Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams, you're listening to the REtipster podcast. Today, I'm talking with somebody who a lot of you already know, not just as a guest, but also the former co-host of the show, Ajay Sharma. So Ajay started out in the land investing space like many of us, but over time, he's carved out a very specific lane where he's built a serious reputation, and that's in sales and in curative title work. And these are two areas that frankly, most investors either overlook or don't fully understand. but they can make or break your business.

And Ajay is also the guy behind Land Closures Academy, where he's trained a lot of investors and team members on how to actually convert deals, not just find them. And now he's also putting together what's shaping up to be one of the biggest events in the land space, his third year as running the Land Scaling Summit. In this conversation, we're going to dig into what he's been building, what he's seen in the market right now, how sales really works in the land business and the curative title world, and why this is one of the most important skills that an investor can have. So with that, Ajay, welcome back. How's it going? Man, Seth, what an introduction. I am living the dream like I have in many years past as we've begun these, man. I'm so excited to get to just break down everything that I see that's working in this niche. I think as we've entered into 2026, there's this mix of both fear and optimism, right? And I feel like people are on one side or another. And I think if people listening leave this episode with anything, I would just like to continue to instill optimism that even in weird, uncertain market and global conditions, you can make lots of money if you just commit to being good. And so that's what I want to talk about today. Yeah, it's well said. Now, you're wearing a lot of hats, as many of us do, but you're an investor, you're a closer, you're a coach, you're putting together this conference together.

So like, how do you describe what you actually do today? When someone says, what do you do, Ajay? Like, what do you tell them? And what does your day-to-day look like? Yeah, it's such a good question, Seth. You know, it's funny. In the past like week, I've had four friends randomly reach out and ask like, hey, which businesses do you spend like the most time in? And the answer is it ebbs and flows. The nice thing about, you know, my main two businesses, right? Succession Properties slash Assets for Acres, a real estate company. And then also the Land Closers Academy, me, the coaching business where I'm teaching people sales, sales training, helping them convert their leads into deals is they're obviously very symbiotic, right? So it's funny, I may train an investor on closing a deal and then use the same skill. I just trained to go close a deal on one of my own deals, or they close that deal and all of a sudden need funding. And now we get to JV a deal together, or I refer it over to a good friend of mine that's a funder. So to answer your question in terms of what my day to day looks like, you know, it changes based on the day, I would say my weeks are probably more consistent where I might have a week that's very heavy on the real estate side where I'm deal making and raising money.

And getting deals to the finish line. You and I both know the days leading up to closings are the days that you want to pull your hair out, right? Whereas the coaching business has and always will be more of kind of a part-time endeavor where transparently I got begged into it by investors. I remember I spoke at an event and had almost 40 people ask me when the paid sales training was starting up. And I was like, wow, man, I didn't realize that many people wanted this. And so I really built the curriculum and the training around how do I get investors that have leads into deals? And for those that don't understand their gap on getting deals, let's get you visibility through some good accountability and KPI reviews every single week. And so it's been this really rewarding thing, Seth, where last year was the best year for both businesses. You know, we did well over seven figures in gross profits in the real estate business. I think we finished off the year around 1.4 or 5. And then the coaching business has grown like wildfire. And I don't feel like I do that much marketing for it. Most of our stuff's been word of mouth because people have just had good success in it. So anyways, all that to say, it ebbs and flows week over week, but I just have so much fun running both businesses. And at my core, I would say I close deals, man, either mine or my clients. And that's the answer is I'm a real estate investor that closes deals.

And you're one of these investors who is kind of doing this, I don't know if it's a hybrid or just two totally separate things with land investing and the curative title world. Which one is like the bigger deal now for you? Is it curative title or is it land or how do you split those up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on our core real estate business, a lot of our land deals that we are doing are...

A mix of subdivide deals, both on and off markets. We're doing a lot of value add on that side. We do some flips still if they're really healthy. We do typically like $50,000 plus margin flips. I'm not spending a lot of time on the buy for nine, sell for 30,000. There's tons of those deals out there. I did them. I cut my teeth with them. I think it's a great way to start in this business. But over time, you just have to weigh your relative bandwidth and you can either scale your business through higher margin deals, or you can scale your business through more deals. Now, obviously you can do both. Sure. But you get better and more efficient.

Focusing on one of those two. And so we've truthfully scaled our business where I have a handful of Americans on my staff. We have what I consider to be relatively low overhead, all things considered, but we have opted for higher value deals where I think some of the smallest deals we're doing are usually 30 K spreads at this point. Now to clarify too, I think a lot of people ask like, Hey, are you spending more time on curative or land? And I would also just add, there are a lot of curative opportunities for land. I mean, we've done a handful of land curative deals. One of my favorites that I did last, I think it was actually Q4 last year, we got this property in Arkansas. And just to add some color to curative, a lot of curative title is land. So I've dealt with multi-owner land deals. I've done land deals with judgments on them. One of my favorite curative land deals I did was this 80 acre a property we got under contract in Benton County, Arkansas. Or no, sorry, not Benton County. This one was Izzard County. And what we did was it was landlocked. And so you might say, how is that a title issue? Well, your title company will not give you title insurance or will create an exception based on not having legal access. And so what we did is we cold called all the neighbors and basically got one of the neighbors to agree to sell us an easement for $10,000.

And so I bought this property for, I think it was $40,000, originally under contract for 80, renegotiated down to 40 based on legal access.

Bought it for 40, bought an easement for 10, spent another 13,000 to actually put a physical road in. We put nice like gravel and caliche down and we're all in for 63, put it on the market. We sold this thing for, I think it was 158 within three weeks on the market. And so, you know, I think as, as this conversation unfolds, Seth, I think something i'm seeing in the space is there are still so many ways to make great money in this business.

And they're not all as simple as, oh, hey, send some blind offers, wait for a signed contract and throw it up on the MLS and it'll sell in a week, right? That was awesome in 2021. I love those days, man. I wish I understood business at the level I did back then. I didn't. That's okay. Live and learn. What I do know now is this is still a great business to run and there is still a lot of money to be made in it. It just means you need to be willing to do some things we used to not do. I used to throw out landlocked leads. Whereas now I'd say, Hey, let's cold call the owners. I used to throw away deals with messed up title. Whereas now I say, well, can it be fixed? And is there enough margin? And can we renegotiate on the front end to make this worth it for everybody? I used to not pursue curative deals because of that. We've done some houses, right? I've probably done about 15 houses last year, which is wild to say that we're, you know, just these basically in these trashier parts of town where somebody had died. We tracked down all of the kids, we bought them out individually, we fixed based on airship, we sold the property as is, I didn't touch it, I'm still running it the same way I would the land business where maybe I get a contractor to go out and do like a junk removal, but I still have only ever seen two of my properties on the house side and about a handful on the land side. I've walked a couple of subdivide projects that are fun. So to answer your question.

Some curative deals are still land, guys, you know, and I think it's a great way to add a skill where you can do even more land deals than you used to in a more creative fashion. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think so. One of the things I'm wondering about, because this is a common theme I've heard a lot in 2026 and even last year, is that the land business has gotten way harder. The end of easy land deals is just like a common theme that I've heard. So like there's still money to be made, but it's just like a different landscape. Like you got to really be serious. It's not like a side hustle type thing anymore. Kind of like what you said, like it's not just sending out blind offers mindlessly and deals just come out of thin air. So I'm wondering, like in your experience, what you've seen, like, has the land business gotten harder? Like, are you feeling the pain or not really? Because you're so good at sales and you can, does that kind of cure a lot of problems? Yeah, I would say sales certainly cures. I think if you become a good salesperson, you were never without money. And I tell my wife that frequently. We can talk about that in a second. And I think I want to answer your first question more directly of, has it gotten harder? I would say the answer is definitely. It's definitely gotten harder. I think for a couple of reasons, in any business, over time, right, you have to look at.

What are you doing to acquire customers, right? In the early days, we would use direct mail, we would use cold texting, we would use cold calling. Now, what happens in any marketing channel that stands the test of time is over time, your cost of marketing goes up, right? So marketing is simply capturing attention at some level. And as competition increases, your cost to capture that attention goes up. Let's use direct mail as an example. Okay, We see it twofold. Number one, because USPS is just going to raise the price of postage every now and then. They've got to keep making money and inflation makes things get more expensive over time. It's just a function of how the postal system works here in the US. On top of that, you're going to have rising costs on your mailers over time, right? Like the cost of paper isn't going to remain the same over time, the cost to use energy and material. So the cost of any marketing channel just at a variable expense will go up. With text messaging, I'm sure we've all seen subscriptions have gone up and changed. Data is one of those that maybe has ebbed and flowed depending on who you're using.

Knowing that the cost of attention goes up in marketing, our cost to acquire a deal becomes more difficult, right? So you have one battle here. On another end, you've got your relative margin of a deal, okay? So as competition increases in any business, your margins get compressed. The reason for that being the more people that are doing business in the same plane overall, the willingness to take on a deal at less money also changes, not in our favor, right? More people means people lower their standards. If people lower their standards, you have to compete against other offers where people have lowered their standards. So somebody might lock up a deal. I think a really good way to look at it, Seth, is like pre-2020, it's pretty uncommon, pre-2022 even, pretty uncommon that people would wholesale rural recreational lots, right? People did it. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it was a lot less frequent.

Now, the thing that changed is as the marketplace differed, because we can wholesale, we are actually able to offer a lot more money on a property, which means when you're competing with somebody who's in a flip box, who's only going to flip properties up to maybe 55% of market value is as high as you would go. So, well, that competition, that's squeezing margins, right? And so you look at it and you've got increased cost of marketing. You've got relatively squeezed margins on your unit, your widget of what you're doing business, which is an average land deal. And then our dispositions have changed, right? The cash conversion cycle has gone down because the market's changed, right? You've got all this stuff going on in the global economy between oil prices because of what's going on in the Middle East. You pair that with interest rates are changing that's always going to have some lever on demand at some level whenever you can borrow debt at really cheap rates it stimulates the economy that's how the federal reserve makes sure that we spend money to stimulate what's going on and i'm simplifying things just to paint a picture of like when you ask the question has it gotten harder yes it's gotten a lot harder to make money right now let's come back though and say okay so what does that mean in my own business for example seth i looked at the formula and i said okay, so what do I need to do? I need to decrease my cost of marketing. And so pretty much the only marketing we do is cold calling because.

I could keep my relative costs so dang low. I myself will do some cold calling happily. I go outbound on curative and land deals. I'm actually getting ready. By the time this airs, maybe it will have gone live, but I'm going to do like either a one or two day challenge where I just hit a dialer to see how many land deals I can lock up. And so that should be fun. And so it's how do I not get rid of, but how do I decrease the cost of my marketing on the margin piece? The problem we have to solve for is how do I continue to do deals where I can still afford to run the business.

So on one end, it's making sure you are targeting deals where you can make $50,000, right? If you were only targeting deals where you could make nine grand, well, when those get compressed and your cash conversions go down, like you're not putting yourself in a position to win a lot of times, right? So your relative margins need to increase, which is where we've focused on higher margin deals. And that third piece, the cash conversion piece, there's so many ways to combat this. Market selection is one, right? Where on the front end. Let's pick markets with high demand. I think there's also a piece though of understanding the disposition funnel really well. We're top of funnel. I've got good pictures. I've got good listing. I've got good call to actions in my descriptions. Bottom of funnel, I have a really strong realtor that's pushing people to walk properties and pushing people to make offers, right? That's the sales component. And I think all throughout that process, Seth, the biggest thing is, and the problem I solve at Land Closures Academy is pointing out the inefficiencies of taking you from lead to deal, and then also increasing your relative margin of that deal through really good negotiation tactics, right? So for an example, I had a gentleman who joined the community just a month ago, and all he's doing is wholesaling infill lots in Florida, okay? And he was telling me he's doing these deals where he's making like a thousand bucks on some of his deals. And I said to him, I'm not going to say his name, but I said to him, I said, hey dude, we need to just.

Increase your margin on your deals. I don't want you to change anything else. Here's the script. Here's the training on negotiations. I actually, for your call reviews, I don't want you to submit calls you didn't close, which is what I'll normally do. How do we close closable deals? I said, I want you to submit the calls of the deals you did close so we can train you up on how you could have made more money on the deals you're already doing, right? So what we do in Land Closures Academy is how do we make more money on the business we're already doing, right? Now, if you're frankly just not doing enough volume, we're going to have a conversation around that. But at the end of the day, if you're doing any level of business, you can make more money, right? Make more money on each deal you're doing. Do more deals with the exact same marketing you already have because we're going to plug the leaks in your system. So you're not losing deals to competition or objections or anything else. So super long-winded answer here, Seth. But your question was, has the business gotten harder? The answer is yes, but you have to understand why it's harder. And once you understand why it's harder, well, now we can tackle this as a solvable problem rather than throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ah, it got hard, right? Congratulations. It's difficult to be a top 1% income earner in America, right? I'm sorry you thought this would be easier.

Unfortunately, to be top 1%, to make a half million dollars plus in the world, to run a seven-figure business and be top 10% in business owners in America, it takes work, okay? So yeah, I'm not going to pretend it's as easy as it was back in 2020, but that's not to say you cannot make a very good multi-six figure living running this business. Some part-time, some full-time. It really just depends how you build the business. Long answer. Ask any clarifying questions. You said a couple of key things there. You said to understand why it's harder and then how to solve for that. So like in 30 seconds, really succinct. Why is it harder? And how do we solve for it? Why is it harder? Costs of marketing have gotten more expensive. Your margins have gotten compressed because of competition. We have slower sales cycle because of just the economy and where it is, right? How we fix that is on the front end, decrease your marketing, right? If you can decrease the cost of your marketing on the midpoint, get better at sales. So every dollar I spend on marketing has the highest probability of closing a deal. Also highest probability of increasing the relative margin of every single deal you're doing, if I can just take you from doing a $1,000 deal to a $10,000 deal and you're doing five deals a month already, well, you're going to make an extra $45,000 because of it. That's just focused on one scale for six weeks. That's the only thing we worked on with my one client. Back end, right? I think being smart about your funnel, but also don't have an ego about your prices. Drop your prices, offer owner finance, sell your notes through paper stack or people like Eric Chiraga, and you will fix the cash piece of your business very quickly.

That might be a little more than 30 seconds. A little more, but that's fine. I appreciate that. So the message of get better at sales, totally understand that, totally agree with that. But the word sales is a huge word. Like there's a lot that lives inside of that. I mean, even if you just look at like what the whole funnel is and then what you say, like every single word matters in that funnel, the turnaround time, the delivery, like everything matters. So like if I want to get better at sales, like where do I start? Like, what is the biggest thing that I need to focus on? And if I could just fix one chink of the chain, one problem in my funnel, where do you think most people need to fix that? Yeah. So, man, there's so many different angles that I could hit here. I think where I'm going to start is something that I've been preaching since you've ever had me on the podcast, Seth. And I think that the one place I would start is quantity of offers made. Okay. If we track no other metrics, how many times do you even attempt to actually make a deal close, right? Because at the end of the day, if I don't make an offer to my sellers, they can't tell me yes or no. I'll give an example of somebody you've had on the podcast recently, Shelby Wengreen, right? I love Shelby. I've had the honor of working with her for about a year. She is phenomenal. She just hired her first acquisitions manager.

And her acquisitions manager is awesome, but she's going through the head work a lot of us have gone through. Ajay, their asking price is $125,000 and we're about to offer them 50, 60 grand. How do I do that? These are real numbers on a deal they were working. The first deal that Shelby's new acquisition manager locked up, the seller wanted $125,000.

Now what we did is we took it through the script. We had good negotiation. We made the offer. Okay.

We locked it up for $50,000 and probably sell it for around 105. Okay. And so there's a lot of lessons in there that I could talk about. But the biggest one is that we need to disregard asking price as a metric of whether I should or shouldn't make an offer. Right. So if I, if I could do anything, Seth, I would just increase the quantity of offers. I'm going to start there. One question on that, because I've had this happen to me many times where somebody says, if your offer is not going to be at least 120,000 or whatever the number is, then don't make an offer. If they say that, you still want to disregard it? Yeah, I would still make the offer. Like they've told you flat out, I'm not going to accept anything out of that. That doesn't matter. A hundred percent. Okay, cool. So how do you make that palatable when they've said that and you're not responding with a ridiculously low offer? Is there some way that you make it seem okay or something? How do you get them to entertain that? So it's a couple of things, And that's where we could start getting into a little bit of scripting, right? Because I think the reality is something I like to point out, Seth, is when a seller says that 95% of your land investors are going to be so intimidated, they won't pursue the conversation. I think the reality is we have to remember our job as salespeople is to help people make decisions. Okay. And so I want to tell you a story on this, you know, on the curative side. Okay. I had a woman I worked with, I cold called her.

She was one out of three owners. And when I initially spoke with her, she said there was nothing I could do to help her. And I said, actually, a lot of people tell me that. And that's usually a signal that I'm the only one that can help. Would it be okay if I asked a couple questions just so we could go through some options, right?

And so, again, there's a bunch of sales lingo that I've already dropped just kind of in that one way I answered that is I want to be a firm. Yeah, I love that. That's really good. Whatever objection people throw at me. So that's fun. And there's so much of this stuff and we only have so much time today. You know, as we go through this process, she tells me that there are these horrible family members that will not sign anything and are horrible to work with and this, that, and the other. Eventually we buy out our interest for $10,000 and I get a text from her husband. Oh my gosh, you should see her right now. She's at peace. Thank you so much for doing this. Right. And the story there, the reason I tell that is a lot of times people don't realize what they're up against and they don't know how to solve their problems. They don't have the options that we have as investors. And what you need to do is take them through processing the decision to actually understand whether it's a good or a bad decision for them. Okay. Here's another example. When your kids were younger, Seth, right? What did they tell you they wanted for dinner? A lot of times, I'm sure chicken nuggets, I'm sure macaroni, I'm sure desserts that they shouldn't have had, right? I'm sure there were times your wife probably prepared wonderful meals. I don't know if she cooks or not, but great.

Then I'm sure there were times she prepared wonderful meals. And we have to look at this and say, what is better for this child based on what I know? Okay. The macaroni or this wonderful, healthy meal that my wife has just prepared. Okay. The kids don't know. They don't know what's good for them. And in the same vein, even though a seller who's an adult sure has told me, don't call me unless you can give me 120, right? The reality is they don't oftentimes know what's actually good for them in their life. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you every seller is a deal, Seth. My philosophy is this.

If I can just walk through the decision-making with my seller.

Meaning what's the opportunity cost in their life for this cash? Because here's the reality.

Oftentimes when we make offers to property owners, Seth, we're offering them between $30,000 to $100,000 in cash. And I always tell this to new reps I'm training. I say, man, if you were going door to door and you had a backpack filled with that money and every time you made an offer, you actually dumped it out in $100 bills on their coffee table. Do you think the conversation would be a little bit different absolutely right and the only difference is the conviction between both of us that the money is real and the problem that it solves in their life another thing i often say is like man seth you know you're obviously a successful business owner but you know if we made the magic wand i said hey seth i could wire you a hundred thousand dollars right now would it solve some problem in your life just something something right now it doesn't need to be a huge one necessarily but i think if i could help you get rid of something that you forget you own or don't really care about or don't really use and I can help you process that it actually solves some other problem in your life, you are more likely to take an offer that is detached from the property value and attached to this problem we're solving. And so I would tell you, yes, I would go ahead and make the offer. Now, I'm gonna give you guys a couple actionable litmus tests that I think are helpful. We have to acknowledge the constraints of the business. So like if I don't have sales capacity to take on all the leads in the world and you're getting a ton Let's say you're cold texting you have ton of leads hit your desk Some of them give you asking prices if you need to disqualify from a bandwidth perspective.

I would say my litmus test is if we're within 30% of market value, I'm always going to have that conversation. Okay. So let's say a property is worth a hundred thousand dollars. If the asking price is 130 or less, I'm always going to have that conversation. I have seen time and time again, Shelby's deal being a great example of, it was worth a hundred, 105. They wanted 125. We closed it at 50.

Right. And so I think a lot of times sellers don't know. They don't know what their options are. They don't know what problem it solves in their life. Our job as salespeople is just to help people make a decision. And whether that decision is to work with us or not is up to them at the end of the day. And so they hear sales, right? Seth, I think so many land investors hear sales and they're like, oh, you're going to be some, some slick, you know, kind of wise guy. Like I'm at a car a lot. No, that's not at all what I'm doing. Honestly, the best sales people are listeners, not yappers, Seth. We need to be able to listen to what problems are going on in their life and then pivot based on what we know and what solutions that we can actually offer. Because we have so many options as land investors, Seth. We can buy outright. We can trade. I've heard of investors that have traded things before. We can double close if they're okay with longer timelines. We can buy on seller financing. That's becoming a lot more common in this market. I don't know if you're seeing it. I'm happy to talk about what we're seeing. I have a lot of people in our community that are buying on seller financing now. And so we have those are four options I laid out just then and there. And there are infinitely more based on the situation of the seller. But a lot of times sellers don't know what their options are. They think their only option is to get an offer they like, sell it for cash, and it's got to be in 15 days or they don't even want to hear it, right? And it's like, well...

Let's take a step back and figure out what other problem this solves in your life. What will that magical $30,000 to $100,000 wire solve in your life? How can we work together to get you that solved problem? And a lot of times that problem, Seth, and if I could just hit one more point here, is what I call a life event, okay? So that's like my own, I'll call it proprietary. This isn't trademarked or anything. It's just a function of me being in this business for a long time. A lot of times our sellers are not motivated the same way a house wholesaler is used to motivation. It's not my foot's on fire. I'm about to lose this property. My car just broke down. That has happened sometimes. But instead, it is they are either actively pursuing a life event or a life event just happened. Let me give you a couple examples, right? Oh, well, this was a property that I bought when my wife and I were going to move down to Florida. She passed away two years ago, so we're not going to do that anymore. That's too bad. That was the life event. Knowing that we have a detachment, that's what we're going to work on, right? Another one that's really common is pursuing retirement. A lot of our sellers are a little elderly.

And so, hey, what are you going to do when you sell the property? That's just going to go towards retirement. Oh, okay. What do you do for work right now? Do you like your job how does this get you closer to retirement does that speed up that process at all so you're telling me if we got you a wire for fifty thousand dollars you'd be two years closer to retirement would you prefer to sit on the property for another five and maybe make a little more at the end of this or retire in three years instead of five right so you see how we're processing decisions that maybe they're not thinking through on their own based on that life event that thinking those are just a couple examples how i define a life event is your day-to-day looks different before and after that event, right? Retirements, deaths, births, empty nesters, moves, new jobs are all examples of life events. And we have to look for them if they give them to us, or we have to basically create them, manufacture them within the conversation, which we do in our seven figure land flipper script. And so I say all this to say, I don't remember what your original question was, but I really hope I answered it.

So I saw a little, uh, one of these little Facebook story videos from you the other day where you would talk about the four objections, it's price, spouse, timing, and was life event the fourth one? Trust slash certainty. So like they don't think it's gonna happen basically. I almost think of it kind of like flashcards in a way, like objection, okay, here's how you answer that. But like sometimes the objection comes up in like a weird format that like doesn't quite fit like a cookie cutter the way that you're thinking of it. Do you ever have it where like you're just kind of stumped? You identify what the objection is, but like the way that they phrased it, You don't know exactly how to respond to that specific version of the objection, or can you just handle anything now? That's a great question. Me personally, I can handle anything. People in my community, they can handle anything. And the reason why is because I don't, I think the flashcards are great, but I train on frameworks. So, you know, I think the word script turns off a lot of people and I tell them the script is a tool. This is meant to serve you, not put you in a box. Yeah. Frameworks are meant to serve you. Objection handling is meant to serve you, right? And I think different personalities need it a different way.

Seth, I'm honored to have been your friend for many years. So I know for somebody with your personality, it actually does help to memorize that beforehand. So you're ready when the objection comes, right? I also think though, a step beyond that is once you've understood like the exact objection handling, well, now let's take a step back and let's look at the framework for how we built the objection handling. And so the framework that I use, I call ADEQ. So it's four letters. And that framework, it stands for first, I acknowledge and educate my seller. Okay, excuse me, acknowledge then disarm AD, then I educate my seller. And then I ask a question. Okay, it's very intentional. So let's say they do hit me with a very weird sounding objection. Do you have an example by chance? If not, I can try to think of one. Like, let's say it's the timing thing, for example. And what they're talking about is a life event, but the life event is like a really bizarre, weird thing that you've never even heard of before. And you're trying to respond.

Is if you understand what they're going through when you really have no idea. Like you don't, never even heard of that before. That's just the first thing that comes to mind, but. No, that's good. So let's say they want to sell the property, but they're distracted because they're trying to sell their boat right now. And if they don't sell their boat in time, they have to make another payment on the boat. And this is just too much for them right now. Is that bizarre enough? How's that? Yeah, it's good. It's random enough. It's kind of a weird, funky timing objection, right? I think it's also just like a busy objection, but how I would handle that is, again, if you come up with a better example, I'm happy to tackle one. I think that's a good one to start, right? I need to sell my boat or else I have another payment. I'm too stressed and I can't think about this right now, right? Let's play with that. And so what I would do again, acknowledge or disarm. Hey Seth, I understand that must be really stressful to have that much on your plate right now. I will tell you, Seth, a lot of times people typically will work with us because they're busy and they have so much on their plate. And so basically what we do is, you know, we're already on the phone, assuming we can work out terms, we basically just walk through an agreement together, and then it's hands off for you. So most of the time people work with us, because we actually take things off their plate rather than adding them to their plate. And, you know, you're going to get a check at the end of all this, which it sounds like we might be killing two birds with one stone if God forbid this boat doesn't sell, right? So I mean, knowing that, right, knowing that I'm actually taking things off your plate, do you have five minutes for us to just walk through an agreement really quickly? And you can tell me whether it makes sense to move forward?

Yeah. So I can see how that, that kind of does, it's pliable. Like that can, that can work towards anything. If you just kind of fill in the blank with like the boat or whatever the thing is, right? Yeah. And, and just to break that down a little bit further, right? The acknowledge and disarm goes hand in hand. What I'm doing there is making my prospect feel heard. I want them to know, I hear what you're saying and I understand the problem, right? The education piece is actually where I'm like selling them, so to speak. And that's where you reposition the thing that they told you into why working with us actually helps you, right? Or I just need to educate them on whatever the actual issue is. For example, if it's trust, like I might say, hey, Seth, a lot of people that I've spoken with have had bad experiences with other people before, or maybe you're just a little bit skeptical because you get so many scam calls nowadays. So what I typically do is I'll introduce you to my attorney or my title company who can vouch for me that I've done business they're actually local to you and you could even pop in and talk to them if you needed to Seth if I was to put something together like that would that make you feel a little bit more comfortable on working with me so again.

Acknowledge and disarm. I'm acknowledging the objection, telling them you feel heard disarming, letting them put their guard down a little bit so that they actually hear me when I come in for education, where I tell them either a third party story, here's what I've done in the past, or here's a problem I've solved in the past, or here's how the process works. If it's a process question, and then I finish off with a question because it's like that whole, you know, I'm asking the questions because you're in charge when you do that. Right. And so I say all that to say that framework does so much because if you have an objection, you can make them feel heard. And for me, I'm thinking while I'm making them feel heard a lot of times, right? You educate based on how you solve that problem in the past. And it really boils down to those four. So if you study those four and understand them and know kind of like the 10 or 11 that are the most common, you finish off with a question.

And in that question, you maintain control of the conversation and then take it one step closer to us doing business together. Does that make sense? I do want to ask one question that I asked Dave Denniston, and I'm pivoting a little bit here, but so Dave Denniston has gotten into the curative title business in large part because of his conversations with you. And one of the questions I asked Dave was the land investing business has certain challenges these days. The curative title business also has certain challenges. Sometimes they're similar, sometimes are very different ones. I was asking him like, which battles do you prefer to fight? The ones in the land business or the curative title business? And his answer was like, the jury is still out. I haven't been doing this for that long. You haven't been doing this longer. So I'm curious from your standpoint, as somebody who is very competent at sales, which challenges do you prefer? And I know sometimes there's crossover, like it's the same business, but when it's a different thing, like a house with curative title issues versus just a clean title piece of land overall, which battles do you prefer to fight? Yeah, so man, Seth, Can I answer that in a very long answer? I think sometimes let me, let me paint some context and I like to show the thoughtfulness of the answer because the truthful one is it depends. Okay.

And let me explain why. I think the land business is easier from a technical skillset. It is much easier to, you know, pull a list to give it to land caller, right? Joe Roberts is a good friend of mine. I think, you know, Joe, right? Landcaller is a service. I have a lot of investors that have worked with him. Great guy, devout faith, just like family man. Awesome dude through and through. Big fan of Joe. Seth, if you have an affiliate link with Landcaller, you should drop it. I do. I'll put that in the show notes, by the way. I love Joe. Cannot recommend him enough. But, you know, pull a list, go to Landcaller, calls come in, you call them back, you lock up a contract, you post it on a flat fee MLS broker. There's so many things that make this so easy. To execute on the skills required to get a deal done. Curative title requires a higher level skillset, but it's a lower barrier to acquire a customer. Okay, so let's come back to the framework I talked about earlier, Seth, when you asked me, has land gotten harder? I talked about marketing, I talked about margin, I talked about the disposition, right? The relative ease to get to my cash, right? Cash conversion cycles, the fancy business term. So if we looked at those three lenses, cost to acquire a customer with curative title, much cheaper, much, much cheaper. I can find a list.

Oftentimes what we'll do is cross-reference tax delinquency and death, right? Those are the two variables I cross-reference and those are the leads that I go outbound on. I can pull a list for about 30 bucks off the tax roll, sometimes free from the tax roll. I can have a Pakistani VA or AI clean that up based on the naming scheme. So we're all into this data for about a hundred bucks now. Okay. I can skip trace these records. We use skip genie a lot of times because we're doing it at an individual rate. And oftentimes will want family members, I think I pay 17 cents a skip, about 300 bucks. I have enough list phone numbers to, if I just call this on my personal cell phone or I pay 25 bucks for a phone service, I will have a deal within a couple of weeks. Okay. And those deals, they'll make 30, 50, a hundred grand typically, right? Now that's the marketing piece. Okay. That's also the margin piece on curative, right? Whereas with land, I might spend a couple thousand bucks to get two or three deals. Okay. Now the, the variable here, Seth comes in the scale and the dispositions of the business. And, and let me, let me expand on that. So when I say scale.

I think most people have not really grown businesses they don't they've never had big staff they've never had overhead more than like 10 grand a month or something right my rent at my office is half of that for context so i think it's it's a question of how big you want your business to be and everybody wants to make more money but not everybody's willing to take the risk appropriate my friends that do land at scale dave denniston sumner healy clay hepler ben gallant and nick staley right the guys that are doing multiple six figures monthly they also have overheads between $30,000 to $80,000 a month, right? Enough to make most of us really sweat month to month when you hear that as an overhead. And so the land business requires more capital upfront, but it's a lot simpler, okay, which makes it easier to bring on a 20-person team eventually. The curative title business is a lot cheaper to run, but requires a higher skillset to execute. And so what that means is you have more expensive talent or you have a ceiling on how you can scale. The only person I've seen do this at like an eight figure plus range is Logan Fulmer. And Logan's model has been to scale with business partners. So he brings on smart 50, 50 partners. They live in the, not live in, sorry. They work in the same office.

You might think they make so much money and they're awesome people. Their model has been 50-50 partners because the overall competency required is much higher. Similar stuff to like a law firm, right? You have a high degree of skill and accreditation required. And so because of that, you have partners in the business that are required to both sell and fulfill work and then shared resources underneath them to get those things done. I've churned through about four acquisition managers now on the curative side, whereas AMs are so much easier on the land flipping side. But again, the relative scale for the businesses is what changes. So to investors that want to make two to $500,000 a year, you know, I'd say it doesn't really matter. I think you can keep your overhead extremely low if you do curative, but get ready to learn some stuff, right? With our friend Dave, for example, I'm honored to be JVing two deals with him right now. One that's a million dollar land parcel, right? With a bunch of owners we're working on. Another one that's, we're all in for 25 grand. We're on the market for 95 right now, and we'll probably end up selling it around 80. We've already got two verbal 70 and 75 on it. So, you know, it'd be a good deal. Took us about a week to acquire all of it. What I'll also say from the sales perspective is on the acquisition piece, I would say it requires a little bit more finesse in land in the sense of, I mean, what's that old expression? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut, right? I think you do enough volume in either business, you're going to get some deals. I do think it's a little bit easier on the curative side because people are so detached from it. So I see this to say, land is easier to scale.

Oh, the last thing I want to add, Seth, your relative ceiling for a deal in land is untapped. So, for example, my friend John Jasniak, he'll do $2 million deals in gross profit spread, right? Really hard to do in a curative deal. There are deals that happen like that. They're very, very rare. Whereas land subdivides, man, you and I have plenty of friends that have done $500,000 deals, $1 million deals. Plus, I know people personally that have done $10 million land deals that they've subdivided or entitled. and that scale per like unit of deal doesn't exist the same way in curative title. I think you have an average higher margin, but you have a lower ceiling. And so the last piece I'll add is on the disposition piece with curative, you're in such a low cost basis that you can afford to discount heavily similar to how we did land pre 2020.

Now I wasn't around for that, but I've studied the greats, if you will, and the model back then was, Hey, demand isn't super high for these random parcels. So we're going to list at 70 or 80% of market value to get things to move quickly. You can still do that. It's harder to do it on the land side if your acquisition price is getting pushed up though. Curative, I'm in 10 to 25 cents on the dollar. So I can do that with these trap houses or rural pieces of land and I'm able to get to cash a lot faster. So very long answer. So it depends on your goal, your margin, your bandwidth, your knack for sales, your desire for scale and for team. So there's a lot of nuances in that, man, which makes it really hard to answer like, what's better? They both rock, man. That's why I still do both deals. I'm just very picky about high margin land deals and good markets. And I'm very picky about curative deals, not being like a thousand owners on them so that I'm not doing too much work to make almost no money. Because you can lose money in both is the answer, right?

I've heard a handful of people saying things like the land business is not a side hustle anymore. And I think what they mean when they're saying that is like, this is not a like hobbyist. Yeah, I'll just tinker around with it a little bit on the weekends. Like you got to really run it like a business is the other way I've heard it said. Like you just got to take it really seriously. Have good systems, a good follow up, like be meticulous about it. Do you think curative title is a better side hustle? Like, is it more something yet? You can tinker around with it. Like you can do it on your free time as long as you're, you know, good at analysis and finding the problems and talking to people. Yeah, it's a good question. I would say on the front end, again, it requires a certain set of skillset competency. I will say on the back end, if you were to do it where you just JV a deal with somebody like me and, you know, I take on the risk of capital to buy out heirs, the legal piece to work with my attorneys and that whole thing, I think it would be a great business to side hustle.

However, I think you have to JV it with full-time operators because these deals can sit, man. With land, you don't have the nuance of taking a deal through 100% ownership necessarily, right? It's like you have one or two people you're working with. It's like husband, wife, duo, or two siblings or whatever. But then you've got a contract and the rest of the systems are pretty turnkey, man. You stick it with a realtor and you just kind of wait sometimes, right? And so I would argue if you were going to be a sole owner and run this business, I think part-time land wins, actually, because your skill set competency and your need to constantly make decisions is much lower. So it requires less brain bandwidth overall. There's a lot of set it and forget it things you can do in land because there's been maturity in the space, right? Like I said, man, you pull a list from Land Portal, Land Insights. You give it over to Joe Roberts at Land Caller. You wait for those leads to come in. And heck, I know some people that.

You can hire like a VA or an acquisition manager. I wouldn't recommend it if you're like super part time, unless you've done a good chunk of these and you can. But then once you've got a contract, again, it's a dispo, man, you post it somewhere, you bring it to a realtor. And like there are all these ways you can kind of outsource and you sort of just need to funnel the things well and make sure your leads are good and make sure you're closing your deals. And I actually would argue it's easier to run this business part time than it would be to run curative title part time. The caveat here, let me actually add a story here for some context. I'm going to use Shelby as an example. Again, I love, I love her as an example. I think she's a wonderful human. I know you've, she's a stride user, obviously. And I think you guys have become close in that Shelby is a mother. She's got a little toddler at home. And when her and I started working together, she told me, she said, I've got about three hours a day. I can work on this. Okay. I said, okay, well let's look at this business. And when we were goal setting, I said to her, Shelby, I think there's two questions you have to ask whenever you set a goal, right? Seth, I think if you and I were to just be like, Oh, what's your goal? Now I want to make 10 million bucks this year. Cool. let's go make 10 million. Sounds nice, right? There's a counter question to that of, are you willing to do what it takes to hit that goal? And I think that's the question most people don't answer. So in land, for example, somebody might tell you, I want to make a million bucks this year. Cool, man. Are you willing to be a good sales manager to American-based US acquisition managers? Are you willing to have overhead around 30 to 40 grand a month? Are you willing to need to work in the business that's required for that?

No. Okay, cool, then you don't wanna make a million dollars. You'd want the result without any of the effort, which is okay. Just be truthful about what it's gonna take to get there. To come back to the Shelby example.

We looked at her goal and, you know, she wanted a good multiple six figure groove. She had a couple hours. She could work every day. And I think someone like Shelby treats it more like the gym where you and I both know some jacked people. Seth, you look great. I've seen you in person plenty of times. But yeah. How many hours a week do you spend at the gym? A few. Nothing crazy. Maybe like four to seven, right? Four to seven, maybe 10 if you're like a training for something crazy. It's kind of similar with a part-time land investor where as long as you're consistent and you hold high standards about the work that you do, you can still run this business very part-time. Now you have to be very intentional about how you do that. Shelby's got an EA or yeah, she's got a VA that's her EA. She's got an acquisitions manager. She's plugged into my sales training and she works consistently every single day. And that affords her the ability to still lock up good deals, right? So you've got to be intentional in your design, but it's not part-time in the same way that it was in 2020 where you could just blast out blind offers, let the contracts come, list it with a realtor, make a quick 40 G's and call it a day. So the part-time looks different. It still requires work, but again, the same way the gym requires work, I would say if you can be consistent and disciplined and have the skillset to, you know, lift weights correctly, do the cardio correctly, not injure yourself in business. If you could learn the skills of sales, learn the skills of marketing.

Make sure you're plugged in with the right communities and using the right vendors. This is still a great business, right? And I think the last thing I'll add is if truthfully you wanted to run this extremely part-time and you got a lot of knowledge of how this business works. I would say on market subdivides are probably the easiest way to do that. You have no cost for your marketing. The thing you have to be comfortable with is the slow sales cycle. If you're okay waiting a year for your parcels to sell, maybe your partner has the full-time income you guys live off of. Maybe you've got some good savings, or maybe you've just been doing this long enough. You have a stockpile of stuff. If you could just dedicate a couple hours a day, it takes about 400 to 500 on market offers on subdivides to get a good deal. You work with an equity funder, right? Somebody that's going to do just like a 50-50 split with you on a subdivide. Somebody like a Justin Sliva, who we're both friends with over at Plum Capital, right? I don't know if that's the name of his group anymore or not, but Justin Sliva is a great example. Good human, understands land, will split capital with you, do a 50-50 JV split, right? And you don't have ongoing interest costs, which is, again, the fear of somebody who's part-time, or I don't have income, I don't want overhead. Great, run that model, you'll make a couple hundred grand a year. I can almost, I don't want to guarantee anything publicly, right? This isn't financial advice, whatever, blah, blah, disclosure we need.

I think you could run that business part-time as well. It's just going to feel less good. It's not sexy, Seth. It's really boring, actually. But boring makes money, man. So we've kind of gotten a good feel. You've painted the picture well in terms of the differences and kind of what it takes to succeed at each one. But I want to try to ask you to do something impossible. In fact, I would be frustrated by this question if somebody asked me. But if you were only allowed to do land investing or curative title, if you'd only do one, which one would you pick? That's man if i could only do one which one would it be there's so many variables in answering that and i'm a this is why it's an impossible it's an impossible thing to answer but like it's funny i have not been able to choose to the point where my business does both right i think it would it would depend on like lifestyle overhead appetite goals for income right so knowing what your goals are and what you want out of life? I think based on the current market conditions, I would have to pick curative title to make sure.

I guess I'm only allowed to pick one. I would pick curative title in my actions. I will continue to invest in land. That decision, how much of that decision is driven by the fact that you're good at sales? Like if you were terrible at sales, would you give the same answer? If I was terrible at sales, I'd actually probably lean more towards curative, ironically, because it requires less finesse. It just requires a lot of time, honestly. People don't talk about how curative is a lot of work. So the moment after I get a verbal from one co-owner, for example.

I'm gonna spend three to 10 hours verifying a fact pattern, prepping a closing packet, and an affidavit of airship. There's a very operational intensive piece people don't always talk about in that business. And then I've got to track down all the other owners and if they're not compliant, now I've got to pull the legal lever, which costs me money, right? And so there's these backstops that aren't as glamorous, that I like to be transparent about, which is also why, like from a business context, Seth, you need enough margin in your deals to hire good people. If I wasn't doing $50,000 curative title deals, I couldn't pay $500 an hour for an attorney, right? I couldn't do that with $9,000 land deals. Now, the reason I am so bullish on curative right now is truthfully that combination of low cost of marketing. So if I can just bring in three to five really good people, bringing in $50,000 deals, one to three of those a month that I can sell fairly quickly on the back end, I can run a very profitable business. The management required to scale a land business to about a half million a month is very different. It requires a lot of data, VAs, teams, consistent overhead that's just not the same. So your startup costs in land are much higher today than they were five years ago. And I think that's where it gets more difficult. That doesn't mean it's a barrier or you shouldn't pursue, it just means you have to be mindful of the business you're getting into. Yeah, I do think knowing what I know about Curative Title, and I'm certainly not the expert on it, but the way that we've seen competition increase in the land business.

It's hard to imagine that that same thing would happen in Curative Title because there's just too many things to like slow a person down, too many reasons for a person to throw up their hands and be like, I can't do it. Land is just, I feel like it's more scalable, like you were talking about. Like it's much more of like a push these buttons and this will happen type thing. Whereas Curative Title is like, I don't know, like there's a lot of different weird things you got to figure out. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think too, they obviously go together, right? Like Land has plenty of title defects. And that's where I think if you pair the strategies, man, I'm about to do a campaign in the next month, just targeting landlocked properties, actually, and see what it yields. Because I know a lot of landlocked property owners get targeted by, you know, your run of the mill investors, and they all back out, right? And so I'm curious if I pursue these owners to either do a buyout really cheap or actually offer to do like a joint venture where we go in and we will like facilitate getting legal access and then we have a split on the back end. There's ways to run these businesses, Seth, with next to no overhead and the tools we have available today just make that so possible. So.

You know, again, even as you asked me the A or B question, I'm like, man, both go hand in hand. And this is why I jumped on curative because now I can do landlocked deals. And now I can deal with multiple owners on the land. Again, about 30% of the like outbound curative deals we're doing are land deals, right? So I don't want people to think I don't do any land. And then we do a lot of bread and butter. You know, we're still doing flips. I had a great Benton County, Arkansas flip I did with a partner we bought for 450,000. We sold for 750. We did one in February. That was a great buy for 150. We sold it for 240.

I'm still doing flips, man. I'm still doing. We just took down a subdivide in Anderson County, South Carolina last week. That I bought for one 90 and we're spending 10 grand on surveys and perk tests. And then we're going to, we're listing this thing at five 80. So I'm just really picky about the land deals I do, but man, I'm still doing dozens of land deals a year, right? They just, they just look different. Right. And I'm not spending $20,000 a month on the same data and marketing that I used to. I've just rejigged the model for the business. You know so i love land as an asset i love the industry i love the people in this industry i just also enjoy stacking skills as time goes on i think seth too like as we talk about the market today you know you've had people on here i think you just released an episode with what's his name chris rude is that his name yeah you're seeing him you're seeing uh brent bowers i think you had on what are they doing with land they're going vertical man right like you had a mobile home or modular or whatever they're doing, that's another way to monetize on land. If you can just do the skill of acquisition, which again, you need good sales, you can make money on land by going vertical.

And when we're already conditioned to like a six month cash conversion cycle in a normal flip or wholesale, it's not that blasphemous to go ahead and go vertical, right? I think that's one skill stack. I think curative is another skill stack. I think sales is another skill stack. I think subdivides is another skill stack. Now, if you pair all of these, what if I go outbound, get a rural recreational property that had an airship issue that I solved subdivided and added land home packages to well I just made a million bucks on one deal and I don't have to do anything else the rest of the year okay so this is where these things are not mutually exclusive right and I know you asked me an ab question for good clickbait and I did a terrible job answering it but let the record show it's because you know business isn't in a box man and I think uh somebody with my personality loves that about business right because I'm super ADD I'm type I have an Enneagram enthusiast, where I have fun pursuing multiple things, which is why I live the life that I do.

Okay, so tell me about the Landscaling Summit. I know I went to the first year, I missed last year, unfortunately, but I'm planning to be there this year. But help me understand, like, why did you decide to do this? So I will start, Seth, that the first year, it was a direct call from God, okay? So I'm gonna talk about my faith publicly here for just a minute, where I had dropped off my wife at the airport, I think it was around Easter time and I was listening to, um.

Man, I was listening to, uh, Stephen Schwartz's book, what it takes. And he has this chapter on, uh, philanthropy. I almost said philosophy, wrong pH in that I just felt the presence of the Lord. And I had paused the book and I had heard him tell me, you need to throw a fundraising gala to fight human trafficking. Right. I was like, Lord, I do not know how to do that. At the time I'm probably 25 years old. right? And I'm a couple of years older now, but I'm still in my twenties. I have relatively low life experience, Seth. And I think sometimes people forget that because I have relatively high business experience and I'm very transparent about the skills that I do and don't have. I have no idea how to throw a fundraising gala. And I asked the Lord, I said, Lord, I don't even know how to get people to a gala. He said, yeah, but you know how to get people to a land event.

Funny enough, I had started the land scaling summit because I knew it was the only way I knew how to bring together business owners with checkbooks where I could raise awareness for this horrible thing that happens in the world and fundraise money to help and rehab victims from it. And so that's what we did. And I started the event based on what I knew, and I knew the pain points of land investors. And so I said, I'm going to do my best to bring together the greatest minds in land, right?

And have honest discussions, right? I think my, not issue, but my problem with other land events, or maybe what I felt like was lacking, was honest discussions about the intricacies of their business. So for example, Seth, you and I, we go to a land event and they present on a topic and presentations are awesome, man. Not everybody's a presenter, number one. Number two, you don't get the full depth of somebody's skillset and knowledge in a presentation that you do in a sit down conversation. It's why people love podcasts, right? I think number two is we had this gap where, you know, there are these brilliant events like our friend Dave Denniston that runs the Unconference every year, which are awesome, right? But you don't necessarily have like a one to many sharing aspect. So different events do different things. Okay. I think there is a time for a hardcore training event where you just, you know, Logan Fulmer runs these training events where you're just drilling information all day. Great events, they serve a point, right? You're training, okay? You've got Dave Dennison at the Unconference where you're just masterminding for two days straight and you sit down, you're breaking bread, you're building relationships and you're getting into the weeds of your business. I think that's awesome, right?

But I felt like we were lacking a space where we brought literally the best minds in the land space to sit down and have honest conversations where we break down the challenges in their business, why they made the decisions that they did, like you and I are talking about right now, and how investors that are sitting here in the fear and uncertainty of the current marketplace, how we can navigate it the same way you know the guys that know how to make money will. And not only that now we have an opportunity to talk to them with a q a at the end with us being in the rooms and us being able to have these conversations i intentionally engineer a two hour lunch break to make sure people can network the same way that you would so that we have an opportunity to talk with these minds so the format of the event came from a call from god in the first year and we threw this gala and we fundraised money we fundraised forty thousand dollars to fight human trafficking it was awesome and the next year people asked are you going to do that again and i said well the transparently the gala was a lot of work and i think i'm just going to donate some money towards this cause instead this year. But I had people in my industry that, you know, begged me to throw the event this year because it's such a good time the first year. And so I did. And it was awesome, Seth. Last year, we had double the attendance. We had almost 200 people at this event. I'll just say that's huge for a land event. Like I haven't heard of a bigger one than that in the land investing space. So congrats to you on getting that many people together. It was very difficult. And transparently, I don't think people know this. You know, You and I have both been on the event throwing side.

They are just not profitable. They might make a little bit of money, but guys, I am good at sales. I make a lot more money doing one deal than I do throwing an event.

If I just do one curative deal where I make 50 grand, I'll make more money than I will throwing the land scaling summit. The amount of effort that goes into curating sponsors that goes into making sure my conversations are good, that make sure I research. I have to research every single guest as we sit down for these fireside chats to bring out the most valuable information, right? In this sit down format, the amount of work that goes into the project management of securing a venue. I had to put $9,000 down for the venue that we have this year to block off October 15th and 16th. We're doing a Thursday, Friday this year because last year we had so many people who couldn't come because of weddings and soccer games that time of year. And so I said, you know what, we're going to try a Thursday, Friday, I might shoot myself in the foot about it. But that's okay. We have a huge venue. And so I'm bringing again that the best minds in the space together.

And I'm going to sit down and have honest conversations with them about how we navigate making money in our niche of land investing. We are going to bring in a whole panel of the best people I know in Curative Title. We are going to, I don't know if I'm going to bring anybody in for vertical or not, because it's getting more and more common of people doing kind of these land home packages, of people doing, you know, modulars. I wouldn't be opposed to bringing somebody on. I don't know anybody super well in that niche. And I'm very particular about everybody that speaks at one of my events. I don't want it to be a pitch fest. I will offer people to sign up into the Land Closures Academy typically. But again, it's one conversation for an hour, typically not need sort of hard sell credit card machine in the back type stuff. I'm not Grant Cardone.

Now, the focus and the thesis of the event has always been, how do I bring about the greatest minds in land, have honest conversations, and the most amount of business owners in a room so that you leave with the exact action plan that you need, right? So it's this mix of what I didn't see at all the other events that I'm so passionate about where I am willing to basically sacrifice myself for two days. I don't think people realize how draining it is to be upfront in a room in front of hundreds of people for two days, but I just don't have the confidence that I have somebody else that can do it at the level and understanding of our niche that I can. And so, man, I end up like a potato for the next three days after these events because they're so hard on me, but they are just so fun and so life giving. And after every event, Seth, the amount of people that come up to me and they say, dude, I just had these breakthroughs.

I understand I need to do this thing. And they go and they make an extra quarter million dollars in their business. And that stuff just lights me up. I'm sure you can tell my energy really spiked when you asked me about it, because I'm so passionate about bringing people together and honest conversation that you just don't always get over the internet because we're all trying to put on a show and look good. And there's these sound bites and it's a different game, man. And just shaking hands and breaking bread with people cannot be replaced, especially in this ever growing AI industry where I never know if a message somebody writes me or an email they wrote me. Was that them? Was that an AI agent? You can't replace it in person, man. So I just, I want your brain, Seth. I want Clay's brain. I want Sumner's. I want all these people that I'm trying to bring together the best minds in land, all running real businesses, making millions of dollars a year and helping investors do the same. And yeah, man. So long story long, we are throwing the land scaling summit again this year. It will be on October 15th and 16th. That is a Thursday and Friday. You can find all the details on landscalingsummit.com. We will likely have a code Seth for a discount in that. So if you see a coupon code, type in Seth. Seth will get a small affiliate commission. We will also give you guys a discount, but I would highly recommend anybody that is in land and trying to grow. You got to check it out. What follow up questions do you have, man? I talked for so much. I'm so excited to talk about this event. I love it.

Yeah, totally. Well, I'm just thinking about, and I guess this is coming from my own perspective too, but I know there's other people where for some of us, it can be a huge effort to like fly across the country for something like this. Like they got to leave family behind. I didn't realize this until I had kids, like what a big ask it is to go anywhere for anything. Like it's just a big deal to do that. So it's got to be worth it. What makes this one worth it's having? And I already know the answer to this, but I'm curious to hear your answer. Yeah, it's a great question. I would say, again, I am fighting to bring, you know, number one is the caliber of the speakers that are there, but number two, the caliber of the attendees. I think if you talk to anybody that's been to my events in the past, focus of the investor that we attract are oftentimes full timers are oftentimes people that have been through whatever issue you're going through. We have people that have worked every marketing channel. You know, I think, um, in some of the older camps.

The only events that happen are the ones where people are running the exact play that they teach. I don't teach a play, man. I'm not teaching you to flip desert squares. I'm not teaching you to do double closings. I'm not teaching you to do rural rec. I teach you how to convert more deals. And so I bring together people where if your intention is to do more deals, you are in the right place, right? And so any investor that wants community, that wants to shake hands with people in the space is so hard. Like, Seth, you know how hard it is? you and I are great friends. And we still only talk a couple times a year, like an honest sit down conversation where the camera's not on, right? You know how hard it is to get people together like that. So when you know that those minds are going to be in the room, you and Mike are going to be in the room with us, right? Like that becomes an opportunity to build a relationship with Seth Williams to ask other stride users how they're using their CRM. Like you can just get so much help in two days instead of in two years, right? Because you have all the information in one big room. So man, I understand that it is difficult to get places, which is also why I'm a big fan of living in a city with a big airport. The event is in Dallas. We have a huge airport. Most airports have a direct flight to Dallas, unless you're flying from a smaller city, at which point I'm sorry, you'll have a connecting flight. That's on you, not me. Okay.

Yeah man i would say again if you have any ambition in growing your list of friends like last point i'll make seth you and i have met people at events and what do you do you probably exchange phone numbers with people that you connect with right and when that happens and you have a problem it's so much easier to just like text a friend, Then have to jump into a paid community than have to pay a guru. And I say this as somebody that sells sales training and has an active community. Okay. So I have every reason to tell you to go join the paid communities. And I'm telling you right now at the event, which I guess maybe I'm biased again, because I'm also the one throwing the event, but at the event, you will make friends, you will get phone numbers and you have this ongoing relationship. I've seen people for mastermind pods. I've seen people start business, like joint ventures with people. They've become business partners or in the least you get money connections. Gosh the amount of people that don't know how to raise money and work with funders but if you meet these people you know you meet drew haney right good mutual friend of ours that raises money does funding um you're just able to accomplish so much more in your business and also the last point i'll make is it will shatter your beliefs for what's possible because i will push you if i'm in that room with you to really pursue the life that you want because the reality is seth.

The lives that we want are not just money, man. The money is the tool. The business is the tool to basically pursue your God given calling, right? I think our calls as children of God are first to be holy. That's our highest calling is to do our best to be holy. Number two is to serve our families. And number three is whatever we're called into for our work, our vocation, our trade, our business.

And so our business pursues one and two. I get to tithe a lot more If I make more money and give the ministries and spread awareness, if I make more money, I also get to serve my family better because my wife is less stressed, right? And if she's less stressed, we all know that the home is a better place. If you're married and you're a husband, you know that if your wife is stressed, it affects the home, right? And that's not me saying that in a bad way. It's just saying, if you can do anything to alleviate that stress, it helps everybody, especially if you have kids, right? Like Seth, I'm sure your kids feel it when your wife is stressed. And so if you can do anything to take that off, it helps the peace of the whole home in a beautiful way. And so again, like level three is that business guys like let me help you love level three so you can serve levels one and two. You know what I mean? That's, that's like my passion, man, is I just want people to love their lives because I love my life and I've been given so many gifts, one of which is teaching, one of which is bringing together community. I get to use both of those for two straight days where we just break down business and shatter your ceilings. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm selling so hard and I don't mean to be, man. I'm just so passionate about this event. No, I'm with you. And I, just a side note, it seems like a lot of people I talk to on podcasts and just Zoom calls, one of the questions is like, hey, am I gonna see you in person anywhere this next year?

And the answer comes down to, well, what events are going on? And in 2026, like a lot of land events have either like died or they're on hiatus. Like there is nothing going on. And this is it. Like this is kind of like your chance. If you want to see somebody...

Go to this because there's not any other like big open forum for people who want to do this kind of thing. So it's worth noting that going in because you and I are friends with all the people that throw events. So I got a value that can fit up to a thousand people. It will not be that big. Okay. Last year we had almost 200.

I am targeting just over three this year. We're going to spend a lot of money on ads to get in front of people for that, for your benefit. I lose cash spending money on ads. I don't really make a lot of money spending that those money on ads, But I want the room full because I am so passionate about what this event can do and what that network effect does and what the information we're bringing together does and the best vendors in the space. Again, Joe Roberts was our platinum sponsor last year. I need to give him a call after this and see if he wants to be again this year. And I'm so passionate about him as a vendor because I know he'll take care of people. And he loves his family and he loves the faith and he loves making sure business owners get good results. And he's literally run a business where he cut his own net margin in half to make sure he's got a better quality of product, right? That is something not a lot of business owners do and say. And so, man, I'm just so passionate about bringing like servant leaders to the space that want investors to run better businesses and make more money, not for their own pursuits, right? Like, I don't need you, Seth, to make more money because it benefits me. I want this to benefit you. And those are the things that feed me and fuel me to keep pursuing my God given calling to bring people together and to help the next set of business owners make more money to build a better world, basically. So I know that sounds very like woo-woo and it's like, bro, it's a land event, chill.

But like, I'm passionate, man. It's truthfully something where I feel like I just know this helps people's lives. And I know we've talked about Land Closers Academy. For anybody who may not be familiar with this or maybe just didn't catch it, what is Land Closers Academy? Who is it really for? And like, what does a person walk away with if they participate in that? I'm going to answer your last question first. What does somebody walk away with when they join Land Closers Academy? I'm going to use two words that are going to sound very salesy, but clarity and accountability. And here's what I mean by that. The way that our group is built is the thesis is I'm going to take your existing business. I'm going to make you a lot more money. And the way I'm going to do that is making sure you're taking your existing lead flow and you were getting the maximum amount of deals. And in those deals, you're getting the maximum amount of margin. Okay. So again, clarity and accountability. I'm going to keep saying those words. The way we do that, Seth, number one, okay, clarity. I have you post your acquisition KPIs every single week. I personally audit those. There's no AI agent doing that. There is no AI in that Slack channel. I am doing that. I am commenting. I am saying, what's the bottleneck on this verbal that came out and you don't have a contract signed? What's the issue here? Oh, they are hitting you with this objection or they're ghosting you. I'll drop a voice memo. Here's what you need to do. Boom. They go close that deal. Okay. So accountability and clarity. I'm going to call you out anytime you have a verbal that doesn't get signed. So any investor that's sitting here that got a verbal from a seller and they didn't sign the contract, you just lost 20 to $50,000 because you didn't get that contract signed. That's the first skill that we work on immediately.

Number two is the maximum amount of margin, right? I mentioned my example earlier of a gentleman in our community who's just wholesaling infill outs. He went from, you know, 1K deals and now he's getting five to 10K deals because the only thing we worked on was negotiation.

So in your conversations, you submit your exact calls to me, right? So again, this isn't theory. This isn't me teaching you here's how to scale a business, right? This is not theory. This is me submit your call you had with a seller and we're going to train on it. And I'm going to tell you what I would have done different. And then if I see there's an opportunity for role play, we're going to drill it. So next time you get hit with that issue, we know that you have the muscle memory now because you used your brain to mouth activation to close that deal. Right. And then number three is in that deal. I'm going to walk you through exactly how you can go save that deal. Now, look, I'm not going to sit here, Seth, and guarantee every single time you submit a call, I'm going to save all your deals. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is we're going to take your existing business and we're going to milk the most amount of money that we can out of it. Based on our acquisitions piece. Dispo is another problem. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I solve for dispositions. What I can tell you is if you do enough acquisitions, you will not have a money problem. Okay. As long as you're getting enough deals on the front end, you have something to sell. If you don't have acquisitions and you're great at dispo, you got nothing to sell. You don't have a way to make money. Okay. So that's not to say dispo is an important problem. It's just to say that's not the one I focus on because any investor that I have helped get more deals makes more money. It's a very simple one-to-one relationship, right?

So I would say that's the thesis of it. Now, obviously there's community, there's more resources, there's recorded trainings, there's deliverables and scripts and freebies and graphics and all these things we do. But at the end of the day, I would come back, Seth, it's clarity and accountability. If your goal is to close more deals with the current marketing you're doing, I'm not going to have you go scale to some 30 person team. That's not what I teach. I want you to build the life that you want, just like we did with Shelby, where she's got an acquisition manager. She's still only working a couple hours a day. She's still loving seeing her husband and her daughter and she's making more money and doing more deals because of it, right? Like that's, that's what I want to do is I want to help people live better versions of their own lives, not live a version of my life. I'm 27 and I don't have kids yet. All right. I'm going to live a very different life in this season than somebody who's 40 with three kids and you know, is not in a foot on the gas season. Like these are just different seasons. That's okay. We're going to custom build a roadmap for you to keep loving the business that you have, but we're going to make sure you make a heck of a lot more money doing it. Does that answer your question? Yeah, and as you were talking, I was just thinking, there's a lot of skills you can build in the land business or the curative title business.

That they don't transfer that well. Like it's kind of relevant for the land business or for curative title. But what you're teaching, I mean, a person can and will take it with them everywhere they go, even if they get out of land, right? I mean, sales is like the universal skill that matters everywhere. Like more sales solves pretty much every problem. So if there's ever a thing worth investing in, it's probably something like this, right? I would agree. I'm super biased as I say this. I'll tell you this. You know, it's funny. I've obviously become really good at sales to a point where it's almost dangerous a little bit. Like you have to be careful in day-to-day conversation where you don't like accidentally manipulate a situation just because you're good at words. And so the funny thing about that though, is my wife, her name's Erin. She's beautiful and I love her.

She's heard me on so many sales calls and has picked up things through osmosis. And it's to the point now where it's so funny, you know, we'll be ordering Korean food, for example. And I'll be like, babe, I don't wanna go pick it up tonight. Can we get something else? Like, can we get... Uh, can we just cook? Can we, you know, get something closer? And she'll say, okay, so the only reason you don't want Korean food is because you don't want to have to go pick it up in the restaurants a little further. Am I, am I hearing that right? And I'm like, are you isolating my objection right now? You know, and it's so funny, but there's a, there's a truth to it where we're truthfully problems are solvable.

And if you can hear what is stopping people from executing on a certain decision and solve the problem that is stopping them, you can do more things that everybody's happier about. She's like, okay, so what if I go pick it up? Or what if we get delivery or those, you know, okay, fine. If you go pick it up, yeah, let's get Korean food tonight. Right. So it's funny, but at the end of the day, we're just processing decisions. Right. And like, that's all I want people to think about. This isn't car salesman city slicker, you know, let me, let me get you, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's not, it's none of that. It's let me teach you how to help somebody process a decision with you as their guide. And if you can do that, you will be much more successful in your marriage with your kids with you know at restaurants at whatever else you do day to day you're going to negotiate better deals on your cars when you buy them you're going to negotiate better deals when you're buying your homes at the end of the day like the thesis is learn people and learn decision making and do more deals and if those are things you want more of in your life i can tell you we probably have room for you in the land closures academy and if you're not ready for it we will tell you and send you somewhere else i have no business taking money from people that are not ready for our training. And both myself and Jacob on my team are very adamant about making sure that, you know, we're not bringing people in that you're using your last whatever amount of money on your credit card. That's not the goal. Okay. So if you have expendable ability to grow your business, and you want to grow your business, I'd say just come have a conversation with us. We'll tell you whether it's a fit or not.

Hearing about Erin and how she picked that up through osmosis makes me wonder. I wonder if you could sell just recordings of calls you've had with people. That's it. Like, I just listen on nonstop to Ajay talking to people and figure it out. Oh, that's how he does it. Like, there'd probably be value in that. Yeah, I'm thinking about releasing that as just kind of like a thing people can buy for a couple hundred bucks. Because if somebody had, you know, 50 good calls from me or from someone on my team, like, that's a good training material. That's good yeah i think it could be a good standalone product honestly cool man well folks if you want to check out the show notes for this episode where you'll find links to everything retipster.com forward slash 269 also go to landscalingsummit.com go to landclosersacademy.com check out ajay's stuff ajay as always great to have you on the show great to talk to you and catch up and to all the listeners out there we will talk to you next time thanks seth.