Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 222. Today, I'm talking with Wayne Boerger, who has flipped many land deals and now runs Nordic Sky Capital, where he funds land deals for other land investors.

Wayne has a unique perspective because he's been pretty deep in the trenches as an operator and now works as a capital partner who genuinely cares about the success of the land operators he works with and funds deals for.

In this episode, we're going to talk about what it looks like to transition in your business - not only leaving your full-time job to flip land full-time, but also transitioning from land flipping to land funding. When you should do this, whether you should do this, and how to make that transition. And also, as a land funder, how to attract great land operators - the person finding the deal in need of funding (that's what we call an operator). And also, as an operator, how to vet and find the right funder.

Strategic relationships have always been important in the land business. And for a lot of us, they're getting more and more important as the months and years go by, as the land business continues to mature and get more efficient. And we're going to talk about how letting go of the wrong things can unlock some of your best opportunities.

So whether you're just getting started or looking to scale, we're going to get a lot out of hearing about Wayne's journey. Let's dive in. Wayne, welcome. How's it going?

Wayne: Awesome. Doing great, Seth. Good to see you again, and I really appreciate you having me on. Hope I can provide a bit of value to your listeners. I've listened to you for a long time, so it's a real honor to be here.

Seth: Yeah, awesome, man. So let's rewind. When and why and how did you first get into land investing? What did your early deals, your early business look like? And how has that evolved over time?

Wayne: Yeah, well, I started like a lot of folks. I had a friend that started back - we started in 2020, COVID time. I was doing projects outside, listening to podcasts. My wife actually had a friend of hers that had started looking at the land business. They were in some training with the Land Geek guys, and they were in the Flight School program, and I thought we'd be great at it.

And while I was out doing this project, I must've listened to 15 episodes of Mark and his podcast. And I thought, "Oh, this is really interesting. This is not what I ever thought land would be." And we had done a bit of real estate in the past and we just jumped in. We just got in the next Flight School program. That's how we learned it.

We flipped desert squares, a lot of trial and error. I would feel like, looking back on it, it's funny - I feel like we'll talk about some of the mistakes I made, but I felt like I was more of a collector than I was an investor. I was pretty good at the acquisition, but not always great at the disposition, but I sure learned a lot. It was a great introduction to it.

And yeah, I think my progression was really just like a lot of folks. I realized that at some point, the level of effort per deal and the profit you make makes sense to maybe start looking at bigger properties in different areas. I spent two years just in Arizona, one county in Arizona, because I just really wanted to feel like I had it dialed in and I was working a full-time job and it was a really busy time for us with kids and, like a lot of your listeners I'm sure, just busy lives. And it's a great side hustle type of opportunity. So yeah, that was the early days for us. It was great to look back on.

Seth: Those two years you spent in one county in Arizona, I assume they were all like the cheaper desert square properties that whole time. Or did you get into bigger stuff within that one county?

Wayne: We never really got high value properties. I mean, I probably didn't buy anything above, you know, say $12,000 or $15,000 maybe. You know, you can do some 40-acre parcels, some of those parcels. And that's as big as you get. There's no real big population center in my county. And so, you know, at the time it felt comfortable. It felt a little like a warm bath. Like, "Hey, I know this area and I know how to talk about it," but you would hear from other people working in different areas and they were really good at the time. And that was sort of the impetus - like I really should try a few other spots if for no other reason, just to kind of get a taste for what it's like somewhere else.

Seth: Did any part of you ever feel like you were kind of in a rut because you were just doing the same sort of smaller stuff over and over again? Or what kept you from exploring other counties? Was it just the comfort factor? Like you just sort of knew what to expect in that one place?

Wayne: Yeah, I think that's mostly it. Honestly, when I look back at those early days especially, there was a bit of reluctance. So it was comfort, little reluctance to make a mistake or to start doing higher value things and not know what I'm doing and screw it up and lose a bunch of money. So there's some fear in there that it took a while to overcome.

Seth: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember having a similar thing where I had spent a couple of years doing not the same county, but just kind of limiting myself to smaller stuff that I felt comfortable with and didn't seem too scary. And I remember feeling a little bit of burnout with that. Not that I was going to quit, but it just felt like a lot of work. And not that it's not work when you do bigger stuff, but you kind of delay the bigger rewards when you aren't willing to go down that path. And in some ways it's kind of like a different business model too, when you do the bigger stuff, like a lot of the assumptions start to change about how much you should be offering and how much due diligence you got to do and hold times and all this stuff. And you don't know what you don't know, right? Until you dive into it. And so there does have to be at some point that leap of faith. You can have coaches and guidance, all of that, but you're exactly right. The points where I feel like I really grew in my business was on account of like, "Okay, I'm just taking a step of faith here a little bit, trusting that other people have done it. I can do it too. Just get into it."

When you and I were hanging out in Orlando earlier this year, I was hearing more about your story and it sounds like you had gotten laid off, not once, but twice, as you were growing your land business. And at one point you decided "I'm tired of getting laid off, screw this. I'm just going to do land full-time." Can you just tell us the story of what happened there?

Wayne: Yeah, yeah, of course. So I spent - I mean, I was 25 years in the technology world, software, wore a lot of hats, different roles. It was a great career. I mean, I don't have any bad feelings about it. Certainly set me up for a lot of the things I'm doing today. But yeah, 2023, I was working for Salesforce at the time. I spent eight years with them.

And yeah, early 2023, they laid off 10% of their global workforce. And myself, even though I'd had a very successful career there, myself and a lot of other really, really good people just got let go. It's just a spreadsheet exercise, I think. But to their credit, they treated me fairly well. I had a little bit of runway to go find my next gig.

And I did. I went and started working for a small software company - a small Salesforce partner here in the Twin Cities. And it turns out that they had some company problems that I couldn't see when I came in and they created a role for me. And I think I was easily expendable. And when that all came to a head about five months later, so this is September of 2023, now I lost my job for the second time. And that experience hurt. I had been laid off before in my tech career, but being a W-2 employee for 25 years, I really started to feel like, "Man, I'm letting my family down." I had been in land at that point for about three years and had visions of kind of doing it full-time, and I was kicking myself for not being further along.

There was a lot of soul searching. One thing I would just encourage everybody is the importance of community, just having a great community around you. Well, probably the biggest blessing besides me just getting started in the land community from that Land Geek program was Buck Rizvi, a great friend of mine. He was really the impetus for saying, "Hey, of the 25 of us or so that were in that training program, if you want to be in an accountability group, we're going to have a little mastermind. We'll meet weekly and help each other." And I hadn't really done that before, but I said, "Yeah, of course I want to do that." And there were maybe 10 of us that started there. And then over the next year or so, it became really four key people. Five years later, we're meeting every week and it's been a real blessing. And that was the group that kind of kept me on track through all of my challenges.

And also, one relationship there, Drew Haney, was instrumental too, because after all this happened, he and I were working on some partnerships at the time. And then I lost my job. And I thought, "I don't know if I can go through this. I got to figure this out." And he gave me just some great advice. He said, "Hey, man, I think there's the good Lord telling you that maybe you should be doing land full time."

So I got laid off on Friday. We had that conversation on a Saturday afternoon. I was actually at a scout campout with my youngest son. So I was out in the woods. I had time to kind of think and pray and just kind of get away. I hadn't even told my family I was laid off yet because I thought I can't tell my wife on Friday that I got laid off and then let her just have to process this while I disappear in the woods for two days with the scout group. So I thought I'm just going to let it sit for two days, and I need to process this and figure out what I'm going to do. And I talked to Drew on Saturday, and he just said, "Hey, man, I think this is the path for you." And I had considered it. Obviously, I wanted to, but it just petrified me. But I really felt like the proverbial chick thrown out of the nest and now you have to fly.

And funny enough, I woke up Sunday morning in my tent. I'd prayed about it and I just knew - I thought, "This is what I'm doing." And so Monday morning, I was a full-time land investor and I never even - I didn't interview. I didn't look back. I didn't make any calls to say, "Hey, you know, what other software jobs are out there." And so, yeah, it was real soul searching.

Having a community, having some key counsel, people that you trust around you is just so important because it'll open up areas of your thinking that you would not do yourself. And so at key moments in my career, that's been super important.

Seth: If you hadn't talked to Drew in that moment, do you think you would have done what you did? Like, would you have, if you hadn't talked to him, would you keep interviewing and try to find another job or?

Wayne: Yeah. I mean, I'm almost certain that I would have Monday morning just started hitting the phones, you know, call my recruiters, call my network. I mean, I had a great network. I think at some point I probably would have found something, but it would have, in hindsight, again, you know, I think I was pretty - I was fairly well situated because I wasn't a ladder climber. I wasn't interested in running Salesforce. I was really good at what I did and I really enjoyed it. And I was just happy in that role. And I think I could have stayed there for a long time.

Seth: To be the devil's advocate here. Could it be that maybe God wasn't telling you to do that, but Drew was telling you to do that? Because if you hadn't talked to Drew, you wouldn't have done that.

Wayne: Yeah, no, it's fair to say that. I do see things through my faithful lens a lot. And there are other reasons, though. It's interesting because I had started funding deals right around that time. And I didn't know it at the time. And I just think sometimes you need someone to give you a little bit of courage. I didn't have the courage. You know, people talk about peak earning years, you know, you get to a certain point of your career. I was at peak earning, but I was also at peak outflow years of my life. You know, teenage drivers, three kids and the mortgage and just kind of everything, activities, all of that stuff. That will tail off for me in the next five to eight years. But right now, like right where I was in the midst of it, I thought, "How am I going to replace this?" And it was really, really scary.

Seth: It would be a scary time in life to make that transition for sure.

Wayne: Yeah. And we did - look, totally transparent - we took a step back financially. Like I did some things financially that I didn't think I would ever have to do. But I also feel like I was led to that point and had some resources to get us through that phase so we're very blessed to have had that. And you know I was actually just thinking about it - I know this is probably going to be a few weeks before this drops this episode but it's right around Easter time and beyond what all this kind of means in my personal faith - I think that story is just the greatest example of like in your darkest hour, in your darkest days sometimes the greatest blessings just flow out of that and I've always tried to think of that in tough times in my life is like, you know, no matter what your tradition is right, I just think you have to look for what's the silver lining, what is the door that may be open that I didn't see before. You know I got turned around totally right in my career, but then I noticed something right - I had opportunities that weren't evident to me before so I just try to - I mean I don't know for your listeners, I guess I would always encourage everybody. You may take a step back, but just always be looking to see, is there another door that's opened here that I just couldn't see in my prior situation. And that certainly has been the truth for me at multiple particularly key points in my life and career.

Seth: And I've had very similar experiences too, like decisions that I totally would not have made if I hadn't had an important person in my life, either encouraging me or just like reminding me, "Hey just so you know like this is an option too." So I think it's super important to have those people that - I don't even know if it's necessarily putting you back on the right track but just like helping you see things you would not see on your own. It's like the whole idea that just two are better than one, you know, with more advisors you'll have more victories in life. So, yeah, that's great, man.

So when the plug was pulled on your job, tell me about that. Like, was that a hard thing? Did you just kind of smoothly go into land and start doing that? Or like, was it a rough several months or how easy or difficult was that for you? Did you have to change your strategy at all as a result of having to rely totally on your land income?

Wayne: Yeah, it was difficult. I had, I won't go into all the details, but I had a very small team. I had a VA, one VA in the Philippines. And so I actually kind of had two brands I was running and in hindsight, it would have been smarter just to really say, "Hey, I'm only going to do one." At a similar time, I was doing a marketing program that I actually used a good chunk of my severance pay to do some land marketing. And that was a growth time for me too, because that of course happened to be the marketing plan that I invested in heavily and it just didn't produce the results that I had thought it would. And so that was very hard, but I grew personally, I think through that, I just realized that, "Hey, you know, you're going to have that." Right. And you can't always choose the timing of those things. And I don't have a great answer for what that transition was like. It was just, obviously it's all hands on deck and you just have to take action in any way, shape or form. And I did that pretty well some days and other days I just really struggled with it, but it did feel good. I know that I was looking forward to getting up and working on my business every day in a way that I wasn't before when I was a W-2 employee.

Seth: And at some point along the way, you decided to get into funding land deals. Tell me about that. Like, when and why and how did that enter your radar? And were you just using your own money to fund these deals? Were you partnering with somebody else to get the money or how did that all work?

Wayne: Yeah. You know, there was a podcast I listened to where there was a guy that was talking about self-directed IRAs and a particular type of program called the EQRP, which gave you really full reign checkbook access to be able to do investments through your retirement accounts. And of course, I had lost my job. I had these old 401(k)s that were sitting in retirement accounts, and they weren't doing particularly well at the time. I wasn't real happy with my investment advisor at the time. And so I thought, "What have I got to lose?" Actually, it's a great upside because I understood what land deals could do. I knew if I funded deals and shared in a bit of the profit, it certainly would do better than whatever returns I would get in the stock market, mutual funds or whatever.

So, yeah, I went through the process of getting one of those set up. I rolled pretty much, well, probably 80% of my retirement funds in there because I really felt like I know what I'm doing here. And yeah, one of the rules around that is you can't invest in your own deals, which was a bit of a shame. I wish I could have run my own business by using those funds, but I couldn't. But of course, I had built a network. I had my mastermind group of guys. I started with a couple of guys from that mastermind that had deals that needed funding. And yeah, it just sort of grew from there. I did use just only my own funds. That was another area where I felt like I just didn't know what to do. Like who's going to give me money to go and fund somebody else's deals or even, yeah, I knew I had to kind of keep looking for money for my own deals because I was constantly doing that.

Seth: I might've missed something here. So why can't you fund your own deals?

Wayne: Yeah. Well, in those particular - there's IRS requirements for an active, you know, being an active business. And I'm, look, I'm no tax attorney or anything, but I know that when I set up the plan, they were very clear and they said, "Hey, listen, you can't, if you take this and you say, hey, I've got a land deal in my business and I need $20,000 for it, I can't use my retirement money to buy that property." Now there's probably some gray area as there is in most of this tax stuff, but that's my understanding of it. Others may have different interpretations, but I wasn't willing to risk the tax advantage benefit of that account to say "Hey I'm going to do my own deals" when I was pretty confident like I could find enough of other people's deals and put those in there. And you know it was a great way to start because I knew that I wasn't relying on any of those funds to pay my bills because any gains would have to go back into that plan and so I could really learn how to underwrite deals and I started to really learn the process of who do I want to work with, what's the right type of - you know, I made some mistakes, you know, we sold a couple of things on terms and I was like, "Yeah, okay, we'll sell them on terms." Well, you know, that's just not ideal for a funding operation. It's just like your regular land business. You can run out of capital really quickly and your return is okay, but you know, you got to wait a couple of years and it just is less than ideal in a funding operation. Some people I think make it work, but you know, just things like that, you learn. I started to get my feet wet in the funding world. And yeah, it was just pretty much on my own funds through my retirement account. And I want to encourage everybody that that could be something that you consider. Obviously, some of the investors and things that we're working with right now, those are the kinds of funds that they have. So it works good for them to be sort of arm's length and not have to actively be involved in anything.

Seth: I've got a self-directed Roth IRA. And when I have used that to buy properties, I basically just own it in the name of that IRA. So I don't use it to fund my business - it's just basically like an asset owned in the retirement account, essentially. So that's not what you were - you were thinking more take the IRA funds and use it to fund your own business. And that's what wouldn't work. Was that?

Wayne: Yeah, correct. Yeah. I certainly couldn't put that money into like active operational expenses and things like that. I think that probably is a gray area. Like I said, I never really broached this. There may be a gray area where you can actually acquire the property, but because that's, you know, I think, yeah, different people maybe would see that as like an active business activity. I have no idea.

Seth: You work with another capital partner now, right? Tell me how that relationship came to fruition. How did you find this person? What is their role in your current funding operation? And then what is your role?

Wayne: Yeah. So actually, great thing. This is a friend I've had for more than 15 years. He and I met in a business networking group here locally. He's a longtime, very successful mortgage broker here in the Twin Cities. And he's done other kinds of real estate investing. And he's a really interesting guy. And he was actually someone that I had reached out to a while back about funding my deals. Because I thought he knows how to find money, how to fund, maybe he's got a lender, maybe he's - this is while I was still running my flipping business. And I thought, you know, he could fund some of my deals either through his money or other people that he knows.

And it took us a while to kind of realize that, "Hey, maybe we just do this thing together." And it was kind of my partner's name is Josh. Yeah. He said, "Hey, you know, I think we can do this like you're the land guy." He's done some land stuff, but he doesn't really, he didn't know anything about our model, about exactly how we did it. And, but he said, "Hey, I think I can help you find the capital. You run the deals."

We kind of put our heads together. And that was last October. We kind of made it official and yeah. And we just, it's been great. So I do all the underwriting. I do all the management, you know, obviously I have all the relationships with land investors and operators around. And he is mostly behind the scenes, but he's really creative in thinking about disposition, thinking about some other things. He helped me actually in the process, like with some of my old inventory, got some great ideas. He's really good on social media. He says he's not, but somehow he gets lots and lots of attention. He posts regularly. And so he's pretty good about that. So we just, we mesh really well. We have different personalities, but we work together really well. And obviously it's one reason I'm here in this location because his mortgage office was here, downtown Minneapolis. We're in the Grain Exchange building here.

Yeah. So I come down here every day and we get together and put our heads together on land deals and we're raising capital together. And, yeah, it's been really, really good. There's probably a lot I could say. I wouldn't have anticipated being in a partnership, but it's worked out great. It was just, I realized now it was just what I needed.

Seth: And for those of you who are watching the video version of this, that background behind Wayne is not fake. That's actually a real - this is my real office in a way.

Wayne: Yeah yeah for those that don't know actually maybe it's worth saying - yeah so this is the Grain Exchange building downtown Minneapolis. It's a historic building. This is the actual old trading floor that they used to do commodities trading and things like that. It's got a lot of history here and yeah that's the old trading board back there so the trading floor used to be a little pit just kind of right over this way and I mean I feel really actually really special every day to come in and you know being in the land business and being in a place that had a lot of history tied to the land.

You know, the bounty that we had from the land and helped to build this country. Minneapolis was built as a mill town for a lot of the agriculture around here that come in here and make flour for Pillsbury and other things. There's actually a building right across the street called the Flour Exchange. And I've not been in there, but I don't think they have a trading floor like this. But actually, Seth, if you don't mind, you know, we're here in the Twin Cities. There are some land investors in the Twin Cities. And I'm in the process - I'd love to have a land investor event in this space and come in and do some cool things, I think. So open invitation, actually really for anybody that's in town. If you haven't come to Minneapolis, reach out to me. I'd love to be happy to show you around and we can come down here and hang out.

Seth: Where does the commodity trading happen now? If that's shut down, does this still happen somewhere else or what happened there?

Wayne: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't really know. I know it all went electronic. There's a book that they keep at the desk down here that actually shows the history and everything. This used to be like a big chalkboard. There's a big like gantry over there. You think of like the thing where you have like a bookshelf and you have like the ladder and you get up and down. There's one of those right over here in the corner that you just kind of have a couple of ladies on there and they would roll it back and forth and update prices with chalk on the chalkboard. And then it's progression to electronic. And then eventually there were screens kind of all over on the floor. And again, I'm not a historian about it, but it's really interesting to think about. But I think they do trade it, but they may have shut this down entirely in exchange for maybe more like the Chicago Board of Trade and some of the others.

Seth: This capital partner you're working with, I may have mentioned, I may have missed it, but this was just somebody you already knew ahead of time? Or was this somebody that you sought out or something? Is it kind of just a luck thing that you happen to know this guy? Or if I wanted to go find somebody like this, how would I do that?

Wayne: Yeah, that's a good question. Have a friend that's a really successful mortgage person, I guess. You know, it was luck, right? Like, I mean, it was really fortunate for me to already have this relationship. It did, you know, I did have to cultivate it. He didn't really know much about land. He didn't really understand what we were doing. But I think finding someone like that, I guess I would say if you're looking to get into a true partnership with someone, you really have to feel comfortable with that person. And that's a bit of a marriage that you don't want to go into lightly, but because we had an established relationship over a period of time, it was much easier to say yes and say, "Yeah, let's get this thing done." It doesn't have to be forever. Like, I don't know, maybe five years from now we do something different, but it's really been the right choice right now. And we're doing really good things.

In terms of advice of how you find somebody, I'm not sure I have great advice just because it worked out maybe more simply for me. I will say I was doing a lot of just looking for capital partners. I was really just trying to network as best I can. I went to local real estate meetups. I was trying to find people that either had sourcing for land deals or I met guys that bought notes that people have different models and different things. And when you're trying to find capital for deals, it's a challenge. Obviously, that's why funders exist because we understand what land deals look like.

And so trying to go and educate a commercial banker or something about your business and why it's a safe place to put some money - we're trying to actually do that behind the scenes, right? So if we can access that capital on behalf of our folks, then that's obviously a great service that we can provide. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, I know your podcast partner, Neil, had a great episode not that long ago, if folks haven't heard that, just about how he got started and, you know, picking up the phone and calling like every local bank that you have. That's something we haven't done yet - it is on my list of things to do like this - we're always raising but it's you know it's out there but I think from a partnership standpoint yeah just i would definitely tell people be cautious about who you choose to get into partnership with and it's working great for us.

Seth: Is he pretty comfortable with risk? Like how much educating did you have to do to get him to say like, "Yeah, I'm going to dump tons of money into these deals." Just trying to like figure out the mental burden of risk. You know, like say if you invest in a deal, it doesn't go as planned. Do you feel a lot of stress? Like, "Oh man, I somehow screwed this up." Or does he like, "No, I understood what I was getting into. It's fine. It's not a big deal." Like tell me the dynamic of how that works between you guys.

Wayne: Yeah. You know, we haven't had one go too bad yet. I've certainly in my funding career, I've had a few that have gone sideways. And so we haven't felt too much pain yet. So obviously I know something like that is coming, right? There's always, when you get into this business, there's always a deal, whether you're a land flipper or funder, there's always a deal that goes sideways. You have to just kind of expect that that's going to happen. He's pretty good from a risk standpoint. Obviously he isn't willy nilly about it. It has taken some education, but I think once he understood that, "Hey, here's what the underwriting that I believe in is," you know, and I would show him the criteria and like, here's the process and here's my philosophy around it. It's been pretty smooth, right? So he's put some of his capital in, I've got a bunch of my capital deployed, you know, prior to our partnership, most of my capital was deployed. But so it's really a process of, you know, when you're using other people's money, of course, yeah, it can be really stressful. I'm kind of naturally wired - I don't know why I've had a couple of people, Jaren in particular has said, "Hey man, you were made to be a funder," which is great validation for me. And I think one of the reasons he says that is because he's seen how I've reacted in times of like really challenging situations, marketing that didn't work out or a deal that went bad or something like that. And I'm just not wired in a way that for better or worse, I don't get too high or too low. I sleep pretty well. I don't stress over things. Obviously when it is other people's money, I take that very seriously.

And so we always find a way to work things out, but I'm a big Jocko Willink fan. If anybody listens to him, he's an extreme ownership guy. And I think that philosophy is actually really well applicable to the land funding business because you really have to take ownership and say, "Hey, listen, if this is gonna work, I have ownership of a large portion of whether this is successful or not," even for an operator who really runs things really well and you don't have to do very little. You have a very high responsibility. I take high responsibility for making sure that the deal goes well and things stay on track and help anywhere that I can. And I think it's one thing having spent as long as I did as an actual operator, I know exactly what it feels like, right, to do these deals. And so I can empathize with a lot of that.

Seth: If you guys fund a deal and all of the money comes from your partner and none of it comes from you, I don't know if that ever happens or not. Or if it's always like 50-50 or how you decide whose money goes into which deal. Like, is your money always going into it on some level or are there ever cases where it's just him? And if it is just him, do you make any money from that? Or like, how does this partnership work together between you and him?

Wayne: Yeah. Well, you know, he still runs his mortgage company. So that's actually his - we sit in the same office and we talk all day about our deals. But he's got a bunch of deals, more stuff that I'm not involved in at all. And so he's really, his active part is a lot of that. And I'm really the active, you know, I'm probably 90% of the activity right now is my working with partners, working on deals, managing our pipeline and all the closings and all that stuff.

Anyway, I will tell you, we have a situation where we just, it just varies. Like we're small. And so I don't want to say our guidelines are loose, but each deal is sort of approached on a unique basis. And what we try to do is just have a diversified capital stack where, how we work on each individual deal may look a little bit different, right? We've got a couple of different capital sources as pretty much every funder does. And so depending on what the deal needs is how we structure that. So in terms of how we square things away, we've just got a good solid operating agreement. I would encourage anybody in a partnership, you got to make sure you have a really solid operating agreement that spells that out. We have a real long-term view to our business too. So we know this first year is really, we're doing a lot of just bootstrapping relationships and making sure our capital stack is in a good place. And then just grow really deliberately, conservatively and just do a really good job with everybody we work with.

Seth: So I am curious, having experience doing land flipping full-time and now funding full-time. How is your time spent differently? Like what does your day-to-day look like? Or I guess what's the differences between how your day-to-day was versus how it is now? Like is funding land deals, is that an easier type of business to run or how does it compare?

Wayne: I think it depends on the person. For me personally, of course I'm doing this because I love it. I think it's the best fit for me. It's a better fit for me than the land flipping business was.

And I know you and I talked a little bit in Orlando too, just about how, so some of you didn't know that Seth and I were at a similar mastermind or the same mastermind down in Orlando, Peter Vekselman put on. And it was real, kind of changed everything for me. I was at the time, maybe Seth, this is the point to tell this story, but we had hot seat sessions. There were about a dozen of us there and everybody had a slot during the weekend to take an hour and say, "Hey, here's what's going on with my business." And I'd never really had that opportunity to sort of lay my whole business out in front of some other very successful land guys and say, "Hey, here's where I'm doing great. Here's where I'm struggling. What do you guys think?"

And at the time, this is probably, what was it, February, late February, something like that. I was running a flipping business. I was starting to do some education around distressed properties and new opportunities there. I was doing funding and I was kind of doing all these things. And I didn't really express it like, "Hey, what should I do?" But Seth, I think actually it was you, as I sort of opened up the floor, you said, "Well, what do you really want to do?" And I've known for a while that, if I had to choose between making calls to sellers or making calls to operators who are working and trying to figure out funding for their land deals, I would make the operator call a hundred percent of the time. Like it was just always, I felt like I could connect with people way better. There were things about just making seller calls. I was good. I was reasonably good at it, but in terms of what energized me every morning, it was definitely, "I want to partner with other operators and be part of helping them scale." And when I said that, you said, "Well, why don't you just do that?" I mean, that's how I remember it, right? "Why don't you just do that?"

And there were 11, 12 other guys looking at me, and every head was nodding like, "Yep, that's what I'm hearing too." And it was the first time, I shouldn't say it was the first time. It definitely was not the first time. Drew had told me almost two years ago. He's like, "Hey, I think you maybe should really focus on this." And Jaren told me it over a year ago. And my wife told me, even like in January, she said, "Hey, you might want to really just do this."

Seth: So I don't know what this is. I will take the full credit because you were excited when I said it.

Wayne: You should. You should. But it's so funny how I heard this philosophy a while ago where there's a difference between knowing and knowing and that seems kind of odd but there's a point at which like I think in my brain I knew - I thought "Oh that's great" - I didn't know exactly how maybe how to do all the things but I knew this is the thing I'm actually really well wired for but to know - no like "This, no this actually is the thing and you should do it and take action like right now" - those actually are different things. And this was definitely one of those pivotal moments too, where the scales of decision suddenly, like a few other bits of advice had weighed up over here. And it wasn't until that moment sitting in front of all you guys that it really tipped for me. And again, that was like a Thursday or Friday, just like when I lost my job before it was like a Thursday or Friday. I flew home on Sunday and Monday morning, I told my team in my flipping company, I said, "Hey, all of our deals, every bit that's in the pipeline, these are now yours." I had a good friend that was helping me do on a commission basis, like work with all the leads. And I just said, "Joe, these are all yours."

And that's been to this day. And I really just wound that down very quickly and went all in on this. And it's just been a bit of a whirlwind couple of months. So I don't, going back to your original question. I'm not sure if that's the answer to it, but I think it's such a critical part of that was another just tipping point for me when I knew this was the best use of my time and I needed to focus. I had spent really the whole five years I've been in the land business. I had some level of split focus aside maybe from the, "Hey, I'm just doing one county in Arizona," but so much of it was just kind of searching for - there's so many shiny objects. Right. And it's just been such a great blessing.

I've had all kinds of validation since I made that decision a couple of months ago that, yeah, this is for sure the right thing to do.

Seth: Yeah, I mean, you touched on a number of really interesting things there. This idea that you can be doing the wrong thing in your business for years sometimes when you, in your subconscious, you know better, you know, this isn't the right thing to do, but you just keep doing it. You just like program like a robot to do this thing until you hear it enough. And then all of a sudden it clicks and kind of reminds me that like these kinds of relationships with other entrepreneurs or even land investors who know me and my business intimately.

I mean, having those conversations is as important as anything else that I do. Because like you said there, like it literally changes the trajectory of where you're going in your business and life. Like what if you never showed up to that mastermind and you just kind of kept struggling or floundering or just, you know, just doing too much and not doing any of it that well and having that clarity to be like, "No, cut everything else, I'm going after this." Like, did that feel like a weight off your shoulders when you were able to just make that conclusive decision and move forward with that?

Wayne: Yeah, a hundred percent. That's actually, that's exactly right. It did feel like I flew home and I felt like it was a weight off my shoulders because anytime I think you can release something that you just don't really, that doesn't energize you, that doesn't sort of fill your life in a way you really want to - think hard about like, "Do I really need this? Is there a different way to do it?" And sometimes in your business, that means that's the thing to outsource or to hire for or to find just a different way to do it. So those listening that are in the flipping business, you've probably heard it before, but I would just tell you again, think about it, like really think hard about the whole process and figure out what you enjoy doing. If you're struggling with certain things, find some way. There's a path to finding a different way to get that task done or maybe just shift entirely. I don't want to tell anybody what they should do, but I've always been a bit of a learner.

I know I'm energized by something new. I just picked up a lot of different things as an adult. And just because I wanted to, right. Started playing guitar, you know, in my forties and started jujitsu like a year and a half ago. Like, I'm sure some people are like, "Why are you doing all this stuff?" But it does a lot for me to always feel like I'm stretching myself. It keeps me humble and realizing that, "Hey, I don't have all the answers. Like I have a lot of growth left in me." And so I think it's good for everybody to continue to explore that in your land business or whatever business you run. Don't give up sort of the core thing. If you've got something that's successful, I know I've heard that from people before too. They say, "Hey, I had a great business flipping desert squares and now I want to go do big stuff." And in fact, one of the guys in our mastermind I think would tell you, "I wish I'd kept that standard sort of desert square business going while I did some of these others until I felt like really ready to fly."

And so encourage people to do that too. But sometimes it does make sense just jumping into the deep end. So I know the parameters around that when you might make that decision. But I think it certainly was useful to me to have had a taste of a number of different things kind of throughout the land business. But shutting off the ones that I knew were not working for me at the moment, that was just as important, maybe more important.

Seth: Well, I'm curious, now that you're in funding full-time, I mean, obviously a crucial component to making that kind of business work is finding good operators that you can work with again and again that you trust and you just know they're going to do a good job. How many different operators are you working with? Or like if it was your job to go out there this month and find like three new ones that are all solid, I don't know. Like what, what tips would you have in terms of how do you do that? Like, what are your best practices for finding good, reliable ones that you can depend on?

Wayne: I mean, I already had the benefit of having a pretty good network already of land investors. So it was sort of a natural pivot for me. The land community is, as you know, actually fairly small and somewhat self-regulating from, you know, who are good operators, good people, good value systems, things like that. And that's always been super critical to me. Like probably at the top of my list is, is this an operator I would work with? I have to get some gauge of what their value system is because if someone's a bad actor in the land community, like they don't last long, I think. I haven't seen, I've seen very little of it, thankfully, but I do truly think land tends to attract people that are really on the up and up because if you're not like word gets around and people aren't going to work with you anymore, you kind of get shunned out.

But I think how I go about finding people is, of course, I have some personal relationships. It's funny being on the podcast actually, because I really have done, I feel like I've done very little to try to like really run my flag up and, you know, hang my shingle out and say, "Hey, we're in business to fund deals," I think because my vision has always been I don't necessarily want to work with a hundred different operators. My long-term vision and I would never turn anyone away like I'm always happy to meet new people certainly interested in doing that. I like to go to the events certainly went to events as an operator and now going forward I'm coming up on a few events here that I'll just come as a funder and hopefully add value that way but let's just kind of get to know people and they can get to know what we're about but for me it's very much going back to what we were talking about before where you know that deals are going to go sideways you have to expect that deals are going to have problems. And so when you expect that, who do you want to be in partnership when that happens? Because it will happen. And so this criteria that I have is whether I feel that that person is going to be level-headed and rational at that point with a focus on solving whatever problem it might be versus placing blame, getting angry, threatening lawsuits. We've all heard crazy stuff, right? I have no interest in that. I feel like, again, this sort of extreme ownership thing, let's put our heads together and solve it. Right. And yeah, there may be some pain. I think if you're doing the business right, there's a way to get out without, you know, taking a bath, right? Like if you're doing it right, the land business, we can buy at big discounts and do it properly. And obviously a funding relationship, there's a lot of money moving around. You have to take it really seriously and have good agreements and clear agreements. I think actually when Steve Hodgson was on with you, one of the things he said was just read your agreements, like really read them.

We get in this, you know, our world of sort of accepting privacy policies and things like that. Nobody reads it, right? You just click the button, right? But at some level in the land business, you really should know it, particularly if it's someone you're working with on a regular basis.

I try to keep our agreements like really normal language, three, four pages, you know, nothing more than that. I think if it's more than four, like it's really hard to find time to read it, really understand it. And then you probably have a lot of weird verbiage in there. So I guess actually, so just to back up, the relationship part is just critical to me. My long-term objective would be if I had 10 operators that I felt really, really good about, that's like a perfect world. And they have a handful of deals. We've got a few folks that send us pretty much all their deals right now, just a couple, which is great. And we don't necessarily say yes to everything, but it helps a lot. When you take the friction out and I don't have to vet the operator, they don't have to vet me like we have a really good - like I know what to expect, I know how the communication is going to work, I know you know all of those things that's hugely important because as an operator you know if you're seth if you're flipping land like you don't want to have to think every deal like okay now i gotta i got all these different emotions in terms of how i find funding for it if you have one or two people and there's other good funders out there right so they're like whoever it is for you you know find that person or two or have a couple in your quiver and really get a good, deep relationship with them. And that's my focus. I really want to understand what people are, what their value system is, because we'll go into these deals together and we got to feel comfortable with that.

Seth: And how do you do that? Like, is it just a couple of conversations with them or do you ask for references or something or?

Wayne: Yeah, I probably should ask for references. I typically don't. A lot of times we always talk obviously about their experience level. I've got a young guy in North Carolina that brought me an interesting deal recently, never worked together, but you know, talking on the phone, he seems like he's really got a good level head. He's got a full-time job, but we're doing like a trial deal, right? So sometimes people will say, "Hey, they'll come and they'll say, I have 15 deals for you" and they're brand new. And for me, it's just the proof is in the pudding in terms of how a deal goes. So usually what I'm trying to do is find one or two deals that we can start with that are of a reasonable size. I normally won't start with someone brand new with a very big deal. So I guess if you're someone that only does big deals, I would have to get to know you maybe in a different way and see a really, really good track record.

Seth: So what do you consider reasonable size or big deal? How do you define that?

Wayne: You know, I think for a first deal, I like something less than say 40 or 50,000 on an acquisition. And for some people, I realize that that's a really big deal. That's the acquisition price, not the value per se.

Seth: Correct. Yeah. In terms of like, because I think in terms of like, what's the capital risk that we would have out there. And then we would, of course, we would underwrite it a little more tightly initially. And I think I maybe do this a little different than some funders, but I have a philosophy of like, because people have come to me and say, "Well, what's your term sheet? What's your buy box? Like what exactly are you looking for?" And we kind of have that, but it's also like, if I have an operator that I know really well, and we've got a good track record together, and we're getting this with a few folks, I will open the aperture a little bit, right? Because if it's someone I trust, I think it's reasonable to say, I would take a little bit more risk or maybe, you know, fund something a little bit above what I normally might, if the underwriting supports it, that it's a good deal. And it's someone I trust that, "Hey, if it's not exactly what we think it's going to be, they're going to make it right." And, you know, we'll make, I should say, we make it right together. So, again, it's not willy nilly, but it's very much based on, "Hey, I have a relationship with someone and we're going to go into this together."

And so, yeah, you know, in terms of like what's a big deal, what's a small deal? It does depend a little bit on the operator, but someone coming to us that's brand new - we would yeah I would like to see something ideal sort of first one would be let's buy at 20 and sell at 40, 45 something like that and get a couple of those under our belt and then like I said you get a really good idea like how well do they communicate are they good at working with agents or survey or perc test or you know like anything that might need to go into it you get a pretty quick idea of how well people are going to work with you.

Seth: How do your terms work as a funder? When I say terms I mean like what's the profit split? Like who holds title? Who's in charge of selling the property or finding the realtor or deciding the price or subdividing it? Like, just tell me about all this stuff. How does the typical agreement work in terms of what you and they are agreeing to?

Wayne: Yeah, well, I always want to make sure that we're aligned with the, we're incentivized in the same direction with our operators. So I do, and I know a couple of the guys do this too, is a scaled model. So we're typically doing something like for the first 60 days, it's a 65-35 split, the next 60 days, it's a 60-40. And then anything beyond 120 days is 50-50. That's generally where we start.

Seth: When you say the 65-35 split, who's getting the 65? Is that you or the operator?

Wayne: Yeah. The operator. Yeah. I want to incentivize the operator to price it and work the deal so that the quicker they sell it, the more they keep. So if you can find a buyer in the first 30 days and get it closed within 60 days, that's ideal, right? And every funder is going to tell you, that's - I love that we had a deal actually come through and close to close it was 18 days and that was a little bit of - you know we did a bit of pre-marketing to a couple of builders and that was a great situation but people do those funders will do those all day right you're getting close to almost transactional funding at that point so that's generally like splits but it's always depending on the deal you know we can kind of work through certain things in terms of title we've done both we don't insist on taking title we certainly prefer to take title because that I think is cleanest, but realize that does add a little bit of friction to the process. You can normally deal with that just through agreements. We don't really want to be involved necessarily in, "Hey, we're finding the agent, we're doing all the listing agreements, we're doing that." We'll obviously do that, but my expectation of my operators typically is that if you're not doing that, you don't really own your business. I think the operator really needs to feel like, "Hey, if I'm bringing you this deal, I want you to provide the capital for it and partner with me." We'll certainly advise.

We're happy to kind of come alongside the folks that need it and do that. We don't run a coaching operation, but I feel like part of the responsibility of a funder is to leverage whatever expertise that we have that we can provide to someone who maybe is running into things that they haven't seen before. That's part of the value that we should add as a funder and not just write a check and wash my hands of it and say, "Hey, if you default, we're going to," you know, like that's not, I'm not interested in that. I want everybody to succeed. So, like I said, we prefer to take title. There are other ways to secure our interest, whether through a mortgage or a notice of interest or notice of agreement, those kinds of things. There's other techniques. And we're comfortable with those.

Seth: Do you ever work with subdivides or anything like that, or is it just straight flips?

Wayne: Yeah, we've got a couple of subdivides going right now. I think we, certainly today, we are, we're trying to just keep those to a minimum. I don't want to try to take on too many subdivide deals because those are definitely ones where we will get a little bit more involved because typically there's funding required for - I think we're doing one in Oklahoma that's now, finally, we're selling some of those. And but it took a little while to get things like "Hey we ran electric to a few of the properties and got some dirt work done had a road redone and had some pads put in" so there's an additional investment kind of working with those and yeah it's a learning process so we're certainly not opposed to it but knowing that the timeline is longer I think as our capital stack continues to grow and get more diversified we'll probably be looking to do a few more of those actually I've got a couple of really good operators that have some really good, interesting deals. And I'm just kind of holding them at arm's length for a little while until I feel like we can really truly serve them properly, both finance and process wise. But I'm always open to looking at any kind of deal. I mean, we've looked at commercial deals. We've looked at a lot of different things. We're keeping it fairly narrow in terms of the ones that we actually fund right now. But I've learned so much from just talking to operators and learning how they've done it. I met a guy last year and actually we're finally now going to be doing our first deal together. He's in North Carolina, but he handwrites all of his letters. He sends letters, but he handwrites them and I'd never heard of anybody doing that, but he has a very high success rate, very high response rate. And I thought, "Good for you, man. That's fantastic. Let's talk more." And I just, as long as you're finding your way that works for you, like not for me to judge, right? That's great. Like I have to be able to kind of understand it but at some point if the deals work then cool let's talk about working together.

Seth: Yeah I know I've actually heard many people over the years that do that handwriting thing and every time I immediately judge them harshly and think of what a fool they are. But then like you say, it works for them. So it's like, "Man, I guess you can't argue with what works if it's actually working."

So if I'm a land flipper, I've got like five deals under my belt. What should I be doing right now if I want to work with you or find another funder? Like, how can I legitimize myself, make myself look like a good partner? Is it just about like keeping really good track of each deal you've done and presenting like some kind of a pitch deck to the funder or in your eyes, like what would a person need to do? If they come to you off the street, you don't know them, you haven't heard anything about them, what could they do to impress you and make you say, "Heck yes, let's do this"?

Wayne: Yeah. I think for me, I love just to see somebody that's organized. I don't have a set way. We do have a form on our website so you can submit deals, but I don't know that that's even primarily - most of the stuff just comes through. Somebody sends me an email, they find me on the funder's website. And I think just be organized, have a plan. Don't oversell your deal to me. Be realistic, somewhat conservative. The ones where the red flags go up are where someone comes along and says, "Yeah, this is a for sure, you know, we're going to buy at 120 and sell for 500. And here's two comps." And, you know, when you really dig into it, you realize there's this and that. And so, you know, don't oversell it. I don't expect you to maybe necessarily know every last thing. It's great if you do, but it's not unusual as a funder to turn up things that maybe they hadn't seen or hadn't understood. So I think just the basic, really the basics for us to get started and really understand the deal is where is it? Do you have it under contract? What do you think it's worth? Do you have relationships there? And then I always have, for sure, like we don't fund deals just based off the basics. If it's someone new, I'm always having a call or two with them to get to know them better, talk about the deals, their experience level, all of that. So I think I'm not looking to be impressed. I just really want to find out like, "Who are you? Like, what are you really about? What do you value? What are you trying to accomplish? How do I help you do that through this deal that you've brought to me?" And what do you expect maybe going forward in terms of like number of deals? Are you looking for a long-term partner? Are you just kind of a one-off type of situation? We're open to those things but yeah i think just just be real be yourself you don't have to impress me really like i just want to understand who that person is and be organized right because we do have it's amazing like our deal flow is really really full right now and i have to be very organized and so the best thing you can do is if you email me or fill out our form just put as much information in there as you can with whatever you've done. I don't need a full due diligence package or anything like that, but the standard stuff that you would think someone could go out then and really get a good sense of what's going on with a property.

Seth: Do you ever sell properties with seller financing when you funded the deal or does that just not work? So I've done that once and I actually did that early in my career. I did that once. I get people asking about this sometimes, like if I fund a deal. I want to sell it with owner financing. How does the agreement work? And what I've heard far and wide from every funder is we don't sell it with seller financing. Like it just doesn't work. So I'm just curious if you've done that, how did that work? Was that a mistake or would you do it again?

Wayne: I wouldn't do it the way that I did it before. So I have one deal. It's still on my books. I get a payment on a regular basis as my sort of profit split of that payment and it comes in regularly and it's fine. It's nothing too exciting. I would not do it again. I think I would have better places to put that money as a funder. So I guess what I would say though, if that's your model, the one way we could potentially work together is that you structure your seller finance in a way that is interesting to a note buyer. And then we use someone like Eric Schierloh or some others, you know, there's folks out there that will buy notes and they may buy them at closing. You do have to, you know, there's a discount on the note. And so you just have to price in such a way that it makes sense. And I would say we have to know that going in. Generally speaking, if we do a deal, we fund a deal, and later on they decide, "Hey, this isn't selling for cash. I want to sell for seller finance." Then we would have to have a conversation at that point of exactly what would happen if we found a buyer and seller finance, because we're not going to hold that note. We're not in the business of holding notes. So if we do that, we would only do it in the case of, "Okay, cool. If you can find us a buyer and seller finance, we're going to sell that note at closing and you need to be comfortable with that in order to accept that offer."

And that's how we would do it. Again, there may be other funders that are okay holding notes, but I want to let people that are in the note business, hold the notes. And then we can, you know, we're all about speed. We really want to do good deals and get everyone to do things quickly and turn the money as quickly as we can, because that's best for everybody. So that's how we would approach that.

Seth: Can you tell me what disposition financing is in your book? What does that mean, what is it? How does it help investors close more sales?

Wayne: Yeah, well, we just talked about seller financing, right? I think most people know about that and how that broadens the buyer pool. So this is one unique thing I think that our partnership has brought to the table is that when I started working with Josh, I would tell him about, "Here's how we run this business." And he started saying, "Listen, you know, for example," so he's been in the business a long time. He has his own finance company. He finances all kinds of strange things too, boats and planes and really crazy things.

And I don't, I actually don't even know how he does it, but he's got this way of like putting programs together himself or working with his partners to do unique things. And this is what the disposition, this is my term, I guess, for disposition financing is that one reason to work with us is because we can help you through Josh's contacts, do things like, for example, there's a builder program that Josh has in his playbook, I guess. So if you're a builder and you've done at least one project in the last two years, and if you have a 700 credit score and can bring 20% down, so just put your builder hat on and say, if I qualify on those things, this program will finance the entirety or the other 80%, right? So if you put 20% down, they'll finance all of the other 80% from both the land acquisition and the building cost, right? So if you're a builder, I want to build a home on a piece of land or you're talking to a builder. So you're the land investor. Maybe I put my land investor hat back on. Say, "Hey, I've got a property and I want to sell. I think a builder would be a great buyer for this infill lot. I can go to them and say, hey, listen, I have a program that I can get you into. If you have 20% down, 700 credit score, and you've done at least one project in the last two years, we can finance all the rest for both the land acquisition and the cost of the construction for interest only payments for 24 months." You probably should have Josh on your podcast sometime to actually go deep into this, but this is one example that he's told me. I was like, "Wow, that sounds amazing." He's like, "Yeah, it really, really is." So that's an example of, if you just think as a land investor, if there's any way that you can broaden your buyer pool.

That's a good thing and that's why we do things like seller finance. We have a whole - and we're actually putting together a cheat sheet. I think by the time this drops we'll have this cheat sheet ready and you can maybe put it in the show notes or something like that but it'll be on our website that basically says, you know, we've got this builder program, we've got one that's an ag lender right so if your property - they do finance in all 50 states. I don't know all the details of this one, this one's newer, but basically if it's got ag type of zoning there's a really cool program for getting financing for that. So whether that's for acquisition or we could do it on both sides, right? We do it both for acquisition and disposition for whoever your buyer is. So there's some really interesting things. And we realized we have something kind of special here through Josh's experience is that we want to start putting together more programs so that here's a good reason why we can partner, whether you use this for funding or not. I think it probably makes sense that come to us, we'll fund the deal, and then we can actually provide a pathway for you to kind of utilize these other programs and use it in your own marketing to say, "Hey, we can do this," right? If you can, to help make it easier for people on the disposition side, they've got these other options. Does that make sense? So I think that's how I'm thinking about it. We think it's actually a really, really good potential. So there's at least three or four that I can think of, and hopefully that'll grow over time, but more arrows in the quiver, I guess, for folks to be able to sell their property.

Seth: Well, Wayne, it's been awesome talking to you. I'm going to wrap this up with our three closing questions. So one of those questions is, what's one land investing myth that you think needs to die? Anything come to mind?

Wayne: There's probably several of them. Yeah, that's a good question. What do we consider a myth? I think we've touched on this a little bit, but some people think that there's only one way to do the land business. The more you get around other people, you realize that there are just, even within the land niche, there are a thousand sub-niches and it's really worth exploring or at least figuring out like what's going on and talk to as many people as you can. So I guess if you were to put it in the myth is that I think some people that teach, they say, "Hey, this is the way to do it. Like there," or "This is the best way is this type of property or that type of property or this sort of, you know, double close or wholesale or whatever is the best." Well, it may be right for an individual, but realize that your own path is your path. And so, yeah, I would want to put that to bed that there's one right way to do the land business. Because there definitely is not, you can - you go to any conference with more than five people and you will find people doing the business in very, very different ways. So that's what I would say.

Seth: Yeah, that's very true. It's almost like in the land business and even in life in general, I think there's definitely some absolutes out there that are just true through and through. But a lot of times when you hear people speaking in absolutes, you just kind of have to question that. Be like, "Really? Are you sure about that?" Like, are you saying it can't be done because you can't do it or because it actually can't be done? Or likewise, are you saying it can be done because you have some special ability that most people don't have? Could anybody do this? I don't know. It's worth scrutinizing those statements, I think.

Wayne: Yeah. I'm guilty of that too. There's things I feel like, "Why can't someone do this? It seems easy to me," but of course it's not easy for everybody. We all have our things and you just got to really embrace the ones that come naturally to you.

Seth: Yeah, totally. So this question, kind of more just on the personal side, just to get to know you a little bit better. What's one of your best memories in life? What comes to mind?

Wayne: Oh, wow. I've been so blessed to do a lot of things. I think one of those, I took a leap of faith actually is I had the opportunity in my software business to go and work on a project that was in New Zealand. I had backpacked through there when I was in my early twenties with a couple of buddies and single and just had a great time. And then, yeah, after marriage, we didn't have kids yet. And yeah, I just, I started traveling to New Zealand. We eventually moved down there for this work project. I remember I had a couple of friends here in Minnesota that thought, "Oh, I could never do that so far away." And I thought, "Wow, when am I ever going to get this opportunity again? Why wouldn't I do this?" And funny enough, I thought, "Well, this would be," it's changed a lot of things for us in a weird way. We just have lifelong friends that we developed while we were down there through our church and other things. And then my wife and I have been back a couple of times. We finally were able to take all of our kids. They're all old enough to remember a little over a year ago we went back. Even in the midst of all my job loss, I had already sort of prepaid our flights and some other things. And I thought, "We're just going to do this trip." And it was really, I tried not to get too stressed about it, but I would never have changed it. It was such a blessing. And now that seed is planted in my children. So you just kind of, it's become this little mustard seed of something that has blossomed. And I don't know, now they're talking about, "Should I go to college down there?" Like, I don't know, you could, right?

But we just love it. It's a really cool place. I'm sure some of your listeners have been there, but it's a great memory. We'll always have it. Look forward to going back again and building some new memories. But yeah.

Seth: You see any movie scenes from Lord of the Rings when you were there?

Wayne: Yeah. Yeah. Believe it or not, actually, when I was down there for my project, the husband, a boyfriend at the time of a gal that I worked with was in the movies. He was the guy when you watch the first movie, the ringwraith that stabs Frodo and is the one that's like sniffing around when they're hiding under the tree. That's him? That's my friend Brent.

Seth: No way. That's awesome.

Wayne: He's a librarian at the parliament in Wellington. But yeah, we lived in Wellington, which is sort of the central, you know, Weta Studios is right there. Peter Jackson lives there. And so, yeah, there's a lot of filming locations around there. We went to see a bunch of those, but yeah, I sort of feel like I have a little direct connection to the films there, but yeah, it's a cool place.

Seth: Which of the movies or episodes now from the TV show do you think is the best one? Any opinions on that?

Wayne: I've not seen any of the TV stuff. I mean, I just, I love them all. We have the extended versions, you know, kind of a little nerdy about it. I did read those books a fair bit when I was younger. So it's such a great classic story, anything by Tolkien, but yeah, I don't know that I have a favorite. The Return of the King obviously is, you know, when you have that sort of climax of Aragorn, you know, taking the mantle that has been bestowed upon him. That's pretty cool.

Seth: So last question, when was the last time you left your comfort zone and how did you grow? You may have kind of answered this in this interview earlier, but anything else come to mind?

Wayne: Yeah. I mean, I think that's it. I actually, if I were to go back, you know, this is actually really important. It changed my life entirely. Actually, when I was in college. I mean, I was a pretty introverted kid when I was growing up. I had a small group in a small town in South Dakota and had my group of friends, but I wasn't real comfortable meeting people that I didn't know. When I was in college, my freshman year, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do for the summer. And I got invited by my neighbor on my dorm floor to go check out this job selling educational books door to door.

And I said, "Yes," they thought I could do it. I was like, "This is great. They said I could probably make, you know, five thousand dollars in the summer. It was the average." And I thought "I can at least be average." And I remember telling my parents and to their credit, they didn't poo-poo it. But I found out, you know, years later that they were like, "We thought he was crazy. Like, this is not our kid to go out and, you know, knock on strangers' doors and sell books." But it totally changed the trajectory of what I believed I could do. I have great friends that I met through that program, met my wife through that program. She was a fellow bookseller that I met my very last summer doing that. I did that for six years. So I did that all through college, a couple of years full time after college. I recruited and trained other kids, but it was a school of hard knocks, right? When you go out and knock on thousands of doors all summer, that was definitely out of my comfort zone.

And maybe there's a listener or two out there that did that program. I tend to meet people from time to time. There aren't a lot of kids that do it anymore, but back in the 90s, it was a fair number of us. But it was a great thing to kind of hone a skill that I didn't realize I really should have, which is how to sell yourself, sell your ideas, talk to people you don't know, be comfortable in front of rooms. And it's impacted every career role I've ever had. It's impacted every relationship I've ever had. And it's just been a real blessing. So I guess, yeah, it's funny. I hadn't thought about that one at all in a while, but that was a real step out in faith type of moment and changed everything.

Seth: Well, it's actually a really interesting thing. Because I imagine when you started doing that job, it was probably really uncomfortable, maybe almost painful to knock on the doors of strangers and talk to people, by the time you were wrapping up that job and being done with it, would you say you were like good at it? Or do you have a much higher level of comfort with it?

Wayne: Yeah. Well, there was always some level of hard, right? There's always some level of suck, right? It's just like, you know, you can be a really fit athlete, but your workouts can still suck and be, they can be hard. And I think that's really the best way to think about it. Jim Rohn, who I love would always talk about, like "Don't wish for fewer problems, wish that you were better," he says it better than I do but it's basically that like you know your problems are going to come. Don't wish that you just don't have any problems, you just wish that you become a better person and that's truly what happened through that and really every hard thing in my life but particularly that. It was a real good lesson for me to say "Hey at the beginning of the summer this was hard and I also wasn't very good at it and by the end of the summer I was like this is still hard but I'm much better at it" like I can deal with someone being rude to me. I can deal with super hot and sweating through my shirt. I can deal with being tired or hungry or all of those things. And then obviously I stuck with it for as long as I did because I, primarily, because one, I guess I was making decent money, but it was really more about, I recognized that I was having a lot of personal growth through that. And I just wanted to, I hung onto that and say, "Hey, every year I'm learning something different that I didn't realize I even needed to learn." And that was super valuable to me.

Seth: That kind of job sounds like a living hell to me, like really miserable, but I can absolutely see how that would be transformative in building a skill that you could take with you everywhere. Can you think of any class you took in college that was more valuable than that experience?

Wayne: Nothing. Not even close. Not even close.

Seth: That doesn't surprise me at all to hear you say that. It almost makes you wonder, I wonder if you could just work that job and be set for life. What did you learn at college that was like so impactful that it just totally changed everything. And like, I realize a lot of companies want to see that to hire you in the first place. So like there's that little bit of it. But when you think about the major in business and communications that I got in college, almost none of it do I use today or did I need to do anything in life, really? I mean, it was just checking a big box. I mean, the real transformation happened from just doing hard things in the real world and realizing, "Oh, I can do this even though it's hard and I didn't think I could." Was your experience similar?

Wayne: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. You have to sort of find out where your limits are. I think of this sometimes too, because I've heard people say you got to get out of your comfort zone. But I always think of it as, "No, if you get out of your comfort zone, you're actually like, most people will jump right back into their comfort zone when they're out." What you want to do is go to the very edge of your comfort zone and stay there as long as you can. Go to the very edge of it and stay there as long as you can, because then your comfort zone expands just a little bit. And then you can go a little bit further, right? You don't want to make it so that you feel so uncomfortable that you don't ever want to do that again. And I've done that in things in my life too, where I just like, "Oh, this really sucks. I'm never doing this again." Well, where maybe if I would have taken something that was just on the edge of my comfort zone and that was to be, to be fair, going to sell books door to door was probably leaping entirely out of my comfort zone. But I also had a support network around me. It was a very old company. They had a very proven system for teaching young college kids how to go out and do this work. And it was really more of a numbers game. They knew you got a good product. And if you're working really hard and just show it to a lot of people, it really doesn't - we used to say if you had the three B's, you had bad breath, buck teeth and body odor, you would still sell books if you did, if you followed all the steps. And I don't know if I had any of those. I probably did. But I found a way to sell books. This rural kid from South Dakota that knew nothing, had never really been anywhere. And I'm out knocking on doors in Burlington, North Carolina. So yeah, there's just so many things I got from doing that.

Seth: Yeah, your comfort zone is dangerous. Just yesterday, actually, I was on a long drive and I randomly thought of the book, The 10X Rule. Kind of late to the party. That book has been out for a long time, but I never actually read it. So I'm listening to it. I'm going to get it on Audible and start listening and, you know, about halfway through it now. And it's just a really interesting idea. I feel like on one hand, it's like a really impactful, life-changing mindset to get into that. Just understanding, like, if I work like a normal person, I'm going to get normal results. If I actually want to get big results, I need to just go nuts and realize, like, I'm probably not going to hit it, but I'd much rather come up short on 10x my goals than just 1x my goals. So, like, totally get that. I feel like it can be kind of toxic too, though, or it can be taken too far. I don't really know where that line is. I feel like it's pretty far out there because most people don't even bother to try doing 10X. But it's one of those interesting things in life is discerning, working really hard, but knowing when to pull back and stop too. Right.

Wayne: Yeah. That's the Grant Cardone one, right? The 10X. Yeah. Because there's another one that's similar. I don't know the Grant Cardone stuff as well. The 10X is easier than 2X? Correct. That one I really related to because that one was very much about change your mindset, right? If you have a 2x mindset, you can kind of keep doing the same things that you're doing, but just do more. And, but if you have the 10X mindset and he was a little cliff notes, I guess, for everybody, if you haven't read it, the 10X mindset is, "Oh, I have to really rethink if I were to make, have to go 10X," right. Go from a hundred thousand to a million. "I need to rethink everything in my business." And that's where you see, and again, maybe you don't make 10X, but you go from, you know, where you are to, you know, five X or four X, something like that. You're certainly will get farther looking more deeply at that.

So yeah, I love that. I love that philosophy. It's challenging. It is hard. I mean, you can get in probably a real rat race type of like buckle down, just do more kind of mindset, which isn't always the answer. And sometimes that's the answer, but a lot of times that is not the answer. It's just do more.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Well, Wayne, if people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? Where should they go?

Wayne: So nordicskycapital.com is where we are. I've got both places for both folks that are looking to invest funds, as well as, of course, land operators that have deals that they're looking for funding on. My email is just wayne@nordicskycapital.com. And yeah, I would say come to Minneapolis. Find yourself passing through. Reach out to me. I'd love to connect with you. Or, you know, regardless, yeah, always happy to have a call with particularly land operators, kind of get to know what their business is like. But that's where to find me.

Seth: Show notes for this episode, retipster.com/222. And that's where you can find links to Wayne's website, as well as a lot of the other stuff we talked about in this episode. Wayne, thanks again. It's great to talk to you in this format. We'll talk again soon.

Wayne: It's my pleasure. Appreciate it, Seth.

Seth: You bet.