Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster Podcast. This is episode 200.

Can you believe this podcast has been around for 200 whole episodes? I was trying to think of some awesome thing we could do to celebrate our 200th episode today, everything from shaving my head to buying a new car for every one of our listeners. But then it occurred to me, what would top all of that is if we interviewed Justin Piche.

So that's what we're going to do today. We're talking to Justin. Some of you may know him, some of you may not, but I'll just give you a quick lowdown. Justin has a pretty interesting background. He was in the Navy for about five years. He was a submarine officer on the USS Maine. Then he had a career as an engineer with ExxonMobil. Then he got into the land business and he's had quite a successful track record of pretty much everything he's done so far. Now he runs a team of over 20 people and his company primarily flips and subdivides land. There is a ton we have to talk about today, everything from how he finds deals to how he hires and manages his team and how to be an effective leader and what it actually takes to build a seven-figure land business. So this is going to be awesome. Justin, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Justin: Thanks, Seth. It's going good, man. We were just talking earlier, but I just want to say, for the listeners, I am so excited to be here at REtipster. Back in 2019, I started doing house flipping and wholesaling. I consumed outrageous amounts of BiggerPockets podcast. And then when I finally made the switch into land, REtipster was the podcast. I've just listened to so many of these episodes. I'm really excited to be here.

Seth: That's awesome. Glad to hear it. Thanks for being a listener. It's great to finally talk to you in this format. So, we're going to start this the way we always do when we interview land investors. Tell us about how you discovered the land business, why you decided to get into it, what did you think it had to offer, and what did it look like when you first got started?

Justin: I started really being interested in real estate around 2018-2019, listening to BiggerPockets. Decided to just take action, put together some mailers, and figure out how to wholesale houses. I started doing it remote in markets like Oklahoma City and Kansas City and had a little bit of success, not a lot of success, but a little bit of success finding some houses, making a little bit of profit.

At the same time, a good friend of mine, Kyle Bryant, who I'm sure Ajay knows and Seth, you may know him as well - he was investing in land and we were friends. We went to the same church. We were in the same parish group. I would ask him questions about how to be an effective investor. What are the returns like? What is the mailer yield like? Because I was comparing that directly to what I was experiencing in the remote house wholesaling world. The results for him were just significantly better in terms of yield on marketing spend. And the risk-to-return was also way more attractive.

Justin: I would be buying homes for $100,000 to maybe make $10,000 to $15,000 as an assignment fee or take title of it and flip it as-is. He was doing the same returns with $15,000 of investment instead of $100,000-$150,000 investment. Sometime in 2019 or 2020, he had a deal in Colorado and he brought it to me and a friend to invest in. I funded the deal and he doubled my money in like three months. I was so impressed and decided, "What am I doing? Why am I not doing land?"

I basically asked him, "Hey man, will you be my coach, like my private coach? I will pay you." At the time, he was coaching for Clint Turner in LearnLand. And he said, "Most of the material is already recorded. Clint has this book of education. I recommend you just join his coaching program." So that's what I did back in September of 2021.

I think this is important for people to understand - I had a lot of advantages probably coming into the land investing space. I had 10 years of established career. I had quite a bit of investment capital that I had built up over the years. And my wife worked as well. I know a lot of listeners are either looking to get into the land space or they got into it and really bet on themselves, put all their eggs in one basket, and it was like do or die launching this business. I had a couple of advantages. I don't want to call them crutches, but certainly legs up on starting a land business where the risk for me was maybe a little bit lower than some people. Having all that capital allowed me to invest heavily in marketing and systems to generate good deal flow right from the beginning. Honestly, in six months, enough to replace my pretty good ExxonMobil salary.

Seth: I'm actually curious about that. You mentioned those three advantages: having a pretty strong financial standing, which I assume just means like a slush fund of money built up, your career experience and leadership experience, and also your wife worked. Which of those three advantages do you think was the most important one? Does one stand out as, "Oh, that was really what did it for me"?

Justin: Man, what a good question, Seth. You're known for those. For me personally, if I had to weight one over the other, I would say the leadership background, managing teams for 10 years gave me the confidence to know that I could build a team. That was probably number one.

I think number two was money, certainly just having capital. When you're starting a land investing business specifically, if you don't have a lot of capital, you kind of are thrown into one of two paths. Either you raise and use other people's money, which frankly is not super easy if you don't have a track record. It's usually going to be friends and family. You're going to be giving away a lot of equity right at first to build up some sort of track record. So that's one way. The other way typically is wholesaling and not taking title and flipping land. And I didn't have to do that.

When I had an investment thesis and a conviction about a property that I wanted to buy, I was able to take title without having to overcome those other hurdles in addition to just finding the land. That was the first hurdle - let's find a good piece of land and be able to evaluate it and see the potential. And that was the only one I really had to get over at first to build up a portfolio and inventory.

Seth: So you think if you only had that career leadership experience, if that was all you had, you didn't have the money and your wife didn't work, how much longer do you think it would have taken you to get to where you are now?

Justin: Probably a good bit longer, honestly. Scaling is obviously a big challenge. I think a lot of people have a desire to grow their businesses, but you always run into some sort of constraint. And for me, that constraint wasn't money. At first, it was really just time. For the first six months of my business, I still worked W2 full-time. And I had just had my second kid that same month that I launched the business.

I was working for ExxonMobil full-time, and then I'd get off at 5 or whatever time I'd stop working, log off the computer for ExxonMobil, and then I would hang out with my family, my newborn baby, my daughter, my wife. That was a challenging time. I certainly did not hang out with my wife and newborn baby as much as I should have. I'm not going to mess that up for the fourth one, I guess, if we have another one.

I was doing that full time. And then in the evening, that's when I was catching up on calls, catching up on calling sellers who were coming in at the time on PatLive for my mailers, comping properties, and getting ready for making those offer calls the next day. I was figuring out where in my ExxonMobil schedule I could carve out 20 minutes to have a conversation with a seller. All the while building up the systems, building up the CRM, building up the website, figuring out where I'm going to market to next, like a one-man show for five-ish months before hiring somebody finally.

Seth: Do you think you hired at the right time? Should you have done it earlier or should you have waited?

Justin: Personally, I would have hired sooner. I think I pushed past that pain threshold to the detriment of my family and my relationships. And I would not do that again. The benefit of hindsight is that you also now have these skills that you may not have realized you had before, or maybe not fully realized you had before. My ability to train and find a good employee, hire, set clear expectations - sure, I knew I had some of that through my time leading in the United States Navy and then leading teams at Exxon. But it's different when you have complete ownership over something. I would definitely go about it a little bit differently. I certainly would have hired sooner.

Ajay: It's a really interesting thing because I know when I started, I was married, but I didn't have kids yet. And that was a big deal, just giving me a little bit more time. If I was to start from nothing today with a wife and two kids, it feels like that would be way harder. Not impossible, but just way more tension. Plus, you had a job and it's just a ton of stuff to do. Did that ever cause marital tension or family tension? How do you navigate through that? Because it just takes time, especially when you don't have a team yet and you just say, "Give me five months and I'll do it." Like, did you just ask them to be patient with you?

Justin: Yeah, it certainly did cause tension. In fact, if you were to ask my wife, I know she would tell you that was one of the hardest seasons of our lives. I think for her, and maybe this is advice for any new parent, she felt kind of alone because instead of attending to her needs and our new growing family's needs, I was splitting my time between my job and my other job. I really regret the way that I went about starting it, honestly. I'm a pretty ambitious person, and I think I pushed too hard to the point that it certainly was a hard season. For those of you who are new parents or are about to be parents, I highly recommend very much unplugging from your obligations at work and your business and planning for that, because you really only get those moments with a brand new baby to serve your spouse for those small periods of time when you're having children. And you don't get those back. Those are some of the most emotional and challenging moments, especially for a woman who's having this baby. So I highly recommend not messing that up like I did.

Seth: Do you know what her love language is? If you're familiar with the five love languages?

Justin: I have a men's Bible study that I was doing last night with some guys at my church. And that was one of the things we were talking about. One of my buddies was saying his wife has certain love languages, like words of affirmation. His is quality time. And so he's super content to hang out in the evening time with his wife, but that doesn't necessarily serve her in the way that she needs to be served. For my wife, hers is absolutely acts of service. That is her primary one. Words of affirmation as well.

It's got to be thought out in advance. That's what I've learned. Because a lot of times she'll be like, "When are we going to go on a date?" I'm like, "Let's go tonight." And then it's like, that doesn't really make me feel as loved as if you had told me a week ago, "Hey honey, get a babysitter for Thursday night. We're going out together to spend time together."

Seth: How lucky are people when they have the same love language? Like I can just love you in the way that I want to be loved. And it just clicks because my wife's is quality time, mine is words of affirmation. And no matter how many years I've known this, it still just takes intentional effort to be like, "Oh, I can't give you what I want. I have to give you what you want and speak that language."

Justin: It's so funny too, as an entrepreneur, because we battle certain ideologies around activities being a dollar per hour. This is one I talk about a lot with a mutual friend of all of ours, Drew Haney. Like doing the dishes - if your wife's love language is acts of service, you're like, "Man, we could hire someone for 15, 20 bucks an hour to do these dishes," but that's not what it's about. It's about your wife feeling loved because you're doing something within the home and offloading that off of her. And so to your point, Seth, it is funny when you're naturally wired differently. I feel like I know no couples where they just have the exact same love languages.

Seth: I agree with you. I can't think of anybody that I know that has the same love language as their spouse. So, when you got started your first year in land flipping, what did your strategy look like then? What does it look like now and when and how and why did that all start to change?

Ajay: It's a really interesting thing because I know when I started, I was married, but I didn't have kids yet. And that was a big deal, just giving me a little bit more time. If I was to start from nothing today with a wife and two kids, it feels like that would be way harder. Not impossible, but just way more tension. Plus, you had a job and it's just a ton of stuff to do. Did that ever cause marital tension or family tension? How do you navigate through that? Because it just takes time, especially when you don't have a team yet and you just say, "Give me five months and I'll do it." Like, did you just ask them to be patient with you?

Justin: Yeah, it certainly did cause tension. In fact, if you were to ask my wife, I know she would tell you that was one of the hardest seasons of our lives. I think for her, and maybe this is advice for any new parent, she felt kind of alone because instead of attending to her needs and our new growing family's needs, I was splitting my time between my job and my other job. I really regret the way that I went about starting it, honestly. I'm a pretty ambitious person, and I think I pushed too hard to the point that it certainly was a hard season. For those of you who are new parents or are about to be parents, I highly recommend very much unplugging from your obligations at work and your business and planning for that, because you really only get those moments with a brand new baby to serve your spouse for those small periods of time when you're having children. And you don't get those back. Those are some of the most emotional and challenging moments, especially for a woman who's having this baby. So I highly recommend not messing that up like I did.

Seth: Do you know what her love language is? If you're familiar with the five love languages?

Justin: I have a men's Bible study that I was doing last night with some guys at my church. And that was one of the things we were talking about. One of my buddies was saying his wife has certain love languages, like words of affirmation. His is quality time. And so he's super content to hang out in the evening time with his wife, but that doesn't necessarily serve her in the way that she needs to be served. For my wife, hers is absolutely acts of service. That is her primary one. Words of affirmation as well.

It's got to be thought out in advance. That's what I've learned. Because a lot of times she'll be like, "When are we going to go on a date?" I'm like, "Let's go tonight." And then it's like, that doesn't really make me feel as loved as if you had told me a week ago, "Hey honey, get a babysitter for Thursday night. We're going out together to spend time together."

Seth: How lucky are people when they have the same love language? Like I can just love you in the way that I want to be loved. And it just clicks because my wife's is quality time, mine is words of affirmation. And no matter how many years I've known this, it still just takes intentional effort to be like, "Oh, I can't give you what I want. I have to give you what you want and speak that language."

Justin: It's so funny too, as an entrepreneur, because we battle certain ideologies around activities being a dollar per hour. This is one I talk about a lot with a mutual friend of all of ours, Drew Haney. Like doing the dishes - if your wife's love language is acts of service, you're like, "Man, we could hire someone for 15, 20 bucks an hour to do these dishes," but that's not what it's about. It's about your wife feeling loved because you're doing something within the home and offloading that off of her. And so to your point, Seth, it is funny when you're naturally wired differently. I feel like I know no couples where they just have the exact same love languages.

Seth: I agree with you. I can't think of anybody that I know that has the same love language as their spouse. So, when you got started your first year in land flipping, what did your strategy look like then? What does it look like now and when and how and why did that all start to change?

Seth: What does your business look like today? I've heard your name associated with subdividing a lot. Is that precisely all you're going after or just tell us about how it's changed?

Justin: I've never stopped flipping. I think what I do now that I didn't do when I was starting is that I try to improve every property regardless of whether it's a flip or a subdivide. And really that's just lessons learned through long holding periods of tracts that people can't get on. In my opinion, the quickest way to sell a piece of land is make it look good or make it accessible to somebody just from the road.

Put yourself in your buyer's shoes. You're looking for your 10-acre tract in the country and you got to convince your wife or your husband or whoever to go and look at this tract and then potentially buy it to move there or to have a second home or to have some sort of recreational property. You have a vision for what this could be, but they might not. And if you pull up to a property that is a wall of trees, completely uncut, and you have to pull over on the shoulder of a county road, there's cars whizzing by you, and you can't actually walk into the property - you've driven 45 minutes and you and your wife get out and you say, "Look at these trees, honey." That doesn't sell properties. That's like, "I don't even know. This is too much work" and move on.

For us, it's pretty easy to do that clearing. A lot of folks have connections or understand how to hire a contractor and how to budget that into the project and how to just execute that process of improving the property in a small way. And so we just try to do that on every property. Flipping is still a huge part of my business. Basically, one out of every four to five deals is a subdivide. So maybe it's like four flips to a subdivide is kind of the way we're running right now.

Seth: I'm curious just on that comment you said about, if you pull up to a wall of trees and can't really see it, like the whole brush hog thing or clearing it out so you can see more of the property. I had a property one time that had a couple of huge divots, just like huge holes in the property. But you couldn't really see that easily because they were sort of covered with trees. So basically like clearing it out would reveal, "Oh, this thing is actually going to be a lot of work to fix it." I'm just wondering how would you handle that? If you saw that there were those issues, I don't know if it's an ethical question or not, but do you go out of your way, pay money to make the thing look worse, but give them better information? Or do you just say, "I'm not going to touch it. You figure it out and make your own decision."

Justin: That's a good question. If what I was doing was making the property less marketable, I would not do it. That's the calculus there. I wouldn't hide the fact that there's sinkholes or whatever on the property. I think I'd work to find that out on the front end and potentially just not buy it if I thought that was going to impact the value.

But again, it's hard to see those things. We literally just bought a property in Alabama that had an easement, but the easement wasn't actually marked or surveyed out. It was a very vague easement. There was a lot to the east - it's this 20-acre tract. There's a lot to the east that fronts a public road. And the easement just said it crossed this tract. So I could choose wherever I wanted. The tract kind of went from, it was almost like a triangle. At the very north side would have been a very long easement. At the south side was the smallest easement.

Justin: I decided to run the easement along the shortest route so that my clearing work and budget would be low. So we hired the surveyor. They had to mark all these corners because the whole area had never been surveyed. So it's quite an expensive easement survey, way more than I would have expected. But now I've got the easement marked and I can bring in a crew to clear a trail into the property and maybe clear a little bit for a home site or something.

And the clearing crew goes out there and the survey goes right through a sinkhole. Survey crew didn't say anything. They just surveyed it. And I was like, "Man, what a frustrating thing." So in order for them to change the survey, it's like another several thousand dollars. And the work to fill in the sinkhole is excessive. So now we're sitting on this property and like, what are you going to do with it? Probably worth resurveying to get the easement moved a little bit to the north so that we don't go through the sinkhole. Or it's like the easement's 30 feet - how wide is the sinkhole? It's not 30 feet. So can they just go around the top of it?

But that's where doing this business remote gets really challenging because you can't walk every property. And even if you did, what are the chances we found that little sinkhole right there? Probably pretty low. But the survey crew, as they were surveying it, they should have said something. That's really frustrating.

We do include that in our SOP now, especially on subdivisions. Maybe on the easement, we weren't very specific. But certainly on subdivisions, we say, "Look, we haven't been to this property. We are looking at the contours. We're looking at the 3D map. We're trying to put the property lines in such a way that it doesn't interfere or makes portions of the property unusable that would be otherwise usable with a different shape of a lot line. So when you're out there, this sketch plan that we're providing, this is just a guess. This is about what I want in terms of lot count and size, but whatever makes sense when you get on the ground as you're surveying, that's what we want to do. We want to create the most desirable product from this, not some set line that we put on Land ID."

Ajay: This begs a good question though, Justin. You talk about bringing in a crew to fill in some gravel, maybe get an excavator out there. Begs the question of finding contractors, especially in new markets. I think this is one of those things that guys like you and me kind of gloss over because we've just been doing it for years. It's just like, "Yeah, you just hire someone to go do the work." How many times have you been bitten by somebody that was supposed to go out there and never went or did shoddy work or just ghosted you after something? How do you find good contractors to go bush hog, to get out a road, to do some gravel? Give some kind of process for how you're finding your contractors.

Justin: A couple of ways. One, land brokers specifically. They generally have a book of people that do this type of work because they're the ones responsible for marketing and selling tracks. And so they want the properties to look good. It's in their best interest to keep the cost down for their clients and produce a great result. So that's a great place to look.

Obviously, Google - the more rural you get, the harder it is to find, especially people with Google reviews. But I mean, it still works. There's a reason why people have Google ratings, and it's one of the most popular things in the world.

I've started using Perplexity. We're in Callen's AI Masterclass together, and that's an incredible tool that is... I really, really like that tool. It's basically like an AI-supported Google on steroids that is exceptional. It really is quite a remarkable product.

Justin: An example of a query that I did the other day was looking for a bank in Knox County. I typed in, "I'm looking for a small community bank in Knox County that is very likely or has a high likelihood to lend on a land development, kind of a small entitlement deal." What it did was find basically all the small banks and then gave them all a score on how likely they are to lend on this type of product. I just went down the list. The first bank only worked with people local to Knox County. Even though the project was in Knox County, they didn't want to work with somebody out of state, which a lot of banks are like that. The second bank followed up with us and it looks like they're good to go.

But back to finding contractors - Google reviews, you can use a tool like Perplexity. Depending on what the type of work is, if you're looking for somebody to do stonework or gravel type stuff, you can call material suppliers, like a rock quarry, or where they go to pick up the material. Because a lot of the best people are there in the morning to pick up rock. The guys that are doing tons of jobs, that get consistent business - the rock quarry or the material supplier, they're going to know who those good contractors are.

And maybe another piece of advice is just call people. You've got to call people that say they do this type of work. A lot of times, excavation companies are kind of your catch-all. If somebody says they have an excavation company, they generally can build roads. They can generally do clearing work. They can do a lot of different stuff. So if you're having trouble finding somebody that does specifically bush hogging or forestry mulching, maybe call an excavation crew. Same with road building - having trouble finding construction road building, call somebody that does excavation work because they either have subs that do that work or they have the equipment to do it themselves.

And then maybe the last piece of advice is I always get multiple bids, no matter what. Even if I have a contractor that I trust and that I've been working with a long time, I always get multiple bids. You just want to protect yourself. You want to make sure each bid is competitive. If a contractor starts feeling like they've got you and you're their customer, they might start to pad their profit margins a little bit. Not everybody is like that. A lot of people do really high quality work for a very fair price. But I have had a bad experience on more than one occasion with maybe trusting a contractor a little too much, having them do subpar quality work and having to both redo it, but also at a cheaper rate from a higher quality supplier. So always get multiple bids. Two minimum, three is kind of a better number.

Seth: I'm wondering how much of this business are you still working yourself now? Or what parts of it are you working yourself versus your team? Is it correct your team is like 20 plus people? You've got like one of the bigger teams I know of out there in terms of land investors.

Justin: We have 21. We were about to have 22, but unfortunately, I had to let a team member go last Friday. And then I hired somebody new who started on Monday. So we'll be 22 soon, I think. We have a job posting out for that position that was vacated. We can talk about that if you guys want. It's never fun to have to let somebody go. And I'm sure there's probably people listening that are like, "Man, I have some underperformers that I don't know what to do with." So if that's something you guys want to talk about, I'm happy to dive into my philosophy on that.

Justin: But yeah, 21 people. Obviously, it's split up the normal way that most land businesses are. We have acquisitions, we have transactions, data, admin finance in the middle, project management. And then we have sales and dispo. Something that's probably a little different than most land investors is that I have an in-house dispo team. I think a lot of people, at least recently, have moved to broker sales because honestly, you don't necessarily need an in-house dispo team. There are realtors out there that specialize in selling land and you can outsource all of your dispo to a realtor. But we don't for a couple of reasons. We have an in-house dispo team that's a sales manager and a couple of assistants that work for him.

Seth: If anybody is newer to the business and doesn't know what dispo means - that's basically just the team to sell your properties.

Justin: Exactly. Some people use "sales manager" to talk about the acquisitions manager. I know, I know. It's so confusing. Yeah, I call him my sales manager. His name is Brian.

So what am I working on? That's the question. I recently hired a project manager and an underwriter to both help underwrite subdivide deals and to manage all of that work that we're talking about - getting those bids, getting those quotes, scheduling it, lining all that stuff up. Before, it was really just me. That was really what I was doing a lot of is project management because we have 15 subdivides that we're currently working on in various stages of either under contract or selling. And it's just a lot. It's a lot of coordination.

I was finding, as I often find when I'm working in my business, that I become a bottleneck because my time is limited and then things start to kick and push. And that affects everybody on my team. And I don't want that to happen. So I'll work and I'll identify that hole where I am just kicking things down the road and I know that I need somebody else to do that. So that was a hire that I had.

Right now I'm doing a lot of bigger subdivide stuff. I'm working on that podcast, the Ground Game podcast, which just launched a couple of weeks ago. We just released episode five. We can talk more about that too later. And kind of just nurturing some relationships with funders, simplifying my capital stack in the business right now. Traditionally I've used a combination of my own cash, unsecured promissory notes from friends and family lenders, and deal partners. I'm consolidating all that into essentially a limited partnership model where money goes into a limited partnership, comes down to an investment company that investment company is a deal funder for Scout Land Group and potentially other land investors. So I just have kind of one partner that I'm using for funding, of which a lot of the LP money is my own.

Seth: So many different directions we can go with this from what you just said there.

Justin: Let's explore them all, Seth. I'll cancel my next meeting.

Seth: Awesome. Thank you. One thing I was wondering about at the Land Scaling Summit, when you were talking on the stage with Ajay, you mentioned what your monthly payroll is. What is that?

Justin: I should probably know what my exact monthly payroll is. The challenge is that there's a huge commission component to payroll. And so it varies from month to month. But I would say without commissions... Payroll is somewhere around $30,000 a month without commissions. And in a good month, maybe that goes to like $50,000 or $55,000 or something like that. And that doesn't include marketing spend. That doesn't include tech. That doesn't include data. No, that's salaries for employees. So like your normal monthly expenses... somewhere in the $70,000 plus range.

Seth: Some people might hear that number and just be in shock. Like, how do you do that? Does it ever give you anxiety? What if you have a month where you don't sell anything? Do you ever lose sleep by that? Or do you have the kind of brain where it's just like, "No, it's fine. I just don't think about it."

Justin: I don't have that kind of brain. I think, fortunately, I think that kind of brain can get you into trouble of not really caring or being like, "It'll all work out." I mean, I do have faith that it will work out. But there's a couple of things that I try to do to make sure that it works out.

One of those is I do take title to every property. And when you take title to a property, especially if you buy cash, you have an asset that is lendable. And so one of my levers in my business is if I see some sort of shortfall coming because we're going through the summer or the winter and the sales pipeline isn't full and I see these OPEX expenses coming, then I can see that a couple of weeks or months rather ahead of time and work to leverage a property. Use one of my bank connections to leverage property.

Additionally, since I have a lot of equity in deals, I can bring in partners on those deals and basically give away some of my future profits for cash coming into the business. So it's another lever. I have a portfolio of notes. So the third lever is that I can sell those notes for a cash value and get a cash injection and forego the cash flow of those notes.

Really, those are the main kind of levers I have in terms of bridging slow periods. But another thing that I like to do is something called a 13-week cash flow analysis. And it's not super easy to do. But what it is, is essentially looking forward a quarter and planning out or seeing what all of your ins and outs will be or are projected to be. And obviously, you can't say for certain that every deal you have in your sales pipeline is going to close on the closing date. We all know that doesn't happen. Same with acquisitions. You can't say that you're actually going to be spending this money on all of these deals. But you can roughly see.

If everything goes to plan, you can see where your cash balances go below whatever your comfort zone threshold is. And so if I see that coming, I'll have a 13-week outlook, I'll be able to see that coming and I'll say, "Okay, well, we need to do something here. We either need to get funders for these deals so that we're not putting that cash out in equity into properties, we need to get a bank loan for these deals, or we need to leverage these deals, we need to sell some notes." Something like that. My call is never to cancel a contract, though. I would tell you that. I would never say, "Oh, we're just not going to buy that."

Seth: You mean you could get a funder for a deal after you've already bought it and taken title to it? You kind of retroactively bring it into the picture?

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great idea. I mean, you could do that with a bank loan too, like refinance something that you already own.

When I started my business, I wasn't using bank loans for anything. And I went to the very first LearnLand event back in October of 2022. And Justin Sliva was there talking about using bank loans on larger properties. And I don't know why I wasn't like, "Oh yeah, of course you can use bank loans on assets like land." I just didn't even really think about it because none of really the education in the space at the time was really talking about that.

You got to have financial discipline. You have to understand the risk. You have to have a conviction about the value of the property. But if you have those things, then I think it makes a lot of sense to use leverage. I mean, you don't want to over-leverage yourself. Maybe you want to go maybe a little bit lower than the max loan to value on the loan if you are worried about the payments or worried about the cash flow, worried about how long the property is going to take to sell. But I think it's a great tool to produce a higher cash on cash return for deals.

I mean, I could buy a property at $100,000 cash and sell it for $200,000 cash and make $100,000. And that's exceptional. I love those deals. Or I could go to AgSouth Farm Credit in North Carolina, buy that property at 15% down, maybe call it 20% all in at the most with closing costs and still make $100,000. And now I've made 5X on that capital.

Seth: The whole bank loan topic is pretty fascinating because you're right. I mean, there is kind of a misconception that banks won't finance land. And I think that's true if the dollar ranges in a certain point or depending on the uses or lack thereof of land. And especially if somebody's starting out with super cheap stuff, and like, yeah, they're gonna hit that. But when you graduate to bigger properties, like it's totally feasible.

We actually did a really good deep dive on that with Jay Thomason and Daniel Earhart, episode 192, retipster.com/192. If you want to hear more details on how they did it, they offered up a lot of specifics on how they were able to find those people and pitch their deal and make it work pretty well.

So I am curious, a lot of people that I know who have big teams, even half the size of yours, it seems like, at least from what I hear from them, they're on calls a lot during the week. Like a good part of their week is just telling their team how to do what they're supposed to do and making sure they're doing it and that kind of thing. Is that true for you? Or do you somehow not have to spend all your time that way?

Justin: I am on a lot of calls, but that's because I do coaching. I do the podcast. And so there are a lot of periods of time that I am doing those type of calls. Honestly, I am not in a ton of meetings with my team. And I think that's because I have really good managers in place.

Justin: Maybe I can just go through the meeting cadence for my team. I think that might be helpful. So we use the EOS framework to manage the business. Gino Wickman, the book is Traction. I know a lot of folks in this business have heard of it or are in various stages of using it. I had read it maybe back in early 2022, kind of sort of tried to implement it, but didn't have a ton of conviction about it. And then when I hired my assistant January of this year, I was like, "All right, this is your first mission as assistant is to get every single meeting scheduled, get the frameworks built out and hold me accountable to holding everyone accountable to execute this plan." And it's been incredible.

There's team meetings that I'm not a part of. There's my sales manager has sales meetings. My acquisitions team has acquisitions meetings and training. The ones that I am a part of is I'm part of a weekly transaction coordination meeting. And that is really an alignment between sales, transactions, project management, and myself of all the things that need to happen on all the deals that we're working on. And right now, we have 40 properties under contract to purchase. So there's various things of all these properties that we need to do to get them ready to market and sell.

I lead a team meeting once a week with the entire team, everybody on the team. And that's more of a general update. Give the team updates on things that are happening. I like to be pretty transparent with the team of what is happening and what's not. So they just understand where we are, what's coming. And then we give department updates. So acquisitions gives an update. Sales gives an update. Transactions and marketing give updates.

And then I always end with four wins. I make everybody share their video because it's so frustrating to be on a call and nobody's sharing their video, especially when you're on a multinational remote team. It's like, "Come on, guys." So we all get on video and I make people share four wins. We won't leave the call until I get four wins. And that's really fun because, A, I love hearing good things that are happening in my team member's life. And I know they do. And it helps everybody feel more connected and more part of a team.

And then we do a level 10 meeting on Thursdays. And if you're familiar with the EOS framework, the level 10 meeting - it's 90 minutes. It's got a pretty set agenda. And you really just work through. You do a segue, get updates. You look at KPIs. You review your quarterly rocks or your big goals for the quarter and any progress or any updates that are needed on those. And then you go through any headlines that you need to communicate down to the team.

And then the bulk of the meeting is spent in IDS, which is identify, discuss, solve issues. It's all about looking introspectively at your business, each of the departments and saying, "What are our issues? What are we struggling with? What is going wrong?" And just getting it out on paper or on computer program or whatever you use to do it and actually discussing them, segmenting out that time to discuss them. And that's been super helpful. It's super helpful just to admit to ourselves what we have going wrong and then put plans in place to actually solve those issues and move towards us being better.

Seth: Maybe you could quantify, like how many hours per week are you on any kind of call with anybody on your staff? Not podcast staff, not that, but just like your actual land business.

Justin: Probably seven, seven hours a week. So about, yeah, about an hour and a half a day, I am on calls with my staff.

Seth: And the reason you're able to keep it to that is because you stay in better touch with your managers and then they handle all that?

Justin: Yeah, there are more calls happening. It's just, I'm not a part of all those calls. Like I don't need to be a part of the sales team call. I'm not setting strategy for how we're marketing. I'm not negotiating on offers. I'm not finding new realtors. I'm not making sure the buyer's list is all in order. That's my sales manager's stuff.

I'm not in the acquisitions training meeting. I'm not the one training my cold callers. I'm not the one training my acquisitions team, my acquisitions manager is, or my cold calling manager is. And so those meetings, I don't need to participate in. And now I do pop in from time to time. Sometimes I have a thing that I want to train on or some process that I think would be better than what we're currently doing. And I will go in and train the team on those meetings, but it's not a regular thing.

Seth: What's going through my head right now is like, if I'm in your shoes and there's just so many little details of things that need to be done - say when you're doing due diligence to buy one of these 40 deals you have on a contract, missing a detail can potentially be catastrophic depending on the detail that gets missed. So like, how do you make sure it all gets done? I mean, if you've only ever lost money on one deal, how do you run such a tight ship where mistakes don't get made? At least not that level. It sounds like you must have made either really good hiring decisions every time, or maybe you fire a lot of people to get the best people? I guess, which is it? Are you really good at hiring or do you have to cycle through a lot of people to get the star players?

Justin: That's a great question. So let me start by saying mistakes are made. But you're right. We don't make many mistakes that are catastrophic, I would say. I don't know if we've ever made any catastrophic mistakes. I think one of the bigger ones is that not recognizing there's that sinkhole, because now I think that might be deal number two we lose money on, honestly.

I don't excessively fire. In fact, I hate firing. I really, really do. I've fired six people so far. So we've had, I guess we have 22 or 21 on the team. We've had a total of 27 people working for the company. Nobody's ever left of their own accord, which honestly, I think is, I'm very proud about.

Justin: One of the things I really try hard to do is build a great culture on the team. And a part of that is because I've been a part of really good cultures when I was in the Navy. Just incredible command culture with amazing commanding officers. And I've been a part of really bad cultures like ExxonMobil and some of the teams that I worked on there. And I just understand how important it is for people to feel valued at their workplace. And if you don't feel valued, you don't want to be there. And if you don't want to be there, you're going to be searching for something else.

Seth: How do you make them feel valued? Isn't that even a love languages thing?

Justin: I tell them that I value them. I celebrate the wins that the team members have. I'm just very transparent and open with them. We have core values that are aligned with kind of all of that. And I'm generous with time off. I'm generous with holidays. I'm generous with commissions and compensation. And I think just everything I do with the team shows them that I care about them.

And it's not this like, woo-woo, "we all care about each other" kind of environment. This is a professional working environment. But I think there's just a lot of trust and respect amongst the members of the team because we're all growing in the same direction. And everybody can see that if they put in more, every other person on the team is going to benefit.

Let's just use a cold caller, for example. If this cold caller puts in time and energy to correct mistakes they're making and is able to get more leads push or more leads qualified, that is going to have a direct impact to benefit literally every other person on our team. And that's the type of stuff I talk about on a week-to-week basis. And the team recognizes that. And because of that, I think they all both hold each other accountable and maybe to a higher standard than they would if that wasn't the case. And I think it just creates a caring atmosphere because you're doing things not just for yourself by improving, you're also doing things for everybody else on the team.

Seth: There is a book called The Five Love Languages in the Workplace, I think is the title of it. It's basically the same book, but for professional environments. As I hear you talking about what you do when you spend time on these calls every week, so maybe that's quality time, you give them time off, maybe that's gifts. It sounds like you're checking several of those boxes when you do that. The words of affirmation, that's what I heard you saying at first. You just verbally tell them. So that's great for people who care about that, but it might not check the box of somebody else. But it sounds like you're covering it pretty well.

Justin: I haven't consciously thought about the love languages in leading my team. I just have thought about how I've flourished in the workplace. And I just want to create that environment for my team. I didn't know that there was this book, Seth. I wish I did. We have our team actually as a part of onboarding, we have them take a couple questionnaires and personality assessments. One of which is we run them through the free love languages test. Didn't know there was a workplace one, wish I did, because that might scare some people where they're like, "What's this for?"

Ajay: Yeah, why do you need to know my love language is physical touch? Why do you need to know that in this remote workplace environment? But I do think it's so important because my dispositions manager, Taylor, I know that she's words of affirmation. I know when she does something really well, I'm going to write her a nice message or send her a voice memo or praise her publicly in front of everybody. But I'm going to do that with words.

Retention is something that people don't talk about enough in this niche and retention happens through culture. You think about the cost of turnover, especially if one of these key roles in my company does leave, it's really expensive for me to have to hire all over again, train all over again, get them to KPI, which is like get them performing at whatever role they need to perform at. And then ideally retain them all over again. They've got to integrate with the team.

We accidentally did this thing that was really, really good for our culture. We call it team time and we basically just set up a zoom for our team. Now given our team's a lot smaller than yours, Justin, I've just got three on staff now. Not including me and Ben, but we have what's called team time where we just have this rolling zoom where they just go in and they just hang out for 30 minutes once a week and it's like sacred time. And they talk about personal life. They're all moms. So they'll talk about their kids. And of course, like work gets talked about, but the point is that you want it to be like the equivalent of locker room talk, but for them. And when they have that culture, it makes them want to work outside of working hours more regularly because they enjoy their coworkers. It makes them want to push each other in healthy ways and celebrate wins together.

Ajay: I just love that you've created this culture. I think regardless of you telling us how you pour into it, you telling us nobody's ever left is such a testament to the fact that you've done a great job curating really strong culture.

Seth: The opposite side of that - it sounds like you fired about one-sixth of the people that you've ever hired. I'm just curious, when do you know you have to do that? What is the trigger that says, "Okay, it's too late"? And could it be that maybe you're waiting too long because you don't like to do it?

Justin: I think there are certainly cases where I have waited too long. And that was probably pretty early on. The first time I had to fire, it was actually July 4th of last year, 2023. And I fired five team members.

Seth: In one sitting?

Justin: Yeah, at one time. And that was brutal. It was really brutal. Frankly, it was because we went a different direction. I had some mail scrubbers, people who were going line by line, looking at all our properties and pulling those off the mail list. And I kind of pivoted. I went to more of a less mail approach to marketing and they had to go. That was four. And then another one was a sales assistant who... Just, we had started listing basically everything with realtors. And so that was part of it. There wasn't as much work for this person, but the other part was just the role had changed. There was more. And this person could not rise to the occasion. They couldn't take on what we actually needed.

Maybe it's "Buy Back Your Time" by Dan Martell. There's the "Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it." Or maybe that's "Traction." I don't remember, man. "Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it" - somewhere in one of those books. That's really how you know. People have to understand the role and what the responsibilities are. They have to want to do that role for whatever compensation you're paying them. And they also have to have the capacity to do it. And if any one of those things are not met, then it's not the right person for that role.

On firing, it is really hard. And I think a lot of people struggle with this. And I think the first place you need to look when you're kind of making the decision to fire somebody is, what did you do? Is it your fault? You got to look at yourself. You were the first person to look at. And so you got to ask yourself, did I set this person up for success? Did I clearly communicate all expectations? When those expectations were not met, did I give feedback and provide opportunity for that employee to rise up and meet those expectations?

Justin: If the answer to those things are no, then maybe you still need to fire them, but it's your fault. If the answer is yes to all those things, how many times do you let this go? Is it like three strikes and you're out? Or is it like, I've done it all once and you didn't do it and you're gone?

That's a great question. It depends on what it is. The risk of firing somebody too late is that the rest of your team sees that and starts to feel like they're not working in an equitable business. They see that and they see that you are kind of a weak leader that tolerates underperformance. And that's not good. And then they also just are, it's not fair. It's not fair to the team.

And so what you're really trying to do and trying to protect is everybody on the team. As a leader of your team, you cannot prioritize one person, like your own feelings and the feelings of this person you need to fire. You need to prioritize the entire organization and your team. And the right thing to do when you have an underperformer that the rest of the team recognizes as well, especially, is let them go. I mean, first, provide them the opportunity to improve, provide clear expectations of how to improve, get them to commit to working towards those expectations. And if then they still cannot meet them, they have to go. There's just no other way around it.

Ajay: So good, man. And I think it's such a callout to leadership. Justin said the leadership was one of the most valuable things in his background. And you just see it and hear it as you're talking about your culture here. What's that old expression you hear as kids? Just like one bad apple makes a basket rotten or something? It only takes one bad apple. And if there's one person on your team that's either lowering the bar or toxic to the culture, it'll affect everybody else there. And then it's an insult to everybody that has those high standards in that performance if you let lack of performance or lack of respect in the workplace continue.

Justin: I was meeting with a friend over the weekend, kind of explaining I had a hard day Friday, so on and so forth. And he shared with me an anecdote that I think rings really true. It's contrary to what most people believe. I think most people think that by firing somebody, everybody's going to be sad. The whole team's going to be sad. We're letting this person go. Part of our team is leaving. They're going to be worried. They're going to be sad.

If you do this the right way, that is the exact opposite of what happens. So the story is a mutual friend of ours works for a big oil company. They went through some very deep cuts, a one-time kind of deep cut, basically like get rid of the chaff type of a cut. And everybody was worried. They were like, "Man, everybody's going to be sad. We're going to be like, morale is going to be so low. Productivity is going to be so low after this cut."

Justin: But instead, what happened is everybody who was left was a high performer. Everybody who was left was bringing the most value to the company. They all felt validated in that. And they were just like, "Go at it, man." People were positive. They saw a lot of the waste disappear. They felt valued as employees. They felt respected by their leadership because the people that were not holding up their end of the workload and the bargain were the ones who were let go. And it really just invigorated the company and invigorated the culture. And that is what actually happens if you do this process right, not the sadness. There may be a little bit of sadness, right? People make friendships. I get it. So I'm not going to discount all of human emotions, but you will have a better, more trusting team that feels respected.

Seth: I'm curious, when you have somebody who's not a high performer, how often are you able to just do or say the right things and they do become a high performer? Are they a low performer because you're not doing something right? Or is it because you just hired wrong or they're in the wrong role? I don't know. Are there any like magic buttons? Like do this and look at better.

Justin: Yeah, I don't think there is a magic button. I think you have to look at, again, those three things. Do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity to do it? The capacity to do it really is a them thing. Or it's a you picking the wrong person for the role, right? Maybe you didn't evaluate their capabilities well enough on the hiring side.

And I am not like a great hirer. I think I do have a knack for understanding the motivations of people and how that will fit into my culture and organization. But I think what I'm better at is maybe communicating what type of culture we have. And that is almost in itself sort of a self-selection. The people that want to be a part of that are the people that will continue on and accept the job. The people that don't want to be a part of that will not.

I don't think anybody should really inflate their ego on how well they are at hiring. You're going to make bad hires. You're going to make a mistake. I have made multiple mistakes and I've had to let people go. And we've paid the price, right? We've spent a lot of money and time and energy training people, building them up in our systems and our processes, only to have to vacate that role and fill it again and put in all that energy again.

Seth: People who were in this long ago, I almost feel like they've had a harder time with it because they kind of saw how things used to be. And they've got this baggage of expectations from the old world. And it's just been, frankly, hard to change with the times, but it sounds like you've clearly done that well. How did you do that? Is there some key difference in what you're doing? Like, are you marketing in a different way or are you increasing your offers? Or just help me understand, how have you been able to keep up with the way the world is today?

Justin: I would say that I started this business kind of in the transition. People who started their businesses, maybe like 2016, 17, 18, 19, maybe even into COVID times, 2020, there was a certain way that things worked. You send a bunch of mail, you get a bunch of responses, you do deals. And then in 2020, a lot of folks started getting into the space because people had more time, they were working from home, a lot of people were laid off, they were trying to explore these opportunities that allow them to continue to make money for their family. And property values kept going up. And the getting was good, 2020, 2021, 2022.

So I started at the end of 2021. And I feel like it started to transition pretty significantly at the end of 2022. So I was really only in the good getting, if you will, for about six, seven months. And then it started to shift. Deals started to get harder to get. And that's when I started pivoting along with the changes to the market.

I thrive in maybe a little bit of chaos. I think I just get really bored if I don't have so much going on. I think to some people that might seem incredibly stressful, but I got my three kids. I got this business. I'm doing the podcast. I'm building a new house. Things are just going crazy. But I feel so much like vigor when I get up and I'm starting to work because there's just so much I can accomplish. Part of that is just I like to be agile. I like to try out new tools. I'm very, very action oriented. If I think something is going to benefit the business myself, I think it's going to work. I am going to try it. I'm going to do it. If you've seen those memes of the bell curve of like people adopting things - I'm like that early adopter type person. I'm just, let's go.

Seth: What are you doing for marketing? Is it like, are you still doing mail only or is it part or?

Justin: I do mail. I primarily cold call. Cold calling is my primary marketing channel. Back in end of 2023, when Launch Control went down, suddenly I had employees that needed to work and we couldn't do any active outbound marketing other than mail. And so I immediately switched to cold calling, got the cold calling software, brought my team in, brought all our data over and immediately started cold calling and we had a lot of success like very early of generating leads and so I quickly scaled that team up and since then it's become my primary marketing source.

Earlier you were saying that for a new person direct mail is like the only option. Why do you say not cold calling?

Justin: Let me clarify that statement. Direct mail is really the only option if you are by yourself and you don't have anyone else to help you. It's not the only option. I want to be clear. You can totally text. You can totally cold call. You can do those things yourself. It's just you may find very quickly that that takes so much of your time, you don't have any time to do the more important things in your business, which is focus on scaling it. Especially early on is negotiate deals, talk to landowners.

If I were to advise somebody today of how to start a land business, I actually wouldn't recommend starting with mail. I recommend starting with a cold caller. I recommend starting right from day one with hiring a cold caller, figuring out all your data, figuring out your software and processes, do it yourself for a week or two. Just do it. Figure out what they're going to be doing, figure out the lead flow, figure out the strategies you want to use, and then hire a cold caller. Because the price per contract, price per deal is significantly lower than mail for me.

And every market is different. There's so many factors that impact how effective your marketing is. For me, a cold calling contract, to get a property under contract from cold calling is less than one third the cost of mail.

Seth: Are you using like an agency or something? Or do you have all your own people in-house to do cold calling?

Justin: I have all my people in-house. Obviously, we've been talking about leadership. I love leading teams. I really do. It's one of the things that I find the most value in. So I wanted both the team to be in-house, but I also, because of that, I have a lot finer control over qualification of leads. I can specify exactly what types of properties I want them to forward on to my acquisition manager, lead manager, and now US-based closer.

We can change that over. We can dial it in, dial it back. Every time we see a subdivide opportunity, boom, we don't even need to qualify on price. We move that over because we're going to make an offer on it. And it's hard to do that when you outsource it. It's not impossible. There's a lot of great companies. I know you've had Joe Roberts on here. Joe's a great guy. And I think he runs a really solid operation. It's just for me, I'm trying to drive that price down as low as I can. And I have the skill set to manage that team.

Seth: What if somebody doesn't love managing a team? I can clearly see you love leadership and you're very good at it. If somebody doesn't love it, or they're not good at it, and they have no interest in doing that, do they just kind of need to settle for a smaller business? What would you recommend they do?

Justin: There are obviously great companies that you can outsource to. You just have to know that it's going to be more expensive than if you bring it in-house. There's no way around it. Those companies are providing a service. They're handling all of the headache for you. You take on all that headache of hiring, firing, evaluating, training, paying, everything. You have to do it when you take it in-house. So there's a ton of advantages to outsourcing. The main is just maybe the brain damage that happens, especially if you don't like that.

If you're doing something that you don't like, you're going to be pretty miserable in your business. So certainly that is an option. I just think you're going to make slightly lower margins on the deals that you do than maybe if you're optimizing your OPEX. Maybe another option is that you could focus on larger deals in a smaller quantity. And I know there's a lot of people that do that type and have businesses bigger than mine, much bigger than mine, who are focusing on larger deals, but just way fewer of them. Because not everybody wants a huge team and wants to do 150 deals a year. That's a lot. It really is.

Would it be better for me personally if I was by myself and I just did five big subdivides a year? Probably. In terms of how much stress and how much work I'm doing. And I talked about this at Ajay's event. And I really see this business not just serving me, but serving all of my employees and all of their families. And I think that's genuine good in the world, that there are 50 families that are elevating their lives because of this business.

And maybe not to get too religious, but I am a Christian, and my God is a creating God. He worked, he created. And one of the first things he tells people to do in the Bible is to take dominion over the earth, be fruitful and multiply. "Subdue the earth," I think are the words in one translation. And to me, that means building something.

Seth: It is interesting how you look at the creation, the Genesis account talking about when God made man and all this stuff. Adam worked before the fall. So work is not a punishment. It's actually what we're made to do. And especially the leadership thing. I do think good leaders are in severely short supply. There's a lot of people out there who could be good leaders, but they maybe never get to a point of being able to do that and execute it. Other people who are terrible leaders and they're put in that position and do an awful job. So if you're born with a gift or if you've developed that skill and you actually get to that point and have the opportunity and grow a huge team - yeah, I agree. That's a huge service to the world and anybody who gets to be on your team. I commend you for that. I hope you can grow the biggest team you can.

Justin: I mean, there's a limit to it, obviously, at some point. I don't know what that limit is yet. But just kind of on that note that you talked about in Genesis and Adam working, there's this really good children's book that was recommended to me by my friend Sam, by an author named Jordan Raynor, and it's called "The Creator in You." And I bought that book at his recommendation for my kids. It's one of the ones we read regularly. And I think it does a really good job of being true to the gospel and being true to the word of the Bible and explaining to children, what does that mean? What does it mean that our God was a creating God, that he worked with his hands and then he rested? And what does that mean for us? And it just talks about the possibility of things they can do in the world. And I think it's really impactful for, especially for young children to see that. And so I recommend it. If anybody is in the market for children's books, I'd recommend that book.

Seth: I've heard of Jordan Raynor. I haven't heard of that book though. So I'll totally check that out. You got a couple more minutes, Justin, as we wrap this up?

Justin: I do.

Seth: I haven't done this much lately, but I'm going to do it now. We're going to ask three final questions just to learn a little bit more about you. Because this is always kind of fun just to hear what you're going to say. So one question here, it's actually two questions in one: what dreams have you let go of and what dreams are you still holding on to?

Justin: Man, good question. When I joined the military, I was in college at the time. And when I joined, I didn't really know if I was going to love it or like it or whatever. But when I started doing it, when I got through training and I started serving on the submarine, man, did I love it. I thought it was incredible. Just the crazy things that we would do and the sense of mission and purpose, I'd never experienced anything like that.

When I got married to my wife, I'd already signed up to be in the military. And so she made it pretty clear she's not a military wife. And I, at the time, did not think I was going to do any more than five years. I was like, "I'm committed to, we're going to serve this initial tour and I'm going to get out." So that was the agreement from the beginning. But after experiencing it, my heart kind of changed towards it.

I think part of it is like when you're good at something, it's hard to leave that. If you've spent a ton of time working towards something, you've invested thousands of hours into this thing and you've gotten really good at it. Leaving it all behind is incredibly hard. You know, your identity can be wrapped up in that thing and you feel like you're losing a part of yourself.

And so at the time when I was coming up on the final parts of my initial junior officer tour, my wife and I had discussions and I kind of was advocating for like, "Hey, let's stay in. I'm enjoying this a lot." But, you know, we had some really hard discussions, but came back to the agreement we had made when we first were married and made the decision to separate fully from the military and move back to Houston, where we're from. Because we wanted to start as a family and we had other dreams that we wanted to achieve.

A dream that I'm still holding onto - oh man, you know, I have this dream that I want five kids. And so I don't think that's going to happen. I think my wife is going to call it hard at four, but I am still holding onto that dream that I can be a grandpa with like 20 grandchildren or more. I'm holding on to that dream. We'll see what happens.

Seth: If I could have a hundred more of the ones I have, I would totally do it. I don't think my wife would agree, but I would. Cool, man. Thanks for sharing. So what is one of your best memories?

Justin: Man, there's so many memories.

Seth: You sound like somebody who generally loves life. I feel like I've heard you say like, "I love this. I love that," which is really cool and encouraging to see that. It's just fun to see somebody who appreciates all the things life has to offer. So it doesn't surprise me that you probably have a lot of these.

Justin: Honestly, I think my - oh man, I might get choked up talking about it. One of my favorite memories is the birth of my daughter, Nora, my first child. I think there's very few things that... Actually, that's not true. There's a lot of things that people share across all people. And having children and experiencing being a parent is one of those common, unifying experiences that people across time and location have experienced. It is magical, it is unbelievable, and just seeing her face for the first time just brings tears to my eyes.

Now I have three kids. My oldest is five, she's in kindergarten. My son is three, and my youngest daughter is nine and a half months and she just started walking, which is insane, which means a lot of bruises and stuff on her face now because you know she's not very good at walking, she's just kind of like does it. That memory of just becoming a parent is just seared into my brain.

Seth: Yeah, it really does kind of like a switch in your brain. I think I mean everybody says that being a parent changes everything and it really does. And I remember hearing that all the time before I had kids but when I had them and they were mine I was like, "Oh now I get it. This is amazing."

Justin: That is the fire, the catalyst that started me along this investing and business-owning journey. It was because I was working this W-2 eight hours a day, nine hours a day, whatever it was, commuting 30 minutes to an hour each way. My wife was working her job, which was very stressful as well. We had one child, COVID hit. We got to experience this incredibly special time and still work our jobs, obviously, to a lesser extent because of the way things were back then. But we had to spend so much time with her and then we started going back to the office and then we were having my son and my wife's getting a new job, I was getting a new job at the same company, just different roles that were going to require us to hire somebody to take care of our children in the morning and in the afternoon and like we were going to basically have one hour a day with them and that was just so unacceptable. I had to find something else that gave me complete control over my time.

Seth: Last question, when was the last time you left your comfort zone and what did you learn?

Justin: I don't know why this is popping into my head. This is probably not the actual last time I left my comfort zone, but this is one maybe in the last couple of years that I really left my comfort zone. For my wife's 33rd birthday, I threw a really big kind of surprise party for her. I hired a party planner and there were like 60 people there. We rented out this brewery. It was awesome.

And that in itself obviously was like a big gift to her. But I wrote a song for her and I had hired a musician to be there. And so I played the song in front of like all of my friends and like people at my church and my wife and I sang it in front of her and I was so nervous. And I can play guitar pretty well, and so I wasn't worried about the playing and I can sing pretty decently. I play in the worship band at our church, but I play lead guitar. I'm never singing the songs. And so it's just kind of nerve-wracking to be up there in front of all these people so exposed playing the song that I wrote for my wife that was a little cheesy and a little sweet and really personal.

What did I learn? You know, I think it's worth stepping out of your comfort zone in a lot of cases for the people that you love, especially for the things you're passionate about your business, maybe. And I think it's hard to grow if you don't, if you have an aversion to stepping out of your comfort zone. Like, how do you - I mean, it's like a muscle, right? Ajay's posting all these posts in the gym, man, leg day. I love seeing it. I'm super motivated. I haven't - I've been kind of on a six-month hiatus from working out, which is super convicting to watch you post these things. But it's like a muscle. You push it to the limit or past its limit a little bit and then it gets stronger. And it's the same thing with that comfort zone.

Seth: Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and experience with us. Awesome conversation. People want to find out more about you. What should they do?

Justin: I love that you asked me that. So as alluded to earlier, I have just started a new podcast called The Ground Game Podcast. We launched like two-ish weeks ago. We've released episode five. My co-host, Clay Hepler, who you have had on this program, and I listened to that episode. It was incredible. We are coming together each week and we're talking about really kind of an inside look at our businesses, maybe a little deeper than most people would go on another podcast.

We're kind of carrying a theme of looking at quarterly goals and giving updates on those quarterly goals at the beginning. We're going through deal reviews, kind of at a high level, but we can get into some details of deals we are actually working on and what is going good, what is going bad. We have a little section we're calling team building tactics where we talk about, hey, how are we managing our team?

You can check out thegroundgame.io. You can go on Apple podcasts and Google or Spotify. I do have a website - it hasn't been updated in quite some time so maybe by the time this episode comes out I will update it, but it's called justinpiche.com. It's kind of like a coaching website. I'm not actively marketing for new clients but if the right person comes who wants to work with me then I certainly like working with people who go after things and have big goals. Other than that, you can find me on social media, mostly it's called @scoutingforland.

Seth: Justin Piche - P-I-C-H-E in case anybody is not looking at the screen, they just listened to this. Justin thanks again, it's great to know you, great to talk with you and I hope we'll talk again soon in 2025.

Justin: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me Seth, a pleasure as always brother.