Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast.

Today, I'm bringing back a guest you may remember from a few years ago in episode 162. It was called Stealth Wealth Strategies from an Undercover Millionaire Land Investor. He goes by JB.

And the last time we talked, his business was firing on all cylinders.

Direct mail was working great, deals were flowing, margins made sense. And like a lot of people back then, it felt like the playbook was pretty clear. This time, things are a little bit different. JB and I recently had a long private conversation, not for the podcast, where he and I were just talking pretty openly about what's not working anymore, the emotional toll of questioning a business that once defined you, and what happens when the strategies that built your success start kind of breaking down.

A lot of people are feeling this right now, but very few are willing to say it out loud. In this episode, we're going to talk about what JB is actually doing now and why he's walking away from things he once swore by and how he's thinking about risk and scale differently and some of the uncomfortable questions most land investors are asking themselves in private, but never on a microphone on a podcast like this.

So this is not a hype episode. This is not a here's the next shiny strategy episode. This is an honest conversation about adaptation and humility and what it really takes to survive when the market stops rewarding the old rules. So let's jump into it. JB, welcome back. How's it going?

JB: Seth, it is great to be back with you. You're awesome. So I cannot believe that it's been, I think you said 162, three.

Seth: Yeah, that was August 1, 2023 was when that last one was published. Wow.

JB: Again, you do great work. I was super excited to catch up with you last month and agreed to do this. So this will not necessarily be, like you said, the shiny object in Rainbows and Unicorns, but... There's still some opportunity in land if people know what they're doing and they're a good operator.

Seth: Maybe you can just bring us up to speed for those who are not going to go back and re-listen to episode 162. What did your business used to look like and how has it changed?

JB: Started in 2016, did my first deal in 2017.

And then, you know, when you've got a W-2, you can roll everything back into the business, dude, it was rolling. It was great. In 2019, I quit my W-2 job, went on, had six figures, seven figure years. It was extremely successful. Things were great. And then you hit about 2013. If anybody was in business during COVID and then they hit 22, 23, they start to see, I think, a lot of the things that we were running into.

Seth: When you look back at the version of your business that was working in 2017 to 2021, 2022, what's the first thing in your mind that clearly does not work anymore today? Or it could just be it works not nearly as well as it used to.

JB: I was only direct mail and blind offers.

And really, my business was built on helping people. What I would do is I'd say, okay, yes, you can send an offer for $40,000 and you can sell it for $100,000. That would happen. But a lot of what we focused on was I sincerely wanted to help people. So if you had affidavits of ownership, back taxes, liens, foreclosures, judgments, quiet title lawsuits, I would talk to people's financial advisors. Hey, are you for real? Hey, is this a scam? And really sincerely try to help people work through that because what they needed was A, someone with the expertise. B, someone who was honest, who wasn't going to screw them, and C, a rich uncle.

Hey, I've got this piece of property. I haven't seen it in 10 years. I want to offload it. I'm tired of paying the property taxes. I don't live in that state anymore, but I've got these issues that stop me completely from conveying it. And they need somebody to come along and write those checks. That's really where my business focused was. You hear about house flippers. They go in and they change the toilets and the carpet and they repaint it and they do the roof or whatever. I rehabbed the paper.

If you fast forward to where it is today, we have come into a new and different land investing industry where it is much more mature. It has been kind of found out and there is a lot more competition.

When you and I spoke, you were like, hey, are you interested being on the podcast? And I said, Seth, I'm happy to do it. They may not want to hear what I have to say.

Seth: That's exactly why we need you on here. People need the truth.

JB: Yeah. As I mentioned a minute ago, today we're talking to two different audiences. One is you're either thinking about getting into this or you just got into it. Or the second audience is you've been doing this a while and look, I live in a vacuum. I work from home. I'm self-employed. I know some of the other people in the industry, but I don't really talk to them.

Maybe it's just me, but everything I kind of hear and read. It's not just me. So those people also, if you're struggling, this might be for you. So we looked at it and said, hey, it's not what it used to be. Coincidentally, the very day that you and I got on the phone, I got an email that morning and it was sent to my work email address. It was BCC'd to land investors. And it said, 30 of you contacted me recently to buy my property through direct mail or whatever. I'm emailing all of you, what is your bid?

I'm out. I didn't even respond. I'm not in business to be in an auction scenario. When you do that, you're not getting value, most likely. The point of the story is that's just kind of the world we're living in now. I've had letters where it's like, okay, I had 52. Not an exaggeration. I'm not picking a number. Hey, we had 52 of you guys contact us last year. It's the first of the year. We're ready to sell. Send us your offer. That is not a sustainable business model. We have to be honest with ourselves and address that.

Seth: I've heard this said countless times over the past year, but this idea of you need to treat your land investing business like a business. Like this is not a hobbyist thing anymore. And it makes me wonder, do you think today's successful land investors, are they competing on skill or are they competing on who is willing to accept the worst margins? Or maybe both.

JB: It's all of the above. Okay, so you had an episode, and I'm going to call it famous because I've heard it referred to in other podcasts you've done where you had a bookkeeper that said 40% of his customers had gone out of business or shut it down. Now, it was a small sample size. I want to say he had 50 or 60 customers.

But that is a telling number. So you had another recent episode where it was episode 250, where you brought in five leading minds in the industry and basically went down and asked them the same questions. This one was good enough that I sat down and I took notes and I had a different page for every one of those five guys. And when you'd ask them a question, I'd write down, so I want to know what number one, what does he think? Number two, what does he think? And I kind of saw some patterns of the five, three of them said... Their business is evolving to subdivide level deals. And the low number was a minimum of $300,000 on the buy side, up to about $5 million. And that's where I'm headed. And if you want, we can kind of walk through how I got there and what we're doing today.

Seth: Marketing, texting, cold calls, RVM, which is ringless voicemail, PPC, which is pay-per-click. Then you've got direct mail. Within direct mail, you've got a neutral offer, you've got a blind offer, you've got a range offer. And you said you've always ever just done direct mail or have you done anything else?

JB: I tried cold calling. I did not get a deal out of it. I contracted with a third-party provider that does that for 90 days. It failed miserably. And there were a lot of promises about, well, you'll get leads and you'll get deals and all that. And one of the problems we've had today, when I say we, I mean the industry, oh, you'll get leads. Oh, you'll get deals. What is the profit margin of that deal? How many people are doing a double close?

If you're new to this, you need to look at that and say, hey, they're going to tell me that I'm going to get leads. They're going to tell me I'm going to get deals. How many of those are double close? Because a double close margin might be 10% or 30%. Well, if you spend a significant amount of money buying data, scrubbing data, mailing table, talking to people on the phone, answering those return calls, all that for a 10% margin on a double close, I've done one double close in my life. The problem with double close is the margins are much, much tighter and you have no control. What happens if you're about to close and your seller says, oh, my next door neighbor didn't realize I had it for sale, and he's going to pay me $10,000 more than you are, and you've already gone through title, you're about to close next week. Or you paid to list it on whatever listing service, MLS, land.com, whatever it is. You spent this money, you burned time, you did all this,

and you do not control that asset. So for those two reasons, small margins and lack of control, I have avoided double closes. And when gurus today talk about margin or talk about we give you leads and deals, what is the definition of your deal? Like I said before, I sincerely want to help people. I'm going to write a check. I understand the legal structure of all the problems that we have to deal with to help you get this done, get the title clean, all of that.

Today, is it the last guy who called you? So there's basically three reasons why someone might be more likely to get a deal over me if we're talking to the same seller. Number one is they pay more, which goes back to what we just talked about. Margins are tighter. That hurts. Number two, they just happen to call on the day that you decide to say yes. Or number three, they spent the time...

To consistently, persistently call you over and over for weeks and months and develop trust and rapport until you finally say yes. I'm not trying to talk somebody out of their property. I have a service and I have a checkbook. If my service helps you and my checkbook helps you, then it's a win-win for all of us. I help you clean up your issues. I help you cash out fast and you can go spend it on whatever you want to spend it on. And I get the property. Everybody's happy.

We kind of ran into a come to Jesus, a road to Damascus moment, if you will, of what are we really doing here? And can we continue to do this? There are people who are doing, let's say they'll pick two marketing channels. It'll be texting and direct mail. And it appears if you listen to podcasts and all that kind of stuff, they are succeeding with that. And I have no doubt of that. I just think it is harder. And I think there are fewer people that are being successful doing this. And by the way, you and I talked about this.

How many podcasts have started for land and then failed? How many gurus have gone out of business? I know you did a podcast one time. The number I want to say was over 50 gurus that were doing this. I have no idea it was that many people. That is nuts.

Seth: I think it's more than that. But it kind of depends on what you call a guru. There's lots of people that like are a coach in some way, shape or form, or they're trying to make a name for themselves and have some platform and that kind of thing. There's a lot of them.

JB: So look, I'm not doing this to be self-serving. I'm doing this to help others in the industry, to pull back the curtain and say, here's my business and here's what I'm saying. I'm cynical.

And the question I always ask is, why is that guru doing this? Are they being magnanimous? Are they being altruistic? Are they self-serving? And they're selling a service.

And so they're going to sell, hey, the money's great. Here's my case study example, my success story of a great client I had, and they're making a lot of money, and they quit their job. There's no doubt that's true. But I would heavily scrutinize before I would write a check, because why are they doing it? They're doing it to make money.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. What did the timeline look for you? Like we talk about when things were going great, when we talked in 2023, and my sense is you started to see things working less and less well as we got into 2024, 2025. Sounds like there were just a lot of signs of like increased competition. At what point did you stop thinking like, yeah, this is just a rough patch versus, okay, something is fundamentally broken here?

JB: The deals are drying up. And there's the term ROAS, return on ad spend. How many pieces of mail do you send before you get a deal? And when you see that number increasing from like 2,500 pieces for a deal to 3,000, to 5,000, to 8,000, to 10,000. And then the United States Postal Service has increased the cost per stamp. When you're sending tens of thousands of letters, this impacts you. This makes a difference. Your marketing spend is going up.

And yeah, I did go, I said, all right, I'm going to go try cold calling. Didn't get anything that I would define as a deal. And so, okay, you're doing direct mail. You're trying, again, it could be neutral range, blind offer, whatever.

This gets painful because you look at your bank account at the end of the month and you've spent 10, 20, 30 plus thousand dollars on marketing or more. And what have you really shown for it?

Seth: Can I ask with the cold calling, it's going to be enlightening to some people. How much money did you spend on cold calling? And like, how long did you try that before you just decide, okay, this doesn't work? This isn't going to be the answer for me. Just curious how deep you got into that before you decided to go back to direct mail.

JB: I used a land calling service. I hired them for 90 days as part of their service. They sold the data to you as well. And I want to say it was $10,000, $12,000. It was not a small number, but you know, no, I've got budget and I'm willing to try something else because direct mail was slowing way, way down. And the sales pitch was you will get a deal or two a week and you'll get a few leads a day. And I got nothing. I got the classic, the same thing you would experience with postcards. Sure. Absolutely. I want to sell you my property. It's worth a million dollars. Send me a check when it's obviously not worth that.

And, you know, I'd go back to the vendor and say, this is not what you told me. All my other customers are doing great. You know, I don't know why you're not seeing this. And I started asking, let's define what a deal means. And then I started to realize it would be more like 10% margin on a double close. Well, that is not my definition of a lead. That is not my definition of a deal. That is not the business I'm in. And it was, well, you just need to put them on a ticker where you would call them every week or every month. And then for six months, that lead would turn into a deal. No, no. That's not the business.

I mean, like I said, my business is I bring financial and legal expertise on how the process works, what it takes to get you out of your problem, help you. I'll pay for everything and write a check at the end. That's my business model. So it doesn't benefit me to pursue a $5,000 gross profit calling you twice a month for six months. So that was the experience.

Seth: I ask because I know a lot of people who do only cold calling and they kind of swear by it. It's like the lifeblood of their business because direct mail stopped working for them.

And there's probably many different reasons for this. Maybe it has something to do with the agency they're using. Maybe it's their willingness to chase down deals that they otherwise would not have to work as hard for, for direct mail leads. But it just makes me wonder how much do you think it hurts you to have the experiences of the good times when things came easier? Like if you got into this today without any past experience, without knowing how much easier it used to be, do you think that would make it easier for you to stomach these harder experiences? Because you're just like, this is just how it is. I got to work harder.

JB: Yeah, I do think so. Because you literally have to unlearn what you've learned. You've learned, hey, this works. Now that doesn't work, but you still pay money like it does. You're still investing in marketing like it does. So now you've got to go backwards to go forward to learn, hey, this isn't working like it used to. And then your gurus will say, hey, you need at least two marketing channels. Again, I'm not saying that these marketing channels don't work, but here's really where we came to.

I had three choices. Option one, quit. To set the tone, I literally would make a seven-figure top-line profit. I had some great years. I mean, God bless me, and there were good things happening. And when you see that number in your tax return go down year over year, there's a problem. So option one, quit.

Option two, I need to stand up a much different organization. I need a team. People who are scrubbing, people who are mailing, people who are maybe pricing if you're doing blind offers or range offers, people who are answering inbound calls, people who are managing a call team, someone handling texting. This takes overhead, headcount, time management. It's not the world I want to live in.

I did some soul searching and I looked at it and I said, okay, if you get a blank piece of paper, where would you want to be? I said, okay, I want to be a billionaire. I'm not saying that's the goal, but anybody would say, of course, that's a great goal. But let's say you want to be a millionaire or a multimillionaire, and you certainly want to have freedom. You don't want to work for somebody else. You want to drop your kids off at school. You want to make sure you're the little league coach. You want to have that freedom and security in your bank account. And the boss can't fire you. You can't get laid off. You know, the term riff, riff is reduction in force, it's a fancy way of saying he got laid off.

Okay so if you want to be a millionaire do millionaires sit around and debate what we just talked about? Well I don't know there's cold calling, well texting might be good, which of the direct mail should we do.

They don't do that. They just go do deals. And how do they find those deals? A lot of times it's on market. And that's what we've evolved to is all my deals are big deals now. And I think if anybody has been in this a while and they know what they're doing and they've kind of saved their bank account and didn't go buy fancy cars and beach houses and all that kind of stuff. Just for me, that's what we did.

And so that's what we're focused on is buying on market. And that was the change was buying on market subdivide deals and definitions. A minor subdivide is I take it, I chop it up with a survey, I sell the pieces. A major subdivide is there might be zoning involved, plaiting involved, that kind of stuff. And we're not afraid of doing dirt work and we're not afraid of running utilities. We know what we're doing. We know what we're talking about. And today we've got close to 5 million in inventory in land deals.

And I don't regret the decision and I sleep better at night. And here's the changes I made was number one, I fired my data provider. I used to spend a ton of money on data. I don't do that. I fired my VA scrubbing. I don't do that. I significantly decreased mail. So, you know, again, I'm spending $20,000, $30,000, sometimes more. You know, of course, you'd have a month where you spend $10,000.

Seth: How did that feel?

JB: That felt awesome. I laid off my transaction coordinator. I had someone whose only job was to talk to sellers, answer questions, deal with title companies, do all that.

There were no offers coming back. The mail was not working. And so, you know, when I did all of that, I basically stripped out that cost. It felt fantastic.

Seth: So you said a couple of things there. You said, first of all, you fired the data scrubbing. So you're doing less of that and you significantly decreased the amount of mail. Usually people decrease mail because they're scrubbing stuff out. They're making their list smaller. So how did you scrub less and decrease mail? Explain that to me.

JB: Yeah, great question. So there are three data providers. I can name the one that I used to use. I'm not trying to disparage them. They were great. It's just the business changed. So I had a national contract with them, spent a ton of money with them every month. I let them go. One of the things that I have found that I like is the Land Portal. That is a good platform.

The Land Portal buys its data from the exact same data provider that I had. It's the same data. And I got on the phone with that data provider. Again, I won't name them. And I asked the guy, hey, dude, you know what the land portal is? And it was my account rep. And I said, you know what the land portal is? He says, oh, yeah. And I said, okay, I've compared the two data sets. Your data looks exactly like their data.

Are they buying it from you? And he said, well, I can't answer that. And I said, you can't answer that because you don't know, or you can't answer that because you will not disclose. You can neither confirm nor deny. He said, I can neither confirm nor deny. I said, all right, tell me what I need to know. So I get the same data, but I don't have that national contract. I mean, I was paying less per record than you get through the land portal. But I do like the land portal.

And again, if we're going to only do large subdivide deals, what am I scrubbing for? That means I'm doing a neutral letter that is very professional, very warm, and not in your face, low ball, all that. You have a thousand acres. I would like to buy that from you. If you're interested, here's kind of my resume.

We would love to talk to you. We're serious. We're professional.

So there's a limited number of tracks that are 100 acres or 200 acres or 500 acres or 1,000 acres. So now you're not mailing to those all the time and you're going to do 2,000 pieces every couple of months maybe. So does that answer your question?

Seth: Yeah. Well, part of what I'm getting at is you said earlier that you only do big deals now. So what, by your definition, is a big deal? I think it kind of just answered it. Basically, 100 plus acre tracts of land. Is that accurate?

JB: I've always gone by dollar amounts, not acres. So by dollar amounts, what's the big deal? $300,000 to $400,000. That's the acquisition cost?

Seth: It would be a low-end acquisition cost.

JB: I mean, we'll look at anything. If it underwrites and makes sense, sure. I'm just not mailing for $50,000 deals anymore. And then on the high end, I mean, we closed on one in December. It was a little over $2 million on the buy side. And we have the ability to write those checks. We have the banking relationships. We have the equity. We have the expertise. And we'll go anywhere in the country that it makes sense. And that's really our business model today.

Seth: So the play is to go after these larger parcels, and there's just fewer of those to go around. And there's also probably fewer players who even have the cash to buy those kinds of properties in the first place. I was just trying to confirm what kinds of deals you are not doing anymore, and what specifically you are going after, and how you've been able to decrease that competition. Like basically how you're able to survive as it's getting so much harder.

JB: Well, you know, I just mentioned that just under $5 million in inventory.

And half of that is equity. And part of that equity number is some profit and some what I've put into the deal for bank financing. So you've got a $75-25 or an $80-20 deal. I'm writing a check for half a million or $600,000 or $700,000. So some of that is there. But Seth, if it took me the year to sell those, our projection is we make over a million.

Seth: Do you think it'll all sell within a year? Is that a realistic expectation, you think?

JB: Well, we took bets as a team. My director of development, who handles all the dirt work and putting in utilities as needed, that kind of stuff. And then the agents that I work with, I'm like, all right, guys, my butt's on the line. I'm the one writing the check. Y'all are just part of the team. When do we think these are going to close? And, you know, they'll usually say in six months we'll be out. I'm more like, I think it'll be a year because I have to be conservative. I'm the one who my name is on the loan with the bank.

And by the way, my goal was and is to help people in these scenarios. So I'll tell you a story. The deal that we did that we closed on in December that was over $2 million. One of the things that I will do that land investors will shy away from, which will help differentiate us from the market, from competition, is if it has a building or buildings on it, we will buy those happily. I had the ability to underwrite them, insure them, fix them, whatever it may be.

Well, the one that we closed on in December, the woman was a widow. Her husband had just passed away. And they were doing some improvements to the property. They just added onto the house. This was not expected for him to happen. And he passed away. She said, I'm moving back to be with family. She listed it with a major brokerage. And part of our offer was we toured the property. We met her. We toured the house. We drove all over this thing. It was a massive ranch. And part of our offer was we will pay you this amount of money, but we will also let you live there for free. You have had a traumatic event in your life. We understand this is troubling for you. You will live in this house rent-free.

Until you can move at your pace and your convenience. We're happy to do that. We see what she's going through and some other investors are going to say, all right, on closing day, you better be out because we're coming. That's not who we are. And I'm happy to help people in those situations.

Seth: Yeah. Now, how many of these bigger deals are you aiming to do each year? Like how many transactions does this equate to?

JB: How much money do I have? That's basically it. And we've talked about doing partnerships, LP, GP stuff, pulling those together. We've worked on that and we have the ability, we have the expertise, we have the reach, we have the relationships. If you gave me 10 million, if you gave me 50 million, I would go do as many deals as A, it makes sense for. So don't go buy a deal just to spend money. And B, you've got budget for and if we can meet those two criteria, we'll do it.

That's the go-forward plan. So when you talk about making these big uncomfortable moves like, you know, canceling your data account, letting your VA go, dialing down the direct mail, canceling services that once felt essential.

Were any of these things hard to shut off, not logistically, but just mentally? Like just letting go of the way things used to be? Like, I just have to use this thing. Like, that's how the business works. It almost feels like losing part of your identity to shut down what used to be an essential service. But I think just psychologically, it's a big shift, I think, to say, no, we're cutting off this thing that we used to rely on. We're going a different direction. Was that hard to say no to any of those things?

Seth: No, the opposite.

JB: Okay.

Seth: It was a relief and it was super easy because there's a realization. If you want to do 5 million in a year, top line.

And you're buying a $25,000 track, you need a hundred of those. That is two per week, including the week of Christmas, the week of Thanksgiving. That is two per week. That is a team. And everything that I do is super clean. Every line of business I have has its own bank account, its own LLC, everything, and its own P&L. And my CPA audits those. And I have a P&L and a balance sheet every month that they send the financials back to us.

And I'm looking at those financials for my land business. And the bank account is going down. The sales are not good. I'm spending more in marketing and overhead than some months I'm bringing in in sales. You're waking up in the middle of the night saying, OK, I quit my job to do this and the ground has shifted under my feet. I've got to figure this out.

So your question is, I feel bad. No. And when I talk about a transaction coordinator, that was an American. So I'm paying American prices for this with paying Social Security matching, all that kind of stuff, paying for data. I'm paying for mail. Prices are going up for postage. I just removed a significant number that was costing me in expenses every month.

And I just added a bunch of inventory. Like you go and you buy a large ranch and you chop it up. And now all of a sudden your balance sheet goes up because if you mark to market, all right, here's what I have it listed at. Now we're going in the right direction. It was like, oh, thank you. This is a relief. I'm out from under the expense and we've got more inventory and now we've got a plan.

JB: So I think what's going on there, I'm sure you'd probably agree. The reason it was easy to let that go was because it had become a big pain point and it's easy to chop off something that hurts. I think what's hard to do is to preemptively see it coming before it hurts and get rid of it before it's a problem. Would you agree?

Seth: Well, well I'm too stupid to see it coming.

JB: I am too. I think most of us are. It's very difficult to see that. I'm out in the ocean like oh this is great, I'm playing to the waves, everything's fine, you know, I did not see that tidal wave coming that just bounced me on the bottom of the ocean. I didn't feel good.

And then here comes another one. It's like, okay, we kind of need to figure this out or get out of the water. And no, I didn't see it coming. And it's kind of hard, I think, for anybody to see it coming. You got to figure it out and react to it or you're out of business. And that's any business you want to be in.

Seth: Yeah. I know the thing that everybody used to say, and maybe some people still say it, just send more mail. I know. When you hear that, what goes through your head now? Like, do you think this is a way that people just avoid having to reimagine the business? Like, is it just lazy thinking now to say send more mail?

JB: It used to be the answer. The answer used to be just send more mail. Now, what does that mean? That means two things. One is either A, just send the same quantity you did last week, last month. This batch didn't work. The next batch will. True. Or send more mail, meaning send more than you sent in the last batch. That typically worked. But now when you're talking about how many people are sending more mail.

There is a blizzard of paper out there in people's mailboxes.

And I used to be the guy that could come along and say, sure, here's a check for 50 grand. Thanks. Now there's 10 of me in their mailbox on any given week. And I'm exaggerating, but it was a relief to move away from that and I think send more mail. When I got into this, one of the reasons I sent mail when I ever started was, there's no way this can be true.

I'm going to send a letter to somebody that doesn't know me, and I'm going to offer them $50,000 for a $100,000 piece of property, and they're actually going to do that. And half the reason I did it was, I'm either going to prove this, that I'm right and they're wrong and this does not work, or this will be life changing. It was the latter. It was life changing. It was amazing.

But now there's so many people sending those things out there and from the seller's perspective they have more competition for their property and the seller's market in their mind typically trails two years behind what the market actually is because their data is anecdotal. So what do I mean? Well, my neighbor, half a mile down the road, he sold his 20 acres for X amount of money. That's what it's worth. Okay, when did he do that? Oh, it was around the time of COVID.

That is not the world today. Oh, you're just trying to rip me off. You don't understand what things cost around here. No, the world has changed. So in their mind, it's worth more than it is in a lot of cases, and they have a lot more competition.

Seth: So when you make offers now and those offers get accepted, what do those offers look like? Is it 50% of market value or are you having to offer more? Like what does a successful deal look like?

JB: I used to price at about 35% of my found comp. We all do this. You go on, you look, and what are the listings and what's in the area and what's the same quality, literally comparable? About 35%. I moved that up to 50% to 60% and still struggling to find deals. I've been doing subdivides for a few years as a side business, but not core business.

And then, again, as you study your financials and you look at your deals, you start to realize, I'm making more money over there and working a whole lot less than I am over here with what I used to be doing, sending direct mail. And again, I tried cold calling. That didn't work. Okay, we got issues here. You go where the most profit is, and it was subdivides.

So to answer your question, we price higher. I would probably say 50 to 60%. And we still struggle with those, finding them.

Seth: Do you ever offer even more than that? And if so, like what has to be true for that deal to work?

JB: I mean, you'll find this interesting. A couple of times I've said, screw it. I'm looking for a subdivide. I'm going to send a blind offer at full price. A blind offer, full price, but they're large subdivide deals. I got either people mad at me.

Or silence. I got zero deals and I was at full price. I knew what the market was and I got nothing. That was a couple of years ago. And so you're constantly A-B testing on your marketing. We'll try this, do this, try this.

What is the number one major hurdle when you are calling, texting, emailing, whatever it is, mailing people? What is the number one hurdle? I believe the first number one hurdle is, do they want to sell to you at all? Do they want to sell at anybody at all? Now, think about that. I did 1,000 texts, 1,000 cold calls, 1,000 direct mails. Pick a number, 90, 95, 98, 99% of them don't want to sell at all. If it's an on-market deal, we have removed that hurdle completely.

Because that's one that I struggle with is I don't want to convince you to do this. I'm not trying to con you. I know if you list it with somebody, I can underwrite it. I can see the numbers. There's value versus price. Here's what you think the price is. Here's what I think the value is. Here's what I think I could do with it. Here's what my cost would be for development. Boom, let's roll because I know you are a willing seller and way over 90% are not a willing seller to begin with. And we're just wasting marketing dollars chasing those.

Seth: Could the strategy very well be just make offers to on-market properties on the MLS and just skip direct mail altogether?

JB: I don't know. I would say there's two things there, FSBO and AI.

FSBO, F-S-B-O, for sale by owner for people that are new to that term. There are times when people will go for sale by owner and they'll drop it on Zillow. And they're kind of ornery and nobody can tell me what to do. I'm smarter than everybody else. And you can sometimes find an on-market deal with a for sale by owner. So Redfin, Realtor.com, Zillow, probably not Land.com. You could potentially find some there, yes.

The second is AI. If there's somebody out there who can figure out how to scrub MLS, scrub Land.com, and pull the delta of here's this listed and here's what it's worth. Here's what the market's going for on closed deals. Those two would be, I think, approaches. The problem is, can you build a repeatable, dependable business model? Your thesis is, I'm going to find for sale by owner on Zillow. Can you support your family doing that? I don't know. Is there enough there? Or can you support your family just finding through AI online stuff? I don't know the answer to that.

Seth: As you've had to pivot and change things, you basically just come to this realization that the way things used to work isn't working that long anymore. How hard is it emotionally to question a model that once made you very successful, especially when your identity is wrapped up in being, I'm the successful millionaire land investor. Like, I know what I'm doing. I'm confident in this space to suddenly like, I'm not, I don't know what I'm doing. I have to totally rethink this. I know there's the side of it like, I'm rethinking this because I have to. But the other part is just like, I don't want to let go of who I am or who I was. Tell me about your thought process with that.

JB: I think I said it in our first podcast and I'll say it again. I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'm not. There's so much that I don't know. So because I have that self-deprecating, sincerely humble, like there are people way smarter than me doing this. Question everything all the time. And it is okay to be wrong because the goal is not to be a guru. The goal is not to have people look at me, look how smart I am. What is the goal? The goal is freedom. My goal is freedom.

Money doesn't buy happiness. Money does buy freedom.

If I want to not get up tomorrow, I don't get up tomorrow. If I don't want to go drive in traffic tomorrow, I don't do that. So if that is your goal, then you work backwards from there. So you have no problem saying, I admit I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I admit that it's okay that if I make changes, my goal is freedom. There's no one defined path to get there. There's no one market niche or one marketing approach, figure it out.

And remember, again, there's times I'm waking up in the middle of the night like, this is not working. We got to pivot. And we basically studied our business retroactively. We went from a forensic accounting approach. Let's look backward. What is working? Let's identify that. And it was subdivides. I don't think I'm saying anything that the smart guys out there don't know. Like I said, you had episode 250, three of the five guys, that's what they're doing.

That's where they're headed.

Seth: So I know when we talked about a month ago, you had told me that you couldn't in good faith recommend land investing today the same way that you used to. And you're not the only person I've heard say this, by the way. I think a lot of people have that thought in their mind, but I'm curious under what circumstances would you recommend this business? Like what kind of person would they need to be or what would they need to do or not do in order to make this business work?

JB: Again, what is our goal? Our goal is freedom and we don't necessarily want to be a land investor. We want to be an investor. I love land and that line of business for me will never stop. But I think it was you. Go back and listen to episode 250. A lot of value, really good. I don't know if it was your question. One of the guys made the comment of, if you had 30 to 50 grand, where would you put it today? Well, first of all, that's a lot of money.

Most people can't scrape that together today. So you're telling me the table stakes to get in this business is $30,000 to $50,000? Really? My comment to someone would be, if you've got $30,000 to $50,000 sitting around, and we can talk about the things I would ask a guru before I would buy into that, maybe you take $30,000 or $50,000, and you have a career change, and you go sell real estate. And you say, I'm going to live on 30 to 50 grand. I'm going to learn the industry from the inside.

And I've got that amount of money for 30 grand at five grand a month. I can live for six months until I get a couple of deals and get rolling. One of the brokerage houses that I worked with, that broker started out selling land in the eighties. He's probably worth over a hundred million dollars today. I mean, he has a multi-thousand acre ranch. I mean, this dude is rolling. He's one of the top guys in the industry. Are you in land? Are you selling land? Are you investing in land? Yes. All of those things are true for him. He reached freedom, success, anything he wants in life, but he didn't do it through arguing over do I text or cold call.

That's number one. Do you go find deals for investors like me, for example?

So let's look in marketing. That's data, mail, or cold call, and or texting. That's a VA. That's whatever it is. I spend $5,000, and I find a deal that I buy for $6,000, and I sell it for $10,000.

That's a good margin, right? I bought it for $6,000, sold it for $10,000. We're talking Desert Squares, Maricopa County, whatever. I spent $5,000 in marketing to net $4,000 in profit. Is that worth it? That is not a sustainable business model. Or the exact same marketing dollar of $5,000, now you go buy a $60,000 deal and sell it for $100,000. The problem is everybody's going for that band, that buy for 50 or 60, sell for 100.

So maybe you bring in deals for other investors. Maybe you question, hey, I want to be invested, but maybe it's not land. Maybe it's an SBA loan and you go do contractor garages or self-storage, which you and I are both in self-storage. And two others, I'm a neophyte and an idiot when it comes to AI. So the goal through marketing, cold call, direct text, is to find deals. Can you use AI to figure out how to find deals in a different way? Again, either things that are FSBO or things that are on market.

The other one, you had a guy on one of your episodes, I thought it was an interesting concept. He's basically doing mobile homes. And you're hearing that more and more today. And if you look at our country and our society.

Starter homes, first-time buyers, if you look at that economic data, the cost of a first-time home has exploded.

It's not so much about the quality of the product, the asset. It's about market. And your first home could be $400,000, $500,000, $600,000.

Most 20-something-year-old people today cannot afford that. But they might be able to afford a mobile home.

Now, as near as I understood it, you can't go buy 10 acres and drop a mobile home on it and give it septic and all that because it kind of kills the numbers. But if I'm a mobile home dealer and I make 20%, 30% on the mobile home, I can pretty much buy the acreage on market. I buy an acre or two that's already zoned, and I get it for 90% of list price, and I drop the mobile home on there, and I make 30% margin on that. Now you got a deal. Now you got a plan.

That's not something I've gotten into, but believe me, I did some soul searching and asking the same question you're asking me now. And it's hard for the person who's sitting in their car right now, listening to this on their drive to work, flipping between podcasts of different gurus selling their coaching and their program and their tools and their data and everything else who have their next case study of here's my success story.

There are people doing it. I just would be really careful. I would question everything. I would make sure you've got enough money to lose because you're going to spend some money up front on marketing. And the first deal I ever did, it took me almost a year to figure out pricing. And I paid $10,000. I sold it for $25,000.

So I knew when I purchased that $10,000 track, I would. I was willing to lose that amount of money, and I viewed it as if I were purchasing a stock that goes bankrupt.

I took some money from my investment account, and I said, okay, just view it like a stock that you've lost. You gain and lose money on stocks. That happens. Okay, great. That's the way I looked at it, but it's harder. I think if I were advising my son, like, what would you do? I think it'd be more likely to go learn from someone that's been doing it like me, like some of the others, maybe bring them deals and shadow them because that's where the deal is today. It's in the larger subdivides. And you could have success in mail and all that. Are you going to continue to have that success a year, two years, three years, four years down the road? Are you willing and able to stand up that team, pay for those people, chase those deals? I don't know.

Seth: So when we talk about your revised strategy of going after these larger deals now, what do you say to people who hear this strategy and they think, well, yeah, that works for you, JB, but only if you already have money like you do.

JB: That's fair. I didn't start out doing multi-million dollar deals. I needed two things. I needed to grow my stake. You go to the casino or the poker table and you've got your stake. I need to grow that. And I need to learn enough. You know, Gordon Gekko said a fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.

And people are going to lose a lot of money and you've got to be darn careful what you're doing. So you need to learn. How do you learn? You can pay a guru. You can spend marketing. Or like I said, you can go work in real estate, shadow a big player. I'm not saying that's the only road. And I'm not saying that any of these marketing channels we've talked about are bad. I'm just saying it's a lot harder. And if direct mail was still killing it like

it was five years ago, I'd still be doing it.

Seth: So it sounds like the answer is start small, grow your stake, and then eventually you will have the money.

JB: Yeah. So let me help the new person. What would I do? Go be a real estate agent in land, go find deals. You know, that's one of the things these gurus sometimes they're like, yeah, go find deals. Well, I can't afford that one. You know what? I've got a funding business. It's just for you. And you end up just being a deal finder for the gurus, right? But you can bring it to me or maybe some other people and you can say.

Okay, maybe I'm invested. Maybe it's sweat equity. I brought it to you. I just want to sit in the background and learn. And it doesn't cost anything. And that's when I'm thinking, okay, is there an AI tool? There's somebody smarter than me out there that can go look at the country and say, where is there a high demand? Where is there a mispriced asset and go find that. How much does that cost you? Not very much. You spend some time to develop some sort of AI, some sort of prompt. You know, prompt it okay, look for this and this and this or this, not this, boom, go.

You've mentioned this AI thing a few times. Have you been doing this at all or have you tried like chat gpt deep research to pointedly ask exactly what you want to know and tell it to go to work?

Seth: I'm embarrassed to say that I am not doing any of that. The only AI I'm leveraging is what's on the LAN portal. They've got some good tools there.

JB: I would strongly encourage you since, I mean, you seem to understand what you're looking for. And I think you might be shocked at what Chad GPT Deep Research or really any of these deep research tools can find. Like it is... Almost breathtaking. Like I can't even believe how much information it pulls back and how accurate it seems to be because it's spending a lot of time doing this stuff. And I'm actually a little embarrassed. I haven't tried more of exactly what you're talking about because I know it is capable of a lot. I'm probably going to do that as soon as we hang up here is go see how far I can get with it.

JB: Well, you know, maybe that's your next episode and I get 5% of that business.

I believe that this is potentially possible to use AI leveraged in this manner. I'm not willing to go pay someone $10,000 to teach me how to do that. But I would like to learn. Seth, I don't even know what question to ask. I don't mean the prompt question. I mean, there's Claude and Grok and Chajubiti and there's all these other ones. Which one is better and why? And then once you get into it, you know, I can go on and on about this. I'm just such a dummy when it comes to this.

I'm not even smart enough to ask the right question, but I know there's an opportunity there. I just don't know what it is yet.

Seth: A big way to do that is to ask Chad GBT or Grok or Claude, ask me what you need to know so that you can build the right prompt. Like interview me, ask me what I'm looking for. I'll tell you. And then we can build the prompt together. So like, I'm with you. There's tons of stuff that I've built that like, I don't know how to build it. But I kind of have this vague idea what's in my mind. Maybe AI can help me bring more clarity to this and then we can build it. It's like literally just... Whatever you can articulate, however clumsy it might be, just do it. And you'd be shocked at how much further AI can bring you.

JB: It has been on the back burner. I'll have to move it to the front burner because I'll admit, once you buy a very large subdivide and you get it going, you get a lot more time on your hands. Yeah, yeah. So I've got time to spend on this.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. So one thing I wanted to get into before we finish this is tell me about your self-storage business. I know the first time we ever met, I think it was in 2023, if I remember right, I was telling you about the self-storage business. You decided to pursue it. To my knowledge, you've bought two facilities. Tell me the quick story of that in like three or five minutes. How did you find them? How's it going? Are you looking to do more? Let's hear about it.

JB: Love self-storage. It's great.

And as I've said over and over, I'm not very smart, question everything. The goal is to be successful. There's no plan. There's no path. Just figure it out. It really kind of goes back to owner financing land deals.

So I seriously consider, do I want to go that path? Well, if you do that, you're taking money off the table and you don't, like if I put a hundred grand into something, that hundred grand I cannot flip on land deals. It's kind of tied up, and now I'm getting this $1,000 a month or whatever the math is. And so I always make deals compete against each other. I make niches compete against each other. So multifamily, I want you to compete against an RV park. I want you to compete against whatever.

I had a really good year, wrote a massive check to the IRS. I said, I've got to shelter some cash here. So with a self-storage facility, you get the depreciation. If you do an owner financing on land, you don't get the depreciation. If I have a self-storage facility, every three months, six months, a year, I can raise rates. Owner financing land, I cannot. And they can come pay me out anytime they want. And there's a finite sales price for that owner financed land.

So self-storage, let me get this straight. I can continually increase the size of the payments. I get the tax depreciation. I get the appreciation of the asset because in owner financing land, the number is the number. Whatever you sold it for, you're done. Now, okay. And so I really started looking at this.

Purchased two. They were both found through direct mail because that's what I knew. I said, okay, send a neutral letter, make a list. I've stood up the system and the business to be able to do direct mail marketing. I said, let's go try that. Bought two. The first one was phenomenal. I had it for two years.

I bought it for 1.3. In December, we cashed out refi it for, it's worth about 1.8 now. But just to be conservative, we refinanced it for 1.7. So in two years, I've enjoyed the depreciation. I've enjoyed the cash flow. I pulled out from the refi more than I ever put in it to begin with.

Which was the plan all along. Fantastic. And again, I had looked at, do I really need to do owner financing of land? I'm not sorry that I went down this path.

The second self-storage facility we bought about a year ago, it was just okay. And really the fault was probably mine. I had another asset I was selling. Somebody was just blowing me up to buy it. I was going to make more than 3x my money on it. I needed a place to park it. I was going to 1031 it. Okay, great. We'll do that.

Again, I was helping out the seller of a second facility. It was a mom and pop shop. The dad had gotten dementia. He was having some issues. He had been running the business. And I'm like, sure, I'll buy this. Okay, fine. That one was just okay. We sold it last month and basically broke even on it. It was too small. It was a very small facility in a very rural town. It was basically too small to be worth our time.

And, you know, God bless those people. We helped them out. We helped out the buyer of the other property. We got out from under the loan. We freed up that equity. We know what we're doing with land. We kind of figured out, okay, the land business of where this needs to head, which is subdivides. We know what our buy box looks like for the next self-storage facilities, plural. And so that was the smart business decision. Cut loose, break even, get out from the debt, pull out the equity. Now let's go do more land deals and more larger self-storage deals.

Seth: I mean, is that where you see your preferred future going? Is like shifting a lot more over to self-storage and less from land or not necessarily? Like you kind of want to do both.

JB: What's the highest best returner? You tell me the one where I double my money and you tell me the one where I make 10% of my money. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to pick the one that doubles my money. Would you rather double your money once or do 10% year over year for the next 30 years? Your question is posed that I only get to double my money once. Then no, I'll take the 10% for 30 years. But the question is, can you have a sustainable, repeatable business model where you can double your money?

You know, the ranch we just split up, we're going to more than double our money. We're going to kill it on that one. That is awesome. So, you know, let's pick a number. You pull out a million dollars in profit. Now you've got some budget to be careful for six months until you find really the right one. I think the realistic, truthful answer to you is all of the above.

You know, you give me $2 million. I'm going to take a million and go buy a $2, $3, $4, $5 million land deal or two or three. And then I'm going to take a half a million or a million and go buy a self-storage facility and do both at the same time. They both have benefits to the business.

It's really interesting, this conversation, because some people make tens of millions from real estate, hundreds of millions from it, not because they're working that much harder, but because they're just having different conversations and thought processes every day. You know, we were talking about how, you know, a massive developer has very different thoughts and conversations in a different normal day's work from like a land flipper who's working on small rural flips. It makes you wonder, are there ways that you could fundamentally change your normal to fight bigger or more important and more profitable battles each day?

Seth: Well, like I said before, the conversations that those multimillionaire people are having, are they debating texting versus cold calling? Maybe, but just at a much larger level. They're not. Now, they might have an employee in their business that's having that conversation, but it's not them.

JB: I get up every day and I question everything.

Am I doing it the right way? Is there a better way to do it? What is the best, highest, most efficient return on my time? Am I making $10 an hour or $1,000 an hour? What is the best return on my time? Because that's the most valuable asset. I'm giving you a terrible answer, but I would love to have those conversations. And so now, do you just do more million-dollar ranch subdivides? Or do you do major subdivides? So you go into, I don't know, Indianapolis, and there's a hot suburb of Indianapolis, and you buy some acreage, and you do quarter-acre lots, and there's 2,000 rooftops, and you put in all the infrastructure, and you make a killing.

Maybe there's a risk reward on that. It takes more time, takes more capital investment. It takes a really sharp pencil on underwriting because you'd go bankrupt doing that. I've worked with developers in the past that I've partnered with and they kind of rolled their eyes before I got into land. And they'd say, you know, the guys who really make the money in development is the land guys.

I'm a big fan of Sam Zell, as an example. And he made a killing. He tried development and hated it. Great book, Am I Being Too Subtle by Sam Zell. Go read that. And he basically said he got burned on development. I think it was a Vegas casino or some hotel. He's like, I'm never doing this again. And he just said, I'm going to buy on-market deals that are mispriced. And I'm going to be so big that there are very few people that can call to write that check and I'm going to go do it. And I can already see, I see the asset, I see the market, both geographically and the market meaning demand. And that's how he made his money to become a billionaire.

Seth: You had mentioned earlier that as things started to change, one of the options of what you could do was quit. I'm wondering, did you ever think about quitting land flipping as things started to change? Or what would have to be true for you to walk away from land entirely? Not out of failure, but just out of clarity.

JB: No, I don't know that I would quit. I loved land. It's been extremely lucrative. I know when you buy right, the returns are amazing. You also said that it's not about being a land investor. It's about being an investor, right? So I mean, I guess the math would have to stop working.

Seth: Yeah. But again, when I retrospectively looked at my business, the math still worked. Okay. Where? Subdivides. If somebody wants to sell me a piece of property for $50,000 today, that I know I can list tomorrow for $100,000. I will do that. All of us will do that. It has become much, much harder to find that seller and get them willing and able to sign the closing docs. And, you know, as I've mentioned on here, if you've got 10, 20,

30, 40, 50 land investors contacting the same seller, you got a problem.

JB: Any business, service or product, you have to constantly change in question. And there's two different things. Are you doing this as a side hustle and you love being a dentist or whatever it is you do for a living? Great. Or do you make your living as an investor? And I joke with people all the time. I don't gamble. I don't sports gamble. I don't go to casinos. Why not? I gamble at my desk every day.

I risk capital to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I risk my family's future every day.

So you got to change. You got to be ready. And I think a lot of us, if what I'm seeing is correct and what I'm hearing is correct, just from the outside looking in, it's not just me. Others have felt this. And so if you're listening to this and you've been in it a while and you've felt the struggles... It's not just you. If you're successful and you have no idea what I'm talking about, God bless you. Good for you. If you're a new person, buyer beware. Caveat emptor. Make sure you understand what you're getting into when you get in with a guru or buy a program or whatever, because it's not as easy as it used to be.

Seth: That was another thing you mentioned earlier, questions you would ask of gurus?

JB: Yeah, I wrote some things down, you know, I was preparing for this. When you and I spoke a month ago, you had a great comment. You said, when was a coaching course written? Was it five years ago? Was it five days ago?

And there's a bunch of questions I would ask gurus, like really critically thinking. When was it written? And I kind of used like, okay, within the last year, that's good. But use AI as maybe a BC/AD kind of marker. Okay, but was it before AI or after AI? Has it been updated? If this coaching course has been updated, when? Was it five years ago? And when did you update it? I would ask any coach, what percentage of your customers, your students fail? How many fail last month? How many failed a year ago? Is that number growing? And conversely, how many of them graduate? You know, how many of them were like, hey, dude, I don't need you anymore. I've got this all figured out. I'm moving on. Thanks.

What is the average profit margin for your clients, your students, their deals? It used to be 50, 60 percent. Is it 10 percent today? Is it 20 percent? What's the definition of a margin?

Seth: Yeah. What is a lead? Oh, we're going to get you leads. We're going to teach you how to find leads. What does that really mean? Is that a willing seller at a price that I'm willing to pay? Or is that just someone who wants to talk to me? I think that question is probably most relevant for cold calling agencies and even texting agencies that do this on your behalf and claim to bring you back leads. I think that's really who that's aimed at.

JB: Well, yeah. And like postcards, you know, the first thing I ever did was I heard this guy had a really interesting concept. His name was Seth Williams who had a podcast back in 2015, 2016. You've been doing this 10 years, by the way.

Seth: Longer than that. Yeah.

JB: How long have you been doing this, brother? Seriously.

Seth: Started land in 09, if that's what you're talking about.

JB: You mean land or REtipster?

Seth: REtipster. Yeah, REtipster was started in late 2012.

JB: Congratulations, dude. You've had longevity. And that speaks to the value that you bring to the community. They got to ask those questions. What's a lead? What does that look like? The other thing is these coaches will say, all right, well, we'll finance it for you. We'll help you. Well, that's a good thing if you don't have the money, but it's a bad thing if all you're doing is spending marketing dollars to give somebody else the deal.

There's a bell curve to this. If it's a $5,000 or $10,000 deal, your cost per deal might be a number. If it's a $100,000 purchase, your marketing cost per deal is exponential. I mean, it's expensive to find those. Like they'll say, well, we'll give you leads. We'll help you get, you know, whatever. Be specific.

I would ask a guru, is it a double close? What percentage of the deals that your clients do are double closes? And then just ask yourself, are they being magnanimous? Are they being altruistic? Are they trying to help their fellow man? Are they just self-serving? They're selling a product and a service. And I look at these land gurus.

So in 1848, gold was discovered in California. In 1849, there was the gold rush, which side note, that's why the San Francisco 49ers are called the 49ers. And they've got gold in their uniform and their helmets and all that. It's the gold rush. That's where it came from. Do you want to be the guy that's going out there digging around in California and one out of a thousand is going to go back into town on his horse and he's got a gold nugget and I'm rich?

To me, the gurus are the guy who's sitting in town saying, I will sell you a shovel and all thousand people come through, buy a shovel from him. And oh, for an extra cost, I will teach you where to find, where to dig. And they're just sitting there getting rich for all these people who have dreams because the reality is not everybody who pays money for a guru, a coach is successful.

And that's kind of the way I look at it. So, you know, those are a ton of questions, hard questions that I would ask.

Not saying there's not value, but be careful.

Seth: Great questions. I think if you were to seriously go out there and ask a guru that stuff, I think to several of those questions, they won't have the data because they don't keep track of who finished the thing and how are they doing and what are their margins and all this stuff. It's impossible to keep track of all that. And of the few things that they will have the data for, they probably will not be honest or they're going to somehow frame it in a way that makes themselves sound better, like it's on them, that kind of thing. And to that end, like I do think about, you know, how many of your students were successful.

That is a data point. It's worth considering. But at the same time, like whose fault is it that they were not successful? Like, is it the teacher's fault or is it the implementer's fault? And it could be either because if the teacher has given out bad information, and then obviously they're going to struggle. But what if the person implementing is just a terrible implementer, as most people are? I don't know, it's hard to draw like conclusive information from that.

JB: 100%. And, you know, the 80-20 rule, probably 80% of the people who do any business fail. They're not organized. They're not efficient with money. They overspend. They spend money on the wrong things. They don't know how to run a business. Yeah. And so that's the cohort that you're starting with. There's no question about that. You know, and maybe it's not the student. That's a problem. Maybe it is or is not the coach. Maybe it is or is not like direct mail is not working like it used to, but they're still selling direct mail.

Right. But the interesting thing is, whether or not the student is successful, the guru still makes money.

Seth: Your shovel seller analogy. I've heard that before. It's a good one. There's nuance to that, too. Like, is there value in being able to buy a shovel? Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. So, like, just by nature of the fact that somebody is selling the shovel doesn't inherently make them evil or wrong or like, yeah, you're a swindler. But if that shovel seller is knowingly telling people stuff that they have not verified themselves, or maybe they even know it's wrong, but they don't care. They can still make money. That's when I think you're getting into that villain territory. I'm not at all saying that these gurus are evil. I'm not accusing anybody of anything.

I'm saying they make money whether you're successful or not. And the sales pitch is going to be, look at all my successful customers. See, I had one of my podcasts. I know you add value. This is not a sales pitch for your stuff. You know what you're doing. But students just need to be careful. And to go back to your question on the majority of the students, they're not cut out for this to begin with.

You start asking all these questions and the guru, conveniently, the coach, doesn't have the answer to it. What they do have the answer to is how many of your customers, your students from three months, six months, a year ago are still with you?

They're still paying you. And if they have dropped off, is that because, I mean, you use the term they graduated. You've got a great relationship with them. You talk to them on the phone. Maybe your partner in doing deals, whatever. Or is it because they just dropped out and they got frustrated? They couldn't have heard anymore. The coaches have that data.

JB: Well, I would think the sign of a successful coach is if their people are not paying them anymore. Like, you shouldn't still need me to function in the real world.

Seth: 100%. But the coach will know that. You know, I've had 10 people or 100 people, whatever their number is, who have graduated, and I still talk to them, or I know why they left. I know their website. I know they're doing business. Versus the people who, there was a couple of very difficult conversations that the guru and the student had where the student says, this isn't working, this isn't working, and they finally stopped paying.

And life happens. You have a baby or you change jobs or something and you just can't spend time on it anymore. But again, those are just the questions that I would ask and be really careful. I don't know what coaching costs these days, but beyond the cost of the coaching, it's the cost of the marketing and standing this up. If you're going to text or cold call, my understanding is you have to have somebody ready to deal with that. If you've got a regular job, who's going to handle that? That's an expense.

JB: Yeah. I almost think there's a ton of value, whether you have a coach or a course or not, whatever it is, there's a ton of value in getting a lot of your information from people who are not coaches and don't have anything to sell. Like they're just real people in the trenches with you. Maybe they're doing something a little bit different than you are, but like, you can just kind of keep your ear to the ground and hear like, okay, what's working for you over there because maybe there's something I can glean from that. Tons of value in that and I think part of that is masterminds, you know, going to events like we can actually rub shoulders with real people and have real conversations and not just what you might hear from your favorite podcast or guru you know.

Seth: Yeah, well in the land conference you and I went to they stopped it. They rebranded, refitted, relaunched, and I think they're doing something a little bit different now with less land. There was another one that doesn't exist anymore. He shut it down.

JB: Oh, that's true. And I've had people contact me on our last podcast a few years ago. I gave out my email address and had people email me. And coincidentally, I have a call this afternoon at 4.30 with a guy that I used to work with in my corporate job who reached out to me on LinkedIn looking for investors. And they do multifamily partnerships, syndication stuff.

And then we got to talking and, you know, here's kind of what I'm doing, whatever. And so now he's bringing me deals for review to help him out. I'm not giving him a penny. Super nice guy. I'm happy to help. I'm not involved, but I'm happy to help him out. So the one he sent me today might be a deal. I kind of like it.

Seth: Nice, man. Well, JB, thanks for talking again. If people want to connect with you again, you don't have to give anything up. I know we're calling you JB for a reason because you don't want to put your name and face all over the internet. But if somebody wanted to connect with you somehow, is there a way they could do that?

JB: Yeah. You know, I figured out for myself a long time ago that I'm pretty introverted and a loner. I don't need attention. I don't need to be on Instagram and all that, but a couple of ways. So the website for my company is bcpland.com. So that's Bob Charles Paul land.com. And it's set up in the classic way you would of here's an FAQ and here's if you've got a deal, being able to fund deals. There's a component there. And the email address is service at BCP land. The other thing I tried to do just to add to the community and just did it for fun. And if I can help people, great, is they can follow me on Twitter. So it's America Land Baron.

And to be clear, you take the word American, you remove the A, and you get the redneck version of America. So it's at americalandbaron.com.

Seth: I'm going to link to that along with your website and several other podcast episodes we mentioned in this conversation in the show notes for this episode, which is going to be at retipster.com/260, because this is episode 260. JB, as always, great to talk to you. I'm glad you're still doing well, even through all the changes over the past few years. And hopefully we can do this again and check back in at some point and hear how things are going.

JB: Yeah, I'm happy to do it. And one thing I would add, you know, thinking through this, you were talking about what can people do?

To start out. I'm to the point now where I would partner with people. I would put together partnerships with bringing investors. I would pay finders fees. I would bring in partners with sweat equity. I mean, we talked about some of those things. I would do that. I mean, if people have deals they're serious about, I'd consider them. I have people reach out to me on Twitter saying, what do you think? And here's my underwriting. Here's what I expect. Boom, good luck to you and then go away. I hope I'm not inundated, but you know, if I can help people, they can reach out.

Seth: Yeah. That whole thing on partnerships. So I don't know if you're talking about like on a per deal basis or like setting up a literal business entity with a partner, but I will just say I used to be kind of anti-partnership just in general. I just sort of wanted to be a lone wolf and do my own thing. But over the past three years now, all of the best things I've done have came about as a result of partnerships, basically finding somebody who I kind of feel like God just dropped them into my lap. It's not like I was some genius and went out and found like just rubbing shoulders with the right people over time.

And just finding amazing people who are so much better at what they do than I am. And they enable me to do things I would never otherwise be able to do. So I totally understand the apprehension people have about not liking partnerships. But I'll just say there is absolutely huge opportunity there if you can very carefully scrutinize and find the right people to partner with.

JB: So you talked about the evolution of the business, of my business. And I talked about trying to sincerely help people. That could be investors. So maybe you don't want to, or you don't have the time, you don't have the interest, you don't have the expertise, whether it's JB or it's Seth or it's whoever it may be. Great. That's another way that people can play in this game.

And as our business has evolved, even though I'm blessed with a nice little stack of chips, I'm blessed with the fact that let's go bring in partners. That is where my business is going. And if I can do 10 of these deals and have 20 million in inventory, and somebody makes a return that is much better than they would ever see in the market, we've gone to some conferences. We're actively starting to look for those partners. We're working in that direction. I 100% agree with you. Partnerships is the next phase of this for the guys like us.

Seth: JB, thanks again. Great to talk to you. For the listeners out there, again, show notes, retipster.com/260. Thanks again for listening, and we will talk to you next time.