Why Some Members Fail (LA 719)
Why Some Members Fail (LA 719)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steven and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hello.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And, I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about why some members fail. It’s truth week. [inaudible 00:00:15] about truth investing week here on the Land Academy Show.
Jill DeWit: I’m trying to think of some funny things before I get to the real things.
Steven Butala: Yeah, failure is not that funny.
Jill DeWit: I know, well-
Steven Butala: But, it’s necessary. There’s the spoiler alert.
Jill DeWit: This is not just fail … why some members fail, not … I took it as not an individual transaction like big time fail, like-
Steven Butala: Yeah, they sign up and it doesn’t work.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Or, they don’t sign up or they don’t try.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: The chances are if they’re failing at this they’re failing at something else. Like a lot of stuff.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: Why is that funny … Truthfully funny to you, isn’t it?
Jill DeWit: It is.
Steven Butala: We’re gonna bring marriage into this at some point.
Jill DeWit: Good thing we’re not married.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com online community, it’s free.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Tina asks: I’ve been using a popular CRM for the last couple of months since I started land investing, and while it’s very easy to work with it is also pretty expensive, and I think I’d rather put that money towards actual land deals.
How do you organize all of your leads from initial receiving, to purchasing, to sale? Doing it on Excel seems very daunting to me, unless there are some tricks that I don’t know about to make the information more manageable, and I like the idea of paper records even less. Any recommendations?
Steven Butala: May I?
Jill DeWit: Please.
Steven Butala: For years and years I … We were using a proprietary system that was written in sequel for us long before a Windows environment … a web-enabled Windows environment was popular. You can imagine how long ago that was, and it cost me a quarter of a million dollars. We were running it on a Windows 2003 XP server until very recently, and I bagged it all … drum roll, for what? Excel. One single Excel spreadsheet.
There are three tabs at the bottom. The first one’s called acquisitions, the second one’s called-
Jill DeWit: Engineering.
Steven Butala: Engineering, and, the third one’s called sales, and that’s it, and everybody loves it. Now, here’s the thing. When you have a big staff, or staff of more than three, they have to be relatively educated on how to use this because it’s disastrous, they can go in there and wreck the whole thing in 10 minutes.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steven Butala: CRM’s like Salesforce, and I think there’s this one guy, I don’t remember who, that’s probably who you’re talking about, Tina, who’s got a land-specific CRM out there that he manages himself, which I talked with him for a while. Howard Zonder is his name, who is a super bright guy, great product, but real expensive.
We were gonna do some stuff together, it just didn’t end up being a good fit for what we’re trying to profess here. Good old-fashioned Excel. The most successful people I’ve talked … the guys in our group, people in our group, use some version of what I just described.
You put all your leads into one single tab, on the acquisition tab, and when you’ve purchased them or decided to purchase them, you move them literally, physically move them to engineering where you get it all prepped out and ready to put on the internet, and when it’s sold you move it to sales.
It’s never in any of those three places except one time. We call it, “Okay, we’re ready to push these three over to engineering,” and then you can hear … so as the engineering gets done, somebody else takes it over. If some other virtual assistant that’s good at that, making maps and stuff, that’s done. They go in there in spreadsheet, they work on it, we don’t even know they’re doing it. Then, they’re done with it, okay, it’s ready to be pushed over to sales, and then closed.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: It’s as simple as that. All this complicated stuff about running businesses and proprietary software is for the birds. Go ahead, Jill.
Jill DeWit: I’m trying to imagine … The only thing I want to say about, Tina, is, you need to get past your daunting Excel experience, and really get to know it, because that’s all we use, especially when you’re downloading your data, scrubbing your data, doing your pricing. Paper records … It’s funny, I had someone come in our office … my office the other day, it was a broker, by the way, who’s in our building kind of like, “What the heck are you guys doing over here?”
One of his comments was, “Boy, I like your operation. There is no paper anywhere.” I’m like, “Nope!” They’re used to dealing with stacks of paper on every transaction for a house, and all of that, it was hilarious. Don’t even go there with the paper records, and that’s the last thing you want. Could you imagine, someone comes in and you go, “Oh, hold on a moment,” and you’re here rustling papers, you’re digging on your desk trying to find it, or going through sticky notes going, “Oh, I know I have a property here that’s gonna fit you perfectly.” Oh my gosh, you don’t want to do that.
Steven Butala: There’s all these safety blankets, especially for somebody my age. One of them is like reading a newspaper in the morning. There are people my age that still read a newspaper in the morning, they are people younger than me. I don’t understand that. You got to get rid of these habits and stay up with the times.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steven Butala: Do you ever sit around with an old guy that likes rap? I have, and I think it’s cool. Do you ever sit around with an old guy who likes Busy Gillespie?
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: I have, and it’s no fun. Which one do you want?
Jill DeWit: I just saw a funny commercial about that. I got to tell you … this morning. It’s some insurance company, and their whole line was, “We can’t keep you from becoming your parents, but we can ensure you better,” something. The whole thing was … These people are sitting in a support group, and they’re saying things like, “Why would I throw this away? It works perfectly fine,” and this woman goes, “Why would I not wear this hat? I got it for free?” All these things that your parents-
Steven Butala: Here’s one of my favorites … this is guy-driven. Why is every light on in this house?
Jill DeWit: Yes, that’s in there.
Steven Butala: Oh my gosh, really?
Jill DeWit: Yes, that’s exactly in there. Oh, then … I know, someone said, “Why is that door open? Are we trying to air-condition the whole outside?” It was hilarious, “the whole block?” It was so funny.
Steven Butala: I go way the heck out of my way to not say stuff like that, even though some of them are actually true.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: There’s a couple of them that are.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: You got to stay up with the times on this. This actually falls right in the topic of the show, Why Some Members Fail? You know what, let’s just say it, this is the meat of the show.
Jill, why do some members fail?
Jill DeWit: Well, I have a couple here that I’d like to talk about. Right out of the gate it’s a wrong fit. That’s one of the things that I have seen, and I really try to catch early on, and I really … I do a lot of consulting calls, and my team does a lot of consulting calls.
There’s initial calls where … It’s available on our website. You can go on there and just schedule 15 minutes to talk with my team, and sometimes it might be me, and we’re just here to answer your questions, and really tell you what this is all about, and so you understand.
One of the things I’m trying to do and we’re weeding out is, who is a good fit? If someone can’t operate a spreadsheet, they can’t spell Excel, then, number one, that’s a problem. There’s things like that sometimes that’s a wrong fit.
Someone who can’t understand, not only just data, but can’t understand these transactions, and they can’t understand, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You mean I can put this online and sell it on my own website? Well, whose gonna make my website?” Okay, so there’s little things like that they have to get past.
Number one, people that fail, it’s the wrong fit. That’s usually … and we try to scrub that out. Now we’re into it. Say we got past all that and you’re in the program, and you’re trying to do it, but what do I see are the most common things that people don’t … why they fail?
One is, they’re spending too much time with no action, and the reason is, because they’re over analyzing and second-guessing everything. Have you noticed that?
Steven Butala: Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you, but even before that … I’ll just cut to it, the single number one reason why I see members fail is they don’t make a commitment in the beginning.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: Or, it’s just … there’s 16 things to do, and they can’t put the number one on one of them, number two, and three, and four, and a five, and then there’s lack of flexibility about, if five didn’t work how they wanted, they throw their arms up and say, “See? This doesn’t work at all.” That doesn’t apply to land investing or real estate, that applies to how you approach life.
I’m gonna be naked super honest here. If you’re a CFO of a railroad company, or a COO of a railroad company, because we have a person in our group who is that person … or was that person, and they bought into the concept of sending letters and buying property, enough to the point, then they proved it to themselves, made enough dough to the point where they quit that job that they were succeeding at, you’re gonna do well.
If you are some person whose hiding in your bedroom and you’ve got all kinds of other issues, this is not gonna save you from that, you’ve got other stuff to work out. If your wife is saying something like, “You never finish what you start,” and she puts … and then she holds up both of her hands with all ten fingers and starts counting off, “You started this and you didn’t finish it. You started this and you didn’t finish it,” and she gets to number nine or 10, and then she starts using another hand, “11, 12, 13,” this is not for you.
I can honestly say, Jill, that I can’t name one thing that you started that you haven’t finished.
Jill DeWit: Thanks.
Steven Butala: I mean maybe at best I can think of a couple … maybe one or two things where you got into it and said, “It’s not gonna turn out the way I want. I’m not gonna get the outcome that I thought. I’m gonna do something else. I will replace it with something else.”
Jill DeWit: My horse jockey career didn’t work out. There’s one. Don’t forget the time I wanted to be a sound recorder engineer. That was a long time ago, that didn’t work out. Just kidding.
Steven Butala: People fail at this because their personalities suck. It has nothing to do with real estate, Excel, math, it’s what they bring to the table, which is this negative personality.
Jill DeWit: I would like to circle back around, because what you just said is a beautiful way. I took it down to that level of some of those issues, but you’re right. My notes-
Steven Butala: People, listen to her show to watch … to listen to us disagree.
Jill DeWit: No, my notes support what you’re saying.
Steven Butala: Okay.
Jill DeWit: Which is really interesting. You’re talking about, it’s a mindset, true. What are the things that they do? They overanalyze or second guess, they’re never getting anywhere. Okay, well that would be anything. They don’t invest enough time or stick to a schedule. They don’t deal with anything.
Steven Butala: Ding, ding! Don’t stick to a schedule.
Jill DeWit: My other thing was, the one problem and they give up, well, they do that with everything, too.
Steven Butala: Yep.
Jill DeWit: It’s all the same thing. If you fail at this you probably failed at buying … getting that sunglass shop off the ground you’re working on, and the electronic items that are all in your garage that you’re gonna sell on eBay, that one didn’t work out. You can’t blame any of the businesses, or any of those products, or any of the concepts. As much as it hurts to say this, you got to look at you.
Steven Butala: Yeah. If you’re sitting around saying, “I am gonna be successful at what I do. I don’t know yet, because I’m not old enough, but I just need somebody to show me how to do it, and show me some reward for the effort I put in,” this is for you.
If you succeeded in the job that you’re in but you hate it … this is really common, I’m describing myself. I made partner at a Big 3 accounting firm at a very young age and I walked out of there. I walked away from a quarter of a million dollar job a year, because I couldn’t stand to go in there one more day.
I had this thought, “If I have to flip burgers for the rest of my life that’s what I would rather do than deal with these ding dongs for any more,” because it was all false corporate crap. If that’s going on in your head you’re gonna do great at this.
Jill DeWit: That’s motivation.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: But, you still got to flip that switch that, “I’m going to die doing this, or die trying doing this.”
Steven Butala: That’s right, Jill.
Jill DeWit: You’ve got to have that attitude.
Steven Butala: You nailed it.
Jill DeWit: I think the best people that come to us, honestly, they have succeeded in another business-
Steven Butala: That’s what I think-
Jill DeWit: I don’t care what it was. They may know nothing about property. They sold some widgets. They showed rat traps online and killed it, because they knew how to market, make a website, how to drive traffic to it, how to use Google Ads, whatever it is. They know to do that, they’ve already mastered that, it’s running in the background, then they find us, it’s awesome, and they kill it.
Steven Butala: Anybody whose ever sold anything online, whether off their website, on eBay, Amazon, which is a lot of people. Especially from other countries where they’re importing stuff, drop shipping it, all of that, they all know this story: “Well, those rat traps, those are selling great for a year and a half, we’re killing it. We had 90% margins.” Then all of a sudden it started to dwindle, and then two months later it was gone, because they got some competition, somebody figured out how to reach the right consumer better than you, they have a better mouse trap, they have a better rat trap, or something like that.
You constantly have to be looking for some stuff new to present to people where you can make some money.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, you’ve got to roll with it.
Steven Butala: Land, there’s nothing better than land. You don’t have to take any inventory, you don’t have to drop ship it, there’s no shipping, it’s just paper. You don’t have to manage it at all. It’s never gonna go away. You can constantly buy it, constantly, because of the way the property tax situation is set up.
Every year people get a tax [inaudible 00:14:30] they don’t want to pay anymore, they just want to get rid of it.
Jill DeWit: Well, you know like you just used that example with the rat trap, changing it up. We can change it up. I can take 40 acre properties, subdivide it, and have new APN’s, there’s a way to change it up-
Steven Butala: It’s endless.
Jill DeWit: Maybe I’ve been dealing all over the East Coast, that’s all I’ve been doing and master. You know what, I’m gonna start buying in the Midwest, and I’m gonna start buying in the West Coast. I’m gonna hit all-
Steven Butala: Now I’m gonna start buying mobile homes-
Jill DeWit: All kinds of people. Right.
Steven Butala: Now I’m gonna start buying houses-
Jill DeWit: Yes, there’s so much you can do-
Steven Butala: Oh, house is working great, but mobiles in Tennessee aren’t working so well. Let’s try northern California-
Jill DeWit: Correct.
Steven Butala: On and on, and on. I never … There’s a lot of things I get tired of and get pretty curmudgeon about, real estate investment. “Well, with the economy change, what do I do then?” Are you kidding me?
Jill DeWit: Buy more.
Steven Butala: Buy more! Find better buyers-
Jill DeWit: Buy better! Now its less expensive- [crosstalk 00:15:21]
Steven Butala: There are people and billionaires in this economy waiting for this next downturn, and believe me, they want to hear from you. If you can buy property for less than its worth, they’re waiting for you to call them.
I look at this and I see endless, endless opportunity everywhere I look. My only regret is I don’t have 10 of me where I can do it all at once. My eyes are constantly bigger than my stomach when it comes to real estate.
To wrap it up, why do members really fail, Jill, because, they just aren’t into it in the first place.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: They don’t make a commitment in the first place and say … The other thing, I’ve seen a few people … and this is sad, who have too much responsibility. They have 18 kids, and they just have too much overhead fixed costs in their lives to get out of the situation that they’re in. There’s not a lot of situations that are like that but there are some, and they really do want to do something about it. That’s actually sad-
Jill DeWit: That does bum me out, I know. When they really have their hearts in it, but they really don’t have the resources to do it. You know, those people I say, “Hang on, we’re not going anywhere. Things will change when you get ahead and the time is right. Call us, we’ll be here.”
Steven Butala: We have a company called Offers to Owners, and you can look into our credit card processing when people put orders in throughout the day, and I thought that I put all of our orders in, because we use, obviously, we use 0202. We created this company to let people in on our stuff and our resources.
Do you know when the number one … an hour in the day, we’re on the West Coast, by the way. What’s the highest number of orders? Between 11:00, 1:00, 2:00, can you guess?
Jill DeWit: I think it’s mid-day.~
Steven Butala: It’s not.
Jill DeWit: No? What is it?
Steven Butala: 10:00 PM, which is 1:00 AM on the East Coast.
Jill DeWit: Got it.
Steven Butala: People are doing this in the middle of the night.
Jill DeWit: Got it. Hey, good for you for checking and knowing our business that well.
Steven Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: I love it.
Steven Butala: Well, I was looking at how much money we’re making, and I incidentally saw that it’s all happening in the middle of the night-
Jill DeWit: That’s cool.
Steven Butala: Which, I think these people have jobs, man. Our members have jobs.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: Well, you’ve done it again. You spent another 15 to 20 minutes listening to the Land Academy Show. Join us tomorrow for another interesting episode where we discuss, who is set up the most to succeed at this?
We talked about failing today. We’re gonna talk about … We’re gonna end … truth week on success.
Jill DeWit: And, we answered your question posted on landacademy.com. Go there and find our online community, it’s free.
Steven Butala: You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
I felt like that was a really good show. I felt … The shows really aren’t for me, they’re for the listener.
Jill DeWit: No. They are! You are correct.
Steven Butala: You know what? I have to tell ya. I love talking about failure. I know it’s weird. My favorite book is all about failure, by Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates’ father. Without failure, you’re never gonna succeed. There has to be a yin and a yang to everything.
Jill DeWit: One thing that’s important too, to be ready for it. I’m glad that we talk about it, because I don’t want anybody to be surprised. I tell people, “Just be ready. You are gonna make a mistake,” and then they are ready and they do make a mistake. They go, “Oh! Okay, and here’s how I recovered, and thank you, Jill, you were right. I won’t do that again.”
Steven Butala: You know, I’ve noticed, too, when people fail … I notice this in our kids, some of them are like, “Yeah, I failed at that, whatever. I won’t next time.” Some of them are like, “I failed at something, therefore, I am a failure.”
Jill DeWit: Aw.
Steven Butala: That’s not good.
Jill DeWit: No, you don’t want that-
Steven Butala: No, you never want that-
Jill DeWit: I don’t want anyone to ever think that-
Steven Butala: You want to bounce back, get on the horse, whatever cliché you can think of. Get back on the horse right immediately.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: You don’t want to take the stuff personally.
Jill DeWit: You can’t.
Steven Butala: This seller called me, “Yeah, that’s fine. Bring it. Put on your thick suit. Get some good boxing gloves and get out there.
Jill DeWit: Share the fun by subscribing on iTunes, or wherever you are listening, and while you’re at it please rate us there.
Steven Butala: We are Steve and Jill.
Jill DeWit: We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: Information-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration.
Steven Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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