Seth: Hey everyone, how's it going? Welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 240 and today I'm talking with Ron Apke.

So Ron and his brother Dan have made a big name for themselves in the land investing education space and they also created Land Portal, which is an amazing data service for land investors. If you haven't checked it out yet, you totally need to.

And I started using their software over a year ago and I immediately saw how good it was. And when I gave them feedback on it. I saw how seriously they took it and how hard they were pushing to make it better.

And I can tell you, I've reviewed a lot of software in my years of running REtipster. And it's pretty rare that companies actually care enough to the point of not just listening, but making changes to the software based on what I say. It just doesn't happen.

And today I wanted to dive into both Ron and Dan's personal stories together and also what it's like to build a business as brothers and a little bit more into the Land Portal as well, on what it's like to run that kind of company. So Ron, welcome. How's it going?

Ron: Seth, I appreciate the warm introduction and yeah, excited to talk about anywhere and anything. I think we can take this podcast for sure, but I appreciate you having me on.

Seth: Yeah, of course. Of course. First and most importantly, do people ever mistake you and Dan for twins?

Ron: Every single day, pretty much. Every day we're going anywhere together. It gets asked pretty much, I mean, legitimately every day. A lot of times it's multiple times if we're together longer. But yeah, pretty much every time we go out to lunch, we're asking for twins from someone.

Seth: Yeah, no, it doesn't surprise me. Why do you think that is? Is it, I know for me, when I think of, I think it's the cover of your podcast. I don't know if it's still the cover, but both of you guys are standing there next to each other and like you're smiling in the same way and you just look very similar. But like which one of you guys is older?

Ron: I'm about two and a half years older than Dan. Yeah, I don't see it, obviously, from my perspective, but we get asked it so much. We must look something alike if we're asked that every single day.

They never ask. We had someone recently who they didn't ask if we were twins. They just like made a statement like, yeah, I'm a twin, too. Like it wasn't like a question. Like they just made a statement that we were twins.

So, yeah, it happens regularly. but yeah, we've gotten used to it.

Seth: Yeah. I've never worked with a family member like you guys are doing. I'm curious, like being older, does that play any role in like the decision-making dynamic? Like are you kind of like the alpha dog because you're the older kid or not really?

Ron: No, we've done a good job, especially the last couple of years, really separating responsibilities, roles, everything like that. So like, and I think with any business partner, it's really important. And that's when conflict happens is when you have something come up and you're like, who is in charge of this?

And you have that question that has not been an issue for us over the last couple of years. Is there some overlap? Like we have opinions on different things, but there's always someone in charge of each aspect of our business.

Seth: Was there a time when you guys like used to get in arguments or does it ever happen? Like it's got to happen at some point, right? Where like you just clash on certain issues or how's that work?

Ron: It's not as regular as you would think. I don't think, but early on when we started land, when we were starting flipping land, it was a much more regular thing. Cause like I was, he was doing the sales stuff, but I would kind of over, not oversee it, but I would like kind of just make sure everything's smooth.

Like when you're first getting started, like you want every lead, you want to take advantage of every single lead you get. So I was maybe micromanaging him a little bit with it unnecessarily probably.

But yeah, I mean, there's not a ton of conflict to be a hundred percent honest. Like there'll be times when we have different opinions on the direction of the business. Then we just meet, talk about it and then kind of make a decision based on that.

I'll sometimes get emotional or like get not just when I'm passionate about an idea or something like that. It's like, all right, we got to go this direction. This is why this is working. We can scale this up.

So that's what it comes. It's big decision things. It's not little things anymore.

Seth: Yeah. So like when you guys first discovered the land business, was that you or him or did you both somehow simultaneously discover it or who was leading the charge on that?

Ron: So Dan called me, I was a college basketball coach legitimately working for $0. Like I got paid $5,000 over 24 months. But the year that he called me, I was making literally $0. It's one of my dreams to coach college basketball. I wanted to try to turn it into a career. It didn't work out that way.

But Daniel called me and he just basically presented the idea. Like we had a rental property at that point, maybe two at that point. I don't remember exactly, but he just came to me. He's like, there's a lot of opportunity here. Like there's a reason we haven't heard about this business model. People are flipping land just like they flip houses.

And he came to me with the idea. Initially he was like, he'll be the money partner in it. Cause he was running another business. He'll fund the mail fund, all the marketing and stuff. And I'll do the operations.

And then he loved the business so much. Then we both really got into operations and day-to-day of the business.

Seth: Do you think it's kind of a superpower to be working in this business with your brother superpower the reason i say that is because like when i look at my entire entrepreneurial journey like it's just been me so and there's only so much i can do as one person even if i have a team like there's only so much i can do to make them be geniuses at what they do but with you it's like there's two geniuses at the table and you can divide and conquer and like get basically twice as far maybe even further because there's two of you or maybe another question is like do Do you think you would be as far as you are today if it had just been you all along?

Ron: Oh, no, absolutely not. In terms of that, I think you talk about like the superpower thing, like having a partner that you can trust is the most valuable thing. Like I'd never like there's no distrust from one way or the other between us.

So I think that is the most important thing with any business partner. And like naturally, like you grow up with someone like some people have much worse relationships with their siblings than we do. We have a really close relationship outside the business as well.

But yeah, just being able to trust the business partner, I think that's where like, okay, you can get so much done because I'm not overlooking things. I'm not checking the bank account every day to make sure things are like double checking things. I can trust him to do his responsibilities. He can trust me to do the same. And that's why we've grown businesses the way we have.

Seth: So like you start as land investors, then you get into the education space, and then you get into the software space or the land portal. I know you said, Dan, looks like he was kind of the discoverer of land in the first place, but- Whose idea was it to get into education and then to do the software thing?

Ron: Education was more, to be honest with you, was more organic. It was people from different spots. You start making money and you start living. We weren't living a crazily different life. It's just like you're making money. We're posting some content, and it came kind of organically, honestly.

Obviously, we doubled down on it when people were reaching out to us and asking us how to get started in something. But there's so much, and there's still a ton of opportunity in land, obviously. But you know back then like it was like anyone could go find a deal like it just wasn't that hard finding land deals back then so it was more just an organic thing was the education the software thing i think was conversation between both of us i don't remember who initially honestly said it it was just something that was such a gap in our industry as you know like you look 24 36 months back like there was nothing that could do like there is so much data was so much more expensive.

Like there's no competition. So these people were just charging whatever they want. It was expensive. It was not land specific. It was just really poor data overall. They're just spitting county records to you where now like you have much more customized data set.

I think that was a really organic conversation. We were like, okay, we can provide data records to our members. We're already doing that through data tree, but we thought we could improve some data honestly, and have some custom things and get it to our members.

And that's our software our business was made 100% initially for ourselves, our land business, and then also our students.

Seth: It's crazy to think about how much harder it used to be back in the day to just get any information. I remember I was talking to just some of this past week. So my first year in land, just getting a parcel map was like the hugest pain in some counties.

I remember there was a county near me where to get a parcel map, I had to like, I think I'd like mail them a check for 50 bucks and then they would send me a CD and on the CD would be like a PDF with a really poor image of the parcel. It is for a single parcel.

So like if you're doing a bunch of different deals in that county, it's like multiply that by however many deals you're trying to do. It was crazy how hard it was. And I remember thinking in that moment, like, well, I guess this is good because nobody else is going to go through this hassle to get this.

So I'm curious, Ron, when you think Think about running a, you know, software as a service company, the land portal, compare that to running a land business. How does that compare? I mean, they're two completely different businesses, even though they obviously overlap and work in the same space. But like what's easier or harder about running the land portal versus the land? The land business itself?

Ron: It's a good question. I've never really thought about what's harder. I just kind of like just work on stuff, honestly, and like whatever happens, happens. But that being said, it's different. It's very different.

Like the land business is very transactional in terms like you make so much money on one deal where like land portal is like, it's a snowball kind of effect. You build a better software, you have good partners like yourself and you just grow the business. Like it's more of a snowball effect growing that business.

What is same? The same is like the data behind like advertising. Everyone like tries to act like land flipping is any different or land investing is any different. It's like you spend money on ads and you get a certain amount of return based on the quality of ads.

The ads are obviously direct mail texting. It's different types of ads than we use on land portal. But that being said. Building the software was easier because of our following, because of our partners that we have.

So I want to say easier than the biz. It made it easier. Software companies aren't profitable 99 times out of 100 in their first 12 months. But if you have a following, if you already have users, like we knew we had a set amount of users going into it because our students trusted us.

We've always recommended the best possible things for them. So that's why the software was able to grow fast. And then word of mouth kind of takes off.

I don't know the answer to your question there. I mean, both of them have their difficulties, I think, but both of them are definitely scalable, I think, but software, I think overall is probably more difficult.

Seth: Is there anything you've learned about software that you didn't expect when you started, like before running the Land Portal? Any challenges that you've experienced where like, whoa, I did not anticipate that being a problem or even like big wins and fun things about it? Like, whoa, that's like cooler than I thought it would be.

Ron: The development part, like little things can take a really, really long time. Like you think like, OK, you just got to change this button. Like it is not just like changing a button or changing a little interface thing. It is a sometimes like the littlest things from a user's perspective can take a week for a team of developers to change. So that is something that probably, I don't know if it's unexpected, but something that I didn't realize the extent of the development in terms of that.

What I love about this business is talking to other land investors. I don't like looking at me and Seth as competition. I like communicating with other land coaches, other land educators, and building partnerships with them.

Like that is something that I have a true passion for meeting them in person, everything like that, because obviously there's aspects that are like a competition thing, but I want to try to provide the best possible software for other land educators to provide to their students.

Because I know when we like started land investing and why we started, when we started the education, like we were looking for the best softwares. It's not like any, and you do the same thing, Seth. It's not like any software, someone comes with a good affiliate program and you're like, I'm going to push this to a hundred people.

It's really about like you want to push the best things. And that's what I've really enjoyed those conversations and having partners that help us build the software as well.

Seth: One thing I've noticed about you and Dan is that you guys move pretty fast. Like you push hard. There's just like an urgency behind what you do. Like we're going to make this good.

Whereas a lot of people, especially people who have experienced success, they might just be kind of slower to move or kind of apathetic or lazy because you're fine. But I'm curious, how do you decide what to build next?

Do you have a giant list of things or is it because somebody asked for it or being land investors yourselves? Do you just intuitively know like people need this, whether they realize it or not, they're going to want this feature.

Ron: I think the number one, I don't want to say number one thing, but when there's gaps in the market and we know there's demand for it, like that, that's, those are things like when we came up with like being able to filter landlock, we were the first software ever to be able to filter landlocked properties.

We knew the demand for that filtering based on road frontage, everything like that. Like we knew the demand for these things. So when there's something that no one else has, our slope analysis tool, no one else has, when there's something no one else has, and we know there's a value when we bring it to them.

Yeah, you really don't know fully until you bring it to the market. But when there are gaps and things we can add and value we can bring to the users, that's what we really focus on.

Like, yeah, there is a laundry list of like things that a lot of users don't recognize. Like we're trying to improve the speed of filtering everything with the speed. It's always really important with websites and that's constantly being worked on.

But that being said, like as far as the improvements to the software, typically it's user-based suggestions, anything like that. Try to find gaps in the market as well and how we can provide more value to land investors and real estate investors.

Seth: Yeah. I know the land portal is still growing pretty fast, even though you've been around for well over a year now. I don't know. It's you grow as though you just started. I think a lot of companies.

Whether it's software or anything else, like they kind of get to a point where they just plateau and they're just like, yep, we're good. Just keep doing more of the same thing. But just given how fast you've grown and how much you've grown, I don't know if you're at a good place to even make this determination right now.

But if you had to start the LAN portal all over today, is there anything you would do differently? Like would you add certain features sooner or just not even bother with some things or even just a more fundamental thing about starting this company? I don't know. Any thoughts on that? Looking back on it?

Ron: Not a ton, honestly. Like it was obviously a huge learning experience and you're going to learn like over the, we've all been doing this for two years with Landportal and we learned a ton.

I would probably double down on partners a little earlier, to be honest with you, like get their feedback for it. Cause I want to build the software for it. Obviously not every single aspect that everyone wants is going to be in the software, but doubling down on partners early because you guys talk to the most students.

Like we have such amazing coaches that are supporting Lamporto and pushing it to their students, like getting them on board a little earlier. And like, really, cause you felt that I think Seth with like feeling the growth of the company, feeling like your input mattering in terms of that.

So like bringing on a larger volume of partners earlier might've been a valuable thing.

Seth: I am curious, like what motivates you guys? Why do you have so much energy to push for things that are better and growing? What I mentioned earlier. A lot of people, when they make a certain amount of money or get to a certain status, they just kind of stop or get lazy or lose their motivation.

Keeps you motivated.

Ron: So I think a couple of things, like I've never been like a complacent person, like, like it's a business and like, you're trying to always make more money. It's like, I just don't want to be complacent. Like making the same amount of money as I did the last month or last year is just not where I want to be.

And like, it's a game, like the way you do it, like you want to keep on growing things, like whether I'm playing a sport or anything, I want to improve. And that's how I've kind of view business. Improving a business is making more money. Essentially. It's a purpose.

Also, I think that's how we determine that we're doing the right things. We're making the right moves. And sometimes you make the wrong moves and it costs you money or the business goes down for a few months, something like that. And you got to make adjustments.

So I just enjoy it to be a hundred percent honest with you. And also I know the software brings value to people with all the AI stuff and efficiencies. I know the software helps people be more efficient in their land business.

So continuing to do that and provide the best possible data, the best possible everything with the software for land investors is really motivates me every day.

Seth: And just a refresher, what are all the problems in the industry that you were trying to solve? I know we kind of mentioned, you know, other data services are a lot more expensive.

Certain things that we're just missing altogether, like being able to tell road frontage or the slope, I know is a huge thing, but are there other like big problems that cause you to start the Land Portal or problems that like still need to be solved and you're still working on it? Anything come to mind?

Ron: So when we first started, like the number one thing is like, let's have mapping and data be the same thing. Like there's too many subscriptions out there, mapping and data being in the same spot. So that's where we started. Like, okay, this is going to be a high quality mapping software with data alongside of it.

And then the other filters came like as far as road frontage. Landlocked, wetlands, FEMA, slope. Our biggest problem we wanted to solve is how do you not target bad land? You know what I mean?

Like when you first started this business, it's like you, it doesn't matter. Like whatever you pull your list is you're going to be targeting the quality of land. You just don't know.

When I started first targeting subdivides, I was looking at a map on Datatree or another software and I'm like unchecking boxes on there. Like that's the only way to target a lot of road frontages by zooming in on the map and literally unchecking boxes.

So that's what we wanted to do is like, OK, now we want people to only be targeting good land. So no slope, no wetlands, no floodplain or whatever you want in terms of that.

So that was our biggest thing is like, how do you target only good land? Ninety nine percent land you target is good land.

Seth: with all the different features and technology you've got in the land portal, some of it being AI, and AI is a huge thing and I'm sure will probably forever be a huge thing, at least for the rest of our lifetimes. How do you think the land investing and the education and the software space, I know three different things, but how do you think those things are gonna evolve over the next five years or so? Like, do you have any predictions on things that will become easier or harder or just different?

Ron: I think land investing is going to change in terms of niches, I think are gonna become very, very important. And I think people are going to like, The business is going to keep on adjusting. It's turning into more of a business land investing, where when we first started, Seth, it was like, okay, like you just send some mail, you get some deals. It's that easy.

Now it's like, it's turning more into a business and that's not AI based. As far as like how people are running their business, I think marketing is going to have a significant, significant change in the next few years.

I think texting, like the way people are, there's no regulations behind a lot of these things right now. Ringless voicemails. You have these robot people calling and there's good use cases for it. But Dan and I did a podcast a few weeks ago and it's like, when you can click one button and you can ring 10,000 people's phones in a second.

Like that is going to be an issue. That is going to be something that's regulated because there's not a lot of cost to it as well.

I think like when I still love direct mail, I think direct mail is going to change the style of direct mail a lot over the next year or something like that, 24 months. But I think regulations are going to be a huge, huge factor. And I'd love to get your thoughts on it as well.

But I just think when it's too cheap and too easy to reach out to thousands of people, you're going to have the regulations come up.

Seth: Thing is, though, like there are regulations out there now, but people just kind of ignore them and they kind of have ways to circumvent them and get around them. And so it's like regulation that can actually be adequately policed. I think this what you're talking about there, like contacting how many tens of thousands of people with one click, being able to do a lot with very little human effort is something that's going to affect everything.

Like the whole internet is going to be affected by that. When you think about how easy it is for people to make fake videos and just make stuff up. I get emails all the time that I'm pretty sure are AI generated that like sort of pretend to know me and who I am and all this stuff.

And it's kind of bugs me. I don't really know how it's going to be stopped or fixed, but it's definitely something to be mindful of.

Ron: Like with texting and stuff like these service providers are becoming really good at recognizing spam and stuff like that and for me like That's why I think direct mail is going to have, obviously, like Georgia had a strict direct mail, like regulations that they added, which I'm not a huge fan of the way they did it. I think it was overkill, to be honest with you.

But direct mail has such a higher barrier to entry. You're sending $0.65 pieces of mail. There's a big barrier to entry versus like what piece of marketing is going to get the most attention. Someone who's getting 100 texts a day or 100 robots calling them a day or someone who's spending $0.60, $0.80 on a piece of direct mail.

I think direct mail is going to have a huge, huge comeback in really all marketing, not just this business.

Seth: Yeah, I agree. And I think that cost factor you just mentioned, it's always been a more expensive way to do it, but now it's getting like really expensive to do it. Like you really have to want to do this to make that work.

And I think if anything, that'll probably help the people that are still in that because they're going to have less posers to deal with. It would just be easier to actually do it right.

That doesn't mean that they don't have to like get more creative and original and put lot more thought into their mail piece to get a better response rate and all that. But hopefully it will kind of weed out some of the people that shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

Ron: I agree. I think there's, I don't know if we're feeling saturation, like in terms of those forms of marketing yet, but I know those are, there's a lot of softwares that are being built right now on robot dial.

Like I was presented one recently, someone came to me and he was actually, he was talking about if he wanted to switch or he was asking his opinion and he was doing a cold calling agency. And then he's like, this is someone who can do a robot dialer or something like that.

And I just wasn't sold on it, to be honest with you. And I just think those are going to change. I think cold calling is still going to work. I don't think there's going to be many regulations. I'm picking up the phone and dialing, but texting and the robot stuff. I'm very, very intrigued.

Seth: Kind of circling back to the land investing business, the education space in the land portal. That's a lot of stuff to juggle. I know because I'm also juggling similar endeavors at the same time. So how do you divide your time? What does the pie chart of your weekly schedule look like?

Ron: So with our deals we are currently doing from Usland Investing, we're doing a lot of subdivides. We're partnering with good people. I really like utilizing people in terms of every part of my business, in terms of our education, having people around us that can produce media with us and help make the content part easier.

For our deals right now, we're doing a lot of bigger subdivides. We just closed on one a couple of days ago, a $200,000 subdivide in North Carolina. We've been doing a lot of that, partnering with really good people who kind of run the operations behind the deal will be money partners.

Advice people, kind of like that, where it's not like I'm hands-on answering the phone. That's how kind of that gets spread.

The education and the drone part or not drones part, I'm sorry, and the software part, those are kind of 50%, honestly, with me, there's weeks where it's like, okay, I need to be higher on the education side or help students or whatever it is, or try to create some new content.

But it's about 5050, be honest with you, Seth, it's not easy to juggle. As you know, I'm sure it's not always the easiest thing to juggle a lot of things. Sometimes you're like, I just want to put 100% effort into this this week, and then I'll do that. But it's not the easiest thing. It's a balancing act for sure.

Seth: And you You questioned yourself too. Like, am I putting it in the right place right now?

Ron: Yeah, I kind of find like certain weeks just require a lot of attention on one thing. The other stuff kind of has to be ignored temporarily and then I can kind of catch up. But yeah, man, it's over a decade now. I've been trying to figure out the right way to do this and it's frustrating. It's hard.

It's really hard to like to do it right and feel like I did it right. And I don't know if I've ever really perfected it, but I guess this is the life I chose.

That's what entrepreneurship is, I guess. You don't know exactly if you're putting the time into the right spot all the time. And even if you're just running one business, it can be the same exact thing. Like you just don't know if you're putting your time effort into the right thing.

So it's a balancing act for sure. But you just got to whatever you're working on in that moment. Just some people try to get distracted with other things. Like just focus on what you're working on in the moment as well as you can.

Seth: Yeah. And you guys bought Droners.io a while back, right?

Ron: So, yeah, we did that last March, maybe last. It's been about 18 months, I think, since we've owned it. our third brother or our other brother, Mike is the operator on that.

And again, like that is something where I've maybe spent a few hours a month on droners, like we'll meet kind of direction plan, stuff like that. So, and Mike having to trust another brother that can run the business, do the day-to-day operations is really, really beneficial. And there's a very little time I put into that business, which is nice and helpful.

Seth: Is it just the three of you brothers in the family or the other siblings?

Ron: Just three of us. Yep.

Seth: Okay. Is Mike, is he the youngest or middle or oldest?

Ron: He's the oldest, actually. So we're all about three years apart. I'm two and a half years older than Dan and about three years, two months younger than Mike.

Yeah, just us three.

Seth: Is that a hard business to run and make profitable? I mean, I know when you guys bought it, I remember a lot of people in the land space were like really glad that you did because a lot of people used that site.

It was like the best go-to place to find a good drone pilot. And it was like, oh man, it's shutting down. It's horrible. What are we going to do? And then you bought it. It's like, oh, good, it's not going away. But is it easy to make that kind of business profitable?

Ron: So how we bought it was it actually went into foreclosure and it wasn't Droners that it went into foreclosure. It was the company on top of Droners. So the company on top of Droners had a bunch of assets underneath and they were going bankrupt essentially. So they went bankrupt and Droners was one of the assets. So we went to a federal auction and bought it there essentially.

But yeah, I mean, it's a marketplace app. We have some done for you stuff that's built into it now. It's not overly profitable to be 100% transparent. It's not like something that way.

Like every deal, every order, you're going to make a thousand dollars. Like it's low margin business, just like Upwork or any other marketplace app. And like, you get the fees, like that's kind of what you're doing.

We're in the same spot, Seth. Like we saw it go, just no one, you couldn't hire pilots on your owners anymore. So I told our other brother, Mike, I'm like, Mike, look into this, see what's going on. If you're interested, like there might be an opportunity here.

And it was like, it was, it was a dream to like own it. Like we never thought it was going to actually go through. Yeah, we saw an opportunity there. We knew we had built, again, we had built-in customers with land investors. We knew we had built-in customers with land investors because you guys all felt it. We all felt it when Droners went out of business or whatever was going on with them. So we had a built-in customers before we bought this software company.

Seth: You mentioned this foreclosure auction sale thing. How do you even find out about that? Say if land.com ever goes into foreclosure and I can buy it for $5,000, is there a way I can be on the line?

Ron: Oh, it was like, we saw that it wasn't being operated. Like there was no customer support. You couldn't really, some people could hire pilots, but if your job ever went pending, you couldn't hire pilots. Like it is kind of a self-running business, honestly, but some people who are like newer on there, like very few jobs would actually get up posted.

So Mike reached out to a CEO or someone high up in there and we got a hold. There's an attorney essentially who is in charge of selling the assets under the company that went bankrupt. And they were the one that were doing the auction.

So we had to go to Raleigh, North Carolina, federal courthouse. Like it was an intimidating courthouse. And like we were in the auction with one other party. It was a lot of digging to actually find about the auction, to be honest with you.

Seth: So I'm wondering, as you've seen the land investing business change, and it has definitely changed over the past few years, have you ever found it difficult to keep your followers and students informed about what's working now? Like I'm talking about like updating old course content or making sure people know the new rules of the game and that kind of thing.

You know, I know you guys have been doing this for a while and you've made content years ago that may not be accurate anymore just because the world has changed. Is that ever like a challenge?

Ron: Yes, for sure. Like it's as things change, as strategies change. And one thing I'm very big on, like, I don't want to just because I'm there's a new strategy doesn't mean it's the right strategy. You know what I mean?

As far as like some people like, okay, there's a new marketing strategy and this has to work or something. Like I don't like to change content or change strategies until I know myself, I've tested it, that it is actually working because then you're just throwing a lot of stuff out there.

I will give options and let people know. But as far as like the strategies we teach, like I'm very strict on testing them out, but yeah, it's tough to keep things updated nowadays, Seth, like things are changing.

Like even producing land portal content tutorials for land portals like i look at our tutorials we did three months ago like this looks completely different this is like a different looking software than it is today so so much stuff within and that even changes so it's definitely difficult people aren't stupid as far as like our users and stuff like that are like they figure things out like they understand there's some little changes or software changes or whatever it is but yeah it's a battle i'd love to i'm sure you've kind of faced the same stuff where it's the game changes it seems like every month now.

Seth: What's hard about that too is like, especially if you're ever in like group chats or things like that, you'll hear some people saying like texting. We tried it, it just doesn't work. Or cold calling, we totally struck out with that.

And then the person next to him was like, what are you talking about? It works great for us. Like this is the way we do everything. So it's like even knowing like what is the objective truth and like what is going to work for everybody?

It's almost kind of like you just got to present options and make people aware this is a thing some people do really well with. This is another thing and kind of let people self-select to some extent.

Ron: Yeah, I agree. My always thought process and like some people who just like things, a statement of saying something doesn't work means it has never worked for anyone. It's never currently, like there are people successfully doing ringless voicemail. There's people doing PPC very successfully, all different kinds of marketing.

Like to say, to make a statement like this doesn't work, like, no, it just didn't work for you. You weren't the best texting operator or something like that. So there, yeah, any strategy, marketing strategy can work for anyone and the best operators will find a way to make it work for sure.

So yeah, it's, all the different strategies work. It's just some people fit better into different marketing strategies. And some people, this business just isn't for, to be a hundred percent honest.

Seth: I mean, when you think it just your own life and your business pursuits, all the different things you have going on, what does the end game look like for you? Is it about building up tons of passive income or some kind of legacy or something else?

Ron: I don't think that much ahead of like five, 10 years, honestly. I love, so whenever I'm producing content or anything like that, like one thing that I always have in the back of my head is like, whatever I am recording this podcast I'm recording with you today is going to live on forever.

Like I always think about presenting myself in an honest and transparent way. Like that's one thing that I know is like a legacy thing, whether it's my kids after I'm gone watching or my grandkids or my great grandkids watching content from 2025, 75 years from now.

Like I always think about like the content that I'm putting out in an honest way. Like that's something that I know is going to grow business wise. Like I just, I love growing companies like droners it's just like it's a portfolio now we have seth as far as our land investing our education droners and land portal like it's just a portfolio of companies essentially now and i just want to grow those as effectively as possible but yeah the one like long thing term thing that i always think about is like my kids watching this exact podcast or my great great grandkids watching this podcast 80 years from now or something like that i know sometimes it kind of messes with my head knowing that like these could be out there like 100 years from now Some people just put whatever content like to get to, I don't know.

And it's like, how are you actually portraying yourself? Like, is this going to sound cool to you? Is this going to sound good in 10 years, even 15 years? Like I, you got to think about that. I think when you're. Putting content out on there.

And I think naturally, like people who are more honest than like with how they're selling things, how they're doing things is going to get more attention in the present day as well.

Seth: I'm one who tends to err more on the side of like this thing I say, it has to be said and portrayed perfectly. Like I cannot make mistakes. I think that can go too far. And you can also go too far in the other direction of just not caring at all. It's kind of hard.

Ron: That's your reputation though, Seth, like even within our company, like we have one of our media people when like we first partnered with you with someone, she was like so excited. Wow. You guys are partnering with Seth Williams. And like, it's, it's a reputation.

Like your reputation is built every single piece of content you put out every word of mouth. Like you don't hear people say, Seth, Seth Williams told me this, he's probably BSing me or anything like that. Like it doesn't happen.

So yeah, every piece of content is kind of building that reputation.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. Totally agree on that obviously. Cause that's how I do it.

So when you think back to when you guys started, by the way, what year did you guys get into this?

Ron: We're like 2019, 2020, right on the end of 2019, yeah.

Seth: So you've been around long enough to see, you know, how much has changed. And I'm curious, was there anything you heard back then that you found to just be like wrong? Or maybe it was even right then, but it's wrong today?

Ron: A lot of people, looking back at it, a lot of people were like, just flip the land quick. Just get the money quick, flip the land. Like looking back at all the deals, and I'll sometimes do it. Like our first year, we did 48 flips. It was from April through December. We did 48 flips our first year in this business.

And like looking back at the land, like I could have made $700,000 more, $800,000 more by subdividing. And people were just like, flip it fast, flip it fast. But like you look at it, like no project-based stuff was being done then.

And it's not hard to subdivide land, as you know, like it is not hard to do minor subdivides in land. So that's something where I know we left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table, maybe millions of dollars on the table by not doing project-based stuff. So that's one thing I definitely would have changed back then is trying to make more money on each deal.

Seth: Yeah, that's so true. I was just talking to an investor this past week. He was talking to my man, if you dropped me off as a land investor in like 2014, like within a year, I could be making 10 million net.

Like it would not be difficult at all knowing what I know now. Yeah, because yeah, back then, I mean, people weren't thinking at all about subdividing or any kind of improvements. I mean, it was just buy a property cheap, do nothing and sell it, which, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but like, holy cow, if you actually evaluate every deal for what it is, like I sometimes almost tremble to think of like how much money I left on the table, how much waste there was in my early days. Cause I just wasn't even looking at it through that lens.

Ron: We had a student who just did his, or not just, it was probably six, eight months ago. He did his first deal and it was a subdivide in North Carolina, splitting into two parcels, nothing crazy. It was like 19 acres, maybe three parcels, sorry, 19 acres into three parcels.

He was going to buy it for 35, sell it for 70. I'm like, dude, you got to look into subdividing. I know this is your first deal. It's not difficult. And he ended up selling for 115.

Just that deal took him from buy for 35 or whatever it was, sell for 70 to buy for 35 and sell for 115. And just a really easy split, $2,000 survey, something like that. I didn't think about it back then. I thought about it. I just didn't even get, I don't think I was close my first 12 months to doing a subdivide in return.

Like there are so many deals I can think of in my head right now. Like, my goodness, that property had so much road fringe, 60 acres. 3000 feet of road fringe. I'm just, I'm just flipping it.

Seth: A couple of questions here, and these are intended to be thought provoking. So if you need a second to think about it, take your time. But one question here is, what's one thing that you see new land investors focusing on that you think is actually a distraction from long-term success?

Ron: I think a lot of people coming into this business, like over, just overthink getting their marketing out. Like I think as a land investor, like you got to pick a path and any business, you got to pick a path and then like double down on it, try to make that path work.

So many people are like jumping from marketing strategy to marketing strategy instead of like, okay, here are my options. Like even if you're combining two marketing strategies, people get caught up in different things before they send out mail.

How do you get leads? How do you get deals in any business? Like you send marketing, you, you market. So people get caught up in choosing their LLC, choosing their, what state to put my LLC in. Like, I don't care. Just choose a state, choose a state you're in. That's the easiest thing.

Where should I start this business? Do some county selection, different areas. What should my website name be? Like all of these different reasons to prevent them from actually getting marketing out the door. I think that is the biggest hurdle.

Like you can easily start this business and have marketing out five, seven days from now. But there's some people who stretch it out the six months because they have doubts or they're just like analysis paralysis in different areas.

I don't know if that answered the question, Seth, but I think market selection is one thing that people spend where it should be a four hour thing, choosing your first market. They spend four weeks on it.

Seth: That does answer the question. And I would totally agree on that. I mean, so many of those initial steps that really aren't needle movers and don't really make you any progress at all. Create an LLC. Like I did that. Like I get why people do it, but like, it's not really a needle mover. Like nothing is going to happen if you just make an LLC.

And man, some people deliberate over like, what state do I do it in? And what do I call the thing? and just on and on and on. And I don't know if it's conscious or not, but I think maybe some of it is like self-sabotage type.

Like I'm actually kind of scared to do anything. And this feels like a safe action that I can take right now. And even when you do start taking action, like I remember the first mail campaign I ever did. And again, this was a long time ago. A lot of the tech today didn't exist back then, but just like getting the list and sorting through it and putting it on click to mail and sending it out.

Like I remember just thinking through the process, like this is taking so much time to do this. And it was taking a lot of time because I had just never done it before. Like literally every click of my mouse was a new thing I had never done before. I didn't know what to make of the next page and all this stuff.

And I think, especially for experienced folks like us, where like, we just get it. Like it's second nature. It's extremely easy to take these actions, but it's easy to forget about like, when you've never done this thing, like everything feels like this big laborious challenge to get through.

So I think for any newbie, just like getting through that first campaign, even that first year is a huge accomplishment. Even if like tons of money isn't made yet, like it develops that familiarity so that you can just work the business. Like it's a comfortable old shoe. It's not such a weird feeling anymore.

Ron: Exactly. And I empathize with those people early on, but like, you need to stick to like, okay, here's my plan getting started. Like when you, if you buy a course, you buy it, whatever it is, however you get started in this business, like have a timeline on when you're going to choose your market, when you're going to do this and just stick to it.

And like, there's no, like, I am not, not setting my marketing by X date. And like, it is going out that date, no matter what it is, it is going out. I promise if you have that strict deadline, you're going to get the mail out. But yeah, you got to focus on needle movers.

Like you said, Seth, like marketing, sending marketing is a needle mover sales, talking to people on the phone, lead management. Those are all needle movers. Even choosing a County really isn't a needle mover. Like it's not, if you choose a County, you can't make money until you actually do the other things.

Seth: Well, Ron, I know you do interviews like this pretty regularly. You've got your own podcast. When you get interviewed like this, or even when you listen to other interviews and conversations about the land business, what's something that you think people talk about too much? And what's one thing you think they don't talk about enough?

Ron: Talk about too much. I'm going to think about that for a second. Don't talk about enough, I think, is funding. I think funding in this business, I think there's so many ways and so many different ways to get funding in this business or like.

Get money to fund deals. And like, you can do tighter deals if you have better funding. Funding is a pillar of this business, in my opinion. Like once you grow, you do a couple of deals. Yeah, you can get more expensive funding when you first start.

But like getting real funding partners, real money partners in this business, house flippers are getting it at 8% a year. Like, and then we're paying whatever, 50% of profit on a deal or whatever it is new people are paying. Like you got to put time and effort into finding funding partners in this business.

Like so many people are like, I'm just going to submit it on this website and whatever happens, happens, which is great. There's great funding ways to find funding in that, but it needs to be a focus of you as you grow this business.

I was talking to someone who he probably netted like, I don't know, between 500 and 750 last year. And I was kind of talking about his business. I'm like, how much money are you giving investors? And he's just telling me the numbers, like he's making $600,000 and giving $300,000 on top of that to investors, something like that. Just an incredible amount of profit to investors.

So funding is not talking about enough, in my opinion, getting about the, what is, you said what is talked about too much. I mean, it's not really like a part of the business, but I think people try to make the business sound easier than it is. Like this is a legitimate business, especially nowadays.

I think just posing it as like an easy business or something like that is a business, all parts of any business that has, it's a little different than other business in terms of like, it's very transactional. Like you make money on each deal you do. Like, it's not like you have recurring customers, but people don't treat this business enough like a business.

I think it's because sometimes it just gets oversold as like an easy way to make money, which you can make money in this business. Absolutely. I think that definitely gets talked about too much.

And I think market selection, going back to that, I think that gets talked about way, way too much.

Seth: Yeah, the market selection thing, I feel like it's such a catch-22 because it's not unimportant, but being one of those initial steps that feels like something that will affect everything, which it does kind of impact it.

But at the same time, there's deals everywhere. It's this weird thing where I don't want to underplay it, but I do think it can be overplayed as well. And even with some of the software out there now, I think some people, they may not understand just how dynamic of a thing it is.

It's not just what a county looks like. Like there can be great zip codes in really bad looking counties. So I don't know what I'm saying other than just, I agree. I can see how that's up.

Ron: Dan and I always say that with market selection, and I understand early on, like choosing a market takes a while. We always say like it has really, really high perceived value. Like extremely relative to its actual value and market selection.

Market selection has an insanely high perceived value. We can make a YouTube video, Seth, on choosing a market and it's going to do amazing because everyone thinks it's so important. And it's really perceived to be extremely high value when in reality, it's somewhere way underneath that.

And there's other things that are much higher value sales. We talked about like what is not talked about enough. There are people in the industry that are talking much more about sales, sales strategies, which I love, which is definitely talked about more now.

But yeah, market selection is something with extremely high perceived value. And I'm not saying it is no value, but it's much lower than what it actually is perceived to be.

Seth: Well, Ron, I just want to acknowledge what you and your brother brothers have done for the industry. I know you guys have contributed a lot. The Land Portal, amazing software. By the way, if people want to check that out, retipster.com/landportal. That's the RETipster affiliate link.

Ron, if people want to find out more about you or connect with your stuff, is there a place they should go to do that?

Ron: Yeah, Apke Brothers YouTube channel is probably the best place. Yeah, that's probably the best place you can find us. You can find us on Instagram as well. But yeah, Apke Brothers YouTube, we try to post as much content and keep up with you, Seth.

Seth: Yeah, awesome. And if people want to check out the show notes for this episode, just go to retipster.com/240. That's where you can find links to all the different things we've talked about, all of Ron and Dan's stuff online. Ron, thanks again. It's great to talk to you. And all the listeners out there, we will talk to you again next time.

Ron: Thanks, Seth.