Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. And today I'm talking with Cody Cuvillier, a land investor who has built a full-time operation while serving as an army officer and Apache helicopter pilot. Over the past few years, he's grown his business from a side pursuit into a team-driven company. And he's doing it with a level of discipline and structure that I think a lot of us can learn from.

We're going to talk about the moment he almost quit in 2025, how he 3X'd his lead flow, and what daily KPI accountability actually looks like inside his team, and how he's scaling toward a $1 million gross profit goal without blowing up his margins. So if you're trying to build something steady and sustainable in the land business in 2026, this conversation is going to be worth your time. So Cody, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Cody: Great, Seth. It's amazing to be here. I remember back in 2019, driving to Fort Rucker when I was stationed there listening to this exact podcast. I think at the time it was you and Jaren. So that may remind you if it's been a while.

Seth: Yeah, you've been following for quite a while. I appreciate that. Thanks for listening. I was glad to finally talk to you in this format.

Let's start right there. Tell me about your military background. Are you currently in the military or you were in the military or what's the situation on that?

Cody: Yes, I was active duty from 2014 to 2022 and I graduated from West Point and then commissioned, and I went to flight school at Fort Rucker. And then I was kind of stationed at a few different places during my service and got to fly Apaches, which is pretty awesome. And I was very lucky to do that. No longer flying. Currently serving in the California National Guard in more of an administrative role right now, which is a part-time weekend role.

Seth: Do you know Joe Roberts at all?

Cody: I do know Joe Roberts. We connected at Ajay Sharma's event last year.

Seth: Because he was a helicopter pilot too, right?

Cody: He flew Cobras in the Marine Corps, which is like the Marine Corps' version of the Apache. Honestly, I should say the Apache's the version of the Marine Corps because the Cobra's been around since Vietnam.

Seth: So if an Apache and a Cobra got in a fight, who would win? Which helicopter is better?

Cody: I would say the Apache, but I'm sure a Cobra pilot would tell you different. So it would depend on who you're talking to.

Seth: Should that concern us that we're still using a helicopter from the Vietnam era? Like, shouldn't they update these things?

Cody: They probably have, but I don't know. It has been updated a million times. Yes. It's not the same helicopter that it once was. It was kind of just like the Honda Accord, but they just keep making it a new version. You just keep making it better and better.

Seth: What did flying an Apache helicopter teach you about pressure and decision-making that translates directly into running a business? Anything come to mind?

Cody: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is preparing outside of the cockpit. I mean, honestly, there's only so much you can do outside of the cockpit, but the more you study and the more you plan for your mission and the more you have a kind of know where you're going to go, what you're going to do, exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to execute under pressure makes it a lot easier when you're actually in that situation to be able to make that decision quickly, which I do think can be related to business as well.

It's like how much time you put in on the front end of studying and making your SOPs and doing all that work can translate really well when you need to execute or hire somebody or make a quick decision in your business. So the more background you have and the more you, the time you take, the better.

Seth: Yeah. It's all kind of a tricky thing. Like the study is essential, but like there comes a point at which like you just need to start moving. There's these things, emergency procedures in the Apache and kind of every helicopter has these and they've changed a little bit since I've gotten out but basically you have to memorize them completely so then the idea is you know them so well that when you're in an emergency you just know exactly what to do like a second nature so those types of things like a way you can prepare I don't know how that can translate to business I don't think there's anything in land that I can think of that I need to memorize word for word maybe a script I guess and you're trying to talk to a seller. So.

Yeah. Well, like when you're learning how to fly a helicopter, like what does that process look like? Is it like book study or like, are you getting in a flight simulator, like a video game type thing, or especially with something that could really go bad if you do it wrong? Like when do they trust you to like get in the cockpit and actually control stuff? Is there like a driver's ed instructor right next to you who can hit the brakes and take over if they need to, or how does that work?

Cody: Oh yeah. There's definitely a driver's ed instructor there for the whole time you're in flight school. There's someone who could save your life if you do something. So that's always good because I've definitely done some pretty dumb things when I was learning. But yeah, it's a mix of everything. So it's kind of surprising. You get in the aircraft really quick.

And obviously I went to flight school 12 years ago, so it may have changed slightly. At least the airframe is different, but you get in pretty quickly and it's a guy's right there to help you save you if you mess up. So it's a mix of all that together, simulator in the aircraft and also a lot, a lot of book studying, a lot of book studying.

Seth: Do you have to know how to fly a plane before you can do a helicopter or they just put you right in the helicopter? Like, is that a totally different thing?

Cody: Yeah. The army just does right into helicopters. That's the primary aircraft of the US army. But if you look at like the Air Force and Marines and Navy, they all learn on fixed wing first and then the rotary wing pilots will go rotary wing after. So honestly, kind of nice. I wish I could have gotten some fixed wing time into, but can you use this helicopter pilot experience in the real world at all? Like, could you go fly a helicopter right now if you wanted to, or is it not the same thing?

I mean, it's based on experience and how many hours you have. I think in general, Army commissioned officers get less hours than our counterparts in the other services because we have warrant officers and they're like the primary flyers. So I could, but I just didn't get as much hours in the helicopter that I probably would need to be competitive to get a job, I guess you could say. But if I want to just go rent a helicopter, I could. I probably would want someone there to help me just because I'm not trained on every single helicopter and there's differences.

Seth: Sure. Yeah. I can't go rent an Apache. Unfortunately, that's not something I can go do in the United States right now is go rent an Apache. Bummer. Yeah, it's too bad.

So looking back on your military time, are you glad you chose that path? If you could talk to yourself from 10 or 12 years ago, would you recommend that to yourself? Or would you recommend it to your kids? Or did it hold you back in any way? What are your thoughts looking back on your choice to go down that road?

Cody: I do not regret it. I always wanted to fly. And I think it was a really fun time of my life. And I definitely would do it again. I don't know. I feel like if I think about my kids doing it, it makes me a little nervous because I know that and helicopters are, I mean, generally safe, but they're more dangerous than fixed wing. And obviously, there's the whole aspect of joining the U.S. military. And do you want that for your kids? I mean, I would be honored if they served, but I think part of me wants to keep them safe as any parent would in out-of-arms way.

So I think that's kind of the thing I struggle with. My wife is 100% no, so she's probably going to be part of that decision. But we don't want to push our kids too hard.

Seth: How did you and your wife meet?

Cody: When I was studying at West Point, I did a semester abroad in Brazil. And we had a mutual connection with my aunt and my wife's sister. My wife's dad was reaching out to me a bunch. So eventually I met her in Brazil. I was supposed to be like, they're supposed to be like my sponsor family that my aunt set up. And I ended up, I guess, stealing his daughter away from him in the long term.

Seth: Where in Brazil was this?

Cody: This is Rio de Janeiro. Okay. So I was there for studying at the military engineering school there for six months.

Seth: Yeah. I was lucky enough to go to Brazil for about a week when I was in high school. I was in like a special choir at my high school. We got to go down there. We went to Recife, which is not Rio, but I loved it, man. Like it was one of the coolest trips I've ever been on. It was very hot though. I remember being like, I couldn't believe how hot it was down there.

Cody: Yeah. I think that's the Northeast of Brazil. I haven't been there yet, but I've heard it's quite, quite hot, but it's also beautiful. The beaches and stuff.

Seth: I don't know if you made it to any beaches out there. We did. Yeah. It's, it was, I remember the water was like bathwater. It was like really warm. Which is nice in Michigan here when you get in Lake Michigan it's just like ice cold like it's just shocking so that's what I'm used to so when you get into bath water in the ocean it's like wow what is going on.

Yeah. West Point isn't that like a hard school to get into am I correct and when I think that like how did you get into that is there something special about you your story that I ask myself that every day.

Cody: No actually I didn't get in my first try when I tried to get in out of high school.

I applied for all the service academies, or at least three of them. I applied for Air Force, Navy, and West Point Military Academy, and I did not get into any of them. So then I went to just a local community college in my town and reapplied the next year to all three. And I ended up getting into West Point, and I was super pumped, and I went. But yeah, it is difficult. You have to get a congressman's recommendation. So you have to go interview with your local congressman. And yeah, it's a pretty extensive application process.

Seth: Congrats, man. Sounds like you've had an awesome military career. So let's talk about land investing. When and how did you discover the land business? And like, what made you think this was something you could work into your active duty military life?

Cody: I originally didn't know about land. I just kind of knew about single family fix and flips and wholesaling. And I was stationed in what used to be called Fort Hood, Texas, which is about an hour north of Austin.

And when I was there, I had this plan of like, oh, I'm going to go buy this house near Austin for $250,000, which probably would have been a great investment today. This was back in 2016. And I ended up finding out someone in my company was really into single family home flipping and purchasing and stuff. So I got into single family homes and did a few deals in Austin, or excuse me, in Killeen area, did a few deals. I was really excited about moving into commercial family. We got, I guess you could say deployed, but we were in Germany for nine months. And I was doing all this research and reading a bunch of books on commercial investing.

And then I came back and went to kind of Captain's Career Course, which is what the army sends you to before you become a company commander to get trained up on that. And the army said, hey, by the way, you're going to Korea. I said, oh, well, how am I going to flip houses there?

And I've heard a few podcasts about land. And it was just something I never really was gravitated toward. But as I learned more about it and researched more, I learned it could be a remote, something you do remotely, which was very appealing to me as someone who had no idea where they were going to be in the next two to three years or less, especially if I deployed or something. I didn't want to be in the middle of a flip.

I think that was another thing is not having to manage a flip or all that back end on when you're doing single family or commercial real estate investing. I could just have a piece of dirt and worst case scenario just sits there. So that was appealing to me too. I think that's what got my wife and I interested in moving into land investing. So that's what we did in 2019. We paid for a course back then. There wasn't as many people offering courses in the business. So we paid for kind of a group course and did it and started flipping desert squares in Nevada and Arizona, as I'm sure a lot of listeners have done that before too.

Seth: Tell me about your first deal or two. Did you just immediately go for the desert square cheap stuff out West? Was that kind of the story or how did it start?

Cody: Yeah, that's what we did. I honestly, looking back, I wish I would not have started that way, but I think it was kind of our comfort level of not knowing if this land thing was going to work. We did not start trying to double close or wholesale. So we were kind of straight up trying to buy and then resell. And we had some money set aside from our single family home investing. So we just were buying desert properties for, I don't know, $500 to $2,000 cash and then hoping to flip them for like three to four X, mostly owner financing. And that's what we did. But the scary part was I think we bought 12 deals before we sold one. So there was a point where my wife and I were like, are we just burning money?

What are we doing here? We just bought like $25,000 worth of land in the middle of nowhere that we definitely don't want personally like is this going to work that was eventually we sold one and then we sold all of them but it was it was kind of a the beginning was a little scary for sure.

Seth: Yeah I can totally see that the first accepted purchase agreement you get is like such a thrill and it's easy to kind of get carried away before you realize oh wait you gotta sell this stuff too none of this really works until we prove that works too.

Right did you have to sit on any of those for a long time or did they sell like within a few months?

Cody: I think they sold within a few months. I think enough of them sold in a few months for us to kind of get our money back. So it was like, okay, we're, and we had very little to no OPEX because I mean, at the time we were sending maybe 500 to a thousand letters a month, which if you do that today, you're, unless you're extremely targeted and know your market extremely well, you're probably not going to have the same results as I did back then in 2019. So our OPEX was super low. So it was not at the time I was like, man, we're burning all this money on mail, but now it's a whole different game.

Seth: Well, it's interesting the time you started because you've really seen, I feel like most of what there is to see historically. I mean, you kind of got into it when it was quote unquote easy or easier. And then you saw the huge uptick during the COVID era. And then you saw when things got harder. So tell me about like the evolution. Like I'm assuming you probably graduated to bigger deals at some point. And like, what do things look like at the peak and what do they look like today? Like what version of land flipping are you currently running?

Cody: Yeah. So moving from 2019 to 20, probably 2024 or 25, we really did not change much. And the reason was I got really busy in my role as a company commander in the army. And then my wife, we had our twin girls in 2020. So at the end of 2020, so she was running the business full-time and that completely stopped when we had twins to manage. And then I got out of the army in 2022 and then we moved out of the country for two years. So I was kind of running the business full-time, but not really because I was trying to travel and enjoy time with my kids.

So over that time, we had moved into other areas. We tried a little bit in Washington, Texas, and we started to move into bigger and better deals and a lot less volume in terms of the number of deals was shrinking. And we could get by by doing, I guess, part-time effort and getting decent results. I mean, we weren't making a ton of money, but it was enough to sustain us while we were traveling and living abroad, which is honestly pretty great. And we moved back to the U.S. in 2024.

And my son was born in 2024. So we have three kids now. We bought a house on 20 acres in the Sierra Foothills in California, which is like our dream house. We didn't think it was our dream house. We just fell in love with it. And then we realized, oh, man, we have to make some money. We can't just do this part-time job forever and expect to live well in California with three kids.

So I kind of realized in early 2025, I need to really change things. So, and that was, that was when, so early 2025, starting out, I was, I was only doing SMS and I was seeing about two to 4% response rates. I had two team members and not including myself. And it was just a struggle. We had a good 2024 because we got lucky on two deals, which when you have no OPEX or very low OPEX and you get one to two deals, that could be great. That could make your whole year. And I came off 2024 cocky, like, oh yeah, I'm going to crush this thing. I got a pretty good year. Not really understanding that that was just probably lucky and luck in the sense that the amount of marketing I was doing did not merit the amount of I made on those two deals.

It was, it was, and just to kind of, so the listeners can hear it. It was one of those lucky deals you always hear on podcasts, which is I bought for $150,000 and sold for $350,000, which is like an incredible deal that I, they're pretty rare. And like, I didn't have to subdivide. It was just an easy flip.

That was what I was coming off of 2024 to 2025 thinking I could, you know, repeat that five times in a row. So, you know, I don't know what it is about that, but it is so easy to get kind of cocky and arrogant, even when, you know, it was kind of luck. Like, I don't know, at least for me, my brain just like gets to this place. You're like, oh yeah, I got this figured out. I'm okay today. So I'll be okay forever. But it's like, it never works that way. It's like, you can never really get complacent. You always have to constantly keep plugging away to stay on top of things. At least that's my theory. That's been my experience.

Seth: It's almost like if I'm feeling safe, it's because I'm not thinking correctly. Like don't ever feel safe because the world is always changing it would you agree with that?

Cody: A hundred percent agree so like I'm in a I'm in class at Berkeley right now I'm doing my MBA there as a part-time program and my teacher always says like as soon as you make money you have this sign on your chest that says take my money so that's what happened in land I think in during COVID times is you had all these wholesalers who were seeing like wow look at all these land investors making all this money and then they get a lot of influx into the business because you saw so many people making money with very little OPEX.

So I think we always have to be kind of thinking about how can we improve our business. And probably when we need to be thinking the hardest is when we're making the most money because that's when people are going to see how successful this niche is and try to adapt into it or jump into it.

Seth: So Dave Ramsey's got this quote where he says, you have to tell your money where to go, or it will leave you. And I found that to be really true. Like when the money is coming in, well, like you have to really be intentional about like putting it somewhere, putting it to work in like a long-term buy and hold property, or I mean, even like a 401k something, but like, don't just let it sit in your bank account and think you can just blow it wildly on whatever you want. because like it will not always be there.

Like something will change or life will get harder. I think a lot of us have come to that realization over the past couple of years.

Cody: Totally agree with that.

Seth: When you were traveling over two years, I think you said, was it 2022 to 2024? Where were you guys going? Where were you in the world?

Cody: So we went to Brazil where basically we went to my wife's parents' house for around nine months. We weren't planning on staying that long, but some things came up that kind of forced us to stay there a little longer, but I love my in-laws, so it was great. And we stayed down there because during COVID as well, we had this long stretch of time where we didn't see them a lot. So and Gabby and my wife had seen her, I guess, a big portion of her family had not met our daughters yet. So it was an opportunity for us to go down there and really spend time with her family and her friends down in Rio.

So that's where we spent a lot of that time. And then we also went to which our ultimate plan was to go to Portugal and stay there for six months to a year. And we ended up doing a mix of that. So we went to Portugal for a few months and we went to Cape Verde, Africa, because their primary reason is they speak Portuguese. So it was kind of an easy transition. And we stayed at kind of a nice resort. It was amazing. And then we went to Barcelona for probably around two months. And then we did a transatlantic cruise from Barcelona down to Rio with our families. We flew them out and did a sweet cruise. It was actually cheaper to do that cruise than to fly back to Brazil, which is pretty nuts.

Seth: Yeah. That sounds like a ton of fun, man. Do you speak full-blown Portuguese?

Cody: I do, yeah. I was studying Portuguese when I was at West Point, but honestly, being married to my wife has helped a ton. Her English is amazing, but we try to speak Portuguese together in the house.

Seth: I assume your kids are bilingual too then?

Cody: They are, yeah. I speak to my girls in English because I don't want them to have some terrible Portuguese accent like me. I have a white guy gringo slash Rio de Janeiro accent, which is kind of weird. I don't want them to develop that.

Seth: That's what a cool Brazilian accent sounds like right there.

Tell me how this worked when you're traveling, especially doing like a transatlantic cruise or being in Brazil. Like did that slow down your business at all? Or were you able to do everything just as if you were in the US? Did anything break in your business during this time when you're international?

Cody: I had never really, I guess, run my business like a full-time job yet, even though I think at the time I thought I was doing running a full-time job. But the hardest thing was the time zone difference when I was in Europe that was pretty rough so I'd like work late afternoon into really late evening time and then wake up late which is kind of tough when you have kids so I'd wake up late and my wife would be like okay here you go and the that was that was the toughest thing is the time zone and then also putting people in place that can kind of run the the back end or get contract signed or I mean not contracts get deed signed and things like that was something I had to plan for ahead of time and then sending wires being able to send wires when you're out of the country was something I had to figure out.

Those types of things were the biggest learning points for me. But I don't think I had enough operations going on for me to really be overwhelmed with that. And maybe it was a good thing at the time. I think it was probably a good point. We were living abroad. It was actually very inexpensive for us to live in these different places relative to the US. So I didn't really need to make as much money. So we were profitable. I think we, I don't know, we probably were making between netting between 70 and 100,000 a year, which was fine for us to live abroad. And I think I had a team of two.

At the peak of my abroad. So I had a person on SMS and then I had a person who was more of like my acquisition manager who was also foreign based.

Seth: So remind me, were you totally out of the military at this point when you left for this two year stint abroad? Or were you in the national guard at that point?

Cody: I stayed in something called the IRR, which is like inactive ready reserve. So I was kind of just in this limbo state where I wasn't sure if I wanted to rejoin or not. I was almost jumped out completely. And I had a few mentors in the military that told me, hey, just, just stay in this. Cause you really, you have no obligation. You just kind of, you float around until you decide what you want to do. And so I stayed, I stayed there until I got back and decided to join the California National Guard. So I didn't have any military obligations while I was abroad.

Seth: Did you get paid anything for being in that limbo state or not really?

Cody: No, no, not at all.

Seth: That's too bad. It would have been nice.

Yeah. So am I remembering right? Did you say there was a moment in early 2025 when you almost quit? And if so, what was going on in the business at that time?

Cody: Yeah. So I was coming off that good 2024, right? Because I had a few good deals and I was kind of feeling great. And then rolled into January and I still had my team of two thinking I was crushing it. And one of my texts, my texting, because I was texting at the time, my response rates were down to two to 4%, which is pretty atrocious for anybody that does SMS out there. And I was getting maybe 15 to 25 leads a week, which is not a lot.

Seth: How many texts is that per week to get that many leads?

Cody: Man, I don't... I could just do the math, but I'm lazy. It's maybe like 500 a day or 500 to 700 a day at the time. And this is your two team members who are doing this for you? Yeah, I had one full-time SMS person. The other one was more of my acquisition manager. Yeah.

And I thought that was a lot. I thought it was sending a ton. And the thing is, the difference between mail, if you're doing direct mail and you're doing SMS, maybe 25 leads would be pretty solid if you were doing direct mail. I think the lead quality would be a little better, depending on the type of mail you're doing. With that kind of direct outreach, cold call SMS, you really need more volume. So I didn't know that. And so having very few leads. I wasn't converting any deals. We weren't getting anything signed. I didn't really have good processes in place for my acquisition manager to really know how to negotiate a deal.

And I was seeing all these people in land leaving for other things. I feel like a lot of people were leaving in early 2025 or late 2024. And one of the things I saw was messy title or distressed acquisitions is same thing, different name. A lot of people went that route. And I thought, maybe, hey, this is what I need to do. And so I bought a course thinking, hey, this will just be an add on to my business. So I was trying to add on to my business when my business was broken. It's like, hey, you probably should fix the business first before you try to add something to it.

So probably about halfway through the course, I had reconnected with a few mentors who aligned me with some really high level land investors who were doing really well. And it kind of reset my perspective. And they were all getting a massive amount of leads per week. It had bigger teams, better systems. And I was like, oh, no wonder I'm not doing well.

I'm doing like, I don't know, a fifth or a sixth of the work that they're doing. So why would I expect to have the same results as them? And that was what really kind of changed my perspective. Like, okay, do I want to run away? Do I have to relearn this whole new business? Or should I just go deeper in the one I already know?

Seth: So is that kind of what convinced you not to quit was realizing like, it's not that it's broken. I just have to work harder, like just do higher volume?

Cody: Yeah, I think that was it was just kind of understanding that it's not that I suck or that I'm unlucky. It's just I'm not doing enough. And so when you have like a math formula, I need to do this amount of marketing to get this amount of overall leads. And then of those leads, I'll probably make offers on half. And then if I make this many offers, my conversion rate should be X. Like it's easy to kind of start plugging and playing to know what your top level marketing needs to be for you to get the certain amount of deals you want to get to. And that sounds a lot easier. I had to do that over the course of a year or so.

Seth: So you went from under 20 leads per week to around 70. Was that just by doing more? And was this texting that you did more of? Or did you do something different to increase that lead flow?

Cody: I did cold call and texting.

So I increased texting, which was, and I changed platforms because I think I don't really want to call out a platform for doing it the wrong way. I think the biggest problem was I was on a platform long enough, not really having good processes in texting. So once you get down to that 2% to 4% response rate, that probably means your numbers or your company is being flagged for something as spam or something. So jumping platforms and kind of rebuilding up my reputation was important. So I was able to get my response rates up and I increased my volume on SMS. I didn't increase any employees there.

And then on the cold calling side, I thought it works really well to match cold calling and texting up. Some people pick up the phone. Some people respond via text. So I built a team of cold callers. And that was probably the majority of my year was trying to figure out why I could not have success with cold calling. And I had some issues that came up with basically some employees on the team that were doing cold calling for me that were saying they were calling, but in reality, they were hanging up on every single person they were talking to.

And that was, it took me two to three months to figure that out. And I hired a consultant to help me build my call center team and all that, which is to find out that it was like two people that were preventing me from being successful because they were pretending to work was tough.

Seth: So you said you built your own cold calling team. So how many people is this?

Cody: Last year was four. I currently only have three people on the team now, and I'm probably going to get it back up to four.

Seth: Gotcha. And you're currently doing both cold calling and texting right now? Is that the current situation?

Cody: Yeah, that's what I'm doing now.

Seth: Have you used Stride Sales Coach? I don't remember if you were part of that or not.

Cody: Yeah, I do. You do. Stride Sales Coach. So I use it combined with, I'm in Ajay Sharma's program. I'm sure, I think he's one of your sponsored coaches. Yeah, yeah.

So that has been pretty awesome for my acquisition managers to have like the live aspect of getting call reviews and also listening to other people's calls and having a structure to follow on a script. That's been really critical for us having better conversion this year and last year, but then also putting it, our calls into Stride Sales Coach to get those, that automated review is really nice because then my team could go and do it and they don't need me to review their call or they don't need to wait for until a week later to get feedback from a live call with Ajay or his team. So having the AI to implement is pretty helpful too.

Seth: That's awesome. Did it make a big difference to get involved with Ajay and learn from him about how to handle these calls the right way?

Cody: That was critical for a few things in the business. I think having a script, which he offers for free, and then his actual course is for free as well, was just following that and having structure.

Has changed my conversion completely. Also hearing people on his calls and knowing what a good closer sounds like was something I didn't know. I thought I was a good closer. And then I listened to what actually good closers and good salespeople sound like. Oh, I have a lot. I have a lot to learn.

Seth: Yeah, that is hugely helpful. Seems like the two could kind of work well. When I say the two, I mean, Ajay and then Stride Sales Coach. Ajay, in terms of just understanding, like, what does a good call even look like? Like, what do you say? How do you say it? How do you double and triple dial and what's good follow-up look like? And Stride Sales Coach is like the manual pain in the neck thing of like having to actually listen to every call and like figure out is this good or not. It just kind of does that and grades it. So you can kind of like educate yourself about how to do it right and actually like stay on top of is it being done right or not. Would you agree? Like do they work well together in that sense?

Cody: I think so. I think there's a lot of things that you can get that you kind of need to hear live and like the tonality of how someone says something or how fast they speak. Or if you're like mirroring someone's energy, then that's something you have to get on kind of a live call recording. And I'm sure someday AI is going to be able to figure that out. I mean, we have AI agents that kind of sound like real people. So we're probably not too far off from that.

And then having the actual words you say analyzed by AI is helpful to see if you're actually following the structure. If you're listening to certain parts of the call, maybe they talk about a critical life event, which could be retirement or a kid moving out of the house or a death in the family or something and maybe you missed it and you didn't mention anything about it on the call. It's like that's something that that Stride Sales Coach could pick up on.

Seth: Would you say that the cold calling, like is that the bigger deal between the two in terms of cold calling versus texting? Like if you could only use one of them, is that what you would stick with?

Cody: I kind of get somewhat even amounts of leads from both. I probably do need to go analyze which leads convert more and which convert better. And I don't have an answer for that on this call today, but I think honestly having a balance of both is critical. And honestly, looking into this year, I want to get back into direct mail. Which has been something I've been nervous to do. And I know a lot of people are having plenty of success with it, but when I get back into it, it won't be how I did it.

You know, in 2019, it'll be very targeted on certain types of property, which will probably be like larger acreage, big road frontage that you could potentially either flip or do some sort of value add development on. Because I think that's where you'll get the most ROI on your direct mail, at least for what I'm seeing and what I'm going to try to do in my business this year.

Seth: Yeah, there's really easy ways to sort that way now. Didn't used to be that way. Now, when you say 70 leads per week, what does that actually mean? Like, are these sellers calling you back or are they text replies or form submissions? Like what is the quality of these leads?

Cody: So the quality is not great. I think normally, so we call them our gross leads. You could say like the amount of people who've expressed interest in selling their property is really kind of the only thing we're screening for is someone who is interested in selling in the next, you know, 60, 30 to 60 days. And then they, and then we have lead managers who call them up and ask some call every we have one thing we do too now is everybody gets a scheduled appointment so if it's a cold call or a texter we will schedule that person that leads appointment with our lead manager and then do a handoff of like this is you're going to be talking to this person on this phone number so then there's a higher chance of our actually getting a show at that appointment so then our lead manager will call them and ask them a few qualifying questions.

They'll ask for asking price and just a few key details about the property. And if they're still, we're interested in making an offer on them, then we'll schedule them with our action manager or one of our action managers and do the same type of handover. Here's the phone number. Here's the appointment time. So to try to increase our show rates.

With those people. Probably about half of those leads get scheduled. So probably 35 of 70 will get scheduled.

Seth: So like of the 70 come in, what percentage of those actually end up being closed deals? Is it that 2% to 4% or is it something different?

Cody: Man, I need to do the math on this. But so we're targeting my goal for my extra demanders is to get about two signed contracts a week on average. And I think I need to increase my leads for that to be the norm. I think now we're probably two to three total where I want to be like four to six total. So I think I need to increase to about where each of my action managers have five appointments minimum per day. So that's 10 appointments total for the business for them to actually be able to convert enough to do that.

Seth: So how many people are currently on your team? Did you tell me that?

Cody: I have eight people on the team right now and it's very acquisition heavy. It's pretty much all acquisition. And that's something I need to work on right now is, is bringing on a transaction coordinator or someone on the dispo side to help me with that. Cause I've, I've been leaning on agents a lot as some people do when they're, when they're building on the acquisition side.

Seth: Do you think that's okay? Like, could you just lean on agents and have your business work that way or do you need to sell some of those things through your team internally?

Cody: I do think a lot, there's a lot of really successful people who do that, who only just rely on agents because they think the ROI is higher. I think that there are some deals, I think having someone who is in a transaction coordinator role who kind of manage all the closings could also manage the disposition for kind of the lower price parcels that may not make as much sense for an agent to post, probably.

Anything under $60,000 to $70,000 maybe be better to sell. But internally, and especially the deals where you're looking to sell owner finance, because if you're selling owner finance with an agent, you have to pay the commission out still, and you're only getting a down payment. So a lot of times you're walking away with nothing if you're paying the commission out on the full price and you're only getting a small down payment. So I think for the seller financing deals or owner financing deals, I mean, it's nice to have that department or at least somebody who can post some properties for you.

Seth: Are all of your deals still just straight flips? Like they ever do improvements or subdividing or anything like that?

Cody: I'm starting to get into subdividing this year. And it's not something it's because I never wanted to do subdividing. I just never had any deals come across that I think were, could be used as a subdivide. And I think the more volume I do, the more potential subdivide opportunities I get. I'm not actively I know some people actively look on market and really only target that. We do majority flips, but we have two active subdivides we're working on right now. I'd like to increase that to maybe one to two a quarter. So four to six a year would be really cool to manage for 2026. And the rest just being flips, most likely a year.

Seth: Somebody just left a comment on a recent podcast interview I did, episode 260. and they said, non-value-add real estate investing is dying. Do you think that's true? Or is it just maybe it depends on the markets you're working in? I hear this said all the time where somebody will make some bold statement like, this is how it is in the land business. Well, it's like, that's how it is where you work, not necessarily where I work. But what are your thoughts on that? Is that along the right lines or is that just totally wrong? Because it sounds like you're doing a lot of just straight flips still.

Cody: I would say I would change that to non-value-add investing is harder than it used to be.

Seth: There you go. I'm thinking it gets harder every year, but I do think it gets harder regardless of value add or non-value add, right? Because there's more people in the market. There's more people trying to get deals done and it's just going to get harder and you have to adapt. You have to adapt with the every year.

So I think saying I will never do a flip because I'm only going to do value add. I mean, that's fine. Some people have a lot of success, so I don't want to knock it. If you're only doing a few deals a year and making a lot of money on them, but I think if you're sending out marketing like I am, which is a lot, and a lot of land investors are, to say no to a flip that could make you 50 grand, I feel like that'd be weird to me. I'm not at the point where I'm making so much money where I'm going to be like, no, I'm good. I'm going to wait for that $200,000 deal. I'm not there yet. Maybe one day.

Cody: Do you sense that the margins of these straight flip deals are getting thinner? When you just look at your average straight flip that you're doing.

Does the work to profit ratio so is it getting worse and worse or is it not really? You just kind of have to send out more marketing to find them. So one thing we changed in our business and it's kind of aligned with, so we have a few different prices we offer to people. So we'll do like our flip price, which maybe in 2019 was 30 to 40% of market value. Now my flip price offer is roughly 50% of what we're offering. And then on bigger deals, which is like anything over $70,000, I'm willing to accept like a 75% return on, which is less, right?

Is one thing to think about on the flip price and then we have a double close price so like how much like which is a little higher of a threshold I think it's like 65 that will accept up to you and then one thing we recently implemented is a seller financing offer where if somebody's not willing to do it and they're stuck on a price right they really want a certain price will actually offer seller financing to everybody who's price fixated and like classic person who's like, oh, I'm not in a hurry to sell. I've had this property for years. I just want to get X dollars.

So we'll always offer them a seller financing price now. So we will offer tiers of offers. And I think having multiple exit strategies and multiple acquisition strategies for properties is critical in how the market's changing. It's getting more competitive.

Seth: What kind of KPIs do you track with your team to make sure that they are doing what they're supposed to do and on the right track?

Cody: On the cold call side, I probably track too much, honestly but the the biggest thing is that just by the person is I'm looking at talk time and leads pushed per day is kind of the biggest thing I'm looking at to make sure they're actually engaged throughout the day and then how many overall connections and every calling platform is different so I don't really want to steer someone the wrong way but how many actual conversations they had per day how much how much time they talked on how long they talked on the phone and then how many off how many leads were pushed it's kind of the big three texting I look at how many actual texts we sent and what our response rate was, what our delivery rate was, and then how many leads we actually pushed.

So that's the big thing. And then the lead manager side, I'm looking at how many appointments were scheduled, how many were attended, what his overall talk time was, and then how many appointments he scheduled for our action manager. And then on the action manager, it's the same thing. So how many appointments were scheduled, how many attended, how many follow-up calls did we do? And that's another thing on the lead manager side, how many follow-ups were done, what's overall talk time. And then it's offers made, contracts sent, and contracts signed.

So that's kind of a summary of kind of the whole acquisition pipeline of what I look at. And recently, I don't know if I could get into so I actually didn't use to track that, but one thing I got into recently is I actually have them fill those out. So my team members fill those out. And then in our daily huddles that we have now, they actually brief those to me, which they probably actually hate.

But, so something about, I don't know, having to brief something to your boss that just, you know, makes you have to absorb a little more accountability than maybe you would if you're just filling out a spreadsheet when you actually have to look at someone on Zoom and be like, hey, this is how many calls I made yesterday. You kind of own it a little more. So that's something I recently implemented the last few months.

Seth: Is that like a weekly meeting you're doing with people where they have to come to the table and talk about what they did?

Cody: So I used to do weekly meetings probably pre-2025. And honestly, those weekly meetings probably turned into whenever I feel like it meetings.

So last year, we implemented daily huddles. And the purpose of those was just to kind of me identify any issues in the business or communication problems that I could fix as the boss quickly instead of having to wait another week for someone to bring it up at our next weekly meeting. I have probably expanded that more than maybe I should have. So now every day we'll actually jump into KPIs on a daily basis to try to see if there's any trends, that are happening. I'm not scrutinizing someone day for day. But if I see someone on the cold call team far outperforming someone else, I'm like, hey, what did you do differently yesterday? And we need to share with everybody how you had so much success. So it's more of a constructive meeting than, hey, this person's awesome and you suck. It's not really how I like to run them.

Seth: Oh, I shouldn't be doing it that way. I guess I got to change how I do things. I don't know. Maybe I was in the military, so that works too. Do you like have any way that you incentivize your team to like do more calls or close? But like, does it make any financial impact to them if they do this or is it just, yeah, it's just your job. So just do more of it.

Cody: Last year, I've been trying to something I've been trying to figure out how to do it the right way. And I think I'm still figuring it out. But I created some incentives for the lead generation team of like, if you hit this many leads or this many leads per month, then you get a this much bump. And it's like a tiered system. So I think the biggest bump would be like $100 and it goes down from there for a certain amount of leads pushed for the cold callers and texters.

And then one thing I also implemented, and I know a lot of people do this based on like annual gross profit, but something I'm doing this year, and we can talk at the end of the year and tell you how it goes, but I'm kind of implementing quarterly bonuses depending on gross profit in the business. It's all salary tiered based on how much they make in the business for every month that they work.

Seth: That's a tricky thing to figure out. I don't know if you do it based on the global revenue of the business. Because what if person B over there had nothing to do with the revenue going up? But they did make a difference over here. Should we all be anchored to the same number? Or do you complicate the heck out of it and have everybody measured on something different? I don't know the answer either. When you figure it out the right way, I'd love to hear about it.

Cody: Exactly.

Seth: Yeah, there is a book called Profit Works. Tried to listen to the audio book a couple of years ago. That's all about that. All these different ideas you can use on how to actually bonus or financially incentivize people based on things that actually matter to them. Not in a way that's going to set them up to just expect money for no reason next year. Like a Christmas bonus or something. But like actually have it tied to something meaningful that they can change. And I remember hearing some good ideas, but it also got really boring. I couldn't like stay focused on this topic. I feel like ChatGPT might be a good idea now. If you could really tell the details, you could probably get some good ideas there.

Cody: Yeah. I mean, my biggest concern with implementing like bonuses for leads pushed was just getting an influx of very bad leads. And that's what I told the team is if I see an influx of just terrible leads and we increase leads by a ton, but they're all bad, I'm just going to end this.

So do not abuse the system.

Seth: Yeah. It's a multifaceted thing. Like it's not just a black and white, make this one number go up. It's like, well, but what about this and that and that? Like it all has to work together for it to work. So I hear you. Then you have to have good data for people to get on the phone with people or have good response rates. So it's out of some of their, some things that are my control and not theirs. So it's tough.

Let's talk about your tech stack. I know you're a Stride CRM user. Do you Stride for any of this phone call stuff or when or why did you realize that you even needed something like Stride?

Cody: Yeah. So I was using Airtable for forever and I always wanted to jump to a CRM. Not always, I guess over the last year and a half or two years, I wanted to jump to like a real CRM. I just had never had one. And I'm sure you could build Airtable better than I did. But my level of knowledge, that's where it was. And as I was growing and increasing the amount of leads we were getting, I just couldn't keep track of everything. It was just too hard to stay organized and create a system that everyone could manage.

And so I was out looking for a CRM and I was talking to a few different people in the land space about different options out there. And a few of them had mentioned to me, oh, well, Seth Williams is making a CRM. You may want to check that one out. It's for land. I was like, oh, well, that's perfect. I'm a land investor. Look at that.

So I figured anything you attach your name to would be a good place to start. So I made the leap and the painful process of transitioning all of my data over, which was what I was scared of. But I got through that. And now we primarily use all of the calling and stuff we do in the Stride now is from our lead managers and our acquisition managers.

We're not doing any cold calling or texting through Stride, which we tried at the beginning. And that was dumb. And we got blocked by, I think, Twilio for a while. So we have figured out how to do it the right way now, I think, at least for the next few months. And we're doing only scheduled calling and follow-ups.

Seth: Yeah, and this is a common question, just so people know what Cody's talking about. You can text through Stride, but you don't want to do bulk texting, like an auto-dialer, sending out thousands of texts at a time or your number will get shut down. That's why you would use something like Launch Control or Smarter Contact or something else that's actually meant to do that. So if that's what you're looking for, that particular use is not what Stride is for.

How long did it take to migrate everything over?

Cody: I honestly think it was pretty quick just to get a 70% solution of like, can I use this just to ongoing with the data I have while I'm importing the old stuff? I think it was probably two to three business days of back and forth with support I mean, I did spend probably an entire day talking to like a little support bubble and sending Loom videos back and forth with the support team. Like, hey, how do I do this? How do I do that? And I still do that, but I don't have to spend a whole day on it anymore. Yeah. It was pretty quick, maybe two to three days to be able to use the system. And then obviously I've learned over time of how to use it more effectively. And I'm still learning. There's a ton of things that it can do that I have not taken the time to implement in the automation side and things like that.

Seth: Yeah. There's actually a new thing that's, if it's not there yet, it will be soon. It's like this Ask AI. Like I actually just used it yesterday. I was kind of blown away. It was automatically sending email notifications whenever a conversation came in. I'm like, I want to stop that. So I was asking it like, how do I turn these off? I was expecting it to tell me where to go to do it, but it said, would you like me to turn that off for you?

And I was like, yeah, do it. And I just did it. It was like this Claude Cowork type thing where it just like does it for you. So you don't even have to know where to go to do it. You just have to know what you want and it can do it for you, which is a pretty huge deal because I know the pain of having to learn anything, just the mental calories you have to burn, even if it's not that hard. Like you still got to think about it to do it. It changes things when like it'll just do the thing.

Cody: Yeah, I think there's also like a new project management tab, which I have not explored yet, but I think it could be pretty useful for some of the subdivides that I'm working on right now.

Seth: Yeah, you should check that out. I've not used that myself that much yet, but we got a handful of people asking us for that. Those more complex projects where you need to get a bunch of different parties involved and track things from one to the next.

Pretty awesome. So like, what does Stride do for you exactly? I know you mentioned like phone calls and that kind of thing. Like, do you use it to track your KPIs and do you do any like automated follow-up or like, what would you say are the most useful things that you do use? Because I know it can do a ton and most people don't use everything I can do. I'm just curious, what's stuck for you?

Cody: I probably use it more basically than a lot of people because I'm not coming from another CRM. So I don't know what I don't know. But I think the biggest thing for me is just having all of the data revolving around that lead in one place. So I can go in and I could see the conversation that the lead manager had and what they talked about. I can go see what the acquisition manager talked about. And then the action manager, before they jump on a call, they're not looking at condensed notes that were typed out that probably missed 50% of the conversation. They can go and actually read the transcript or listen to the call. It sounds super basic, but that has been really critical for me of just having one area to go and look at everything about the lead.

And then you can also save contracts in there and save everything. So I mean, I do have other systems that we use, but I really just use Stride now for managing everything involved in the acquisition and disposition side and everything about the lead and the agent we're using and everyone involved in transactions just in there now.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, that's really what a CRM should do, especially like it's usefulness should compound the more people you have on your team. Cause like, you don't have to like ask anybody what they're doing or what they did. Like it's just all there.

Like there's a running record so you can just know it. And when you're calling somebody like notes, you'll know what happened in the past. You can look at the transcripts. If you got that turned on.

Cody: Yeah. I've enjoyed it so far for sure. So yeah. And appreciate you being one of the early adopters of the first hundred people to sign up. So it's been great to have you in there.

Seth: I was lucky for sure. It was like around, I guess the stars aligned for, me being sick of Airtable at the same time and trying to grow. Timing just works out.

Cody: So you have said to stop comparing yourself to the guy who's scaled to a million in 12 months. So what do you think is the danger in that mindset?

Seth: I do think there's part of it is it's good to hear stories about the guy who's scaled in 12 months because sometimes that really motivates you. And like, if this guy can do it, I can do it. So you can get some motivation out of that, which is nice when you're feeling good, right? It's awesome. The problem is when you're four to six months into your growth phase of your business and your OPEX is exceeding your profit that you're bringing in, it's really hard to look at that guy and feel, yeah, I'm going to be there soon. Sometimes you get pretty down in the land business when it's cyclical.

So just knowing that everybody's on a different path. And if it takes you five years instead of 12 months, does that really matter? I think the biggest thing is just staying in the game, learning and getting better, growing your business at the pace that makes the most sense for you and your family and your lifestyle and protecting your net profit along the way, because a lot of the guys who grow that quickly, they are spending a ton of money, which is not really sexy to talk about on podcasts.

If you're doing that much in 12 months, it means you have invested a ton in a team very early and you are doing a ton of marketing, which is a huge OPEX expense at the beginning of your business. I would say that's probably the normal case. I think it's pretty rare someone who has no money grows in 12 months to a million dollars. I think someone you really have to invest a ton. So knowing that I think it's okay to like, I'm going to take, you know, two to five years to do this. And I'm going to grow smartly and not blow up my business by increasing OPEX to a point that I can't keep up to it with the gross profit that I'm bringing in from the business.

Cody: It's a very good point. Very true. I think most of the time when you hear people growing, like just going super fast, a lot of money is being spent. Like you just kind of has to in order to get the lead flow coming in.

Seth: Do you think a person can scale too early or too quickly? How fast is too fast? Maybe it just depends on how much cash you have to burn.

Cody: Yeah. I do think there's education behind it too. You don't want to scale too soon. I think you want to know the basics of land investing. You want to know how to find a deal, how to analyze a deal, how to underwrite, see if it's a good deal, get a contract signed, get it into escrow, all that stuff, how to sell a property. You want to know the basics first. You don't want to like, okay, I'm going to scale this in three months. And you don't even know how to do a land deal. And all of a sudden you're trying to hire a team of 20.

So growing slowly gives you the benefit of making mistakes and those mistakes not costing you tens of thousands of dollars. You can hire on a small cold call team and try to grow that or a texter. And that's different than, I'm going to send $20,000 worth of mail in my first month. Maybe you should ease into that.

And another aspect of it too is knowing that every change you make in your business is probably not going to show up on the bottom line for probably three to six months or more in some cases, depending on what you're doing. So, it may feel like you're lighting money on fire for a while, when in reality, you're just not going to see the results of what you're spending money on for three to six months. So having a good amount of OPEX, I guess, money in the bank to spend on OPEX is nice to have in that scaling, which most people don't have that when they first start a business. They're starting with very little money. So growing that over time allows you to feel a little more secure when you're ready to scale to a certain size.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, aside from just the knowledge of what you're doing, it sounds like maybe just a certain cash cushion needs to be there. A friend of mine runs a marketing agency.

He hires all U.S. people locally. And every time he's hiring somebody, he tells me like, yeah, I'm basically just, I've got 50 to 60 grand that I'm going to light on fire here. Like it could be a total waste and I have to be willing to accept that. To some extent, I think he's right. Like you just don't know until you hire somebody and hopefully it works out. And it might not. I'm sure it's obviously probably less money if you're hiring somebody overseas, but whatever that amount is, just kind of realize like there's a bit of a runway and it might not work.

And hopefully we're not letting $50,000 on fire when we're just starting out our land business. But yes. I mean, what do you think should be true before you hire your first person? Is it like you need X amount of dollars? You need to be able to maybe say you've done 20 deals or something like you've proven the business model, like you know what you're doing. You're using Stride CRM. That's probably the most important thing right off the bat. Is there any like checkboxes where it's like, I wouldn't recommend you hire somebody until this and this and this are true?

Cody: I feel like you need to know every aspect of the business pretty well. I think maybe that takes five to 10 deals. I don't think it takes a ton. I think the biggest mistake I made, and I think a lot of people make when they bring on their first hire, it's like you bring someone on and you give them maybe two to three days of really intense training where you go over each thing once or twice. And then you just send them off to be your magical employee who's going to do everything correctly.

And then over time, you get upset at them because they're not doing it the way you wanted them to do. When in reality, you did not train them. You didn't create the SOP for them to know how to do their job. You didn't give them the daily check-ins they needed for the first few weeks. And then you didn't give them the weekly meetings or the open line of communication they need to really succeed.

So I think a lot of it, why it's good to hire a small first is because you can make all those mistakes with one instead of five to ten. And, you know, like hiring one, you'd be like, okay, let me just get really good at hiring this person, getting them really good at this specific task in the business, which whatever you have them doing, if it's texting or cold calling or lead management, giving them very like hyper-focused tasks in the beginning is I think critical compared to just like what I did. It's like, hey, I'm gonna hire this person. Then I ended up firing them because I'm like, this person's terrible. And then two years later, I'm like, well, it's probably me that was terrible. It's probably not them.

Seth: Yeah. If I remember right, you're targeting a $1 million in gross profit in 2026, right? And we're in the middle of March, 2026 right now. So the year is almost a quarter of the way over. What has to go right operationally for this to happen?

Cody: I think if I maintain what I'm doing now, I can get there with, which is around 70 to 80 leads a week. So like consistent marketing, consistency on marketing is really critical.

And then consistency on conversion, I think is the two biggest things. And I think if I keep just stay where I'm at, it will work out. But I already am identifying kind of bottlenecks in the business I need to fix. So I feel like every time I'm feeling good for a couple of days, I find some problem that I need to fix.

So I mean, theoretically, if I don't do anything different and just kind of keep doing the same, we should be kind of set up based on the amount of pipeline gross profit we have from last year and the beginning of this year. Deals drop off all the time. And if you lose one or two big deals, it's like, oh, wow, my pipeline just shrunk significantly. So getting those consistent contracts in is going to be critical.

Seth: Are you taking title to all these properties or are you double closing them or something? Or how's that working?

Cody: I'd say the majority we're taking title to. Probably 80% to 90% we're taking title to. And then we'll try to do double closes on some properties if we think the market can support a quick close like that.

Seth: How are you funding these things? Like you just using your own cash or do you use funders or loans or how does that work?

Cody: Yeah. So I, I primarily funded internally myself for a while. And I think that's the benefit of growing slowly is you can do that and just leave. And I don't, I haven't pulled a ton of money out of my business. I pay myself a modest salary. And then I just roll everything back into the business besides for what I pay myself. So that has allowed me to really, I guess, compound my money really well over the last five years.

But I also, last year, I started getting into bank financing, which honestly, I never even thought about when I was doing $2,000 desert squares. But when you do bank financing and something I realized, you can get 100% cash on cash return, but maybe you're not buying for 50% market value. You can be buying for maybe 60% to 70% market value. But if you use a bank loan and it's a good market or maybe a property you could subdivide, all of a sudden, you're doing 100% cash on cash return on a property that you're buying at 70% market value. So that's something that has opened my eyes to different ways to make a deal work on those bigger dollar amount deals where you're probably talking in the 150 plus sale price range.

Seth: What's been your secret for getting bank loans? How many deals have you closed with bank loans at this point?

Cody: Only once. I'm not that cool yet, but I've closed one and it's been good.

Seth: Is this one where they're collateralizing the property or how much did you have to put down? What do they need to see to get comfortable with this?

Cody: Yeah, I basically had to give them a net worth document about my life and what I'm worth and how much I own of everything. They did an appraisal of the land, which luckily came in way more than I was buying the property for. So I think it came in at like $300,000. I was buying it for $200,000. I think I only had to put so I ended up actually on this one, there was two options. If I closed it out right with my money and then refinanced, I could have gotten a loan.

I could get financing on the 80% of the appraisal value. So I could have actually pulled money out when I refinanced, if I would have refinanced with it. Whereas if I got the loan before I closed, then I would have just gotten 80% of my contract price. So I'd have had to put $40,000 down.

Seth: Nice. Was it hard to find this bank who would do this for you?

Cody: I definitely leaned on local land investors who had done this before. What I started doing was calling farm credit unions. And as you probably know, because you've been to land for a while, I don't really like land investors very much. So I got denied by like three or four farm credit unions before I figured out, I don't think these guys are going to loan me any money.

Seth: So the one that you did work with, was it one you already had a relationship with or you would just refer to them by another land investor you knew?

Cody: Yeah, I was referred to them by another land investor who's used them a lot. So that helped kind of knowing someone who had done it.

Seth: Yeah, I actually had a separate conversation. We've talked with this a handful of times, but one particular one where we focused on this was episode 192, retipster.com/192, where I talked with Jay and Daniel about how they get bank financing for land. The whole point of that conversation was to really dive deep into like, where do you find these banks? What do you got to give them? What should you expect? So if anyone was interested in that, you can check out that episode too.

Well, awesome. So as we wrap this up, thanks again, Cody, for talking with me. As you continue to grow, is there anything that still makes you nervous? Do you feel like you have this all figured out?

Cody: Definitely do not feel like I have this all figured out for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm always nervous. I'm always thinking about where's the market going to go? How is this going to look in one to two years from now? And I think what makes me feel better without worrying too much, maybe it's like the natural helicopter pilot in me. I always think about what is going to go wrong before I get into this aircraft.

I think just always improving your systems and relying on the basics of like consistent marketing, going over KPIs with your team, holding them accountable, like just doing simple business practices well over time. I think we'll be able to weather kind of any storm that comes up because even if something happens, I don't know, five years down the road, and I don't think this will happen, I think. But like maybe land if land investing does end or this value that whatever that comment was the value add investing is the only way and non-value add is dead if you know how to build a good team and a good business that'll translate to whatever but you want to pivot to whether it's messy titles or single family homes so I don't think that's going to happen with land I think we have plenty of people have been buying and selling land for for years but I do think between now and maybe five years from now I'm sure things will change in terms of how we operate but people are still making money.

Seth: Have you done any messy title things since you were kind of toying around with that idea or did that not really become a big part of your business?

Cody: I completely ignored it and just went all in on land because I thought it was kind of a shiny object that I was looking at. So I didn't want to manage two businesses at the same time.

Seth: Whenever you have to change your business in like, you just don't know what's going to work. Like maybe it can work, but it's not going to work for you. Like maybe you're just not cut out for that or it's not what you enjoy. It was interesting, your comment earlier about how it didn't make sense for you to do that when like the fundamentals of your business were broken.

I almost wonder, like, is it okay to do that if the fundamentals of your business are broken, but you don't need those fundamentals for the other thing you're going after? Like, maybe it's a question of that, of like, if you're going to do messy title, maybe you don't need to be texted a bunch of people and having a higher lead flow because there are different types of leads. I don't know. Did you ever think about that part of it?

Cody: Yes, I wouldn't have the problem of needing to, you know, do mass outreach, but I would have to either do it myself or train a couple people on how to do those types of calls and how to intake. And it would just be relearning the basics of the business. So there would still be that, you know, three to six months plus time where I'm not making really any money. So I figured, why not lean into the thing I know how to do and just improve on the things that I'm not doing extremely well on.

Seth: Pretty much everything I've ever tried has ended up being harder than I thought it was going to be. It's almost just like, like, just assume it's way harder than you think. And maybe it's just a question of which battles are you willing to fight? Because you're going to have to slog through something. It's just a question of what that is. I know the messy title thing, it is certainly easier in some ways and certainly way harder in other ways. And maybe you're well-equipped for that or maybe not.

Cody: I totally agree. I think if you just focus on one thing for long enough, you're going to be successful. I think the problem that a lot of real estate investors have, and I definitely have had, is like, well, let me try this. Let me try this. Let me try this. Before you really can narrow in on what you're going to be really focused on your business and take it to the next level.

Seth: When you're reaching for every new shiny object, that's the that's the tough place to be. And it's weird how you can actually be very good at something you hate doing. I think the magic is to find the thing where like you're good at it and it's actually kind of fun. Like it's not totally miserable to do the thing. I think it was Andre Agassi, the tennis player. I mean, he was like best in the world at one point. And he was saying, like, I hated playing tennis. Like I did this because my dad wanted me to. It's like, wow, interesting. You can be the best and not enjoy.

Cody: Well, I think as long as you choose land investing and you go all in, I think there's a correlation between liking something and being good at it. So I think the more you practice something and you start getting good at it, you'll probably eventually start liking it.

Seth: Well, Cody, if people want to reach out to you for any reason, you don't have to share anything. But if you want to, now's your chance. Is there any place they would get a hold of you?

Cody: Yeah, you could reach out to me on LinkedIn. I don't really use social media much. That's probably what I use most. If you add me on Instagram, I probably won't see it. I think I posted in like 10 years, but Facebook maybe or LinkedIn. And if you could put that maybe in the show notes, Seth.

Seth: I can do that. You know, I actually don't know that many land investors who are like super active on LinkedIn. What do you get out of LinkedIn?

Cody: I don't honestly use it a ton. I think I used it more so because when I joined Berkeley, a lot of the people I work with there, go to school with, they use it and they're a I don't know, school that are more active. I feel like it's a more productive social media for my brain than, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn or Instagram.

Seth: Yeah. It is interesting when I was in the banking world and when I was taking my MBA, like everybody was on LinkedIn, like that was the place to be. But in the land world, for whatever reason, tons of stuff is happening on Facebook. I don't know why it worked out that way.

Actually, one other thing I was going to ask you, so you're getting your MBA at Berkeley. Why are you doing that? Like, is it just like a self-improvement thing or you don't need it for your land career? I don't think, or is it going to help you in some way for that?

Cody: Yeah. I mean, I always thought I wanted a degree and I do have the benefit of having the GI Bill for my military service. So part of it is just, I've always wanted to go to grad school and get my MBA. And then part of it was to build credibility. I think down the road, if I ever do bigger development deals and need more funding, having like a Berkeley MBA, West Point military service, and all this experience and land just can help build a resume for funding bigger deals and doing bigger things in real estate.

Seth: Cool, man. Well, it's certainly not going to hurt you at all. I know when I got my MBA, it was kind of a similar thing. It's like, like I knew intellectually, like I don't need this for my career, but like it was a box I wanted to check. And I did learn a ton through it. Some things I wasn't even planning to learn, but inevitably you'll learn a lot, that kind of thing.

Well, Cody, again, thanks for being on the show. If people want to check out the show notes for this episode, then go to retipster.com/262. And Cody, it's great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Cody: Yeah, thanks so much, Seth. This is amazing.