon.

So what is one of your best memories?

Clay: I met my wife in Spain about nine years ago, maybe 10 years ago. I met her and we had this fling that was just electric. And I just knew from the moment I met her she was an incredibly special one. And we were together in the summer I was working in Spain and studying in southern Spain she was as well and we spent two months together and then I went to college and I didn't talk to her for two years.

That was a horrible mistake. And then I called her up. I called her up in the spring of my sophomore year of college. I said, hey, I made a mistake. I bought plane tickets. I'm coming out to see you in Denver, Colorado. And I remember flying in to Denver, Colorado and touching down and walking through Denver International, which I'd never been to.

And seeing her four-runner pickup pull up and she in her, you know, I haven't seen her in two years at that point, a little over two years. And I was just like, this is the best decision of my entire life. I was, the rest of the ride, just sitting there and just so in love. And that's one of my favorite memories.

Seth: Thanks for sharing. That's really cool, man. Probably having children is one of the best things people can experience with, which I know you recently had that experience and are going through that now, but also just like meeting someone you love and just going through that falling in love process, you know, and getting to know each other. It's just, it's like one of the greatest gifts you'll ever have in life for those who have it. And actually, you know, it pans out well and then make good decisions and all that stuff.

But that's a great memory. Thanks for sharing. Last one here. So when was the last time you left your comfort zone and how did you grow?

Clay: When I decided to create this course, I said, what value can I add? And it felt like, well, I have a successful business. I've been able to do all these things, but how can someone entrust in me a certain amount of money to help them get to where I am?

That was really, really hard because people's money is such a spiritual consideration. Spending money in a course or joining a community, it's such a big thing. It felt really uncomfortable and unsettling. I'm going to do this because I really want to, because I know I can do this. But it felt like, am I worthy? Am I worthy to do this?

You'll have those questions when you do stuff like that, when you go out in your comfort zone, when you say, hey, I want to serve a greater audience, a greater set of people. because I think I can, because I know I can. But you question yourself at all times. And so that had been uncomfortable, especially when it started. I've been getting a bunch of people reaching out to me and I ended up starting to say, Hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to launch this. I'm going to do this.

But that was uncomfortable for me, specifically at the beginning. You know, you don't want to sound salesy or you don't want to do, you don't want to be the person that's out there pitching, pitching, pitching, because it's really just kind of icky. But if you have something to say and you have something to contribute, it sort of overrides that. But it certainly hasn't been easy in that way.

Seth: So aside from X, which I'll link up to your profile in the show notes, again, retipster.com/191, is there any other way people could get ahold of you if they want to, or is that the place they should go?

Clay: X or Instagram. And I also have a podcast. So I can share all of those in the show notes.

Seth: Okay. Awesome, Clay. It's awesome to talk to you. Appreciate your time. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. And retipster.com/191 for the show notes. I'll talk to you next time.