Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? Welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. Today, we're talking with Josh Pierce. So Josh is a fast-scaling land investor who has taken the industry by storm in less than two years. He started in November of 2023.

Josh went from zero experience in land to running a high-performing business with a full team, doing hundreds of thousands in monthly gross profit. Now, another thing about Josh that caught my eye is his creative approach to closing deals. Josh runs another side business called Cookie Closers, where he sends boxes of high-end cookies to motivated sellers. It might sound kind of funny, but it actually works. He sent me a box so I could experience it firsthand. And I can tell you that these boxes are great at creating trust. I can totally see how they would have a huge positive impact on conversion rates and responses and help close land deals that otherwise would have totally slipped away. Josh is a great example of what's possible in the land business with enough vision and grit and creativity. We're about to learn a lot from him. So Josh, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Josh: I'm doing great. Thank you for the incredible introduction as well. Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here. I'm excited to chat and share what I've learned along the way and hopefully help some other folks get going and make some big moves.

Seth: Did I hear right that you were a fitness coach at one point before you got into land?

Josh: That's correct. For five years, I built and grew an online fitness coaching company. I was helping middle-aged women lose weight and I loved it. It was incredible, but I just kind of reached a point where I burnt out a little bit. And I was feeling a calling to get into a higher ticket widget, you know, where the juice was a little more worth the squeeze and brought myself into this interesting corner of the real estate world, buying and selling land.

Seth: And there's a lot of other things you could have done out there. Why land? Like, how did you discover it? What made you see this and decide, okay, that's worth my time to jump into that?

Josh: Oh, man. So one of my best friends 10 years ago started wholesaling houses and I watched him get started and I sat on the sidelines and I was like, I'm going to do a flip one of these days. And five years went by and I still hadn't done my first anything in real estate. And when I left the fitness space, I reached out to him and I said, "Hey, man, I'm ready to go. Where should I start?" And he's like, "Man, I'm going to be honest with you. If I were to start over right now, I wouldn't do what I'm doing. I'd look at land." And, you know, we got into, you know, why? What do you mean? And he basically said, "I caught the wave in wholesaling houses."

And if you get into land right now, you can be a part of that wave, whether you're a little bit ahead, a little bit behind, whatever. It's going to be a much better opportunity than starting houses right now. So I said, all right. I started sniffing around in the land space, came across a few people that I wanted to learn from and hit the gas pedal right away.

Seth: Did you have a lot of money coming into the land business? Some people are very well capitalized, others hardly have any money at all, and that can play a big role in how quickly you can grow in that kind of thing. So was that something you had at your disposal or what did that look like?

Josh: I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing. I wasn't sitting on capital coming in. To be totally frank, I don't recommend trying this at home. I floated the entire business on my credit card coming out of the gate. So I saw it as I'm taking a loan out for roughly 25 grand for the first few months to get this thing going because I know that this is going to be the thing. While I didn't have money, what I had was time. I wasn't working a full-time job on the side, so I could jump in and do this 40, 50 hours a week. That was a huge part in helping me really get going. But yeah, with no money, I developed the double-close strategy and built that as my core strategy and started running it from there.

Seth: How long did it take before you started making money in this business? Did it happen right out of the gate or what did that journey look like?

Josh: I don't think anyone could have properly prepared me for what that time delay could have looked like. And I think I had heard, you know, it's going to take a few months and I, you know, oh yeah, whatever. We'll see about that. It was five months from when I sent my first mailers out to when my first deal went full cycle.

And really, you know, sweet deal in the sense of it was a double close, buy for a hundred, sell for 145. I ended up taking home 31K on that with no money out of my pocket. You know, so I made $31,000 on nothing. And that was enough to completely clear me out of any red that I got into the five months prior to that. But yeah, those five months were interesting. It was a challenge. I brought a VA in pretty much when I first started sending mail. So I was paying an overseas VA out of my pocket without any idea when I was going to make my first dollar. And I just saw it as betting on myself.

Ajay: So Josh, can we unpack that a little bit? Because you are pretty unique in the sense that you did have a business background, right? I think a lot of people that get into land flipping, a lot of times it's their first business or they're leaving the W2 world. And so they don't quite have the same conviction where they know inputs equals outputs. If I do work, I will make money. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like from a turnover perspective, but I know it'll come. Man, you're probably speaking to thousands of people that might be doing this in their first business right now. And you're somebody who took a lot of risk, right? 25 grand on credit cards is enough to make some people very nervous and anxious. What message do you have for people if they're processing through taking certain levels of risk and this is both dangerous but also like you said it's betting on yourself so like be careful on your words but i also want the really like man walk us through your brain to see who else out there should do what you did.

Josh: I love that question. Thank you for asking that. So the first thing that comes to mind is the idea of investment and where you put your money, right? Like 90% of America will put their money blindly into the stock market and they think that's safe, right? Like, I don't think there's anything safe about investing in companies where I have no control over. I would much rather invest in myself. And I'm not saying I'm going to get better returns every time. I feel more confident that I can control the inputs and therefore affect the outcome. How I justify this—again, I don't recommend trying this at home necessarily—I was at 35 years old, 34 years old, making a transition from my second career to my third. So I had seen proof of concept with this working. I had gotten into Sumner Healy's mentorship at the time. And I'd seen some of the people posting their wins and that kind of thing. And I was like, all right, this seems legit. Got on calls with a few people who are now some of my good friends and made sure that it was the real deal. And once I had that proof of concept, I knew that this was what would make me a millionaire one day.

And I saw that investment as the entry ticket. That was the entry fee. If I want to be a multimillionaire one day, there's a cost to play that game. And taking a risk back against the wall, whatever it comes out to on the credit card, which for me, it ended up to be about 25 grand after a mentorship and a half, my mail and everything like that. And that's how I justified it. You know, a $25,000 investment to get into this world where I can give my future family everything they ever want and need.

Seth: Well, I do wonder, what did you expect was going to happen? I don't know if that five-month timeline of actually making money, if that was like what you expected or if that was longer or faster, but what did you think was going to happen versus what actually happened?

Josh: I think that the time horizon was pretty much on par with the expectation, but what I realized throughout my first year was the deal cycle. It's a slow cycle. It's a long cycle and to prepare yourself for that. So I thought I acquire this property and I can sell it pretty quick. I guess coming in, I was like, okay, I won the acquisition. I got a deal. And then I realized, okay, this is only the first half of this thing. And now I got to put it on the market and maybe it sits for 60 days. And then maybe we get an offer and it's 45 days until closing. I just didn't realize how drawn out the entire process would be from starting to take calls to collecting a paycheck.

Seth: Did you have like a certain revenue goal in mind? Like, I'm going to make X amount my first year or anything like that? Or were you just like, oh, we'll see what happens?

Josh: I don't know. I came in a little bit delusional. I said, I'm going to make a half a million dollars in deal profits my first year. And it started out slow. You know, the first five months, we didn't make a dollar. And then it started to pick up. There was an 11-week dry spell in there at one point where we didn't have a single closing, but ended up closing the year out just under $400K. And I feel great about that for the first year, not knowing anything about real estate coming in.

Seth: When you think back to your experience as a fitness coach, do you think that played any role in your success or is it just totally disconnected?

Josh: 100%. 100%. I think about this often. Alex Hormozi says, your first business gets you good. Your second business gets you rich. And I didn't make much money fitness coaching. It wasn't the career that was going to get me, you know, that the future life I wanted and the house that I want and that kind of thing. But what it gave me was, it gave me the opportunity to learn systems, to learn how to work with a team, to learn how to delegate, scale, all of that inside of a world that I was incredibly familiar in the fitness space. Having those conversations were very easy for me. So it gave me a very low barrier way to learn those skills. And fumble through it so that when I came into this.

I knew I would need a VA right out of the gate. I prepared a mail list one time and I was like, all right, that's the last time I'm doing that. I need to make this hire now. I knew that. I knew my time was going to be my biggest constraint. So I knew I was going to need to create SOPs from day one. I knew that I was going to need to pass those off as quickly as possible so that I could keep myself free to continue growing the business. I had a few of those, some wisdom that I learned in the fitness space in just building the business that allowed me to really shortcut those first six to 12 months, really.

Seth: And how many people on your team right now?

Josh: I've got nine right now.

Seth: Okay. How long was it to fill all those spots? Like, did that happen in the first year?

Josh: Gosh, no. I'll just kind of walk through kind of what that looked like. So I started my first VA six weeks in. She became a generalist and helped with a lot of marketing, preparing mail and stuff like that. And then I hired another VA to do lead intake for me a couple months after that. Then at about month 10, I hired my first acquisitions manager. And shortly after that, we brought on someone to comp as well, because I realized I didn't want my acquisition manager comping properties too. I just wanted them selling. Then I brought on someone to run my dispo side of things as like a TC. So by the end of the first year, I had five staff. And the rest has pretty much happened on this side in the new year in the last five months.

Ajay: Man, Josh, I just want to point out, I think something that you've done so well, two points I want to highlight. The first one, if you follow the track of how Josh laid that out, right? First VA was a generalist. Josh looked at the business and said, I got too much on my plate. I need somebody else to do some stuff, right? And what you didn't do, which is my second point, is say, here's the exact role I need to hire for. It needs to look exactly like this. So many people when they hire their first person in my opinion go way too specialized on that role and when they do that, it becomes more troublesome because you ask yourself the question, I don't know if I'm going to have enough work for this person. What does that need to look like? Do I hire part-time talent, which my opinion is part-time talent does not scale very well. You can't serve two masters. So if they've got multiple part-time jobs, it's usually not great. But you basically follow this track, Josh, where you weren't afraid to bring on generalists early on.

You specialized over time and you specialized for the problems in front of you, right? It went from a lot of work to generalist VA to, what was it, lead manager, then acquisitions manager, right? Or data person and then acquisitions manager where you said, sweet, we pumped up the machine. Now I don't want to close all these or I don't have the bandwidth to close all these. Oh my gosh, we've got so many contracts. I need somebody on dispo, right? So you just watch the hiring track and it tells a story. Go back and re-listen to the pace and the manner at which Josh hired. And there's a story in there that's such a valuable learning lesson that I didn't want everybody here to miss.

Seth: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So if you're hiring a generalist, are you basically saying they have to be good at everything? Or if you don't even really know what you need them to do, like how do you even measure, okay, I got a good person.

Josh: I'm so happy to share this conversation, this thought process. And anybody that may be new to this space, you know, you're doing it all yourself and you think you might need some help. You could probably take a note or two from this. So I didn't have revenue when I made my first hire. I had done mail prep once, which means I prepared one mail list. So I knew one thing I was going to give her that went on onlinejobs.ph. And one thing I've learned from a friend and mentor that I've had in the past is how he hires someone who's got so much more potential than the position you're actually hiring for. So what I was looking for is someone who could possibly be an operations expert in my company, but who maybe didn't know that about themselves at the time. Someone who kind of had that it factor. And that's when I talked to Kath, that's what I saw in her.

It was like, okay, cool. This is someone who can grow with me. She's versatile, like a utility player. And going into that first conversation with her, when I made her the offer, I was like, hey, look, we're just getting started. It's not my first business, but we're just getting going here. I have one thing that I want you to be doing right now, but I'd like you for about 20 hours a week. I don't know what the rest of that time is going to look like, to be totally honest. I'm going to give you that one thing. And then I'm going to use my time to create and build more processes. And as I build them, I'm going to pass them off to you. And we're just going to build this road as we go. And I anticipate 20 hours a week now. And in about 90 days, I'd love to get you up to full time. I know it sounds like there's some uncertainty in what your role is going to look like, not exactly knowing how you're going to—if you're open to it, we would love to have you. And I would love to just build your plate as we go. She loved it. I had the conversation with her. I was like, look, when I bring someone in, like I bring you into my family, like I want you to grow with me regardless of how that looks. And she was down for it. And I think that transparency, I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but that transparency was what won that relationship for me. Because while I didn't know what the role was going to look like, I had this conviction of like, look, I want you to be here. And we're going in this direction and I can't do it on my own. I need you by my side. And I mean, she's still with me today.

Seth: When you're talking to somebody like that, what would be a red flag or a green flag? When you're looking for a generalist, you don't have it that well-defined. What kind of response would show you, okay, this person is going to work or like, okay, this is not going to work.

Josh: I look for like a sharpness in the responses, even like not being quick to get words out, but like, do they have this sharpness about them? How do they speak? Like, does this person feel like someone who's a problem solver, who can be left to work on their own and build the fire? You all are good friends with Mike Belcom. That was one of the greatest lessons I ever learned from Mike was how he speaks about his staff. He's like, I have staff who they can build the fire. Everybody else is really good at keeping the fire going. They don't let the fire die. They're good at maintaining it. My staff can build the fire. And when I heard that, instantly flip the switch in how I hire. That's what I look for. So I feel around in my interviews for, is this the kind of person who can build the fire or can they just maintain?

Seth: I've actually heard there's a difference between people who can start things versus keeping things going. Some people are really good at one with the other. If you find people really good at building the fire, does that mean they actually aren't that good at maintaining it? They just start things.

Josh: I don't know. Good point.

Seth: Yeah. Which are you, Seth?

Seth: I think I'm probably better at keeping things going. Okay. But I have to be good at starting things or I never would have gotten anywhere. But I think I prefer to keep them going. It's kind of my thing. But what are you guys? Are you starters?

Josh: I like to build the fire. I like to build the fire and pass it off. And that's what I'm realizing is my role in a company is cast the vision and then make sure I have someone next to me who can build it quickly. And I can just keep casting the vision. So I'm a systems guy. I love to build the system, but I don't like to run it. I like to make sure that someone else can run it so I can keep building more systems.

Ajay: I'm the same way as Josh. I'm like a do it once. So I understand it. Build out systems and then hand it off kind of guy.

Seth: Yeah, that feels like the more profitable skill set to have is being able to start things and pass them off. Because if you just maintain, like you're kind of stuck, maintain this.

Ajay: Yeah, no. And that's a really good point. Just in the sense of like, as markets shift over time, it becomes really important that in terms of like—keeping a fire going to this analogy here, there is so much validity in essentially starting a new fire in pivoting, right? So like to continue to stay relevant in land, and I'm going to get slightly ahead of us here, Seth, but I know like Josh, in your own business, you were a heavy mail shop for a long time and you've pivoted and gone very aggressive on the SMS side, right? I think there's something to be said there where that's an example of starting a fire is you need to be adaptable to change because marketing channels historically are always going to get more expensive. They never get cheaper. So you need to account for that at a certain point, paying for that arbitrage on attention no longer makes sense. And you have to pivot. And I'm not saying direct mail does not make sense. That's not the message I'm sending here. As much as I know that was a pivot you made in your business as trends have happened. So Seth, to your point of profitability, I guess so. That doesn't mean one's more important than the other necessarily, but I could see in small business how it really matters that you have the skill set of being able to start regardless of the strength, maybe. I don't know. What do you think?

Seth: Yeah. I was just talking a random story. My cousin-in-law about a month ago, he lives in Arizona. And it boggles my mind how many things he has started in our thriving businesses to this day. Like he's a developer, he's got a media company, he's got a magazine, all this stuff. Just hearing about it overwhelms me until I realize he's a guy who starts things. It actually doesn't go well for him at all when he tries to run the thing. He just starts the thing and then finds the right person. And to your point, I don't think one is better than the other, but... If you want to make a ton of money in life, being a starter and being able to delegate that will get you there a lot faster. Because if you have to be the guy running stuff, there's a ceiling there. Because there's only so much you can do that keep running on your own.

Ajay: It's true. And just to clarify, Seth, all his businesses are profitable and successful?

Seth: Well, that's how I made it sound. You didn't even tell me everything.

Seth: So on the whole thing of pivoting from mailing to texting, what does that look like right now in your business? Like how much mail do you do per month versus texts? And like, what's working best right now?

Josh: Yeah. So I built the entire business on just mail, blind offers, and it was our bread and butter. We crushed, we got up to about 20,000 letters a month. We had a 0.4% response rate that held pretty steady. And we converted 15% of our calls into deals that averaged at least 25K. So we had a well-oiled machine on the blind offer side, and then preparing for the holidays coming up as we scaled back our mail, we figured it was an ample time to introduce a second marketing channel. So we introduced texting at that time, came out of the holidays. We've been doing 23,000 blind offers a month. And we are right now doing about 50,000 text messages a month.

Seth: If you were forced to give up one of those, which would you give up? Which one works best?

Josh: Oh man, this is a loaded question. I'm so torn. I'm so torn because we had so much success with the mail. And it's such a well-oiled machine. I know that one in every six calls is a deal. I just know that. That's how we work. Whereas mail, it's so much more of a crapshoot. And we don't get fat deals in the mail. There's almost a cap on the size of the deals we see in our mail. I mean, we're getting six-figure deals with our text. So you got to kiss a lot more frogs, but the deal size is bigger. It's equally as profitable in terms of ROAS right now. So it's kind of neck and neck, let's say as long as ROAS stays the same, I'd probably stick with mail. And understanding also that I'm probably half as efficient now as I was six months ago with numbers and response rates and everything like that. So that's why I just, I saw that coming and wanted to get ahead of that curve for sure.

Seth: Yeah. How many of your team members wouldn't be necessary if you were not doing texting?

Josh: You had removed two people out of the operation for sure. And it makes it so that now I only have one closer to work with, which becomes easier to when you start talking about a whole team that adds nuances as well. So it's definitely a more simple operation. I understand why my mentors early on said, Hey, don't jump into this right away. It's more complicated. You'll get more leads and it requires more work. I totally get it now. They all have their drawbacks, man. Like each channel has its little things about it that is just horrible to deal with. You just got to figure out which battles you want to fight.

Seth: I know what you mean. It is a loaded question in terms of like which one's better because it's like I don't know like they both have their mixture of great and terrible things.

Ajay: Can I add to here? It really depends on like an operator's strengths to be honest. Like some people are just phenomenal at filling the funnel, right? Somebody world-class at this from the Leah community, Josh, I'm thinking of Rylan. That guy is probably one of the best I know at just filling the funnel. So he arbitrages the crap out of cheap marketing, right? Which is great, right? Tons of like text message and cold email, and they're probably doing tons of other stuff. I don't talk to him super frequently, but I know he's really, really good at top of funnel, right? I think other people have more of a sniper approach generally and are really good at it. And I think, Josh, that was your bread and butter for a long time. I'm not saying you've changed that necessarily, but you have expanded on some of it. So I think there's even a question of like operator preferences here, Seth, where it's like, man, do you prefer to just have your picking of the litter and fuel the funnel on top? Or do you want low lead flow, but you're like clipping one in six like you do with the blind offers, Josh. The question is though, as soon as anything, any one of your variable changes.

How sensitive is your business, right? On the texting front, let's say you go all in and then LC or Smarter Contact goes down for a few days. Oh, there goes that. Let's say a hurricane comes in. Oh, three week delay on direct mail, right? So there's risks on everything, which I think are such interesting trade-offs and why I feel like, Josh, you've done such a good job of diversifying your lead generation at this point where like you mastered one skillset, didn't turn it off and then spun up another where you have the benefits of both now. Right. Which again, come with their own challenges.

Josh: Just to speak on that real quick, I remember, you know, we had several conversations about this and you're like, dude, your mail crushes, like why not just scale it? And the thing is, is I saw my response rate go from what I saw was very acceptable to trending down over time with no other change in my marketing or anything like that. So I saw it as managing key man risk. You're not relying on one corner of the business or one person. The same thing with one channel. I wanted to diversify. I see a lot of the big dogs in the space that I've learned from and stuff like that. They're diversifying in some aspect. And I try to not get the shiny quarter syndrome and get all the marketing channels. But I just knew to get to the level that I wanted to be playing at going all in on mail felt like a very risky play and running a ton of overhead as well.

Seth: Yeah and even inherent in the question of like what's better mail versus texting like there's so many assumptions we could be making about what you're even doing like what kind of properties you're going after and what your blind offers look like and tons of stuff it's really hard to make any definitive statement about that without understanding a ton of stuff about what's going on underneath the hood on that whole thing the ROAS side of it.

Texting versus mail, is one of them clearly better?

Josh: No. Actually, we really started to take a close look about 60, 75 days ago when we were looking at scaling our sales team and scaling volume. And we saw that they were neck and neck. We're looking at around 7% with both of them or 7X with both of them. There was no clear winner where it made sense to go all in on one. So yeah, they've kind of been neck and neck the same. Of course, we always have an interesting lag or delay in ROAS because if we're just getting a well-oiled machine with our texting now, it might be 75 days before that $115K deal goes through. And now that turns our ROAS from 7X to 14X overnight. So a lot of factors like that. But yeah, it's pretty much neck and neck.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Is there anything unique or different about the property you're going after? What type of land deal is or isn't worth your time? What does that buy box look like?

Josh: We always underwrite a $25,000 margin to the business in there as well. We don't market to anything under $55,000 market value. So we'll go as low in acreage. We used to never go below five acres. And then as we started to increase our volume, we dropped it down to two acres. We always have that floor of $55,000 market value. We cut everything below that out of our data sets. And now as we're getting into more and more volume, especially with texting, if we're sending 50,000 texts a month, we might need to start with 200,000 top of phone records, which requires us to expand our criteria significantly, get into markets that maybe a year ago, I was picking the cream of the crop. Now I've got to widen my criteria. Now we're actually looking at, we opened up infill and stuff like that into our markets as well. So it's rural. Our bread and butter is 5 to 20 acre rural properties, anything between, I would say, $80,000 and $140,000 market value is kind of the sweet spot with spillover on both sides of that.

Seth: Sure. Cool. How many markets are you working in?

Josh: We're in a handful of markets now. I mean, we've got six states that we love and we try to just go deep in those states, double-close friendly states. We try to keep it there. And then in each of those states, we found our honey holes and we're just expanding outward to the surrounding counties in there. So I couldn't even ballpark the amount of counties we're in.

Seth: Yeah. Are you trying to do double closings a lot or sub-dividing? What does your standard deal look like?

Josh: Double close is our standard deal. We really, really build a solid relationship with our sellers right out of the gate. And I think that's where we steal a lot of deals that maybe other investors thought they had or deals that we used to lose. We find that when we build that relationship, we're no longer competing on price. But yeah, so by building that relationship, by the time it comes time to pitch, we always pitch it as, this is what we do. This is our process. And when we don't pitch it as an option, hey, we could do this at this price or this at this price, we find that we've built enough trust with them. They feel comfortable saying yes to go with us. And then at that point, it's just, all right, cool. What are the next steps? They're ready to let us lead them. We do that probably 75% of the time. We close on a small handful of properties. Now that we're in a better cash position, we're opening that up a little bit more. But going back to the initial cash question that you asked earlier.

I didn't like the idea of working with deal funders on every deal and giving up a sizable portion of my deal. I felt like there was a better way to do it. And that's where I honed the double close strategy as our primary. But we've got a few minor subdivides, nothing crazy. I'd like to open that up as well. And without building another business and completely veering off paths, just open it up to where we can handle more of those properties as well.

Seth: Yeah. That thing you said about building trust pretty quickly with the sellers. So what does that look like? Is it because they just love your personality? Or like, do you have a website that builds trust? Or is it because you're sending cookies to everybody? Or like, why exactly do they trust you when they don't trust other people?

Josh: So I'm very big on the customer journey. And this is something I took from the fitness business. And I came in and I was like, okay, we're going to perfect the customer journey from day one. And there's always going to be a very clear next step. There's going to be a handoff to the next person. We're going to butter up the next person so that they feel like that that relationship is going to be even better than this one. And by doing that, we always under promise and over deliver. So when our mail leads, they call our answering service and our answering service says, all right, cool. Someone will be in touch with you within the next day. And we call them within five minutes. And then we have that call and we schedule the offer call for the following day. And let's say we schedule it for 1 p.m. We show up at 1 p.m. And we always ask, why did you call us?

And we hear all the time, Josh, I called five other people back and none of these people are returning my call. It's like, they're not even really interested. So what I realized is all you need to do is be the type of person who does what you say you will. By just taking that strategy and always doing what we say we will. People are like, oh, I love working with you guys. People that we're under contract with who know we have their property listed will call us and say, Josh, I just want to let you guys know, I'm getting higher offers for my property. And I just want to let you know that I'm not going anywhere. I like you guys. I'm committed to you guys. So by doing that, people are being given opportunities to sell to someone else and they're choosing to stay with us. And again, it's this congruence that we build from the very first conversation all the way through. We run our Cookies for Contracts SOP, where if we don't send cookies to close the deal, what we do is our last step of intaking the new contract, we will send them a box of cookies, thanking them for trusting us and just assuring them that we're the type of people that always follow through with what we say we're going to do.

Signed by my Dispo Girl so that it's a springboard into a great relationship with her. So they think she wrote that and they call her and they're like, oh my gosh, Maria, this is incredible. I'm so excited about working with you guys. I feel so great about my decision. We're creating congruence all the way through.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah. That focus on the customer journey, that's a pretty big deal. I think a lot of people miss is just thinking through the lens of like, what is my customer thinking and feeling and seeing with every step of this journey? I mean, just the act of having a live person answer the phone and then somebody else call back that day, like that alone is like way ahead of what a lot of other land investors will do. Who might just like have a voicemail greeting and that's it. Maybe I'll get back to you. Maybe not. It might take me a week, that kind of thing.

I mean, just exceeding expectations there. And that's awesome, man. I love that. On the whole cookie closers things. Maybe we should transition to that. So you explained a little bit about what cookie closers is, but tell me more. How did you even get this idea? Did you hear about this from someone else or what exactly is it? What are you sending to the seller, I presume?

Josh: Everybody that's listening, think about the last deal that you lost at the finish line. The deal was great. Relationship with the seller was great. The conversations were smooth. They accepted your number. You sent over the contract. And for whatever reason, something fell through and that deal didn't work out. Maybe he got spooked. Maybe he saw something in your contract that he didn't like or got another offer for a little bit more. Or his neighbor said, you don't want to sell to someone like that. Whatever it was, think about that deal that that fell through that should have been yours. And as you think about that, think about how much that deal was worth to you. 30,000, 50,000, 100,000. If you do subdivides, it might have been a seven-figure deal.

And that experience right there, that happened to me more times than I wanted to admit in my first year. And as a systems guy, I'm always looking at what's the biggest constraint? How can I solve that? So I zeroed in on what's the closest thing to money today? And it's these damn deals that were falling through in the 11th hour that were inside the five and we've found a way to fumble the bag essentially. So I started looking at what's going on here. Why am I losing these deals? It's usually not my price. And what I've distilled it down to was most of the time, they just don't trust us enough. We've had two 12, 15 minute conversations and it's just not enough for them to let go of this land that they've been holding onto for a hundred plus years in their family. So I set out to make myself trustworthy, to make us seem like the easy choice. Well, how do you do that?

Don't look like everyone else. Stand out, do something different. Do something that's a little bit above what everyone else is doing. And that's where we started testing the cookie thing. I actually lost the deal to someone who, when I found out what the situation was, why they chose that other person, it wasn't necessarily a higher offer. They felt better. They felt more comfortable moving forward with them. Ultimately, they said the guy had sent them a package and a letter inside. And I was like, okay, cool. Well, I just got smoked by a deal that should have been mine to someone who did the small personal gesture. There's definitely something there. So we set out to start doing that. And cookies were something that it's low committal. It's not too cheesy. It's something they can share with their family. And we started sending out the cookies. So what the box is, is it's a high-end cookie box. It almost presents like you're opening up like a Hermes or like a coach purse box kind of thing. So it's this elevated experience. And it's a black glossy box that's inside of the brown shipping box. So they open it and they're like, okay, what is this? And they open it. They've got the black box inside. They open that and there's a card with their name laying on top.

They open that and it is a handwritten, not handwritten font, but actually handwritten card from you, from the investor, communicating whatever you want to communicate. For us, we're usually trying to let them know that we've appreciated getting to know them and hit on reasons why they may want to consider us. We're the type of people that always follow through. There's no pressure. Whatever it is, we're trying to help them feel like we're the easy choice. So they read the card. Okay, this is great. They're already looking at us different than they've looked at the 15 other investors that have reached out to them this week. Beneath the card, we've got five massive cookies. They're five ounce baseball-sized cookies. Too big to eat by yourself in a lot of cases. So what we find is your seller is going to break that cookie in half, share it with his wife, and now they get to have this experience. Compliments to you. And his wife is saying, who sent you those cookies again? Oh, it was Ajay. Ajay who? Ajay is the guy that's been talking to me about our land. And now she loves Ajay. I like him. He's way better than all these other guys that have been texting you and calling you and won't stop, you know, whatever. You should call Ajay back. He's getting her influence.

There's five of those cookies in there. So maybe they share them with their kids and have a family experience, or maybe they just repeat that same cycle five nights in a row. So by the end of that box, I can't guarantee they're going to call you back. I don't know what your relationship was like with them. I don't know how your last conversation left off. But what I can guarantee is by the time they finish that box of those cookies, which are probably the best cookies they've had, they will never forget you. They'll eat those cookies. If they don't call you back, they consciously choose not to, but they're not forgetting.

Seth: I've still got my little card that Josh had sent me with his sample one. I'll show it up to the screen. If people are listening to the audio only version of this, check out the YouTube video. You can see the little card or what that looked like. I assume it's not you that wrote this, Josh, but whoever wrote this and I don't know if every note is this long, but it's like a four by eight card. Yeah. It's a long message. Like you don't just scribble this out in like 10 seconds. Like somebody actually like put some effort into this thing. And I remember seeing this before I even opened the box of cookies and like, this from this, I already love you, Josh, and we had never even really talked. I think I met you for like five seconds at Ajay's event last year, but it's super powerful. And what do they cost per box to send these things?

Josh: So what we do is we sell them in 10 packs and they work like credits or like a token based system, kind of like when you hit up RocketPrint and you say, I need to get my new bulk package of mail. So you get a 10 pack, use them as credits. You just let us know who you want to send to and what you want your letter to say. And we send them out for you. And a 10 pack comes out to $497. So about 50 bucks a box.

Seth: Sure. 50 bucks for an impression. Yeah. And I'm just wondering at what point in the process does it make the most sense to send this? This is obviously not the first touch. Is it like after you get on a call and you're like, yeah, that call went pretty well. I'll send them a box. Or is it like after you send the offer and then you send it or?

Ajay: Josh, can I speak to this as a user? So this is, please fill in cracks here, Josh. But for those that don't know, I have been probably one of Josh's biggest customers on the cookie closer side and have been a massive fan and have tried to refer you tons of business because we love it so much. Man, I've got three or four different stories I can pull of how this has helped us close deals, but I'll start with this one.

We had a deal I'd been working personally for months. Okay. A guy owns three properties and it was a bit of a messy probate deal. His niece and nephew had a say in the property. He was the executor of his sister's estate. And this was long and drawn out as they were finishing up probate. I stayed in touch. I followed up regularly. I made sure I monitored the court date so I knew exactly when the judge was going to order the letters of testamentary, granting him the ability to sell these properties. But anyways, in the midst of my follow-up after a good earned conversation, another flipper came into play.

And this person offered my seller more money than me. So, what's funny is after I got a verbal, but there was a title issue and he wasn't comfortable signing anything until all that stuff was done, regardless of how well I handled those objections. I said, you know what we're going to do is we're going to send him and this niece and this nephew a box of cookies, right? And so, we did that. We sent them all cookies.

Seth: But you sent three boxes?

Ajay: We sent three boxes for one lead. I will say it was three houses that we were doing this on. So, this was a distress deal. So, these were houses, not land. But like an asset's an asset, right? Sent these cookies out. and it was so interesting. The dynamic flipped almost instantly. Here's what I'll say is when those boxes hit, he used to always send my calls to voicemail and then text me later, started picking up on the second ring. Okay. I promise there was probably six different instances where we had an appointment and he would send me to voicemail and they'd call me later, whatever. Right. Later on, he was literally picking up second ring. Hey, excited to talk to me because of this $40, $50 box of cookies, right?

Piece number two is, like I said, in between me getting a verbal and him getting these letters, somebody had reached out, offered him more money. Now, they were financially driven like most of our sellers are. And so he said, hey, dude, I'd rather go with you guys because you've gone the mile of building a relationship, right? And I was like, hey, can I ask what have we done to earn your business? And he was like, to be honest, anyone that sends sweet treats over to the Dunn family is good in our book, right? And so he called out these cookies. We ended up buying all three properties and we're going to make 50 grand on each one right? And so those three boxes of cookies, I mean, what is that a thousand X ROI? 150 bucks on cookies and $150,000 in pipeline profit right now. There's going to be selling costs and money costs and all that kind of stuff in there, don't get me wrong.

From a sheer just like inputs outputs perspective, that was a lead where I said, Seth, we've got like a soft verbal here. We're really close. There's some administrative stuff holding us back. We've not gotten paperwork signed yet. I looked at it and said, this is deal insurance. And I think that's a term you've used before Josh. This is insurance for me that I don't lose this deal. Otherwise you become forgettable. And instead now you're more memorable than any other Yahoo on the phone. I guarantee it. Right. So that was an instance where it worked really well on our team and on our business where we've now closed those deals and we're getting them ready to go onto the market here soon.

Seth: And I got to think this is highly applicable to any type of real estate or probably any type of deal, not even real estate. There was a self-storage guy I was talking to. I was trying to buy two of his facilities a couple of months ago and he wanted way more than it was worth and I wanted to pay way less. And we did some phone calls and stuff. I got some input from Ajay. He told me what to do and I did it and it seemed to work. But I have a feeling this would have made a difference. I don't know if I would have won the deal, but it's impossible to not take notice of something like this because it's just so unusual.

And when somebody really gives you tangible value like that, it's just huge. So great idea.

Josh: Yeah. And I'll share too, we're using them the most in our business. So we run a process called Cookie Closer Friday. So Friday afternoon is the order cut off for Monday shipments to go out, which are perfectly timed so they land mid to late in the week. So every week, we have a process we run, Cookie Closer Friday, where my acquisition managers are taking a look at our pipeline and we're seeing—who should have closed this week? Who should have been a deal that didn't materialize? What are inside the five-yard line leads this week? Who needs to get this box? Who's one impression away from a deal? Who needs that one solid impression? Who could be swayed over the edge? So typically inside of that, it's people who they're hot sellers and they're marching down the field. And like Ajay said, it's deal insurance. I want to make sure I don't lose this deal somehow. And then there's the sellers who they agreed and you sent the contract. They got flaky, hesitant. Maybe they're like, well, we'll get to it. I've got my attorney looking at it. If they're going to take a few days to get their attorney to look at it, I like to get them a box because we've seen sellers actually bypass their attorney. The attorney takes too long to review it. They get that impression from us. Now they get the trust that they need. Having their attorney review it is a trust objection. So if I can overcome the trust objection without that, boom. So that helps there. And the people who just, they were great and they just ghosted along the way. And we want to reconnect with them. So those are the big ones there. As we've integrated the process more deeply into our system, we started to look inside the red zone, right? Not just inside the five-yard line, but like, okay, let's get a little bit more strategic in sending these out to more people. So that's kind of how we look at it. That's on the sales side.

Everybody that didn't get one in the sales on the acquisition side gets one as soon as the contract is inked the following week. Like I mentioned earlier, it's a springboard into our closing process with our closing coordinator, which has been great too. And then we also use it when we've got partners that kind of go above and beyond. If we've got an agent who just goes over the top and we want to reinforce that behavior, get him a box. We've got a soil scientist that moved us up on his calendar and we were able to get something in on short notice for next week. Give this man a box. We want him to do it again. So we're using it like that as well. Title companies that go above and beyond make it really easy for us. They're like, ah, we shouldn't really do pass through funding on this, but we'll do it. Get them a box. So it's like, for us, it's not just deal insurance, but it's relationship insurance.

Like 50 bucks to invest in some of these relationships is worth its weight in gold.

Seth: Yeah. I got to think the land business is like not even the tip of the iceberg with this kind of thing. Like think of any situation in life where it would be useful to build trust with somebody who doesn't trust you or doesn't know you. I mean, there's millions of situations you can come across. I get emails in my inbox just about every day from people who are trying to get my attention. And it's just delete, delete, delete. If one of them happened to send me that, I can guarantee you, I want to give them my time of day. Like it's just so unusual to get that kind of thing.

Ajay: Is that why you haven't been returning my email, Seth?

Seth: Yes. I was hoping you'd be between the lines.

Josh: I don't know. I got his attention with a cookie closer, so I can't relate.

Seth: That's very true. It worked. Do you have any stats on like for every 10 boxes you order, you can expect all of the deals to close or five of the deals or one of the deals or is there a success rate of how often it turns out the way you want it to because you order these boxes?

Josh: Yeah, I can share. And I want to caveat this by saying these are loose numbers. It's incredibly challenging to actually track because that requires me being annoying with all of our clients. and also the range of who people are sending them to varies so much, right? So like we send ours to inside the five yard line leads, but maybe the next guy is sending them to all the people that hung up angry on the phone to try and win them over again, right? So maybe his 10 isn't going to look like my 10, but I'll share how we've thought about it and what a lot of our folks see. So when I first started sending these, I ballparked it as let's say I send 10 and get one deal. I spent $500 to ink, you know, let's say a $25,000 deal because that's our average. That's a 50X ROI.

I would play those odds all day long. After sending them out and using the strategy that we have, I built a custom GPT that writes these letters, you know, and all that. What we found is we're not just sending 10 and getting one. We're typically getting two to three out of that. But again, it really, really, really depends on who you send to, the timing of it. It's like sending flowers after you just pissed your wife off kind of thing. Are you trying to win them over again? Or is it that? And then also how you write that letter. Those three things I think are the most important there. But I can confidently say that most people are getting at least one deal out of every 10 pack that they get.

And if you're plugging this into your process, you're probably going to get two, possibly three. I had one week early on in this where we sent four boxes and we got three contracts. Yeah. That's very unusual. I'm not at all encouraging a 75% close rate with these.

Ajay: Josh, I know this is something you and I have sidebarred on when we've chatted just as friends about how like the biggest pitfall of everybody about doing anything in life is typically just a function of like doing enough work where you actually get a result, right? A really easy human example of that is like putting on muscle, right? If you go to the gym once a month versus six times a week and your weight training in respect to those things, which one do you think will you build muscle sooner? Probably the time where you're going to the gym six times a week, right? And so it proves a point of like so many people expect astronomical results for such little inputs, right? And here's what I mean is like in the land business, Seth, Josh, we've had conversations about what offers need to look like, right? When I'm coaching people on the sales side, I say, Hey man, like I want you to be making 20 to 25 offers a week. If you want to be inking two deals a week, right?

Some people don't even make that much in a month. And they're complaining as to why their land business, that, Hey, the land business doesn't work anymore. Right. And we're sitting here with Josh Pierce is crushing it with six figure months. I think to the same vein. And the reason I'm making this point is with the cookie closers. I mean, I hate to say it, Josh, but I know for a fact, man, you've got people that order a 10 pack, send out one box and they're like, huh, didn't work. It probably won't send out anymore. You know, which is so unfortunate from the frame of like, you're just not doing enough work to get a result, which is why I think it's so smart that you even do it in a 10 pack, right? Because you don't want to set an expectation where you should be doing one of these. It should either be enough to get the result or not, right? Like I'm a proponent of if you're going to join a gym, do 12 months at a time instead of a month to month membership, because it shows me you're committed to go for 12 months, right? All that to say, I just want to point out, Seth, your question of like, hey, how many does it take to get a deal? Phenomenal question. But it also means you got to send out 10 to get those one to three actually inked up, right? So there's a function of just doing the work that gets results there.

Seth: I think you told me this answer already, but just to be totally clear, what is the correct timing of when to send this thing? Could you actually do damage to a relationship if you do it after you make somebody mad and they perceive it as, oh, you're just trying to get on my good side? Like, what is the optimal time to do it?

Josh: Oh, man. Ajay, have you figured that one out in your guys' operation? To answer your first question of can you damage a relationship, we've not seen that in the probably 100, 110 boxes we've sent. It doesn't seem like it would, but I don't know.

Ajay: Yeah. Anybody that really gets mad over cookies, man, they've got problems in their life. I will never understand, right? I mean, it's the same people that get a postcard and curse you out and all kinds of stuff, right? So like, hey man, that guy's got his own issues in his life. I think on the other side, in terms of like optimizing, so we, similar to Josh, we actually have a dedicated Slack channel for Cookie Closer Friday because my assistant Kaylee runs the ops for our entire team that's sending out boxes. So we make sure we have all those submissions to her so she can run the admin side of getting it all submitted. And not like it's a huge lift, but guys, we'll do five to 10 boxes a week just as a part of our process. sometimes less, sometimes more. I think we sent out eight last week and that was just on one deal that had a bunch of parties involved.

In terms of optimal time, we see two situations, maybe three that it mainly serves. One is somebody opted into our marketing at some level, gave us a reason to think that that deal is going to close. So take, for example, somebody calls on PatLive, gives you an asking price that you know you can do or get pretty close to. You start following up with that lead and it's hard to get back in touch with them. That's a very qualified lead, in my opinion. Our biggest deal killer in this business is price. So if I have a reason to believe that price is not my reason why I can't do a deal, I'm going to attack that thing like gangbusters, right? So that's opportunity number one. Opportunity number two is when I get a verbal, but there's something in the way, right? There's an attorney objection. There's a judge that needs to order things. There's a partner spouse objection that for whatever reason you didn't overcome. Maybe you're not the best at sales training. Maybe it was just really difficult and wasn't a regular case study of objections. Doesn't matter. If you again have a verbal on price or are pretty close and we're on the fence, right? And we're waiting to overcome an objection. Absolutely. Send a cookie box out for that. You will never go wrong there. Right. And like, what's your worst case scenario? They signed the contract before they get cookies. Oh no. Right. It's like, if that's my worst case scenario, I'm okay with that outcome. Scenario number three is those leads where you got really close. Maybe you did get a verbal and like Josh said, they just never signed a contract. Right. There was no objection or you didn't know of one because you weren't a good enough salesperson or they were reserved and didn't give it to you. But you thought you had a deal. And for whatever reason, the contract's not signed. Right. I can tell you with convicting confidence that somebody that's been doing this for several months now is a regular part of our process.

That when we send cookies to those demographics, we do more deals. Like people that ghost us for a long time, people that are on the fence with us and are looking at other people to do business with. And they tell us, I mean, I had Josh on for a Facebook live week ago and I showed you a screenshot from a seller I had that texted me where after they inked up the deal, the last message they sent me was thanks for the cookies, right? Like it was, it just makes you memorable. So that's where I would identify in terms of just like Seth, to answer your question of like black and white, here are situations you should definitely send cookies out that are optimal. Anything you want to add?

Josh: Yeah. I mean, we've kind of distilled it down to one semi-ambiguous phrase or situation in our business. So that's kind of like a litmus test. When you believe you are one solid impression away from getting that deal. That's when that person gets a box, right? So it's like, oh, they're debating between my offer and someone else. Boom. I'm one impression away from that deal. Like when the egg is sitting at the top of the barn and it could roll one way or the other. I want that guy to get a box, right? That's where the deal insurance works. It's magic, right? Am I going to get it every time? No, I'm not. But do I reasonably believe I'm going to increase my chances of getting deals? Absolutely. So if I'm talking to somebody, they want some astronomical price way more than I can pay. They don't sound motivated. That's probably not worth a box of cookies, right? No, no.

Seth: On the timing of it again, let's say it's Tuesday and I say, okay, Josh, send out a box of cookies to these people. When are they going to get that? Is there delivery confirmation? Like, I don't want to call them before they got it and say, Hey, do you like my cookies? And they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Is there a way to know that they got it?

Josh: We send you a tracking email when the box ships. Once you become a cookie closer, once you've got your 10 pack, you'll get an order form in that order form. It's pretty simple and straightforward. Who's this going to, what do you want your letter to say? What's their address? And then what's the email address that you want tracking information to go to? So I typically recommend, even if you have your VA filling these orders out, put the email address to the person that manages the relationship. So the acquisitions manager, for example, and then that person is going to receive an email that says, Hey, your order to so-and-so has been submitted. You'll receive another email when we have tracking. And then you get that tracking email. And now your acquisitions manager can monitor that tracking email and see when it lands. And then they can perfectly time their follow-up. I typically recommend giving it a little bit of time. So like if the box lands on Thursday, don't call them Thursday afternoon because maybe they're at work and they haven't even seen the box yet. And you also don't really want to appear as though you sent the box to get the deal. Right. You asked the question earlier. You said, can you damage the relationship? Can you blow up a deal with this? And, you know, I think the biggest way you put yourself at risk of blowing up the deal is if you make that letter be about the deal.

You know, if you say, oh, I'd really love to do this deal. If you sound like you sent this box in exchange for the deal, I think you lose it, right? It feels transactional. Yeah. We always use the tone of, hey, I'm incredibly grateful for the time that you spent chatting with us. And it's been great getting to know you. I understand you might not be ready right now, but just to let you know our offer's out there. And when the time is right, we're here. Don't be afraid to reach out anytime. By the way, you know, maybe we can have a quick call this next week and just, you know, kind of see where you're at with things. It's this detachment from the deal. The letter is just like, let's get them back on the phone. And then once they get them on the phone, they're impressed. They've got the cookies. They talk about how they were great cookies or their wife and family got to share them. And now I can segue into the conversation.

Seth: I can see why a custom GPT would be super useful writing those letters. I feel like I would totally screw up the wording of this and make it about the deal and say it all wrong. But a custom GPT would probably just wordsmith it just right. So it's a great idea. That thing's pretty gnarly too. like the letter that I wrote you, I gave it context. I said, Hey, this is Seth. He's got this podcast. I think this is a tool that knowing what I know about him and how he's looking for a competitive edge and getting deals and stuff. I think this is a tool that he'd love to see. Let's get his attention. And knowing the context, it tweaks that. And then what I do, it's a dynamic GPT where I can say, all right, that's a little strong. Let's tone it down a little bit. Or let's mention what he said about wanting to use the funds to pay for his daughter's college or you can spruce it up or whatever, shape it however you want, and then you drop it. So it's like the whole intention with that was I wanted my VAs to be able to write these letters with context from my acquisition managers. And that's what we solved there. But really, I mean, the ancillary benefit of that is there's a lot of people who don't really have a way with words that now—they can send out a top tier impression without the words getting in the way necessarily.

Seth: So Mike Belcom and I have been working a lot on different automations in the stride CRM thing. I wonder if there's a way to make some kind of Zapier connections. So like after this happens, boom, generate a letter, send a box of cookies.

Josh: Yeah, we're working on that right now. The cookies app is in progress. And the big thing is like, I want it to be a cookies app for like how I'm setting it up right now in my business is it's the cookies app for like new contract intake. So when the deal hits this stage, send them a box that has this standard letter format in there. And then once we have that down, we'll start playing with it to make it a little bit more of a dynamic context for leads. If a lead is in this stage or whatever. But I think that's going to take a little more finesse from like the copywriting standpoint. But yeah, I mean, we've got a handful of people that are interested in the once it hits this stage, automatically send a box. Let's take my team out of it.

Seth: Josh, totally appreciate sharing about everything you've shared about so far. As we near the end of this conversation, a couple closing questions I had for you. And this could be about either cookie closers or your land business. When you look back at everything you've done, can you think of any like mistakes you made early on that you wouldn't want to repeat again if you were to start over? Or if you could give yourself advice back to when you were starting, like what would you tell yourself?

Josh: The biggest mistake I've made over and over again, and I think I can spare people years of trial and error, is you don't get bonus points for doing it on your own. Nobody's standing there at the finish line giving you extra credit because you figured it out on your own. You didn't ask for help. You didn't have a mentor show you the way. And I think there's a lot of people that take pride in, I don't do the whole guru thing. I'll figure it out myself. And I'm telling you, I learned this big when I did my fitness business. For nine months, I fumbled around with what I thought was a business. And when I finally hired a coach.

Things took off. It took the lid off because I got a proven framework and then I just needed to execute on that. And the same thing here, coming in, investing in support right away, getting the frameworks. I can't imagine where I'd be had I not invested in those first mentorships, had I not invested in Land Closers Academy with Ajay. When I recognized we have a bottleneck, how I think about it is who is the best person I know at this and how can I pay them to teach me their ways. And that's what we do. Like, I think for anybody at any stage in business or whatever, like you're not above getting a mentor. I mean, that's the shortcut.

Seth: That's brilliant. I've never heard it worded like that. Like you don't get bonus points for doing it yourself. But like, holy cow, how many times in my life have I, I don't think that was my thought process, but like, it's a good way to reframe it. You're just hurting yourself by not getting help, you know? So that's very well said.

Josh: You know, I talked to Ajay about this in his Facebook group last week too. It's like, you can't afford not to, you know, when we're dealing in $50,000 and $100,000 deals, if that mentorship or that course or whatever it is that can teach me that skill, if it helps me get one more deal, it pays for itself over and over and over again. But the way this works is it doesn't just help you get one more deal. Investing in Ajay's mentorship, that helped my closers get two deals a week. It's astronomical returns. So if you're a numbers person and you make decisions based on ROI, you can't afford not to.

Ajay: I didn't pay him to say that for anybody wondering.

Seth: That's huge though. I mean, man, what a glowing testimonial, Ajay. We should take a recording that you can use that. Honestly.

Kind of a similar question, but maybe slightly different. When you see people out there who are either brand new to land investing right now, or maybe they're not new, but they're kind of struggling because things are harder today than they were a few years ago. Anything else you'd say to them? You kind of just did say something there, but anything else come to mind?

Josh: One of the things I see people do all the time is they just have shiny quarter syndrome. You know, as you mentioned this earlier, people don't put in enough reps to really determine if something works. They send out 500 blind offer letters and get a few responses and they say, oh, that didn't work. I'm going to try texting now and I'm going to do RBMs now. And it's like, do one thing, get really, really, really good at it. Once you get really good at it, don't even start another thing. Just scale that thing to the moon. And then at the right time, maybe add in the second thing. So I see people just starting out and they're trying to juggle multiple pipelines. I mean, my business, it didn't get twice as complicated. It got probably four times as complicated when we added a second marketing channel. Pick one thing and stick with it and do it long enough to really get feedback and make decisions based on that.

Seth: What would it take for you to go into a third marketing channel at this point? It sounds like you would never do that, right? Or am I wrong?

Josh: Well, we're a ways away from that. I could see ourselves stepping into cold calling as well, because we've already got the data. We've already got the list. It's like, it would be a simple addition running into the same pipeline. But again, it's not on the radar at any time in the near future where we've got our hands full trying to wrangle this texting beast.

Seth: Well, if people want to find out more about you or check out Cookie Closers or anything, where would you point people to?

Josh: Yeah, for sure. Well, if you're interested in Cookie Closers, you can go to cookieclosers.com and all the information will be there. And then give any questions. Like I'm an open book. Like just shoot me a message. I'm on Instagram. I'm active on Instagram, joshpierce.rei. It's P-I-E-R-C-E dot R-E-I. Or you can shoot me an email as well, josh at highergroundland.com. But yeah, I'm an open book. Whether you're just getting started, you've got questions about anything we jammed about today. You've got questions about the cookie closers and how they work. Let me know and we can jam it.

Seth: Thanks again, Josh. Appreciate you coming on. It's great to talk to you. People want to check out the show notes for this. We'll have links to all the stuff Josh just mentioned. Just go to retipster.com forward slash 225. Josh, thanks again. We'll talk to you next time.