Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? Welcome to the REtipster podcast. Today, I'm talking with Ciaran Sheil. Ciaran is a land investor who lives in Ireland. He runs a fully remote land flipping business. He does about 40 to 50 deals per year, and he's been doing this since 2019.

So Ciaran started in this business when he was just 19 years old. He built it during college and has since created a system that runs lean and focuses on the right markets and consistently delivers results, all without ever having to step foot in the U.S. for the properties he sells. In this conversation, we're going to talk about how he does this, the systems he's built, how he works with local agents and experts, and what it really takes to flip land when you're 5,000 miles away.

Ciaran, welcome. How's it going?

Ciaran: Thank you for having me. It's cool to be on the other side of the camera. I've been listening to this podcast for the last five or six years.

Seth: That's awesome, man. Thanks for listening. Happy to have you as a listener. It sounds weird—you never really know who is listening to these things and who it's impacting. All I know is I'm just sitting here talking to a camera by myself, maybe with one other person. You just never know who's listening in. So that's awesome.

Why don't we just hear about your background a little bit? How did you first discover the land business? It seems like somewhat of a random thing, especially given that you're across the Atlantic Ocean. Did you meet somebody, or how did this come to fruition?

Ciaran: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. I've always been interested in business—anything you can buy or sell, I did. I built websites for people. I did stocks and shares. I imported used phones from England and sold them locally here. I did door-to-door sales for a couple of weeks. I've done everything.

I read Rich Dad Poor Dad and got interested in real estate stuff. I started listening to podcasts. There's a guy called Rod Khleif at Lifetime Cash Flow through real estate investing podcast. I was listening to it and was like, "That's all great, but I'm a broke 17-, 18-, or 19-year-old. I've got no money." Then I got ads online for flipping land. This was back in 2019. I think a lot of people started in the niche around that time.

After a holiday to New York, I signed up for a course, Land Academy, doing blind offers for properties. The first deal I got, I got a free property with the course—I won a raffle. Then for my first deal, I bought for $3,000 and sold for $12,000 in Northern California. I was like, "This is unbelievable." And then I just got addicted.

Seth: What were you going to college for, out of curiosity?

Ciaran: Business administration and commerce. I always wanted to have my own business.

Seth: I don't know how far along you were in college when you were 19 to discover this. I'm assuming you probably just started, right? Did you ever feel like, "Why don't I just quit this college thing since I've got a land business that's working?"

Ciaran: So I started it actually the summer before starting college. I started this and started college. A bunch of things kind of fell into place. COVID happened while I was in college, which made life a lot more flexible to be able to coordinate things, to be able to do the lectures online, and to do land calls in the evening. I also had another day job as well because I was still putting more and more money into buying more and more properties.

So I did think about quitting college, but that was probably year three. At that point, I should just finish it rather than throw three years down the drain.

Seth: Yeah, totally. It makes sense to me. I'd probably do the same thing. But I always wonder—especially when I look back on college and try to find that one class I took that just made all the difference to me. It's kind of hard to think of what that is. I can think of a couple that were interesting, but the stuff that really made a difference in my life was more what I learned after college. I don't know if you have a similar experience. I will say accounting is probably really good to know.

Aside from that, self-education is a lot more valuable. There's nothing wrong with getting a degree, but I just think if you're going to college, you're going to get a skill set that sets you up for a job. But if you want more than a job, you need to be a self-starter and seek out the information that you're looking for yourself.

Ciaran: Yeah, I think if I could go back, I probably would have majored in accounting. At the time, it just felt really hard and I didn't understand it and it didn't seem that important. But being in business, you realize accounting does matter a lot to really understand what's going on. It's more like a tangible skill, whereas general business stuff is just kind of like, "Eh, you know, whatever, business."

I did a work placement at an accountancy company while I was doing my degree. I tried to convince the college that I would work for myself and they didn't like that. I was made to work for this accounting company. I just hated it. I just hated being told what to do. I found it terribly boring. I understand different accountancy concepts that are useful now. I just couldn't do it day to day. It'd just be too boring for me.

Seth: Yeah, I hear you. So being in Ireland, how many times have you been to the U.S.? How often do you come here? And when you do travel here, where do you go and what do you do?

Ciaran: I've probably been to the U.S.—I don't know—seven times in the last two years, three or four times a year. I went to a couple of masterminds and events. I joined Collective Genius, which has been really helpful. It's largely a house flipping group, but I learned a lot about systems and operations and some of the stuff that the house guys are doing that I feel like is lacking in the land flipping niche.

A lot of the reason that I go there is to network and find people that are a little bit further along from where you're at and people that have had the same issues with their business that I've had. Because we're not splitting the atom here with what we're doing. If you've got an issue, the chances are someone else has had the same thing. So I've gotten an awful lot of value out of masterminds.

It's a bit of fun doing this over here. It's just good to be around investors. I think I probably wouldn't do maybe as much travel if I were local. If I were in Texas or something, it'd be easier to go to some meetups. When I'm over here, I try and make an intentional effort to show my face a few times a year.

Seth: Yeah. I think if there has ever been a time where land investors can learn from house flippers, it's now. There used to be a time when it was just such a different business and land was just so much less competitive, but it's kind of changed. I feel like there's just a lot we can learn from them these days. Would you agree?

Ciaran: Land is still a lot less competitive than houses, but I think it's always been true that there's been stuff to learn. But I just think when I started, there wasn't really the kind of business that's around now. Back then, you could just send out marketing and get lots of deals, and you didn't need to be good at anything. You just spent some money on marketing and got some deals. But because those times have been so good, more and more people heard about it and more and more people have done it.

Now, there are plenty of deals to go around. You just got to be better today than before. You have to treat it like a business.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. Well, on that, just the way that the world has changed—can you walk us through what your business looks like today? What kind of deals did you start with doing? What does your process normally look like? What does it look like now? Are your deals bigger or is your marketing different or are you working in different states? Take us through the evolution of your business.

Ciaran: When I started, I was mailing Northern California blind offers and I was just getting deals. Whatever deal came in, I was doing, and I didn't really have any sort of system or strategy behind it. It was just "There's stuff selling up here. Let's buy some properties."

I then wanted to scale the business and started mailing more and more markets with blind offers. It became more difficult to scale and price different areas—just different pitfalls in each market, different things to look out for. Trying to understand each area just became very difficult and high risk. I'd have mixed luck. I might do a huge deal and then have a deal where I break even or lose 500 bucks or make a thousand dollars after holding the property. I haven't really lost money on any sort of deal, any sort of significant money, but it was just a little bit all over the place.

About two years ago, I suppose now, I went back and looked at what I was doing. I was still using the template that I had from the course and was doing blind offers without any sort of strategy. So what I did was I looked at all the deals that I'd done and said, "Oh, well, this area is good. This area is good. This area was good. This area was terrible. This area was terrible." So I ranked the markets. I've bought in probably 12 states. So I just picked the top three or four states and then said, "Let's maximize our deal flow in these areas." So that really helped. If everything remains the same and you spend more money marketing to the better areas, your business just naturally improves. So that's what I did.

Since then, I have stopped doing blind offers entirely. I have now built up my own custom direct mail pieces that are written—you can use ChatGPT or get three or four different templates and make them customized to you. Because I used to have people say, "Well, I've got the same letter before," because all the letters read the same. They're all fake checks or they're all blind offers, the same sort of cover sheet and then a blind offer. So just having your piece that sticks out like a sore thumb from all the other people—that's kind of what you want.

I built out a good website and built out a Google My Business profile to just legitimize what I was doing and try and make me look a little bit different or differentiate myself from all the other competitors.

Then on the due diligence side, I looked at what I learned in each of these areas. When you do deals, you learn a lot more than just analyzing a market. When you actually do a deal, you go, "Do I need to do a perc test here? What are the requirements to build? What's the municipality like for development? What are the attorneys like? Are there title companies?" Once I find some good areas to work, I want to do as many deals as I can in those areas. I save a significant amount of time and things become a lot easier.

What I ended up doing was JVing with realtors. Realtors would basically sell or dispose of the properties for us, and my job was to acquire the properties. There are realtors that have sold 20, 30 properties for me, where they're making a significant amount of commission selling properties for me. They'll run out to the property. They'll look at the property for me. The title company knows me. They've got all my information on file.

It just makes everything so much more efficient and lower risk. I can pay more than anybody else in that market because I know that area really, really well.

Seth: When you say JVing with a realtor, do you mean you just pay them a higher commission or do they own part of the property or something?

Ciaran: When I say JV, I just mean it's more than just one transaction. It's a long-term, enduring relationship that I want to work with that realtor. If we do one successful sale, it's okay. But I would like to do 10 or 20 sales with that same realtor. Then I get a better degree of confidence in their numbers and in their underwriting. I develop friendships with realtors and it just makes everything easier.

Seth: Yeah. Do you wait until you do one successful deal and then jump in with both feet with them? Or do you tell them right off the bat, "Hey, if this goes well, I'm going to bring a lot more deals your way"? How do you motivate these people to be more willing to help? Or is it just like, they're either motivated or they're not? You can't change that about them.

Ciaran: So picking realtors, I want to find somebody that sells—there's usually one realtor that sells half the volume in an area. So I want to work with a good realtor that has gotten good results. I suppose it just depends on how the conversation goes. Sometimes you'll have a better call and you'll say, "Well, there's more of this where this came from," and it works out well. Sometimes, though, in some of these more competitive areas, you just want to get the first deal closed, and then you can open the door in the future. Once they've gotten paid by you, their guard is a lot lower.

You call some of these realtors, and they say, "I get calls from investors every week who want me to value their property for free and they never work with us." So a lot of realtors just feel like investors just take advantage of them, waste their time, and just don't want to do business like that.

Seth: What you're saying makes total sense. It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that, but it's actually just good to hear that perspective in terms of why some people would not return your calls or just blow you off. They probably do get taken advantage of a lot. So is there a way to tell them, like, "Hey, I'm serious. I'm going to take care of you and here's proof." Is there any way to prove that up front, or do you just have to go full circle with a deal and then they know?

Ciaran: The way you kind of communicate on the phone and the way that you carry yourself—I think because I've got the experience, I can have this little bit of confidence on the phone when I'm explaining to them that, "Look, this is the way we do it." If you can say to people, "This is the process that we have. This is the way we do things." They kind of go, "Oh, you're a professional," a little bit more than like, "Hey, can you value this property for me?"

I feel like you can convey that a little bit over the phone, but it's hard. It's like building trust, like a lot of people with this remote business model. I think that barrier to trust is a huge thing with sellers, with title companies, with attorneys, with realtors, and with cleanup. I have a guy trying to clean up some property that I have. I bought some land. I want to clear up some trash off it. Because I've been burnt before by people, I said, "Look, I get it. I'll send you a deposit. Once you receive the deposit, will you start working?" He said, "Yeah, that's fine." There's this hurdle to overcome.

Seth: Yeah. Just to kind of understand the context of your business—what's the typical deal size? Are there specific states that you're working in? What does a normal deal look like for you? Is it just a straight flip or are you subdividing or doing something to it? Tell us about that.

Ciaran: I've got a few different angles to the deals that I do. I generally take title to everything. I've done a couple of wholesales, but I generally take title to properties. A lot of the time I buy and flip.

My average deal size last year, I think, was $23,000 or $24,000. I'm trying this year to increase that a little bit. I generally double my money on a lot of properties that we buy. I buy more rural land, from four acres to 150 acres. I do some stuff in the South and I do some stuff in some attorney states and some stuff in some non-disclosure states. A lot of my decision-making now is based on the fact that I tried a bunch of areas and then I found some good people that I like to work with.

Seth: When working in those attorney states or non-disclosure states, have you noticed any difference in terms of, like, "Oh, this is actually a lot easier here.? This is less competitive here?" Or is there not really any difference at all?

Ciaran: I think with states that have banned wholesaling, there are some good opportunities like Oklahoma, South Carolina, and areas where people can't wholesale. There's less competition. It's sometimes harder to get transactions closed where there are attorney states. So I think if you've got a good attorney, it can really help. If it's hard to close transactions, it's easier to find deals generally, which is what I've seen.

I also do some distressed stuff as well. I'll buy properties that are landlocked or have various title issues because I know the attorneys in these areas that I work and they can help advise me or help me solve issues. I can call in favors on properties where the attorney that I work with might not do something for somebody else but is willing to do a probate for me or willing to help advise me on an access situation because they've worked with me before.

So I really try and leverage the relationships. I can just do less work and I generally see a better outcome.

Seth: Definitely. So it sounds like you've got certain markets that you know really well and you go back to again and again. I'm assuming the markets that you're in today are different than the ones that you started in. Makes you wonder, how do you know when it's time to stop working in one market or start working in a new one?

Ciaran: For us, I'm looking at my marketing report and I'm seeing what my return on ad spend is per area. Not really the response rate on the piece—more so the return on ad spend. What's the average deal size? What's the cash conversion cycle from money in to money out? How long is it taking? Then I'm ranking it and saying, "Well, if I've only got so much money to spend on marketing, am I getting as many deals as I can in my best market?"

I like a bit of diversification. I don't like to have all my money across maybe 10, 15, or 20 properties and then all my money in two or three properties. I want to have a little bit of diversification that mitigates my risk.

I guess it's how much money you're making per deal and how long it's taking that kind of what it comes down to. If my cash conversion cycle is shorter and I make a little bit less money per deal, but I can flip my money faster, it might make sense for me to go to an area where I can flip money faster. So it's not just deal size. If your deal size is 50% bigger, but it takes three times as long, then that's not a good idea.

It depends on the case-by-case situation, but I'm trying to use the data that I have to make the best decisions with it.

Seth: Yeah, that's a big deal. I know that's one thing we've been working on a lot in Stride CRM that I and Mike Balcom have been building, and I know you know Mike as well. Those metrics and KPIs—it's something that a lot of land investors just don't keep track of at all. They just have no idea what's going on. There are so many different ones to keep track of as well. But just having a good handle on that—I mean, that's really the only way you can know if something is broken or not if you're looking at that stuff. Otherwise, you're just kind of going on your gut.

How do you keep track of all that stuff? Do you have a certain system in place, or how do you reliably make sure you're looking at sound data that helps you make those decisions?

Ciaran: Yeah, so this was a huge gap that I realized when I joined Collective Genius and started networking with some of the house guys. What we've done is we've added custom fields to our CRM. That's the marketing channel when the lead came in, whether the lead's qualified or not. Every lead that's open on the system needs to have a next defined action. If it's going to be open, what's the next thing that's going to happen?

Really trying to think about how a lead gets processed through the system. And then what can we do with the data? So I've got a stoplight report and with that stoplight report, I can then work out what the KPIs are that we need to have per team member. We've got it down now to where there's a KPI dashboard per team member. So I can see—I've got four people working for me, but if one person's pulling the weight on the team, I can see that with data.

Data leads to better decisions. Some of the stuff that we've done as well with our marketing is we can retarget leads that are qualified in our CRM that I might have had an appointment with that maybe we didn't get a deal on. I'll send them direct mail pieces and custom direct mail follow-up pieces. But I can only do that if I'm tracking that.

I use Looker Studio to map out all the data. You're doing this business on hard mode if you're not using the data to help make better decisions.

Seth: You say Looker Studio?

Ciaran: Looker Studio. It's a Google data visualization tool. You can build your own custom dashboard. It's free.

Seth: So it's awesome. I love free stuff. I got to check that out. I've never messed with that, but that sounds seriously useful. It's one thing to have the data, but if you can't make sense of it and really understand what you're looking at, what's the point of any of it? So if anything makes that easier, that's pretty nice.

Ciaran: Yeah. Less is more. You don't want to make it really, really difficult to track a bunch of things. I would start off with tracking a few things that are going to help move the dial. What marketing channel does the lead come in from? Having every lead that has a next defined action be really helpful. And then just tracking—less is more. Don't track a number that you're not willing to take action on. My job as the leader of the business is to ask, what decisions can we make that will help move the numbers? How do we impact the numbers in a positive direction?

Seth: Yeah, absolutely. You kind of mentioned earlier some of the changes you've had to make, whether it's changing markets or changing what you're saying in your mail template or changing the type of mail you're sending altogether from blind offers to neutral letters, that kind of thing. When you look back at all the changes you've had to make and maybe the changes you still need to make—I don't know, things never really stop changing—has anything struck you as a really hard thing to change? Or how do you even decide which things are worth changing in the first place? Because I know sometimes when I do this stuff, I'm just trying a bunch of stuff. I don't really know what's going to make a difference. I'm just changing everything to see if maybe a different recipe gets a different result. But given that you track data so well and your metrics, is there something that clearly says, "Okay, Ciaran, this is a problem. This has got to change. And this is specifically what you should change it to?" Is it that clear? Or what does that process look like for you?

Ciaran: I would be very careful about changing too much stuff because if you change three or four things, I can't then compare the results over time. So if you want to be consistent with your results, you've got to be consistent with your inputs. Everything must remain the same for you to be able to actually work out whether that change is actually worthwhile.

I've seen people pivot massively in the business, and that's a really bad thing to do. My direct mail—every single week for the last two and a half years, I think we might have missed maybe two weeks. We mail every single week. I might increase the direct mail maybe 10% or 15%, but I'm not changing and stopping and starting and stopping and starting.

It takes a quarter or maybe even six months to determine whether a change is worth it. Because if you think about the deals that you're doing, it depends on how big your business is. But every year, I see a big deal that comes in on direct mail. You see the whole selection of results. It takes a while for that data to come in. So making massive pivots is just reckless, a recipe for disaster.

Seth: And on that point, you said it takes maybe a quarter or six months to be able to see the differences of whatever change you made. So part of what's baked into that, though, is the assumption of how much mail you're sending, right? So how much mail are you sending per month?

Ciaran: I'm sending 3,000 pieces a week. I think that's about 15,000 a month. We also do texting as well. The benefit of doing texting or cold calling is even though our mail is quite consistent—so I suppose my mail is consistent because I'm mailing the same amount each week. I also mail three markets at a time. So I can get a blended response rate of two or three different areas. Because some areas might have a lower response rate. So I'll match that with a higher response area from our data so that we can try and normalize out the response rate.

Then we add in texting as well, so we can do texting to help bump the numbers. By having a second marketing channel, it makes things even more consistent as well. So just a few little tricks here and there can make it easy. I think of every week of my payroll cost to run the business, and I'm like, "We need to make sure that we're maximizing our capacity, that we don't have too many leads coming in." It's about 70 leads a week, which is what my team can handle. Two lead managers, a median acquisitions, and I've got a texter and a data guy and we can do about 70 leads a week and we track that every week.

Seth: Yeah. So you got mail. Is that your primary marketing channel and is texting kind of your backup, or is texting the primary one and mail the backup?

Ciaran: Yeah, so mail has always been the backbone of the business, but texting has done really well for us. About half of our deals right now are from texting.

Seth: Is the ROAS better for one or the other?

Ciaran: ROAS for texting is way better. You have a 15 to 20x ROAS on texting. It depends on how you track it, whether you're tracking equity captured or deals sold. Then direct mail is about a 7 or 8x return.

Seth: Anybody who doesn't know ROAS—ROAS, return on ad spend, it's just a way to measure for every dollar you're putting into your marketing, how many dollars you're making back from that.

So if texting is clearly dominating, why not just totally move to texting?

Ciaran: So the thing about texting is it takes about twice as many leads to close a deal as it does from direct mail. So per hour, we make more off a direct mail lead because my close rate on those leads is higher. But with texting, we see a better return on ad spend, but it's more work. It's more labor intensive.

Seth: The dollars you have to spend to pay for that labor—is that part of what goes into that ad spend or ROAS calculation?

Ciaran: I'm just recalling from when we looked at it, but I think I included the cost of a lead manager.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, if that cost is baked in, why not just go all in on that? If the ROAS is—that's kind of the bottom line of this: this is what's performing better.

Ciaran: Because we got one closer right now. The closer on the team is me. I can't do 100 appointments a week. I can only do so many. So it's less about the return on ad spend. It's more about how many appointments I can go on and what the best utilization of my time is. Plus, I like to stabilize things. There were issues with launch control last year. It's good to hedge with two marketing channels.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. I'm talking to you like the biggest hypocrite in the world. Because if anybody has a problem removing themselves from the business, it's myself. But have you ever thought of finding someone closer to replace you? Or what would it take to remove yourself from that part of the business?

Ciaran: I've been making adjustments to the business over the last two years. I've been slowly working on each aspect of the business, optimizing steps in the marketing funnel, and then building out a lead management process and a lead tracking CRM-sort-of process. Right now I'm doing sales coaching for acquisitions.

I don't think I can teach somebody acquisitions quite yet. I've got one guy on my team that I think will be able to get close to close the deals. But it's such a critical job in the business that you really want to make sure that you're doing it at a really high level. Because it's catastrophic if it doesn't work. If you're not seeing results, it can really cost you.

Seth: So when you say closer, are you talking about the entire process of handling the conversation and negotiation with the seller to get it closed? Or do you just mean the act of coordinating the signing of documents?

Ciaran: It depends on what way you design the business. You can design the business with a one-call close, where you go from an initial lead-in to a contract signed with one point of contact. So you can have a team of just closers that just work the leads from start to finish.

If you're doing texting or cold calling or some of these maybe cheaper marketing channels, it takes more work to convert a texting lead or a cold call lead. It's cheaper, but it takes more work to convert them. We use lead managers. What lead managers do is they manage the pipeline of opportunities and then basically set my calendar up. So I use Calendly or on Stride, you can set up a booking event. They book my calendar with appointments all day. So my job is to just go on appointments and present offers to people that want to sell.

We've gotten there to the point in which all the properties are all valued ahead of the call. There's an offer range suggested; anything important with the due diligence. So I can just go on the call and I can just present the offer and then close the deal. And that's a really high-value task. I'm not sure if it's the most important task in the business or the most important high-value role, but it's certainly a role that I'm probably clutching onto for a bit longer until I'm 100% confident that we can have the team.

Seth: Well, speaking of your team, what does your current team look like? How many people are on your team? What parts of the world are they in? What parts of the business are they running? And other than being this closer negotiator person, what other roles do you still have in the business?

Ciaran: I've got my data manager in the Philippines. His job is to set up a marketing program. So we've got each week of marketing all planned out for the year. He manages all the lists and all the data, coordinates with RocketPrint and does all that stuff.

I've got an operations manager and her job is to manage the lead managers, help with the due diligence on the properties, and prepare purchase and sale agreements.

I got two lead managers, one in the Philippines and one in Belize, that just started last week. I've got a texter in Pakistan. I got another girl that's doing lead management that we're going to move into cold calling. I want to start cold calling ourselves next week. So I think that's six on the team.

My job, I run the morning huddle. I run the stoplight meeting each week. I do performance reviews of everybody on the team. I'm really big about treating this business like a business. I try and do what I should be doing as a manager running the business. I also do a lot of the recruitment on the team as well.

Seth: Gotcha. So you mentioned in a call that we were both on a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was actually really astute. You just kind of nailed it. You're talking about how this used to be very much a data business. That was kind of it. If you could figure out where to get lists and how to make sense of them and how to say the right things in your letters and all this stuff, it's kind of just the numbers game at the end of the day.

You've kind of had this revelation that it's still that, but it's much more of a sales business now. That ability to follow up quickly and say the right things and kind of think on your feet and that kind of thing. That's becoming much more important.

Ciaran: A hundred percent. When I started this business, I was all interested in the data stuff. That's naturally the way that I'm wired. I'm more of a data-kind-of-process-oriented person. It was a big realization when I met other people that are doing houses and more than me. I had a chat with Ajay at Collective Genius a couple of years ago. He was saying to me, "You need to build out a sales process." So that's what I did. I built out a sales process.

It's almost like running a business. The value is made by your ability to sell. It's like operations almost come secondary. With the business, everybody's getting letters all the time. It's easy to order direct mail. It's easy to send direct mail. What's hard is calling all these people, answering all these calls, dealing with angry sellers and trying to convert them into closing. That's the hard bit. That's the bit that's more difficult to scale and more difficult to manage, where you get paid more if you can convert some of these sellers into deals. That's really where you make your money.

It's almost like more people are introverted than extroverted. Part of the issue I had with my team a couple of years ago was I hired a bunch of people that were introverts like myself, that didn't want to call people, that didn't want to work through the rejection, and that didn't want to call people.

Your ability to connect and build trust with these people—a lot of these people that are selling to us are elderly people. They're people that maybe have been scammed before. "How do I know that you're legit?" They're getting letters every single week from other folks doing the same thing. "Why should I work with you?" Five years ago, there was just no competition. So you could just send out marketing.

Also, your marketing spend doesn't linearly scale. The reason I haven't grown my marketing budget that much—I've grown my marketing budget maybe 15-20% the last year and a half—is because we can't work more opportunities. If I put more leads into the funnel, we actually might have a reduction in the amount of deals we do.

Seth: Why is that?

Ciaran: Because we can't actually effectively show up and work the leads to the extent that you should be working the leads.

Seth: Yeah. I love hearing this from you because you remind me of me and a lot of other people I know, like you said, kind of the introverted side where you don't necessarily wake up in the morning. "Oh, I can't wait to go and sell. I want to be a salesman." But you still clearly see the importance of it. So you're not just denying the importance behind it. You're actually seeing it and you're willing to do the work to figure it out.

You put that really well in terms of the hard work being the showing up, the work the leads, and the talking to angry sellers on that whole thing of getting on the phone and talking to people. What do we mean when we say being good at sales? What is sales exactly? Is that just being likable or is it saying things so that people know you're legitimate? I don't know if you have any examples in your mind of specific things you said or did that made all the difference in getting a deal to close when otherwise it would not have closed. Is there some magic phrase that you say or can you help me understand exactly what works?

Ciaran: I wish it was a magic button, but there isn't. The biggest thing is connecting with the people on a deep level. I've had deals where the last-minute people have said, "Where are we going to close?" And I didn't realize we're in such a hurry. "Well, I need this money to pay my rent or I need this to do this."

When people call, they're naturally—they've got their guard up. They're not opening up to you. You have to ask great questions. You've got to really have a level of professionalism. When I say sales, don't hear me say, I try and make an offer to everybody that calls. We don't want to be sleazy salespeople. We want to say, "Hey, we're a solution for you if you're the right person that would qualify or make sense to do business with. If you need a quick sale or you don't want to take all the effort of listing it, we just tell people, "Hey, have you thought about your options? Have you thought about listing the property?" "Well, no, I don't want to pay a realtor. I want the sale to happen quickly."

It's asking better questions so you can actually truly understand the situation rather than just saying, "Hey, I can offer you 15,000," or having a VA give an offer rather than actually listening to them and hearing them. My appointments are 30 minutes long with people.

We spend a lot of money and time to generate leads, and you have to have a good process to handle them. So we ask open-ended questions. We try and ask them all the questions about the property on the initial call. Then my call is the offer call. I try and ask them, "Hey, are there any other decision-makers? Is it just yourself that owns the property? Or why haven't you sold this property already? Have you thought about selling it before?" So they don't feel like we're trying to push them into a deal.

I've got nothing to sell. I'm offering to buy your property. I'm not trying to sell you anything. So I think a little bit of not trying to sell them. It's up to them, but you gotta do a good job representing who you are and how you can help them, and if you don't understand the issues that they have or why you would be a good option, then you can't really do a good job making a solution that would help them because you don't really understand what they're going through.

Seth: Yeah. At the end of the day, every human wants to be known and understood. They want to know that you get them. It's kind of funny. A lot of times I'll have these long conversations with people, sometimes on a podcast interview, sometimes just in normal life, maybe on a long car ride somewhere. I'll talk with them for a couple hours. When we get to where we're going and we get out of the car, it's like, "Man, that was the most fascinating, best conversation I've had in the longest time."

The reason they're saying that is because we were just talking about them the whole time. I was just interested in what they had to say. I wanted to actually get it and get to the bottom of it. I would say things that show that I understood it. People love that. People love just knowing that you get it. It's hard to do that if you're in a hurry. If you just look at things transactionally, it's like, "Okay, how can I get off this call as fast as possible and make money from it?" You almost have to distance yourself from that mode of thinking and try to be a friend in a way. Would you agree?

Ciaran: Yeah, sellers can pick up your tone. If you go into something trying to hurry through the call or you've got that salesperson kind of commission breath and you're trying to just make a deal, people don't like that.

A huge gap for me, though, was not having a sales process. I've worked with a sales coach, Jenny Hudspeth with Aurea Sales Tools. It has been so, so helpful in having a process for how to overcome objections. How do you handle these conversations? How should the call go? How would you have handled it? I think it's one of those things that once it's shown to you, it makes a lot more sense. But it's something that naturally, I love the KPIs and love the dashboards. I love the data side of the business. I think out of the people that I know, I'm a good operator. I'm good at the operation side and making good financial decisions. But I think you need coaching on areas that you're weak in.

I think now I'm above average with my ability to close these people and we've seen just such great results from doing it. Sales is one of those things that if you're an entrepreneur, you have to be able to do. There's no way around it. You have to be able to sell. If you can convey yourself with confidence and you know where you're going, it's just following the process. It's like all the other stuff. It's just following the process, but you kind of need a process and a rubric and a playbook to go from to be able to know how to do it rather than just banging your head against the wall.

I've started to use money to just get the outcome that I'm looking for because time is money.

Seth: You know, it's funny because I hear you say that and I agree with what you're saying. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be able to sell. It feels intimidating, those words like, "Do I know how to sell? I don't know. Is it a skill that I have? I don't know if I know how to do that." When I walk back, it's like, "Well, do I know how to be a nice person and befriend a person and show interest in them and figure out what they want and figure out if I can do something that will actually legitimately meet their need, not just my need." So if I can say yes to all those things, then I probably can sell. Do you think it's really as simple as that? Or am I on the right track?

Ciaran: I think you're right. Sales is not this kind of pushing people into making decisions, but it is more about communicating and understanding the situation. I'm getting people that say to me now, "Such a nice time speaking with you today. I really enjoyed this conversation." I've had some people where they've signed agreements with me and they go, "I actually didn't think I was going to sell the property, but we just spoke about it. You planted the idea in my head. And I'm just like, you're right. It's a good decision for me where I'm at with my life."

Even if you're good at sales, think about this. If you can convert 20% more of your leads and your return on ad spend's like five or six X, now you've increased it to seven, or you've increased it from 10 to 12 or from five to six. Having a process has been so helpful and I can hire people and train them in that process. So I do sales training with my team twice a week. We do game tape where we listen to the calls. "Hey, what do you think of that call? There are also new things you can do to improve the call." There's no such thing as a perfect call, but we do kind of call breakdowns. What questions would you have asked? Your tone? Your pacing? You kind of talked a bit over this hour. You should have let them kind of talk a little bit more. You cut them off at this point. Just being consistent all the time on training the team on this stuff has just been so helpful.

So sales, communication, and convincing people to sell or influencing other people to make decisions. We want to try and make it easy for them to decide or highlight that it's a good decision to work with us or help them determine that we're a good option for them. But then leadership, leading a team, you're influencing others on your team. So that's the same sort of thing. It's just a little bit in a different context.

Seth: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So you've got a team and I take it one or two of your team members handle a portion of this sales process, but you sort of handle the closing portion of it. So what portion do they handle? And how hard is it to find the right people who are not just willing but happy to handle that kind of job, where they're good at it and they're not afraid to get on the phone?

Ciaran: I've got lead managers on my team. That's part of the funnel that you're asking about. So lead managers answer the inbound calls from the direct mail pieces. So on our direct mail pieces, we've got numbers, phone numbers, and people ring. We live answer the phone. So we were previously using PatLive and we realized it takes on average five calls to get somebody back on the phone if you miss a call. So it's easier to just live answer. It improves results and it's less work to just live answer than it is to have an answering service. So that's what we've done.

The lead manager takes the initial call, and someone qualifies as a seller. So it tries to understand, is there an established motivation to sell? Is there a reason why they want to sell? Or what's going on? Sometimes people go, "Yeah, sure, I'll sell my property for the right price." "Well, when you say the right price, what do you mean? What do you mean by the right price"? "Well, I actually don't want to sell, but I will sell if you give me a great deal of money for it." "Okay, so you wouldn't be interested in working with an investor that buys for less than market value, would you?" "No." "Okay, well, let's not set up a call."

If the person goes, "Yeah, look, I've owned the property for 20 years. I planned to build up here, but I moved to Florida. I don't want to build up here anymore. I'm sick of paying the taxes." "Okay, well, how does 2 p.m. on Tuesday with Ciaran work for an appointment? He'll call you. He's our land buyer. He actually runs the company, but he's available by appointment. So I'll just schedule you on his calendar. Would that work?"

My team will then analyze that property ahead of my appointment. I'll go to the appointment. I'll say, "Look, I'm the land buyer." And I'll read the notes and say, "Hey, you're chatting with Ralph or you're chatting with Hannah or you're chatting with whoever. What has you looking to sell the property?" And you ask open-ended questions, trying to understand them. "How much would you be looking to get out of the property?"

The lead manager manages from the call-in to booking the appointment. And then if the appointment no-shows, they don't answer my call, and their job is to put them back on the calendar. They'll do the follow-up. If I say, "Sounds like now is not the right time. You've got going on right now. Let's do a follow-up in a month's time." My lead manager will do the follow-up in a month's time for me. So I'm just trying to spend my time doing the highest value job, which is closing the people that want to move forward.

Seth: Gotcha. This process of training your team to handle their portion of the sales process—how much work is it to do that? Does that training ever really end? Is there ever a point where it's like, "OK, they're there. They don't need any more of these calls where we review their conversation." Or is it just always something you constantly have to work on?

Ciaran: I think this is a trick question. I think you probably know the answer to this question. It's a continual effort. It's the practice and role-play and continually working on it day in and day out. We do have playbooks." This is how we do a call. This is what the notes should look like. This is how we go about a call. These are the questions that we ask. Here are some examples of some really good calls."

We score the calls out of 80 as well. So you can upload the transcript into ChatGPT and have a grading rubric for each call. How was their tonality? Did they ask questions? Did they do any sales techniques like language mirroring, like asking assumptive questions, like going negative, like asking questions and deploying sales techniques?

I do training twice a week and we try and document that training and we try and put it up onto Notion or have a learning management system like an LMS, like Zoho Learn, where you can set up employee onboarding and videos and stuff so that there's a resource for them to start off with when they start at the company. We've got an onboarding plan. "This is what's expected from you in 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. This is where we expect you to be."

You have to be really specific as to what you expect. How can somebody do a good job if you don't know what a good job looks like? And then even when it comes to hiring, what kind of person are you looking for? I hired a bunch of introverts and I asked them to make cold calls. That's a recipe for burnout. It's a recipe for unhappy people. You want someone that is energized by talking to people and loves talking to people. So we're using DISC assessments and trying to do some attitude tests, trying to really understand the people that I'm hiring. I'm really picky. I'm really difficult to work for. I have really high standards.

I think my team is really good from having all that. I pay them well. I've set up core values for the business. "This is the way we do things. This is the way we behave. This is who we are." Really treating the business like a business with the respect that it deserves. It's the foundations of the business that I think are often overlooked. "Oh, I want to do this new marketing channel. I want to do ringless voicemails. I want to do cold calling. I want to do PPC. I want to do this. I want to do that." But you have to have a solid foundation. You have to learn how to recruit people, how to run a marketing system, and how to do quarterly reviews of people on your team. How do you do dashboards? You have to do the kind of boring that you need to do as a business owner. Cash flow forecasts. I'm doing cash flow forecasts right now and predicting where my cash is going to be for the next 90 days. So I know where I sit with the business.

All this stuff is the boring stuff that no one talks about. Some of the success in this whole process is knowing if you're actually getting deals and getting them closed.

Seth: Some of this has to do with the customer journey or, in this case, maybe the seller journey. What are they experiencing? Every single interaction they have with you and your company—what does that look like? Say they get this piece of mail and the first piece of the customer journey is like, what does this piece of mail look like? What is it like to open it? What is it saying to them? Is it telling them to call or email or go to some website? When they call or do what the letter tells them to do, what do they experience then? Do they listen to a voicemail or in your case, do they get a live person on the phone? Does this happen 24/7? Is there always somebody there or just certain hours of the day? And then what does that first conversation look like? How long do they talk to them before they move to you? Is there any way in your customer journey that you've intentionally changed this over the years or anything that you think you still need to change to make that feel more seamless and basically just give people a good experience?

Ciaran: Really going to masterminds and talking to people that are ahead of you. I try not to reinvent the wheel. If someone's got a good system that's achieving the results that I'm after, I want to just rip it and copy it. Not completely copy their marketing copy, but I want to implement what they're doing that they're seeing results from. I try not to reinvent the wheel. I try and make good decisions, but I don't want to do something that's so out there. It's so different that I don't know if it's going to work. I want my business to be consistent and predictable and achieve consistent results over time. So that's one thing.

Some of the stuff that you can do, like building out online testimonials, is a good thing. Getting video testimonials—that's a good thing. Just some common sense stuff. We also have a post-appointment survey call. So I'll do an acquisition appointment and my lead manager will call back and go, "How did your call go with Ciaran? On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate the offer? You know, how do you feel about everything now? Now that this whole call is over, because their guard's now down, how could we have done better? What are you going to do now?" So really trying to understand them.

You could call some of the people that you've bought property from. "Why did you choose to work with us? What part of our process did you like?" And then with some of the marketing, is it easy to read? Does it read well?

Previous direct mail pieces I had were just big walls of text that I'd read. And I see myself glossing over and I'm like, "This doesn't read well." Let's have bullet points and have it easy to read. There are some common sense things. You ask the direct mail company, "Hey, can you give me your highest-converting direct mail pieces and use those pieces to try and understand what's working for people and then do what's working?"

I don't think there's any kind of silver bullet, but it is just trying to keep in touch with what's happening in your business and where the industry is going. That's a huge thing about doing the networking things to try and keep ahead of what everyone is doing and trying to understand what's happening. There's AI stuff now. So we're looking at setting up with OpenPhone; you can connect it in with Zapier and then ChatGPT and do AI call scoring as a thing that I'm looking at doing now. So some of the stuff is just common sense things, but I don't think there's any silver bullet, but just ask people, "Hey, why'd you work with us?" Trying to understand them. And then there are some easy wins that you can do, like the reviews and having a good website and having photos of yourself and being a real person.

Seth: What kind of offers are you making? Say you've got a property that's worth a hundred grand; what do you offer for that? What are you listing and selling it for? Because sometimes—I mean, all the time, really—the amount of your offer also has a lot to do with whether or not that thing gets accepted and how much money you end up making. So what does your typical deal look like?

Ciaran: So we email the realtors that we work with and the realtors value every lead that comes into our system in the areas that we have realtors that we work with. So we can have a really high degree of accuracy and precision as to what the value of that property is. And knowing the realtors that we work with, sometimes I'll reduce the offer a little bit because I'll know that that realtor will maybe overvalue a property by like 10% or whatever.

I'll look at my data again and go, "How much does it cost to close on a property in this state? You know it's an attorney state when the closing costs are going to be higher or when you do probate or whatever." I built out a custom GPT that basically we've got all the information as to what closing costs are, what the transfer taxes are, and what the selling costs are in each area and I can just upload the realtor's email into ChatGPT and then it'll tell me what the offer ranges are for those properties.

So we're offering like 40 to 55%, but if I invest a certain amount of money, I've got a minimum cash return as well. If I invest $40,000, I want to get at least $25,000 profit irrespective of the percentage, and I don't want to do a deal that's less than $15,000 profit. And then if we need to do probate or clean up the property, it's got an estimate for what the probate costs are per region. The custom GPT I've programmed with as much stuff as possible so that my team can put in an offer range without my involvement.

Seth: Yeah. Do you ever have it with custom GPTs where it suddenly just stops doing what you told it to do and just kind of goes off the rails? I had that recently with one. I read an article last week about AI hallucination.

Ciaran: So apparently AI can kind of go a little bit rogue. I have had that before. I've got a manual prompt as well that has all the stuff in the custom GPT and, like, a big long Word file. When I'm doing stuff in the business and I'm making changes and I'm improving stuff, I try and document as much stuff as I can. Running a business is not easy. It's just not if you want an easy life; you know, get a job. But I certainly want to try and make my work somewhat leveraged. So I try and use the IT systems to have backups of everything and have manual ways of doing stuff. But we try and implement AI when we can into our processes.

Seth: Yeah. Early in this conversation, we were talking about you being in Ireland, working in this business in the U.S. from across the ocean. Have there been any big hurdles or challenges either when you got started or even now that are difficult about that, the proximity of how far away you are, or does it really make no difference at all? Is there ever a time when you think to yourself, "Man, if only I were in the U.S., then this would be easier"? Or does that not really happen?

Ciaran: All the time. Where do I start? What are some of the big challenges? Initially, it was trying to get a bank account for the business. I rang so many banks. Because of this rule, which I think is called the Patriot Act, it makes it really difficult to open a bank account if you're a non-resident of the U.S.

So I rang, I don't know, 30, 40, or 50 banks or something, and I couldn't find anybody. I found a bank in Puerto Rico and they got their banking license revoked and got shut down and I tried Mercury and they shut me down. I tried Relay Fire, tried a bunch of banks and I found a couple of banks that would let me in, like challenger type banks that could do verification online with Zoom. I'm not doing anything wrong, but it's just that the banks are not familiar with the rules. It's harder to verify my information when I'm overseas compared to maybe if you're in the U.S. And the only people that are overseas running U.S. businesses are maybe 1% or half a percent. So it's like the banks just go, "Oh, we just want U.S. people or U.S. residents. It's just easier."

I got a tax refund in my name. So I got a check from the IRS. I couldn't deposit the check over here. Because the bank, we're saying, "Well, this is from the Treasury, so there's no clearing bank in the U.S., so we can't actually cash the check here. If it's a check from a business, you could. We'd have a clearing bank on the other side. But when it's the U.S. government, we actually can't deposit that check." So I went to like three different banks and they couldn't do it for me.

Seth: This is a bank in Ireland that is saying this?

Ciaran: Yeah, it's a bank in Ireland. And I said, "I've got a U.S. check. Can you deposit it and give me euros for it?" And they said, "We can't do that."

Seth: What bank did you end up landing on to handle your U.S. bank account stuff?

Ciaran: I got a corporate bank account now with a big bank, but it's a relationship that you need to establish. I got an introduction and stuff. It's not something that you can just walk off the high street to get to a bank. If you are a U.S. citizen and you live abroad, you'll have a much easier time getting a bank account. But because I'm not a U.S. citizen or I don't have a U.S. visa, it's a lot, lot harder.

And then for taxes, when you sell a property, they take 15% of the sales price; they have a withholding called FIRPTA, Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act withholding. So the title company will withhold that money and send it to the government for you and then you can claim a refund and you might get the refund a year later. That's what this refund was about from withholdings two and a half years ago.

Seth: Man, I mean, what would it take for you to just move to the U.S. and become a U.S. citizen? Is it that big of a problem or can you figure out how to deal with it?

Ciaran: You can definitely get a business visa and you can get set up that way. But it's not something that is super straightforward to do. You have to hire an immigration attorney. You have to have a business that's beyond marginal, that you can support yourself with, and that you can support hiring other Americans with.

I've got some tax advice now that I've got a corporation set up for my situation. I've got a corporation set up, not a CPA or lawyer or whatever, your own advice. But I just spent some money getting advice to get it set up right so that things flow better.

When I sell a property as well, I can't really notarize a deed over here. There are notaries here. So I got a couple of things notarized, but then you need to get a government stamp called an apostille. That's a foreign stamp where the Irish government says, "Yeah, this is an Irish notary." I know in the US, they can't see if the notary is valid so the government stamped something. It takes three weeks so I've got a signing agent in the states that signs documents for me just for my closings.

So there are a lot of roadblocks there but what I will say is the technology is coming on. Things are getting easier. You can do online notarization now. Some of the banks are becoming more equipped since COVID and online opening and stuff but it certainly can be challenging. A lot of the banks are like, "Well, why do we need your small business?" I'm a mom-and-pop business. It's not like I'm a huge company. And stuff like credit lines, you can't get US credit. There are a couple of ones that you can borrow money for houses for if you're a non-resident, but not for land. And you look me up, you skip trace me and I'm like a bit of a ghost. You know, it's all just a little bit more complicated. Every problem can be solved, but it's just more hassle for me.

Seth: So the notary situation. So you basically just have somebody locally in the US who has authority to do that on your behalf. Can you use something like notarize.com or anything like that? Or does that not really help you at all?

Ciaran: Needs that government stamp and all that. So notarize.com doesn't work because they can only do US signers. I've been using Blue Notary. Blue Notary can do a knowledge-based verification, I think it's called, or you upload a copy of your passport and they can verify that you're a legit signer. I think there are notaries in Florida and stuff, but not all the title companies accept that.

I have to look at lots of different solutions to try and find that company to be able to work for me. But if you're a US citizen and you live anywhere, you can definitely use notarize.com and it's a good bit easier.

Seth: Yeah, I feel like that's going to get more and more difficult, sort of, just because now with AI stuff, you can do a live deepfake on Zoom and look like somebody you're not. And you can make fake images of your driver's license or passport and all this stuff. It's just like, yeah, I don't know.

I do know I'd interviewed Arturo Paturzo back in episode 164, retipster.com/164. So he does a lot of the same stuff that Ciaran was just mentioning but he is a guy named Tony Durante whose whole profession is basically doing all of this stuff for people that live in other countries, like, I'm going to help you get stuff notarized; I'm gonna help you set up your LLC. I'll help you set up your bank account. I'll be the guy here who is your liaison with these local places to get stuff set up so is that kind of what you do then?

Ciaran: Yeah, I don't want somebody to have signing power and have access to the funds for the business. You could maybe employ somebody as a manager for your business and have them open a bank account for you. But then they also have signing power for the bank account because they've opened it. And I just wasn't comfortable with that. But largely, yeah, that's what I've done. I've met other people that are doing land flipping from the Philippines, from Australia, from all over the globe. And from chatting with people that have the same problems, you can then find these kinds of solutions.

I've really made a business of trying to find people that are further along than I am. I had this accountability group that we ran for five years where I met with people every month that were trying to grow the land business. We would review each other's businesses and give each other feedback. "Oh, well, what do you do with this situation? What do you do with this situation?" And having a second person to bounce ideas off has just been very, very helpful, especially with some of these stupid issues. "Oh, like now, you know, to use Blue Notary Bush, I've tried them all."

Seth: Yeah. I'll include links to all the stuff that Ciaran is talking about in the show notes for this episode, retipster.com/231. If anyone wants to check that out.

But Ciaran, we're only through like half the questions I wanted to ask you, but this episode is already getting fairly long. A couple of just closing questions here. So do you have some kind of long-term vision for your business? Is land investing your end game or do you see this as a launchpad? Something else? Where do you want to be in five years?

Ciaran: It's a hard question. I ask myself that question a number of times a year. Right now, I feel like we're getting some good momentum with the business. I want to hire probably two closers on the team in the next couple of years. I'm interested in commercial property. I've always been interested in buying some commercial property. So I think I do do some of that. I feel like I've kind of worked through a lot of the issues of the business. I'm happy with where I'm at right now. I think I'll grow the business a little bit bigger and hire a couple more people so I can be less in the business, but I kind of like where I'm at.

Seth: Oh, that's awesome. If somebody is listening to this, maybe they are in Ireland or Europe or somewhere else in the world. Maybe they're just looking to get started and they haven't yet gone through all of the obstacles that you've figured out how to go through. Or maybe they're not even sure if land investing is viable at this point. Do you have any advice for them? I mean, we could probably piece together advice you've already given, but any like concise ,do this if you're going to give it a try.

Ciaran: Just do a few deals. I was FedExing documents and checks back and forth to them. It works. It's just not as efficient, but do a few deals. Try it out before you kind of go fully deep into setting up a company and doing all this stuff. Just start. I listened to podcasts for hours. Years before doing anything with real estate. I started somewhat young at 19, but I wasn't listening to podcasts for a couple of years. I would say, just do a deal and just see how you like it. And then you'll learn so much more from the doing than from listening to the podcast.

Seth: Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. It is crazy how much you learn. You almost can't even really be explained until you've experienced it firsthand because you might have some experience that's kind of an anomaly. You know, maybe there's something weird about the market that you're working in; it can't be represented in every other market that people are talking about. So I couldn't agree more with that. But of course, moving and doing it yourself is kind of the hardest part because it requires the most legwork and groundwork, but it's totally worth it.

Well, Ciaran, if people want to connect with you or learn more about you, you're not obligated to share anything, but if you want to, now's a great time. How could people connect if they wanted to?

Ciaran: I think one of the best ways is to just message me on Facebook, Ciaran Sheil, Facebook or Instagram. I try and post there from time to time.

Seth: Awesome. Well, Ciaran, thanks again for your willingness to come on the show and share your wealth of knowledge. It's been awesome to get to know you a little bit. Can't wait to get to know you even better at the Land Conference coming up. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Again, show notes at retipster.com/231. And we'll talk to you all next time.

Ciaran: Thank you.