Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 209, and today we're talking with our good friend Dave Denniston.

So Dave and I have been working together more and more over the past couple of years here. He and I were just acquaintances for several years, but it was in 2023 when he invited me to be a part of the Land Unconference. Then we did a smaller Unconference event called the Inner Circle in October of 2023, and we did it again the next year. Then we went to Italy this past October.

So he and I have been working together a lot. I've gotten to hear a lot about what he's doing and see how his business is working, and it just keeps getting better and better. Today, I wanted to sit down with Dave and just kind of pick apart all the different things he has going on and also hear about some of the big initiatives and new things he's doing in 2025 with the Land Unconference, which is just an awesome event. It's really the thing to be at if you can ever make it to it. So, Dave, welcome. How's it going?

Dave: It's good to be back. Made it back again, man. I feel lucky.

Seth: I think you're one of the few people who have made it on here three times. That's very unusual. So good to have you back.

Dave: The Holy Trinity. I don't know how to be able to top it. This might be it. This might be my final appearance on REtipster.

Seth: So for those in the audience who maybe haven't heard of you or haven't heard our previous conversations, why don't you tell us a little bit about your business or businesses? I know you're doing a lot of different things. So what are the different businesses you're running right now? And maybe dive in a little bit more about your land business specifically.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So very quick summary: I graduated in 2003 from college with a finance degree and got started in financial planning, which is what I've been doing since. So 22 years going on in the financial planning world, which I love and I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon. Some days suck, but for the most part, I love doing that.

I got into land in 2017, so I've been at that for seven years now, primarily doing a lot of cheaper lots. We've been slowly moving our way upwards over the last year and a half. I also got into doing some hard money lending. We've been doing Unconference stuff now since about 2019 on a smaller scale up to 2023 when Seth got involved in it. And now I have a new thing, Leadership in Land, which is not really a business—it's more like knowledge and giving away lots of great information for people. You can just go to leadershipinland.com to check that out.

I've scaled using other people's time because, as you can tell, all the different things that I'm doing take up time altogether. So I've had to hire lots of people over the years to help manage that load. Obviously, there's still a lot on my plate. It's not passive income by any means—it's all very active income, but I love doing it. It's fun.

Seth: As it relates to your land business specifically, you've got a pretty big operation—I mean, bigger than most people I know. Can you get a little more into, like, what is your deal volume per year? How many people are on your team? What sizes are your deals?

Dave: Last year, we had about three, a little over $3 million in revenue. I haven't finished crunching the numbers yet—we're recording this on January 7th, so I haven't updated through the end of the year yet. But we were very, very close to it. So I'm pretty confident we got over that; it might be 3.1. I don't know; it doesn't matter. It's about the same.

I will point out that not all revenue is equal, though. When someone looks at a revenue number like that, there are pros and cons that come with that. Terms deals, for example, take a heck of a lot of work to manage. That revenue was about 1.4 million of the three, which includes early payoffs, including people defaulting. There's various document fees and stuff that we charge. And then there's cash flips, which was, off the top of my head, I want to say it was like 1.2 million or something, 1.3 million out of that business.

We definitely do a lot of cash flips. Revenue-wise, it's about the same as the terms income. And we have about 15 to 20 people to help me manage all of that. The team fluctuates. I just hired in the last week three more people, so we're probably closer to 18 or 19. We were as high as 25 and then got rid of a few different people over time or they quit or whatever. So it's definitely a relatively decent size. Although I will point out there are other people who have far larger teams than me. I've known people that have teams of 40 or 50 or something like that, which even for me, I'm like, I don't want that large of a team. That's too much.

I would also point out that with having that large of a team, I'm working in the business part-time. My profit is probably a heck of a lot lower than a lot of other people doing less revenue because I scale the team and I'm putting a lot into the team to get there.

Seth: You consider yourself a part-time land investor, right? Because it's funny because I know that when you look at the overall pie of how much time all your different businesses take each week or each month and then also like the revenue that each one throws off each year, land is like the biggest one, right? Would you say?

Dave: Like in 2023, for example, it was a pretty darn good year for me. I think I netted like 600K or something like that from the land side. Last year was a pretty crappy year for me in terms of profit. I'm probably walking away with 250 to 300K, or something like that in profit. So last year, for example, it was about equal to the financial planning. In 2023, it was a lot bigger—it was probably two to three times as big as my financial planning net, for which I'm grateful to have multiple streams of income so that I'm not just dependent on the land thing.

Seth: You're pretty good at diversification, right? Is that part of your overall philosophy? Like, is that why you're doing so many things that are kind of unrelated? I mean, I guess they're not totally unrelated, but you know, they're... one doesn't make everything else crash if it stops working?

Dave: I would definitely encourage people to listen back to a couple of other conversations because I give some details on that. I'll give a very short version though. So 2003, I graduate from college, right? And I start out with Edward Jones doing door knocking, which was really flipping hard to go door to door as a 22-year-old asking people for their life savings to hand over to you.

So I ended up working for somebody else. And then I made an acquisition—I inherited some money from my great aunt, and we had no mortgage and any of that stuff. So I was completely debt-free. And then I was 27 at the time. And this is in 2008. And I was like, you know what, now's the time to take a risk. And so on August 1, 2008, I closed on a financial planning acquisition. At the time it was $3 million, and I put a million dollars down, fully leveraging everything—money from family, all that stuff. And guess what happened about a month later? Everything came to a standstill and it sucked. And so I promised myself at that time, I am never going to be solely dependent on one thing ever again. And here we are 16, 17 years later with what I got going on now.

Seth: Sure. There's a lot more I want to get into about your land business, but there's a couple of things I want to make sure we talk about before we get much further.

So let's switch gears quick and talk about the Land Unconference. Tell us a little bit about the history of why you decided to do this. And I know one big change this year in particular is that you're basically trying to like double the size of it, right? So tell me about why you chose to do that.

Dave: Yeah. Well, it's funny because Ajay's here. He was part of the birth of the new Unconference, if you will. So 2019, I was two years into land and I really had some communities I was involved in, but it didn't work out. Again, you could listen to prior talk about that last time. And so I wanted to help create community of something that isn't just one brand. And I think REtipster does an awesome job of this.

Regardless of where people are from, you welcome them in with open arms. So I love that about Seth. And I'm sure many people listening to this appreciate that about him. But I think for me personally, I wanted to have events. You don't have any events typically, right? So you don't have annual get-togethers to bring people regardless if they came through Bosch, Land Geek, Land Academy, five billion other people nowadays that have communities.

So many of those are so insular where all they want to talk about is their community. They're not welcoming people from other communities like REtipster does so well. And so I said, let me put on an event where we can do that. So Ajay was there with me. And maybe it'd be good Ajay for you to tell the story a little bit of what it was like, so people don't just hear it from me.

Ajay: Yeah, no, I'd love to. I think it's so cool because I've seen the evolution of the Unconference. So the first one I attended was May 2022. And this is funny, a little behind the scenes - I can't remember if we mentioned this in the last interview, but Dave didn't like me at first. We had beef... no, I'm just kidding. But Dave is, how do I say this, particular in how he likes quality and quality control. Is that fair to say, Dave?

Dave: Absolutely, as a piece of that. You want to control the rooms you put together.

Ajay: And so you had a bit of an application process even in 2022 when there were just about 10 of us, which I guess you could argue is even more important when it's a small room like that. And our mutual friend Callan Faulkner, whom I love dearly, knew me pretty well at the time and was like, "Hey, I invited this Ajay guy and he's coming." And Dave was like, "What the heck? I did not vet this guy."

And I didn't know any of that. So I'm a young, naive, 23-year-old land investor, loving life, and making friends. And here there's this thing going on in Minneapolis. I live in Chicago at the time. I jumped in my Honda CR-V and drove on over. And I had a phenomenal time. I made a lot of friends at that Unconference that I am really good friends with to this day—Andy Rouse, obviously Callan, Drew Haney, and those are all people I still talk to this week. These are really good friends of mine to this day.

But what was so cool about the Unconference and what sets it apart from so many other events is that there's no real upsell, backsell, or cross-sell. No big incentives to do anything like that. And not that there's anything wrong with those things—it just changes the motive of the event. It allowed all of us investors to get deeper into our own businesses. There's not people talking on stages, presenting about certain topics that are aligned to their overall interests.

It's, "Hey, let's break bread and let's talk about what you're struggling with in your business." And every other brain in this room is going to help you come up with a solution. So getting that dedicated attention to your business in a room that Dave had hand-selected with other operators of people that are of similar or higher caliber from a revenue perspective was just phenomenal as a room.

So you learn a bunch, you have breakthroughs, you build super real relationships, you can get real, you can get raw, and you can get dirty in a professional sense. And so it was just overall really cool to see that in a room of 10. Fast forward to 2023, and Dave did such a great job. He said, "Hey, I'm one guy. I can't lead a room of 50 people. Let's bring a bunch of other smart people together to lead rooms like Seth Williams, like Callan, like Justin Sliva." Again, mutual friends of ours who we like and trust and are smart. And now they're leading rooms to help facilitate conversation.

In 2024, you curated even smarter people. No, I'm just saying that because I got to be a moderator last year. And so I'm teasing and I loved it. I loved our room. Dave, you actually attended; you sat in on my room the second day. So I like to think it went really well. And we had some really raw conversation that I will not talk about in a podcast setting because we got really deep on, like, a human level, beyond just land business technique, tactic, brouhaha. It's what's going on in your head and how do we make sure you're not limiting yourself in your business because of some personal head work?

So anyways, all that to say, it's been fun seeing the evolution and I am pumped for 2025 because I get to be a moderator again. I've already got it on my calendar and I'm excited, especially because Minneapolis is awesome that time of year and August is when, boom, it is perfect. Not right now. Seth feels me. It's about zero degrees out here in Minnesota today. But in August, it'll be like a perfect 80 degrees. Our friends from Texas can come and cool down up north.

Dave: But really, I think Ajay described it so well. What I want to add to it is that there's so many events where you get everybody in one room and there's someone talking at you. And what I want to facilitate is that I'm naturally an introvert. If there's like a big group of people, I'll kind of hide in the corner unless I know people. But if I don't really know anybody, it's really hard for me personally. Like Ajay is like the complete opposite. He'll work the room getting to know like 5 billion people.

But I wanted to make something that for someone like me, we can facilitate conversations that are purposeful in small groups. So rather than having 50 of us all in one room together, we break off into five groups of 10. And what we're doing this year, for which I'm taking more risk—you know, it's taking more money for me because we have to get a hotel now. We've had it here at my office, which we'll continue to. In order to grow it, we have to now get a hotel. I have to buy a room block and you have to deal with this kind of thing, which is an additional risk on my end.

But I want to be able to serve the community. I have to have more moderators to make it work. I'm hoping and believing that we can fill this thing, and I think there's so much value for folks to come to something like this, where you get to work on your business. You're not just getting talked at—you are talking with other land investors to develop relationships and get help on your specific issues, rather than just talking generically about the newest strategy, for which there's room.

Don't get me wrong. I have friends that run those kinds of events, and I think there's a wonderful place for that. But I think there's also a place for smaller, intimate conversations and relationship building where you get specific help on your business, which is what ultimately this is all about—without the upsell of "buy my $30,000 coaching program and my $100,000 coaching program."

Because guess what? With all my streams of different income, I don't need to be doing this. I do it because I want to, because it's fun. I enjoy it. It brings me joy giving back to people. As a matter of fact, it's probably the least profitable thing that I do in terms of money. But in terms of relationships, it's paid many dividends. And I love being with my friends and sharing experiences and making those memories for other people.

Ajay: I want to touch on how unprofitable and risky events actually are just really briefly, because guys, if you have not thrown an event before, especially one of magnitude where you need a hotel block, you need a conference space, a venue, you have food and beverage minimums—I don't think you realize when Dave signs these contracts, he is committing to like, at least for me, when I threw the summit last year, I was outlaying; I think it was like 50 grand regardless of if people bought tickets or not.

And I remember when we finally sold our like 48th ticket, I looked at my wife and was like, "Hey, we're about to break even." She's like, "Oh, cool." I'm like, "I don't think you realized this was coming out of our pocket if we didn't sell these tickets." I just want to highlight—you're right, these are not profitable. These are not profitable streams. I mean, you're at a 15% to 30% profit margin, maybe. You're taking a massive amount of risk up front.

But truthfully, they're a labor of love, is what me and my friend Sumner Healy always say. These events, they're truly because you love putting together these events and bringing people together and you want to do something good for the community. And Dave, I have seen you just serve the land community time and time again. So I want to call that out so people realize Dave's putting a lot on the line here personally for this.

Seth: I'll just say that some of the most important person-to-person conversations I think I've ever had as a land investor have been at Land Unconference events, just the nature of how it works, where you're put in these groups, where the whole point of it is to be real, to let the guard down, show what's really going on. Like what you say is confidential. You don't have to worry about stuff being shared around. It's a great environment to do this kind of stuff.

And I think most of these events are good for meeting people. And this is definitely no exception to that, but it goes so much further than that. I mean, every single time I walk away from it, there's so many aha moments and so many notes taken about just such relevant things that I have a hard time finding anywhere else. Like you don't see people talking about this in Facebook groups. And even when we went to Italy, I mean, I got to know the people on that trip in a way that I just couldn't do any other way. Like you can't do this on Zoom calls. There's things that come out of these conversations when you're living side by side with somebody day after day that it's like, "Oh, so that's really what's going on. So that's how this really works for you."

So I appreciate both of you guys' willingness to put money on the line and the risk and the time to doing these events, because it's not easy. And it is kind of scary, especially when you're starting this kind of thing. So it's exciting to see where this is going for you, Dave.

Dave: Thank you. As a participant, too, I want to put out there that there is an ROI that hopefully you get. And it's so hard to measure what that can be. So as a business owner, I get it with hosting it. The network that I've been able to build up is amazing. So many people I could turn to with questions. If you have a question on hard money lending, Eric Schraga has come to the last couple of events, which wasn't really existing at the time. And for me, I mean, it lowered my cost of capital on big deals from like 40% down to like 18 or less, like 6% on some deals.

And so you get huge ROI. I mean, think about that. I had one deal I got in Wisconsin where we bought for 80, sold for like 200. I used Eric for that. And that ended up saving me the equivalent of 20% on that gross, right? I would have had like $25,000 less in my pocket because of going to that event and getting that idea and having the relationship.

Dave: So there's a return on time, but there also should be, at the end of the day, hopefully an ROI that you get, whether you're partnering with other investors or getting that new tool or new idea or whatever. But it's so hard to measure. I can't tell you what you're going to get out of it because I don't know what you're going to do, who you're going to talk to, or what that's going to be like. But I promise you that you will meet great people. And at the end of the day, what you get out of it is what you bring to it. The more that you give, the more that you're going to get.

Seth: Now with making this event bigger, does that change the dynamic or even the schedule of what's going to happen or anything like that? People out there who have been to past Land Unconference events, should they expect anything different or is it kind of more of the same, just with more people in the room?

Dave: Yeah, well, what we're doing—because on one hand, here at our building, we have five different conference rooms. So it's really easy to fit in 50, maybe 60 people here. But that's kind of the limit. And as we get to try to get to 100, well, now I had to look for space outside.

And so essentially what's going to be happening is that for people that have been here before, it'll be the same exact feel. Because there's going to be 50 of us, 60 of us mingling in an area together and set aside in rooms of 10 to 12. And there'll be another group at the hotel that we're going to be using. There will be another four, five rooms of people that will be mingling together there. So it's not going to be a hundred people all in one space.

It's going to be divided among there, which also means that for my end, we've had cruises we've done before. We've done some cooking class, for example, last year. So I have to look at what the capacity is and how I want to handle some of those evening events with more people coming. So to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do yet. I will tackle that problem when we get there.

Seth: In terms of the type of person who should or should not show up to this kind of event, has that changed at all? Or tell us about who your intended target audience is for this.

Dave: Yeah, for sure. I think it is not meant for someone who's just started out. If you have just sent out your first five or 10,000 mailers, this is not the conference for you. If you've just started text messaging, if you've just started dropping ringless voicemails, and that's the first thing that you're doing, this is not the place for you.

We're looking for people who ideally have been in the land business for at least a year and have a minimum of $50,000 of revenue, ideally higher. That way you'll be with your peers that are going through the same thing. Different experiences, but going through the same kind of things at the same time. So we'll separate people by revenue level, as we always have.

The higher your revenue level, I'm going to be asking for proof. Show me that you have actually done what you've gotten done because we want to make sure people that have $3 million plus in revenue have much different problems than someone with a hundred thousand dollars.

And so putting people with their peer group, I think, is so helpful—forming people that are going through the same thing. These are people that have very similar problems. And so that's how we'll be doing it. And so how I'm going to do that by hotel and stuff yet, I'm not sure. We'll figure it out. We might still kind of have, here's million dollar people in this room, and in the next room, you have the $50,000 to $100,000 people. That way, during breaks and stuff and lunches, they can still have a chance to talk and pick the brain of one person or the other.

I'll tell you, in my experience, I mean, I've learned stuff from people with far, far less revenue because there's still something to be learned from everybody because they're doing stuff that I'm not doing. So even in the mingling, as you go on the cruise or whatever, talk to everybody that you can and find those two or three or four people that could be partners or could make a difference in your business and stay in touch.

Seth: I guess if a person isn't quite sure if they fit the profile, they can just go to landonconference.com and apply, right?

Dave: And that'll tell me eventually whether or not they're a good fit. But that is the place to go if you want to take the first step and see if it might work for you.

Seth: Yes, sir. Let's pivot a little bit to Leadership in Land. Tell me about this.

Dave: Yeah. So as I talked about at the beginning, I've hired and fired and people have walked away from my business a lot over the last seven years and have some people have been with me five or six years, some people less. And I really felt in the land space, there's a lot of wonderful education. If you want to learn how to do land, Seth has a great course on that. You want to learn about owner financing; Seth has a great course on that. You want to learn about flips; there's plenty of courses that tell you how to do a flip. Ajay has a great course on how to close and sell techniques—that wasn't existing a year ago.

And so as the space is maturing, I think niching is more common. And for me, I have a great passion for hiring and systems and operations and am really trying to figure out this mystery of how you hire the right people, retain the right people and lead your team. I'm slowly but surely building out a free course and a podcast that's available at school. If you go to leadershipinland.com, it'll take you to a school page where you just give your information and boom, you have access.

And we're releasing stuff every one to two weeks of new content as my business is changing, as I'm talking to different land investors to share what the best practices are. How do you hire and retain people and incentivize people? And what are good books and what are the tools that you're using to help specifically around leadership?

Seth: And you do like interviews with other land investors, right? Is it mostly people with teams to get their insights on how they do that?

Dave: Yeah. Some people might just have one or two people. Some of the people I've interviewed have very, very small teams, but we don't have any solopreneurs that don't have somebody. Everyone that I've interviewed has at least one or two, or in some cases, 10, 15, 20 people on their team. So a lot of different sizes of businesses and different people to relate to and get information for.

Seth: So if anybody wants to check out Leadership in Land, just go to leadershipinland.com. Land Unconference is landunconference.com. I'll have links to both those things in the show notes for this episode, retipster.com/209. Anything else you want to talk about with either one of those things, Dave?

Dave: No, I mean, just come join and let's learn together at both of these things. These things, like I said, are, at the end of the day, a passion project and I love doing them. So join me on the journey and let's learn together.

Ajay: Can I jump in for a second here too? I just want to highlight; I think it's so easy to miss how valuable a lot of the stuff Dave's talking about is. Like leadership is a broad term. This can mean a ton of things. And inside of that are so many skills. I know one example you listed there, Dave, was hiring and firing. Holy hot darn, the amount of investors I have chatted with that really struggle when it comes to hiring! You ask yourself questions: overseas or US-based? Compensation package? Roles and responsibilities? Cultural competency in one area versus another?

Should I hire somebody in a main market versus a tertiary market versus XYZ? I mean, there's a whole can of worms in all that stuff. And so I think just having an open place where people are able to talk about a lot of this stuff is so valuable.

Like even myself, guys, it took me almost two years to hire my first VA just out of fear because I had no idea what I was doing. And I still went through a recruiting agency when I did. And so it was like, man, I wish somebody had just held my hand and shown me how to hire when I was six months in, 12 months in, because you can just move so much faster with more people. You can do more inputs and outputs very quickly when you can quadruple the main levers in your business that create outcomes.

And I'm not saying that's what's right for everybody. Because I also know to Dave's point, there are phenomenal leaders in the land space that don't have a hundred staff. I think Brian McCarthy is probably a great example. And as a mutual friend of all of ours, this really smart guy, phenomenal leader, great family man, great man of faith runs a very profitable business whose numbers I will not share right now because it's not my business.

But the point is he does a great job and he's got a small team. At least to my knowledge, I haven't caught up with him in a little bit, but last I knew he had two or three people on his team and they were crushing. And so that's a different type of leader than somebody who's got maybe 20 on their staff, and not that one is better than the other, but man, there's different skills and paths to take and what business you want to run.

So anyways, I just want to highlight that because I get so jacked up about that. And I think it's such an asset to the community, Dave. So thanks for putting that together.

Dave: Absolutely. No, I agree. I mean, there's people that are crushing all my numbers with less. So, you know, it's totally a thing, but that's how my business has turned out. And that's what it is.

Seth: On that whole leadership subject, I've talked to a number of different land investors who previously had big or bigger teams and their teams are getting smaller. I'm sure there's various reasons for this. Maybe AI is taking over, maybe things have just contracted a little bit, maybe—I don't know, whatever.

But are you actively trying to make your team smaller or looking for ways to do that or utilizing AI in any way to say, "I don't need this person anymore"? Or do you have a passion for having a large-ish team like this? I know some people love the leadership thing - they do it because they love it and they love the community and all that stuff. Where do you stand on that? Like, do you want this kind of team or what are your thoughts on it?

Dave: Yeah, well, I'd say, first of all, with being part-time in the business, number one, I have time constraints. So I need people to help, especially with the terms business like I have, where there are payments bouncing, there's people paying off stuff. I mean, we're deeding stuff really super regularly, and we're not going through title. It's self-closing type stuff for those kinds of things that we have going on. So it requires a lot of labor, a lot of manpower with that kind of business.

And that's just what has worked for me. You know, I wish I'd been able to find subdivides that I bought for $100,000 and could sell for $300,000. That's just not what has worked for us. That's just been the way of what has worked for me and my personality and my business. Not to say that we couldn't do that stuff, but when I'm only working part-time in the business and only have so much time, it's a lot easier to keep on doing the same thing than to reinvent the wheel or try and do something else that may or may not work for me.

Dave: Part of it too, I would say, we had a team of like 25 at one point. And we did have AI come in where before we were access scrubbing thousands of records, because when we did the math, it made more sense for us to do that, but it required more manpower. Well now, Land Portal, for example, that we signed off with, we were able to get rid of a chunk of people that were doing all that access scrubbing for us. So there's the possibility that that may continue.

For example, look at lead managers. Well, right now, we actually have an AI agent set up to deal with text messaging and emails that we get. So that's going to reduce the need for lead managers on that end. But right now that can't do audio well. I'm sure our good friend Callan Faulkner and other people are working on it, but every time I've heard it demoed and tried it, voice isn't there yet to be able to take that over. I love the idea of them doing it 24-7 and following up with people. But where we're at today, it's still requiring a decent amount of labor for us, at least, to be able to get to it.

From the time I started seven years ago, it takes so many more flipping mailers to get the number of leads, to get the number of contracts that we want. And it's competitive and it's hard. And I wish I could have less labor in a lot of ways. But for us in my business, with doing the marketing that we do, for example, we have a podcast, we have a YouTube channel, we have some social media stuff. All of that requires time and effort and energy and people working on it in order for it to happen.

Like for example, this year, we want to move from about $3 million revenue to four, right? That's where we really want to hit. In order to do that, my current sales gal is maxed out. She's doing what she can do, right? But I have to hire another sales- Actually, I'm hiring two salespeople right now. We just hired one, about to hire another one probably in the next week in order to be able to hit that goal, which guess what? One or both of them may not work out. Hopefully both do, but I'm hedging my bets in order to help us grow the company to the next level to hit that goal of wanting to get to 4 million, 5 million, 6 million.

Dave: Because for me, I want to go on the journey with people. I'm actually starting this year going to offer ownership in the company, people buying some of my shares that have been with me for a while and are main members of the team that can buy shares from me so that myself and Eric aren't going to be the sole owners, but we'll have third and fourth, very minority owners, potentially as part of the team.

So I want to take people with me. I do enjoy the leadership component. I hate having to constantly follow up with people and "where's this, that, and that," I really do not enjoy that at all. I could foresee a point where AI helps us in reducing some of the headcount and abilities. But as far as we've dove into so far, we ain't there yet. AI generally has been more supplemental, helping with educating, informing, helping to think through issues more so than replacing a lot of manpower.

Seth: I don't know of many people who are offering ownership to their employees in the land business. And I'm curious, what outcome are you hoping to see as a result of doing that?

Dave: I think a few things. Number one is the pride of knowing that you're an owner in the company. You would talk about retention, right? Someone who owns part of the company is a lot less likely to walk away than someone who doesn't. It does create other potential issues, of course. But for me, I think giving that opportunity is important because if someone like my sales gal, Christy, if she can go to someone and say, "Yeah, I'm an owner, I'm a partner in the company," it's a lot stronger of a position. I know, for example, I've heard in the state of Arizona that trying to sell properties on your own, if you are not the owner, could lead to some legal issues. So it helps to avoid those kinds of things potentially too.

Seth: Interesting. I don't know much about that. I've heard of that - I've never looked into it or outside of just hearsay of that being a thing.

Dave: But those can be potential landmines. But mostly it's for the primary things I was just talking about - just pride and reward too. If someone's been with me for a few years, they're making a big impact. I want to show them - they have to buy into it, it's not given, right? They have to buy into it, but it gives them the opportunity to say thank you. We're not just doing this, just me. It's us together that are building this business.

Seth: Initially, when I heard that, I was thinking that maybe you were hoping to get better performance out of people, like they would just work harder or do what it takes to get the job done type thing. And maybe there's some of that going on, but it sounds like it's more so people will think twice before leaving, that kind of thing, or being able to speak from a position of power by saying "I'm a part owner." I hadn't even thought about the legality issue of it, of like, you actually have to be an owner to sell a property. I am curious, like, what does it cost for these people to buy in? And then like, do they get some kind of monthly or quarterly payout as a result of being an owner? I wonder about this just from my own standpoint of like, if I ever did this, how would I incentivize them? Like, how would I even logistically make this work? Like, why would they want to do this?

Dave: I can tell you what I plan on doing. I've talked to some people that are other land investors. I don't want to reveal any names that actually were thinking of doing the same thing. So we're kind of bouncing ideas off of one another and seeing what are you thinking? What are you doing?

Dave: In my particular case, we have a book value for the company. In our case, we have a lot of notes. We have a couple million dollars or $3 million worth of inventory that we haven't sold yet. Hypothetically, the value of that inventory - the notes, we know what they're worth. The inventory is hypothetical in what we think it's worth. And so then we have some liabilities. We have all different kinds of hard money loans and business loans and whatnot that the business is carrying. So assets over here, liabilities over here, we come up with a number that is book value.

Because there are operational costs, my assumption is, hey, if we wanted to, we could just shut everything down and we sell that inventory and we have the existing notes that we could just live off of if we wanted to, if we didn't want to grow the company. And so I like that book value number for that reason, because you know what? Okay, screw it. We're done. We're done mailing. I'm just going to sell this stuff and we're done.

So I would just discount those things by a certain percentage because there are some operational costs. So for me, I'd look at about 15% something like that as a number, and boom, there's your valuation. So for me, it's a discounted book value. Other investors I talk to, they actually separate out the note portfolio that they own 100%. And then they just have the remaining business of the existing inventory that hasn't sold yet. And that's how they're valuing the business.

So there's so many ways to cut it. And then basically, what I'm going to offer is something like a 5% ownership stake. So buying my 90% ownership stake though by 5% of my 90. So now I'm an 85% owner rather than a 90%. So I still have vast majority control in the business. But it gives them a chance to get it.

Dave: And basically, in terms of how distributions would happen, for me personally, every single month, we look at cash flow. And so I like to keep, because we have so many people and so much overhead, right? I like to keep $130,000, $140,000 in the bank. So anything above that on the end of the month becomes an ownership distribution.

So last month, for example, we distributed out, I think it was like 60K to the owners. And that's meant to cover taxes, right? Because being an owner, you have taxes that you owe on income as well as just living expenses or whatever. And so that would just get done on a percentage basis to the owners. So my 90% of that 60K was 54 grand, for example.

So there's some months where there's no distributions because we had a crappy month and the 140,000 went down to 70, which gives me heartache. So we're going to wait for that to get back up again before we do it. Like I was sitting in October, we were having a really stinking bad month. And I was like, oh crap, this is not looking good. Cause I had some hard money loans that were coming up needing to be paid. And I had just gone through 30,000 a month for some other hard money loans. And so I didn't see much in the way of cash sales. And luckily November started turning around leading to a good December and that's the distribution. But it's definitely stressful. And that's me having a bunch of terms properties versus some people that don't have any of that stuff. But we have a lot of overhead compared to a lot of other people too.

Seth: So tell me about the hard money loans thing. So this is, you are a lender, not a funder, right? So you're not like taking title to the properties that you find - it's like a loan where people are paying you? Is it monthly interest and that kind of thing?

Dave: So I'm going to talk from two ends of it. So there's Generation Family Properties, my land business, which is the lendee - we are receiving lending. The benefit of hard money loans in that we're buying a property for $50,000, we get a hard money loan for $40,000 on that property, where if we sell it within a few months, we might just pay 6 or 7% interest on that, and that's it. Whereas if it takes a whole year, now we have to pay back the thing plus 18% to do it, or we're paying on a monthly basis, the interest and the principle is due at the end of that time period.

And so that's us as a company. So what I was just referring to was where we had a property that had been sitting in inventory. We've cut price, cut price, cut price, cut price, tried multiple marketing efforts. Nothing's moving the stuff. And so then we just have to pay back the loan, right? The money is due. It was a one-year term. So we're having to pay that puppy back, which hurts our cash flow, but is not like an expense that we make, right? Because that's inventory. We're having to pay back the loan, that's inventory money. So very painful.

And on the other hand, I mentioned earlier on, one of my streams is I am a hard money lender, a business I own 100% of. Now, I don't do much there. Someone like an Eric Schraga or Josh Biesinger or someone like that do like 5 billion times more volume than I do. I have about 200K tied towards that stuff. So it's very much a side hustle for me. So I also act as a lender as well as the lendee. Keep in mind Generation Family Properties I own 90% of, whereas this hard money stuff I own 100% of. And my intention is to continue to sell some of the companies. So the hard money loans will always be 100% mine is the intention. So it's another stream of income that I own 100% of versus a smaller piece of in the future.

Seth: And I've had a similar dilemma myself because to get into lending for other people or funding other deals, there is some opportunity cost in that. If you choose to divert your money towards that, that means you're not putting it into your own land business. Do you have any kind of formula in your head for how you do this? Or is it kind of just like, "Oh, I don't know, I'm kind of experimenting, we'll just see what happens"?

Dave: Well, here's what I know - if you look at our book value of the stuff I just talked about, it's about $4 million in our land business. That's there, right? $4 million. 90% of that to me is like 3.6 million. That's a huge chunk of my net worth. So for me, what if we get sued? And now all of a sudden, I lose all of that asset? I wanted to diversify, being the financial advisor that I am, to ensure that I'm not too tied to that one stream of income. That way if everything burns down, I still have that one business that can help to maintain the standard of living and hit our goals like we want to. So that's part of my thing for it. Plus then I own 100% versus a smaller percentage in the business.

Seth: On that whole thing, I guess going back a couple of questions about, I guess, divesting a little bit or getting your employees to take ownership in your company, is there a certain floor? Like you always want to own this percentage or more, but not less than that? Like you're always trying to keep it above 51% so you have the ultimate control. Is that the idea?

Dave: Yes. Yeah. So 51%. One of our big goals is I want to find someone that can be the true COO and separately someone's CEO eventually in the business. And so those people deserve ownership stakes in the business if I want to keep them there. So in my mind, I'm already planning on, hey, 15 to 20%, I'm going to have to sell for those people, let alone some of the other employees that are not in those seats.

So I'm wanting to make sure to attract people long term that I don't want them to start their own land business. I want them to stick with me. Creating competitors could be a bad thing. It happens, you know, plenty of other people do it. But if I can keep people that are talented and driven, I want to be able to do that.

Ajay: I think Richard Branson has a saying about that. Have you heard that one before? It goes something to the effect of-

Dave: Teach people so much so they can go out on their own, but treat them so well so that they don't want to.

Ajay: Exactly. Don't put me on my quote of Richard Branson - Sir Richard Branson, excuse me, he's been knighted. But it goes something like that. But Dave, I know, again, on that topic of leadership, I've met a lot of your staff over the years. And I can confidently say as one of Dave's biased friends, that he does treat his staff really, really well, and because of that, you've had phenomenal retention.

Like I think of your sales gal who I won't name because apparently some people have tried to poach over the years. But regardless, she is phenomenal and seems extremely loyal and is just ready to work. Like I remember chatting with her and she was like, "Oh yeah, like we needed some help on acquisitions. So I locked up seven deals that month" or something crazy. And she's so funny. She's like, "Dave's always worried about me getting too busy, but like, I love it." So just a good attitude, but great example of somebody who I think you've taken really good care of over the years and it shows.

How do you find those star players? Because I've also met a number of your staff and they do seem like pretty sharp, like not just any person you find in the street. It's like, wow, that person's gold. I know you could probably write a whole book on this, but in like 60 seconds, how do you do it?

Dave: Well, I would say several things. I mean, I'm seven years into this now, and so I have the benefit of dealing with a lot of people over that time period. There's plenty of people that you would be like, "Dave, why the heck did you hire this person?" Right? And they aren't with me anymore. It's a process.

One of my rules that I apply for myself whenever possible is I hire two people at the same time and for the same role. And so we have duplication of efforts. You know, so hey, if this one person doesn't work out, I have someone else potentially. Hopefully, both people are amazing and turn out super well, but it gives me a chance to compare and contrast.

So here, just recently, we hired two more lead managers. Well, we're going to have a good chance to compare not only to our current lead manager that's with us, but the two of them together. You know, what's the quality of work? How do they look together? And these are full-time positions. So it's costing me more cashflow to be able to do this, but it's allowing me to better evaluate the talent.

So that's a big thing for me personally, I've been hiring two people at the same time. Because when you just have one person, it's like, I think they're doing okay, but you don't have anything to compare that to. And the main measuring stick when you're starting out to hire people is yourself, which is a very hard measuring stick to hold other people to. Yeah. So because you're lucky if someone could do 70 percent of what you do a lot of the time.

Dave: And so that's part of it. Part of it, too, has been incentives. You know, I find that many land investors are cheap. So hiring and paying people well, which is why my net is so much less than other people - I pay my people generally very well. Would they like to be paid more? Of course they would. Wouldn't everyone like to be paid more? But paying people that you find are quality, how are you going to incentivize them?

Not only paying them well, but you're wanting to draw a path of growth for them. If someone is really good, if they are a B plus or A player, they are not going to be satisfied being a lead manager forever. They're not going to be satisfied being a pricing analyst forever. Part of my idea of having a larger team is we have a path for growth for people. They have something that they can move towards.

I'm dangling out there the COO and CEO thing, every single conversation I have with people. This is what you could grow towards if you're the right fit for that job, which comes with a huge amount of potential pay because it's a lot of time and effort and energy to do it. So I'm dangling carrots out there of, "Oh, you do this, there might be something else better in your future" versus you have one or two VAs. If they just love doing that one thing and they're happy with it, that's cool. But if you're trying to get B plus or A players, you've got to dangle carrots in front of them to show them a path to growth and give them not only salary, but prestige and the feeling that they are headed somewhere important.

Seth: When you hire these two people at the same time, it's really interesting. Do you like sit them both down and say, "Six months from now, one of you will be fired? Don't be that person." Or like, is that what you're thinking in your head? Or is that not what happens at all? Like you'll keep them both?

Dave: If people are talented, I will find room. If people are working hard, they're crushing the numbers, I will make room for you. I will take less pay for a short time because I believe that's going to lead me to more pay. That's going to increase my portfolio value. That's going to increase my wealth by having solid players on.

And so my hope is that both stay on. And we just have to see how things go. It depends. But in this particular case for all my new people, I let them know we are on a trial period. We're going to spend the next four months learning about each other to see if I'm a good fit for you, the company is a good fit for you and you're a good fit for us.

And so, for example, the lead managers, we're starting them out at eight bucks an hour, which is decent wage for a lead manager that are international. And then say, "Hey, you stick around three or four months, I'll give you a raise to nine bucks an hour if we think we're a good fit for one another." So the goal is by the end of three or four months, then we have a conversation to sit down. "Hey, how are things going? What do you think about the company? What do you think about the job? Is this a good fit for you?" And us giving feedback to them, "Hey, we think you are or are not a good fit for us."

My hope is everyone we hire sticks around for two or three or four years. Hopefully some people stick around for even longer, but that's generally how my hope is knowing that it doesn't always work out that way. And some people are going to quit. Some people are going to stay on a while. And it just is a constant iteration process.

Seth: I am curious, what would you say is your primary marketing channel in 2024 and going into 2025? Because I know this past year, a lot of things have changed for a lot of land investors. How has it changed for you? Like, what have you been experimenting with? What has worked well? What has not worked well? Where do you think it's going to be going this next year?

Dave: Let me just go back to the beginning, if that's okay. So 2017 through 2022, we primarily did blind offer letters. That was like the main thing that we did, which led us to buying lots and lots of property. I also - we talked about before - the octopus strategy of how I was doing tax liens and tax deed foreclosures and stuff like that.

And 2023, I started experimenting with texting. My good buddy Ajay tells me about how great texting is going. And so like, you know, if Ajay and Ben can do it, doggone it, we can do it too. And so for a whole year, we took Callan's course, for example. We spent - I put multiple people on trying to do it. And by the way, those people were part-time people. And so they weren't full-time folks. They were part-time folks. And nobody could crack the egg of consistently on my team, getting text leads to be followed up with. And then we got maybe like four deals out of it. It wasn't very much.

Good old blind offer letters - and then we started adding in some neutral letters - we're still working, but it's gotten worse. Before it'd be even cheaper properties, it'd be one out of 200 letters, before went out of 300, became one out of 600, one out of 700. Like last year was like one out of a thousand maybe for cheaper properties. And some areas we totally just whiffed on stuff altogether. More expensive properties became more and more and more.

Dave: 2024, we then tried cold calling. So Joe Roberts engaged him. They gave us a huge amount of leads altogether. And once again, for us, mailing worked the best, which was a mix of neutral, ranged, and blind. So it wasn't even just blind. It was doing a mixture of different things. And we probably tested 13 or 14 different letter templates using different companies and different types of letters and stuff like that. And that by far outperformed cold calling.

Cold calling was very similar to our experience with texting. We had a load of leads, but then we were able to only close on three or four deals because so many people wanted market value or higher. And at least with the staff that I have, couldn't be talked down. Christy, who we talked about earlier, who's phenomenal and does a great job with many things - she couldn't talk these people down. I couldn't talk people down myself when I stepped into the acquisition manager role, but mail just seemed to work better for us personally.

So going into this year, we're not doing cold calling and we're going to focus on just pure mailing. And as we record this in January, January through March, that's the only thing we're going to do. And we got it down to what we believe are our three or four best performing letters. And that's all that we're going to do for Q1. Go with what has worked the best in 2024 and let's see how things go. And then we are interested in experimenting with PPC and cold emailing as potential strategies.

Overall, if I was to talk about this journey that I've been on of marketing, to me, it requires a far larger bandwidth. If you are texting or doing cold calling, it requires far more labor. The cost per lead without including labor is pretty stinking cheap, but the cost for labor to manage that is pretty stinking high. So it might be possible I don't need all the lead managers that we have as we don't have cold calling this year. I'll be interested to see where that goes.

Seth: Totally interesting because I know several fairly big land investors where cold calling is either a big part of their strategy or it's like all they do. At the same time though, it does seem like a commonality I've seen from the different cold calling agencies I know out there is that they seem to be a little more liberal with what they consider a lead - like they just kind of send you a bunch of stuff and it's just not quite the same thing as somebody who read a letter and picked up the phone and called you. I'm curious what do you think the breakdown was? Like, if cold calling wasn't working that well for you but other people kind of swear by it or at least it's an important part of it... Like, is it the salesmanship on the phone or is it getting back to people fast enough? Or is it the types of property you're going after or any wild guesses as to like what went wrong?

Dave: All of that. You hit on all the big ones. I think number one, I would say is what kind of property are you going after? If you are doing subdivide plays, if you are doing entitlement plays or something like that, to me, where all these people are asking for market value type things, great fit, right? If you have honed down that these are the 2,000 people every month that fit our buy box of the kind of property we want, I think it's fantastic for that. That's not something that we're doing. And that's why that side didn't fit for us.

We're still trying to do flips. We want to buy at 30, 40, 50 cents on the dollar, maybe do a double close where we're buying at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar that my good friend Ajay helped us to work down the script with. But even then on the normal flips, even trying to do a double close was flipping hard even to get people to agree to that.

Dave: We think the property is worth $80,000 and they think it's worth $120,000. And then last year, from everything I looked at, looking at our inventory, in general, land prices went down in most geographic regions we were in. So we were fighting a downward trending market where they're still thinking their property is worth $120,000, which in our opinion, the market value is $80,000, maybe it was $100,000 a year earlier. So there became a bigger and bigger gap between what we think the market value is versus what sellers are willing to do.

So maybe this year will be different. Maybe inflation will be a thing and the price of land will rise and that'll make those kinds of things easier. Number two, which you hit on was sales staff. Last year, we went through a big change in our business where we didn't have lead managers before - we had intake managers doing three different things. And so now we became more and more specialized. And so we've been going through this process of finding rock star lead managers. We haven't found them yet, unless maybe these two that I've just hired, maybe one or both of them hopefully are rock stars.

But I think getting people to follow up - the speed to lead is so important. Part of the reason why we've invested into AI responses is because we went through some lead managers stuff after they were either fired or left, and they had like tons of emails they hadn't been through. Well, now with having the AI do that, I don't have to worry about that. Assuming the AI is operational and working and not down, that's going to automatically respond to people 24 hours a day. So I'm hoping all of those kinds of things can help us. And that's part of the reason why I'm interested in PPC and cold emails because we can plug the AI right into that easily that we've been developing.

Ajay: I just want to have a stab at answering the question because I think it's a really important topic for investors to understand. Dave, you are right. It is all of the above. I would agree. And I think anybody who comes from like a, you know, got into land investing between 2017 and 2021 - I mean, direct mail was a gravy train, y'all.

I remember I jumped in in 2020. And I remember I look back at my numbers and just - I mean, everybody wishes they started sooner, right? Everybody wishes, "Oh man, if I knew then what I do now." But I remember looking back and mostly investors would regularly see between a 20 and 50X return on their ad spend. And when I say return on ad spend, for every dollar I put into direct mail, I used to get back 20 to 50 bucks back, which is nuts as a return on ad spend.

If you follow any conventional wisdom gurus in the internet marketing space, they'll tell you any marketing campaign where you get over a 3X is to be scaled up until you hit about that limit. So conventional wisdom states that between like a three and seven is normal for a profitable business.

Slight caveat is it's really important in our niche to recognize our cash conversion cycle, meaning the cycle it takes for us to put in a dollar to get back a dollar - there's a big delay there, especially with direct mail, because you send it out of the mail house, you know, there could be a hurricane or whatever happens in the US or politics, elections, holidays, all that stuff hits a desk, you get a phone call, you buy a property, you sell a property, it sits on the market, all these things need to happen.

But something to be mindful of is when we think of picking different marketing channels, you have to ask yourself two questions. Number one, who are we getting ahold of? And number two, how difficult is it for that person to tell me they are a lead? And so number one is who are we reaching out to and how? With direct mail, we're reaching out to all the same people we are with cold calling, right? But it's number two, where it really starts to differentiate.

Ajay: Somebody with direct mail - think about all the actions that person needs to go through to tell you that they're a lead. Typically they're looking at a mail piece. The brain is cognitively deciding, consciously deciding, "Yes, Dave, GenFam properties, baby. They look legit." I'm now going to pick up my phone, type in the number that I see on the postcard, give this person a call, and I don't know if I'm going to PatLive or an intake manager or lead manager or whatever, but I've reached out to the company. It took me going to you.

Which was more conscious decisions, more steps. On the flip side of that, we've got cold calling, which like I'm calling, "Hey Seth, this is Ajay." I'm like interrupting Seth's day. Seth did not plan to talk to me that day. It was an involuntary decision to interact with our marketing to then tell us, "Sure, yeah, I'd sell the property for the right price," which is what you get a ton with cold calling.

Now, that's not to say it doesn't work. I like to tell people, I've converted leads through direct mail, cold calling, cold texting, PPC, PPL. We've done Facebook ads, I've done on-market deals. We've done all kinds of stuff, and it all works. There's some different levers you need to pull and things to be mindful of.

But something to focus on is thinking about the level of qualification that the lead self-qualifies through by telling you how they're interested. Am I interrupting your day? Or did they make a voluntary decision to interact with something that we put in front of them? And that's going to change your cost per lead. So direct mail, you're going to get less people reaching out. So it's going to cost you, I see anywhere between $100 to $300 for a cost per lead on direct mail, especially blind offers these days. Whereas with cold calling, I see $25 to $50 for a cold call lead - drastically different cost per lead.

Ajay: And then it's the question of like, how do I monetize this? If I do some double closings where maybe I'm okay squeezing out a 10 grand assignment, well, yeah, it might make sense to do some cheap marketing. But if I'm trying to do some more quality deals where I make 20, 30, 50, 100 thousand bucks, you probably want more quality.

So there's a bunch of micro decisions in there. But at the end of the day, it's all about attention at some level. How am I garnishing the attention of my avatar? The cost of attention through mail for somebody to walk through qualification - much higher per person, whereas cold calling, it is cheaper. Different levers we're pulling, and typically, the lower quality of the lead, the better sales process you're going to need on the back end.

The better you need to be at triple dialing, at following up, at making sure you reach out to people, at your actual sales skills on the phones, and making offers that you're okay insulting people based on their asking prices, versus direct mail, a lot easier. You need less of a sales process and you needed even less of one back in 2022 and before that. It was really, really easy. I mean, easy is relative, but compared to today, it was a different landscape. So I'm sorry, I'll get off my high horse now, but this is the stuff I get really, really jacked up about.

Seth: Did I hear you right that you said you've got three templates that are working well? Are they all neutral letter templates? Are you doing blind offers at all anymore?

Dave: We compared, for example, last year, blind one page versus blind two page. The blind two page got us far more appointments and ultimately buys than the one page. And then we had different companies. So Generation Family Properties versus Southwest Family Land versus Southern Family Land, different companies that we put out there just to test to see, "Oh, we're more local to Florida and Georgia than Minnesota," or "We're more local to Arizona and New Mexico and Colorado in Arizona versus Minnesota."

Dave: So we were testing just lots of different things. Alicia Jarrett at Supercharged Offers, she had a bunch of different templates. And so we worked with that and got some great templates from her that we paid a lot of money for mailing with. And so those we've continued to test and change and alter. And one was like a blank check kind of thing - basically, "Hey, tell us what you want for a property" as a neutral letter. Two page kind of thing.

Another one we came up with totally that I call it "Dave, the owner letter." And so our good friend Andrew Haney did one that was him in the military, but instead I did it kind of based on me. And so that did pretty well last year, relatively. And there's like a QR code that sends them to the YouTube page on that letter.

Seth: A lot of what I know here is anecdotal. I hear different things. I don't really have any data to solidly back this up, but it seems like the people that are doing the blind offers, they're either spending a ton of time to come up with as accurate as possible offers, or they're willing to offer a lot more, or maybe they've got some fancy template, like a check or something like that. You are doing some neutral letters though, right? Or are you just totally blind?

Dave: Yeah, so like this year, this quarter, we're doing 50% blind, 25% neutral, 25% ranged.

Seth: When you look at the return on ad spend for those three segments, which one has the best return?

Dave: I haven't specifically measured ROAS on each of those templates, but I do know the total number that we sent out. I do know the total appointments that we got from each template. And I know the total buys from each template. The reason why we're doing 50% blind is because blind two-page for us did the best. And that's with the offer on the front page did the best for us out of those when you measure by those different criteria.

But we got some great deals from Neutral Letters as well. We got some great deals from Range. So we don't want to throw them out because what if we just happen to hit the right person on the right day and that makes us $100,000 or $50,000 in gross profits? That makes up for an awful lot of mailers if you just happen to hit the right one. And so we want to continue to test. And this quarter will be a good indication for us of how we're doing and what's working for 2025.

Dave: And then we'll take stock of that, of what happens in Q1 and make adjustments for Q3 in particular. Q2, we're going to go a lot lighter on mailing and maybe test out one of those other strategies. Because I like to take a break from mailing because it's so flipping expensive. So we take usually a two-month break. So we'll go four months hard, two-month break, four months hard, two-month break kind of thing.

Seth: On that two-page blind offer, this sounds like it did significantly better. So what's on the second page? Because clearly there's magic in that. Is it say something or is it like colorful or you have any wild guess? Like why is that so much better than the one-page offer?

Dave: I think one of people's biggest concerns is "Is this a scam?" That's the number one objection. "Are you legit? Are you just trying to steal my money?" And so page two, we have spent a lot of time and money and energy to get testimonials. And so we have Better Business Bureau listed on there. We're Better Business Bureau accredited. I think we've had now like 100 reviews or something like that. So we reference that on the second page. We encourage people, go and check it out to see that we're legit. We talk about closing through title and stuff like that.

We talk about the number of transactions that we've had. So for us, one of our things is we've been around seven years now. We're not some brand new person starting out. So I'm leveraging that part of us that helps us stand out from a lot of other people.

Seth: That's a really good one though. Cause you're right. I mean, the scam thing has gone way up in the land space. And I think people are, I don't know if everybody is, but some people are certainly concerned about that. And if you can prove that you're legit in a way that can't be faked, that goes a long way, even though I'm sure that's hard to do getting those reviews. And I don't know if your testimonials are like video testimonials. So, you know, it's a real person kind of thing.

Dave: All of it. I mean, that's part of the reason I have a large staff. We're doing all of these different kinds of activities, which take manpower. You can't automate a conversation at this point on a video call with someone that bought or you sold land to - that is awfully hard to do.

Seth: Awesome. Well, Dave, totally appreciate your time and telling us all about what you've been up to and the Land Unconference and the Leadership in Land and all that. Anything you want to leave us with? Any final thoughts or closing statements or anything like that?

Dave: Yeah. Well, I think for everyone that's trying to join the land business, leave right now.

Seth: Thank you. I was hoping you'd say that.

Dave: I'm just kidding. No, I think there's plenty of room for people. One of the things I appreciate about you guys, we're not BSing here. This is real. It is harder than it used to be. Is it still profitable? Yes. But in my opinion, it takes more money. It takes more scale. It takes more learning, whether you're going through Seth's course or Ajay's program or something like Leadership in Land, take us up on this free stuff and let's all learn and grow together because it ain't as easy as it used to be. And let's just push together, learn from each other, create community and not hold back. You know, here I haven't held back anything about my business.

Seth: So that's the kind of spirit all three of us wish for everyone. So come and participate and be a part of all these great communities and come hang out with us at the Land Unconference. And I'll be at the Land Unconference. Ajay is going to be there.

It's a great chance to hang out with any or all three of us and a lot of other amazing people. Some people that you'll probably recognize, others that you might not recognize, but like you should know them because they're just as legit and awesome as everybody else out there. Maybe they're just not as public about what they're doing, but sometimes that's where the coolest stories come from is people that don't necessarily want you to know them because they're just sticking to their guns and doing their thing.

But again, Dave, thanks for being here. Ajay, thank you for being here. People want to check out the show notes for this episode. Again, retipster.com/209. You can find links to all the stuff we talked about.

And thanks again. We'll talk to you next time.